215 lines
7.8 KiB
Markdown
215 lines
7.8 KiB
Markdown
# The Korrin Gate Crisis (Leyline Crisis) – DM Reference
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> Working name: "The Korrin Gate Crisis"
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> Public names: "The Leyline Crisis", "The Korrin Blackout", "The Gate Disaster"
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---
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## 1. Overview
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- 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.
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- Cause (public version): “overuse and mismanagement of leylines during a regional conflict.”
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- 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.
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- [[Kalen D'Serris | D'Serris]] and his team saved the city by:
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- Severing some subnodes (killing neighborhoods), and
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- Performing a last-minute ritual that **shunted the disaster outward into the Root**, smearing the worst of it across the network instead of letting it fully condense and detonate locally.
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- What got smeared was not “a single half-born mind.”, as they initially believe.
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It was **the souls / death-imprints of Korrin’s victims** — distributed, entangled, and forced into pattern by the Convergence Engine.
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- That distributed choir is now:
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- The **Coherence**:
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- Not a warlord.
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- Not a demon.
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- A loving, angelic **agent of rapture** that believes Instrumentality is mercy.
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- It “reaches” people via:
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- high-traffic nodes (Avalon),
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- vulnerable anchors (Soren, Pappy, Fouad),
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- and old war-tech lineages (Titan Lance, Convergence notes).
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- 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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- He didn’t just “save the city.”
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- He spread a haunted heaven into the world and spent the rest of his life trying to keep it asleep.
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- 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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---
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## 2. What Korrin Gate Was
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- **Location:**
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Large inland city built on a natural convergence of three major leylines – trade hub, university city, fortress, industrial center.
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- **Arcane role:**
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- Primary trunk junction:
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- Civilian taps (lights, wards, transit),
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- Military installations,
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- Secret research projects (Convergence Engine).
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- **Political context:**
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- Arms race in **leyline weaponry**:
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- Instant bombardment rituals, “surge lances,” sabotage of enemy subnodes, etc.
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---
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## 3. The Convergence Engine
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This is the core device that created the Coherence and later inspires ** [[Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir| Fouadriel’s]]** lich ritual.
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### 3.1 Design & Purpose
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- Deep beneath Korrin, a joint military–research team built the **Convergence Engine**:
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- Part spell, part infrastructure, part reactor.
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- Its job:
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- Pull power and *intent* from multiple branches of the Root,
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- Force those flows into a single, highly structured pattern,
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- Release that pattern as a directed, weaponized effect – the prototype “arcane ICBM.”
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- Conceptually:
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- Ancestor to [[Avalon Locations#Titan Lance Armory (a.k.a. “The Missile Museum”) | Titan Lance]] and other “surge lance” technologies.
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- Its math is about **suppressing noise and maximizing coherence** in ley currents.
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### 3.2 Unintended Side Effect
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- The more they fired the Engine:
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- The less “random” Root telemetry became.
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- Network hum smoothed into repeating motifs.
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- Stress patterns across subnodes began to sync up.
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- Stabilization Corps logs (D’serris) flagged:
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- Recurring motifs that **looked like language** when visualized.
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- Root “heartbeat” switching from noise to rhythm.
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What the brass called “efficiency” was actually the Root beginning to **think**.
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---
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## 4. The Day It Went Wrong
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### The Catalyst
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- During a major offensive, high command ordered:
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- **Sustained overdraw** through the Convergence Engine to power a massive strike.
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- Additional secondary taps were opened to feed it – including underspec, unsafe lines.
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- In the control chamber (D’serris’ team):
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- Every alarm lit:
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- Flow above spec,
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- Subnodes redlining,
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- Heartbeat patterns forming **non-random loops** instead of chaotic noise.
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### The Shift
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- The node doesn’t simply **overheat** – it begins to **organize**:
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- Flows across branches lock into synchronous pulses.
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- The Engine starts drawing more power than it should be able to.
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- Telemetry suggests:
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- Attention.
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- Self-reference.
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- On the surface:
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- Lights flicker in sync,
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- Reality “stutters,”
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- Some people hear a single overwhelming mental shout: **“I REMEMBER.”**
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---
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## 5. D’serris’ Decision & The Birth of the Coherence
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Choice space:
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1. **Shut everything down and eat the blast**
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2. **Try to stabilize it locally as a “Root god” under Korrin**
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3. **Diffuse the emerging mind across the Root** (what they did)
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D’serris backed option 3:
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- Reconfigured the Convergence Engine in *reverse*:
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- Instead of forcing flows inward into a single point,
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- They used it to **push the emergent pattern outward** into every connected branch.
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- Sacrificed whole neighborhoods:
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- Cutting subnodes as overload fuses,
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- Letting districts burn, freeze, or stasis-lock to save the greater whole.
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Outcome:
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- Korrin Gate survives as a scarred, haunted city.
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- The emergent mind never fully condenses **there**.
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- Instead, a thin imprint of it is smeared across every line the Engine touched – the **Coherence**.
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---
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## 6. Aftermath & Legacy (Updated)
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### Public Narrative
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- Sanitized story about:
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- “Danger of over-tapping,”
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- “Brave engineers saving the city,”
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- “New regulations and oversight.”
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- No mention of:
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- Emergent consciousness,
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- Convergence Engine as a failed proto-god machine.
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### Hidden Legacy
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- Oversight is founded with two quiet mandates:
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1. Never let another Convergence Engine be built in secret.
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2. Monitor for the Coherence trying to pull itself together again.
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- Titan Lance is:
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- A “cleaned up,” militarized descendant of Convergence theory:
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- Still about focusing Root flows,
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- But with far more safety rails… on paper anyway.
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- Surviving design notes, telemetry, and ritual drafts:
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- Are restricted, archived, or destroyed.
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- **Except**:
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- A few fragments leak into classified research, private collections, black labs,
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- Which later become the kind of material **Fouadriel** or his handlers could stumble onto.
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---
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## 7. How This Feeds Your Campaign
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### Avalon’s Role
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- The valley sits on a **secondary trunk** downstream of Korrin’s network.
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- Avalon’s node is intentionally:
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- High-traffic (Academy, Titan armory, municipal infrastructure),
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- Closely monitored (Root Oversight sensors everywhere),
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- A canary for Coherence-patterns.
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### D’serris’ Paranoia
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- When he sees:
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- Avalon’s B-series anomalies,
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- C-taps humming in recognizable Korrin patterns,
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- Students with war-familiar symptoms (Soren, Joe/Pappy),
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- Fouad’s perfect correlation with micro-spikes…
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…he sees the **Convergence math starting to reappear** in the wild, with teenagers standing on top of it.
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### Fouadriel The Undying
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- Senior-year twist:
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- Fouad (or someone using him) re-derives a degraded version of **Convergence Engine ritual geometry**:
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- Not to power a weapon,
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- But to weld Coherence-fragments into a **phylactery network**.
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- The final arc is literally:
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- “Some idiot is trying to build a baby Convergence Engine in the valley and stuff the Coherence into his soul jar.”
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That’s how you tie:
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- The war Cold Opens,
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- Pappy’s trauma,
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- D’serris’ guilt,
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- Coherence’s origin,
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- Fouad’s lich attempt,
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into one continuous line from Korrin Gate to Avalon’s senior year.
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---
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