Imperial Magic Guild

Imperial Magic Guild is the Grand Empire of Karadia's one and only magical organization. It's tasked with training new generations of mages, magicians and sorcerers, providing the Empire with a firepower of tens of thousands of magic users, and both exploring and understanding the deeper workings of the universe (not to mention getting rich off it). So much about the theory.
The truth is that the Imperial Magic Guild is supposed to neutralize the political power of the archmages, simultaneously keeping them useful and pacified. The Second Empire kept its mages on the short leash, but the memory of the First Empire and its recurring problems with the loyalty of its magic users (including a short interregnum of a full-blown Magocracy, not remembered fondly) remains. After all, it's not easy to deal with influential group of people with an ability to brainwash other people, if needed.
The result, among other things, is that the exact internal politics are intentionally messy. Archmages and senior mages are all purposefully (and subtly) encouraged by the Grand Empire to remain in a constant state of internal turmoil, with numerous coteries coming and going. Some of the most significant coteries going renegade over the ages is considered a small price to pay for the fact that none of them are strong enough to topple the government.
It isn't without a side-effect. Higher ranked members of the Magic Guild are angry - and they were for centuries now. The internal dislikes between the coteries keep the Guild disarmed for now, but if one of them manages to dominate the rest, a solid competitor for the control over the remnants of the Empire will arise.

Structure

There are two levels of the Imperial Magic Guild. The first one is the field. There is always a single Collegium per province, both a building and the element of the organizational structure. All mages active in the province are considered members (permanent or temporary) of the local Collegium, which is tasked with overseeing their actions to make sure that they aren't going to go renegade or act against the Grand Empire.
The Collegia' are ruled colegially, through a form of direct democracy. Vote strength is greatly dependent on how strong are you, with the system tilted so much towards the strongest mages (8th Circle up) that most never reach the moment when they can be elected or have a serious influence on the local politics.
To avoid someone amassing too much power over the Collegium, there is no defined head of them, only a handful of officials elected for a set amount of time. The most common electable positions include:

• First Speaker - Responsible for representing the Collegium before other imperial organizations.

• First Librarian - Responsible for maintenance of the on-sight libraries and vaults.

• First Quatermaster - Responsible for supply of materials needed for the Collegium to operate.

• First Teacher - Responsible for training of new mages and magicians.

There are also some more unique ones, that are guaranteed to show up. The list includes:

• First Warden - Responsible for maintaining safety and security of the Collegium, chosen from (and by) the Wardens.

• First Prosecutor - Responsible for identification and elimination of mages that act against the Empire's best wishes. Typically elected by the head of imperial bureaucracy in the province.

Those 'First Ones' are more of a heads of departments, who then pick the mages they want to work under them (with the exact list of members typically changing every election). Beside the departments, there are also some non-aligned mages busy doing their own researches and doing some sideworks. The only exception are the Wardens, who are more or less stable.
Then is the second level of the Guild - the central one. The Silver Council composed of every single active archmage (with membership being mandatory). They reside in four Towers (less buildings and more a tower-shaped pocket dimensions), one in the north (in Elvhara), one in the south (in Karthia), on in the west (in Novia), and one in the east (in Hellana, moved there from Nikopol). This division is technically made to secure the Magic Guild from decapitation strikes (such as the one that exterminated the mages of the Second Era at the beginning the of the Twilight War), but in practice the number is because it's quite common for the Silver Council to get gridlocked, as in truly important votings that affect the entire Guild entire Tower votes as one.
This forces the Imperial Magic Guild to often rely on the imperial mediation, especially as the Towers are in constant struggle for control over the local Collegiums and access to the political dividends of their position. It is unknown how many archmages are active at any given moment, as they tend to leave their Towers rarely (as that's always' a threat to their power). What is known for sure is that twenty strongest of them in each Tower receive a title of Magister (numbered, so there is for example the Seventh or Ninth Magister of the North/West). Due to the influence that comes from these titles, there is a constant rivalry between their holders, with the occasional outsiders trying to snatch a seat of their own.

