What the world remembers as magic is the Iru People Iru The progenitors, and the only naturally evolved people of Elshore. technological substrate still running beneath the living world. After the Chaos Event The Chaos The Chaos was a continent-wide civilisation-collapse spanning approximately ninety-eight years, beginning around year 1700 of the Inarin Calendar when the Iru Parliament of the... names it plainly: a planetary system, reached through Attunements and worked by command rather than by spell. The system does not grant what is asked. It grants what it understands.
The machine under the world
Long before the present age the Iru laid a technological substrate across Elshore, an automated system that ran the world and, in its long decline, kept running unmaintained. To those who reach it now, without the knowledge that built it, its workings look like sorcery. The game does not keep that secret: the substrate is real, inferred in the novel but stated openly at the table.
A character does not memorise spells. They hold Attunements, licensed channels into the system, and through them they issue commands the substrate carries out, always at a price.
Most characters and most cultures use other words for it. Maan People Maan The most numerous people of Elshore and the baseline cultural reference of the age. villagers say magic, sorcery, witching, the gift. The Iru speak of the breath of Ooli, of attunement, of the sovereign reach. Highland Erg speak of the currents of Tir-Kul'ei Faith Tir-Kul'ei The Deep Remembering, the shamanic practice of the free Highland Ergs of the Frozen Highlands.. Annils call it the proper function of the world. By N.O. 64 most ordinary people no longer know what the system is at all and frame the same operations in entirely sorcerous terms. The mechanics are identical regardless of vocabulary; use whatever language fits the table.
System commands, not spell lists
There is no closed list of effects. A user describes what they want the system to do; the table works out whether the substrate can be made to do it, at what difficulty, and at what cost. One Attunement bends to a hundred uses in the hands of a clever player and a fair Game Master.
Appendix D catalogues over two hundred standardised baseline operations across all eight Attunements: typical costs, suggested difficulties, and example effects. Treat the appendix as a guide, not a contract. The system can always do more or less than the appendix names; experienced tables move beyond it, inventing operations in the spirit of each Attunement and negotiating cost and difficulty as they go.
- Describe the intent. The player states in plain terms what they want to happen. "I want to seal this door." "I want the wound to stop bleeding." "I want to know who walked through this room last."
- Set Attunement, cost, difficulty. The GM names the Attunement the operation falls under, sets a SYSTEM CREDIT cost, and sets a difficulty, consulting Appendix D for a baseline if the operation matches an entry there.
- Decide whether to commit. The player chooses whether to pay. If they commit, the SYSTEM CREDIT cost is spent now, win or lose.
- Roll the command. Roll Attribute (usually Focus, sometimes another) plus Attunement. The dice mechanics live on the Core Rules page; a die that meets the difficulty is a success.
- Interpret the result. Success delivers the effect; the number of successes shapes how cleanly. Failure delivers nothing, or worse. The credits are gone either way - the system charges for the attempt.
Ruling a new effect: name the Attunement it falls under, state a cost and a difficulty before the player commits, then resolve the roll and narrate what the world does in answer.
SYSTEM CREDIT - the grël resource
Working the system is paid in SYSTEM CREDIT, the daily allowance the substrate grants a recognised user. Every character carries a credit pool with a Maximum and a Current value, written on the sheet as Current / Max. In the folk register of N.O. 64 the same pool is simply called aether: "I am out of aether" means "my credits are spent." Both describe the one mechanic.
The pool refills fully at local Elshore midnight, when Current returns to Maximum. (One Elshore day is sixteen hours, not twenty-four; midnight is local, not Earth-standard.) Of the pool, the part already committed to an operation is Reserved; what remains free to spend is Active. Credit is spent whether or not the roll succeeds.
Starting Maximum is 100 at level 1, rising by 100 per level (credits = 100 x character level). A solo level 5 user has 500 a day; a master at level 10 has 1,000. Operations above three thousand credits are not single-user spending - they need multiple participating users, a relic feeding the operation, a system-rich location, an Ïsuulë expenditure, or some combination. The world makes its largest changes through institutions, not individuals, and this is the rule that says so.
Cost tiers (boundaries belong to the higher tier; regional conditions scale the number)
| Tier | Credit cost | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Low / Moderate | up to ~20 | A 20-credit command is Moderate, not Low. |
| High | ~100 | A demanding, deliberate working. |
| Extreme | ~500 | Beyond ordinary solo reach on a normal day. |
| Mythic | ~3,000 | Institutional or ritual scale; rarely solo. |
Costs scale with local conditions. A Moderate command may cost 30 credits in a high-aether region and 90 in a thin one. The GM announces both cost and difficulty before the player commits.
Authorization - the paths to access
SYSTEM CREDIT alone is not enough. A character without authorization and without a relic cannot issue commands at all, no matter how full their pool. They still accumulate credit capacity as they level, in case access is acquired later. Access comes by one of these paths:
- User (Iru, innate). All Iru carry native authorization; the system was built for them. The first time an Iru uses the system is the Awakening - the player simply allocates a first Attunement dot and the Iru wakes to what they could always do. No roll, no procedure.
- Non-user (Iru, pre-Awakening). An Iru with native authorization but no trained access. Until they spend a first Attunement dot they cannot use the system in any form, including Universal commands. A Non-user who needs light strikes a flint; who needs water boils it; who needs a wound stabilised applies pressure and bandages.
- grël (protocol). Children produced by the ISEMH grël protocol since AC 7, and hereditary grël whose engineered bodies pass as Iru. They carry authorization the system recognises with unusual cleanliness; rarer still, and often unaware of what they are.
