Resonance
Resonance is a quality of an individual's soul related to both the divine and the practice of sphere magic. The term aura comes from the various early magics of spirit and void which perceive the state of others' souls in the form of a colored aura. This color scales from black to silver; as the bulk of the range is either red or gold, the auras are colloquially referred to as such.
Resonance is primarily affected by what one kills or which gods one sacrifices to. A strong resonance is referred to an alignment. Sacrificing to a god will move your resonance into alignment with that god's, and killing something of a particular resonance will move your own in the opposite direction. Alignment can be an accurate indicator of what someone has been killing or which gods they have been sacrificing to, however shuddeni and ch'taren will always have red and gold alignments, respectively.
Aura grades are somewhat large ranges, and are as follows:
| Black (maximum red aura) |
| Dark Red |
| Red (maximum red aura for a neutral character) |
| Faint Red (maximum red aura for a good character) |
| None |
| Faint Gold (maximum gold aura for an evil character) |
| Gold (maximum gold aura for a neutral character) |
| Bright Gold |
| Silver (maximum gold aura) |
Certain spells, particularly of the void, spirit, water, and fire spheres, will either improve if the target has compatible aura or fail if the caster has an incompatible one. Water and Spirit are aligned with gold auras, while Fire and Void are aligned with red auras. Water and Fire spells will suffer a substantial penalty to spell power for each grade unaligned aura, although a neutral aura works fine. Spirit and Void spells, on the other hand, get a bonus for a correctly aligned aura but often fail entirely with an incompatible one. Other effects are possible; individual spell helpfiles should be consulted in these cases. Natural magic is usually indifferent to alignment, but followers of Lielqan will see a benefit from having a gold aura while battling the undead abominations of Gamaloth.
