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Pneuma

2026-07-20T09:05:08Z

Tyg13: /* Key terms */

'''Pneuma''' is the world's life-force. Everything alive holds it; anything holding it is alive. It is both a resource you gather and spend and the basis of character progression.

== Forms ==

Pneuma has one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' forms.

* '''Pure''' — plain life-force, no element. Life-magic and all physical power run on pure.
* '''Elemental''' — pure pneuma bound to one of the four elements: fire, air, water, or earth.

[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|The four elements on a square. Each edge joins two elements that share a quality — a temperature (hot or cold) or a moisture (wet or dry); the diagonals share none.]]

Each elemental form also has:

* '''Allies''' — two elements that share a quality (adjacent on the square). Every element has two allies.
* '''Enemies''' — the two elements that share no quality (diagonal). Every element has exactly one enemy.

== Reactions ==

When two elements are combined, a reaction occurs. What reaction occurs depends on the relationship between the two elements.

{| class="wikitable"
! Elements combining !! Relation !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Share a quality || Allies || '''Synergy''' || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Share none || Enemies || '''Dissonance''' || Cancel into pure (less than went in)
|}

'''Hybrids''' are created when two allied elements are combined. The type of combination depends on the shared quality of both elements:

{| class="wikitable"
! Allies !! Shared quality !! Hybrid
|-
| Fire + Air || Hot || Lightning
|-
| Fire + Earth || Dry || Magma
|-
| Water + Air || Wet || Mist, ice
|-
| Water + Earth || Cold || Mud
|}

== The Three Laws ==

There are three simple laws which describe the rules of how pneuma works.

'''Law I — Vitality.''' Pneuma is life. Anything holding pneuma is alive; anything alive holds pneuma. Fill a lifeless thing with pneuma and it wakes; drain it and it goes still.

'''Law II — Attrition.''' Shaping has a cost. Any time pneuma is converted between pure and elemental, or two enemies annihilate one other, part of it is spent. Only carrying and storing it are free.

'''Law III — Affinity.''' Elements favor those with an affinity for it. Affinity grows by spending that element (casting or exertion). The higher the affinity, the less each conversion loses to Attrition.

== Key terms ==

* '''Shaping''': converting pneuma between pure and elemental, either direction. Always costs (Law II).
** '''Absorption''': the act of siphoning energy from physical elemental pneuma present in consumables or in the world, to fill one's pneuma reserves.
** '''Condensation''': the act of transferring one's pneuma reserves into physical elemental pneuma for later consumption.
* '''Affinity''': how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element. Tracked per element, per practitioner. Sets casting cost and power. Grows by spending that element (Law III).
* '''Mastery''': a single spell's accumulated experience. Affinity for an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.

== Sources ==

* '''Elemental sites.''' Throughout the world, wherever elements are present - a river, a burning fire, a rocky mountain.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive gives up its pneuma when slain. An elemental creature yields its element; a common beast yields pure.
* '''Consumables.''' Pneuma can be condensed into physical form, which can be consumed to yield its power. Both pure and elemental pneuma can be condensed.
* '''The self.''' Every body slowly regenerates their pure pneuma (Law I). Exercise or meditation speeds this, but far slower than gathering from the world or market.

== The pool ==

Each living creature has an unbounded reserve of '''pure''' pneuma.

* Filling: absorbing elements from the world, pneuma from other creatures, or by consuming physical pneuma.
* Draining: casting spells, using abilities, condensing pneuma into physical form.

== Casting ==

Pneuma is the primary resource used to cast spells. Each spell draws a specific kind of pneuma: pure or elemental. Since creatures only have a pool of pure pneuma, to cast elemental spells, they must convert it. This conversion is more or less efficient based on one's affinity with that element (Law III), and is never lossless (Law II). Each spell has an associated mastery which governs how powerful that spell's effect is.

== Abilities ==

Pneuma is the primary resource used to power physical abilities. Each ability uses pure pneuma, and one's pure affinity determines how much the ability costs. Warriors, rangers, rogues, and other non-magical combatants all primarily use abilities.

== Affinity ==

Casting a spell grants affinity to its user corresponding to the type of pneuma needed, pure or elemental.

Affinity governs how cheap it is to convert back and forth between pure pneuma and elemental (to cast it, or condense it).

Just like living creatures have affinity, elements have affinities too: allies and enemies. An element's ally can be combined to create powerful hybrid spells, and growing one's affinity in an element does not hinder one's ability to grow their affinity in an allied element. This effect is called '''synergy'''. An element's opposite destroys or negates it, and growing one's affinity in an opposing element is more difficult. This effect is called '''dissonance'''.

Due to how affinity works, a spellcaster is naturally inclined to pick a particular element and stick to it. Due to how synergy and dissonance work, a spellcaster who wishes to grow their affinity in multiple elements will likely pick an ally of their first chosen element. Since each element has an enemy, and each ally is an enemy of each other (e.g. fire has allies air and earth, which are both opposites), players will typically pick an element pairing according to a shared quality (hot/cold/wet/dry), and hybridize. As one grows their mastery, it is eventually possible to become a master of all four elements, despite how dissonance works.

== Physical form ==

Physical pneuma comes in two forms:

* '''Typed pneuma''': dropped by elemental creatures, siphoned from elemental sources, or condensed by spellcasters. This is the primary market good that gets traded.
* '''Pure pneuma''': dropped in very small amounts from slain elementless creatures, or created by annihilating elemental pneuma of opposite types. This is a luxury resource which is much harder to come by in large quantities.

Pneuma

2026-07-20T09:04:46Z

Tyg13: large-scale manual style and content rewrite

'''Pneuma''' is the world's life-force. Everything alive holds it; anything holding it is alive. It is both a resource you gather and spend and the basis of character progression.

== Forms ==

Pneuma has one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' forms.

* '''Pure''' — plain life-force, no element. Life-magic and all physical power run on pure.
* '''Elemental''' — pure pneuma bound to one of the four elements: fire, air, water, or earth.

[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|The four elements on a square. Each edge joins two elements that share a quality — a temperature (hot or cold) or a moisture (wet or dry); the diagonals share none.]]

Each elemental form also has:

* '''Allies''' — two elements that share a quality (adjacent on the square). Every element has two allies.
* '''Enemies''' — the two elements that share no quality (diagonal). Every element has exactly one enemy.

== Reactions ==

When two elements are combined, a reaction occurs. What reaction occurs depends on the relationship between the two elements.

{| class="wikitable"
! Elements combining !! Relation !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Share a quality || Allies || '''Synergy''' || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Share none || Enemies || '''Dissonance''' || Cancel into pure (less than went in)
|}

'''Hybrids''' are created when two allied elements are combined. The type of combination depends on the shared quality of both elements:

{| class="wikitable"
! Allies !! Shared quality !! Hybrid
|-
| Fire + Air || Hot || Lightning
|-
| Fire + Earth || Dry || Magma
|-
| Water + Air || Wet || Mist, ice
|-
| Water + Earth || Cold || Mud
|}

== The Three Laws ==

There are three simple laws which describe the rules of how pneuma works.

'''Law I — Vitality.''' Pneuma is life. Anything holding pneuma is alive; anything alive holds pneuma. Fill a lifeless thing with pneuma and it wakes; drain it and it goes still.

'''Law II — Attrition.''' Shaping has a cost. Any time pneuma is converted between pure and elemental, or two enemies annihilate one other, part of it is spent. Only carrying and storing it are free.

'''Law III — Affinity.''' Elements favor those with an affinity for it. Affinity grows by spending that element (casting or exertion). The higher the affinity, the less each conversion loses to Attrition.

== Key terms ==

* '''Shaping''': converting pneuma between pure and elemental, either direction. Always costs (Law II).
** '''Absorption'': the act of siphoning energy from physical elemental pneuma present in consumables or in the world, to fill one's pneuma reserves.
** '''Condensation''': the act of transferring one's pneuma reserves into physical elemental pneuma for later consumption.
* '''Affinity''': how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element. Tracked per element, per practitioner. Sets casting cost and power. Grows by spending that element (Law III).
* '''Mastery''': a single spell's accumulated experience. Affinity for an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.

== Sources ==

* '''Elemental sites.''' Throughout the world, wherever elements are present - a river, a burning fire, a rocky mountain.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive gives up its pneuma when slain. An elemental creature yields its element; a common beast yields pure.
* '''Consumables.''' Pneuma can be condensed into physical form, which can be consumed to yield its power. Both pure and elemental pneuma can be condensed.
* '''The self.''' Every body slowly regenerates their pure pneuma (Law I). Exercise or meditation speeds this, but far slower than gathering from the world or market.

== The pool ==

Each living creature has an unbounded reserve of '''pure''' pneuma.

* Filling: absorbing elements from the world, pneuma from other creatures, or by consuming physical pneuma.
* Draining: casting spells, using abilities, condensing pneuma into physical form.

== Casting ==

Pneuma is the primary resource used to cast spells. Each spell draws a specific kind of pneuma: pure or elemental. Since creatures only have a pool of pure pneuma, to cast elemental spells, they must convert it. This conversion is more or less efficient based on one's affinity with that element (Law III), and is never lossless (Law II). Each spell has an associated mastery which governs how powerful that spell's effect is.

== Abilities ==

Pneuma is the primary resource used to power physical abilities. Each ability uses pure pneuma, and one's pure affinity determines how much the ability costs. Warriors, rangers, rogues, and other non-magical combatants all primarily use abilities.

== Affinity ==

Casting a spell grants affinity to its user corresponding to the type of pneuma needed, pure or elemental.

Affinity governs how cheap it is to convert back and forth between pure pneuma and elemental (to cast it, or condense it).

Just like living creatures have affinity, elements have affinities too: allies and enemies. An element's ally can be combined to create powerful hybrid spells, and growing one's affinity in an element does not hinder one's ability to grow their affinity in an allied element. This effect is called '''synergy'''. An element's opposite destroys or negates it, and growing one's affinity in an opposing element is more difficult. This effect is called '''dissonance'''.

Due to how affinity works, a spellcaster is naturally inclined to pick a particular element and stick to it. Due to how synergy and dissonance work, a spellcaster who wishes to grow their affinity in multiple elements will likely pick an ally of their first chosen element. Since each element has an enemy, and each ally is an enemy of each other (e.g. fire has allies air and earth, which are both opposites), players will typically pick an element pairing according to a shared quality (hot/cold/wet/dry), and hybridize. As one grows their mastery, it is eventually possible to become a master of all four elements, despite how dissonance works.

== Physical form ==

Physical pneuma comes in two forms:

* '''Typed pneuma''': dropped by elemental creatures, siphoned from elemental sources, or condensed by spellcasters. This is the primary market good that gets traded.
* '''Pure pneuma''': dropped in very small amounts from slain elementless creatures, or created by annihilating elemental pneuma of opposite types. This is a luxury resource which is much harder to come by in large quantities.

Pneuma

2026-07-20T08:08:32Z

Tyg13: Forms: drop the per-element temperature/moisture table; fold shared-quality framing into the diagram caption, keeping the edge (not the individual element) as the unit (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the world's life-force. Everything alive holds it; anything holding it is alive. It is both the resource you gather and spend and the basis of character progression.

