All of these magician lodges are active in Mlejnas, some more widely across Tlön. Although I (or others?) may turn some into GLOG wizards at some point, they’re meant to be easily implemented with common classes across editions.
Janissary Lodges
Of the various magician lodges of Tlön, Janissary Lodges are personal possessions of the state (in this case, the senatorial government of Mlejnas,) as are their members. The conditions of their servitude are given by the lodge charter and oath of service, both ancient, and in practice the lodges regard themselves as powers equal to the senatorial families, their charter with the state rather than any individual family ensuring their independence, proud of their status as skilled elites. For all that, to serve in either is to live a short life of obedience into an inevitable painful death. Peasant youth doing their service years in the city may be assigned as adjuncts to Janissary Lodges, but actually joining is voluntary.
Although they appreciate their de facto independent status, it suits their partners in the senate as well: the College and SIDCEG exercise powers too dangerous and necessary to be exercised by any but slaves, or to be entrusted with any one family among others.
College of Exorcists
The College is charged with defending Mlejnas against plague, undead, and other demonic incursions; in doing so, they wield the tools of the three learned professions: physick, priest, and lawyer. Through physick they exorcise with knife, fire, and alcohol (especially the tiniest demons, who can only be seen through magically ground glass.) Through priestcraft they wield moral authority, confidence, and placebo. Through the legal authority of the state they issue injunctions and negotiate plea bargains, mostly through surrender of their own bodies.
Continuing on in bodies progressively surrendered to charred ash and minds surrendered to nightmare, Collegiates are regarded as heroes and feared as creeps. Voluntarily letting demons of various sorts consume their being, the immortality they seek only comes in knowledge of service and in the cybernetics they lovingly pass down from mentor to initiate. A Collegiate at the end of her career (perhaps ten years in) is an iron lung on wheels, connected by tubes and gears, flickering with imprisoned ghosts. Modern craft has lost has lost the way of making such wonders, and for the shells of a fallen member the College will fathom any depth.
Per its charter, the College reserves the right to exercise, with an i, vast emergency powers in the event of plague or other relevant event. So far the College has certainly never used such powers to liquidate opponents, wall them within infected areas never to be seen again, offered as ransom in the manner of the Exorcists themselves, or the like.
Special Intergovernmental Disputes Compliance Ensurement Group
Like the College of Exorcists, the SIDCEG carries out important lawsuits by the state against nontraditional criminals. As a loyal province of Tlön surrounded by other loyal servants, Mlejnas would never go to war. However, sometimes disputes with other loyal servants reach a legal impasse, or they refuse to respond to a proper legal injunction, or to pay damages the Imperial Carpet would most certainly award were it not centuries incommunicado.
Tlön has no swords, but in Mlejnas plasma rifles fulfill a similar purpose - a noble weapon with no peaceful use, not to be wielded except by the warrior elite. (The regular police, colloquially referred to as the “army” and commanded when necessary by the Group, wield appropriate civilian-commoner weapons such as spears, axes, and billy clubs. Some cliff people and other bandits will operate plasma rifles, but this is regarded by all respectable parties as proof of their disrespect for decorum.)
SIDCEG members, among their other magical training, learn to bond with their mounts, most typically emus. Sometimes this process goes wrong and the human body goes forth into the wilderness to live as a bird, while the bird body is possessed of a particular form of rationality. These could in principle serve as especially qualified mounts, but in fact they are the souls of initiates who failed their most important test, and so are unceremoniously sold to private menageries. Other initiates who prove especially skilled in bonding may be assigned an even more fearsome beast to bond with and bring to warintragovernmental settlement actions, or to serve as liaisons with other ecological communities in the region covered by the Carpet.
Public Lodges
“Public Lodges” aren’t a formal arm of the state, at least in the same way Janissary Lodges are. While they are still mostly weirdos, though, they still operate as a part of the normal public world. You can bring a lawsuit against a Public Lodge and they’ll grumble (or laugh) and send their lawyers.
