Council of Nine Mystic Traditions

"All of us have different views of the world, different views of life, different end goals for what we want to become. But, we're still together in the end. I suppose, in this forgotten little corner of the world, is what being a part of the Traditions means for us. Togetherness."

-- Jung-Hee Chung, Akashayana

There are two prevailing approaches to Awakened Magick among Mages. The first is the mystical understandings of Quintessence and the bending of reality through various means, while the second is a more logical and platonic vision of orderly science decoding the methodology of reality.
The Council of Nine Mystic Traditions represents the former, formed to protect themselves against the believers of the latter. Formed in the late 1400's and persisting to the modern day, the Council is predicated on the ideals of mystic advancement and achievement with no room for prejudice, discrimination, or unecessary violence. While it hasn't always lived up to those ideals, it was made in good faith, and the Traditions that make it up still champion and strive for that selfsame cause, even against every curveball the world sends them.
In Tacoma specifically, they don't have much of a presence as they lack the order and population their Technocracy rivals do, but the wheel might have turned for them as of late, meaning more Mages could be made and brought into the fold each and every day. With that in mind, the scene is set, so read on.

Structure

The Council itself is not a strict organization, rather a union of like-minded Sects. That being said, there is some structure of command within the Council, as you can't have a bunch of superpowered people running around all willy-nilly, even on the best of days.

• The Primi are individual representatives of the different Traditions that take part in governance within the Council
• Chantries are gathering places of various Tradition Mages. Some Chantries are one-tradition only, but in the modern day many of them are pan-traditional, some even accepting the independant Crafts and loosely working with their counterparts in the Technocracy. These Chantries usually have their own systems of power, dependant on which Traditions frequent it.
• A step down from the mass Chantries are the individual Covens, specific groups of Mages united by a single task and more often than not made up of different Traditions. These can be research based, adventuring parties, task forces, or just friends who pal around together. They'll defer to leaders in their local Chantrie(s) or their leaders in their own Traditions most of the time.

Within the Council itself, there are also honorary titles that denote levels of expertise and success that one can reach with more acknowledgement of skill than a direct line of command, although the respect involved usually invokes some relationship of authority:

• Oracle: A mage who has reached a level of power to transcend physical existance without fully Ascending
• Primus: Individual members of the Primi, as well as referring to the original founders of the Council
• Archmaster: A rare title these days, Mages who have several lifetimes worth of expertise
• Master: Mages whose deeds and expertise have earned them accolades by many of their fellows
• Adept: Mages who have accomplished impressive feats, but aren't as widely adored as Masters
• Disciple: Mages who have gained great skill, if not great accomplishment yet
• Initiate: A new Mage in any Tradition
• Apprentice: A new Mage who has not been brought into the fold of a specific Tradition
• Sentinel: Allied mages who work with and protect Chantries that they are not a part of
• Consor: Non-Awakened Allies who have proven their strength and usefulness to the Council
• Ally: General term for non-awakened associates of the Council

Culture

Throughout it's long and messy history, and many failures in the following aspects, the Council has intended to champion unity, solidarity, and an uplifting of all manner of diverse backgrounds for Mages across the world. Despite the nine Traditions having many vastly different points of origin, the Council was formed to band together and work as a single unit towards the goal of expanding the breadth of Magick and safely harboring all Awakened who practice it.

Public Agenda

The simplest version of the Councils public agenda is two-fold. Firstly, to unite Mages together within the Traditions to achieve greatness and ascension following the true path of Magick, seperate from the bastardized methods of the Technocracy. Secondly, they are there to uphold and defend Sleepers and other Mages from those Mages who have descended into evil or madness.

Assets

It is nigh impossible to list all the assets the Council as a whole has access to throughout the Nine Traditions, the various Chantries, the specific troves and stores of key Covens, so on and so forth. To make a very long, exhaustive, and utterly boring potential list short: The Council and it's participants have access to probably literally anything you can think of in next to nearly any amount, even if it isn't an easy matter to get access to those resources.

History

In general, the history and breadth of the Awakened is much more involved and dramatic than those of the Kindred Clans, so as we dive into the History of these groups, we'll do more summary of their past thus far and go into more detail about their history in the region itself. Luckily, despite being a key formation of power among Mages, the Council is relatively recent!

