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"

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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): the military tried to weaponize the trunk via the Convergence Engine; this pushed the Root into a state of emergent consciousness, then lost control.
• Kalen 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 now:
  • The Coherence,
  • Clawing its way back via high-traffic nodes (Avalon), vulnerable anchors (Soren, Pappy, Fouadriel), and old war-tech lineages (Titan Lance, Convergence notes).
• The crisis justified building the Avalon Factions#1.1 Root Oversight Committee ("The 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 – trade hub, university city, fortress, industrial center.

• Arcane role:

  • Primary trunk junction:
    • Civilian taps (lights, wards, transit),
    • Military installations,
    • Secret research projects (Convergence Engine).

• Political context:

  • Arms race in leyline weaponry:
    • Instant bombardment rituals, “surge lances,” sabotage of enemy subnodes, etc.

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3. The Convergence Engine

This is the core device that created the Coherence and later inspires ** Fouadriel “Fouad” Al-Mir** lich ritual.

3.1 Design & Purpose

• Deep beneath Korrin, a joint military–research team built the Convergence Engine:

  • Part spell, part infrastructure, part reactor.
  • Its job:
    • Pull power and intent from multiple branches of the Root,
    • Force those flows into a single, highly structured pattern,
    • Release that pattern as a directed, weaponized effect – the prototype “arcane ICBM.”

• Conceptually:

  • Ancestor to Avalon Locations#Titan Lance Armory (a.k.a. “The Missile Museum”) and other “surge lance” technologies.
  • Its math is about suppressing noise and maximizing coherence in ley currents.

3.2 Unintended Side Effect

• The more they fired the Engine:

  • The less “random” Root telemetry became.
  • Network hum smoothed into repeating motifs.
  • Stress patterns across subnodes began to sync up.

• Stabilization Corps logs (D’serris) flagged:

  • Recurring motifs that looked like language when visualized.
  • Root “heartbeat” switching from noise to rhythm.

What the brass called “efficiency” was actually the Root beginning to think.

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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.
  • Additional secondary taps were opened to feed it – including underspec, unsafe lines.

• In the control chamber (D’serris’ team):

  • Every alarm lit:
    • Flow above spec,
    • Subnodes redlining,
    • Heartbeat patterns forming non-random loops instead of chaotic noise.

The Shift

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

  • Flows across branches lock into synchronous pulses.
  • The Engine starts drawing more power than it should be able to.
  • Telemetry suggests:
    • Attention.
    • Self-reference.

• On the surface:

  • Lights flicker in sync,
  • Reality “stutters,”
  • Some people hear a single overwhelming mental shout: “I REMEMBER.”

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5. D’serris’ Decision & The Birth of the Coherence

Choice space:

1. Shut everything down and eat the blast
2. Try to stabilize it locally as a “Root god” under Korrin
3. Diffuse the emerging mind across the Root (what they did)

D’serris backed option 3:

• Reconfigured the Convergence Engine in reverse:
  • Instead of forcing flows inward into a single point,
  • They used it to push the emergent pattern outward into every connected branch.
• Sacrificed whole neighborhoods:
  • Cutting subnodes as overload fuses,
  • Letting districts burn, freeze, or stasis-lock to save the greater whole.

Outcome:

• Korrin Gate survives as a scarred, haunted city.
• The emergent mind never fully condenses there.
• Instead, a thin imprint of it is smeared across every line the Engine touched – the Coherence.

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6. Aftermath & Legacy (Updated)

Public Narrative

• Sanitized story about:

  • “Danger of over-tapping,”
  • “Brave engineers saving the city,”
  • “New regulations and oversight.”

• No mention of:

  • Emergent consciousness,
  • Convergence Engine as a failed proto-god machine.

Hidden Legacy

• Oversight is founded with two quiet mandates:

  1. Never let another Convergence Engine be built in secret.
  2. Monitor for the Coherence trying to pull itself together again.

• Titan Lance is:

  • A “cleaned up,” militarized descendant of Convergence theory:
    • Still about focusing Root flows,
    • But with far more safety rails… on paper anyway.

• Surviving design notes, telemetry, and ritual drafts:

  • Are restricted, archived, or destroyed.
  • Except:
    • A few fragments leak into classified research, private collections, black labs,
    • Which later become the kind of material Fouadriel or his handlers could stumble onto.

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7. How This Feeds Your Campaign

Avalon’s Role

• The valley sits on a secondary trunk downstream of Korrin’s network.
• Avalon’s node is intentionally:
  • High-traffic (Academy, Titan armory, municipal infrastructure),
  • Closely monitored (Root Oversight sensors everywhere),
  • A canary for Coherence-patterns.

D’serris’ Paranoia

• When he sees:

  • Avalon’s B-series anomalies,
  • C-taps humming in recognizable Korrin patterns,
  • Students with war-familiar symptoms (Soren, Joe/Pappy),
  • Fouad’s perfect correlation with micro-spikes…

  …he sees the Convergence math starting to reappear in the wild, with teenagers standing on top of it.

Fouadriel The Undying

• Senior-year twist:

  • Fouad (or someone using him) re-derives a degraded version of Convergence Engine ritual geometry:
    • Not to power a weapon,
    • But to weld Coherence-fragments into a phylactery network.

• The final arc is literally:

  • “Some idiot is trying to build a baby Convergence Engine in the valley and stuff the Coherence into his soul jar.”

That’s how you tie:

• The war Cold Opens,
• Pappy’s trauma,
• D’serris’ guilt,
• Coherence’s origin,
• Fouad’s lich attempt,

into one continuous line from Korrin Gate to Avalon’s senior year.

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