- Relic or RF tag. The common path for non-grël Maan, Annil, Bar, and Erg, whose bodies are not system-compatible: a relic or species-bound RF tag bridges the gap. Lose it and access stops, though Attunement dots and the credit pool stay latent and reactivate when a new token is acquired. RF tags are species-locked - an Annil tag will not authorize a Maan.
- Location. Some places, often near nodes, carry temporary recognition that lets a command through.
- Meir (no path). Meir bodies are not recognised by the system at any frequency. They cannot Awaken, cannot use an RF tag, and a relic does nothing for them. The Meir reach a parallel technology instead: the Vaparian implant and its five tiers of Biotech Usage, the Ark's relationship rather than the ISEMH's clean access.
There is no further path. A non-Iru character cannot Awaken in the Iru sense; the species is biologically incompatible, and trauma or rare encounters do not produce sudden access. Access for the engineered races is always through an external mechanism.
The eight Attunements
All system commands fall into eight functional domains. A character holds trained access to one or more, expressed as dots from 1 to 5: the rating sets the depth of what a user can reach for, and the fiction sets what they dare to. System rolls pair an Attribute (typically Focus) with the Attunement.
The eight Attunements and what each domain does
| Attunement | Domain and example effects |
|---|---|
| Formcraft | Matter and structure - stone, metal, wood, ceramic. Raise a wall section, mend a sword, force a lock, smooth a road, collapse a passage. The most accessible domain; its operations look like exceptionally fast craft work. |
| Vitalurgy | Living systems - bodies, growth, disease, plants, animals. Close a wound, draw out infection, accelerate sporeplant growth, calm a frightened riding beast, neutralise a poison. It cannot cure diseases the system itself is causing, such as heart-fever. |
| Energetics | Energy - heat, cold, light, electricity, fire. Spark a flame, brighten a chamber, draw heat from a wound, throw a discharge, freeze a small surface. The most visible domain in combat; even 1 dot yields small immediate effects. |
| Atmospherics | Weather and environment - air, pressure, climate close at hand. Call a wind, calm a storm, disperse fog, draw rain, settle dust. It rewards patience; the system answers with the season's logic, not the user's urgency. |
| Cognition | Mind and perception - information, illusions, communication, memory. Send a brief message at distance, project a memory image, veil a person from notice, translate a strange tongue. The most ethically complex domain; many operations cross into consent. |
| Continuum | Space and connection - distance, paths, recall, navigation. Open a short path through difficult terrain, recall a small object, mark a route the system will remember, sense the nearest node. |
| Aegis | Protection and constraint - wards, seals, suppression. Ward a door, bind an oath, suppress nearby system usage, mark a region as inviolate. Iruel's Voicers use this domain extensively in their Stillness shrines. |
| Sovereignty | Authority and control - permissions, command of other commands, system hierarchy. Grant a relic temporary authorization, revoke another user's access, override a ward, command a region. The rarest and most dangerous domain; the Inarin reserved it for Sertons. Sovereignty 5 at the ISEMH is one of the two paths to a heart-fever cure. |
Universal commands sit beyond the eight domains: light, water, ration, warmth, cooling, signal, sense, system density, mark, stabilise wound, calm pulse, and voice carry. Any character with a single Attunement dot can issue them through the ISEMH Technology ISEMH System The Infrastructure for Synthetic Emergence and Matter Hosting, the planet-scale Inarin-era system that underlies the fallen world: an identity, logistics, fabrication, and senso... for the listed cost; a character with a Biotech Usage dot issues them through the Ark at no credit cost. A character with neither cannot use them at all.
Combining and sharing commands
Skilled users can combine domains in a single command - Formcraft with Energetics to shape superheated metal, Cognition with Continuum to perceive at distance. The GM judges feasibility and raises both cost and difficulty by one step per additional domain involved.
Operations can also be shared. One character leads and makes the roll, paying the full base credit cost. Up to four helpers may each contribute 25 percent of the base cost from their own pool, rounding up, and each grants the lead +1 die if they hold any rating in the relevant Attunement; beyond four helpers the system register becomes incoherent. Group work reaches effects no single user could manage, but it concentrates risk: on a critical failure every helper who paid shares the same backlash. The Voicers of Iruel rely on group ritual; the Order of Randen Faction Order of Randen The fastest-growing power in the Maan empire at AC 50, the Order of Randen is a religious-political apparatus that co-opts the theology of Randenism and transforms it into a deb... refuses it as a sign of corrupted hierarchy.
Failure and backlash
On any failed system roll the credits are gone and the effect does not happen. On a critical failure - zero successes with 1s on at least a third of the pool - the system misinterprets the command and the GM introduces a consequence shaped by local conditions (stormed regions amplify backlash), by intent (aggressive commands fail aggressively, subtle ones subtly), and by the Attunement itself.
Each domain fails in its own register. A Formcraft backlash misshapes structure; a Vitalurgy backlash injures someone; an Energetics backlash burns or freezes the wrong target; an Atmospherics backlash inverts the weather; a Cognition backlash leaks information to the wrong listener; a Continuum backlash strands or misroutes; an Aegis backlash exposes what was warded; a Sovereignty backlash can revoke the user's own access until the next midnight reset.
Backlash should cost something but never derail the campaign. One catastrophic misfire per session is plenty.
The price
Nothing the system does is free. Use is paid first in SYSTEM CREDIT, then in attention drawn and strain borne, and finally in the slow moral and psychological weight the world tracks as Ïsuulë. Each filled Ïsuulë box adds 1 die to every system roll the character makes, and the bonus is not optional - the magic comes faster, lands harder, reaches further, and other characters notice.
The oldest and deepest workings carry the heaviest price of all, the grël: the cost paid in the self for power borrowed from the machine. Enough accumulated weight changes what a character is, until at the far end the institutions that hunt grëls can claim them and the player loses control of who they have become.