AndrewNotes/Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Crisis.md

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"

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): military tried to weaponize the trunk; pushed it into a state of emergent consciousness, then lost control.
• 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 the thing now clawing its way back via:
  • High-traffic nodes (like Avalon),
  • Vulnerable people (Soren, Fouadriel, etc.), and
  • Old war-artifacts (like Pappy, Titan Lance tech, etc.)
• The crisis justified building the 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. Think: inland trade hub, university city, fortress, industrial center.

• Arcane role:

  • Served as a primary trunk junction for the whole region.
  • Hosted a massive Node complex under the city:
    • Civilian taps (lights, wards, transit).
    • Military installations.
    • Secret research projects.

• Political context:

  • Tensions between neighboring states / factions.
  • Arms race in leyline-based weaponry:
    • Instant bombardment rituals.
    • “Surge lances” (prototypes of what Titan Lance later formalized).
    • Sabotage of enemy subnodes.

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3. The Build-Up

Official story (what most people know)

• Korrin Gate massively over-tapped its node to:
  • Power shields, weapons, and industry during wartime.
  • Add more and more “temporary” taps that were never decommissioned.
• Over years, stress crept higher:
  • Minor brownouts, weird glitches, small wild magic surges.
  • Complaints from engineers and druids ignored in favor of “national security.”

Actual cause (DM truth)

• Deep under the city, a joint military–research team built the Convergence Engine:

  • A ritual / device meant to:
    • Tie together multiple branches of the Root.
    • Focus Sap and intent into a single, coherent beam—an “arcane ICBM.”
  • The prototype weapon was the conceptual ancestor of Titan Lance.

• Side effect no one admitted publicly:

  • The Convergence Engine didn’t just move power; it forced coherence on Root flows.
  • The more they used it, the more the Root in that region began to:
    • Behave in non-random ways.
    • Show recurring “patterns” in its hum.
    • Push back when pushed.

• D’Serris at this time:

  • Junior engineer / battle-mage assigned to the Leyline Stabilization Corps attached to the project.
  • Kept raising flags that the pattern logs looked “wrong.”
  • Was overruled repeatedly by senior mages and generals who wanted results.

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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.
  • Multiple secondary taps were opened to feed it – including some not rated for that flow.

• On the monitoring side (where D’Serris is):

  • Every alarm they have is going off:
    • Flow far above spec.
    • Subnodes redlining.
    • Heartbeat patterns in the Root going from “pulsing” to “structured” – like a flat hum aligning into something like a voice.

The Shift

• The node doesn’t simply overheat – it begins to organize:

  • Flows in separate branches sync up.
  • Entire subnets start pulsing in time with each other.
  • The Convergence Engine begins drawing in more power than it should be able to.

• D’Serris and the stabilization team realize:

  • They are no longer just pushing power through the Root.
  • The Root (or something in it) is now using their hardware to cohere.

The First failure

• Out on the surface:

  • People see lights flicker, wards ripple, then reality stutter:
    • Streets “double” for a second.
    • Voices echo words no one said.
    • Some people hear a single, overwhelming thought: “I REMEMBER.”

• In the Node chamber:

  • Sap pressure breaks containment on a few subnodes:
    • Korrin Gate loses entire districts in instant flares of wild magic.
    • One district becomes a glass crater.
    • Another is frozen mid-motion, its inhabitants in a permanent stasis bubble (later evacuated with horrific side effects).

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5. The Decision D’Serris Made

The options at that point:

1. Shut everything down and let it blow

   • Kill the Convergence Engine, cut the trunk, hope the emergent mind rips itself apart.
   • Expected outcome: Korrin Gate destroyed, shockwaves along the trunk, unknown global consequences.

2. Try to "stabilize" it locally

   • Contain the emergent consciousness in the Korrin Node.
   • Expected outcome: permanent haunted city, a god-egg in the basement, same problem later.

3. Diffuse it across the Root (what they actually did)

   • Use the Engine in reverse:
     • Force the emergent pattern downstream, away from the Korrin Node.
     • Smear its coherence across as much of the Root as possible.
   • Expected outcome: Save the city; contaminate the entire network with a thinned-out ghost.

The high command panicked. The Stabilization Corps proposed options. D’Serris:

• Ran the numbers and backed option 3:
  • “We can’t contain it here, and we can’t eat the blast. Spread the pattern until it’s too thin to act.”
• Helped implement the ritual:
  • Severed sacrificial subnodes (killing power to, and in some cases killing, whole neighborhoods).
  • Reconfigured the Engine to push pattern outward instead of inward.

