The Colleges of Magic

The Colleges of Magic are the eight great schools of sorcery that stand in the Empire's capital, the only places in the realm of men where magic may be studied openly and without the shadow of the pyre. Each college is devoted to a single one of the Winds of Magic, the eight strands of arcane power that blow through the world, and each teaches its initiates to master that wind alone. To dabble across the winds, or to draw on raw Chaos magic, is the surest road to madness and damnation.

The colleges arose from a hard-won compromise. For centuries the folk of the Empire of Man had burned wizards alongside witches, making no distinction between disciplined art and daemonic corruption. Only when the elven mage Teclis instructed the Empire's first magisters in the safe channelling of the winds did sanctioned sorcery become possible, and the Colleges of Magic were founded in Altdorf under imperial charter. Each was granted the right to practise, provided it kept its students pure and its power in the service of the state.

Within each college, apprentices endure years of rigorous and perilous instruction under the eye of their magisters, learning to bind a single wind to their will. The colleges maintain a proud independence from one another, their traditions and temperaments as different as the winds they command, yet all answer to the same charter and the same grim necessity. Their Battle Wizards march with the Empire's armies, where a single magister may scatter a foe with fire, lightning, or the terrors of the grave.

Ever the colleges walk a razor's edge, for the magic they wield is the same stuff that Chaos twists to its ends. A wizard who reaches too far, or grows too proud, may find his gift become his doom. The witch hunters watch the colleges closely, and the magisters watch themselves more closely still, for they alone understand how thin the line between the scholar and the sorcerer truly is.