Wizard's Guild

The Wizard's Guild is an ancient organization dating back over 10,000 years. It was created by the ancient first mages to store their knowledge. Of course, knowledge is fickle and dangerous, and wishes to remain hidden. Magic has a desire to cause conflict and bring forth the ambition within those who wield. The Ur-Mages are remembered for their power, but also for the unheard-of feat of them getting along.

Only rare individuals are able to store spells in their mind for any amount of time (without assistance from a deity or other power), and then, being able to store more than two or three is almost impossible. This means that there has been an incredibly small number of wizards, and the masters and guilders of the Guild are in almost constant conflict unless they have a wizard to keep them in check. As a result, the sages and acolytes who run the Guild have lost nearly all of their magic over time. Adding this to the fact that many of the later wizards did not have idealistic uses for magic, and the four cataclysms of the Guild by greedy wizards, the Guild has fallen on very hard times. The most recent cataclysm was 300 years ago, when the mage Eldon of Milthorn burned several libraries, and killed several masters, so that no one could become a challenger again.

After three hundred years without having a mage, a child named Morgan was discovered who was able to memorize the Draconic alphabet before the age of 10, and therefore was a candidate for wizardom. After 35 years of preparation and study he has successfully undergone the Trials of Wizardry, and has been set out to try to reclaim the ancient knowledge of the first mages.

Guild Ranks

The Guild has a series of important ranks, the majority of which are for normal members. The normal members of the Guild are non-gifted, though the higher levels do tend to be Gifted.

1. Novitiate - A prospective member of the Guild, no requirements.
2. Initiate - A member of the Guild who has learned a single spell, or learned the Draconic language enough to be useful to a Master or Journeyman.
3. Journeyman - An Initiate of the Guild who has copied at least one Book of Power.
4. Master - A Journeyman who has successfully recovered a spell, or written a new one.
5. Guilder - Someone who leads a scriptorium of the Guild, must be a Journeyman to achieve this rank.
6. Runner - A member of the Guild who passes information, a former Initiate who is sympathetic to the Guild and passes information between the scriptoriums and libraries of the Guild. They are the main method by which the Guild backs up data. They are mostly adventurers, peddlers, and minstrels.
7. Wizard - An Initiate who has learned Draconic and at least three spells.
8. Mage - A Wizard who has successfully added a spell to the repertoire of the Guild (this would qualify them for Master status as well, but Wizards are considered to outrank Masters).
9. Archmage - A Mage who knows at least 13 spells. There have been 30 archmages in history, not counting the Ur-Mages.
10. Ur-Mage - The founders of the Guild, and the modern schools of magic. To qualify as an Ur-Mage a modern Archmage would need to create a new school of magic.

Guild Politics

The Wizard's Guild is primarily a fraternal order which allows a series of third sons and other unlikely folk to gain some level of power. Learning Draconic is a huge undertaking, and those desperate to avoid tumbling down in class will often learn enough to gain the rank of Initiate. The other side of that coin is the rare gifted child who will learn a single spell and use that to become part of society.

A huge portion of the Guild is exactly this, mostly made up of runners and journeymen, using their position in the Guild to get themselves invited to society parties, and using the connections to the Guild to secure financial backing and credit to ensure their own ongoing future, carting a manuscript from place to place being a small price to pay.

The smaller piece of the Guild is those who take the work seriously. Those who care deeply about the act of preserving knowledge often go through an informal apprenticeship with a Guilder and then take over the library from that Guilder, or, rarely, leave to start their own. These Guilders are often considered the equal of the local Lord or Baron, and even have the clout to collect taxes and own peasants. This does mean that in the rare case of a Guilder passing without a successor, they sometimes fall into the hands of people chasing temporal power.

The Masters of the Guild are more often those chasing temporal power. Very few have the skills to invent a spell, therefore the most common way to achieve the rank of Master is finding a spell. Nobles will often fund expeditions into the West to find ancient spells for their children, and generally this means that a Master is from noble birth. The Masters of the Guild are typically empowered to do things like grant license to start a library or scriptorium, invest someone with the rank of Wizard, Mage, Archmage, or Master, and control the Guild's funds. The Masters of the Guild also spend an inordinate amount of time forcing rogue sorcerers to join the Guild or leave public life, especially if they are advising nobles. A Master is generally considered on par with a Count, but they don't have anywhere to collect taxes from, meaning that they need to be involved in the Guild's traditions of teaching and advising.

Generally, Masters attempt to build their power bases, to be important parts of the local nobility. Often being ostentatious and spendthrift, being important parts of the social scene. Masters with The Gift almost always flaunt their spells at every opportunity. Guilders tend to be the opposite, a sober second thought on the Guild, and focused on the future of magic more than anything else. The fact that both get an equal say in major actions of the Guild has saved it many times.

Guild Informal Traditions

The Guild has a series of unspoken rules when it comes to fashion and daily life. Most importantly the wearing of facial hair. Tradition grants that only a Wizard or greater may wear a full beard of more than a few centimetres in length. This means that facial hair is an important signifier of rank amongst the Wizards. Many wizards have required Dwarven barbers to maintain their faces. The Journeymen often wear short beards or have very closely shorn faces. Guilders and Masters usually have very intense and impressive sideburns, pretending that their beards give them the power of a true wizard.