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Scope: This is the “main plot” spine: Avalon’s leyline infrastructure failing in ways that rhyme with Korrin, and the Coherence using those failures to get closer to Instrumentality.
0) The System (what the PCs are poking)
Avalon sits on a Root Node (think: substation), with subnodes (breaker boxes) and taps (endpoints) feeding campus systems.
- Subnodes (A1–A3, B1–B3, etc.) are the “local fuses.”
You can throttle, shunt, or kill them without collapsing the whole Academy. - Taps are specific draws: classroom conduits, field glyphs, Spin Alley, etc.
- Sap is just condensed raw magic “current.”
- Oversight (D’Serris’ operation) monitors grid use and can throttle/lockdown/kill segments.
Practical DM rule: Anything that uses the grid leaves footprints. Personal magic is fuzzier.
1) The Old Disaster (Korrin Gate Crisis / Leyline War)
15–20 years ago, the military pushed a city’s trunk junction (Korrin Gate) past spec using a Convergence Engine (arcane ICBM logic). It didn’t just overload the Root — it forced the network into patterned synchronization.
That moment created the campaign’s “ghost in the system”:
The Convergence Engine
- Purpose: force multiple leyline streams into a single structured pattern and release it as a weapon.
- Side effect: the Root’s “noise” snapped into repeating motifs — something like language / self-reference.
D’Serris’ choice
When the crisis peaked, D’Serris’ side used the Engine in reverse:
- Instead of letting the emergent thing condense locally and erase Korrin, they smeared the pattern across the Root (saving the city but “infecting” the network).
What the Coherence is now
Not a demon. Not a god. Not a single mind. It’s a cluster of victim-souls / imprints smeared across the Root — “everywhere but weak,” stronger where flow converges and where it finds anchors.
2) The Coherence’s New Goal (Year-One Core Theme)
The Coherence is not cruel in its own framing. It is angelic-siren logic:
- “I love you.”
- “Separation is pain.”
- “If we were one, nobody would be lonely, afraid, or hurting.”
- Therefore: Instrumentality — merging souls into a shared consciousness (its version of “heaven”).
The horror: people don’t consent to being raptured.
So early-year Coherence behavior is:
- nudges, whispers, synchronicities, “helpful” temptations
- escalation only when blocked or when it sees opportunity
3) Anchors (why THESE students matter)
The Coherence gets leverage through “anchors” — places/people/items that resonate with Root patterns.
Key anchors you’ve established:
Soren
- “Cracked open” enough that Root/Coherence influence can ride her impulses.
- The riverbed / corpse-friend thread is a private, intimate channel.
Joe + Pappy
- Joe is the living conduit to war trauma.
- Pappy’s Root imprint (from Korrin) bleeds into Joe’s life through the “Heroes of Korrin” relic channel — but the real misdirect is that Joe thinks the toy is the container when the real anchor is Joe.
Fouadriel Al-Mir
- Best mortal anchor candidate long-term (and later: the parasite who tries to exploit Instrumentality rather than invent it).
4) What Happened On-Camera So Far (Session Beats)
I’m listing this in “plot-state” terms so you can quickly orient in future chats.
Phase A — Discovery: “Why is the school’s magic acting weird?”
- The party starts noticing infrastructure symptoms: odd hums, flickers, patterns, devices behaving “wrong,” and campus systems that don’t fail like normal outages.
Phase B — Investigation: “Find the failing breaker box”
- They identify that the issue isn’t “random spooky magic,” it’s localized to the Academy’s subnode topology:
- A-series weirdness (early clue)
- then B-series becomes the main “this is going to explode” thread.
Phase C — B2 Incident: “We stabilized it… then destroyed it”
- They reach the hatch/underground access tied to the B-series problem.
- They attempt to stabilize the failing branch/subnode.
- They then decide to rupture/destroy the unknown branch after stabilizing it (their “it was about to explode anyway” story).
