A collection of PSAs published by the Crafter’s Regulatory Guild in concert with the Adventurer’s Society:
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Get good gear!
Don’t fall prey to shoddy craftsmanship and counterfeit creations!
Never buy conjured goods!
When adventuring, know the Kohs Rating of all your equipment!
Get your gear properly attuned!
Don’t give your enemies a sword!
Armor not attuned is a prison for yourself!
Buy Attunement, not a tomb!
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The Kohs Rating of your gear is the single greatest contributor and factor for survival, don’t skimp on it! If you don’t see a Kohs Rating and Guild seal, stay away!
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Charlatans will sell a pile of rubble disguised as a sword! Don’t be fooled!
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Your sword and shield are not truly yours until they’re Attuned! Don’t skip Attunement, it will save your life!
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If outside of Guild-regulated areas, test all purchases with Repair Oil to ensure they aren’t simply shoddy temporary conjurations!
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Just because a rope, sword, shield, or lantern works when you test it in the city, that doesn’t mean it will stay functional out on the Frontier! Don’t be fooled by unscrupulous merchants and craftsmen! Test it thrice or it's your life.
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When venturing into the Frontier, MFP ratings can reach as high as 5,000 Kohs! That’s sufficient to cause mechanical watches and lanterns to stop working altogether, potentially even permanently break! Slip-Travel can expose your gear to MFPs of up to 30,000 Kohs, sufficient to permanently render wagons non-functional.
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Gear needs healing too! Without a spirit, items you purchase won’t be able to be repaired! Make sure all your purchases have a high enough resistance to the environments you’ll be taking them to, to avoid breaking their spirits and keeping them from being mended! Ensure all destinations are within your gear’s tolerance! See guild boards for more information on travel guidelines.
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All items you purchase and do not intend to discard should be attuned to you, a service available at any Guild-approved shop! A blade not attuned is a blade at your own throat!
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The Kohs Rating lets you know the Manic Field Pressure a creation can withstand, even in actively hostile environments. It may be tempting to save a few coins buying gear from civilian and domestic shops, but resist this urge! These items are frequently mage-conjured or otherwise mass-produced, meaning they have little to no Kohs Rating.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Simple objects, such as most basic gear you may be seeking, may give the illusion of working fine even in MFPs in far excess of their rating, but do not be fooled! Just because a metal stick does not obviously stop working when on the frontier does not mean it’s working properly. When exposed to MFPs in excess of its Kohs rating, swords will dull and rust extremely quickly, cut less surely, and break more easily. Clubs may rot and splinter. Bows may snap their strings and warp. More complex devices, such as watches, cease functioning more obviously, but do not make the mistake of assuming they are the only things affected by high MFP environments!
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When a Certified Crafter creates an object with a Kohs rating above 10, they do so by magically crafting the item, bestowing meaning into its essence through their mana.
During the creation of an item, much of the effort is then spent redefining the materials into functioning as a cohesive whole. A sword may be made of different kinds of metal, wood, leather, and a gem, and each of those materials begins as a single object. In order to function as a ‘sword,’ a craftsman must work to realign the internal mana of each of those substances to work in harmony, to bleed in with one another and feed into a cohesive whole, a cohesive vision and purpose. The physical shape of the object is but one, exceptionally minor, factor in creating a quality blade capable of withstanding the rigors of extreme use.
For those familiar with the manner in which magical repairs function, it is the same principle. The principle distinction is fundamentally how ingrained the object’s Purpose is within the item’s spirit. Items with a weak Kohs rating have a very loosely-defined Purpose, one which can easily be overridden by spells (direct or indirect) or even the environment itself.
Furthermore, the higher the Kohs rating, the easier it is to repair an item with magic. It is always better to overbuy Kohs ratings, as the decreased repair and maintenance costs will surely pay for themselves in time.
When an item possesses insufficient Kohs rating for the environment it is within, its personal definition, its own spirit, begins to be affected by its surroundings, working subtly differently than it should. This is most obvious with complex machines which rely upon very precise conditions to function correctly, but even simple items are not immune to this effect.
While few areas on the Material possess a high enough MFP to cause something as simple as a wagon wheel to fail, it is not impossible, particularly during or after Slip-travel.
Exceptionally strong Life MPF may result in a wooden wheel becoming alive once again and sprouting branches and leaves, high Fire MPF may result in a wooden wheel catching fire spontaneously, high Water MPF resulting in the wagon itself floating into the air, and so forth.
