The Tower of Troubles

The Tower of Troubles is a Mages guild where young wizards and sorcerors are trained in the Art. It arose as a compromise between the gods of Bareel and the human practitioners of magic.

The gods were appalled when the first human used arcane power. The story is long and complicated but basically a young man prayed for deliverance for his family and village as it was destroyed. The gods didn't answer and he swore to never pray to them again. So he escaped on his own and fled deep into the mountains. There he sheltered in a cave which ran almost to the heart of the world. There the essence of the quiessent god for whom the world was named whispered to him in dreams and taught him the use of magic. The other gods were unable to determine the source of his power and feared that men would cease to worship gods if mere mortals could perform such wonders without them. So they set their churches the task of exterminating wizards. This went on for millenia till at last Marakeer,god of secrets and knowledge discovered the source of the wizard's power and interceded on their behalf to end the crusade.

The compromise struck was that all wizards would be trained in the same manner with certain fields of study left alone ( time travel and the Void in particular). Wizards were also bound to never attack the prime temples of the human gods nor to share the great secret that all mages must know in order to learn magic. That secret being that the gods themselves were created by a greater being and sent into the Void to bring substance and life there. They were bound by a geas and passed that geas on to their students.

Not all wizards accepted the Geas and are subject to being hunted by the churches Holy Purifiers, Priests trained and equipped to kill wizards.

The Tower of Troubles provides basic magic training and testing for human and half human wizards. In due time they locate masters to which students may apprentice and have vast libraries of arcane and mundane lore . Some library materials require special permission from the Tower Master to study. Towers also sell wizards spell components ; even rare and hard to find items are avilable at the larger Cities Towers. Wizards must pay yearly dues in money, service, or items equal to 100 gp /level. This grants them access to all Towers in the human kingdoms as well as permission to wield arcane magic without penalty. Each tower has lists of mages in the area their field of expertise and offer referrals for such. Another 'perk' of being a Tower Mage is that the Emperor may call upon any Tower Mage to serve in the military for a Five year term as a battlemage. They then undergo special training in combat spellcasting and battlemagics.

Tower Masters are always Epic levels and have served a ten year long stint as a battlemage( achieving the rank of Warmage).