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. 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.