Red Mana

The Human Inheritance

Manatar placed red mana throughout the human body: in blood, organs, and every cell. Humans of Cerberus, the Ark, and Brazzant inherit the same potential. Their cultures train and exploit it differently, but they do not possess different racial mana.

Red mana belongs to the living body rather than the soul. A human corpse produces none, and an undead body cannot sustain a sorcerer's magic. A lich avoids this loss by keeping living organs elsewhere and drawing their mana across the distance.

Untrained red mana can manifest instinctively. Rare Charisma spells and desperate curses may appear through overwhelming emotion without a reproducible formula. Training does not create the power; it teaches the caster to repeat and control what the body already makes.

Human Baseline

Unless a class or another rule replaces these values, a human uses:

Caster level = 1 base CL + 1 CL per 2 points of Charisma.

Slots = 4 per spell level + ½ Charisma.

Charisma measures how strongly the human body expresses its mana. Intelligence instead governs the construction and DC of learned spells. Experience and story can raise caster level beyond the racial contribution, but caster level alone never teaches a new spell. See Character Creation and Progression.

Three Human Traditions

Cerberan sorcery follows the method built by Archon: speech, movement, visualization, and concentration give repeatable shape to chaotic red mana. Individual spells state their components. Silence, restraints, armor, or a wound during casting can therefore stop a red spell when they interfere with those requirements.

The Ranger uses the same red inheritance through an instinctive nature tradition. The Partage instead harvests human red mana, stabilizes it, and returns part of it as divine power. These traditions change how the power is learned and shaped; they do not divide humanity into different magical races.

Recovery and Blood

Human slots recover through ordinary rest. Active rest restores 10% of the base maximum at each spell level per hour, to a 50% ceiling. True rest restores 20% per hour and fills the reserve in five hours. Calculate recovery independently at every spell level and round once from the total time, not once each hour. See Rest and Recovery.

Blood outside a living body still contains red mana but grants no spell slots. Exploiting it directly requires an exceptional mechanism. The known examples are vampires feeding, Archon's Partage, and rare alchemical or magical procedures designed specifically to extract it. A flask of ordinary blood is not a magical battery.

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