Soma

Soma is the world's matter. Everything is made of it — ground, sea, flame, wind, tools, bodies. It holds no life of its own; pneuma is what animates it. The two are the world's dual: pneuma is energy and soma is matter, pneuma is mind and soma is body. A creature's pneuma is its power and its soma is its health.

Kinds

Soma comes in four kinds: fire, air, water and earth. These are the elements. Everything in the world is one kind of soma or a blend of several.

The four stand in the fixed relation the elemental square describes — allies share a quality, enemies share none — and the reactions between them (synergy, dissonance, hybrids like lightning and magma) are things somas do to each other. Pneuma bound in soma is only along for the ride.

The Two Laws

Law I — Persistence. Soma is never destroyed, only rearranged. Mining, smithing, cooking, building and every other craft take soma in one arrangement and leave it in another. A ruin is soma that lost its arrangement and kept its substance. Energy dissipates (Attrition); matter persists.

Law II — Vessel. A vessel is soma arranged to carry a current of pneuma. Fill it and it lives (Vitality). What a vessel can do is decided by its arrangement: the same pneuma glows in a stone and thinks in a person because the stone and the person are different arrangements of soma.

The body

Composition

Every body is a blend of the four somas, fixed by its kind. A salamander is mostly fire soma; a fish is mostly water. The blend decides resistance: typed damage lands hard on a body with little of that element in it and lightly on a body with much. A body's blend is set for life.

Health

A body's health is its soma — how much there is, and how densely it is knit.

• Amount is set by size. A giant is made of more soma than a person and has more to break.
• Density is set by a life. Damage loosens the knit. A body whose soma has been loosened all the way can no longer carry a current, and the vessel breaks.

Health is amount times density. Growing tougher means growing denser: a veteran and a novice are the same size, and the veteran's soma is knit far tighter.

Tempering

Density grows from damage taken and recovered from. It is its own track, answering to nothing on the Pneuma page: a practitioner with a vast baseline is no tougher for it, and a fighter who has never cast is no less.

Healing

Re-knitting loosened soma takes matter. Food is soma, and eating supplies what the body needs to close its wounds. Healing consumables are soma's counterpart to condensed pneuma: matter to rebuild, where condensed pneuma is energy to spend.

Death

Death is the vessel breaking. The body's soma is all still there (Law I), but it no longer holds an arrangement that carries a current, and the pneuma leaves it as the Pneuma page describes. Running the pneuma pool dry is exhaustion; only a broken vessel kills.

Open questions

• Origin. Where the world's soma came from is unsettled.
• Numbers. Blend proportions, resistance strength and the density curve are all undecided.