Nine of the ten trades study, catalogue, call, read, heal or travel. One of them goes out to where the trouble is. The ninth trade is described in the language of a soldier and the entry does not soften it. These wizards engage darkness and the most hideous entities in order to rid the world of the wicked and heinous legions of the lower planes.1 And the moment it names is specific: the Praetor is a relentless fighter who stops at nothing when the lives of others are at stake, particularly when the wretched tendrils of evil had sprouted around the lives of the innocent and the good hearted.
Somebody is being harmed. This is the trade that shows up.
One footnote does a piece of work that the main text does not, and it corrects a reader's likely assumption before they can make it. The Lower Planes are the realm where the vile forces of darkness reside — and then the distinction: many will equal this region as Hell, but in reality is not. Hell is a Semitic construct of an afterworld for the wicked. The Lower Planes are the actual regions where the fallen races inhabit.
Two different things being confused. One is a destination for dead humans who behaved badly. The other is a place where a population lives.
That matters operationally rather than doctrinally. If the Lower Planes were an afterlife, then what a Praetor fights would be a punishment in progress and the fight would be with a system. Because they are inhabited regions, what a Praetor fights is a neighbour with an address, which is exactly how the Planemaster's map treats everything else.
The sharpest instruction in the entry is one most magical writing avoids, and it is given flatly. Along their studies, Praetori acquire abundant knowledge in the dark arts, to learn the very nature of evil.
Learn the dark arts. Deliberately, as part of the training, in a curriculum that elsewhere forbids a great deal on much smaller grounds. And the reason is stated in the same sentence as a consequence rather than as a justification. Thus they are quite capable of destroying dark operations and spells intended to harm other people or that aim to destroy the balance and equilibrium of a region.
Follow that and the logic is a locksmith's. You cannot take apart a working you do not understand. Undoing a curse means knowing how the curse was built, which means having learned to build one — and the entry accepts that cost without discussing it.
The rest of the reconnaissance is in the same spirit. Praetori study and learn rigorously where these creatures are found, what attracts them in the physical world, and what are their natural weaknesses. Habitat, bait, and weak points. That is the Bestiologist's three-field file rewritten for an adversary.
The strangest line in the trade description is about physical training, and it explicitly rules out the obvious reason for it. Many of them train heavily in different combat styles not to fight them physically; but to keep a keen mind and a martial disposition towards evil.
So the sparring is real and the purpose is mental. A keen mind and a martial disposition — one is sharpness, the other is a standing readiness to meet something rather than avoid it. Which is an unusual thing to find in a magical curriculum, because it treats a physical discipline as a way of shaping how a person meets a threat rather than as a way of winning a fight. Nothing here says which styles, how often, or for how long.
Alongside it: powerful arrays of magical matrixes, employed in the same breath as the combat training. Matrices, in this curriculum's usage, are configurations that hold an operation — so the Praetor's field kit is a drawn structure plus a trained body plus the incantations.
The magical half of the trade is specific about what gets studied, and the list sorts into two halves that work together. The defensive set: powerful revocation magics, protective incantations, defense incantations, and mighty blessings. The offensive set: incantations of Light and powerful formulas dedicated to vanquish the forces of evil.
Revocation is the interesting one. To revoke is to take something back — which is what the destroying of a dark operation actually is, undoing a working somebody else performed rather than overpowering it. And the outcome of a successful engagement is stated as relocation rather than destruction: they know how to vanquish them and send them back to their fallen realms through the proper use of Magic. Same as the Conjurer's banishing. Nothing here is killed; things are sent home.
One requirement is stated as standing rather than occasional, and it is the most practical line in the entry. It is important to point out that a Praetor is always protected by amulets, artifacts, spiritual weapons, magical weapons and a host of protective repertoire in order to keep evil at bay.
Always. Not before an engagement — as a condition of the trade. The definition of the one unfamiliar item is in a footnote and it is the most interesting thing on this page. A spiritual weapon is a mental construct devised with thoughts, prayer and orations with the sole purpose of stopping evil creatures. These can also be sacred crosses and blessed ankhs.
A mental construct, made of thoughts, prayers and spoken orations, that stops a creature. That is the same building method as the Philosophical Sphere elsewhere in this curriculum — a thing assembled in the mind from understanding and speech, which then does work outside it. And the footnote's second sentence puts a physical cross in the same category as the built one, without distinguishing what each is for.
