Dantia/Storylines/Mana Surges & Wild Magic

This is an ONGOING ROLEPLAYING EVENT. Information is being updated as it becomes available and as I have the time.

The Long Lead Up

438-05-38(ish) (June/July 2021) - People started receiving occasional odd messaging when casting spells. During Hollow Eve 2021 (and 2022), several Merelew Greeters asked adventurers if they had been having these strange feelings, too. For a comprehensive list of messaging and probability over time, see Urbaj's roundup.

448-05-04 (March 2, 2024) - Mazrian hosts the "Investigating the Magical Mind" event, where adventurers participated in an experiment to try to recreate these oddities in a controlled way. Various mana types and spells were tested, with casters being observed, and other casters attempting to tamper with the mana streams to induce resonance or dampening, with the goal of inducing a similar state as the oddities. There were no conclusive outcomes of this investigation.

449-05-20 (June 14, 2024) - The magic oddities (sometimes referred to as surges) begin increased in frequency, eventually culminating on June 14, 2024 to occur on each and every each cast. Several meetings are held to discuss what this might signify, with no solid hypothesis. One idea that comes up is to try to reduce the amount of casting that adventurers are doing, but it's decided that would be too hard to orchestrate.

Magic is Out

449-05-184 (June 15, 2024) - Realm wide, people felt one of the below messages, depending on their mana type/Guild:

• Pain stabs through your mind and body as your attunement to the breathing rise and fall of Life is suddenly severed! (Empath / Ranger)
• Pain stabs through your soul as your attunement to the footsteps of the gods wavers and becomes lost! (Cleric / Paladin)
• Pain stabs through your mind and body as your attunement to the elemental forces around you is suddenly severed! (Warrior Mage / Bard)
• Pain stabs through your mind and body as your attunement to the heavenly bodies is suddenly severed! (Moon Mage / Trader)
• Pain stabs through your scarred mind as your multifaceted attunement to the mana spectrum is suddenly undone! (Necromancer)

After this, attempting to use the magic system (such as prepare a spell, harness, invoke a tattoo, or use a wand) you would receive one of two messages. Magic was off!

• [The magic system is inoperative at the moment. Sorry for the inconvenience.]
• Strangely, you can sense absolutely nothing. It's as if magic didn't exist.

Over the next hour, we felt (in this order):

• Your body trembles as your mind instinctively reaches toward that place where you usually feel your connection to magic. It is cold.
• You feel a surge of mana reaching toward you! You instinctively reach out to grasp it. You struggle to hold on, but it slips away again, leaving you feeling exhausted.
• You sense a fleeting trace of mana. It briefly grows stronger, but quickly fades away again.
• Your senses explode and you are momentarily blinded! Mana overfills your being, and you struggle to control the flow! Just as suddenly, it seeps away, leaving you empty.
• You feel a deep sense that something has changed. Your attunement to the breathing rise and fall of Life is restored, but it does not feel controllable!

Casting had returned, but with mixed results.

Wild Magic Returns

From the Discord announcement:

Wild Magic is active!
There are a variety of effects.  So far people have discovered:
+ Increased TM accuracy
+ Increased TM damage
+ 1-second preparation
+ Full attunement refill

- Chance to "break glass" and cause no magic in the room for a short period of time (less than 1 minute)
- Increased backlash chance
- "Mana burn" - weaken your attunement!  quickly!
- Chance to spawn a mini-mana storm

Break Glass

> cast
Emotional pain and exhaustion lingers in your mind, even after you regain rational control.
A crash of shattering glass echoes through the area.  You are overcome by a sense of wrongness.
> 
> prep lw 5
Something in the area interferes with your spell preparations.

This would prevent anyone in the room from casting magic for about 30 seconds.

Mini-Mana Storm

A swirling vortex of brilliant light spins across the area.
Raw energies rupture near Navesi, leaving her looking pale and drained.
A weak mana surge slowly makes its way to the north, leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

> look surge
Roaring winds shot through with blinding rainbows spin and turn wildly within a weak mana surge as it tears a path of destruction through the area.  Chaotic manifestations caught in the rampaging vortex spiral violently within its terrible embrace.

A weak mana surge slowly makes its way into the area, leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

The howling wind pounds against you, making it very difficult to maintain your balance.
Pilot Sarahkyth staggers slightly as wind pummels it.

