Mostly no, but have you considered the Pathfinder Society?
Do you believe that there is no communication and coordination between the different magic colleges, cabals, guilds and what have you? Spellcasters communicate, and they tend to ignore borders and often ignore ideological differences. I rather doubt that any serious spellcaster is going to require a dedicated organization, and would probably consider such a controlling concept limiting.
What Daw said. The mages gather in one place if they want to conduct a cooperative research, or for the purpose of teaching magic, but apart from that they are free to travel and contact other magic hubs.
I imagine they work a lot like academic community IRL: there are local centries of study and research, but it's not uncommon for people from one place to visit another and share knowledge. Some of them may find work in business or find another sopurce of income, but they still may maintain some connection with the community.
That's a rather modern conception based on the scientific revolution. RL alchemists were much more secretive, hoarding their secret knowledge and writing it all down in code. Wizards might well be similar; at best they'd probably want something in return.
That's a rather modern conception based on the scientific revolution. RL alchemists were much more secretive, hoarding their secret knowledge and writing it all down in code. Wizards might well be similar; at best they'd probably want something in return.
IRL yes, but I think that it was at least partially because they didn't want their patrons to know that they have no idea how to make gold.
But I am comparing Pathfinder mages to real scholars, not just alchemists. Because in a world where the existance of magic is an obvious fact, there is no Church that would hunt arcane practitioners, and there are multiple academies openly teaching magic, I think mages themselves would be more open.
And IRL, in medieval times, there were many scholars that studied and teched at many universities. Duns Scotus teached at Oxfrod, Cambridge and Paris; Albertus Magnus studied or teached at Cologne, Paris, and several other places; there are many other examples. Of course, travel was more difficult, so once they moved, they usually stayed for a few years, unlike today, when they can visit several scientific conferences every year. But exchange of people, books and theories between numerous universities was common in medieval times as well.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
That's a rather modern conception based on the scientific revolution. RL alchemists were much more secretive, hoarding their secret knowledge and writing it all down in code. Wizards might well be similar; at best they'd probably want something in return.IRL yes, but I think that it was at least partially because they didn't want their patrons to know that they have no idea how to make gold.
Actually, in most cases of real life no.
Only when science and scholars had a real reason to hide from oppressive governments, particularly religious ones, was secrecy a big thing. The Greeks, Romans, and the early Arabs, Persians were all people open to knowledge (the Black Plague ended the Middle Eastern Age of Enlightenment and heralded the Western one by first destroying the urban, cosmopolitan middle eastern cultures and breaking the power of the church in the west.Only the charlatan abberant con-man model alchemists were particularly secretive, most shared knowledge. Granted there wasn't modern levels of knowledge yet to share, but the technology of easy communication didn't really exist yet. Wizards being real in Golarian have no real problems with communication, and the printing press is a thing there too.