== Forms ==

Pneuma has one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' forms.

* '''Pure''' — plain life-force, no element. Life-magic and all martial (warrior) power run on pure.
* '''Elemental''' — pure pneuma bound to one of the four elements: fire, air, water, or earth.

[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|The four elements on a square. Each edge joins two elements that share a quality — a temperature (hot or cold) or a moisture (wet or dry); the diagonals share none.]]

* '''Allies''' — two elements that share a quality (adjacent on the square). Every element has two allies.
* '''Enemies''' — the two elements that share no quality (diagonal). Every element has exactly one enemy.

== Reactions ==

{| class="wikitable"
! Elements meeting !! Relation !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Share a quality || Allies || '''Synergy''' || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Share none || Enemies || '''Dissonance''' || Cancel into pure (less than went in)
|}

'''Hybrids''' — an allied pair combines around the quality they share:

{| class="wikitable"
! Allies !! Shared quality !! Hybrid
|-
| Fire + Air || Hot || Lightning, storm
|-
| Fire + Earth || Dry || Magma, forge-heat
|-
| Water + Air || Wet || Mist, ice, tempest
|-
| Water + Earth || Cold || Mire, clay
|}

Hybrids are physical (water + earth makes mud and clay). Life-magic is pure pneuma, not a pairing.

== The Three Laws ==

'''Law I — Vitality.''' Pneuma is life. Anything holding pneuma is alive; anything alive holds pneuma. Fill a lifeless thing with pneuma and it wakes; drain it and it goes still.

'''Law II — Attrition.''' Shaping costs. Any time pneuma crosses between pure and elemental — or two enemies cancel to pure — part of it is spent. Only carrying and storing are free.

'''Law III — Affinity.''' An element only answers someone with an affinity for it. Affinity grows only by spending that element (casting or exertion), never by holding, hoarding, or buying it. The higher the affinity, the less each cast loses to Attrition.

== Key terms ==

* '''Shaping''' — moving pneuma between pure and elemental, either direction. Always costs (Law II).
* '''Affinity''' — how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element. Tracked per element, per practitioner. Sets casting cost and power. Grows only by spending that element (Law III).
* '''Mastery''' — a single spell's accumulated experience. Affinity for an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.
* '''Carrying / storing''' — holding or moving pneuma without changing its form. Free.

== Synergy and dissonance ==

The ally and enemy relations reach beyond the substance reactions above.

'''Synergy''' (allied elements, sharing a quality) — two faces:
* '''Substance (hybrids).''' An allied pair combines around its shared quality (see Reactions).
* '''Progression.''' Deepening an element eases and strengthens its two allies — building one element makes its neighbors come easier.

'''Dissonance''' (diagonal enemies, sharing nothing) — one relationship, three faces:
* '''Crafting (annihilation).''' Two opposed typed items pressed together at an alchemist's bench cancel to pure, always less than went in. Needs no affinity — the reaction is between the items, not the crafter. One of the few sources of pure.
* '''Combat (counters).''' Each element answers its opposite: water quenches fire, earth grounds air. Countering is an action, not a damage multiplier. See [[Combat]].
* '''Progression (suppression).''' Deepening an element suppresses its opposite — weaker to wield and slower to raise. A rising cost, not a wall: both halves of a pair can be mastered, but it is a long road.

Pure sits outside the square: no allies, no opposite. It neither synergizes nor suppresses, and feels only the general drag on total affinity (see Progression).

Learn one diagonal and you have learned the enemy side everywhere: fire ↔ water, air ↔ earth.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites.''' Springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance shifts by degree, not by border — everywhere holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive gives up its pneuma when slain. An elemental creature yields its element; a common beast yields pure.
* '''The self.''' Every body slowly regenerates pure pneuma (Law I). Exercise or meditation speeds this, but far slower than gathering from the world or market.

== The pool ==

Your reserve is a single, unbounded pool of '''pure''' pneuma.

* No per-element compartments — the pool holds only pure.
* No capacity to raise, and it never fills. Progression makes pneuma go '''further''', not the pool bigger.
* Spending drains it; gathering refills it.

Affinity governs how efficiently pneuma crosses your body's boundary:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma from the world into your pool renders it to pure. Your affinity for that element sets how much pure you get — a fire adept drains a vent that leaves a novice a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma stored outside a body — typed pneuma in crystals or vials, or pure refined by annihilation — sits inert and trades freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps outside a living thing.

== Casting ==

A spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into its element as it leaves you (Law III).

* Every caster draws from the same pure pool.
* Affinity for the element sets the price. Mastered: cheap and strong. Neglected: still fires, but costs far more and hits far weaker.
* Casting and absorbing use the same affinity (crossing the boundary either way) and grow together — but only casting builds affinity (see Progression).

== Progression ==

Progression is bound to what you spend, not to time.

'''Core rule:''' pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's mastery. Affinity for an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.

Consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Only pneuma spent through a cast or exertion builds affinity. Pneuma merely absorbed does nothing on its own; hoarding gains nothing.
* '''Alignment emerges from play.''' Affinity follows what you actually cast — never chosen outright.
* '''Specialization is the path of least resistance.''' Affinity comes fast at first and slows as it grows. Deepening an element eases its allies (synergy) and suppresses its opposite (dissonance), so committing to an element and its neighbors is the easy road; a gentle drag on all gains as total affinity rises makes straddling an opposed pair — or mastering everything — a long grind, not a barred door.
* '''Affinity can't be bought.''' Wealth carries you past the gathering, never past the casting. Cast times and cooldowns ultimately pace growth.
* '''Idle practice counts.''' A cast need not hit anything to leave its residue; its pneuma cost keeps practice from ever being free.

'''What affinity grants:''' spells in that element are stronger and cheaper, plus passive benefits. It does not unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, drops, and quests, then deepened by use.

'''Mastering all four elements''' is the game's long aspiration — not a normal endgame state but a lifetime achievement. Dissonance is what gives it weight: a master has fought the suppression headwind the whole way and ends with no weak element and no bad matchup. See [[Combat]] for what that means in a fight.

=== The warrior ===

A non-caster is the same system, inverted. A warrior works in pure pneuma alone — regenerated by their own breath and released from everything they slay — and invests it through physical exertion into weapon mastery. That gathers into '''pure affinity''' by the same ledger (a cast and an exertion count alike, Law III), with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' (sites, drops, crystals) is the market's main good — freely gathered and traded, the raw stock for both absorbing and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three places: slain elementless creatures, a body's own regeneration, and annihilation of an opposed typed pair. No site yields pure from the ground. Pure trades freely — the market sells fuel; the affinity to spend it well is not for sale.

== Open questions ==

* '''Concrete numbers.''' Absorption and casting efficiency at each affinity level, regeneration rate, annihilation loss, condensation costs, synergy and suppression strength, and the total-affinity drag curve. These curves are the master dial: they set how far the game leans toward specialization versus mastery of all, and how strongly allies reinforce and opposites suppress one another.
* '''Hybrids in play.''' Are hybrid spells a distinct track, or gated by both parent affinities? (Proposed: gated by the weaker parent, learned as spells like any other.)
* '''Imbued gear.''' Should non-casters reach elemental effects through weapons and armor? Proposed, deferred until the base system settles.
* '''A death/corrupting force.''' Largely rejected as a new substance — death framed instead as annihilation that leaves no pure residue at all, and undead as bodies whose Law I self-generation has failed. Deferred.
* '''Ambient dynamics.''' Should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?

Combat

2026-07-20T07:59:15Z

Tyg13: Sweep attunement→affinity to match Pneuma/Bembi's code; repoint cross-link to the renamed Synergy-and-dissonance section (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Combat''' covers how the four elements play out in a fight. The core relationship — each element counters its diagonal opposite — is settled. The offense/defense model and encounter tiers below are '''proposed''' and not yet final.

For the elements, the square, and affinity, see [[Pneuma]].

== The counter rule ==

Each element answers exactly one other — its diagonal opposite — and is answered by that same one:

* Fire ↔ Water
* Air ↔ Earth

Countering is an '''action''', not a damage multiplier: you put the fire out, you ground the storm. This is the same diagonal that governs annihilation and affinity suppression (see [[Pneuma#Synergy and dissonance]]).

== Offense and defense (proposed) ==

Two rules, both on the diagonal:

* '''Offense.''' A boss defends in some element. You deal real damage by attacking with its diagonal counter.
* '''Defense.''' A boss attacks in some element. You blunt it by casting that element's diagonal counter as an action — quench the fire, ground the storm.

A boss's defensive form and its attack are usually different elements, so you juggle two active elements at once: an offensive one and a defensive one.

== Edges and matchups ==

The square splits into two opposed '''edges''' along each quality axis. The natural two-element build is one edge — an allied pair sharing a quality:

* '''Hot''' — Fire + Air
* '''Cold''' — Water + Earth
* '''Wet''' — Air + Water
* '''Dry''' — Fire + Earth

Because counter = diagonal, you fight a boss with the '''edge opposite''' the edge it currently shows. A boss showing the hot edge (fire/air) demands the cold edge (water/earth) from you, and vice versa.

* A '''specialist''' owns one edge: dominant against the opposite edge, weak against their own edge's mirror.
* A '''master''' owns all four elements: no weak edge, no bad matchup. Mastery of all elements lets a player transcend the wheel and stand alone where others need a partner.

== No fixed party roles ==

Elements are not locked to roles (tank/heal/DPS). Every serious player is expected to build proficiency across the wheel and switch reactively as a boss shifts, the way RuneScape players switch attack styles. Cooperation comes from covering matchups: a player weak against the current edge brings a partner whose edge covers it. That interdependence is strongest while leveling and fades for the rare master who can answer everything solo.

== Difficulty by coverage (proposed) ==

A boss's difficulty is how much of the square it forces you to answer:

{| class="wikitable"
! Boss type !! Forces you to answer !! Who can solo it
|-
| '''Single form''' (one element) || One counter || Anyone whose edge covers it
|-
| '''Single edge''' (rotates within one edge) || The opposite edge || A specialist in that opposite edge; others bring a partner
|-
| '''Full square''' (rotates all four) || All four elements || Only a master; everyone else pairs up
|}

"Master content" is content that demands total mastery — so completing the mastery-of-all grind unlocks a tier of solo play otherwise gated behind a complementary partner.

== Worked example: a two-phase boss (proposed) ==

A boss that rotates edges mid-fight:

{| class="wikitable"
! Phase !! Boss form (attack with) !! Boss attacks with (quench with) !! Edge you need
|-
| '''1 — Frost Aegis''' || Water → '''Fire''' || Earth → '''Air''' || Hot (fire + air)
|-
| '''2 — Emberveil''' || Air → '''Earth''' || Fire → '''Water''' || Cold (water + earth)
|}

Against a '''hot-edge specialist''' (strong fire/air, suppressed water/earth):

* '''Phase 1''' is their strength: attack with fire, quench with air, both mastered. Casts are cheap; the pool barely dips.
* '''Phase 2''' is their weakness: earth and water answer dearly and feebly. Attacks chip slowly, quenches barely hold, and each low-affinity cast bleeds the pool fast. This is where they bring a cold-edge partner, for whom Phase 2 is easy.