It “worked”:

• The emergent mind did not fully cohere at Korrin Gate.
• The city mostly survived (minus the scarred districts).
• Casualty numbers still huge, but not apocalyptic.

But:

• A fragmented consciousness was now threaded throughout the Root.
• It could no longer manifest as one big city-killer… but it could leak into many places, slowly, wherever conditions were right.

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6. Aftermath

Public Narrative

• Official line:

  • “Korrin Gate was the result of reckless overuse of leylines during wartime.”
  • “Our brave engineers and mages stabilized the node at great cost.”
  • “New regulations and oversight will prevent such a tragedy from happening again.”

• Korrin Gate today:

  • Patchwork of rebuilt districts and scars:
    • The Glass Quarter where nothing grows.
    • The Hums where people still hear echoes.
    • The Frozen Mile that was eventually dismantled block by block.

• The Root is now treated as:

  • Something powerful but dangerous.
  • Something that needs regulation (Oversight).

What only a few know

• D’Serris and a handful of surviving Stabilization officers know:

  • They instrumentally lobotomized a rising mind by smearing it across the world’s nervous system.
  • Oversight exists largely to:
    • Monitor for that mind trying to pull itself back together.
    • Kill nodes / branches before they can become a new Korrin Gate.

• Classified docs refer to the emergent pattern as:

  • “The Coherence Event”
  • “The Underpattern”
  • Or, in one terrified margin note by D’Serris: “the thing that learned our names.”

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7. How This Ties to Avalon & Your Campaign

Why the Valley Matters

• The Avalon valley sits on a secondary trunk connected to the same network Korrin Gate was on.

• The Academy node is:

  • Newish (installed post-Crisis).
  • High-traffic (students, experiments, Titan armory not far away).
  • Labeled in Oversight docs as a “sensitivity probe”:
    • “If something like Korrin happens again, we want to see it early.”

• Titan Lance Armory:

  • Built as a formalized, “safer” successor to the Convergence Engine concept.
  • Its cradle can, in theory, be repurposed:
    • To try another diffusion.
    • Or to deliver a killing strike to a localized manifestation.

Why D’Serris Is Freaked Out Now

• Recent anomalies at Avalon (B2, Root whispers, etc.) match low-level patterns from the Korrin logs:

  • Heartbeat goes from noise → pattern, then back.
  • Student biometrics correlate with spikes.
  • Certain “voices” reported by kids sound too similar to witness accounts.

• When he sees:

  • Soren’s behavior around the Root,
  • Joe’s Pappy-possessions in a grid-tied field,
  • Fouadriel’s weird passive influence on Heartbeat graphs…

  …he doesn’t see “teen drama” – he sees Korrin Gate, Act II.

• His long-term fear:

  • The fragmented Coherence from the old crisis is trying to use:
    • High-traffic nodes (Avalon, Titan), and
    • Emotionally volatile adolescents as anchor points.

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8. How Different People Talk About It

You can use this for NPC color.

D’Serris

• “Korrin Gate was not a blackout. It was the Root trying to stand up.”
• “We pushed it back once. We will not get another clean shot if it happens here.”
• “When I say ‘shut that node down’, I am speaking from experience, not paranoia.”

Old-timer Mage / Professor

• “They played god with the world-tree and got their fingers bitten off.”
• “We were told to keep casting while the sky hummed. I still wake up hearing it.”
• “Oversight? I don’t like them, but I like melted cities less.”

Normal Civilians / Parents

• “My uncle died in the Korrin Blackout. Don’t you dare mess with campus taps.”
• “That’s why we have all those safety drills. That’s why the lights flicker sometimes.”
• “They say it can’t happen again. They also said one city couldn’t overload a trunk.”

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9. Player-Facing Version (Optional Later)

If you ever want to give them an in-game explanation (library article, teacher monologue), you can boil it down to something like:

The Korrin Gate Crisis (History Textbook Version)

About seventeen years ago, the city of Korrin Gate suffered a catastrophic failure of its leyline infrastructure. Years of overuse, wartime strain, and experimental tapping pushed the city’s main node past safe capacity.

When it finally broke, entire districts were scorched, frozen, or warped by uncontrolled magic. Only the emergency response of the Leyline Stabilization Corps prevented total destruction.

The Korrin Gate Crisis led directly to the creation of the Root Oversight Array, new regulations on high-capacity taps, and strict monitoring of major nodes—such as the one beneath Avalon Adventuring Academy.

Official reports describe the Crisis as “a tragic but instructive example of the dangers of magical overreach.”
People who were there tend to describe it with fewer polite words.