Velthuryn — World Atlas

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Margin Wisp

Born of Discarded Footnotes

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Tier 1 Horde Difficulty 10

A small Lexharrow resonance entity born from footnotes the Archive judged irrelevant and excised. Margin Wisps drift through abandoned stacks, Codex Fracture edge-zones, and burned waystations, repeating the discarded text in faint whispers. Individually harmless. In flocks, they can confuse a scholar to the point of forgetting what they came to find.

Margin Wisp

Tier 1 Horde

*"See also—" the Wisp whispered. I turned to read. The Wisp turned with me. There were more behind it. I do not know how long I stood there.*

Motives & Tactics:

Description

A Margin Wisp looks like a palm-sized scrap of vellum, drifting on no wind, the surface of the scrap rewriting itself with text in a hand the observer almost recognizes. The text is always a footnote — to what, the Wisp cannot quite say. Wisps cluster in places where scholarly excision has been recent: a burned workroom, a freshly redacted archive corner, the rubble-edge of a Codex Fracture.

Motives

None in the conventional sense. A Margin Wisp wants to be read. If unread, it drifts. If read, it follows the reader and continues to be read.

Tactics

No aggression in the combat sense. A flock of Wisps will surround a reader and present footnote after footnote, each one slightly more attention-demanding than the last, until the reader cannot remember what they came to read or what they came to do. The effect is cognitive, not physical. It is also occasionally how a scholar finds out something important.

Difficulty: 10 | Thresholds: 5/10 | HP: 4 | Stress: 2

ATK: 1 | Demanding Footnote: Very Close | 1d4 mag

Features

Flock - Passive: Margin Wisps act as a horde — a flock of 6-12 Wisps shares one HP pool, one threshold, and one turn. Damage that exceeds the Severe threshold scatters the flock; surviving Wisps regroup at a new location next session.

See Also— - Action: On its turn, the flock attempts to draw a target's attention. Choose one PC within Very Close range; that PC must succeed on a Knowledge roll (DC 11) or be Distracted until the end of their next turn — their next action is taken with disadvantage, and they cannot use a reaction. PCs of the Loreborne community roll with disadvantage on this save (they are professionally compelled to read footnotes).

What Was Cut - Reaction: When a PC succeeds on a Knowledge roll (DC 13) to read a Wisp deliberately, the Wisp reveals one footnote of GM-chosen plot information: a name removed from an Archive record, a date redacted from a Concord brief, a citation severed from a chain. The Wisp then dissipates, harmlessly. The flock loses one HP from the dissipation.