Against a '''master''' (all four high): both phases flow — fire → earth on offense, air → water on defense, tracking the boss's rotation. No bad phase.

== Open questions ==

* The efficiency gap between a mastered and an unmastered cast — together with the suppression strength — decides whether a bad-matchup phase reads as "hard but doable" or "unplayable." This is the key tuning dial. See [[Pneuma#Open questions]].
* Whether the offense/defense model above is the final combat shape or a starting point.
* How hybrids factor into combat (a hot-edge player casting lightning, and so on).

Pneuma

2026-07-20T07:58:57Z

Tyg13: Match Bembi's code: sweep attunement→affinity throughout. Combine synergy-reward (allies) with dissonance-suppression (diagonal) under one Synergy-and-dissonance section. Fix stale death/Law citation. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the world's life-force. Everything alive holds it; anything holding it is alive. It is both the resource you gather and spend and the basis of character progression.

== Forms ==

Pneuma has one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' forms.

* '''Pure''' — plain life-force, no element. Life-magic and all martial (warrior) power run on pure.
* '''Elemental''' — pure pneuma bound to one of the four elements.

Each element is a pair of qualities, one temperature and one moisture:

{| class="wikitable"
! Element !! Temperature !! Moisture
|-
| Fire || Hot || Dry
|-
| Air || Hot || Wet
|-
| Water || Cold || Wet
|-
| Earth || Cold || Dry
|}

[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|The four elements by quality. Adjacent elements share a quality (allies); diagonal elements share none (enemies).]]

* '''Allies''' — two elements that share a quality (adjacent on the square). Every element has two allies.
* '''Enemies''' — the two elements that share no quality (diagonal). Every element has exactly one enemy.

== Reactions ==

{| class="wikitable"
! Elements meeting !! Relation !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Share a quality || Allies || '''Synergy''' || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Share none || Enemies || '''Dissonance''' || Cancel into pure (less than went in)
|}

'''Hybrids''' — an allied pair combines around the quality they share:

{| class="wikitable"
! Allies !! Shared quality !! Hybrid
|-
| Fire + Air || Hot || Lightning, storm
|-
| Fire + Earth || Dry || Magma, forge-heat
|-
| Water + Air || Wet || Mist, ice, tempest
|-
| Water + Earth || Cold || Mire, clay
|}

Hybrids are physical (water + earth makes mud and clay). Life-magic is pure pneuma, not a pairing.

== The Three Laws ==

'''Law I — Vitality.''' Pneuma is life. Anything holding pneuma is alive; anything alive holds pneuma. Fill a lifeless thing with pneuma and it wakes; drain it and it goes still.

'''Law II — Attrition.''' Shaping costs. Any time pneuma crosses between pure and elemental — or two enemies cancel to pure — part of it is spent. Only carrying and storing are free.

'''Law III — Affinity.''' An element only answers someone with an affinity for it. Affinity grows only by spending that element (casting or exertion), never by holding, hoarding, or buying it. The higher the affinity, the less each cast loses to Attrition.

== Key terms ==

* '''Shaping''' — moving pneuma between pure and elemental, either direction. Always costs (Law II).
* '''Affinity''' — how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element. Tracked per element, per practitioner. Sets casting cost and power. Grows only by spending that element (Law III).
* '''Mastery''' — a single spell's accumulated experience. Affinity for an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.
* '''Carrying / storing''' — holding or moving pneuma without changing its form. Free.

== Synergy and dissonance ==

The ally and enemy relations reach beyond the substance reactions above.

'''Synergy''' (allied elements, sharing a quality) — two faces:
* '''Substance (hybrids).''' An allied pair combines around its shared quality (see Reactions).
* '''Progression.''' Deepening an element eases and strengthens its two allies — building one element makes its neighbors come easier.

'''Dissonance''' (diagonal enemies, sharing nothing) — one relationship, three faces:
* '''Crafting (annihilation).''' Two opposed typed items pressed together at an alchemist's bench cancel to pure, always less than went in. Needs no affinity — the reaction is between the items, not the crafter. One of the few sources of pure.
* '''Combat (counters).''' Each element answers its opposite: water quenches fire, earth grounds air. Countering is an action, not a damage multiplier. See [[Combat]].
* '''Progression (suppression).''' Deepening an element suppresses its opposite — weaker to wield and slower to raise. A rising cost, not a wall: both halves of a pair can be mastered, but it is a long road.

Pure sits outside the square: no allies, no opposite. It neither synergizes nor suppresses, and feels only the general drag on total affinity (see Progression).

Learn one diagonal and you have learned the enemy side everywhere: fire ↔ water, air ↔ earth.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites.''' Springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance shifts by degree, not by border — everywhere holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive gives up its pneuma when slain. An elemental creature yields its element; a common beast yields pure.
* '''The self.''' Every body slowly regenerates pure pneuma (Law I). Exercise or meditation speeds this, but far slower than gathering from the world or market.

== The pool ==

Your reserve is a single, unbounded pool of '''pure''' pneuma.

* No per-element compartments — the pool holds only pure.
* No capacity to raise, and it never fills. Progression makes pneuma go '''further''', not the pool bigger.
* Spending drains it; gathering refills it.

Affinity governs how efficiently pneuma crosses your body's boundary:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma from the world into your pool renders it to pure. Your affinity for that element sets how much pure you get — a fire adept drains a vent that leaves a novice a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma stored outside a body — typed pneuma in crystals or vials, or pure refined by annihilation — sits inert and trades freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps outside a living thing.

== Casting ==

A spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into its element as it leaves you (Law III).

* Every caster draws from the same pure pool.
* Affinity for the element sets the price. Mastered: cheap and strong. Neglected: still fires, but costs far more and hits far weaker.
* Casting and absorbing use the same affinity (crossing the boundary either way) and grow together — but only casting builds affinity (see Progression).

== Progression ==

Progression is bound to what you spend, not to time.

'''Core rule:''' pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's mastery. Affinity for an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.

Consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Only pneuma spent through a cast or exertion builds affinity. Pneuma merely absorbed does nothing on its own; hoarding gains nothing.
* '''Alignment emerges from play.''' Affinity follows what you actually cast — never chosen outright.
* '''Specialization is the path of least resistance.''' Affinity comes fast at first and slows as it grows. Deepening an element eases its allies (synergy) and suppresses its opposite (dissonance), so committing to an element and its neighbors is the easy road; a gentle drag on all gains as total affinity rises makes straddling an opposed pair — or mastering everything — a long grind, not a barred door.
* '''Affinity can't be bought.''' Wealth carries you past the gathering, never past the casting. Cast times and cooldowns ultimately pace growth.
* '''Idle practice counts.''' A cast need not hit anything to leave its residue; its pneuma cost keeps practice from ever being free.

'''What affinity grants:''' spells in that element are stronger and cheaper, plus passive benefits. It does not unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, drops, and quests, then deepened by use.

'''Mastering all four elements''' is the game's long aspiration — not a normal endgame state but a lifetime achievement. Dissonance is what gives it weight: a master has fought the suppression headwind the whole way and ends with no weak element and no bad matchup. See [[Combat]] for what that means in a fight.

=== The warrior ===

A non-caster is the same system, inverted. A warrior works in pure pneuma alone — regenerated by their own breath and released from everything they slay — and invests it through physical exertion into weapon mastery. That gathers into '''pure affinity''' by the same ledger (a cast and an exertion count alike, Law III), with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' (sites, drops, crystals) is the market's main good — freely gathered and traded, the raw stock for both absorbing and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three places: slain elementless creatures, a body's own regeneration, and annihilation of an opposed typed pair. No site yields pure from the ground. Pure trades freely — the market sells fuel; the affinity to spend it well is not for sale.

== Open questions ==

* '''Concrete numbers.''' Absorption and casting efficiency at each affinity level, regeneration rate, annihilation loss, condensation costs, synergy and suppression strength, and the total-affinity drag curve. These curves are the master dial: they set how far the game leans toward specialization versus mastery of all, and how strongly allies reinforce and opposites suppress one another.
* '''Hybrids in play.''' Are hybrid spells a distinct track, or gated by both parent affinities? (Proposed: gated by the weaker parent, learned as spells like any other.)
* '''Imbued gear.''' Should non-casters reach elemental effects through weapons and armor? Proposed, deferred until the base system settles.
* '''A death/corrupting force.''' Largely rejected as a new substance — death framed instead as annihilation that leaves no pure residue at all, and undead as bodies whose Law I self-generation has failed. Deferred.
* '''Ambient dynamics.''' Should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?

Combat

2026-07-20T07:48:36Z

Tyg13: New page: the elemental wheel in play — counter=diagonal rule, edges/matchups, difficulty by coverage, worked example (offense/defense model and encounter tiers marked proposed) (via create-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Combat''' covers how the four elements play out in a fight. The core relationship — each element counters its diagonal opposite — is settled. The offense/defense model and encounter tiers below are '''proposed''' and not yet final.

For the elements, the square, and attunement, see [[Pneuma]].

== The counter rule ==

Each element answers exactly one other — its diagonal opposite — and is answered by that same one:

* Fire ↔ Water
* Air ↔ Earth

Countering is an '''action''', not a damage multiplier: you put the fire out, you ground the storm. This is the same diagonal that governs annihilation and attunement suppression (see [[Pneuma#Opposition]]).

== Offense and defense (proposed) ==

Two rules, both on the diagonal:

* '''Offense.''' A boss defends in some element. You deal real damage by attacking with its diagonal counter.
* '''Defense.''' A boss attacks in some element. You blunt it by casting that element's diagonal counter as an action — quench the fire, ground the storm.

A boss's defensive form and its attack are usually different elements, so you juggle two active elements at once: an offensive one and a defensive one.

== Edges and matchups ==

The square splits into two opposed '''edges''' along each quality axis. The natural two-element build is one edge — an allied pair sharing a quality:

* '''Hot''' — Fire + Air
* '''Cold''' — Water + Earth
* '''Wet''' — Air + Water
* '''Dry''' — Fire + Earth

Because counter = diagonal, you fight a boss with the '''edge opposite''' the edge it currently shows. A boss showing the hot edge (fire/air) demands the cold edge (water/earth) from you, and vice versa.

* A '''specialist''' owns one edge: dominant against the opposite edge, weak against their own edge's mirror.
* A '''master''' owns all four elements: no weak edge, no bad matchup. Mastery of all elements lets a player transcend the wheel and stand alone where others need a partner.

== No fixed party roles ==

Elements are not locked to roles (tank/heal/DPS). Every serious player is expected to build proficiency across the wheel and switch reactively as a boss shifts, the way RuneScape players switch attack styles. Cooperation comes from covering matchups: a player weak against the current edge brings a partner whose edge covers it. That interdependence is strongest while leveling and fades for the rare master who can answer everything solo.