Cyclopædists of Anglo-America
The Cyclopædists are masters of illusion and hronir, the phenomenon of objects found because they are imagined first. They work across Tlön to expand the collective mythopoetic project describing the fanciful world of Anglo-America, or Tierra. To do so is at once the peak expression of the Sublime Philosophy and, some say, its undoing. For to describe another world, an imagined world, not just with one’s family or lodge is to engage in imposing the mind upon this world, the finest idealism one can manage, even more so than the Cartographic Commission that the Cyclopædia in some ways resembles. But at the same time the people of Tierra as described by the Cyclopædists are mostly benighted fools unaware of the Sublime Philosophy and subscribing instead to some variant of the Nine Coins heresy; and, some worry, the base materialism of these people has infected the structure of Tlön itself. Is perhaps it not the case that issues like the water reservoirs, absurdly affecting men even though they are not part of the continuously observed social world, are a result of the incursion of Tierran metaphysics? Cooler heads point out that water reservoirs ARE plainly part of the continuously observed social world, and that some magicians can speak to them showing their status as observers as well - but then, the incentives are always there to attack the Cyclopædists. Protected by Imperial law though they may be, their function is often one of social criticism.
After all, whisper opponents, don’t the Cyclopædists have a great deal of latitude over the world they’re spinning? When one of the baseball-capped mythopoets describes the inbreeding, cultural chauvinism, and eventual downfall of the Ptolemies, isn’t that just a metaphor to criticize the Core-Cadet Houses? When one tells the story of Spartacus or Turner, isn’t that just a metaphor encouraging the bondsmen of the real world to rebel? When they tell the story of Hitler or Croesus, military leaders so confident their nations would destroy all enemies and destroyed only themselves, is this not just a very thinly-veiled analogy with which to cast unpatriotic doubt on Mlej or even the Imperial Carpet itself? Cyclopædists only slyly reply that Anglo-America is quite real, as real as Tlön, but they tend to do with such a smirk that this is almost some sort of metaphor as well, or undermine it with a comment like “as real as this!” as they cast some cheap glammer.
In addition to parlor tricks and insubordination, Cyclopædists also maintain an interest in finding out hronir or dream-ghosts. The most prized dream-ghosts are isekai, whole (?) people (?) imagined (?) into being from Tierra itself, and who tend to end up in unenviable roles like messianic figure or zoo exhibit. But the Anglo-American Archives also maintains an interest in investigating ruins, by far the best place to find hronir, both sending their own members and sponsoring expeditions to find what can be found. Sometime the Archives even prefers not to send a Cyclopædist on such missions, to avoid biasing the results.
Core-Cadet Houses
Back in the heights of the empire, some aristocrats decided that passing down their enormous wealth and notorious names to their children wasn’t enough: they wanted to pass down other powers and aspects of their identity as well. They stole blood from the First Folk, gave spit samples to Stalactomancers beneath the red earth, and submitted their internal organs to haruspicy. Through this and other bioengineering projects they achieved their dream: they became true superior beings, and their children acquired their magical powers - along with their memories.
To maintain such feats in these latter days, against the effects of mutation and diffusion of patrimony, without the biochemical wonders of the past, required centuries of inbreeding. The “core” line of a Core-Cadet House consists of true-bred descendants, close to catatonic, who mumble carefully recorded prophecies and memories from long ago, and have to be assisted with their core responsibilities - eating enough to remain alive and having sex. The “cadet” part of the family consist of the children of a “core” member and an outsider, and it is these that serve these families as matriarchs, senators, and other leaders. Cadets are themselves sterilized in order to preserve the scarcity of the bloodline, and so nouveau riche are continuously being brought in in alliance.
There is one other part of the family: the founder. Haunting their dreams, trying to exercise control, flashing up in memory: the founder is intelligent in some ways but a slow or at any rate stubborn learner, and bewildered by the modern world. Most cadets learn to ignore them eventually, most of the time. Because of their psychological rigidity and seeming incomprehension at any forms of domination other than the most direct, one can safely dismiss any possibility that these ancient beings are directing their families behind the scenes.
