AndrewNotes/Avalon/10_Canon/Leyline Root System.md

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.