== Difficulty by coverage (proposed) ==

A boss's difficulty is how much of the square it forces you to answer:

{| class="wikitable"
! Boss type !! Forces you to answer !! Who can solo it
|-
| '''Single form''' (one element) || One counter || Anyone whose edge covers it
|-
| '''Single edge''' (rotates within one edge) || The opposite edge || A specialist in that opposite edge; others bring a partner
|-
| '''Full square''' (rotates all four) || All four elements || Only a master; everyone else pairs up
|}

"Master content" is content that demands total mastery — so completing the mastery-of-all grind unlocks a tier of solo play otherwise gated behind a complementary partner.

== Worked example: a two-phase boss (proposed) ==

A boss that rotates edges mid-fight:

{| class="wikitable"
! Phase !! Boss form (attack with) !! Boss attacks with (quench with) !! Edge you need
|-
| '''1 — Frost Aegis''' || Water → '''Fire''' || Earth → '''Air''' || Hot (fire + air)
|-
| '''2 — Emberveil''' || Air → '''Earth''' || Fire → '''Water''' || Cold (water + earth)
|}

Against a '''hot-edge specialist''' (strong fire/air, suppressed water/earth):

* '''Phase 1''' is their strength: attack with fire, quench with air, both mastered. Casts are cheap; the pool barely dips.
* '''Phase 2''' is their weakness: earth and water answer dearly and feebly. Attacks chip slowly, quenches barely hold, and each low-attunement cast bleeds the pool fast. This is where they bring a cold-edge partner, for whom Phase 2 is easy.

Against a '''master''' (all four high): both phases flow — fire → earth on offense, air → water on defense, tracking the boss's rotation. No bad phase.

== Open questions ==

* The efficiency gap between a mastered and an unmastered cast — together with the suppression strength — decides whether a bad-matchup phase reads as "hard but doable" or "unplayable." This is the key tuning dial. See [[Pneuma#Open questions]].
* Whether the offense/defense model above is the final combat shape or a starting point.
* How hybrids factor into combat (a hot-edge player casting lightning, and so on).

Pneuma

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Tyg13: Rewrite in rules-manual register; unify the diagonal (annihilation/counter/suppression); adopt counter=diagonal; add mastery-of-all aspiration; split combat detail to new Combat page (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the world's life-force. Everything alive holds it; anything holding it is alive. It is both the resource you gather and spend and the basis of character progression.

== Forms ==

Pneuma has one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' forms.

* '''Pure''' — plain life-force, no element. Life-magic and all martial (warrior) power run on pure.
* '''Elemental''' — pure pneuma bound to one of the four elements.

Each element is a pair of qualities, one temperature and one moisture:

{| class="wikitable"
! Element !! Temperature !! Moisture
|-
| Fire || Hot || Dry
|-
| Air || Hot || Wet
|-
| Water || Cold || Wet
|-
| Earth || Cold || Dry
|}

[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|The four elements by quality. Adjacent elements share a quality (allies); diagonal elements share none (enemies).]]

* '''Allies''' — two elements that share a quality (adjacent on the square). Every element has two allies.
* '''Enemies''' — the two elements that share no quality (diagonal). Every element has exactly one enemy.

== Reactions ==

{| class="wikitable"
! Elements meeting !! Relation !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Share a quality || Allies || '''Synergy''' || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Share none || Enemies || '''Dissonance''' || Cancel into pure (less than went in)
|}

'''Hybrids''' — an allied pair combines around the quality they share:

{| class="wikitable"
! Allies !! Shared quality !! Hybrid
|-
| Fire + Air || Hot || Lightning, storm
|-
| Fire + Earth || Dry || Magma, forge-heat
|-
| Water + Air || Wet || Mist, ice, tempest
|-
| Water + Earth || Cold || Mire, clay
|}

Hybrids are physical (water + earth makes mud and clay). Life-magic is pure pneuma, not a pairing.

== The Three Laws ==

'''Law I — Vitality.''' Pneuma is life. Anything holding pneuma is alive; anything alive holds pneuma. Fill a lifeless thing with pneuma and it wakes; drain it and it goes still.

'''Law II — Attrition.''' Shaping costs. Any time pneuma crosses between pure and elemental — or two enemies cancel to pure — part of it is spent. Only carrying and storing are free.

'''Law III — Affinity.''' An element only answers someone attuned to it. Attunement grows only by spending that element (casting or exertion), never by holding, hoarding, or buying it. The higher the attunement, the less each cast loses to Attrition.

== Key terms ==

* '''Shaping''' — moving pneuma between pure and elemental, either direction. Always costs (Law II).
* '''Attunement''' — how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element. Tracked per element, per practitioner. Sets casting cost and power. Grows only by spending that element (Law III).
* '''Mastery''' — a single spell's accumulated experience. Attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.
* '''Carrying / storing''' — holding or moving pneuma without changing its form. Free.

== Opposition ==

An element and its diagonal enemy oppose each other in three ways at once:

* '''Annihilation (crafting).''' Two opposed typed items pressed together at an alchemist's bench cancel to pure, always less than went in. Needs no attunement — the reaction is between the items, not the crafter. One of the few sources of pure.
* '''Counters (combat).''' Each element answers its diagonal opposite and is answered by it: water quenches fire, earth grounds air. Countering is an action, not a damage multiplier. See [[Combat]].
* '''Attunement suppression (progression).''' Deepening one element makes its diagonal opposite weaker and slower to raise. A rising cost, not a wall — both halves of a pair can be mastered, but it is a long road.

Pure has no diagonal. It neither suppresses nor is suppressed, and feels only the general drag on total attunement (see Progression).

Learn the diagonal and you have learned all three: fire ↔ water, air ↔ earth.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites.''' Springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance shifts by degree, not by border — everywhere holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive gives up its pneuma when slain. An elemental creature yields its element; a common beast yields pure.
* '''The self.''' Every body slowly regenerates pure pneuma (Law I). Exercise or meditation speeds this, but far slower than gathering from the world or market.

== The pool ==

Your reserve is a single, unbounded pool of '''pure''' pneuma.

* No per-element compartments — the pool holds only pure.
* No capacity to raise, and it never fills. Progression makes pneuma go '''further''', not the pool bigger.
* Spending drains it; gathering refills it.

Attunement governs how efficiently pneuma crosses your body's boundary:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma from the world into your pool renders it to pure. Your attunement to that element sets how much pure you get — a fire adept drains a vent that leaves a novice a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma stored outside a body — typed pneuma in crystals or vials, or pure refined by annihilation — sits inert and trades freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps outside a living thing.

== Casting ==

A spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into its element as it leaves you (Law III).

* Every caster draws from the same pure pool.
* Attunement to the element sets the price. Mastered: cheap and strong. Neglected: still fires, but costs far more and hits far weaker.
* Casting and absorbing use the same attunement (crossing the boundary either way) and grow together — but only casting builds attunement (see Progression).

== Progression ==

Progression is bound to what you spend, not to time.

'''Core rule:''' pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's mastery. Attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across its spells.

Consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Only pneuma spent through a cast or exertion builds attunement. Pneuma merely absorbed does nothing on its own; hoarding gains nothing.
* '''Alignment emerges from play.''' Attunement follows what you actually cast — never chosen outright.
* '''Specialization is the path of least resistance.''' Attunement comes fast at first and slows as it grows; deepening one element suppresses its opposite; and total attunement carries a gentle drag on all further gains. Committing to an element and its allies is easy; straddling an opposed pair or mastering everything is a long grind, not a barred door.
* '''Attunement can't be bought.''' Wealth carries you past the gathering, never past the casting. Cast times and cooldowns ultimately pace growth.
* '''Idle practice counts.''' A cast need not hit anything to leave its residue; its pneuma cost keeps practice from ever being free.

'''What attunement grants:''' spells in that element are stronger and cheaper, plus passive benefits. It does not unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, drops, and quests, then deepened by use.

'''Mastery of all elements''' is the game's long aspiration — not a normal endgame state but a lifetime achievement. Opposition is what gives it weight: a master has fought the suppression headwind the whole way and ends with no weak element and no bad matchup. See [[Combat]] for what that means in a fight.

=== The warrior ===

A non-caster is the same system, inverted. A warrior works in pure pneuma alone — regenerated by their own breath and released from everything they slay — and invests it through physical exertion into weapon mastery. That gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the same ledger (a cast and an exertion count alike, Law III), with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' (sites, drops, crystals) is the market's main good — freely gathered and traded, the raw stock for both absorbing and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three places: slain elementless creatures, a body's own regeneration, and annihilation of an opposed typed pair. No site yields pure from the ground. Pure trades freely — the market sells fuel; the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands.

== Open questions ==

* '''Concrete numbers.''' Absorption and casting efficiency at each attunement level, regeneration rate, annihilation loss, condensation costs, suppression strength, and the total-attunement drag curve. The suppression/efficiency curve is the master dial: it sets how far the game leans toward specialization versus mastery of all.
* '''Hybrids in play.''' Are hybrid spells a distinct track, or gated by both parent attunements? (Proposed: gated by the weaker parent, learned as spells like any other.)
* '''Imbued gear.''' Should non-casters reach elemental effects through weapons and armor? Proposed, deferred until the base system settles.
* '''A death/corrupting force.''' Largely rejected as a new substance — death as a Law III violation (destruction with no pure residue), undead as failed Law I self-generation. Deferred.
* '''Ambient dynamics.''' Should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?

Pneuma

2026-07-20T00:07:46Z

Tyg13: Cleanup: move elemental-square image into the definitions block and condense the elements to one line + image; fold in hybrids table; delete now-duplicate Forms and elemental-square sections (drop ASCII diagram) and the three redundant per-law essays; promote Opposition to a top-level section (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== Pneuma, and how it's handled ==

Pneuma comes in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' ones. Pure pneuma is the plain breath of life and carries no element. Elemental pneuma is pure pneuma that has taken on one element. Life-magic works on pure pneuma directly.

'''The four elements'''

[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|The four elements arranged by quality. Each edge names the quality its two elements share; the pair across a diagonal shares none.]]

Each element is a pair of qualities, a temperature (hot or cold) and a moisture (wet or dry): fire hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, earth cold and dry. Two elements that share a quality (adjacent on the square) are allies; the two that share none (across a diagonal) are enemies. Every element has two allies and one enemy.

'''When two elements meet'''

{| class="wikitable"
! Relation !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Allies (share a quality) || Synergy || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Enemies (share none) || Dissonance || Cancel into pure, less than went in
|}

'''Hybrids'''

{| class="wikitable"
! Allies !! Shared quality !! Hybrid
|-
| Fire + Air || Hot || lightning, storm
|-
| Fire + Earth || Dry || magma, forge-heat
|-
| Water + Air || Wet || mist, ice, tempest
|-
| Water + Earth || Cold || mire, clay
|}

Hybrids are physical; water and earth make mud and clay. Verdant life-magic is pure pneuma, not any pairing.

'''Terms'''

* '''Shaping''' moves pneuma between pure and elemental: give pure breath an element, or unmake an element back into pure.
* '''Affinity''' is how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element, measured separately for each. It belongs to the breather, not the element.
* '''Carrying and storing''' moves or holds pneuma without shaping it, keeping its form. This handling alone comes free.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Every breath-worker learns these three before anything else.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is life. Anything holding pneuma is alive, and anything alive holds pneuma. Put pneuma into something lifeless and it wakes; take its pneuma away and it goes still. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe.