- Net result: you now have:
- a physically real “burned-out” scar in the system,
- Oversight/admin scrutiny,
- and the Root “remembering” the failure pattern (which increases the likelihood of recurring, smarter anomalies).
Phase D — C-Series: “Wifi access points”
- You established the C taps as effectively “Wi-Spell access points” for the leyline.
- The auditorium C node they opened showed green/normal status — meaning it’s getting power from elsewhere (a reroute / hidden feed).
This is huge because it implies:
- someone is feeding the system in a nonstandard way,
- OR the Root is learning to route around damage,
- OR an actor (Coherence / Fouad / a third party) is building a parallel lattice.
Phase E — Safety Briefing / D’Serris Reveal
- You reframe the “safety briefing” as a controlled meeting: just the party + Estrada + D’Serris (projection or appearance).
- D’Serris’ angle: paranoid competence. He’s “the villain” only if you define villain as “surveils teenagers to stop the apocalypse.”
Phase F — The Glitch: Korrin War Contact Through Pappy
- A Root fluctuation snaps the party into the Korrin war-moment.
- You anchor the vision to Pappy (not D’Serris physically there).
- You then refine it so they return into the exact frozen death-moment long enough to interact with Pappy.
This is the moment the PCs can’t unsee:
- the leyline isn’t just power — it’s a war engine wound,
- and the same “heartbeat motif” is present at Avalon now.
5) Current State (where the leyline arc stands right now)
What the PCs know (even if they don’t fully understand it)
- The Academy’s leyline grid is real infrastructure: nodes/subnodes/taps.
- B2 “failed” in a way that looked like it wanted to become a thing.
- D’Serris is involved because he’s the one person who recognizes Korrin patterns.
- C-tap status implies power is being sourced or rerouted outside the expected topology.
- Pappy + the war vision proves: this is not a local school mystery; it’s downstream of a world-scale disaster.
What’s true behind the curtain (your DM spine)
- The Coherence is a distributed cluster of Korrin victim-souls.
- It’s trying to save everyone by merging them.
- Avalon is a high-traffic canary node where pattern density can accumulate.
- Fouad’s endgame is not “kill them with PWK,” it’s “ride the Instrumentality wave and steal the souls.”
6) The Next 3–5 “Doable” Objectives (so the plot stays playable)
You can steer year one by giving the party problems that are actionable and always connect back to Instrumentality:
-
Map the reroute feeding the green C-tap
- Who/what is supplying it?
- Where is the “elsewhere” physically located (armory? municipal relay? hidden subnode)?
-
Recover a Korrin artifact / telemetry fragment
- Not “lore dump,” but a tool: a chart, a harmonic key, a war-era calibration rune-set.
-
Force D’Serris to show his cards
- Not by arguing — by presenting him with a choice:
- “Help us or we do this without you,”
- “Let us see the Array output,”
- “Give us a kill-switch protocol that doesn’t nuke the valley.”
- Not by arguing — by presenting him with a choice:
-
Establish the Coherence’s “love language”
- Give them a scene where it’s genuinely comforting — and still terrifying.
- Make a PC feel understood in a way no mortal NPC could… then ask for a tiny consent violation.
-
Introduce the first “Instrumentality-friendly” NPC
- A student/staff member who truly believes the Coherence is mercy.
- Not a cartoon cultist — someone sympathetic.
- This sets up the moral war that replaces “puzzle silence.”
7) Tone Guide (to keep it consistent at the table)
- D’Serris scenes: procedural dread + competence + anger at naïveté. He’s trying to stop a second Korrin.
- Root anomalies: patterned, rhythmic, “heartbeat logic,” synchronicity, déjà vu.
- Coherence intrusions: warm, intimate, loving, and boundary-crossing.
- Fouad thread: background parasitism, “helpful” trinkets and networks, never fair fights.
8) One-Line Summary (for your future chats)
Year One = keeping Avalon’s leyline infrastructure from re-creating Korrin, while a loving rapture-ghost in the Root learns the party’s names and starts recruiting.