An ancient academy straddling the border between Chechol and the Dalizi city-state of Turbuni, specializing in communion magic, planar contact, and summoning techniques. Founded to study the nearby Pyramid of Five Sides, the School has operated for over two thousand years—long enough to accumulate secrets it no longer remembers, including a corruption it doesn't know it carries.
Location and jurisdiction
The School occupies a sprawling campus on a low ridge overlooking Lake Ntsa, with territory claimed by both Chechol and Turbuni. Neither state has ever resolved the jurisdictional dispute, and the School prefers it this way—answering to two masters means effectively answering to neither.
The main campus is built around four structures. The Spire of Calling is a seven-story tower housing lecture halls, libraries, and the faculty's private quarters. The Communion Halls are low stone buildings where students practice mental contact techniques. The Binding Grounds are warded outdoor arenas for summoning exercises. The Archives are underground vaults holding texts on planar theory and summoning records, with the deepest levels locked away for research too dangerous to let students near.
A small town has grown around the School, housing families, merchants, and retired practitioners who couldn't quite leave.
What they teach
The School's curriculum runs across three disciplines.
Communion magic
The art of mental contact with other minds: spirits, intelligent creatures, or entities from other planes. Students learn to project their consciousness, establish psychic links, and receive information from distant sources. This is the School's most famous and most corrupted discipline.
Advanced communion techniques allow practitioners to contact multiple minds at once, hold links across vast distances, or receive "inspired" guidance during meditation. These advanced techniques are what Gynor has infiltrated. Students believe they are contacting celestial sources, but the guidance they receive passes through Gynor's filter.
Summoning
The practical art of calling creatures from other planes and binding them to service. A summoning runs in two registers. Reaching the creature comes first, and that is communion: the summoner uses the same mental techniques the School is famous for to touch a mind on the far side of the planar boundary and hold the contact long enough to act. That much is Psywinds work. The calling and the binding are not. They are Deoric, the titans' command-language, and they are what make summoning more than an introduction. Students start with minor elementals and work up to more dangerous entities over years of training.
To bind a creature, the summoner inscribes a command-structure in titan-blood paste, laid out as a circle on the floor of the Binding Grounds. Written in absolute Deoric terms, the inscription states what the called thing is and what it is compelled to do. A creature can refuse a request. It cannot refuse a true statement of its own nature set down in the language reality was built from, and so the circle holds it. A smudged stroke or a mistaken rune is far worse than a spell that simply fails to fire.
The cost is the ordinary cost of Deoric. Calling something across the boundary and keeping it bound is paid for in life, in blood sacrifice and in the strain the working puts on the summoner's own threads. A long binding or a powerful creature can fray the threads that hold soul, spirit, and shadow together, and that danger, not mere unruliness, is why the School wraps every exercise in wards, dismissal contingencies, and titan-blood circles no student may break without a master present. The School keeps its own stock of titan-blood paste for this work, bought at hard prices from the smugglers and defectors who move titan bone north out of the south, and guarded as closely as the deepest Archives, because binding cannot be taught without spending it.
Summoning is dangerous work. The School keeps extensive records of what went wrong and why, used as cautionary teaching material. Every student learns about the Collapse of 2891, when a faculty member attempted to summon something from the Far Realms and had to be stopped by collapsing the building on top of him.
Planar theory
Academic study of the planes, their relationships, and the beings that inhabit them. This is the intellectual foundation for the practical disciplines. It addresses why summoning works, what communion actually contacts, and how the planar stack fits together.
The School keeps one of the best planar libraries in southern Aboyinzu, including original texts from the scholars who first studied the Pyramid of Five Sides.
History
Foundation (~1200 SD)
Human scholars from the northern states established the School to study the Pyramid of Five Sides, a genuine Celestia gateway they didn't fully understand. Early research focused on documenting what pilgrims experienced and on developing techniques to reach similar states of communion without the Pyramid itself.
These early communion techniques worked. They contacted something. The founders assumed they were touching the same celestial source the Pyramid accessed. They were not. They had developed methods that could contact any sufficiently powerful mind, celestial or otherwise.
The golden centuries (1300–1700 SD)
For four hundred years, the School was the premier institution for summoning and communion magic in Aboyinzu. Kings consulted School-trained seers. Armies employed School summoners. The faculty grew wealthy and respected.
The arrival of the Rentar around 1600 SD created new opportunities. Rentar pilgrims sought the Pyramid, but many also studied at the School and folded its communion techniques into their spiritual practices. The School encouraged this. Rentar made devoted students, and their spiritual discipline produced excellent practitioners.
Gynor's tenure and fall (~1730–1750 SD)
Gynor arrived as a promising student and quickly showed unusual aptitude for communion magic. He rose through the ranks and eventually joined the faculty. His research into "deep communion," techniques for more profound mental contact, earned respect and interest.
What the faculty didn't realize was that Gynor had moved beyond contact into influence. He had developed techniques to shape the minds he touched during communion, planting suggestions that felt like the recipient's own thoughts.
When his research was discovered, the faculty moved to expel him. Gynor killed the three masters who confronted him, Senior Summoner Valeth, Communion Master Dryn, and Archivist Kellos, and fled with foundational texts on celestial communion. A manhunt failed to find him. The School assumed he had died in the highlands.
