We made a video about the fact that, in Mandrake, no-one can grow anything on purpose. Understandably, people have wondered about this since we announced the game last year!

Of course, the player character is exempt, and much of your activity will revolve around discovering your horticultural abilities. But until you return and start planting turnips, no-one has been able to cultivate food intentionally for a hundred years. Not since the Covenant of Weeds.

It's been entertaining to observe the comments on the video immediately start picking at the edges of the Covenant. It's partly the gamer's instinct to interrogate and test systems, but also the questions people in our world must have been asking themselves down the years, especially when they were struggling to support themselves. Can I try growing something if it looks accidental? Would this cause consequences for our village?

Some kinds of magic are almost like an alternate physics – there are strict rules you can learn and apply to create highly predictable, even quantifiable, outcomes. But another kind of magic – perhaps one truer to the word – resists being treated like another branch of science or engineering, by being sensitive to moral, psychological and social context.

Most magic in Mandrake is closer to the latter kind. So the Covenant of Weeds, for example, resists systematic testing of its own boundaries. Someone attempting that is exactly the kind of circumstance that would provoke reprisals. These are varied, but could have serious impact on more than the person who tested the Covenant.

Archetypally, the actus reus is the sowing of a seed. But you could certainly provoke the Covenant by getting a bit too heavy with forest management. And the consequences for experimenting begin before anything supernatural happens; like Ruan probing your intentions in the video, first you'd face communal censure. If it goes wrong, everyone has to deal with the consequences.