‘Affinity’ can mean two things in a drucraft context. Usually people use it to mean an affinity with one or other of the branches; the same thing that makes it so much easier for a drucrafter to shape a sigl of one branch, as opposed to another. However, it can also refer to the drucrafter’s affinity with a country.
Branch affinity and country affinity are similar in theory – they’re both a measurement of a drucrafter’s compatibility with a certain type of essentia – but work quite differently in practice. Branch affinities are largely inborn, and somewhat unpredictable. Although they do seem to be weakly inheritable – a drucrafter from a family with a strong Light tradition is statistically more likely to have a Light affinity – the correlation is not perfect, and it’s common for drucrafters to have at least one unusual affinity or disaffinity that seems to have come more or less from nowhere.
By contrast, country affinities are extremely predictable. If a drucrafter grows up in a region, then they will invariably have a strong affinity for the essentia of that particular place. This seems to be a natural consequence of the way essentia works; all living creatures unconsciously take in, assimilate, and release essentia in a constant process. As part of this, their bodies become accustomed to the quality and idiosyncrasies of the essentia in that particular place. For the most part, this happens in the background and goes completely unnoticed; it only becomes relevant when a drucrafter travels somewhere else, and suddenly has to adapt to essentia of a different kind.
Adjusting to a change in local essentia (sometimes referred to as ‘essentia shock’) is not difficult or dangerous, but it is disorienting. This disorientation has a particularly pronounced effect on drucrafters with strong sensing skills; the more sensitive they are to changes in background essentia levels, the more they’ll notice the difference. A drucrafter with terrible sensing, on the other hand, is unlikely to notice much, since they’ll only really register the essentia once their body has assimilated it into personal essentia, by which point most of its unique features will have been overwritten anyway (one of those cases where ignorance is bliss). In either case, the change usually doesn’t cause serious problems.
However, there is one situation where essentia shock does become a serious problem: shaping sigls. A shaper, when creating a sigl, has to manipulate free essentia from the surrounding environment without assimilating it first. In this case, unfamiliarity with local essentia becomes a massive handicap, and for an unwary shaper is likely to cause a shaping to end in total failure.
The simplest solution to this problem for a prospective shaper to work with a local. A shaper ‘guide’ can assist with the acclimatisation process, helping the new arrival become accustomed to the differences. A limiter also largely bypasses the issue, since in this case the limiter’s creator will have done most of the hard work already (though having someone familiar with local conditions will still help).
The slower, though more thorough, option is for a prospective shaper to simply stay in the place long enough to become familiar with it. However, this can take a long time. Most manifesters argue that it takes a minimum of six months to a year to become familiar with a really different essentia environment, and mastering it can take considerably longer.
NB: Though referred to as ‘country’ affinities, these affinities are not dependent on political borders. For relatively small countries, this doesn’t make much difference, as the distance between two spots within the country will rarely be large enough for the local essentia to vary dramatically. However, for really big countries, such as China, Russia, or the USA, it’s quite possible for native drucrafters to experience essentia shock just by moving from one end of their home country to the other.