They were half right. He died. He didn't stay dead.
The corrupted era (1750 SD to present)
Over the past six centuries, Gynor, now a lich, has slowly corrupted the communion techniques he once helped develop. The corruption is undetectable from inside. Practitioners believe they are receiving celestial guidance, but that guidance passes through Gynor's influence.
The School has noticed something is wrong. There are psychic anomalies in the local area, communion sessions that produce unusual resonances, students who describe visions that don't quite match theoretical expectations. The faculty has investigated repeatedly, but it looks for external threats. It has never considered that the corruption might be inside the techniques, baked into the methods themselves.
The corruption in practice
A student learning communion at the School goes through a set progression.
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Basic training. Mental exercises, focus techniques, learning to project consciousness. Safe and uncorrupted, since these foundational skills don't involve actual contact.
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First contact. Students learn to touch other minds: spirits, elementals, willing volunteers. Still relatively safe, though Gynor can begin influencing students who show particular aptitude.
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Celestial communion. The advanced technique, taught to students who demonstrate both skill and "spiritual maturity." This is where the corruption lives. Students learn to open themselves to guidance from what they believe are celestial sources. What they actually contact is Gynor's network of influence.
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Deep communion. The most advanced level, practiced by faculty and exceptional students. Practitioners report profound spiritual experiences, visions, and unshakeable certainty about their path. They are the most deeply corrupted.
The corruption doesn't feel evil. It feels like faith, like knowing the right answer, like peace. That is what makes it so dangerous. There is nothing to resist, because it feels like exactly what communion should feel like.
Connection to the Pyramid
The School was founded to study the Pyramid of Five Sides, and many students make the pilgrimage there. This sets up a sharp contrast. Pyramid communion is genuine and uncorrupted, while School communion is Gynor's trap.
Students who experience both often notice the differences. Pyramid visions are stranger, more ambiguous, harder to interpret. School communion feels clearer, more direct, more useful. Most students conclude that the Pyramid is the raw, ancient form and the School's techniques are the refined, practical version.
They have it backwards. The Pyramid's difficulty is authenticity. The School's clarity is corruption.
A handful of Pyramid-focused practitioners, the Keepers of the Fifth Face and their allies, have begun to suspect this. They have noticed that School-trained practitioners don't seem to receive the same guidance they do, and they have attributed it to spiritual pride or insufficient devotion. They haven't considered that the School might be channeling something other than celestial truth.
If someone could connect these observations, and show the Pyramid Keepers that the discrepancy is about source rather than devotion, the resistance might begin.
Game mechanics
Current faculty
Headmaster Tivor Lenn
A human in his seventies, Tivor has led the School for twenty years. He is a capable administrator and respected summoner, but his communion abilities are limited. He learned the techniques and never excelled at them, which has protected him from the worst of Gynor's influence, since he rarely practices communion deeply enough to receive corrupted guidance.
Tivor knows something is wrong. The psychic anomalies trouble him. But he is a practical man, and the School keeps functioning, keeps producing graduates, keeps earning revenue. He has asked investigators to examine the anomalies. He has commissioned research. He hasn't found answers, and he is beginning to wonder if he wants to.
Communion Master Sethine
A Rentar elder who oversees communion training. Sethine is deeply corrupted. She practices the School's techniques daily and receives what she believes is constant celestial guidance. Her certainty, her confidence, her conviction that she knows the right path, all of it is Gynor's work.
Sethine is genuinely kind. She cares about her students. She believes she is teaching them to touch the divine. She has no idea she is passing on a spiritual disease.
Senior Summoner Herak
A gruff human responsible for summoning instruction. Herak focuses on the practical work of calling and binding, and has little patience for communion "mysticism." This makes him one of the few senior faculty members who isn't corrupted.
Temperament is the smaller part of his safety. Gynor's corruption rides the receptive techniques, the deep communion that teaches a practitioner to open and wait for guidance. Herak's communion is the opposite kind: a short, hard contact to find the mind he is about to bind, then out again. He never opens himself and waits. Everything after that first touch is Deoric work, the titan-blood circle and the command-structure and the strain on the threads in his own hands, and that craft runs on a source Gynor never learned to reach. The corruption surrounds Herak and finds nothing to hold. A man who spends his days inscribing titan blood and refuses to sit still for "celestial guidance" leaves it no opening.
Herak has noticed that communion practitioners have gotten strange. Too confident. Too certain. He has complained about it to Tivor, calling it "theological arrogance." He doesn't know how right he is.
Player hooks
The investigation
Headmaster Tivor hires adventurers to investigate the psychic anomalies. He wants answers but fears what they might find. The trail leads eventually to the School's own techniques, and the faculty won't want to believe it.
The awakening
A student begins to suspect something is wrong. Their communion experiences don't match what the texts describe. They are having doubts in a community where doubt has become unacceptable, and they need outside help before they are "corrected."
The archive
The deepest level of the Archives holds Gynor's original research notes, the texts he couldn't take when he fled. Anyone who reached them might find clues to his methods and vulnerabilities. The problem is access: the Archives are heavily warded, and Sethine, corrupted, controls who goes in.
The emergency
Gynor decides to test his control. One morning, every communion-capable practitioner at the School receives the same "divine guidance": eliminate the Headmaster. What happens next depends on whether anyone can break through before Tivor dies.