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.

Forms

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

1. Water
2. Fire
3. Earth
4. 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.

Where pneuma comes from

• Elemental sites and nodes. Typed pneuma is harvested or mined from 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 drops 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 regenerates a small internal reserve of pure pneuma — their own breath. It is slow to refill and never large.

Item and reserve

Pneuma is both a thing you carry and a stat you have:

• World pneuma is physical — motes, crystals, vials — held in inventory, banked, and traded.
• The internal reserve is personal — a small, slowly regenerating pool of pure pneuma. It is enough for casual casting or making do, never enough for serious work. Even a master fills their pouch before a real fight.

Casting and transmutation

Casting an elemental spell consumes pneuma of that element. There are two ways to supply it:

• Consume carried typed pneuma. Anyone can do this, attuned or not. Harvested pneuma is always the efficient fuel.
• Transmute from the internal reserve. A caster attuned to an element can convert their own pure pneuma into that element on the fly. Transmutation is gated on attunement (the unattuned cannot do it at all) and is always lossy — deepening attunement makes it less wasteful, never free. It is an emergency reserve, not self-sufficiency; the deepest fire adept still wants harvested fire pneuma.

Progression: the ledger

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

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.

Consequences, all deliberate:

• Spending is progressing. There is no tension between using pneuma and growing; hoarding is never correct.
• 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 harvested 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, the opposite direction of flow.

Trade

• Typed pneuma is the market good — freely tradeable fuel. Trade sells fuel, never power: the same handful of fire pneuma does more in deeper-attuned hands, so the caster is the catalyst, not the consumable.
• Pure pneuma is not freely tradeable or node-harvestable. It is mostly made — refined from typed pneuma at a loss (a crafting chain), or generated by one's own effort. This keeps pure from collapsing into a universal wildcard and keeps the warrior's progression unbuyable.

Open questions

• What does deep pure attunement concretely grant the warrior? The cosmology is settled; the payoff is not.
• Do elements interact — opposition, combination, counters?
• Ambient dynamics: should weather and time shift local pneuma abundance (storms surging air)?
• Exact refinement chain for distilling typed pneuma into pure.