4E Flavor: philosophies of magic and modern wizardry

[b]Why Magic?[/b]
Among wizards, the question of why magic functions is hotly debated. Natural philosophers and alchemists have made great headway into discovering the rules by which the undisturbed universe functions, but the reasons why this function can be so predictably disrupted by the right kind of person concentrating hard is often unclear. There are several schools of thought as to the underpinnings of thaumaturgy:

[b]Atomism:[/b] Sometimes referred to as mechanists or fundamentalists, many wizards postulate that the entirety of the universe is composed of a single substance which is responsive to sapient thought. This substance is most popularly referred to as "quintessence," and the atomists postulate that all phenomena encountered by sapient beings at the macro level (trees, rocks, shadows, minutes, love) are constructs of focused quintessence organized into self-perpetuating patterns. As the mind is a natural channel for quintessence, all magic really requires is that the practitioner memorize the pattern that constitutes some phenomenon (fire, say) and will enough quintessence through that pattern to cause it to spring to life.

Rituals work by freeing quintessence from patterns it's naturally locked in and then shaping the resultant "mana" (high-energy quintessence, prime for reformatting) before it dissipates or congeals. The alchemical reagents or rare herbs that power ritual magic are simply those substances which experiment has shown yield up their stores of quintessence easily. Since quintessence can absorb and retain "resonance" (the most subtle qualities of the Pattern it occupies - harmonics or tessellations within the quintessence that can remain even when it's been nominally released into mana), certain rituals demand quintessence of certain origin to power them. Residuum, of course, is quintessence deliberately calcified into a neutral state, easily unpacked into mana free of any lingering resonance qualities.

Wizards skilled enough to actually cast spells rather than simply work rituals are individuals who've developed enough focus and memory to be able to draw ambient quintessence out of the world around them and fashion it into a pattern immediately. The atomists point to sorcerers as obvious examples as quintessence theory in action - individuals who happen to act as unconscious channels of pure universal power, their spells colored by the basic resonance of the energies they've most commonly absorbed. Atomist wizards tend to excel at straightforward battle-magic and conjuration, and can find stranger spells more difficult to grasp. Atomism provides an excellent framework within which to produce fire or stone from nothing, but tends to produce equations of staggering complexity when put to the task of cursing someone with misfortune or reversing the flow of time.

There is much discourse within atomist conclaves of wizardry as to the precise origins and properties of quintessence, and why it responds to human will. It's generally believed that the sapient races can affect quintessence with their thoughts because sapience is divinely-gifted and it's in the nature of the gods to shape the world with their will, but questions as to how the gods gained that ability or where quintessence came from at all are much thornier. The atomists generally concern themselves with more practical studies into the nature of the universe, cataloging what patterns produce what phenomena, studying the ways in which quintessence patterns evolve when left undisturbed, and noting the most expedient ways by which the raw substance of reality can be gathered or stored.

Atomism is practiced in wizard academies all over the world, and is often the first kind of magical theory an apprentice learns. Atomist wizards most often revere Ioun, Melora. or Moradin above the other gods and practice magic diagrammatically and somatically.

[b]The Imperial School:[/b] Simultaneously the most reverent and irreligious of magical theorists, wizards of the Imperial School reason that it is in the nature of the world to bend to the minds of its inhabitants. They are unlike the atomists in that they do not generally seek or require a mechanistic explanation for this behavior, and unlike the mystics of the spiral tower in that they certainly believe in a coherent reality that exists separately from its inhabitants. The meritocrats  conceive of magic as a chess match or a battlefield: the laws of the universe are merely a challenge to overcome, and if a single man can overcome a hydra with nothing but gumption and a piece of sharpened metal, there's no reason a single man couldn't overcome gravity with gumption and a piece of polished crystal. In short, power is there for the taking because that's simply how the universe works.