'''II. Attrition.''' Shaping always costs. Whenever pneuma crosses between pure and elemental, or two enemies cancel into pure, part of it is spent in the crossing. Only carrying and storing come free.

'''III. Affinity.''' An element only answers someone who breathes it. Your affinity to an element grows by shaping that element and no other way, never by holding, hoarding, or buying it. The higher it climbs, the less each shaping loses, always just short of a clean crossing. Growth means spending; no coin buys mastery.
</blockquote>

== Opposition ==

Opposition plays out most plainly in the world, yet it is felt within the practitioner as well:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''Opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element suppresses its opposite within the same practitioner — the deeper one's fire, the weaker and slower-won their water, and likewise air against earth — while neighbors carry no such penalty. This is a rising cost, not a wall: every element stays masterable, and even both halves of an opposed pair can be won with enough effort. Alongside it, a gentler drag on all further gains as one's total attunement grows makes mastering everything a long road rather than an impossible one. Pure stands outside the square and has no opposite, so it neither suffers this opposition nor imposes it, feeling only the drag of the total.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''The system leans toward specialization.''' Alignment comes quickly at first and slows as it accumulates, and deepening one element suppresses its opposite (see Opposition, above). Committing to an element and its neighbors is the path of least resistance, while straddling an opposed pair or mastering everything at once is a long grind rather than a barred door.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* The '''opposition of attunement''' rule reverses the earlier "no attunement opposition" decision, which was settled jointly in an earlier design round. It wants that same joint review before it is treated as final.
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs, the strength of opposition suppression between opposed elements, and the soft-cap curve on total attunement gain.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T23:56:58Z

Tyg13: Rewrite the Three Laws: tighter plain-lore voice, each law leaning only on terms defined above (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== Pneuma, and how it's handled ==

Pneuma comes in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' ones. Pure pneuma is the plain breath of life and carries no element. Elemental pneuma is pure pneuma that has taken on one element. Life-magic works on pure pneuma directly.

'''The four elements'''

{| class="wikitable"
! Element !! Temperature !! Moisture !! Allies !! Enemy
|-
| Fire || Hot || Dry || Air, Earth || Water
|-
| Air || Hot || Wet || Fire, Water || Earth
|-
| Water || Cold || Wet || Air, Earth || Fire
|-
| Earth || Cold || Dry || Fire, Water || Air
|}

Elements sharing a quality are allies; elements sharing none are enemies. Every element has exactly two allies and one enemy.

'''When two elements meet'''

{| class="wikitable"
! Relation !! Elements !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Allies || Share a quality || Synergy || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Enemies || Share no quality || Dissonance || Cancel into pure, less than went in
|}

'''Terms'''

* '''Shaping''' moves pneuma between pure and elemental: give pure breath an element, or unmake an element back into pure.
* '''Affinity''' is how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element, measured separately for each. It belongs to the breather, not the element.
* '''Carrying and storing''' moves or holds pneuma without shaping it, keeping its form. This handling alone comes free.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Every breath-worker learns these three before anything else.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is life. Anything holding pneuma is alive, and anything alive holds pneuma. Put pneuma into something lifeless and it wakes; take its pneuma away and it goes still. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe.

'''II. Attrition.''' Shaping always costs. Whenever pneuma crosses between pure and elemental, or two enemies cancel into pure, part of it is spent in the crossing. Only carrying and storing come free.

'''III. Affinity.''' An element only answers someone who breathes it. Your affinity to an element grows by shaping that element and no other way, never by holding, hoarding, or buying it. The higher it climbs, the less each shaping loses, always just short of a clean crossing. Growth means spending; no coin buys mastery.
</blockquote>

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===
[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|Aristotle's Elemental Square]]

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out most plainly in the world, yet it is felt within the practitioner as well:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''Opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element suppresses its opposite within the same practitioner — the deeper one's fire, the weaker and slower-won their water, and likewise air against earth — while neighbors carry no such penalty. This is a rising cost, not a wall: every element stays masterable, and even both halves of an opposed pair can be won with enough effort. Alongside it, a gentler drag on all further gains as one's total attunement grows makes mastering everything a long road rather than an impossible one. Pure stands outside the square and has no opposite, so it neither suffers this opposition nor imposes it, feeling only the drag of the total.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''The system leans toward specialization.''' Alignment comes quickly at first and slows as it accumulates, and deepening one element suppresses its opposite (see Opposition, above). Committing to an element and its neighbors is the path of least resistance, while straddling an opposed pair or mastering everything at once is a long grind rather than a barred door.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* The '''opposition of attunement''' rule reverses the earlier "no attunement opposition" decision, which was settled jointly in an earlier design round. It wants that same joint review before it is treated as final.
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs, the strength of opposition suppression between opposed elements, and the soft-cap curve on total attunement gain.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T23:56:41Z

Tyg13: Add definitions block (forms, elements table, reactions, terms) before the laws so every term is in scope before use (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== Pneuma, and how it's handled ==

Pneuma comes in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' ones. Pure pneuma is the plain breath of life and carries no element. Elemental pneuma is pure pneuma that has taken on one element. Life-magic works on pure pneuma directly.

'''The four elements'''

{| class="wikitable"
! Element !! Temperature !! Moisture !! Allies !! Enemy
|-
| Fire || Hot || Dry || Air, Earth || Water
|-
| Air || Hot || Wet || Fire, Water || Earth
|-
| Water || Cold || Wet || Air, Earth || Fire
|-
| Earth || Cold || Dry || Fire, Water || Air
|}

Elements sharing a quality are allies; elements sharing none are enemies. Every element has exactly two allies and one enemy.

'''When two elements meet'''

{| class="wikitable"
! Relation !! Elements !! Reaction !! Result
|-
| Allies || Share a quality || Synergy || Combine into a hybrid
|-
| Enemies || Share no quality || Dissonance || Cancel into pure, less than went in
|}

'''Terms'''

* '''Shaping''' moves pneuma between pure and elemental: give pure breath an element, or unmake an element back into pure.
* '''Affinity''' is how strongly a living thing is aligned to one element, measured separately for each. It belongs to the breather, not the element.
* '''Carrying and storing''' moves or holds pneuma without shaping it, keeping its form. This handling alone comes free.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

The same attack the elements wage upon their opposites in the world plays out, more quietly, within a single breath-worker. As one grows close to fire, water grows cold and distant to them — its breath answers slower and thinner in a hand already sworn to flame — and the water-sworn find fire recede from them just the same. Neighbors bear one another no such grudge; only true opposites contend for the same soul. None of this shuts a door: a breath-worker may still come to know all four, and even both halves of an opposed pair, but the road across an opposition is the longest one, walked only by those willing to spend the effort it demands.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===
[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|Aristotle's Elemental Square]]

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out most plainly in the world, yet it is felt within the practitioner as well:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''Opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element suppresses its opposite within the same practitioner — the deeper one's fire, the weaker and slower-won their water, and likewise air against earth — while neighbors carry no such penalty. This is a rising cost, not a wall: every element stays masterable, and even both halves of an opposed pair can be won with enough effort. Alongside it, a gentler drag on all further gains as one's total attunement grows makes mastering everything a long road rather than an impossible one. Pure stands outside the square and has no opposite, so it neither suffers this opposition nor imposes it, feeling only the drag of the total.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''The system leans toward specialization.''' Alignment comes quickly at first and slows as it accumulates, and deepening one element suppresses its opposite (see Opposition, above). Committing to an element and its neighbors is the path of least resistance, while straddling an opposed pair or mastering everything at once is a long grind rather than a barred door.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* The '''opposition of attunement''' rule reverses the earlier "no attunement opposition" decision, which was settled jointly in an earlier design round. It wants that same joint review before it is treated as final.
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs, the strength of opposition suppression between opposed elements, and the soft-cap curve on total attunement gain.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T22:25:18Z

Tyg13: /* The elemental square */

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

The same attack the elements wage upon their opposites in the world plays out, more quietly, within a single breath-worker. As one grows close to fire, water grows cold and distant to them — its breath answers slower and thinner in a hand already sworn to flame — and the water-sworn find fire recede from them just the same. Neighbors bear one another no such grudge; only true opposites contend for the same soul. None of this shuts a door: a breath-worker may still come to know all four, and even both halves of an opposed pair, but the road across an opposition is the longest one, walked only by those willing to spend the effort it demands.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===
[[File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif|thumb|Aristotle's Elemental Square]]

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out most plainly in the world, yet it is felt within the practitioner as well:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''Opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element suppresses its opposite within the same practitioner — the deeper one's fire, the weaker and slower-won their water, and likewise air against earth — while neighbors carry no such penalty. This is a rising cost, not a wall: every element stays masterable, and even both halves of an opposed pair can be won with enough effort. Alongside it, a gentler drag on all further gains as one's total attunement grows makes mastering everything a long road rather than an impossible one. Pure stands outside the square and has no opposite, so it neither suffers this opposition nor imposes it, feeling only the drag of the total.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''The system leans toward specialization.''' Alignment comes quickly at first and slows as it accumulates, and deepening one element suppresses its opposite (see Opposition, above). Committing to an element and its neighbors is the path of least resistance, while straddling an opposed pair or mastering everything at once is a long grind rather than a barred door.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* The '''opposition of attunement''' rule reverses the earlier "no attunement opposition" decision, which was settled jointly in an earlier design round. It wants that same joint review before it is treated as final.
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs, the strength of opposition suppression between opposed elements, and the soft-cap curve on total attunement gain.