History

The Ascendant Conclave

The predecessor of the Imperial Magic Guild was the Ascendant Conclave of the First Empire, established during the reign of the Falonar dynasty with help of the specialists from the Menorian Federation. It was a relatively stable - if way more focused on efficiency rather than its exact opposite - organization, which remained for centuries. The only truly major crisis of it was when a small coterie of mages of the Conclave managed to mindcontrol four subsequent Grand Emperors and key members of their court, paving way for their perfect take-over.
Eventually, they failed. The shortlived Karadian Magocracy collapsed when the scheme was accidentally discovered and the mages lost the subsequent civil war. The result was a rather zealous purge of any mage even remotely connected to the Magocracy. Fearing a repetition of that (and knowing of how many other countries, from the Xylian Dominion to, technically, the Menorian Federation were magocracies), many more limiters and checks of the power of the mages were created.
This new and more restricted system continued on, with next to no incidents, until the Twilight War happened.

Twilight War

The Ascendant Conclave died in the first twenty seconds of the Twilight War when the Hexmachina breached the wards of the Conclave Subnetwork and brainwashed or murdered almost every single active mage in the Grand Empire. The few survivors were oddballs who never decided to connect to the Network or were outside of its range when the hammer fell. There simply wasn't enough left to rebuild the Conclave, especially as when the war ended there was not a single member of it still alive.
The result was the creation of the Imperial Magic Guild - following a period of random people trying to figure out how does the magic thing actually works (under guidance whose understanding of it wasn't enough to finish the Conclave's education course before the war. The magic in the Imperium received a massive blow, almost lethal one. It managed to persevere through sheer stubborness and the fact that it was simply needed if the Second Era was ever supposed to show up again.

After the War

The problem was that while the mages received and almost lethal blow, the same happened to the Grand Empire as a whole. Despite its power reduced thousandfold, the mages of the Magic Guild remained a threat to the Empire due to how weak it become. The Grand Emperors of the Third Empire remained - reasonably - paranoid about the threat posed by the Magic Guild, resulting in several reorganizations that, among other things, solidified the wartime split of the thaumaturgy and alchemy divisions into the newly reorganized Imperial Ministry of Production.
The much bigger problem was the discovery of how easily mages can fall - which occured rather quickly, when the forces of the Fallen swept through the massacred carcass of the Empire in the first day after death of the Hexmachina. This only added one more way in which the mages could become a threat to the Empire - while also setting the foundation for the enmity that the Imperial Cult and the Imperial Magic Guild have.

Territories

The are two main levels of territorial organization of the Imperial Magic Guild. The lower one is the Collegium, the higher one is the Tower, sometimes expanded to 'Magic Tower' in common speech, just to signify it's not just a simple tower. There are major differences between the two.
The Collegium grounds are divided into four main parts: the central building, the courtyard, the towers and the underground. The central building is a much smaller and much more mundane Magic Tower, a large (or even colossal, when in wealthier provinces) building housing the quarters of the mages of the Collegium, their personal studies, the main libraries and the lecture halls for the prospecting mages are trained. The courtyard in the middle of the complex houses either relaxations area (often a small park) or some open training areas. The towers (and the walls between them) outline the borders of the complex, with the courtyard in the middle - the towers are used as quarters for the wardens, contracted sorcerers and trainees.
The final - and according to some, the most important - part of the Collegium is its vast, subterrenean part. It includes storage areas, main laboratories and experiment halls, vault filled with artifacts and other valuable goods, and sometimes even some catacombs filled with errant elementals for the purpose of live combat training. The underground part of the Collegium can often be larger than the surface one - it is also way more resistant to truly giant-scale magical attacks, meaning that it was quite often that the entire surface complex was levelled, yet many of those hidden underground survived.
The Magic Towers are way larger. They are giant towers, often on the level when they can be considered skyscrapers yet with each level being a few square kilometers wide. They are truly massive (and are still surrounded by the walls - with towers, manned by numerous wardens - because it's a dangerous world), but actually even bigger on the inside. The ancient reality-bending technomaturgy means that every level has a size of about 20 square kilometers. On average.
The higher you go the smaller the level to slightly lessen its weight (which is potent, even with the magic that actively saps the weight out of the whole construction). However while the lower levels are shared between numerous archmages, the higher ones belong to a single Magister. As a result of said magister total control over the space in their domain, these floors are often... rather weird.