Three acquired capacities are named and they are unusually physical for this material. Praetori become so attuned to defending the Light and the wizarding community that they acquire great physical power, enhanced spiritual insights, and a supreme ability to detect evil miles away.
Physical power is the odd one out among the ten trades. Nothing else here promises a stronger body, and the combat training was just explicitly said not to be for fighting. Detection at a distance is the working capacity. Miles away, which turns the trade from a responder into an early-warning system.
And the fourth thing is relational: through their experiences and magical workings, they develop profitable kinship with particular celestial beings, and those associations become powerful supporting entities in the battle against evil. Kinship rather than summoning — built over time, out of shared work, which is the same depth path the Conjurer's fork offers and the only place in the trades where an alliance is described as growing rather than being called.
Learn the enemy's craft. Abundant knowledge in the dark arts, studied to learn the nature of evil, and the stated payoff is the ability to take apart operations aimed at hurting people. Build the file: where they are found, what attracts them here, and what their natural weaknesses are. Three fields on an adversary rather than on a creature you intend to call.
Study the four formula sets. Revocation for undoing what somebody else built; protection and defence for holding; blessings for ground you want to keep; incantations of Light for the engagement itself. Train the body, and know why. Combat styles, heavily, explicitly not in order to fight anything physically — for a keen mind and a martial disposition.
Learn the holy symbols properly. Power, history and might, on the entry's own list, so that you face evil with the proper weaponry rather than with whatever is to hand. And stay armoured at all times. Amulets, artifacts, magical weapons, and at least one spiritual weapon built from thoughts, prayer and spoken orations. The requirement is standing, not situational.
The trade description, the Lower Planes footnote, the combat-training clause and the standing armour requirement are all in the Praetor entry of the ten Wizardly Trades. This is the Eldest Tradition warrant on the source stub. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE.
⚠ The footnote's claim about Hell — that it is a Semitic construct of an afterworld for the wicked, distinct from the Lower Planes — is this material's own distinction. It is a reasonable reading of how the two ideas differ historically and it is stated as fact rather than as interpretation. ⚠ No reading list is given for this trade, and no formula named in it appears anywhere in the entry. Revocation magics in particular are named here and are one of the four non-calendar rites listed elsewhere in the volume; whether they are the same thing is not stated.
⚠ Great physical power is claimed as an acquired capacity two sentences after combat training is said not to be for physical fighting. Unresolved: nothing states how a Praetor knows a working is hostile rather than merely unfamiliar, in a trade whose defining act is taking somebody else's operation apart.
Follow the field half and this trade is a soldier's. Engagement, hideous entities, tendrils around the lives of the innocent, a relentless fighter who stops at nothing, and a body trained heavily in combat styles. Follow the same paragraphs and nothing is fought. The combat training is explicitly not for fighting. What gets vanquished gets sent home rather than destroyed. The central skill is revocation, which is undoing a spell, and the trade's most-used capacity is detecting evil from miles away — which is the opposite of engagement.
Both are held throughout. The trade described in the most martial language in the volume does its actual work by dismantling and by early warning.
Deception as the Privilege of Gods — Both traditions accept that a practitioner has to learn the hostile craft in order to work against it, and both leave the practitioner holding a capability they are told not to use.
The behavioural account is about who is permitted to deceive and on what grounds, and the argument runs on standing: the same act is licensed for one party and forbidden to another, so the technique is never the thing being judged. Here the licence is granted by purpose rather than by standing, and that is a much thinner rail. A Praetor acquires abundant knowledge of the dark arts to learn the nature of evil, and what keeps that knowledge on the right side is nothing but what it is being used for on a given afternoon. A system that gates a technique by who you are can at least be checked from outside — somebody either holds the position or does not. One that gates it by intention has nothing to check, and this curriculum, which elsewhere specifies drop counts and the hand a stone goes in, gives this trade no rule at all.
Sharpest implication. A spiritual weapon is a mental construct devised with thoughts, prayer and orations with the sole purpose of stopping evil creatures — and a Praetor is required to be carrying one at all times. Something built in the head, out of words, permanently deployed, and named in the same footnote as a physical cross.
Generative questions.