A swirling vortex of brilliant light spins across the area.
Raw energies rupture near Thanataar, leaving him looking pale and drained.

A swirling vortex of brilliant light spins across the area.
A wave of energy passes through, invisible except for the obscene ways the world stretches and pulls around you!  Though it seemed as though Elanthia was going to rip itself apart, the wave passes without causing bodily harm. 
Dasheek collapses to the ground as the world seems to stretch and pull around him briefly.
Pilot Sarahkyth staggers slightly as the world seems to stretch and pull around it briefly.

> peer forward
You peer forward and see ...

[You are aboard a four-masted galleon with twelve sails and a fierce dragon figurehead named the Dragon's Slave which is afloat in Segoltha Bay facing south.]
[The Dragon's Slave, Aft Waist]
Here the silver-hinged gangway is ever ready to release and secure the heavy mistwood boarding plank.  The railings are carved with detailed scenes of dragons along their length, while overhead the vivid blue and white sails obscure the view to the top of the mizzen mast far above.  A honeysuckle vine grows from a banded barrel placed out of the way, the plant flourishing despite the harsh elements it encounters.
You also see a weak mana surge, some sufil sap, a piece of black flint, the crossjack, the mizzen lower topsail and the mizzen upper topsail.
Ship paths: forward, aft, down.
Nearby in the water you see: Arthe Bay (at horizon: east), the Boot (far: north), the north shore (at horizon: east), the south shore (rather far: south), the Segoltha estuary (far: south).

You can cast a spell at the storm to have a chance to destroy it. If you HARNESS the SURGE you will see a short-term guaranteed positive wild magic result. You can also TOUCH, and possibly HUG, KICK, SLAP, or KISS the mana surge which will send a blast to the room, causing skin damage to people and knocking them prone.

Mana Burn

People could also die from "mana burn." Sometimes when casting a spell (OR on the pulse of an already-running cyclic) you would feel:

Excruciating pain sets your nervous system afire!  Something is wrong with your mana attunement and you must weaken it!

At this point you begin dropping vitality. You receive that same message above every time you experience a vitality hit. You have ~2 minutes to harness and release to lower your attunement to below 50% (but it has to be under 50% when the spell pulses to check, it doesn't happen necessarily immediately on hitting below 50%). If not, you will die from vitality loss.

For Empaths, Perseverance of Peri'el mitigates the vitality loss until it becomes such that it drops POP completely.

Your efforts to reduce your attunement may be stymied by mana regen items, if you are wearing sufficient enough. During this event, you may consider removing your mana regen items just to make the chance of death by mana burn a little less likely. Conversely, vitality regen items may help maintain your vitality until you can lower your attunement enough!

There is a lich script in the repo called wild-monitor.lic that will run in the background and handle mana burn for you. Either run that script manually, or add it to your auto starts.

The death window looked like:

[20:18] * Grief was just struck down!
[20:18] * Grief was burned out!
[20:19] * Jacquelyn was just struck down!
[20:19] * Jacquelyn was burned out!
[20:19] * Morgaunt was just struck down!
[20:19] * Morgaunt was burned out!

Research WILD & Bonegrinder

There is a new RESEARCH option!  It could be dangerous!  This is on a lengthy global cooldown, but can be completed several times a day.
When you perform the new RESEARCH, several things happen.
1. You will lose your memorized spell scrolls.  You will gain some magic experience - sometimes more than other times.
2. If you have the Magic Theorist, you will gain new spell scrolls.  
3. There's a chance to learn a brand new spell (being previewed here before it finds its permanent home).
4. There's a chance to earn a spell customizer for certain spells, if you know them.

With the release of Wild Magic, a new Magical Research option was also made available: RESEARCH WILD. It requires 75-125 arcana ranks to research. On successful completion, you have a 100% chance to lose any memorized scrolls. Depending on the number of spell scroll slots you then had, you would be granted up to 2 randomly selected spells, which would be temporarily memorized just like regular scroll spells. At this time, this was the only way to gain a NEW spell called Bonegrinder.

Researching Wild Magic is on a global cooldown (meaning, everyone's cooldown comes up at the same time). The time between seems to be on the scale of about an hour.

