Connects to: 14.23, 15.11, 21.14, 24.18, 26.13, 29.13, 29.14.09, 29.14.46 and 39.14.
Most sorcerers in these lands learn their art by apprenticing themselves to an established wizard. There are stories from far lands of great wizarding academies but the City of Shuttered Windows has none, unless you count the Necromantic Office.
In the dark rooms of this sunken tower young children (almost always castrated boys see 39.14) are gathered but there are no classrooms, no texts and no examinations. Instead they listen to the voices in the walls that come from the entombed bodied and encysted spirits of their predecessors. Often the frightened children spend months at a time listening to the ghosts of long-dead necromancers chat pleasantly with each other within their heads.
Eventually the youths pick up enough necromancy through osmosis and are allowed to join the Necromantic Office. Before that point, however, they are encouraged to monitor each other and report any novices whose sanity seems to fall beyond accepted parameters.
The Office’s educational methods ensure that knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next. However, this often results in students who know where every curry shop in the city was five centuries ago but don’t know how to dispel hostile magic. And every so often one of the ancient and quietest of the spirits of the walls will whisper the formula of a spell that even the elves have forgotten into a young mind.
Adult members of the Necromantic Office play an important role in the City of Shuttered Windows. They keep the White Road (26.13 and 29.13) quiet, ensure that the dead do not walk without permission, regulate proper corpse disposal, animate the corpses of prisoners to prevent criminals from avoiding serving out their full terms (29.14.09), stitch together the flesh golems that escort noble exiles from the city (14.23) and prosecute those who disturb the dead without the proper licenses.
In return for their valuable services they receive everything that people have on them when they die and are granted full immunity from all convictions in the courts of the City unless the charge is heresy.
The Office itself is very secure. If any intruders enter, one of the thousands of ghosts will certainly sound the alarm and the ghosts themselves can easily enter the minds of those nearby and wreck all sorts of havoc.
Connections:
- The Office is not pleased with Lady Alevari (29.14.37).
- Lars the chimera is an ally of the Necromantic Office (Suitor’s Tower).
- Sir Codwise the Old, the Spellknight of the Knights of the Cudgel, has important contacts with the Necromantic Office (21.14).
- Ranmore is an exiled necromancer who is currently working for the Ossory witchclan, if the Office knew of his more extravagant ambitions they would be very concerned (24.18).
- Silk merchants squabbling over bodies has drawn the attention of the Office (29.14.46).
- One of the old lords of the Keep of Dreanach was a renegade member of the Office (15.11).
Hooks:
- Why are most (all?) members of the Necromantic Office eunuchs?
- What secrets do the ghosts know? Any nifty signature spells?
- Are there any duties have the Office has been shirking?
- What happens to novices who are driven crazy by the ghosts?
- What sorts of crimes have members of the Office gotten away with? Don’t they police their own?
- Who would be crazy to try to raid a necromancer guildhall?