Research About Limbo and Cha’mutte

The Great War is a fertile topic for scholars, philosophers, poets, and playwrights in Tollen, and there are many sources that touch upon aspects of the Great War, Cha’mutte, and the Heroes who defeated him. For the purposes of your research, you focus most deeply on the connection between Cha’mutte and Limbo.

The exact metaphysical nature of the great enemy, Cha’mutte, is much debated. Surviving eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Urlich Pass describe him as a gargantuan dragon, made of shadow; the few reports from his slaves and servants that escaped the destruction of Pandar refer to him as a dragon; and scattered claims of Cha’mutte’s dragonspawn strongly imply a draconic nature. Yet many arcanists believe Cha’mutte to have been more, even, than one of the ancient greatwyrms.

The most provocative theory suggests that Cha’mutte somehow bound himself to Limbo, in a way that allows him to create planar tides at will, pulling Limbo close to the Material Plane and strengthening his chaotic energy. Indeed, the Chardonian scholar Paulina Nusinius, writing shortly after the Great War, proposed that Cha’mutte was, in some sense, part of Limbo itself, to the extent that upon his death Limbo and the Material Plane briefly collapsed together, allowing the chaotic power of Limbo to spill across the world, reshaping it. She proposed that the changes to the topography of Taelgar, such as the rising of the Yuvanti Mountains and the collapse of Urlich Pass, are consistent with the lore of Limbo, where land reshapes itself constantly. What other lasting consequences may exist from this contact, if it happened at all, is the subject of much scholarly argument, some of which is elaborated on in Research about Limbo and the Plaguelands.

Regardless of the exact nature of Cha’mutte’s connection to Limbo, it is possible, according to many arcane cosmologists, to infer something about the magic of Limbo from how Cha’mutte acted in the world. Following this line of reasoning, though relying on largely fictionalized and possibly apocryphal accounts of the Great War, the experimental cosmologist Arryn of Tollen wrote of Limbo in his seminal work of planar magic, Experiments upon the Planar Substance deriving the following:

The Action of Magic in the Plane of Chaos

(from Arryn of Tollen, Experiments upon the Planar Substance, Book IV)

I. All matter in Limbo exists in potential, not form. Stone, air, and flame are distinctions of mind, not substance. Shape them by thought or perish within them. The essence of Limbo is Transmutation, the magic of shifting form, and Conjuration, the magic of shifting space.

II. Will is the instrument of form. The stable pocket, the floating isle, the breathing shell of air, and other semi-permanent structures persist only while the shaper’s intellect holds fast. When focus wavers, dissolution begins.

III. Motion and transmutation are one. To move an object in Limbo is to transform it; to transform it is to move it. A disciplined mind may translate thought into force, drawing matter toward or away from itself as easily as drawing breath.

IV. Elemental distinction fails. Limbo does not burn or freeze, but both at once. Fire may bite with cold, water may cut like glass, air may harden to stone. Spells cast here often blend or invert their natures; every working risks the admixture of opposed or chaotic essences.

V. Transmutation amplifies itself. The more an object or creature changes within Limbo, the easier further changes become, eventually ending when form itself is impossible to maintain and the object or creature decays to join the primordial chaos. Mastery of Limbo is mastery of transformation, but the line between mastery and dissolution is perilously thin.

VI. Attention is gravity. Minds attract matter. Strong intellects draw fragments of the plane into orbit, while the unfocused drift helplessly, consumed by shifting substance.