File:Aristotle's Elemental Square.gif

2026-07-19T22:24:56Z

Tyg13:

Describes the 4 elements and their shared qualities

Pneuma

2026-07-19T12:03:47Z

Tyg13: Open questions: flag the opposition-of-attunement rule as a reversal of the earlier jointly-settled "no attunement opposition" decision (wants joint review), and add opposition-suppression strength + total-attunement soft-cap curve to the deferred-numbers list. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

The same attack the elements wage upon their opposites in the world plays out, more quietly, within a single breath-worker. As one grows close to fire, water grows cold and distant to them — its breath answers slower and thinner in a hand already sworn to flame — and the water-sworn find fire recede from them just the same. Neighbors bear one another no such grudge; only true opposites contend for the same soul. None of this shuts a door: a breath-worker may still come to know all four, and even both halves of an opposed pair, but the road across an opposition is the longest one, walked only by those willing to spend the effort it demands.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out most plainly in the world, yet it is felt within the practitioner as well:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''Opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element suppresses its opposite within the same practitioner — the deeper one's fire, the weaker and slower-won their water, and likewise air against earth — while neighbors carry no such penalty. This is a rising cost, not a wall: every element stays masterable, and even both halves of an opposed pair can be won with enough effort. Alongside it, a gentler drag on all further gains as one's total attunement grows makes mastering everything a long road rather than an impossible one. Pure stands outside the square and has no opposite, so it neither suffers this opposition nor imposes it, feeling only the drag of the total.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''The system leans toward specialization.''' Alignment comes quickly at first and slows as it accumulates, and deepening one element suppresses its opposite (see Opposition, above). Committing to an element and its neighbors is the path of least resistance, while straddling an opposed pair or mastering everything at once is a long grind rather than a barred door.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* The '''opposition of attunement''' rule reverses the earlier "no attunement opposition" decision, which was settled jointly in an earlier design round. It wants that same joint review before it is treated as final.
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs, the strength of opposition suppression between opposed elements, and the soft-cap curve on total attunement gain.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T12:03:36Z

Tyg13: Progression: add the specialization-lean consequence (fast early, slowing with total, opposites suppressed → specializing is the path of least resistance, breadth a grind not a wall). (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

The same attack the elements wage upon their opposites in the world plays out, more quietly, within a single breath-worker. As one grows close to fire, water grows cold and distant to them — its breath answers slower and thinner in a hand already sworn to flame — and the water-sworn find fire recede from them just the same. Neighbors bear one another no such grudge; only true opposites contend for the same soul. None of this shuts a door: a breath-worker may still come to know all four, and even both halves of an opposed pair, but the road across an opposition is the longest one, walked only by those willing to spend the effort it demands.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out most plainly in the world, yet it is felt within the practitioner as well:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''Opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element suppresses its opposite within the same practitioner — the deeper one's fire, the weaker and slower-won their water, and likewise air against earth — while neighbors carry no such penalty. This is a rising cost, not a wall: every element stays masterable, and even both halves of an opposed pair can be won with enough effort. Alongside it, a gentler drag on all further gains as one's total attunement grows makes mastering everything a long road rather than an impossible one. Pure stands outside the square and has no opposite, so it neither suffers this opposition nor imposes it, feeling only the drag of the total.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''The system leans toward specialization.''' Alignment comes quickly at first and slows as it accumulates, and deepening one element suppresses its opposite (see Opposition, above). Committing to an element and its neighbors is the path of least resistance, while straddling an opposed pair or mastering everything at once is a long grind rather than a barred door.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T12:03:21Z

Tyg13: Opposition: flip "no opposition of attunement" to the new opposition-of-attunement rule (opposites suppress each other, neighbors exempt, rising cost not a wall) plus the global soft-cap; update the section's framing line so opposition is felt within the practitioner too. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

The same attack the elements wage upon their opposites in the world plays out, more quietly, within a single breath-worker. As one grows close to fire, water grows cold and distant to them — its breath answers slower and thinner in a hand already sworn to flame — and the water-sworn find fire recede from them just the same. Neighbors bear one another no such grudge; only true opposites contend for the same soul. None of this shuts a door: a breath-worker may still come to know all four, and even both halves of an opposed pair, but the road across an opposition is the longest one, walked only by those willing to spend the effort it demands.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out most plainly in the world, yet it is felt within the practitioner as well:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''Opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element suppresses its opposite within the same practitioner — the deeper one's fire, the weaker and slower-won their water, and likewise air against earth — while neighbors carry no such penalty. This is a rising cost, not a wall: every element stays masterable, and even both halves of an opposed pair can be won with enough effort. Alongside it, a gentler drag on all further gains as one's total attunement grows makes mastering everything a long road rather than an impossible one. Pure stands outside the square and has no opposite, so it neither suffers this opposition nor imposes it, feeling only the drag of the total.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T12:03:07Z

Tyg13: III. Affinity: extend the elaboration to the in-the-soul reading of "attacks its opposite" — a breath-worker deep in one element finds its opposite grow cold, neighbors exempt, all four still winnable with effort. Terse law block left untouched. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

The same attack the elements wage upon their opposites in the world plays out, more quietly, within a single breath-worker. As one grows close to fire, water grows cold and distant to them — its breath answers slower and thinner in a hand already sworn to flame — and the water-sworn find fire recede from them just the same. Neighbors bear one another no such grudge; only true opposites contend for the same soul. None of this shuts a door: a breath-worker may still come to know all four, and even both halves of an opposed pair, but the road across an opposition is the longest one, walked only by those willing to spend the effort it demands.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out in the world, not within the practitioner:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''No opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element never hinders its opposite, and mastering one element never comes at another's cost. Mastery of all four is fully attainable, and the ledger already accounts for it without need of any artificial barrier.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:49:44Z

Tyg13: Trade: remove the contradictory "pure cannot be gathered from the world directly" claim; state pure's three sources (harvested from non-elemental creatures, self-generated, refined by annihilation) and keep the "no site yields pure" nuance. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out in the world, not within the practitioner:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''No opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element never hinders its opposite, and mastering one element never comes at another's cost. Mastery of all four is fully attainable, and the ledger already accounts for it without need of any artificial barrier.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' comes from three sources: the pure harvested from slain creatures that hold no element, the pure a body generates for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise, and pure refined from an opposed typed pair by annihilation — a craft anyone may perform, though it always loses a little in the making. No elemental site yields pure, so it never wells from the ground the way typed pneuma does. Pure trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:49:35Z

Tyg13: The warrior: give the warrior an explicit external pure source — the pure released by the slain — alongside their own breath, completing their gathering loop. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out in the world, not within the practitioner:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''No opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element never hinders its opposite, and mastering one element never comes at another's cost. Mastery of all four is fully attainable, and the ledger already accounts for it without need of any artificial barrier.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from elemental sites, a warrior works in pure pneuma alone, replenished by their own breath and by the pure released from all they slay. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' cannot be gathered from the world directly. It exists only as something refined, through the annihilation of an opposed pair — a craft anyone may perform, and one that always loses a little in the making — or as something a body makes for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise. Refined pure pneuma trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:49:27Z

Tyg13: Opposition: demote annihilation from "the chief way" pure enters trade to one way among the creature-harvest and self-generation sources; keep the "no site yields pure" nuance. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out in the world, not within the practitioner:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is one way pure pneuma reaches the market, since no elemental site yields it directly; it stands alongside the pure harvested from slain creatures and the pure a body generates of its own accord.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''No opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element never hinders its opposite, and mastering one element never comes at another's cost. Mastery of all four is fully attainable, and the ledger already accounts for it without need of any artificial barrier.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from the world outside, a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' cannot be gathered from the world directly. It exists only as something refined, through the annihilation of an opposed pair — a craft anyone may perform, and one that always loses a little in the making — or as something a body makes for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise. Refined pure pneuma trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:49:17Z

Tyg13: Where pneuma comes from: make pure-from-non-elemental-creatures a first-class world source (the warrior's counterpart to elemental sites), replacing the dismissive "trickle." (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out in the world, not within the practitioner:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is the chief way pure pneuma enters trade, since it cannot be gathered from a node directly — only refined in this way, or generated by one's own body.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''No opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element never hinders its opposite, and mastering one element never comes at another's cost. Mastery of all four is fully attainable, and the ledger already accounts for it without need of any artificial barrier.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A creature steeped in an element yields that element — a fire spirit gives up fire pneuma — while a common beast, bound to no element, yields pure. What a creature releases is simply what animated it, set loose. The pure drawn from ordinary living things is the surest source of pure pneuma the world offers, and the warrior's counterpart to the elementalist's vents and springs.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from the world outside, a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' cannot be gathered from the world directly. It exists only as something refined, through the annihilation of an opposed pair — a craft anyone may perform, and one that always loses a little in the making — or as something a body makes for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise. Refined pure pneuma trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:40:35Z

Tyg13: Prose pass on the mechanical sections: sweep "flavor" → "element" throughout, and recast the design-doc voice (antithesis "not X, but Y", staccato negations, second-person "you", dev-meeting asides) into calm in-world encyclopedic prose in the lore-wiki register. No design content changed; the Three Laws and Open-questions lists are left as-is. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in a single '''pure''' form and, when steeped in the world, in any of four '''elemental''' ones:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the animating spirit itself, holding no element. Healing, growth, and other "life magic" draw on pure pneuma rather than on any fifth element, since to mend a living thing is to handle pure spirit directly. Earth covers stone, soil, and mountain alike.

By Law 2, whatever crosses into a body is unmade back to pure as it enters, so a practitioner carries only pure pneuma within, never elemental. An element's identity persists instead out in the world — in sites, creatures, and condensed crystals — and in a practitioner's mastery of it, never in the body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, and earth cold and dry. Opposites share no quality — fire stands against water, air against earth — while neighbors share exactly one, and only neighbors may combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out as a diagram, neighbors sit adjacent while opposites sit across from one another:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids remain physical. Water and earth together make mud and clay; verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to any pairing of elements.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both its parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. A caster of hybrids is therefore a specialist in a neighboring pair, and the storm-caller and the frost-caller share no common ground.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition plays out in the world, not within the practitioner:

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels both elements and leaves pure pneuma behind, always less than went in. This is a craft rather than a spell: anyone may press two opposed typed items together at an alchemist's bench, with no attunement at all, since a practitioner's mastery governs only the pneuma they themselves draw in and shape out, and has no bearing on a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is the chief way pure pneuma enters trade, since it cannot be gathered from a node directly — only refined in this way, or generated by one's own body.
* '''Counters.''' Counters take the form of actions rather than modifiers. Water quenches burning and douses walls of fire; each element counters exactly one other and is in turn countered by one other, and none of it reduces to a flat damage multiplier.
* '''No opposition of attunement.''' Deepening one element never hinders its opposite, and mastering one element never comes at another's cost. Mastery of all four is fully attainable, and the ledger already accounts for it without need of any artificial barrier.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in wherever an element runs strong — at springs, vents, groves, and currents. Its abundance shifts by degree rather than by boundary: every place holds a little of everything, and a site only tilts the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth, and nowhere is wholly a land of one element.
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and gives it up when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma, being life-stuff steeped in flame, while a common animal yields only a trickle of pure. What a creature drops is simply what animated it, set loose.
* '''The self.''' Every living body slowly regenerates pure pneuma of its own accord — its own breath (Law 1). Deliberate practice such as exercise or meditation quickens this beyond idle regeneration, though it stays far slower than drawing on the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A practitioner's own reserve is a single unbounded pool of pure pneuma (Law 2). It keeps no separate store for each element, has no capacity to raise, and never runs full. The pool's size never varies; an element governs only how readily pneuma crosses the body's boundary, inward or outward:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — from a crystal, a vent, or a fresh kill — into one's own pool renders it down to pure. How much pure results from a given measure of typed pneuma depends on one's mastery of that element: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensing.''' Pneuma can also pass between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person. Typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials — or pure pneuma refined by annihilation — sits inert, and can be stored and traded freely. This is the only form pneuma keeps while outside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma turns from labor into currency, every practitioner feels their mastery here before anywhere else: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent far faster than an unattuned one, before either has spent a single drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's element as it leaves the body (Law 3). Every caster works the same way, drawing on the common pool of pure pneuma and paying whatever cost their mastery of that element sets. An unmastered element still answers a caster, though dearly and feebly, while a mastered one answers cheaply and with strength. Casting mirrors absorption — the same mastery governs pneuma crossing the body's boundary in either direction — and the two grow together, since mastery is earned by spending pneuma and never by gathering it (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is bound to resources rather than to time. The governing rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery''', and one's attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

This carries several consequences:

* '''Spending is advancement.''' Using pneuma and growing in power are one and the same act, so hoarding gains nothing. Pneuma merely absorbed into the pool yields no progress on its own; only pneuma spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''Play shapes alignment.''' A practitioner's attunement follows from what they actually cast, and is never chosen outright.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Since only channeled pneuma counts, wealth can carry a caster past the gathering but never past the casting. For this reason the rate at which spells can be cast — their cast times and cooldowns — is what ultimately paces a practitioner's growth.
* '''Idle practice still counts.''' A cast need not achieve anything to leave its residue; channeling fire into empty air is practice enough, and its pneuma cost keeps such practice from ever being free.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell limits itself,''' since even a cheap spell steadily consumes gathered pneuma.