The reasons for these actions are all the same, of course, and are due to the ‘intended’ nature of wood when interacting with various powerful elements. Wood that is Living grows branches and leaves, Wood in Fire burns, Wood in Water floats.
Of course, for any of these behaviors to overpower the truth of the wheel being a wheel, the MPF must be far, far in excess of its Kohs rating, where the spirit of the object is so thoroughly overwhelmed that its nature is completely overridden.
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‘Made in a zero-mana environment’ or ‘null mana creation’ is perhaps the greatest indictment of any shoddily made work possible. If it were true, such creations would be some of the absolute worst performance of any items of their type.
Mana, fundamentally, gives things meaning. In a no-mana environment, particles and matter act all but randomly, a few basic physical laws dictating their every action. Heat is mere random motion, objects have no firm-defined boundaries, life is only held together via exceptionally fragile abuses of null-mana random actions such as pressure, and it all tends towards utter meaningless chaos, a homogeneous existence with no interest or meaning.
It is only the presence of mana which prevents this state of being and allows reality to function correctly. It is only thanks to mana that fire in a lantern or on a torch is prevented from burning or harming the torch or lantern, instead focused entirely on burning its fuel as steady light. Cooking fires from untreated or mana-free wood will burn the food over it with the slightest provocation.
When an item is made with absolutely no mana, its spirit is never changed from what it was originally, and has a Kohs rating of zero or even less. Exposure to any mana whatsoever will begin to disrupt its function, though it’s often not noticeable until triple digits of exposure except for very delicate devices. The metal in a watch may be too hard, or too heavy, or too flexible, and the entire device will drift first from proper calibration, or even stop working altogether, possibly even permanently, if exposed to a suitably strong MFP.
If that were not enough reason to avoid any gear supposedly created with no mana whatsoever, such items would be nigh-impossible to repair. Without a cohesive spirit to guide the magic, even Repair Oil or a simple Mending spell would revert metal into ingots, wood or paper into a dead branch or section of a tree, leather into either cured or uncured hide, cloths into unspun wool or other natural threads, completely ruining the item itself similar to temporary conjurations.
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Too many novice adventurers dismiss Attunement as a needless expense, particularly after buying gear with an adequate Kohs rating. They see it as pointless, for their gear is already made resistant to the extreme conditions on the Frontier, surely?
This is a fatal mistake, one few live to regret!
A sword is simply a sword. It is a passive object designed to fight, to cut, to sever. It is a simple, non-judgemental item. It does not care who wields it, it does not care what it cuts. It does not care if the one who bought it has it by the handle, or if an enemy Kinetic is using a spell to cut the head off of its ‘owner.’
An Attuned sword is your sword. It is your constant companion, a reliable tool against all the monsters and dangers of the Frontier. Attuned weapons are less likely to harm their owner, whether through accident or malice. An enemy Kinetic must break a part of the weapon’s spirit to usurp control from its owner, to wrench it from your grasp and use it for their own ends. It’s not impossible, but the better the Attunement, the harder it is!
Higher-quality Attunements make it even harder for enemies to take your weapon, to imprison you in your own armor, to lift you by your own shield! Don’t skimp on Attunement!
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Halir’s Principle states that any technology is reliant upon the conditions of its creation to function, and substantial deviation from those conditions will cause it to cease working.
The more sensitive and delicate an object, naturally, the more affected it will be by Halir’s Principle, to the point where even minor disturbances from its constructed state may interfere with its function. Should a pocket watch, for instance, have insufficient or entirely lacking definitional enchantments, a moderately strong deviation from the background Metal or Time mana it is accustomed to will cause it to slowly lose calibration, drifting further and further from accuracy. With substantial enough Manic exposure, it may even cease functioning altogether or be permanently ruined.
However, should the watch be properly created, with a high enough Kohs rating, not only will it be less likely to cease functioning, but it may well function better. This is because the Kohs rating fundamentally represents how resilient the spirit of an item is, and requires imbuing the item with well-defined functions, ideals, and purposes. Furthermore, a high Kohs rating means that these conditions are locked into the item, protecting it from Halir’s Principle.
In the example of the pocket watch, a high-Kohs device would have Metal imbued with Reliability, Mechanical, and Eternal Aspects, among other where appropriate may allow it to continue functioning long past when a lower-rated watch would be ‘broken,’ the cogs ticking in perfect time regardless of physical defects or missing teeth it may normally suffer from.