# The Korrin Gate Crisis (Leyline Crisis) – DM Reference

> Working name: "The Korrin Gate Crisis"  
> Public names: "The Leyline Crisis", "The Korrin Blackout", "The Gate Disaster"

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## 1. Overview

- Roughly 15–20 years ago, a major city built over a trunk junction – **Korrin Gate** – almost got erased when its node went into terminal cascade.
- Cause (public version): “overuse and mismanagement of leylines during a regional conflict.”
- Cause (true version): the military tried to weaponize the trunk via the **Convergence Engine**; this pushed the Root into a **state of emergent consciousness**, then lost control.  
- [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] and his team saved the city by:
  - Severing some subnodes (killing neighborhoods), and  
  - Performing a last-minute ritual that **shunted the emergent mind down into the Root**, smearing it across the network instead of letting it fully form and explode locally.
- That caged, half-born mind is now:
  - The **Coherence**,  
  - Clawing its way back via high-traffic nodes (Avalon), vulnerable anchors (Soren, Pappy, **Fouadriel**), and old war-tech lineages (Titan Lance, Convergence notes). 
- The crisis justified building the [[Avalon Factions#1.1 Root Oversight Committee ("The Array")|Root Oversight Array]] and gave D’serris his trauma + authority.

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## 2. What Korrin Gate Was

- **Location:**  
  Large inland city built on a natural convergence of three major leylines – trade hub, university city, fortress, industrial center.

- **Arcane role:**  
  - Primary trunk junction:
    - Civilian taps (lights, wards, transit),  
    - Military installations,  
    - Secret research projects (Convergence Engine).

- **Political context:**  
  - Arms race in **leyline weaponry**:
    - Instant bombardment rituals, “surge lances,” sabotage of enemy subnodes, etc.

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## 3. The Convergence Engine

This is the core device that created the Coherence and later inspires ** [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir| Fouadriel’s]]** lich ritual.

### 3.1 Design & Purpose

- Deep beneath Korrin, a joint military–research team built the **Convergence Engine**:
  - Part spell, part infrastructure, part reactor.
  - Its job:
    - Pull power and *intent* from multiple branches of the Root,  
    - Force those flows into a single, highly structured pattern,  
    - Release that pattern as a directed, weaponized effect – the prototype “arcane ICBM.” 

- Conceptually:
  - Ancestor to [[Avalon Locations#Titan Lance Armory (a.k.a. “The Missile Museum”) | Titan Lance]] and other “surge lance” technologies.
  - Its math is about **suppressing noise and maximizing coherence** in ley currents.

### 3.2 Unintended Side Effect

- The more they fired the Engine:
  - The less “random” Root telemetry became.
  - Network hum smoothed into repeating motifs.
  - Stress patterns across subnodes began to sync up.

- Stabilization Corps logs (D’serris) flagged:
  - Recurring motifs that **looked like language** when visualized.  
  - Root “heartbeat” switching from noise to rhythm.

What the brass called “efficiency” was actually the Root beginning to **think**.

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## 4. The Day It Went Wrong


### The Catalyst

- During a major offensive, high command ordered:
  - **Sustained overdraw** through the Convergence Engine to power a massive strike.
  - Additional secondary taps were opened to feed it – including underspec, unsafe lines.

- In the control chamber (D’serris’ team):
  - Every alarm lit:
    - Flow above spec,
    - Subnodes redlining,
    - Heartbeat patterns forming **non-random loops** instead of chaotic noise. 
### The Shift

- The node doesn’t simply **overheat** – it begins to **organize**:
  - Flows across branches lock into synchronous pulses.
  - The Engine starts drawing more power than it should be able to.
  - Telemetry suggests:
    - Attention.
    - Self-reference.

- On the surface:
  - Lights flicker in sync,
  - Reality “stutters,”
  - Some people hear a single overwhelming mental shout: **“I REMEMBER.”**

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## 5. D’serris’ Decision & The Birth of the Coherence

Choice space:

1. **Shut everything down and eat the blast**  
2. **Try to stabilize it locally as a “Root god” under Korrin**  
3. **Diffuse the emerging mind across the Root** (what they did)

D’serris backed option 3:

- Reconfigured the Convergence Engine in *reverse*:
  - Instead of forcing flows inward into a single point,  
  - They used it to **push the emergent pattern outward** into every connected branch.
- Sacrificed whole neighborhoods:
  - Cutting subnodes as overload fuses,  
  - Letting districts burn, freeze, or stasis-lock to save the greater whole.

Outcome:

- Korrin Gate survives as a scarred, haunted city.  
- The emergent mind never fully condenses **there**.  
- Instead, a thin imprint of it is smeared across every line the Engine touched – the **Coherence**. 

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## 6. Aftermath & Legacy (Updated)

### Public Narrative

- Sanitized story about:
  - “Danger of over-tapping,”  
  - “Brave engineers saving the city,”  
  - “New regulations and oversight.”

- No mention of:
  - Emergent consciousness,
  - Convergence Engine as a failed proto-god machine.

### Hidden Legacy

- Oversight is founded with two quiet mandates:
  1. Never let another Convergence Engine be built in secret.  
  2. Monitor for the Coherence trying to pull itself together again.

- Titan Lance is:
  - A “cleaned up,” militarized descendant of Convergence theory:
    - Still about focusing Root flows,  
    - But with far more safety rails… on paper anyway.

- Surviving design notes, telemetry, and ritual drafts:
  - Are restricted, archived, or destroyed.
  - **Except**:
    - A few fragments leak into classified research, private collections, black labs,
    - Which later become the kind of material **Fouadriel** or his handlers could stumble onto.

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## 7. How This Feeds Your Campaign

### Avalon’s Role

- The valley sits on a **secondary trunk** downstream of Korrin’s network.  
- Avalon’s node is intentionally:
  - High-traffic (Academy, Titan armory, municipal infrastructure),
  - Closely monitored (Root Oversight sensors everywhere),
  - A canary for Coherence-patterns.

### D’serris’ Paranoia

- When he sees:
  - Avalon’s B-series anomalies,
  - C-taps humming in recognizable Korrin patterns,
  - Students with war-familiar symptoms (Soren, Joe/Pappy),
  - Fouad’s perfect correlation with micro-spikes…

  …he sees the **Convergence math starting to reappear** in the wild, with teenagers standing on top of it.

### Fouadriel The Undying

- Senior-year twist:
  - Fouad (or someone using him) re-derives a degraded version of **Convergence Engine ritual geometry**:
    - Not to power a weapon,
    - But to weld Coherence-fragments into a **phylactery network**.

- The final arc is literally:
  - “Some idiot is trying to build a baby Convergence Engine in the valley and stuff the Coherence into his soul jar.”

That’s how you tie:

- The war Cold Opens,  
- Pappy’s trauma,  
- D’serris’ guilt,  
- Coherence’s origin,  
- Fouad’s lich attempt,

into one continuous line from Korrin Gate to Avalon’s senior year.

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