The training time on a Senior Warden used to be about 50 years, lead time to be on the Senior council is at least 150 years
World Population in 2007: 6.7 Billion
World Population in 1957: 2.8 Billion
World Population in 1857: 1.2 Billion
The lead time to competent wizardry is just long by the standards of the population explosion that industrialization has caused
Good to have hard numbers for this quest.
But yeah, this is why I argued so hard for Molly to personally take the Peabody situation in hand.
A single dead experienced wizard takes decades to replace, and has knockon effects in everything from fewer wizards trained to less capability to prevent warlocks springing up.
Peabody managed to kill fifty even as he went down in canon.
Letting them fumble this just creates future problems for us and everyone else.
Never said it was but running around with swords and killing people over supposed laws that a lot of magic users never heard of until a Warden came knocking on their door may have the side-effect of discouraging other Wizard organizations from forming.
Only if you've been breaking the Laws.
Magical mercs like Binder have stayed operating more or less openly, taking contracts from the White Court and the Denarians despite Council disapproval because they dont break the rules.
A group of wizards who wanted to stay out would not leave the Council any legitimate room for complaint.
McCoy might gank them though.
The outsiders are a threat, but they aren't infinite inside reality and if they could do this casually then they could also use other things to accomplish the same goal.
I'm not saying wizards should have no answer, but DF wizards don't have a pile of immunities to things. They learn spells and make tools to solve their problems.
Infinite? No. Significant? Almost definitely yes.
Even not counting those who sneak across the Gates?
It doesnt appear to take all that much to summon even a Walker, and Blood Rites demonstrates you dont need to be a wizard-class magic user to do so.
Besides, we canonically see the Walker He Who Walks Behind get banished and return within fifteen years.
And thats just in the Chicago area.
There's got to be something to prevent them systematically hacking away at the training pipeline of the White Council by targeting its apprentices and young wizards.
Just like the healing thing wasnt
invented mentioned until Dresden got his arm barbecued by a flamethrower.
Thats just every year, that shit adds up massively because they don't age. 100 billion people have died in history.
About a 100,000 potential wizards have existed, and i doubt child hood mortality due their healing factor.
Thats just a skill issue, pedagogy and teaching has advanced massively in that time period as well.
The wizard still do apprenticeship as a major component.
1)Wizards die like everyone else, from disease, from accidents, from violence.
Bob's first master Etienne the Enchanter, the guy who made his skull, was burned at the stake in Middle Ages France.
They just recover better from injury that doesnt kill them.
2)Childhood mortality was explicitly a factor. As was infectious disease in general for adults.
Word of Jim:
Disease said:
Info on Wizard healing + other wizardly limitations
(long ago) Disease, in general, was a lot more rampant and likely to kill you.
Yeah, wizards have the capacity to recover from things, but they don't have any particular increased resistance to contracting a disease. They just come back from it in better shape than regular folks. For example, if you get a good case of pneumonia (like I did), you've got a reduced capacity to resist subsequent similar infections. And that's it. In fact, having gotten pneumonia once gives you a pretty darn big mathematical probability that you're going to die of pneumonia in the future. (Pneumonia being one of the main things that actually does the killing when you've got cancer or other serious medical issues.) Wizards don't face that same danger. If they beat it, they beat it, and it isn't of any more consequence than getting over a cold.
But even so, before antibiotics, wizards were as worried about disease as everyone else was. And a great way to not get diseases was to STAY HOME. Which most of them did.
3)There is absolutely zero evidence that modern methods of teaching have anything to contribute to the process of teaching a wizard how to wizard. And the wizards in particular, and the supernatural community in general, have more than a thousand years of documented experience in training wizards
(I said the supernatural community, because we know Elaine Mallory, Molly Carpenter, Listens to Wind and the first Merlin all had nonhuman magic tutors)
Dresden, for example, comes from a teaching lineage that stretches back to when Odin taught the Merlin.
Ebenezar McCoy literally wrote the starter textbook for young wizards.
4)Specialization is a function of societies with excess resources.
In a population as small as the global wizard population is supposed to be and as spread out as it is, there isnt the excess population for people to specialize to do nothing but teach.
Nor can you simply abduct some tween or teen from their family to teach them magic; that Hogwarts shit dont fly these days.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as one standardized way of doing magic.
Every wizard is different, and needs to have what they are taught customized to them and their talents. Ramirez's shields work very differently from how Dresden's do, for example, because he wizards different.
And its not like apprenticeship is a dirty word.
Grad students in a lot of programs are essentially apprentices of some professor or the other, and it remains a major way in which a lot of trades are passed on in the modern day.