Thaumaturgical School

Thaumaturgical schools are institutions that likewise function as both instructional academies and foundations of magical research and manufacture, as well as centres of literature and learning related to fields of magic. As such, they are regarded by the world as places of immense and unsettling power, whose walls enclose not merely wealth, learning and authority, but dangerous arts, hidden knowledge and persons capable of working changes in the world that to which ordinary people cannot relate. Even as these schools are admired, and of course richly endowed, they are still looked upon with unease, suspicion and a kind of fearful respect, as institutions standing apart from the prevailing structure of society.

These schools customarily consist of student dormitories and associated quarters for instructors; instructional rooms and lecture halls for formal teaching; gardens, orchards and cultivated grounds for the raising of herbs, roots and other natural magical components; workshops appointed for the fashioning of wood, metal, cloth, glass and other materials, looms, forges and such other facilities as are needed for the creation of various magic items; and finally large libraries with adjoining reading rooms, scriptoria and studies, where books are kept, compared, copied and consulted in the course of magical learning. Taken together, the land needed to accommodate the school's halls and houses alone, understanding that a thaumaturgical school comprises a campus and not a single building, forms only a fraction of the whole, for the institution extends into a demesne whose bounds may run to considerably more than four or five hundred acres.

Some of the largest thaumaturgical schools include those in London, Genoa, Fiume, Hamburg, Lubeck, Constantinople, Antwerp, Barcelona and Bremen... but though large, they are by no means necessarily the best. By reputation, schools in Zurich, Damascus, Manjarun, Buda, Ohrid and Porto may offer space to less students but are considered among the best in the world. In some parts of the world, most notably in Paris and Kiyev, the thaumaturgical structure is subdivided into a dozen separate institutions, still in close contact with each other but with each part known by a separate name and run by a separate board of trustees. Finally, mages the world over are often trained outside of Thaumaturgical schools, in small classrooms run by a single mage, who nevertheless is able to teach comprehension of understood magic and the use of spells without ever setting foot into a structured library. Most institutions include separate educational structures dedicated to either magical spellcasting or the use of illusions, so that individuals of either the mage or illusionist class may be taught there. The most notable gnomish thaumaturgical school, which offers only classes in illusion, is located in Parnuin, in the Kingdom of Vepses.

Instruction

Students are usually accepted into thaumaturgical schools at the age of ten or eleven, when they are introduced to magic as a problem of apprehension, consisting of a language-like structure of meanings, forms and relations, like a thought-puzzle, that must be grasped first by the mind before training begins on actually manifesting a physical representation of magic. Most students are able to manage the difficulty of being able to read magic within a period of 3 to 4 years.

The next stage of instruction is the manifestation of magic itself, which must be achieved before the student can hope to reproduce it in the ordered and controlled form of a spell. At this point, the object of teaching is not yet the successful casting of a known enchantment, but the first outward evidence that the student is able to apprehend magical structures strongly enough for their presence to take effect upon the world. This proves exceedingly difficult, for the student must do more than perceive magic dimly or respond to it with instinct. The mind must first be brought to recognise in magical expression a coherence which does not resemble ordinary speech, ordinary memory or ordinary reason, and having recognised it, must then learn to hold that coherence long enough for it to impress itself upon the world in some outward sign. Many students need considerable time to grasp this ability not because they are dull, nor because they lack discipline, but because the structure they are trying to apprehend will not remain still in the mind, seeming one moment nearly understood and the next to have broken apart into fragments too subtle, too numerous or too strangely related to be gathered again. Instructors therefore compare the effort to hearing a language spoken all at once by a hundred voices, then being expected to answer in it without being unsettled.

Elves seem to have an extraordinarily natural affinity for this difficulty, an apprehension that also extends to half-elves but slightly less so. Every elf destined to become a mage is able to produce a resonance or momentary flash of light by the age of 25; some are able to do it when as young as 19. The youngest half-elves can manage it at 20, but more often succeed between the ages of 26 to 30. Humans have been known to manage this at age 21... but by far, most do not manage until 28 or older. It is slightly unusual to find a human of age 34 or 35 that is still struggling, but even then, such persons do manage to become magic users. Other races than these, with the exception of the gnome, cannot, in fact, apprehend this magical coherence, presumably because of their biological structure. Would-be gnomish illusionists manage the feat between the ages of 23 and 25, but may be of age 28 before doing so.

Following the first manifestation, learning of cantrips becomes a rapid and exciting period for the student; quickly, they discover they are able to master at up to a dozen, maybe more, all in the space of 18 months, regardless of race. During this time, too, the character studies hard to learn the precepts of spells stretching up in to the fifth level or higher, at least in theory, if not in practice. When the individual student proves they have succeeded in learning and using three first-level spells, they are ready to leave the school and seek a more practical, in-world education, at a speed that suits them. In nearly every case, the span between being able to manifest a magical effect and mastering three spells, as well as cantrips, requires the space of five years.