Say you need something guarded overnight. You could call whatever is nearest and hope it holds. Or you could have spent ten years with one family of spirits, know their tempers, and call a particular one by a name only you use.
The third trade is built on that choice, and the entry states it as a fork with no recommendation attached. Many Conjurers choose to work with a particular category of spirits, often creating powerful ties with these magical beings. Others simply choose to call upon the wide range of creatures when the need arises.1 Depth or breadth. Both are named, neither is preferred, and everything else in the trade description works either way.
The range is wide and it runs from the bottom of the ladder to the top. Nature spirits, elementals, and magical princes of nature at one end. Then the mighty forces of the celestials, the archangels and even the divine powers of the Exterior and Interior Planes — with a footnote confirming that Exterior and Interior are simply another name for Outer and Inner.
Three instruments do the calling: incantations, greater conjurations, and magical rituals. Which are three of the four named orders of working in this curriculum, from the smallest to the largest, and the Conjurer uses all of them. Then the jobs, and they are ordinary. Guarding a place. Looking for magical ingredients. Or simply combat another magical entity. A night watchman, a search party, and a fight.
One line specifies what this trade actually spends its time learning, and it is not procedure. Conjurers concentrate their studies on knowing the magical and secret names of beings, and are quite adept at interplanar relations and habits.
Names first. Which follows from how everything in this curriculum works — the whole spellbook is a matter of saying the right one out loud — and it puts the Conjurer directly downstream of the Kabbalist, who is the trade that knows how to obtain the names of celestials, elementals, deities and cosmic consciousnesses. The second half of that sentence is stranger. Interplanar relations and habits. Not the beings' powers — their manners. The trade is described as an expert in dealing with interdimensional entities as they grow accustomed to their attitudes and personalities.
Attitudes and personalities. This is diplomatic knowledge, acquired by repetition, and it is the reason the depth-versus-breadth fork exists at all.
The most practical sentence in the entry is about selection, and it names three separate skills that a beginner would collapse into one. Knowing the varieties and types of magical creatures helps a Conjurer differentiate between similar spirits, assists them in weighing down their powers, and helps in choosing the correct entity for a particular reason.
Three steps, in order. First tell two lookalikes apart. Then rank them by what they can do. Then match one to the job in front of you.
That is a triage procedure, and it explains why the trade sits beside the Bestiologist rather than replacing it. The Bestiologist holds the catalogue. The Conjurer uses it to pick. And the middle step — weighing powers — is the one that requires having called things before, because a description of a creature's powers is not the same as a sense of how much it can actually bring.
The failure mode is implied and never stated: call something too small for the job and it will not hold; call something too large and nothing here says what happens.
The second half of the job is the reverse of the first, and it is given equal weight. Conjurers not only conjure — they can also banish creatures from a plane into another. The method: powerful exiling magics and formulas intended to keep a creature away from a plane for a given particular amount of time.
Two things in that. First, banishing is relocation rather than destruction. A creature is moved from one plane to another and it still exists, which is consistent with everything else here about how beings are treated.
Second, it wears off. The exile runs for a stated period and then, presumably, the creature can return. Nothing says what the period is or what sets it, and nothing says what happens at the end of it.
So the trade that calls things is also the trade that sends them away, and neither operation is permanent. You bring something for a while; you push something out for a while.
A third mode is named and it is distinct from both calling and banishing. Conjurers are quite capable of communicating with beings via summons, convoking, or calling up the ancient names of power entities and divinities in order to receive information and or consultation.
Consultation. Not service — advice. And the beings addressed in this mode are the big ones: power entities and divinities, called by ancient names.
That is a different relationship from employing an elemental to guard a door. It puts the Conjurer in the same territory as the Diviner, who also gets information from above, and the difference is the route. The Diviner reads a device or receives a vision. The Conjurer calls somebody up and asks.
The last capacity described is the most concrete and it is shared with one other trade. The Conjurer develops a particular affinity at detecting portals, doorways and extraplanar connection sites — and is armed and equipped with the appropriate arsenal of artifacts and incantations to either use these gates or shut them down for good.
Shut them down for good. That is the one permanent operation named anywhere in this trade description, and it stands out precisely because everything else here is temporary — creatures called for a task, exiles that expire, consultations that end. The Planemasters get the same detection ability and use it to travel. The Conjurer's version is stated with an alternative attached: use the gate or close it. Which makes this trade the one that decides whether a connection stays open, and no criterion for that decision is given.
Three trades are named inside this entry, which is unusual, and the comparisons draw the boundaries. Like the Planemasters, Conjurers are adept at knowing the differences between the planes of existence and the creatures that inhabit them. Like the Bestiologist, they are knowledgeable at the many varieties and types of magical creatures.
So the Conjurer overlaps the Planemaster on geography and the Bestiologist on zoology, and owns neither. What is theirs alone is the transaction — the calling, the sending, the asking, and the closing of the door afterwards. Which makes it the operating trade of the three, and it is the one whose knowledge is acquired by doing rather than by reading. No reading list is given for the Conjurer at all, alone among the ten.
Pick your fork early. One category of spirits, worked for years until ties form, or a broad range called as needed. Both are named as valid and the choice governs everything after it.
Learn names before procedures. Magical and secret names of beings is what the entry names as the study, and it is the input the Kabbalist trade exists to supply. Then learn manners. Attitudes, personalities, habits, and what the entry calls interplanar relations. This is acquired by repeated dealings and there is no book for it.
Run the three-step selection before every call. Tell similar spirits apart, weigh what each can actually bring, then match one to the task. Guarding, finding, and fighting are the three tasks named.
Keep the banishing formulas alongside the calling ones. Exile is relocation, it runs for a set time, and the trade that calls is the trade expected to send away. And when you find a gate, decide. Use it or close it permanently. Those are the two options given, and closing is the only irreversible act in the trade.
The range of beings, the selection procedure, the banishing method and the gate work are all in the Conjurer entry of the ten Wizardly Trades. This is the Eldest Tradition warrant on the source stub. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE.
⚠ The Conjurer is the only one of the ten trades given no reading list. Every other entry names books, fields or authors. ⚠ Banishment is specified as lasting a given particular amount of time with no duration, no way of setting one, and nothing about what happens when it lapses. ⚠ Magical princes of nature appears once in the volume, here, with no definition; the elemental hierarchy elsewhere names Archprimes at its head, and whether these are the same beings is not stated.
Unresolved: gates can be shut down for good and no criterion is given for when they should be. It is the one permanent act in a trade otherwise built entirely on temporary arrangements.
Follow the depth path and this is a relationship trade. One category of spirits, powerful ties formed over years, attitudes and personalities learned by repeated dealing — and the Bestiologist's principle running underneath, that knowing a being better makes it likelier to come. Follow the breadth path in the same paragraph and it is a dispatch trade. Call whoever fits the job, differentiate, weigh, choose, use, dismiss. Nothing is built and nobody is known.
Both are printed as equally valid with no criterion for choosing between them — in a curriculum that specifies the number of drops in an oil and which hand a stone goes in.
Zero handshakes on this page. The material is one system's account of an operating role, and the connections worth making — a being's character as part of addressing it, and the assistance economy that makes calling necessary at all — are carried inside this build by the Bestiologist and the school pages, where the same mechanics are shown at work.
Sharpest implication. Everything this trade does is temporary except one thing. Creatures are called for a task and dismissed. Exiles run for a stated period and lapse. Consultations end. And then a gate can be shut down for good — the single irreversible act in the trade, handed over with no rule for when to use it.
Generative questions.