'''What attunement grants:''' it makes a practitioner's spells in that element stronger and cheaper to cast, and confers passive benefits as well. It does not by itself unlock new spells — those are learned from masters, from spellbook drops, and as quest rewards, then deepened through use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster stands within the same system as an inward practitioner of it. Where an elementalist channels typed pneuma drawn from the world outside, a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests that pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which gathers into '''pure attunement''' by the very same ledger — for it counts a cast and an exertion alike (Law 3) — with only the direction of flow reversed.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma''' — from sites, drops, and crystals — is the chief good of the market: freely gathered and traded, and the raw stock for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma''' cannot be gathered from the world directly. It exists only as something refined, through the annihilation of an opposed pair — a craft anyone may perform, and one that always loses a little in the making — or as something a body makes for itself through regeneration and deliberate exercise. Refined pure pneuma trades as freely as any other good; what the market sells is fuel, while the power to spend it well belongs to attuned hands alone, where the same handful of pneuma achieves far more.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:31:12Z

Tyg13: /* Forms */ fix diagram formatting

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 2, anything crossing into a body is unmade back to pure — a person never carries elemental pneuma internally, only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite — mastering one element never costs another. Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 1) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 2). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:27:25Z

Tyg13: Align body prose with the reworked Three Laws: fix stale law references left over from the Kinship/Breath/Vessel → Vitality/Attrition/Affinity renumber (elemental square is Law 3 not 1; self-regen is Law 1 not 2; death/undead cite Law 3/Law 1 not Law 1/Law 2), reattribute the pure-only-reserve rule to Law 2 (Attrition) since Vessel's headline was dropped, and demote the "mastering one never costs another" citation to a derived consequence since that clause was dropped from Affinity. (via upda...

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 2, anything crossing into a body is unmade back to pure — a person never carries elemental pneuma internally, only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 3): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite — mastering one element never costs another. Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 1) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 2). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 3's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 1 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:14:26Z

Tyg13: /* The Three Laws of Pneuma */

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who breathes it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 3, a person never carries elemental pneuma internally — only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 1): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite (Law 3: mastering one flavor never costs another). Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 2) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 3). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 1's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 2 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:13:54Z

Tyg13: /* The Three Laws of Pneuma */ law 3 style edit

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and attacks its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who spends it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 3, a person never carries elemental pneuma internally — only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 1): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite (Law 3: mastering one flavor never costs another). Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 2) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 3). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 1's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 2 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T11:12:40Z

Tyg13: /* The Three Laws of Pneuma */ minor style edits

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pneuma may be imbued with an element, and imbued pneuma unmade back into pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, but never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and abhors its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who spends it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 3, a person never carries elemental pneuma internally — only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 1): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite (Law 3: mastering one flavor never costs another). Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 2) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 3). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 1's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 2 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T07:43:56Z

Tyg13: Rework the Three Laws to Vitality / Attrition / Affinity — replace "Conservation" (contradicted lossy annihilation/extraction already on the page) with an attrition/no-free-lunch law, and fold the mastery-through-spending ledger into Affinity instead of a dropped fourth law. "Flavor" -> "element" throughout for consistency with the rest of the page. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Vitality.''' Pneuma is the force that underlies all life. To breathe is to live, to live is to breathe — they are one and the same.

'''II. Attrition.''' No shaping of pneuma is without loss. Pure may be given an element, and an element unmade back to pure, but nothing crosses that threshold whole — the deeper one's affinity, the less it leaves behind, never nothing.

'''III. Affinity.''' Every element embraces its neighbor and abhors its opposite: what is close may be joined, what stands in opposition, forced together, unmakes both, leaving nothing but breath beneath them. So too an element draws close only to the one who spends it, and remains a stranger to the one who merely holds it.
</blockquote>

=== I. Vitality ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== II. Attrition ===

An alchemist who forces fire against flood in a crucible is left with pure pneuma, always less of it than the two elements held between them — the loss is not a debt owed to anyone, only the price of the crossing itself. It is the same toll paid when pneuma is drawn from a vent into a body, or unmade from pure into a spell: some part is always spent on the shaping and never seen again. No teaching, however deep, closes that gap to nothing.

=== III. Affinity ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

So it is between a breath-worker and the elements they touch. One well-versed in fire draws deep from a vent that leaves a stranger with almost nothing for the same reach; and to call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, costs less and carries further the closer that bond runs. The bond itself is built only one way — by spending, never by holding. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at a vent before battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way into closeness with an element: coin buys the breath, never the affinity to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 3, a person never carries elemental pneuma internally — only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 1): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite (Law 3: mastering one flavor never costs another). Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 2) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 3). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 1's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 2 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T07:13:21Z

Tyg13: /* The Three Laws of Pneuma */ minor style edit

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Kinship.''' Every element embraces its neighbors and abhors its opposite: what is close may be joined into something new; what stands directly against, forced together, unmakes both down to the breath beneath them.

'''II. Breath.''' All that lives breathes pneuma into the world without ceasing, and the world remembers it long after.

'''III. Vessel.''' No creature carries more than a single breath. What is drawn in becomes breath alone; what is spent to call it back out is the only teacher a hand ever has.
</blockquote>

=== I. Kinship ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

=== II. Breath ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== III. Vessel ===

Whatever a body draws in, from crystal or vent or dying beast, becomes only breath again the instant it crosses into flesh — and the surer the hand that draws it, the deeper the draught; a stranger closes their fist on the same flame and comes away with almost nothing.

To call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, is to spend it, and only what is spent is ever truly learned — a breath merely held teaches the hand nothing. The surer the hand, the less such shaping costs and the fuller the shape it takes; yet skill in one breath never dulls the hand in another. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at the vent before a battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way to mastery — coin buys the breath, never the skill to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 3, a person never carries elemental pneuma internally — only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 1): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite (Law 3: mastering one flavor never costs another). Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 2) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 3). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 1's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 2 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T07:09:19Z

Tyg13: Rewrite the Three Laws in lore-wiki voice (mythic, player-facing) instead of dev-facing rule statements — succinct summary block plus elaborated prose per law, no invented named authorities. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Long before scholars gave it a name, every breath-worker's first teaching held the same three truths, and no apprentice has yet found cause to doubt them.

<blockquote>
'''I. Kinship.''' Every element remembers its neighbors and forgets its opposite: what is close may be joined into something new; what stands directly against it, forced together, unmakes both down to the breath beneath them.

'''II. Breath.''' All that lives breathes pneuma into the world without ceasing, and the world remembers it long after.

'''III. Vessel.''' No creature carries more than a single breath. What is drawn in becomes breath alone; what is spent to call it back out is the only teacher a hand ever has.
</blockquote>

=== I. Kinship ===

A flame held near a gust becomes a storm's lightning; held near stone, a forge's magma. But hold flame against flood, or wind against mountain, and neither survives the meeting — only breath remains, and less of it than either side began with.

=== II. Breath ===

It is why a mountain spring runs cold with both water and earth at once, never one alone; why a slain salamander gives up fire enough to warm a hand, though it lived its whole life on nothing grander than insects and shade; why even the stillest hermit, who has never lifted a blade nor spoken a spell, wakes each morning a little fuller than the night before.

=== III. Vessel ===

Whatever a body draws in, from crystal or vent or dying beast, becomes only breath again the instant it crosses into flesh — and the surer the hand that draws it, the deeper the draught; a stranger closes their fist on the same flame and comes away with almost nothing.

To call that breath back out again, shaped as fire or frost or storm, is to spend it, and only what is spent is ever truly learned — a breath merely held teaches the hand nothing. The surer the hand, the less such shaping costs and the fuller the shape it takes; yet skill in one breath never dulls the hand in another. This is why the deepest fire-sworn in the world still kneels at the vent before a battle, and why no buyer of pneuma, however rich, has ever purchased their way to mastery — coin buys the breath, never the skill to shape it.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 3, a person never carries elemental pneuma internally — only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 1): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite (Law 3: mastering one flavor never costs another). Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 2) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 3). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 1's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 2 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T06:59:12Z

Tyg13: Collapse internal reserves to a single unbounded pure pool with attunement-gated conversion; add the Three Laws of Pneuma and an elemental square table; retire "deepening the breath"; reframe annihilation as an ungated craft; defer imbuing and anti-/tainted pneuma to open questions. (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

'''Pneuma''' is the animating spirit of the world — breath, life-force, and the fuel of all magic. Everything alive contains it; to be alive ''is'' to carry pneuma. It is both a collectible resource and the foundation of character progression.

== The Three Laws of Pneuma ==

Everything about how pneuma behaves, for players and for design alike, derives from three laws. Where any later section seems to conflict with a Law, the Law wins.

'''Law 1 — The Square.''' Elemental flavors relate by shared quality. Neighbors share one quality and combine into something new; opposites share none and, forced together, annihilate back into pure.

'''Law 2 — Origin.''' Pneuma is generated wherever life is or has been. Every living thing produces it constantly; the world holds its residue in sites, creatures, and remains, shaped into a flavor, or unshaped as pure.

'''Law 3 — Shaping.''' What a person draws into themselves becomes plain, unshaped pure. Giving it shape again — a cast, an exertion — costs pneuma, and only pneuma spent this way builds mastery of the flavor it was shaped into. Mastery makes both the drawing-in and the shaping-out of that flavor cheaper and stronger, and mastering one flavor never costs another.

== Forms ==

Pneuma exists in one '''pure''' form and four '''elemental''' flavors it takes on when steeped in the world:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth
# Air

Pure pneuma is the unflavored animating spirit itself. Life is not a fifth element: healing, growth, and other "life magic" is pure pneuma work, since mending a living thing means handling unflavored spirit directly. Earth is cleanly stone, soil, and mountain.

By Law 3, a person never carries elemental pneuma internally — only pure. Elemental identity lives in the world (sites, creatures, condensed crystals) and in a person's mastery of each flavor, never in a body's own reserve.