The Imperial School doesn't dismiss scholarship, mysticism, or supernatural phenomena in general; it just sees these things as fundamentally exploitable. It's entirely true that a certain somatic gesture produces flames when performed properly or that a certain ritual chant enables teleportation, but [i]why[/i] a given word, symbol, or hand gesture produces a magical effect is probably nothing more than a conscious or accidental artifact of the gods' creation of the world, and the explanation almost certainly varies from one piece of occult lore to the other. The measure of a wizard is his or her ability to grasp these disparate elements and use them to master the rest of the world. When the mages of the Imperial School entertain existential questions, they generally wonder [i]why[/i] it is that the world is ordered in such a way that true magical power results from the exercise of heroism. Some believe that it is by divine mandate that they are empowered to conquer the world while others care not a whit. Regrettably, the arcane spellcasters most emblematic of the Imperial School are probably warlocks; as unsavory as the mystics are and as bizarre as the energies they command can be, there is no doubt that their power is the result of reaching out and seizing what others could not.

The Imperial School is a very flexible conception of magic, easily adapted to suit whatever spellcasting repertoire its adherent desires. On the other hand, its lack of an underlying metaphysical scheme more complex than the word "booya" means that it does not necessarily make for adaptable wizards. An imperial mage might specialize in conjuring fire as easily as in controlling minds, but the pyromancer would not have an easy time giving putting aside his hard-won mastery over fire to snatch mesmeric powers from the universe's jaws instead.

The Imperial School is common both in the Realms and in the Newer Lands, though it tends to take on different flavors in each locale - it is an outgrowth of the practically inborn will to power in the former but more a manifestation of scrappy, can-do pragmatism and tenaciousness in the latter. Mages of the Imperial School tend to worship Avandra, Erathis, and Kord if they worship any gods at all. Their magic is loud, vibrant, and flashy, replete with bold gestures and thunderous incantations.

[b]The Spiral Tower:[/b] The dreamers of the Spiral Tower claim that magic works because the world as we know it is a story, and stories can be rewritten by the canny. Ostensibly an even more comprehensive hypothesis than atomism, the Spiral Tower holds not that all objects and ideas are manifestations of some fundamental force but that mythic elements themselves are the basic building blocks of reality. A person is an actor, a fire is a prop, and what looks like causality and determinism is merely the script of the play. Those who observe the Spiral Tower from without tend to assume that its adherents are merely profligate users of metaphor, but soon learn that the opposite is true; the greater a mage's absorption into the Spiral Tower, the less that mage sees the world and the more that mage sees the Dream.

Spiral wizards see arcane spellcasting as an activity fundamentally divorced from ritual magic or any other sort of supernatural power. To cast a ritual or evoke a primal spirit is to accept the reality of the Dream; alchemical formulae and even the power of spirits or demons s part of the Dream, and the Dream unfolding as it naturally does is nothing of real consequence. To cast a spell, though, to reach out and reweave the universe into accordance with one's desires through the medium of one's cunning, is something more. Most of the world's denizens are sleepers, passively bobbing along in the currents of the universal narrative, but wizards and other arcane spellcasters are lucid dreamers, aware of the fundamental unreality of the world they inhabit and so able to reweave it. The actual minutiae of wizardry - wands and spellbooks, chants and gestures - are essentially props and ornamentation to the wizards of the Spiral Tower, who generally cultivate the ability to shape the dream around them with nothing more than silent, graceful will. Bards are perhaps the clearest example of the Spiral Tower philosophy in action - scholarship or iron focus often have no part in their magical workings, yet the power of their magic is undeniable. Wizards of the Spiral Tower hold that the power of the bards is the power of stories; the Dream reshapes itself around the songs of the bards because they show it how to become more beautiful.

Who, exactly, is the dreamer of the Dream? What would it mean to "wake up"? Is it desirable, or even possible? Though they don't claim this loudly and tend to expect their students to absorb the notion through osmosis more so than instruction, most wizards of the Spiral Tower believe even the gods to be nothing more than subjects of the Dream, merely elements in a winding, quasi-real story whose genesis or ultimate conclusion is beyond any participant's comprehension. Unlike most philosophies of of magic, the Spiral Tower teaches a relaxed, philosophical acceptance of the vicissitudes of reality; its spellcasting is an intuitive activity almost wholly alien to the rigid calculations of the atomists or the fierce invocations of the imperialists. To Shape the Dream is not exploit or roughly countermand the workings of the world, but to subsume one's self within them and so become an active participant in their unfolding.

