No Wizards' Guild

[hcobb]

If your campaign lacks a universal Wizards' Guild (As seen at ITL 60) then you logically have have no universal system of apprenticeship and therefore wizards are much much rarer. We're talking Conan levels where a major city might have a few wizards and is lucky to have even one. These wizards will attempt to make magic items without apprentices or reference books, so magic items are very very rare. There are no PC wizards as these are high level NPCs acting as mentors or adversaries or just the local power that is.

A transnational church should be able to support enough alchemy to produce a few healing potions, but these will be given out one by one to top supporters.

There is no gate network, but the top wizards in your world should have a few emergency gates that are very rarely used.

[Skarg]

There are quite a few varieties of how wizards can exist in a campaign other than "universal wizard's guild" with or without a heavy gate network.

In our TFT campaigns, based on original ITL without the new mention in the Dran map notes about lots of gates, "the Wizard's Guild" was more of a notional idea and a model. What mostly recognizably existed beyond the pattern, were guild chapters (see ITL) which were generally local to a specific city. Sure wizards got around and chapters cooperated and there were some national and international level authorities within the guild, those were not part of what most the guild was doing with most of their time and energy.

In our later campaigns not on Cidri, we certainly managed to create countless settings which didn't have a universal Wizard's Guild but had other organizations of various types which each had their own concepts, membership, known abilities and teaching structures.

Which groups know which spells and who they train becomes can become an interestingly non-generic part of play and the campaign world.

[Steve Plambeck]

Our group's World, predating original ITL, didn't have a Wizard's Guild, nor apprentices in the same sense as Cidri, but as we didn't allow any living (contemporary) wizards to make magic items at all we didn't really need them. One old, major city-state held the venerable Institute of Thaumaturgy, and the capital city of a major empire in another part of the world held the College of Magic, but these were the sole surviving institutes for studying magic and learning the higher level spells. Each was hundreds of years old, yet both had been destroyed and rebuilt only a couple centuries earlier, following a failed religious jihad that had attempted to eradicate the world of all sorcerers and expunge any practice of secular magic. Any enchanters that might have survived that dark age would be a couple hundred years old if they were still alive and in hiding. And if any spell books for the more advanced spells hadn't been burnt, those too were still well hidden. Gate, Summon Demon, and Magic Item Creation were all among the forgotten and lost spells (basically anything above IQ 16).

In the century our campaigns were set, most monarchs and rich nobles had a court wizard, who in turn had apprentices, all in service to their overlords. And every town and larger village would have a wizard or two who might be aspiring to gain such employment and eventually move up in rank. Otherwise, you'd be an itinerant wizard just scraping by and adventuring, often in the company of freelancers and rogues.

[Axly Suregrip]

Originally Posted by hcobb

A transnational church should be able to support enough alchemy to produce a few healing potions, but these will be given out one by one to top supporters.

Don't forget Master Physickers can create healing potions. So you should still have access to healing potions without alchemy.

Also, lacking wizards does not mean lacking alchemists.

And wizards and wizard guilds do not have to be all or nothing. In my world wizards are uncommon, but not rare. Every town has a few but not enough to have a formal guild. So, no governing body.

[hcobb]

The WG exists to support the needs of the WG. Here are some of the tools they use.

1. Maintain good PR with the public to ensure that many young children are offered to the WG to be tested
2. Select the best offerings and train them for a decade
3. Restrict opportunities for apprentices to keep them chained to the ST farm
4. Tie the journeymen into the system for the rest of their lives
5. Covertly eliminate all opposition groups

Without something a lot like the WG you don't get the active recruitment and training of the best and wizardry drops down to a few self-taught dreamers and their hangers on.

[phiwum]

Right. Because why would talented and intelligent people want to learn powerful spells unless there was a guild with really good PR?

Obviously, using magic would be a terrible drudge and no one would want to do it unless they were hornswoggled by flashy pamphlets and a sophisticated targeted astroturf campaign.

[Scintillant]

Originally Posted by phiwum

...hornswoggled by flashy pamphlets and a sophisticated targeted astroturf campaign.

You, sir, have a gift for language! And I say that in all sincerity.

[Axly Suregrip]

Originally Posted by Scintillant

You, sir, have a gift for language! And I say that in all sincerity.

I nominate Phiwum to write the WG pamphlets! ;-)

[Axly Suregrip]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Without something a lot like the WG you don't get the active recruitment and training of the best and wizardry drops down to a few self-taught dreamers and their hangers on.

Hi Henry,
I agree that man kind is full of examples of people who organize groups in order to gain more power. A Wizards Guild makes as much sense as unions, companies and governments. Organizing groups is mankind's most powerful tool.

But a key element to this is large enough groups to organize. Small enough groups of population won't have this. In villages and hamlets there may be very little of any kind of organizing structure other than key individual(s). A matron/patron that all accept as the authority. Either on the subject (eg. on magic) or on all topics, such as the village eldar. Often a keep of knowledge and the group's history.

Different flavors of this is what I use in lieu of a WG. And just like cultures, what you run into will differ from village to village.

I am saying you can have wizards without wizards' guilds. The structure for who retains the spell knowledge, how complete is that knowledge and what are the requirements to grant access to such will vary. Also, it will be much more limited and constrained than a WG (just pay dues). And there will be competing interests.

All this of course is just how I am implementing it. Really anything is possible. A GM could just say magic is innate and spell knowledge comes from within. Then all WG would be completely optional. In this world you could have wizard being very common and yet no guild.

[phiwum]

Originally Posted by Scintillant

You, sir, have a gift for language! And I say that in all sincerity.

Originally Posted by Axly Suregrip

I nominate Phiwum to write the WG pamphlets! ;-)

Y'all are far too kind. Kind enough that I'm sorta suspicious.

Thanks.