# The Root System – DM Reference

> Canon for AAA. If something contradicts this later, this wins.

## 1. What The Root Actually Is

- **Big Picture:**  
  The Root is a single, world-spanning **leyline organism**:
  - Physically: a network of high-density arcane channels under the crust and through the air, like roots + mycelium + electrical grid.
  - Spiritually: the “nervous system” of the world’s magic – semi-sentient, but not a person in the normal sense.

- **Natural vs Artificial:**
  - The raw leyline network existed naturally.
  - Over centuries, mortals **cut it, braced it, and plumbed it** into something closer to infrastructure.
  - The **Root Oversight Array** (D’serris’s thing) is the latest layer of software bolted onto that living hardware.

- **Sap:**  
  “Sap” is just the slang for condensed Raw Magic flowing through the Root:
  - In-universe: glowy shit in crystals, pressure in taps, the stuff that explodes when mishandled.
  - Metaphor: electrical current + bandwidth + blood.

---

## 2. Topology – How It’s Structured

Treat it like a tree + power grid:

- **Trunk:**  
  Massive, slow-moving leyline that runs under/through the region. Southern Trunk is D’serris’s jurisdiction.

- **Branches:**  
  Large offshoots that feed cities, fortresses, Academies, Titan armories, etc.

- **Nodes:**  
  Places where branches are **anchored and shaped**:
  - City Node, Academy Node, Titan Lance Node.
  - Full of stabilizing anchors, crystals, sigils.

- **Subnodes:**  
  Local “breaker boxes” and fuses.
  - Avalon’s A1–A3, B1–B3, etc. are subnodes off the Academy Node.
  - Each subnode feeds a cluster of taps (dorms, labs, field, etc.).
  - Subnodes can be throttled, shunted, or killed without taking down the whole node – that’s what B2 was.

- **Taps:**
  - Specific points where Sap is pulled off for use:
    - Classroom conduits, Mageball field glyphs, Spin Alley lane runes, Mr. Magic’s pizza hellscape, etc.
  - Controlled by **Runic Controllers** (hardware) and **Root Oversight** (software).

---

## 3. Flow, Capacity, and Failure Modes

### Flow & Capacity

- Each branch/subnode has:
  - **Baseline Flow** – what it’s designed to carry.
  - **Overcapacity Margin** – how much abuse it can take before things go sideways.

- When total draw > safe margin, you get:
  1. Minor: flickers, weird side-effects, illusions stuttering.
  2. Moderate: wild-magic-like anomalies, local structure flexing.
  3. Severe: **cascade** – Sap surges, containment sigils fail, subnode starts to crack.

### What Happens When a Subnode Fails

- **Controlled trip:**  
  Oversight kills the branch cleanly:
  - Everything it feeds goes dark / inert.
  - Sap is redirected deeper into the Trunk or to sacrificial buffers.
  - You get power outage, scary alarms, but no explosion.

- **Uncontrolled failure (like B2):**
  - Sap surges and finds its **own path**:
    - Into nearby taps (overcharging wards, animating junk, whispering to psychically-open students).
    - Into the physical world (crystallized Sap, explosive outgassing, temporal glitches).
  - You can:
    - Stabilize and re-anchor it (what the kids *tried* to do).
    - Or rupture the branch so it burns out (what actually happened when they “destroyed” B2).

- **Root Memory:**
  - The Root “remembers” patterns of failure.
  - Repeated stress in similar ways makes it more likely to respond *on its own* next time (whispers, manifestations).

---

## 4. The Oversight Array – What D’serris Can Actually Do

### What Oversight Sees

Think of it as a god-tier monitoring system with limits:

- **Telemetry Only** – no direct mind-reading, just:
  - Spell traffic that *touches the Root*:
    - Schools of magic, approximate power, where/when.
  - Node and subnode flow graphs.
  - “Heartbeat” patterns: regular pulsing vs weird spikes/wobbles.
  - IDs of oficially keyed users (students, staff, devices) when they authenticate to taps.

- **Blind Spots:**
  - Innate / personal magic that doesn’t use taps (small-scale, within your own aura) is fuzzy or invisible.
  - Old, non-standard rituals that predate the grid can partially bypass it.
  - Anything happening in a fully warded Faraday-style space (no taps in, no taps out) is opaque.

### What Oversight Can Do

From his command node, D’serris can:

- **Throttle or kill taps/subnodes:**
  - Reduce flow to specific areas (e.g., “cut power to Mageball runes”).
  - Lock doors, shut off lab circles, brick enchanted devices tied to the grid.

- **Inject commands:**
  - Force safety protocols on hardware (“trip this breaker if flow spikes again”).
  - Broadcast through certain taps (alarms, emergency lights, announcement illusions).

- **He cannot:**
  - Freely rewrite local reality.
  - Target one specific random kid in a crowd without context unless they’re currently keyed into a tap as the user.
  - Directly puppet people or read their thoughts – he only sees how they interact with the grid.

This is important: the kids are right that he’s surveilling them; they are wrong when they assume “he sees everything we do.”

---

## 5. Consciousness in the Root

### The Natural Root

- Has **instinct**, not a human mind:
  - Wants equilibrium: no part over-stressed, no branch murdered if it can be re-routed.
  - Responds more strongly to **emotionally-charged** magic (fear, rage, awe).

- How it shows up:
  - Subtle nudges: whispers, half-seen shapes, déjà vu.
  - Synchronicities: lights flicker in rhythm with someone’s heartbeat, plants grow toward certain kids, etc.

