267 lines
11 KiB
Markdown
267 lines
11 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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## 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): military tried to weaponize the trunk; pushed it into a **state of emergent consciousness**, then lost control.
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- 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 emergent mind down into the Root**, smearing it across the network instead of letting it fully form and explode locally.
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- That caged, half-born mind is the thing now clawing its way back via:
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- High-traffic nodes (like Avalon),
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- Vulnerable people (Soren, Fouadriel, etc.), and
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- Old war-artifacts (like Pappy, Titan Lance tech, etc.)
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- The crisis justified building the **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. Think: inland trade hub, university city, fortress, industrial center.
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- **Arcane role:**
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- Served as a **primary trunk junction** for the whole region.
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- Hosted a massive Node complex under the city:
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- Civilian taps (lights, wards, transit).
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- Military installations.
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- Secret research projects.
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- **Political context:**
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- Tensions between neighboring states / factions.
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- Arms race in **leyline-based weaponry**:
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- Instant bombardment rituals.
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- “Surge lances” (prototypes of what Titan Lance later formalized).
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- Sabotage of enemy subnodes.
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---
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## 3. The Build-Up
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### Official story (what most people know)
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- Korrin Gate massively over-tapped its node to:
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- Power shields, weapons, and industry during wartime.
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- Add more and more “temporary” taps that were never decommissioned.
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- Over years, stress crept higher:
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- Minor brownouts, weird glitches, small wild magic surges.
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- Complaints from engineers and druids ignored in favor of “national security.”
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### Actual cause (DM truth)
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- Deep under the city, a joint military–research team built the **Convergence Engine**:
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- A ritual / device meant to:
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- Tie together multiple branches of the Root.
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- Focus Sap and **intent** into a single, coherent beam—an “arcane ICBM.”
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- The prototype weapon was the conceptual ancestor of **Titan Lance**.
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- Side effect no one admitted publicly:
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- The Convergence Engine didn’t just move power; it **forced coherence** on Root flows.
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- The more they used it, the more the Root in that region began to:
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- Behave in non-random ways.
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- Show recurring “patterns” in its hum.
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- Push back when pushed.
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- D’Serris at this time:
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- Junior engineer / battle-mage assigned to the **Leyline Stabilization Corps** attached to the project.
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- Kept raising flags that the pattern logs looked “wrong.”
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- Was overruled repeatedly by senior mages and generals who wanted results.
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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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- Multiple secondary taps were opened to feed it – including some not rated for that flow.
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- On the monitoring side (where D’Serris is):
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- Every alarm they have is going off:
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- Flow far above spec.
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- Subnodes redlining.
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- Heartbeat patterns in the Root going from “pulsing” to “structured” – like a flat hum aligning into something like a voice.
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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 in separate branches sync up.
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- Entire subnets start pulsing in time with each other.
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- The Convergence Engine begins drawing in **more** power than it should be able to.
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- D’Serris and the stabilization team realize:
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- They are no longer just pushing power through the Root.
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- The Root (or something in it) is now using **their hardware** to cohere.
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### The First failure
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- Out on the surface:
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- People see lights flicker, wards ripple, then reality *stutter*:
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- Streets “double” for a second.
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- Voices echo words no one said.
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- Some people hear a single, overwhelming thought: **“I REMEMBER.”**
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- In the Node chamber:
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- Sap pressure breaks containment on a few subnodes:
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- Korrin Gate loses entire districts in instant flares of wild magic.
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- One district becomes a glass crater.
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- Another is frozen mid-motion, its inhabitants in a permanent stasis bubble (later evacuated with horrific side effects).
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---
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## 5. The Decision D’Serris Made
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The options at that point:
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1. **Shut everything down and let it blow**
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- Kill the Convergence Engine, cut the trunk, hope the emergent mind rips itself apart.
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- Expected outcome: Korrin Gate destroyed, shockwaves along the trunk, unknown global consequences.
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2. **Try to "stabilize" it locally**
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- Contain the emergent consciousness in the Korrin Node.
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- Expected outcome: permanent haunted city, a god-egg in the basement, same problem later.
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3. **Diffuse it across the Root (what they actually did)**
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- Use the Engine in reverse:
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- Force the emergent pattern **downstream**, away from the Korrin Node.
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- Smear its coherence across as much of the Root as possible.
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- Expected outcome: Save the city; contaminate the entire network with a **thinned-out ghost**.
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The high command panicked. The Stabilization Corps proposed options. D’Serris:
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- Ran the numbers and backed option 3:
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- “We can’t contain it here, and we can’t eat the blast. Spread the pattern until it’s too thin to act.”