The Spiral Tower's philosophy is difficult to get one's head around and even more difficult to completely internalize; wizards are adept at understanding esoteric concepts, but rarely so proficient at fully absorbing and [i]believing[/i] them. Nevertheless, there are clear benefits to the Spiral Tower path - its walkers it cast spells with a fluid, effortless grace that is often completely baffling to wizards whose magic involves hours of tedious study or exhausting feats of concentration. An atomist might write pages and pages of equations to describe the exact patterns that magical energy must flow through to finally coalesce into a horselike creature... but a mage of the Spiral Tower simply dreams up A Horse, and that's the end of it.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of mages on the Spiral Tower path are Eladrin, though wizards of all species have subscribed to this school. Esoteric and ineffable as the Spiral Tower philosophy is, it has never been popular, and tends to either manifest in tight-knit cabals hidden away within more mainstream centers of magical study or in secret enclaves removed completely from the majority of the magical world. Adherents of the Spiral Tower most often revere Corellon and Sehanine, and work magic so subtly that they often seem to not be casting spells at all; the world simply reshapes itself around them.

[b]Relations Between Schools:[/b] The philosophies described here represent prevailing attitudes more so than bodies of law, and it's not uncommon for eclectic wizards to borrow elements from more than one in their personal mental models of the workings of magic. Clearly, atomists and dreamers are capable of casting the exact same spells with equal effectiveness, so at some level they are doing the same thing... but which one has truly gotten to the heart of magic and which one can't see the forest for the trees is very hard to discern, and an imperialist doesn't care. Particularly dogmatic adherents of one school or another will generally claim that a mage trained in a different tradition is [i]really[/i] doing magic in the dogmatist's way and simply obfuscating his methods, even from himself. More generous students of the Art assume that even the most wildly divergent theories are both accurate ways of looking at the same thing, or incomplete descriptions of some greater truth as yet undiscovered.

[b][u]WIZARDRY IN THE MODERN WORLD[/b][/u]

[b]On the Nature of Wizardry[/b]
Nowadays, almost every settlement of significant size plays host to a wizard's academy. The court wizard has become as common as the court jester in the halls of power and "magic shops" selling enchanted knick-knacks keep regular hours in crowded bazaars. In theory, this is because the research carried out at a wizard's academy can ultimately serve the public good: the knowledge, rituals, and enchanted items developed there might defend the polity from threats or increase the overall standard of living.

In practice, any library might well catalog the means of dealing with occult threats, while the library of a wizard's academy is replete with diagrams of hand gestures, guides to enunciating incantations, and general records of eldritch miscellanea completely useless to anyone who is not, themselves, actually intending to cast a magic spell. Rituals with nontrivial effect are generally expensive, time-consuming, and only castable at all by the mages that developed them. Magic items are not only hugely expensive to produce but almost universally personal in scope; gold equivalent to lifetimes of labor for the average peasant might be spent in the course of producing an object that can feed only a few people per day, but more likely on a powerful weapon or piece of armor for a noble or adventurer rich enough to afford it.

Strictly speaking, wizardry is public service run in reverse. The private effort of whoever invented, say, the waterwheel, went on to markedly improve the operation of civilization as a whole. On the other hand, the expense of funding an academy and the  collective effort spent on research and experimentation might ultimately produce a single spell that only a handful of wizards can successfully cast. The actual primary export of a wizard's academy is wizards themselves; the end-goal of wizardry is to become a powerful wizard, and wizardry benefits the public good only insofar as individual wizards are willing to work towards the public good. The artificer tradition is committed to [i]actually[/i] bringing the benefits of applied arcane magic to the masses, but is thus far young and lacking in traction. For the most part, a built-in tendency towards elitism and self-aggrandizement has shaped wizardry's place in the wider world.