### The Caged Thing (D’serris’s Mistake)

- During the old crisis, something malignant / emergent was:
  - Latched onto / coalescing in a trunk.
  - Half-born mind, half-parasitic entity.
- D’serris’ team **shunted it down into the Root** instead of letting it explode locally:
  - It’s now **smeared** along the network, but clusters around high-traffic nodes.
  - Think: virus in the operating system, not separate user.

### Practical Difference

- Root whisper = “turn the pressure down, reroute, nudge.”
- Caged thing whisper = “break this, hurt them, get more access.”

You don’t have to decide exactly which voice is which every time yet; just know:

- Soren’s violent urges are a **mix**:
  - Her own shit.
  - Root amplifying.
  - The thing testing how far it can push through her.
- Pappy’s possession:
  - Pappy was in a war-era Root-saturated environment; his action figure is basically a **keyed relic**.
  - When Joe lets Pappy in, he opens a channel that the Root (and the thing) can hitch a ride on.

Fouadriel is where this gets nailed down later: he’s the first point where the caged mind gets a **stable anchor**.

---

## 6. How Everyday Magic Uses the Root

### Big Buckets

1. **Grid Magic (Monitored):**
   - Anything that draws from fixed taps:
     - Classroom rituals, Mageball field, Titan armory, city wards, Mr. Magic’s animatronics.
   - Logged by Oversight.
   - Safer in terms of blowback, but visible.

2. **Personal Magic (Mostly Unmonitored):**
   - Innate sorcery, smaller-scale bard tricks, druid nature magic not explicitly tied into infrastructure.
   - Uses local ambient mana + your own reserves.
   - Harder for Oversight to see, easier for the Root consciousness to piggyback if you keep poking the same spot.

3. **Hybrid Shit (Risky as hell):**
   - People who hack taps to supercharge personal spellwork.
   - Contraband relics that route Root flow into specific items (Pip’s network, experimental weapons, etc.).
   - This is where you get your wild magic, aberrant effects, and “B2 blew up” tier accidents.

### Student Tech Layer

- **Sending-stones / crystals / “phones”:**
  - Piggyback on low-draw taps.
  - Oversight sees metadata (who connected, when, how much traffic, broad type), not the exact conversation content unless someone has applied specific spy-rituals.

- **Wi-Spell / Arcane WiFi:**
  - Campus has its own subnet.  
  - Oversight can throttle it to free capacity for more important stuff.

- **Games, entertainment, etc.:**
  - Minor draw, only dangerous when a lot of them sync in one place (like Mr. Magic or Spin Alley).

---

## 7. When PCs Mess With It – Guidelines For You

You don’t need hard mechanics, just consistent rulings. Use these:

### Detecting Anomalies

- Any magical PC paying attention can:
  - **Arcana** to interpret flow/anomaly (“this is a surge,” “this feels like a reroute,” etc.).
  - **Religion / Nature** to interpret Root-as-being (“it feels angry/hurt”).
- Soren gets occasional **free vibes** because of prior exposure.

### Intervening

- If they try to “stabilize” a node / tap:
  - Skill challenge: Arcana, Tools (tinker’s / mason’s), maybe help from Elias.
  - Success: reduce flow, reinforce sigils; you decide if problem is fixed or just postponed.
  - Fail: push anomaly up a level (minor → moderate; moderate → cascade warning).

- If they try to **steal** from the Root:
  - Short-term juice (advantage, bonus damage, etc.).
  - Long-term consequence clock:
    - More whispers.
    - More anomalies following them.
    - Oversight notices weird patterns and starts asking questions.

### Oversight Response Ladder

Rough escalation D’serris can take when he sees a problem:

1. **Log + watch** – note anomaly, increase monitoring.  
2. **Nudge staff** – send Larkvale/Elias “check this out” instructions.  
3. **Throttle** – reduce capacity to specific zone.  
4. **Lockdown** – hard lock on taps/doors, emergency protocols.  
5. **Sacrifice** – kill a branch/subnode to protect trunk (what he fears having to do again).

Where the PCs sit on that ladder is entirely about:
- Are they helping?  
- Are they causing more anomalies than they fix?  
- Do they cooperate at all?

---

## 8. Quick Player-Facing Summary (Optional Handout Later)

You can drop something like this into a “How Magic Works at Avalon” doc:

> **The Root & The Grid – Student Version**
>
> - Magic in the valley runs on the **Root** – a huge living web of leylines under the ground and in the air.  
> - The Academy is plugged into it like a **power substation**:
>   - Big node under campus, smaller “subnodes” (A1–A3, B1–B3) feeding different buildings.  
>   - “Taps” in classrooms, fields, and town that pull Sap (magical juice) out of the Root.
> - Most big, flashy spellwork on campus **uses the grid**:
>   - Mageball field, safety wards, labs, weird animatronics at Mr. Magic Pizza.  
>   - Those are monitored by the **Root Oversight Array** – essentially magical IT and safety inspectors.
> - Your *personal* magic – cantrips, small spells, stuff you do with your own reserves – mostly flies under the radar unless you hook it into a tap on purpose.
> - If you abuse the grid (overload a subnode, hack a tap, or run sketchy rituals off campus power), you don’t just annoy your teachers – you risk:
>   - Blackouts, wild magic, and angry maintenance staff.  
>   - D’serris showing up on a projection and asking why the graph just went red.  
>   - The Root itself taking an interest in you. That’s not always good.