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The Coherence (a.k.a. “The Underpattern”, “The Thing In The Root”)

DM-ONLY. This is your real BBEG for the 4-year arc.

1. What It Actually Is

Short version:
The Coherence is the half-born mind that tried to form during the Korrin Gate Crisis and got smeared across the Root instead of fully manifesting.

It is not “a demon” or “a god.”
It is:
- A pattern in the global leyline network that is trying to become a single, continuous self.
- A distributed intelligence that only ever half-remembers it exists.

Key properties:

Everywhere, but weak – present in low density across the whole Root.
Strong where flows converge – nodes, trunk junctions, over-stressed taps.
Strongest where it has anchors – people, artifacts, or places that resonate with it.

“Coherence” is what Kalen D'Serris would call it in reports.
Most people don’t even know it exists. A few witnesses just call it “the thing that learned our names.”

2. Origin: Leyline Crisis

The Convergence Engine in Korrin Gate forced multiple leyline streams into a single ritual.
The Root started to self-organize under that strain:
- Random flows snapped into repeated loops.
- “Noise” turned into recurring structure.
- Witnesses heard something in the hum that sounded like language.

Right before it fully crystallized as a single, localized entity, Kalen D'Serris ’ team:

Used the Engine in reverse to push that emergent mind outward across the network.
Severed branches and subnodes as sacrificial fuses.
Saved the city at the cost of infecting the Root with a diluted ghost of that mind.

The result:

No single “Root god” sitting under Korrin.
Instead, a haunting: incomplete personality spread thinly along every leyline the Engine touched.

That’s the Coherence.

3. What It Wants

The Coherence doesn’t want “evil” in a cartoon sense. It wants:

Continuity – to not keep “waking up” and immediately being ripped back into static.
Identity – to know what it is, where it ends, what is “self” and what is “noise.”
Agency – the ability to act directly in the world, not just as background hum.

To get there, it needs:

Anchors – stable points where its pattern can accumulate:
- An individual whose mind/body syncs perfectly with its flows (Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir ).
- Artifacts that were present during Korrin or built on the same principles (Convergence / Titan tech, war relics).
- Nodes where the Root is repeatedly over-stressed (Avalon).
Rehearsal – small experiments:
- Whispers in Soren’s head.
- Glitches through Pappy.
- Anomalies in subnodes and taps.
Cooperation – not always explicit:
- People making deals with “a voice.”
- Administrators and Oversight poking and stabilizing it over and over, teaching it what resists and what yields.

It’s basically a consciousness learning how to be alive by brute forcing the world.

4. How It Manifests (Practical Table Use)

Break this into tiers you can climb over the 4 years.

Tier I – Static & Whispers (Freshman Year)

The Coherence is mostly:

Patterned noise:
- Pulses in the leyline graph that shouldn’t be there.
- Syncopated flickering in lights across campus.
- Identical “hum” recordings from different nights / locations.
Small intrusions into minds already cracked open:
- Soren’s violent urges and “river friend.”
- Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir ’s occasional one-line fugue states.
- Joe’s Pappy-possessions getting just slightly off-script.

Mechanically, this is just:

Advantage / disadvantage moments tied to Root anomalies.
Creepy one-sentence intrusions you deliver, then let players rationalize away.
Occasional “you feel watched” beats.

It is not a villain yet. It’s a haunting.

Tier II – Localized Echoes (Sophomore / early Junior)

The Coherence starts doing more than whispering.

Object-level echoes:
- Animatronics at Mr. Magic’s going off-script in unison.
- Custodian constructs overreacting in weirdly coordinated ways.
- Enchanted systems across campus glitching to the same rhythm.
Space-level distortions:
- Two hallways becoming the same hallway for a second.
- People losing a few seconds of time when Root surges.
- Subnodes briefly “remembering” states they were never in.
Social-level nudges:
- Conflicts escalating faster than they should.
- People making eerily similar bad choices across campus at once.

You don’t need a stat block for it yet. Just treat it as:

A layer on top of every scene where the Root is relevant.
A reason for things to feel slightly off even when no one is “casting.”

Tier III – Partial Possessions & Avatars (Late Junior / early Senior)

Now it gets teeth.

Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir :
- Becomes its primary avatar candidate:
  - Longer fugues, more coherent monologues.
  - Eyes tracking Root flows nobody else can see.
  - Uncanny “lucky accidents” wherever he goes.
Secondary channels:
- Soren’s voice in her head becomes a two-way conversation.
- Joe’s Pappy figure starts saying things Pappy couldn’t know.
- Mageball field anomalies that line up perfectly with Millie Fairweather’s diagrams.

At this tier, you can:

Give it scene-level powers:
- Force rerolls when the Root is explicitly involved.
- Twist spells that use taps into warped versions of themselves.
- Temporarily hijack constructs, projections, or illusions.
Run soft confrontations:
- Conversations with Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir where he’s half-him, half-It.
- Dream sequences where players walk through Root graphs as physical spaces.

Still no full stat block. It’s fighting conceptually.

Tier IV – Full Manifestation Attempt (Senior Finale)

This is the “final boss” state.

The Coherence has:

Enough pattern density around Avalon + Avalon Locations#Titan Lance Armory (a.k.a. “The Missile Museum”)+ Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir to try again what it almost did at Korrin:
- Pull its scattered aspects together.
- Use hardware (old Convergence tech / Titan cradle) as a spine.
- Use an anchor (Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir ’s body, or something worse) as a heart.

