Recommended Source Material for Ley Lines & Geomancy?

[OverdrivePrime]

For flavor, I've been including geomancy and ley lines in my campaign as handwave flavor and references to the magical arts of the ancients and the magical practices of the fey. My players have been digging into it more and are having fun with the idea (about half of us used to play Rifts back in the day, which was all about ley lines), and have diplomancered their way into getting some elven nobles to commit resources to an airship that runs on ley lines.

So, that's fun and awesome, and I want to encourage that kind of thinking.

However, as a DM, two of the most important things to me are verisimilitude and consistency. This of course, makes planning things take way longer for me, but it also means that I get to learn about stuff that I normally wouldn't have encountered. It also means I'm building a fairly big section on my wikia campaign page (http://daera.wikia.com/wiki/The_Physical_World) about on why my world is the way it is, so that's a lot of fun as well. :smallsmile:

I read a couple pages on Wikipedia about geomancy and ley lines but the entries were pretty sterile and flat. I don't feel like I have a good starting point for sketching out where ley lines should run on my world. Between cities? Between natural elements? Concentrations of elements? Would magnetic hot spots be where nexus points are most likely to be?

I'd appreciate any recommendations you can give about inspirational material or even about how others handle geomancy in D&D.

Cheers!

[Falcon X]

I'll look around for some 3rd party books, but it's never really been a thing in D&D cannon.

Closest you can get is the Astral Plane's tendency to have strings that connect everything magical. If you were to make the Astral Plane perfectly parallel to the Material Plane, then you could merge it with the concept of Ley Lines.

If you want some great flavor, they have chapters in Shadowrun's magic books on how it effects that RPG. Street Grimoire has a write-up I think. Parageology was all about it.

[Edit]
The 3rd Edition book "Underdark" for Forgotten Realms has a Geomancer prestige class and the Veins of Mystara that connect Earth Nodes (called Node Magic). I heard there is also some info in Champions of Ruin.

Decent 3rd party stuff at BadAxe Games: Heroes of High Favor: Elves
http://www.badaxegames.com/download/

[lunaticfringe]

Anywhere you want to put Leylines and Obvious Important Plot Areas. Then you have the OMG No Leylines! Encounter/Sidequest.

Ley Lines can literally be anywhere from my understanding. Play connect the dots with Developed Areas (high sentient population zones), Ancient Ruins (Dem Ancients was Wise & Strong in the Force), and Wonders of Nature (For Nature Geek/Druid Love). Because apparently that's literally how they have been mapped by some true believers.

[xroads]

You might try reading the fluff for Feng Shui. It's a game that weaves geomancy into the setting (as hinted by the title).

On the downside, it is not a fantasy genre. It's an action genre game that crosses all over the time stream. So it'll be limited in the amount of inspirational material it can provide.

[Zorku]

I have not ever been a part of the ley lines enthusiast community, but from what I've gathered, the only big keyword that gives you anything other than a bunch of magical energy rivers under the ground, is "vortex." Really any time that they can claim that the energy spins or goes in a spiral (so, at some intersection of ley lines,) they assign a great deal more oomph to the ley magic at that location.

There's also a lot of weird numerology type muttering, so any time the latitude is a visually appealing number (11, 22, 33, 12.345, etc) they seem to find that more exciting. They love to entangle this with stories about historic figures that were larger than life, so stuff like the carousel at Disneyland (@ 33rd parallel, and a convergence of 3 ley lines, I think?) end up with just so stories about time travelers and whatnot.

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Thinking about it, if you are at all fond of nods to the game that you're playing in your game world, your broadest ley lines should outline a d20.
https://csdl-images.computer.org/mags/cs/2002/05/figures/c50326.gif
Further reading: Hex Tiling a Sphere @ Red Blob Games (http://www.redblobgames.com/x/1640-hexagon-tiling-of-sphere/)

If you actually map out your world onto a sphere then you'll have a pretty bad time trying to map flat maps for the party that show these locations, but there's a little geometry trick where we could instead have the ley lines converge right in the middle of the triangle: they follow a d12 instead. The corners of a d12 line up with the centers of each face on a d20, and the corners of the d20 center on the faces of a d12. Isn't geometry great?

Anyway, you can kind of have ley lines anywhere without a lot of rhyme or reason. I keep wanting to think of them more like rivers, but if rivers are going to flow from a source to and outlet, they can't really do a lot of ley line things, like passing through each other and being perfectly straight. For a more underlying theory, I'd say that ley lines are just this kind of infinite pattern, such that you're never not standing on at least one, but they vary quite a bit in intensity. Stuff just kind of happens to line itself up with the strongest ley line in an area, but if you've got any (dark?) magic practitioners then whatever they are doing is much more perfectly lined up with the ley line than any of the stuff that merely gravitated towards it.

[Mjolnirbear]

In the various Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey, ley lines work like this:

* all living things exude magic as a by-product of living
* this magic can flow like rivers in lines called ley lines that tend to follow geographical features despite not being physical
* ley lines sometimes intersect and create nodes--powerful concentrations of magic that are chaotic and extremely hard to work with

Ley lines and nodes thus tend to concentrate where there is greater life; lush forests have more than sparse deserts. In her world, your power as a mage directly corresponded to your ability to tap ley lines and nodes; only the strongest mages could tap nodes, but the weakest ones could only use ambient energy.

