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. Its counterpart is soma, the matter it animates: pneuma is energy and soma is matter, and a creature's pneuma is its power where its soma is its health.

Form

Pneuma has one form: pure. The elements belong to soma. Pneuma bound in fire soma is the same pneuma as anywhere else; what is fire about it is the soma.

Pneuma is always held: either circulating through a vessel (Law I) or bound in soma. Pneuma with nothing to hold it goes dull where it is (see Spent pneuma).

Binding lodges pneuma into soma. Bound pneuma is charged: inert, and safe to carry, store and trade. A phial is soma made to hold a charge, and is the only physical pneuma there is (see Physical form).

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 — soma arranged 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 moves between a vessel and soma — absorbed, condensed or cast — part of it is spent. Only carrying and storing it are free.

Law III — Affinity. Each soma favors those with an affinity for it. Affinity grows by spending pneuma through that soma (casting or exertion). The higher the affinity, the less each binding loses to Attrition.

Key terms

• Shaping: moving pneuma between a vessel and soma, either direction. Always costs (Law II).
  • Absorption: drawing pneuma out of soma — an elemental site, a slain creature, a phial — into one's own vessel.
  • Condensation: moving pneuma out of one's own vessel into a phial, for later use or trade.
• Affinity: how strongly a living thing is aligned to one soma, with pure counted as one more. Tracked per practitioner. Sets casting cost and power. Grows by spending through it (Law III).
• Mastery: a single ability's accumulated experience, measured as the total pneuma ever spent through it. Affinity for a soma 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 a soma is concentrated — a river, a burning fire, a rocky mountain — pneuma sits bound in it. Absorbing takes the pneuma and leaves the soma; what the site yields as soma is on the Soma page.
• Creatures. Everything alive gives up its pneuma when slain. It passes to the victor's vessel, and what the victor cannot take goes dull where the body fell. The body itself is soma, and what it yields is on the Soma page.
• Phials. Pneuma condensed into a phial can be absorbed back out of it.
• 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. Pneuma released with nothing to hold it — a creature slain with no one to take its pneuma, a dissonant reaction with no vessel at hand — goes dull on the spot.

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, phials, trade.

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

• Filling: absorbing from elemental sites, from slain creatures, or from phials.
• Draining: casting spells, using abilities, condensing into phials.

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

Death is the vessel breaking (see Soma); an empty pool is exhaustion, 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

Every working spends pneuma to activate it. What else it spends is decided by what the working is made of:

• A pure spell — Blink and its kin — shapes pneuma directly, with no soma involved. It answers to pure affinity, the same affinity physical abilities train.
• An elemental spell has a body of soma: a fireball is fire soma flung by pneuma. The caster supplies the soma and the cast consumes it (see Soma). Binding the pneuma into that soma is a shaping — cheaper with affinity for the soma (Law III), never free (Law II).

Each spell has an associated mastery which governs how powerful its effect is. A spell's intrinsic requirements are fixed; affinity shaves only the binding overhead around them. 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.

Pure is pneuma itself, unshaped. The four elements are kinds of soma.

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. An ability's body is the practitioner's own, and the weapon in hand, so it calls for no soma beyond them.

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

Affinity is tracked per soma, with pure as one more, and grows in whatever a working spends through. It governs binding cost — how much a shaping into or out of that soma loses to Attrition (Law II) — and so how cheaply and how powerfully a practitioner works with it.

The elemental square shapes how affinity grows. Growing affinity in a soma costs nothing extra in its allies: this is synergy. Growing it in a soma's enemy is harder the higher the first stands: this is dissonance.

A practitioner is therefore inclined to pick one soma and stay with it. One who wants a second takes an ally, and since a soma's two allies are each other's enemy, the natural pairing is an edge of the square — a shared quality — which is also the pairing that hybridizes. Dissonance is a rising cost rather than a wall, so mastery of all four is reachable.

Physical form

Physical pneuma is a phial: soma made to hold a charge, filled from a vessel's surplus by condensation and emptied back by absorption, each at Attrition's cost. Every other physical elemental good is soma, on its own page.

Open questions

• Whether affinity also thins the soma an elemental working consumes, so a master forms a fireball from a pinch, is unsettled.

CONCEPTING

Problem; having only Pneuma has a single type of resource inherently causes certain content/sources of Pneuma to be irrelevant and useless as they are much less efficient than other methods, thus is dead content and wont be used/played

Solution: having different "types of Pneuma/resources" would make many more situations viable to do as all types of resources are needed to do anything and avoids content becoming dead and makes the world a little more interconnected

-these supplemental resources would be similar to catalyst runes in OSRS, not like another element