Magnus and the Founding of the Order's Code

In the years immediately following the collapse of Venn, Magnus -- then fifty years old and the most powerful surviving wizard in Kyrell -- wrote a document he titled 'On the Obligations of Those Who Know More.' It was addressed to no one in particular and distributed as widely as he could manage given that civilization was in the process of falling apart.

The document contained three principles:

First: Those with arcane power are accountable to those without it, not to each other.

Second: The collective judgment of trained practitioners is more reliable than the judgment of any individual, including the most powerful individual.

Third: The purpose of arcane regulation is the protection of the unprotected, not the protection of practitioners from scrutiny.

These three principles became, with modification, the founding ethical code of the Orders of Wizardry. Magnus spent the next two decades arguing against every modification he considered substantive, winning some arguments and losing others. He died before the Orders coalesced into their current form, but the Code they operate under is recognizably descended from his draft.

The Orders do not advertise Magnus's authorship of the Code. This is not an intentional obscuring of history -- it is simply that the Code, having been adopted, became the Orders', not his. Magnus would have approved of this.