System Sunset

7th-level Legacy Systems & Zombie Projects

Casting Time: 8 hours (a Migration), preceded by a mandatory Freeze period of 1 week
Range/Area: Touch, one Legacy Servant
Components: V, S, M (a fully staffed replacement system, functioning and consumed in the casting; a signed executive sponsor sign-off, consumed)
Duration: Instantaneous; permanent
Classes: VP of Engineering, Director of Engineering, executive sponsor

Touch one Legacy Servant. Its On-Call Engineer is released from their permanent assignment, and the Legacy Servant is destroyed. Unlike the damage dealt when a Legacy Servant’s On-Call Engineer merely becomes unavailable, this destruction is controlled: no damage is dealt to any other system, provided the replacement system component was genuinely functioning at the time of casting.

If the replacement system was not genuinely functioning — a state this spell cannot verify, only assume — the Legacy Servant is destroyed anyway, and every system that depended on it takes damage equal to the combined Technical Debt score of every Legacy Servant the caster’s organization currently maintains.

No other spell can permanently end a Legacy Servant’s duration. Simply allowing an On-Call Engineer to become unavailable only ends the spell that raised the Legacy Servant — it does not end the Legacy Servant itself, so much as pass its damage on unresolved.

At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 8th level or higher, you may target one additional Legacy Servant for each slot level above 7th, provided they share a replacement system.

Flavor: “Migration complete. Decommissioning legacy service. This has been in production for eleven years.” — deployment log, final entry