Pneuma

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 form: pure. There is no such thing as elemental pneuma.

What is elemental is matter. A medium is elemental matter — fire, air, water, or earth. Media are ordinary stuff. They are not alive and hold no power of their own.

Binding lodges pneuma into a medium. Bound pneuma is what gets gathered, condensed, traded and spent. "Fire pneuma" is everyday shorthand for pneuma bound in a fire medium, not a separate kind of pneuma.

The four media on a square. Each edge joins two that share a quality — a temperature (hot or cold) or a moisture (wet or dry); the diagonals share none.

The four media stand in fixed relation to one another:

• Allies — two media that share a quality (adjacent on the square). Every medium has two allies.
• Enemies — the two media that share no quality (diagonal). Every medium has exactly one enemy.

These relations belong to the media, not to the pneuma bound in them. Synergy and dissonance are things fire and water do to each other; the pneuma is only along for the ride.

Reactions

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

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:

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, but only when it moves. Pneuma circulating through a vessel — a structure able to carry it — is alive. Pneuma merely lodged in matter is charged, not alive: it sits inert, and can be carried, stored and traded safely. Fill a vessel and it wakes; drain it and it goes still.

What a living thing can do is decided by its vessel, not by its pneuma. Pneuma supplies animation; structure decides what that animation amounts to. The same pneuma glows in a stone and thinks in a person. More pneuma in a simple vessel makes it stronger, not cleverer.

Law II — Attrition. Shaping has a cost. Any time pneuma is bound into a medium or released from one, or two enemy media annihilate each other, part of it is spent. Only carrying and storing it are free.

Law III — Affinity. Media favor those with an affinity for them. Affinity grows by spending that medium (casting or exertion). The higher the affinity, the less each binding 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 ability's accumulated experience, measured as the total pneuma ever spent through it. Affinity for an element is the sum of mastery across the abilities tagged with it — the same count at a wider scope.

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. A body slowly refills its own reserve by drawing on the pneuma around it (Law I). Exercise or meditation speeds this, but far slower than gathering from the world or market. Because it is drawn rather than created, this is faster where the land is rich and poor where it is spent. Refilling stops at the baseline (see The pool): the body restores what its vessel circulates, and not a drop more.

Spent pneuma

What Attrition takes (Law II) is not destroyed. It goes dull — still present, no longer usable — and settles into the ground where it was spent. Battlefields, ruins and long-worked sites are thick with it.

Dull pneuma can be reclaimed and returned to use. Celaborans do this; whether anything else can is unsettled. Land that is heavily spent and never reclaimed goes sour, and land beyond that is void — nothing living draws anything from it.

The pool

Each living creature has an unbounded reserve of pure pneuma. There is no ceiling.

There is instead a floor: the baseline — the amount of pneuma the creature's vessel keeps in circulation (Law I). Below baseline the creature is depleted, and the body draws on the surrounding land to refill itself: faster the deeper the deficit, faster where the land is rich, slower where it is spent (see Sources). At or above baseline there is no regeneration at all. Everything above the line is surplus, and surplus comes only from the world — absorption, slain creatures, consumables, trade.

Baseline regeneration is a safety net, not an income: it sustains puttering, it does not fund serious exertion.

• 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.

The vessel grows

The baseline rises with lifetime pneuma spent — strongly sublinearly, so early growth is felt and later growth is earned. Circulation is the exercise that enlarges the vessel: not all of what Attrition takes settles into the ground (see Spent pneuma) — a trace lodges in the one who did the spending, and years of it accrete into structure. A veteran practitioner is a long-worked site. The baseline never decreases.

Surplus and condensation

Condensation draws on surplus only — a vessel cannot bottle its own baseline. (Otherwise land regeneration would quietly become an income: regenerate, condense, sell.) Spending below baseline remains possible: spending one's vitality in an emergency is allowed; packaging it is not.

Death

Everything alive gives up its pneuma when slain (see Sources), and players are no exception: death sheds the surplus. Part goes to the victor; the rest goes dull into the ground where the body fell — battlefields are thick with dull pneuma for exactly this reason. What death cannot take is anything lodged in the vessel's structure: baseline, mastery, affinity. The land refills the vessel to baseline, and the practitioner stands back up. Carrying a great surplus into danger is therefore a wager; condensing it first — paying Attrition's fee — is the insurance.

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.

A spell's intrinsic elemental requirement is fixed; affinity shaves only the conversion overhead around it. Cost therefore falls with affinity toward a floor it never reaches (Law II), while mastery keeps raising the effect: investment makes a spell cheaper and stronger, never free.

A pure spell — Blink and its kin — shapes pneuma directly, with no medium involved. It answers to pure affinity, the same affinity physical abilities train. There is no fifth element: pure is the unshaped substance, not another kind of matter.

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.

Every ability spends pneuma — combat techniques, gathering actions, and utility workings alike: exertion is pneuma moving (Law I). Gathering carries its own counterweight: it happens at elemental sites, and sites are pneuma sources (see Sources), so a gatherer absorbs from the site as they exert. At a rich site the loop nets roughly nothing — the land's pneuma passing through the gatherer's hands — while the gross flow still grows mastery and the baseline. Where the land is spent, the same work runs at a loss.

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.