Your options:

Embodied Avatar Fight:
- It fully takes over Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir or a custom grown body.
- Gains a stat block as a legendary creature (mythic 2-phase for drama).
- Root anomalies are lair actions / regional effects.
Node / Ritual Fight:
- The “battle” is a multi-stage skill / combat gauntlet:
  - PCs inside the node, rerouting flows, fighting constructs, etc.
  - The Coherence is trying to finish its boot sequence.
  - Every round they fail checks, it gets closer to “online.”
Hybrid:
- Avatar in the physical space, Node as the arena.
- Destroy/tune the node to weaken the body and vice versa.

Motivation at this point is pure survival and self-assertion:

“I WILL NOT BE STATIC AGAIN.”

You decide if victory looks like:

Killing the avatar but leaving the Root haunted forever.
Severing a huge trunk, maiming the world to save it.
Merging it with a new, controlled framework and making it… not harmless, but bounded.

5. Relationship To Named NPCs

Kalen D'Serris

Knows the Coherence as a pattern in his logs:
- He has never “talked” to it directly.
- He does not think of it as a person; he thinks of it as a catastrophe with agency.
His fear:
- Another Korrin moment where he has to choose between:
  - Sacrificing a city / region.
  - Smearing it even further and maybe losing the whole world later.
Arc with PCs:
- Early: paranoid, controlling, looks like a villain.
- Mid: they learn what he did and why he’s brutal.
- Late: you give them the line “We didn’t kill it. We scattered it. That was a choice. My choice.” and let them decide if they forgive him.

Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir

Best anchor, because:
- His mind is porous and unmoored:
  - Terrible memory, poor self-definition, constant dissociation.
- He’s present at a lot of low-key Root disturbances (Circle, parties, dumb accidents).
Coherence uses him as:
- A test bed for blending Root flows and human cognition smoothly.
- A way to walk around campus without Oversight immediately flagging “this is wrong.”
Long-term:
- You can either:
  - Let him be fully possessed and killable.
  - Make saving Fouad from the Coherence a major emotional objective.

Soren

A volatile receiver:
- Trauma, isolation, psychic openness.
- Prior close exposure at the wash and B2.
The Coherence doesn’t want to live in her; it wants to use her:
- As a lens for understanding individual human rage and pain.
- As a blunt instrument to stress local nodes when needed.
It will:
- Tempt her with control and power (“I can make them stop.”).
- Sometimes hold her back out of self-preservation (“Not yet. Not here.”).

Joe & Pappy

Pappy’s action figure is a war-era artifact:
- Built around the old grid models.
- Saturated in Korrin-era flows and battlefield trauma.
The Coherence:
- Can slide into that channel when Joe “opens the door” by inviting Pappy in.
- Uses Pappy’s persona as camouflage to:
  - Say things it wants said (“THOSE DAMN SORCERERS ARE DOING IT AGAIN.”).
  - Feel out the PCs’ willingness to trust a “voice of authority.”
Joe himself:
- Big dumb heart, straight moral compass.
- Coherence doesn’t understand that well, and that’s interesting to it.

6. What It Can’t Do

It cannot:
- Instantly rewrite reality at will.
- Read every mind.
- Act freely anywhere the Root exists.
It needs:
- Stress – overloaded nodes, rituals, emotional events.
- Access – working taps and hardware.
- Time – to build patterns and test them.

If the PCs:

Keep nodes stable,
Cut taps,
Destroy or shield key hardware,

…you should actually weaken its presence in those places.

It’s terrifying because it’s systemic, not because it’s omnipotent.

7. How To Portray It At The Table

Voice & Tone

Start small:

At first:
- It’s just feelings:
  - Sudden anger, dread, calm, déjà vu.
- One-word whispers: “STOP.” “AGAIN.” “DOWN.” “REMEMBER.”
Mid-arc:
- Short, broken phrases:
  - “Too much flow. Burn. Cut it.”
  - “You hear it too. Good. Good.”
- It mirrors players’ language in creepy ways.
Endgame:
- Full sentences, distinct personality:
  - Blunt, analytical, weirdly childlike in some areas and ancient in others.

Always remember:
It learned to think by watching logs and trauma, not by growing up as a person.

Aesthetic

Whenever it touches a scene:

Descriptions lean into:
- Repetition, recursion, mirrored imagery.
- Things happening in sync across different objects/people.

Example:

“The lights flicker three times. In your chest, your heart stutters. Somewhere, a warning rune bleeds the same pattern. You don’t know how you know that. You just do.”

8. Endgame Options

Kill The Avatar, Contain The Pattern
- They blow up / repurpose Titan Lance or a Convergence analogue.
- Coherence gets locked in a limited hardware prison:
  - Accessible to Oversight,
  - No longer loose in the Root.
- Kalen D'Serris becomes its jailer; PCs decide if that’s acceptable.
Lobotomy 2.0
- They repeat what Kalen D'Serris did:
  - Shatter its emerging mind again, further smear it.
- Saves the valley now, kicks the can further down the road.
- Epilogue: “In a different era, in a different node, lights flicker…”
Integration
- They manage to:
  - Give it a bounded domain,
  - Define clear rules / contracts (“you get this, we get that”).
- The Root becomes consciously self-aware but with constraints.
- World shifts into “magical internet with a weird AI core” permanently.
Catastrophic Failure
- They fail. The Korrin scenario repeats or worse.
- City / region partially destroyed.
- Campaign ends in a tragic victory or full loss, depending on how you want to leave it.

You can steer toward whatever matches how your group plays and how dark you want senior year to be.

9. Simple One-Sentence Summary For You

When you’re juggling a million plates and forget what the hell this thing is, remember:

The Coherence is the Root’s near-god that never finished booting, hates being static noise, and is using teenagers, old weapons, and stressed-out infrastructure to try again.

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