Thoughts on Tendrils and Charges.

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Drop charges entirely, emphasize tendrils as your army on the map.

• As defensive charges: Your tendrils are your defense. Anything that would harm you instead kills tendrils (of the attacker's choice?).
• As attacking forces: Your tendrils are where you act, but are also about shaping and control and destruction (see my document about mission tasks): armies on the map.
• As armies on the map: Your tendrils care about terrain and other tendrils, naturally. Otherwise, they're a strange ghost army.

This carries over to the spells, of course:

• Tendril creation is defense! Instead of defensive spells, create tendrils. There should be many more tendril creation spells to support this.
• Defense will tend to be > 1, so attacking should be bigger. Roll dice? Count symbols? Use terrain?
• Tendrils are double-sided components: if they had a number on the other side, they could eat up different damage values.
• "Tendril hate" is covered by straight damage now, so there doesn't need to be as much; but tendril shaping is a much bigger deal.
• Charge hate is completely unnecessary.

[blinks]

If tendrils have "hp" or a shield value on the back, normal damage spells intuitively work against them directly. Two possible soak methods:

• Any amount of damage is enough to kill a tendril (but only extra spills over).
• Must deal enough damage to kill a tendril.

[blinks]

This change also means that "passed" tendrils (those you've left behind you) are still useful as a defensive mechanism.