[b]The Academy[/b]
Since wizardry's early days, access to powerful artifacts and stores of truly esoteric knowledge has been strictly controlled, both because of the inherent danger such things might pose in the hands of a dabbler and because wizards are rarely inclined to share their toys. Prior to the establishment of formal academies, this meant a general state of open war between wizard cabals; it was common and expected that mages would steal from or outright attack each other in attempts to secure control of valuable implements, spellbooks, or places of power.

This has led, within the formal academy, to the development of a variety of complex ranking systems which sort wizards based on their relative magical power and grant increasing administrative power and executive privilege to those higher on the ladder. Rather than fighting each other outright, wizards demonstrate their puissance through a variety of formal tests and demonstrations, and thereby win priority access to valuable grimoires, residuum stockpiles, and offices with nice views out the window. Since each and every academic discovery potentially serves to make [i]somebody[/i] more powerful and therefore cause an upheaval in the established arcane pecking order, such a system is not entirely stable, but it's largely agreed to be better for the profession than the no-holds-barred free for all that came before it. Sabotage and outright assassination aren't unheard of in particularly cutthroat academies as means of quickly ascending in rank, but they at least have to be done in secret.

[b]Inter-Academy Relations[/b]
[i]Separate[/i] academies are not, technically, bound by the oaths that prevent members of the same academy from incinerating each other on sight. This isn't an oversight. An academy is a standing alliance among a group of wizards against a common foe, and the greatest enemy of a wizard is usually another wizard. In times past, separate wizard's academies have engaged in protracted magical wars, sending monsters lumbering across the land or spells screaming through the sky and generally doing much more damage to the surrounding landscape and the bystanders living on it than to each other.

As wizardry has integrated itself more and more closely into civilized society, wizard's wars have become much less common (or at least much less visible) and relations between academies have become much more congenial. It's not uncommon for separate academies within the same barony to count themselves as close allies or even separate branches of the same wider institution, and for academies affiliated with different duchies or city-states to view extant rivalries in nationalistic, not occult terms. Still, thus far the dream of a truly catholic academy has not been realized, and so one academy skirmishing with or raiding another is technically in keeping with the lore.

[b]Academies and the State[/b]
A wizard's academy is beyond political concerns, devoted solely to the pursuit of higher knowledge and the mastery of the mortal races over the capricious forces of nature. This means that, properly speaking, no self-styled duke or baron truly has the authority to tell an academy what to do, because their so-called nobility is a petty, ephemeral fiction compared to the mind-shattering cosmic truths which even the least among wizards deals with from day to day. On the other hand, someone's got to cook the food and do the laundry.

The actual number of academies that contain nothing [i]but[/i] wizards is vanishingly small. Even those academies founded on remote mountaintops or within deep forests often wind up as the nuclei of small settlements of farmers, traders, craftsmen and guards crucial to those academies' operation. And, of course, it is increasingly common for an academy to situate itself right in or alongside an established town or city. In these cases, complex negotiations have to take place between the academy master and the local baron, duke, or magistrate as to the precise nature of the academy's relationship to the overall public.

Such relationships tend to take on a vaguely mercenary character. An academy is allowed to operate within some noble's domain in return for that academy's service to the noble. It might be required to contribute wizards to that noble's military efforts, defend the city against attack, open some portion of its libraries to public perusal, manufacture magical items to certain specifications, or otherwise pitch in in some appropriate manner. Limits are also often placed on the academy's use of magic, barring the performance of particularly dangerous experiments or the disposal of magically-charged waste materials on public ground. Most academies refuse to engage in something so base as paying taxes, since such petty, mortal concerns are of no consequences to masters of arcane forces, but at the same time quietly agree to provide gifts of gold or other currency to the ruling magistrate at regular times as an entirely voluntary means of showing their appreciation.

