The League of the Mind

Those who belong to the League of the Mind are obsessive experimentors, combining a keen creative intellect with a short attention span. The original mandate of the League was to provide solutions for public work projects (sewers, boilers, and roadways), but their increasingly far-fetched experiements satisfy only their insatiable curiosity. Sometimes their experiements yield useful technological advancements; oftentimes they produce unintended mana geysers, spatial rifts, arcane portals, or huge explosions -- all of which can be useful in their own way.
The League's most grandiose experiments typically concern public work projects and elemental experimentation. These efforts use a methodology that relies on unexpected outcomes: all results are informative, even if they completely defy expectations. For example, an experiment that begins as the creation of a "hypermana focusing lens" might be renamed a "scram-range teleportal" once the researchers discover more properties of what they have fashioned. Then, after a few goblin volunteers vanish inside it, the apparatus gains the designation of "universal refuse disintegrator" -- that is, until the goblin volunteers are discovered alive, having been teleported far from the workshop. This sort of adjustment is par for the course in League experiments; the "fiddle and find out" method is favored over any process of systematic scientific research.

Inside the League

Rabalais (RA-beh-LAY-us), the founder and current leader of the League of the Mind, is a vain, temperamental, super-intelligent elder dragon that was born during the Foundation. As he directs experiments, he values results over success, accepting and even anticipating that League experiments will end in glorously unpredictable ways. However, the dragon rarely concerns himself with the day-to-day running of the guild, preferring to craft long-range plans and let underlings implement the details.
The League of the Mind is organized into units designated as laboratories that specialize in certain fields of reserch. Though they all operate under the general guidance of the League's board of directors, each lab is typically left alone to conduct its research. Now, fields of study emerge all the time, but the more established laboratories -- each populated by hundreds of mages and their attendants -- include the following:

• The Laboratory of Pyrology (heat, fire, and combustion)
• The Laboratory of Storms and Electricity (controlling weather and containing and conducting electrical energy)
• The Laboratory of Metallurgy (smelting, forgins, and working with the magical metal known as mizzium)
• The Laboratory of Alchemy (transmutation)
• The Laboratory of Orientation (teleportation and spatial recombination)
• The Laboratory of Mimeography (means of duplicatin)
• The Laboratory of Continuism (temporal manipulation)
• The Laboratory of Arcane Geometry (counter-magic and redirection)
• The Laboratory of Gravitational Inversion (graviturgy, and means of flight)
• The Laboratory of Plasma-Dermatology (combining opposing elements with the purpose of creating creatures)

Goals of the League

The League thirsts for knowledge, cherishes intellect, and speculates about the secrets of the multiverse. It brings to its scientific pursuits a flaming passion that turns its search for knowledge into an insatiable hunger, makes its cold intellect brilliantly fruitful, and widens its speculation into a search for connections between wildly disparate objects or concepts. It is manic in its expression of creative energy, shifting from careful analysis to intuitive leap seemingly for no reason, always thinking outside the proverbial box. As the League sees it, unpredictable action, far from being antithetical to methodical research, has experimental value: in the words of one researcher: "The only action worth taking is one with an unknown outcome."

Type

Consortium, Research