Frenetic principle

A frenetic principle is a term in spellology for seemingly excessive and retaliatory reactions by reality itself against mages who attempt to violate natural laws, as if the mage in question had unknowingly offended some higher power. These laws were established by the dead god and remain in force millennia after its death.

Examples

 * A mage of Daitsch once attempted to create an exact duplicate of himself by projecting half of his proportional existence two feet in front of him. This caused a massive explosion that obliterated him along with much of the surrounding countryside. Sixty years of mage postmortems of the event led to the conclusion that the laws of the world simply did not allow for an object's existence to be duplicated: the lesser existence would inevitably converge with the greater one with such force that both would violently explode. While this experiment was a failure, Theodore McFarlane managed to exploit the frenetic principle discovered to develop a Spellblade, "Creumbra, the self-racing shadow".


 * Nobody is allowed to live forever. Humans who live longer than 200 years provoke attacks by reapers, beginning on the 200th birthday and continuing in escalating numbers every fifty years afterwards. Reapers also attack in the event of attempts to resurrect the dead.