There are several potential messages you can receive to indicate that research cooldown is up. Here are a few:

The mana streams freeze in place before haltingly resuming their normal course.

For no reason you can determine, the mana streams fluctuate wildly for several moments.

Astonishingly, the mana streams twist themselves into knots as they flow.

When your heightened chance for wild magic effects ends, you will receive:

For better or worse, your heightened attunement to wild magic ends.

Breakthrough Messages

There were various "Breakthrough" messages depending on your mana/Guild. These seem to give hints about what is occurring:

Breakthrough!
Lunar mana fizzes out of focus with unknowable, periodic perturbations from the planets in your range.  Oddly enough, your calculations prompt you to think back to a time with Katamba unburnt and Grazhir whole, the golden age of near-effortless Lunar miracles.  All lost now, and the threads are converging on a similarly disastrous trajectory!

Breakthrough!
Life mana has buckled under vast pressures from what feel like above and below.  You have an intimation that the Life dragons are keenly aware of the causes, preparing and further isolating their conserved lands.  However, as usual, they have withheld their counsel.

Breakthrough!
You just concluded the unpleasant task of tracking the continual disruption in Arcane mana, step by minute step.  Some force beyond your ken, nothing short of godly, has been changing the rules with a brutal hand.  The Great Work is tipped on the brink of impossibility as the mana streams become increasingly immiscible, sterile, and foreign textured all at once.

Breakthrough!
Lunar mana fizzes out of focus with unknowable, periodic perturbations from the planets in your range.  Oddly enough, it is the Negotiants' unbidden tutelage that nudges you toward the research's endpoint and a wealth of knowledge relating to wild magic.  You are assured that the Contract is still inviolate and binding, and all prohibitions remain.  The Contract is all that matters.

Breakthrough!
You have come to an alarming conclusion you attribute the changes in Holy mana's behavior to long-standing and widespread lopsided practices of magic.  An imbalance is shaking the Bulwark loose, which seems bafflingly vulnerable against this menace.

Breakthrough!
You have come to an alarming conclusion you attribute the changes in Holy mana's behavior to an 'upward' lurch in the flow.  Something is stymieing or etiolating the Font of Creation, and Divinity itself is suffering for 
it!

Breakthrough!
Something is broken with the replenishment cycles of Elemental mana.  Even though you have not noticed a decrease in available power, it seems inevitable.  From what your research has evoked, you have the smallest understanding, the barest shape, of an eonic plan that stretches back to the dark histories -- gods and demons, mortals and monsters all helpless before it.

Breakthrough!
Something is broken with the replenishment cycles of Elemental mana.  Even though you have not noticed a decrease in available power, it seems inevitable.  Lessons from long ago prickle at your mind concerning the lore of Sraan Mehath.  You cannot shake a feeling of deep dread.

Breakthrough!
Life mana has buckled under vast pressures from what feel like above and below.  Although this instills a fear in you for the fate of the cycle of life, you do not think the repercussions will echo to the natural world just yet.

Spell Customizations

You could also gain a spell customizer for a spell you already know, meaning you will only receive this IF you can use it. However, the customization is given to you in token form which is not bonded, meaning it can be traded or sold to other adventurers. The following found so far have been:

• Circle of Sympathy customization (a sky-blue sufil tree)
• Starcrash customization (crystal statue of TRADER NAME HERE)
• Shadowling customization (sabertooth)
• Osrel Meraud customization (a sunbright orb)

Vile Plague Wraith Invasion

On 449-05-184 (June 15, 2024), shortly after the the Wild Magic release, there was an invasion of Vile Plague Wraiths throughout Shard, Zoluren and Therengia.

> look wraith
Held aloft by two expansive skeletal wings, the massive plague wraith towers over thirty feet tall.  Under its tattered cloak, a black mass of writhing insects and serpents cling tightly to a nearly fleshless skeleton.  Four elongated arms, covered in a tangle of scorpions and spiders, end in wickedly curved talons that twitch in anticipation of its next victim.  Practically obscured by the inky shadows cast by its voluminous hood, two flaming emerald eyes partially illuminate its malevolent hook-toothed skull.

Some of these creatures drop an emerald scarab medallion with a delicate gold inlay, which was cursed (meaning you could not drop it until it was uncursed).