Royal Osmic Order

You know better than anyone the gods are not always clear, never mind kind. The road from here is not always clear to me.

-Valkan Astera, Mendicant Oracle

This article (or section) contains potential spoilers for Entangling Vines.

It is not befitting a member of the Star-Counters to be over reliant on the stars. They don't lie per-se, but even the wisest may lie to herself.

-Fascine Roam, Eldest Star-Counter

This article (or section) contains potential spoilers for the Path of Entanglement Campaign. If you are a participant in that campaign, consider reading something else.

The Royal Osmic Order, often shortened to "Osmic Order", "Royal Wizards", or "Wise Lords", are an order of wizards in the Kingdom of Bastonia. Unlike the majority of formal wizardry circles operating legally in the kingdom, the Osmics are not known for operating an Arcane Seminary. Instead, they are a prestige order populated entirely by journeyman (or higher) wizards; upon joining the order, wizards are often asked to cease using the titles they obtained from other orders, and are reduced to the status of Journeyman. The Royal Osmic Order serves two major functions in the Bastonian state:

1. Court wizards trained specially for service to members of the House of Baston and other high-ranking officers and aristocrats, and;
2. Wizards Errant, receiving special training to better suit them to an adventurous or mendicant role, serving as a sort of royal troubleshooter.

The headquarters of the order is the Osmic Tower, a fortification constructed in like fashion to an Arcane Seminary. However, due to their atypically famous, affluent, and well-connected membership, a disproportionate number of their members maintain their own strongholds and dwellings throughout, and even outside of, the Kingdom.

Membership

As mentioned in the summary of the article, the Royal Osmic Order is not usually engaged in the recruitment and training of raw apprentices, preferring to leave the messy and often labor-intensive work of the initial education of wizards to the more approachable Arcane Seminaries. Instead, a secondary function of all members is identifying and evaluating candidates for membership among other wizards encountered throughout Bastonia and the world, who are then invited to apply for membership on their own. On joining, the Osmic Order usually expects inductees to renounce their past affiliations and titles with other arcane orders, or at the very least to cease to proclaim or be announced by them.

Recruitment and Promotion

The Osmic Order recruits preferentially among trained Ars Magica practitioners who studied at Bastonian Arcane Seminaries. Due to their mixed-political role, only Bastonian citizens are considered for recruitment; like the kingdom itself, this makes their membership disproportionately human, though of course belonging to the human race is not in and of itself a requirement.

Trusted members of the order - those granted Court Residency or the title of Questor or above - have been through enough of the initial training (and retraining) of the members to be familiar with the recruitment process. They can write Letters of Recommendation to the Proctor-General of the order, at which point the Chapter of Proctors involve themselves, evaluating the potential recruit before deciding whether or not to invite the candidate for examination.

There is a codified examination process which involves the submission of past bodies of work for peer review, contacting the candidate's past mentors and patrons, and, most famously, the Practical Examination, which involves running the candidate through a series of magical and physical challenges in the Trial Dungeon beneath the Osmic Tower.

Providing the Proctor-General and one other member of the Chapter of Proctors is satisfied, the new candidate is inducted into the order and assigned to the Chapter Academic. A candidate remains in this chapter until the Chapter of Proctors is satisfied that the necessary additional education in the procedures and codes of the order have been properly instilled, and the Deans of either the Chapter of Court Wizards or the Chapter Errant are satisfied that the student is a fit for their chapter, at which point they are moved into their new position.

Promotion within chapters is rare as their hierarchy is flat. While Osmics may still attain ranks of Mastery in the same way as at other Arcane Semenaries, internal promotion within the order tends to be generational, with the Chapter Deans, Proctor-General, and Curate of the Royal Osmic Order often personally grooming their own protegees into the position.

Ethics and Internal Oversight

Ethics (and ethical conduct) are a primary focus of the education of the Royal Osmic Order, which is both the reason for, and because of, their trusted positions in the courts of the Kingdom. Since their new inductees are often versed in Ars Magica, the study of ethics and related philosophical and theological subjects actually often consumes more time for students in the order than magical studies do. This education does not rely on the rote memorization of codified ethical constraints, but on the identification of "occasions" for ethical application, and the necessary logical foundations to make sound ethical decisions on a situation-by-situation basis. During this process, students are routinely drilled and monitored inside and outside of their formal educational periods, with their ethical performance evaluated and corrective instruction applied.

This focus is due to cold reality - Osmics are often an order of magnitude more powerful than any other local spellcasters, but must remain trustworthy enough to be assigned royal errands or to guard royal or aristocratic lives.