Mage School: Shining Door

Home: Mighal

Enrollment: ~1,000

Motto: "Passage Is Always There"

The Shining Door school is almost entirely made up of those casters who enjoy moving things across space in a short time, and have created several specialized arcane traditions, such as Dimensionalism and Kineticism, and serve as "home" for many conjurers. They specialize in transportation and teleportation magic, and as such, they are really more of a merchant guild than a mage school, charging exorbitant prices to set up the rare (priceless, really) teleportation circles and dimensional doorways used across Azgaarnoth.

Membership

Membership in the Shining Door is open to those who wish to learn Dimensionalism, Kinetics, conjurers, and the odd sorcerer who enjoys traveling. Warlocks will often come to the school to learn how to find their Patron directly, and most leave unsatisfied on that score.

Tendencies

Shining Door adherents rarely leave their tower (most true for the central tower in Mighal), at least not by normal methods; while their tower looks like a plain, simple, guard tower with no windows (or even murder holes), on the inside, it is a vast and wondrous collection of dimensional portals to a wide variety of other places (and, supposedly, planets and planes) all of which are accessible at the flick of a finger. It is said that anyone looking to shorten a trip anywhere in Azgaarnoth can go to a tower of the Shining Door, describe the place desired, and step through a glowing door (hence the name) to arrive at their destination--for a price. (Return trips, of course, are up to the individuals in question; unless negotiated ahead of time, all passage is one way.)

Connections

The Shining Door is actually quite willing to sell copies of their unique spells to magi willing to buy them, at a hefty price. For whatever reason, though, only a few casters really see the advantage in being able to travel across the length and breadth of continents, when compared to tossing a fireball or bringing corpses to life, and the Shining Door is quite happy to continue to let that bias remain.

All of the Bardic Colleges in Mighal have a very deep relationship with the Shining Door, and any bard in good standing with one of the Mighal Colleges can request the use of the Tower Doorways for free... in exchange for entertainment, news, rumors, information, and the periodic trip out to obtain new material components. (Many of the bards who have this connection with the Shining Door also seem to have a copy of the Dimensionalist spells in their arcane repertoire.)

Periodically, a mercenary company will approach the Shining Door about contracting a mage (or small squad of them) to gain an advantage in maneuver against their enemies, and they are all universally turned away--Shining Door members are prohibited from taking employment with a military unit.

Restricted Spells