States and Wizards

How states manage their relationship with wizards, and why the relationship takes the shape it does.

The Asymmetry

States cannot coerce wizards. They cannot outspend them in the relevant currency, cannot threaten them with anything a wizard cannot threaten back harder, and cannot appeal to loyalty or ideology because wizards have no stake in political systems. A wizard’s power is personal, portable, and not dependent on anything a state controls. The wizard-priest is a partial exception — their dependence on the religious institution creates a genuine mutual bond — but for wizards at large, the state has no leverage.

What states can do is make themselves useful. The relationship resembles how a city-state might handle a neighbouring power it cannot defeat: not submission, but a careful ongoing effort to ensure the more powerful party always has a reason to leave you alone and occasionally a reason to help you.

What States Provide

Wizards need artifacts, rare materials, and information. States control trade networks, borders, archives, and the movement of goods. A state that positions itself as a reliable source of things wizards value — a place where artifacts surface and are sold rather than destroyed, where materials are available, where information flows — makes itself commercially indispensable. The wizard keeps coming back because the relationship keeps paying out.

The standing agreement pipeline is where this becomes most concrete. A wizard who establishes a standing agreement for a true relic needs skilled artisans to produce replicas at scale and distribution networks to spread them. The wider the replica base, the heavier the pattern becomes and the harder it is for the world to let it lapse. A state that provides the artisan labour and trade infrastructure to make this happen takes a cut and builds a lasting relationship.

Tollman is the natural example. It is a trade hub with the skilled artisan base needed to produce replica relics, a sorcerer school, and a port connecting it to wider routes. A city in that position has every reason to cultivate the relationship deliberately — making sure wizards find it easy and profitable to do business there, ensuring that anything a wizard might want tends to pass through channels where the city can facilitate the transaction.

States may also offer administrative infrastructure: smooth handling of large transactions, preferential treatment of a wizard’s agents, or simply the bureaucratic machinery that makes commerce at scale possible without the wizard having to manage it themselves.

The Relationship in Practice

The day-to-day probably involves a great deal of careful protocol and very little direct contact. A state that deals regularly with wizards likely maintains an intermediary — a designated role, someone whose job is to handle wizard-adjacent matters without bothering the wizard with anything beneath their interest or provoking them with anything clumsy. This person needs to understand that the normal tools of statecraft — flattery, pressure, obligation, reciprocity — do not work here, and that the only language that functions is straightforward commercial utility.

When a wizard wants something from state territory, the answer is almost always yes, quickly, with no friction. Not out of fear exactly, though fear underlies it, but because the state has internalized that being easy to work with is the entire strategy. A wizard who finds a state obstructive or slow will either route around it or remove the obstruction. Neither outcome is good for the state.

States also maintain a studied ignorance about what wizards are doing. What a wizard is acquiring, what they are building toward, what their stockpile looks like — these are questions a state is better off not asking. Asking implies surveillance, surveillance implies threat assessment, and a wizard who notices they are being assessed will not respond warmly. The state treats the wizard’s private affairs as simply not its business, because the alternative is worse.

Requests and Limits

States do occasionally ask for things — a wizard’s involvement in a conflict, a public signal of alignment that deters an enemy, help acquiring something the state cannot get through normal channels. These asks are framed purely as transactions, never as favours, and accompanied by whatever the state can offer in return.

The risk is misreading the relationship as warmer than it is. A state that has had a long and stable commercial relationship with a wizard might begin to believe there is goodwill there — that the wizard would help in a crisis out of something like loyalty. This is a dangerous mistake. The wizard values the relationship instrumentally. If the state becomes costly — if helping it requires real expenditure, if it creates conflict with another wizard, if the commercial value drops below the inconvenience — the relationship ends, or worse. States that have survived around wizards for a long time probably learned this lesson at some point, possibly at significant cost.

The Religious Exception

Wizard-priests create a structurally different relationship between wizard and state. A wizard-priest relies on a pattern sustained by the congregation’s belief, which requires the religious institution, which requires the state structures that support it. The wizard has a genuine stake in the institution’s survival — not out of piety, but because the pattern only works while the masses hold it.

Cairnholm is the clearest case. As the seat of the dominant faith, it houses the True Relic of the Capricorn and the temple hierarchy that maintains the rites. A wizard-priest embedded in that hierarchy depends on Cairnholm’s stability in a way a purely commercial wizard never would. The city provides the institutional and political scaffolding that keeps the congregation intact, and the wizard-priest’s power flows from the continuation of that arrangement.

This produces a more stable and reciprocal relationship than the commercial kind. The wizard-priest cannot simply walk away if the relationship becomes inconvenient — abandoning the institution means abandoning the pattern. In return, the state gains a wizard whose interests are genuinely aligned with its own, at least insofar as both need the institution to survive. The cost is that this alignment binds the wizard more tightly to the institution’s fortunes: a state that collapses may take the wizard-priest’s power base with it.