And if you were a Bad Guy, you could work magic by stealing it from the living. A sentient creature has more magic than an animal, and a mage has more than a non-mage. You can bleed it from your target (the slow way) and they might not notice. You can kill the target (the fast way) and get it all at once. Or you can go the sadist way and torture them to death, which also gives the biggest bang for your effort. Appropriately enough they are called blood mages.

Finally, very old and very secretive cultures learned to make both ley lines and nodes. Magically speaking it's like digging a river channel. Or diverting one, or merging it with another. They serve as channels for ambient magic, so it won't make magic where none Was before, but it can help concentrate what is there, like eavestroughs and rain barrels

[OverdrivePrime]

This is extremely useful inspiration/information, you guys. Thanks very much! I have a detailed enough world map (current Photoshop file sits around 2.2gb) that I could probably wrap it around a globe and then chart out ley lines without too much headache. Hmm... interesting side-project that would require me learning about the 3D tools in Photoshop.

Falcon X - I'm digging that stuff in the Badaxe Games PDF. There are some fun ideas in there!

It's been a while since I've read any Mercedes Lackey books. In a weird cooincidence, the elf noble who's footing the bill for the ley-line airship project in my game is named Valdemar. o__O

Lots of great stuff I can use here. Thanks so much, you everyone!

[sightlessrealit]

Here's something for Ley Lines https://koboldpress.com/5e-deep-magic-ley-lines-now-available/

[Zorku]

Well, you never have reason to actually present a 3d globe to your players (as if that would even be easy and convenient,) since that's not really something people typically have pre-Renaissance, so if you want to figure out where the d20 lines belong just distort your map so that it lines up with the figure under "idea 2" in the red blob games page. (You know how to do that kind of thing with the transform tool, right?)

You can still learn how to make it a sphere if you really want to, but for establishing where the corners of a d20 go (or d12, if you just identify the center of each triangle;) this method has all of the necessary information.



Ley lines and nodes thus tend to concentrate where there is greater life; lush forests have more than sparse deserts. In her world, your power as a mage directly corresponded to your ability to tap ley lines and nodes; only the strongest mages could tap nodes, but the weakest ones could only use ambient energy.

So like, is the energy at a node just so chaotic that it takes a great deal of power to focus it to your purposes, or it more like the mage is kind of like a pipe and only so much current can flow through it no matter how hard the material is being pushed? Do the books give you any sense of which way that would be (or some 3rd option unlike either of those)?

[Ventruenox]

I would second the Kobold Press publication on Ley Lines. It's only 14 pages, but provides some simple mechanics for how ley lines interact with 5E magic, pretty much mixing some of the Sorcerer's Metamagic with some Wild Surges. The arcane tradition presented in it is a little underwhelming, but could make for a good NPC. Some of the spells are fun and the feats seem like they would fit your world. Lunaticfringe has the best suggestion for where to draw them for your world - wherever it helps progress the narrative.

[JackPhoenix]

If you're looking for older sources, there's Magic & Mayhem (or More Magic & Mayhem, I'm not sure which one of those two books it is, I believe it was the later) for 3e OGL Warcraft/World of Warcraft RPG. Rune magic there is derived from ley lines... basically, say, rune of flame is derived from the pattern of ley lines in a volcano, rune of storms is derived from the pattern of ley lines that creates the weather that gave Stormwind its name, etc..

[OverdrivePrime]

I'm definitely going to buy that Kobold Press Ley Line PDF. That looks like exactly what I'm looking for.

Thanks for all the recommendations and ideas, everyone! I've already put some of them to good use. :smallbiggrin:

[Armored Walrus]

For a completely different take, check out Stephen King's Dark Tower series. In that one I believe there are six lines of force that hold the world together, and at the 12 ends of the six lines are 12 guardians. Then in the middle where all the lines intersect is the Dark Tower, which is the nexus not only of all the lines of the world, but is actually where all the lines of all worlds meet. As far as where they run, I believe the answer was, "wherever Stephen King needed them to run."

[Mjolnirbear]

So like, is the energy at a node just so chaotic that it takes a great deal of power to focus it to your purposes, or it more like the mage is kind of like a pipe and only so much current can flow through it no matter how hard the material is being pushed? Do the books give you any sense of which way that would be (or some 3rd option unlike either of those)?

Basically it took both power and knowledge. An experienced but weak hedge-wizard could be all manner of clever with his spells but never be able to tap into a ley line.

For someone with the strength to tap a line or a node, you needed the experience. You start with ambient energy, which has no flow or force, you just absorb it. A ley line is a strong river current, and if you lack the experience to handle it, it can kill you, typically though it will just burn out your ability to use magic.

The node is to the ley line as a raging conflagration is to a bonfire. It is chaotic and only the strongest and best-trained can tap it safely.

[thorr-kan]

I, too, recommend Kobold Press's offering.

However, there is also Palladium Books take on ley lines in both Beyond the Supernatural and Rifts.