How do arcane spellcasters organize themselves in your setting? Do they have an independent sovereign entity like ?

I can't imagine why anyone would want to play 5E

The players are way more easier to find.

I think arcane spellcasters are pretty likely to be mostly solitary, just in a tower or with an apprentice - after all, "the plural of Wizard used to War"

Actually, I wonder what a scale of magic users from most to least solitary would look like - Warlocks and Witches often have covens, where Druids tend to be pretty hermit-like (unless they're the sort that like to build henges) and Clerics and other Divine magic users often are part of a wider religion

...

Hello friends i will now discuss my shitty setting

~250-300 years ago, there was an empire who grew extremely prosperous as a result of their usage of agricultural magic to fuel their exploding population. The caveat to this, though, is that the tribal group who unified the empire treated this magic as a divine, religious source of power. This became an issue when a tribal group on the outskirts of the empire, who had already committed the faux pas of researching/using non-Earth-based magic declared that the empire was rapidly exhausting its magical resources.

Facing persecution, they fled, establishing a university town in the colder, northern climates a sea away, and in about a century of development's time, became signatory to a confederation involving neighboring kingdoms, taking advantage of their newfound political clout to attain more resources and conduct more wide-reaching research. They do not hold any authority as much as they are simply the single most comprehensive collection of individuals/information on magic (but they aren't anywhere close to being the authority on everything).

P.S. about ~20-30 years after they fled the empire attempted to use information they seized from abandoned libraries to resolve their magic "drought" and more or less blew themselves--and the millions within their borders--up.

The Imperial College holds a monopoly on the practise of magic. Anyone practising magic without a College-issued license gets a very brief visit from the College's Enforcers.

For mages, you're either a College affiliate, a hounded outlaw, or a corpse.

This post assumes a shitload of things about how magic and wizards work in every readers setting.

It is a bad post and you should feel bad.

Do you prefer to include mundane studies at institutions of magical education (i.e. to understand theories involved in particular techniques, students must concurrently study arithmetic and/or astrology) or have them seperate such that nobles with no magical aptitude can study their boring nerdshit like writing and mathematics?

or both

wizards are the government, and by being one you are a federal employee. For some it's like being a mailman and for others it's like governor or mayor.

>his setting isn't one where the presence of more than a few serious spellcasters did dramatically change the world into something unrecognizable

A wizard state, that'd be weird

...

In current setting they either get sanctioned or they get a bolter round through the noggin. any claim of rogue casters running around is heresy and subject to summary execution.

In the fantasy worlds of my own creation, when arcane casters are even a thing they are generally too few in number and too widely dispersed to have any kind of unifying organization. So they will mostly just adopt the society they grew up in.

>Considering how powerful wizards can become
>can become
>can
If the academics who stay in the university all day and just study are hitting anything above level five, I don't know what to tell you.

Ten thousand level five wizards isn't going to destabilize the world that much.

Well, at least it isn't 3.5. Or, even worse, its retarded cousin, Pathfinder.

It varies, but the end result is always disaster.

There have been theocracies, there have been wizard colleges, there have been lone mages in their towers flinging curses and insults at each other. It never lasts more than a couple of generations before someone triggers a Scouring.

There is some Thing that gets attracted to sufficiently high powered or concentrated magic. No one knows what it is, because no one has ever lived to tell about it. But the world is littered with the perfectly preserved cities of once great civilizations and kingdoms where every living thing there, and every object of magic, has just... disappeared. For more than a hundred miles in every direction. Whatever it is that triggers a Scouring, when the Scouring comes it seems out every person and everything touched by magic it can find. The fact that the affected areas are so uneven, and some even seem to follow long and winding trails, leads many to believe that it isn't just some magical burst of energy but rather something alive. Or alive-ish. Alive enough to hunt people down, at any rate.

Historians have compiled what they can about these sudden genocides, but aside from exclusively targeting powerful magic users its hard to say what the specific trigger is. This has made mages increasingly insular over time, because working together increases the odds of being in the neighborhood when some asshole crosses the invisible line and kills you all. But small Scouring events have shown that even a single sufficiently powerful and ambitious wizard working alone can trigger a Scouring.

As you can imagine, lots of place just kill magic users on sight these days.

An interesting thing to point out for Veeky Forumss favorite powerwanking discussions is that you should basically never see a mage above level 10. Any mage that hits level 11+ is by definition some kind of weird freak of nature monster hunter the like of which the world sees maybe once in a hundred years.

Why? Simple. Because if we are being generous, the vast, vast, vaaaaaaaast majority of people are level 3 or below. Anyone above that is some kind of rare exceptional hero or master of their craft. This means that your wizard can kill every villager they ever meet in their entire lives, wipe out whole armies again and again, and once they hit level 10 it becomes literally impossible for them to gain more xp unless they start hunting down powerful monsters or other legendary badasses.

High level monsters are by necessity rare, otherwise no one would be left alive. Legendary badasses have the same problems leveling up you do.

In any world that isn't specifically crafted by the GM to be a series of progressing encounters designed to make you level up regularly, there literally isn't enough xp in the world to hit level 20. It can't be done.

So no one has ever learned the Time Stop spell, EVER.

That's a bold assertion to make.

Either the typical Master and Apprentice relationship or a relatively small organization controlled by a close knit cabal because history shows that every time magical knowledge is freely disseminated to the general populace there is some country or world wrecking calamity brought upon by some asshole.

...

...