Military

Combat Units

Mortals

Mages - The bulk of the Imperial Magic Guild's manpower, the mages are the regular members of the organization that has finished the training and were recognized as such. The mages exact firepower varies. They are technically experts on a more subtle magic manipulation, making buffs and debuffs their specialty (plus defensive and detection magic, of course), however this doesn't mean that they do not pack a punch.
The exact number of mages isn't certain, much less their power grading. They finish their education at the Third Circle, become senior mages at the Sixth Circle and - although very few of them - reach the Ninth Circle.Even less progress further. Rough estimations set the number of Imperial Guild's mages to about one hundred thousand.
Archmages - Archmage is a mage that reached the pinnacle of their profession - and yet wanted more. They could no longer improve the purity and strength of the mana core in conventional sense, and instead they went through a dangerous ritual in which they bolstered the energy of their cores and let themselves get overtaken by it.
Some die. Others manage to reconstitute their bodies out of pure mana, one that resemble their old yet is always filtered through the eyes of mana. Archmages are closer to daemons in nature, and share most of their vitality - they can survive numerous supposedly lethal wounds, some are even capable of restoring themselves when turned to dust. They can weave powerful magicks. They are also immortal (although none is older than 529 years, due to the Twilight War wiping out their predecessors.
Their number is estimated at around one thousand. The eighty strongest and most influential are called magisters, and are incredibly powerful and dangerous. Although also permanently busy with their rivalries.
Magicians - Magicians are, in short, amateur mages. They receive training in recognized imperial institutions, namely in the Collegiums - this alone means that if one of them is attacked, there tend to be a handful of magicians on-site, that will participate in the defense. However once the basic course is concluded, the magicians leave the Guild and either become a part of the Imperial Adventurers Guild, or become part of some local militia or army.
They are capable of using standard 'mages' magic, however to a relatively limited degree - a dozen or so spells, up to the Third Circle, looked down by serious mages.
Sorcerers - Sorcerers are rather unstable counterpart to the mages, focused not on control but on power. They channel the raging energies of the magic in their bodies to create powerful spells, devastating everything in front of them - although they lack the mages' ability to buff and debuff.
Like magicians, they are merely trained in the Collegiums. Unlike the magicians, however, most of the Collegiums maintain a dozen or two of the sorcerers to be able to occasionally saturate a battlefield in fire or ice. Occasionally they are also send out with a mage as bodyguards slash portable demolitionists.
Wardens - Wardens are a variant of melee-combat oriented mages, initially born from the ban that forbids the Imperial Magic Guild from maintaining armed forces. Wardens are mages, and thus count as regular members of the Magic Guild and their Collegiums. They train their bodies and use specially crafted equipment to channel and reinforce themselves with magic to make up for their lack of martial arts.
They are dangerous, although their equipment and skillset tends to favour them more when they engage against supernatural threats and mages - which means that they are perfect as de facto the law enforcement of the Collegiums.

Supernaturals

Elementals - The Imperial Magic Guild deals primarily with elemental magic. It should be no surprise that they tend to employ a large number of elementals, offering them a highly diverse and expendable combat strength. They are used in attacks, in defense and, quite often, in traps - nothing means business more than a group of angry fire elementals materializing out of nowhere when someone tries to open a door without proper authorization.
The real problem with the elementals is that they require constant oversight of qualified mages - they operate on a rather alien logic, which tends to result with massive collateral damage if a more powerful elemental gets off the leash. Especially the most powerful ones are closer to being classified as living weapons of mass destruction.
Golems - Golems are material objects animated by a bound elementals, with their exact strength depending on material, the amount of it and the strength of the spirit inhabiting it. Some our merely semi-sentient puppet soldiers that can at best slow down a determined foe, some are hulking juggernauts capable of no-selling all but the strongest attacks. And some are weapons of mass destruction.
The Imperial Magic Guild rarely deploys larger number of them outside of defending the Collegiums from large-scale attacks. They aren't exactly easy to transport around, especially as you need them on the larger end of scale to be truly useful outside of mass deployment.

Type: Faction.
Allegiance: Grand Empire of Karadia
Imperial Council: Yes.
Organization Ranks:
Junior Mage - Trainee, 1st to 3rd Circle. No yet a regular member. No voting rights.
Mage - 4th to 6th Circle. Regular members. Low voting strength, can be elected to positions in smaller Collegiums.
Senior Mage - 7th to 9th Circle. Senior members. High voting strength, tends to occupy the positions in Collegiums.
Archmage - Past the 9th Circle. Immortals. Part of the Silver Council, and busy infighting.
Magister - Strongest of the archmages. Immortals, the most important members of the Council.

Combat Strength
Mages - Est. 100 000.
Archmages - Est. 1000.
Magicians - Temporary, numbers vary.
Sorcerers - Est. 10 000 +trainees.
Wardens: Est. 150-200 000.
Elementals: No estimations.
Golems: No estimations.