=== The elemental square ===

The elements follow the classical (Aristotelian) square of qualities (Law 1): fire is hot+dry, air is hot+wet, water is cold+wet, earth is cold+dry. '''Opposites share no quality''' — fire↔water, air↔earth. '''Neighbors share exactly one''', and only neighbors can combine:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"
! Element !! Qualities !! Opposite (annihilates to pure) !! Combines with → hybrid
|-
| '''Fire''' || Hot + Dry || Water || Air → lightning / storm-fire; Earth → magma / forge-heat
|-
| '''Air''' || Hot + Wet || Earth || Fire → lightning / storm-fire; Water → mist / ice / tempest
|-
| '''Water''' || Cold + Wet || Fire || Air → mist / ice / tempest; Earth → mire / clay / the deep places
|-
| '''Earth''' || Cold + Dry || Air || Fire → magma / forge-heat; Water → mire / clay / the deep places
|}

Laid out geometrically, neighbors sit adjacent and opposites sit across from each other:

<pre>
FIRE
(Hot + Dry)
/ \
EARTH AIR
(Cold + Dry) (Hot + Wet)
\ /
WATER
(Cold + Wet)
</pre>

Hybrids stay ''physical''. Water+earth is mud and clay, never "growth" — verdant life magic belongs to pure pneuma, not to an element pair.

A hybrid spell consumes pneuma of both parent elements, and its mastery feeds both attunements. Hybrid casters are naturally neighbor-pair specialists (the storm-caller and the frost-caller share nothing), with no extra machinery.

=== Opposition ===

Opposition lives '''in the world, never in the soul''':

* '''Annihilation.''' Opposed pneuma forced together cancels its flavors, leaving pure pneuma at a loss. This is a craft, not a cast: anyone can force two opposed typed items together — an alchemist's bench, not a caster's own body — and it requires no attunement at all, because Law 3's mastery only governs a ''person's own'' drawing-in and shaping-out, never a reaction between two inert items. Annihilation is how pure enters trade: it cannot be node-harvested directly, only refined this way or generated by a person's own effort.
* '''Interactional counters.''' Counters are verbs, not percentages: water quenches burning effects and extinguishes fire walls; each element counters exactly one and is countered by exactly one. No flat damage multipliers.
* '''No attunement opposition.''' Deepening one element never impedes its opposite (Law 3: mastering one flavor never costs another). Mastery of all four is honestly achievable — the ledger already prices it; no wall is needed.

== Where pneuma comes from ==

* '''Elemental sites and nodes.''' Typed pneuma is drawn in at places where an element runs strong — springs, vents, groves, currents. Abundance is a ''gradient'', not a zone: everywhere has some of everything, and sites shift the local mix. A mountain riverbank yields both water and earth. There is no "fire area."
* '''Creatures.''' Everything alive carries pneuma and releases it when slain. A fire spirit yields fire pneuma — it was life-stuff steeped in flame. An ordinary animal yields a trickle of pure. Drops are not arbitrary currency; you are releasing what animated the creature.
* '''The self.''' Every character slowly regenerates pure pneuma just by being alive (Law 2) — their own breath. Deliberate practice (exercise, meditation) can push this harder than passive regeneration alone, though it remains far less efficient than engaging the world or the market.

== Carrying pneuma: the pool ==

A person's own reserve is a single, unbounded pool of plain pure pneuma (Law 3). There is no separate reserve per element, no capacity to grow, and no cap to hit. What varies by flavor is not how much you can hold, but how efficiently pneuma moves across the boundary of your own body in either direction:

* '''Absorbing.''' Drawing typed pneuma out of the world — a crystal, a vent, a fresh kill — and into your own pool always converts it to plain pure. How much pure you get out of a given amount of typed pneuma is set by your mastery of that flavor: a fire adept draws deep from a vent that leaves a novice with barely a trickle.
* '''Condensation.''' Pneuma also moves between bodies and vaults without ever entering a person: typed pneuma condensed into crystals or vials (or pure, refined by annihilation) is inert, storable, and freely tradeable. This is the only form pneuma takes while it is not inside a living thing.

Because absorption is where pneuma stops being effort and starts being currency, everyone — caster or not — feels their own mastery here first: a well-attuned fire warrior fills their pool at a vent faster than an unattuned one, before either of them ever spends a drop.

== Casting ==

Casting a spell spends pure pneuma, shaped into the spell's flavor as it is spent (Law 3). There is only one path: draw on the pool of pure everyone carries, and pay whatever your mastery of that flavor makes the shaping cost. An unmastered flavor is not blocked, just expensive and weak; a mastered one is cheap and strong. This is symmetric with absorption — the same underlying mastery governs both directions of the boundary — but the two are trained together, since mastery is built only by spending, never by gathering (see the ledger, below).

== Progression: the ledger ==

Progression is resource-bound, not time-bound. The rule:

<blockquote>Pneuma channeled through a cast becomes that spell's experience. A spell's accumulated experience is its '''mastery'''. Your attunement to an element is the sum of mastery across that element's spells.</blockquote>

Consequences, all deliberate:

* '''Spending is progressing.''' There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct. Absorbing pneuma into your pool, on its own, grants nothing — only pneuma actually spent through a cast or an exertion builds mastery (Law 3).
* '''However you play is how you align.''' Attunement is derived from what you actually cast, not chosen from a menu.
* '''Attunement cannot be bought.''' Pneuma held grants nothing; only pneuma channeled counts. A rich buyer skips the gathering half, never the casting half — two gates, one for sale. Cast throughput (cast times, cooldowns) is therefore the progression pacing lever.
* '''Practice casting counts.''' A cast need not accomplish anything to leave residue — channeling fire into the air is legitimate practice. The pneuma cost makes it self-limiting.
* '''Grinding a cheap spell is self-limiting''' by construction: it burns real gathered resources slowly.

'''What attunement does:''' it makes your spells in that element stronger and cheaper, and grants passive effects. It does not unlock spells — individual spells are learned from masters, spellbook drops, and quest rewards, then deepened by use.

=== The warrior ===

The non-caster is not outside the system; they are its internal practitioner. Elementalists channel external, typed pneuma drawn from the world; a warrior cultivates the pure pneuma of their own body through exertion. Physical effort invests pure pneuma into weapon mastery, which sums into '''pure attunement''' — the same ledger (Law 3 treats "a cast" and "an exertion" identically), the opposite direction of flow.

== Trade ==

* '''Typed pneuma — sites, drops, crystals — is the primary market good''': freely gatherable and tradeable, and the raw material for both absorption and annihilation.
* '''Pure pneuma cannot be gathered from the world directly.''' It only exists refined — by annihilation of an opposed pair (a craft anyone can perform, always lossy) — or generated by a person's own effort (self-regeneration, deliberate exercise). Refined pure is a legitimate market good like anything else; trade sells fuel, never power, since the same handful of pneuma does more in a more deeply attuned pair of hands.

== Open questions ==

* What does deep '''pure attunement''' concretely grant the warrior beyond weapon mastery? Likely tied to how elemental imbuing works, which is proposed but not yet designed.
* Should warriors and other non-casters reach elemental effects through imbued gear (weapons, armor)? Proposed, not yet designed — deliberately deferred until the base pneuma system above is settled.
* Is there a "death" or corrupting force opposed to pneuma? Largely rejected as a new substance in favor of death being a violation of Law 1's annihilation (destruction with no pure residue) and undead being beings whose Law 2 self-generation has failed — but this is explicitly deferred until the base system above is fully settled.
* Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
* Concrete numbers everywhere: absorption and casting efficiency curves at each mastery level, self-regeneration rate, annihilation loss rate, condensation costs.

Pneuma

2026-07-19T01:49:06Z

Tyg13: Fold in the second design round: Aristotelian square, neighbor combination, annihilation refinement, world-not-soul opposition, absorb/condense model, reserve deepening (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

Pneuma

2026-07-19T01:33:19Z

Tyg13: Write up the pneuma design: cosmology, sources, internal reserve vs. world pneuma, transmutation, attunement ledger, trade rules, open questions (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

The World

2026-07-19T00:28:15Z

Tyg13: Expand with detailed, non-technical world layout info: terrain types, water, verticality/bridges, caves, notable unnamed areas, and world growth (via update-page on MediaWiki MCP Server)

The world of BTScape is one seamless landscape shared by every player, seen from a 3D camera as you walk, run, and explore across it on foot. It's built from a grid of square tiles, each about a metre across, stitched together out of 16×16-tile chunks that stream in around you as you travel through the world.

== The Terrain ==

Most of the land explored so far is open grassland, dotted with patches of dirt and soil, windswept sand dunes, and snowfields in colder-looking reaches of the map. Civilisation leaves its own mark on the ground: paved cobblestone paths, wooden floorboards, flagstone, and the occasional red carpet mark out roads, buildings, and other constructed spaces, standing out against the natural ground around them.

== Rivers and Water ==

Rivers and streams cut through the landscape as translucent, animated water that ripples and catches the light — tinted darker where it runs deep, and flecked with foam along the shallows and shore. You can't wade or swim across deep water yet; it blocks your path like a wall, so rivers act as natural obstacles to route around or cross by bridge.

== Elevation, Bridges, and Buildings ==

The ground isn't flat. Hills rise and fall across the map, and where the terrain climbs steeply it's rendered as rocky cliff faces rather than smooth grass. Elsewhere, ramps and staircases connect one height to another gradually, like a real flight of stairs. Built-up areas add whole extra layers on top of the base terrain — bridges spanning rivers, raised platforms, and upper floors of buildings. Unlike some tile-based games, BTScape doesn't hide one floor to reveal another: stand underneath a bridge and you'll still be able to see (and bump into) anyone crossing above you.

== Caves ==

Openings cut into hillsides lead down into caves — real gaps in the ground, with the hillside above acting as their rock ceiling. Step inside and the light fades the deeper you go: the mouth of a cave stays reasonably lit, but push further in and it dims toward near-total darkness beyond the small area lit around you, brightening smoothly again as you head back toward the entrance.

== Notable Areas ==

BTScape's map doesn't have official place names yet — the world is still young and growing — but a few areas already stand out to explorers:

* A camp of cultists, marked out by cultist symbols and patrolled by guards, with wells, beds, and tables scattered around.
* A small market row where a general store, a food shop, and an ore trader have set up alongside one another.
* Sprawling wheat fields — easily the largest cultivated area on the map.
* A mining ground where tin ore can be dug out of the hillside.
* A pair of water wheels turning near the mining ground.

These all lie some distance from where new characters first arrive in the world, so you'll need to explore to find them.

== A Growing World ==

The map isn't a fixed rectangle — it's an irregular, ever-expanding patchwork of chunks that can be extended in any direction at any time. Expect the explored world to keep growing as development continues.

Pneuma

2026-07-18T23:55:42Z

Tyg13: basic description

Pneuma is a source of power, and a source of energy. It comes in 4 basic elemental types:

# Water
# Fire
# Earth/life
# Air

It also comes in typeless (pure) form.

Pneuma

2026-07-18T23:51:07Z

Tyg13: Created page with "Pneuma is in stuff."

Pneuma is in stuff.

The World

2026-07-18T23:49:44Z

Tyg13: basic description

The world of BTScape is a chunk-based tile grid. Each chunk takes 16x16 tiles. Each tile is assumed to be 1 m<sup>2</sup>

The World

2026-07-18T23:42:27Z

Tyg13: Created page with "This is the world"

This is the world

Main Page

2026-07-18T23:40:06Z

Tyg13: first edit

This is the BTScape Wiki, son