Conjuration and The Outer Lands' Influence

The concept of conjuration in Anamnesis ended up deviating significantly from its historical counterpart and instead encompassing the renaissance concepts of both natural and ceremonial magic, which can be found bottom lined here.

As I said, conjurers and renascents understand the world well enough to take Arkhe and reshape it through willpower. Arkhe is to be found in everything and can technically take any shape, but that reshaping is not an easy task for human minds. It requires large quantities of Arkhe and wastes much of it in a process which takes days at a time of constant and exhausting mental work. This is the main reason for the game to be measured in weeks and not days.

Dreams are supposed to be a mirage of a mundane person's conjuration potential in Anamnesis. Just like you might learn to modify an ongoing dream, conjurers change the world around them through a much more refined process.

Conjurers can technically do as they please with the world's Arkhe, but a direct approach is impractical and inefficient. You could for example summon your own dungeon/fortress, but this would take years of both preparation and actual ritual, a ritual that could easily crumble down at any point as it happens when the influenced aristocrat summons units. It is therefore much easier to bind units to perform the work manually if you want a large building done. Just the same, it is easier to bind units into your command and induce likely accidents to kill your enemies than it is to summon a fireball to smite them.

The only efficient way for humans to use conjuration is to take Arkhe from materials that concentrate as much of it in as little space as possible, gold being the best resource for this, and slightly tweak the world around them.

You can see the effects of this tweaking when committing Arkhe during combats for example. A large commitment might allow you to change reality just a little bit to give you an edge, enabling you to trigger things that were likely to happen to begin with. Veshite Underground Ops might find their gas masks punctured when using gas attacks, Mole People might become infected with vermin-transmitted diseases, etc.

There is the conventional way, to try to alter things by yourself using Arkhe (natural magic), and there is the assisted way (ceremonial magic) by contacting a more powerful being. When you see magic happening inside the game that costs no Arkhe and happens immediately, it means that it is the work of a different being than the conjurer.


These greater beings bring me to the next point, The Influence.


The Outer Lands' Influence is not a definite faction but an hypothetical driving force that stalwart units theorize is making the individuals of The Steppes turn against The Court and the meritocracy (these other concepts will be explained in the next Lore post).

Individuals tagged as "influenced" will show contempt towards the anthropocentric government of The Court and will instead favour the wisdom of greater beings. By greater beings these individuals mean chiefly the ancient saurians, which are believed to be the creators of the human race and are worshipped by the beastfolk (both concepts also to be explained in another post).

The alleged work of The Influence is noticed more strongly in peripheral areas of The Steppes, so it is considered to come from The Outer Lands.

The Outer Lands are all those territories that because of the geography, adverse weather, hostile inhabitants and, as some believe, the will of greater beings, remain unexplored. Compounding this problem is the fact that, unlike in our world, there is no known body of water interconnecting most of the game's world, with thousands of kilometres of frozen tundra or disease-ridden jungles standing in the way of exploration.

The Influence tends to be displayed as meaner, while the court usually restraints itself more, but overall I tried to avoid a complete moral bipolarity in Anamnesis. You might have noticed for example that Tershelle-Val and Malahs Kovoss, the respective exclusive origins for stalwart and influenced aristocrats, are both defined as "Brutal" in the character creation menu.

Influenced individuals tend to think little about human lives because of their belief in greater, more important beings and a blissful future for everybody under their protection. In their eyes, stalwart resistance to this theoretical future is causing much more damage on the grand scale than any individual human life is worth.