Sometimes, these arrangements break down. The specialized problems local wizards are called upon to solve are often problems those same wizards are responsible for, either by using irresponsibly dangerous magic or carrying on a shadow war with another academy. It has been necessary in the past for pitchfork-waving mobs or platoons of armed soldiers to raze local academies to the ground, because an academy's entire inner circle has fallen to demonic possession or been revealed to have been attempting to control the local baron's mind. Modern-day academies are careful to ensure that many hazards endemic to wizardry stay firmly within academy walls, lest the economic and social forces they depend on to function suddenly turn against them.

[b]Academies and Other Magic-Users[/b]
Though most academies begin purely as alliances between wizards, they tend to become more holistic over time. Arcane ritual libraries are usually opened for the perusal of priests and spiritualists in return for access to the collected magical knowledge of the churches and tribes, in those places in which relations between these institutions have not broken down for other reasons. Other practitioners of arcane magic are often invited to study at the academy in order to be studied in turn, so long as those practitioners are not dangerous heretics.

Witchcraft has gone badly out of style in the eyes of most academic wizards. Witches are technically meant to be afforded the same respect and opportunity for advancement that spellbook-using wizards have, but in practice they are often viewed with suspicion and excluded from many academic proceedings. It's true that the stores of extraplanar knowledge that witches have access to via their familiars can prove invaluable to academic research, but it is often viewed as an embarrassing admission of failure to actually consult a witch on a magical problem because it implies that some hindrance has been found that [i]can't[/i] be overcome through mortal ingenuity alone. And, of course, there is always the chance that the ultimate patron that provided a witch's familiar in the first place was fiendish or otherwise heretical in nature.

Most wizards are happy to allow sorcerers into an academy, and most large academies retain experienced sorcerers on staff who can guide younger sorcerers in the development of their powers. Sorcerers are usually great assets to a wizard's academy; because, as a rule, they command much more raw magical power than wizards do, they're usually much more able to defend an academy from outright threats or serve an academy by loaning themselves out as battle-mages. However, sorcerers are generally treated as second-class citizens by the arcane establishment. Classes in sorcery are usually viewed as a sort of trade school hidden away at the bottom of a serious academic establishment, an act of charity that gives magic-users a place to be even if they couldn't hack it in [i]real[/i] arenas of arcane study. Sometimes sorcerers themselves are treated more like magical anomalies or supernatural creatures than academy members, fit to be probed and studied but not to be afforded authority or respect. For this reason, a great many sorcerers eschew the academy system entirely, instead finding places directly in mercenary companies and army units or simply going their own way.

Warlocks are a particular problem for wizard's academies, because they are often very hard to tell from wizards. The more public the profession of wizardry is, the more people there are that want to join it, and the warlock pact has always provided a path to arcane power for those who lack the talent, temperament, or patience to learn to cast spells in the normal fashion. In theory, it is possible to detect by magic whether a given magic-user is a curse-slinging, soul-reaving heretic rather than a proper wizard, but in practice the pact is cunning, insidious, and secretive [i]and[/i] an enormous body of wizarding tradition specifically prohibits wizards from subjecting each other to batteries of invasive magical tests. After all, not only is it demeaning, but it might be the pretext for an assassination attempt, either during the scan or afterwards once the scanner has detected some sort of crucial weak spot in the scan-ee's magical wards. So it is that a secret heretic is occasionally found hiding among the apprentices (or the journeymen, or sometimes even the senior faculty) of a wizard's academy, and summarily imprisoned and executed. No doubt many more escape discovery entirely, and operate to this day.

Bards often practice at the peripheries of wizard's academies as loremasters, archivists, guest lecturers, or practical advisers. Depending on the power and personal style of the arcanist in question, a bard might be barely afforded more respect than a sorcerer or enjoy frequent collaboration with the academy master. Precisely because some of what is technically classified as bardic magic is almost indistinguishable from wizardry, the wizards of an academy are usually very careful to keep track of which magic-users count as proper, spellbook-using wizards and which magic users are "merely" bards or other dabblers, in order to keep wizards at the top of the pecking order.