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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 9334327" data-attributes="member: 2303">Yeah, the church is the great exception. They maintained an international infrastructure during the dark ages when no-one else could. Greyhawk lacks this kind of church, and doesn't have any equivalent in another field. Nor is wizardry really equivalent to any other guild. The journeyman system as its believed to have worked in the early medieval period was literally about journeys. You studied your craft as an apprentice in one town, but once you got your journeyman credentials you had the opportunity to journey to different places and learn from different masters. This spread know-how and made the state of each craft similar over large areas. If a new technique was developed in Paris, it would soon spread to the rest of Europe.But this is not how I imagine wizardry to work. I guess my idea of paranoid wizards actually comes from Gary Gygax and the early DMG, to me this seems to be the norm of how wizardry is seen in RPGs. DnD and Ars Magica certainly has similar ideas about this secrecy of wizards. In history, the idea of technological state secrets is actually a fairly recent one, perhaps 19C. Rather, the problem in medieval history was getting people to accept new ideas, not to keep those ideas secret.I guess what I'm saying is that you're right, there really is no historical precedent for magic being kept secret. There is precedence in fiction.</blockquote>