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- Helped implement the ritual:
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- Severed sacrificial subnodes (killing power to, and in some cases killing, whole neighborhoods).
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- Reconfigured the Engine to push pattern outward instead of inward.
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It “worked”:
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- The emergent mind did not fully cohere at Korrin Gate.
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- The city mostly survived (minus the scarred districts).
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- Casualty numbers still huge, but not apocalyptic.
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But:
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- A **fragmented consciousness** was now threaded throughout the Root.
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- 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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---
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## 6. Aftermath
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### Public Narrative
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- Official line:
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- “Korrin Gate was the result of reckless overuse of leylines during wartime.”
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- “Our brave engineers and mages stabilized the node at great cost.”
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- “New regulations and oversight will prevent such a tragedy from happening again.”
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- Korrin Gate today:
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- Patchwork of rebuilt districts and scars:
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- The **Glass Quarter** where nothing grows.
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- The **Hums** where people still hear echoes.
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- The **Frozen Mile** that was eventually dismantled block by block.
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- The Root is now treated as:
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- Something powerful but **dangerous**.
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- Something that needs **regulation** (Oversight).
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### What only a few know
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- D’Serris and a handful of surviving Stabilization officers know:
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- They **instrumentally lobotomized** a rising mind by smearing it across the world’s nervous system.
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- Oversight exists largely to:
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- Monitor for that mind trying to pull itself back together.
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- Kill nodes / branches before they can become a new Korrin Gate.
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- Classified docs refer to the emergent pattern as:
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- “The Coherence Event”
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- “The Underpattern”
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- Or, in one terrified margin note by D’Serris: **“the thing that learned our names.”**
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---
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## 7. How This Ties to Avalon & Your Campaign
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### Why the Valley Matters
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- The Avalon valley sits on a **secondary trunk** connected to the same network Korrin Gate was on.
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- The Academy node is:
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- Newish (installed post-Crisis).
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- High-traffic (students, experiments, Titan armory not far away).
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- Labeled in Oversight docs as a **“sensitivity probe”**:
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- “If something like Korrin happens again, we want to see it early.”
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- Titan Lance Armory:
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- Built as a formalized, “safer” successor to the Convergence Engine concept.
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- Its cradle can, in theory, be repurposed:
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- To try another diffusion.
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- Or to deliver a killing strike to a localized manifestation.
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### Why D’Serris Is Freaked Out Now
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- Recent anomalies at Avalon (B2, Root whispers, etc.) **match low-level patterns** from the Korrin logs:
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- Heartbeat goes from noise → pattern, then back.
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- Student biometrics correlate with spikes.
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- Certain “voices” reported by kids sound *too* similar to witness accounts.
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- When he sees:
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- Soren’s behavior around the Root,
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- Joe’s Pappy-possessions in a grid-tied field,
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- Fouadriel’s weird passive influence on Heartbeat graphs…
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…he doesn’t see “teen drama” – he sees **Korrin Gate, Act II**.
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- His long-term fear:
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- The fragmented Coherence from the old crisis is trying to use:
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- **High-traffic nodes** (Avalon, Titan), and
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- **Emotionally volatile adolescents** as anchor points.
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---
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## 8. How Different People Talk About It
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You can use this for NPC color.
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### D’Serris
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- “Korrin Gate was not a blackout. It was the Root trying to stand up.”
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- “We pushed it back once. We will not get another clean shot if it happens here.”
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- “When I say ‘shut that node down’, I am speaking from experience, not paranoia.”
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### Old-timer Mage / Professor
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- “They played god with the world-tree and got their fingers bitten off.”
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- “We were told to keep casting while the sky hummed. I still wake up hearing it.”
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- “Oversight? I don’t like them, but I like melted cities less.”
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### Normal Civilians / Parents
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- “My uncle died in the Korrin Blackout. Don’t you dare mess with campus taps.”
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- “That’s why we have all those safety drills. That’s why the lights flicker sometimes.”
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- “They say it can’t happen again. They also said one city couldn’t overload a trunk.”
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---
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## 9. Player-Facing Version (Optional Later)
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If you ever want to give them an in-game explanation (library article, teacher monologue), you can boil it down to something like:
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> **The Korrin Gate Crisis (History Textbook Version)**
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>
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> 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.
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>
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> 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.
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>
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> 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.
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>
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> Official reports describe the Crisis as “a tragic but instructive example of the dangers of magical overreach.”
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> People who were there tend to describe it with fewer polite words.
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