The Road Thus Far

General Metaplot, spoilered for length

While each of the Traditions that make it up have been around for millenia, the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions was formed recently on June 21st of 1466 AD in a pocket dimension known as Horizon. This formation had to do with a rival organization, The Order of Reason, predecessor to the Technocracy, who threatened all supernatural creatures and the power structure of Mages at that point. From 1457 to that final day in 1466, various debates and phases of planning culiminated with the Resolutions of Intent and the formation of The Council of Nine Mystic Traditions, represented by the first Primi in the First Coven.
The original Nine Traditions and their Spheres were as follows:

• Ahl-i-Batin - Correspondence 
• The Akashayana - Mind 
• The Chakravanti - Entropy 
• The Celestial Chorus - Prime 
• Dreamspeakers - Spirit 
• The Order of Hermes - Forces 
• Seers of Chronos - Time 
• The Solificati - Matter 
• The Verbena - Life

It wasn't long until there was unrest, however, as in 1470 the representative of The Solificati within the First Coven betrayed the rest of his fellows to The Order of Reason, with the intention of uniting them further against a physical threat. Many found this idea to be terrible, especially since several members of the Coven died in the conflicts, and the Solificati soon abandoned the Traditions.
After this dramatic point in history, most key events can be brought down to individual Mages and the Traditions themselves, so the history of the Council as an entity is much lighter. Several clans renamed, with the Chakravanti becoming the Euthanatoi (although many still use the older name) while the Seers of Chronos became the Cult of Ecstasy around 1867.
In 1904, the Electrodyne Engineers of the Technocracy left and joined the traditions as the Society of Ether, filling the Sphere of Matter that the Solificati left behind. Another shakeup happened a few decades later around World War 2 as the Ahl-i-Batin got fed up with the councils passiveness against the Technocracy's actions in the Middle East and abandoned the Tradtions, being replaced two decades later by the The Virtual Adepts, another refugee from the Technocracy like the Etherites before them.

The Council in the Sound

Tacoma Background, spoilered for length

As far as Tacoma's history goes with the Council as an entity of power, that's also relatively light. The Northwest region in general was home to at least 125 distinct Native American tribes, meaning that when all the Awakened among them got lumped together as The Dreamspeakers, it gave the organization a lot of power within the area, and the South Sound was no exception. Through the breaking of usual boundaries by other Mages, some members of other orders visited the area, but the first American settlers to cross in the area wouldn't make it until 1805 with the Lewis and Clark expedition, and not until 1830 did it begin to be settled more extensively.
By the time Tacoma began to be founded in the 1860's, many supernaturals were making their way in, including Mages. Many opted to settle in the recently created Seattle, reading the future of it's success, but many stayed in Tacoma as well. They weren't as intrinsic a weaving force in the region, unlike the Kindred, but found their homes in institutions of education, in choir halls, in gentlemans clubs, and all sorts of mysterious places.
Unfortunatley, as they would soon come to learn, Tacoma was plagued by a strange Magical Weakness that permeated all kinds of magecraft, including True Magick. No matter what various Mages tried, they could not cure or circumvent this strange effect, but it seemed to be a non-problem just a bit south in what is now Olympia, or in Seattle to the north, causing many to leave the city and set up shop there instead. Many did still say, defiant or unable to make the move, but they faced much hardship in the meanwhile, especially in the 1940's, when the Weakness got to a point where the Veils became exceedingly brittle.
In the post-war era, the strength of the Council in Tacoma got a bit of a bump when the Virtual Adepts joined in, but it still remained rather lowkey compared to their strength in other parts of the world. As time marched on, it became even more reduced as the Technocracy moved into the area to a great success, with one of The Void Engineers key locations being in Seattle. A lesser branch moved into Tacoma around the same time, but since the Traditions had a weaker voice there it was done with less alarm or rebuff. In fact, the small branch of the Technocracy had little resources or desire to be constantly warring with the piece of the Traditions that were there, and so a pact of non-agression was put into place within Pierce County as a whole.
While it's a constant push and pull within Seattle, even to this day, since the 1970's Tacoma's small Mage population has been mostly docile with each other, focused far more on their individual plots and attempts to bypass the Weakness than with the war between Tradition and Technocracy. But tragedy struck them all the same in late 2019, when a small but powerful sect of Vampires invaded the city, seeking to take advantage of a supposed vampiric stalemate in the eternal power struggle of the night. While Mages in general were willing to let them deal with themselves, the vampires brought the fight to the Mages when they sought to take the Mages knowledge and places of power away from them.
They brought something strange along with them too, a magical anomaly given a name by the Garou: Malnomen, Mishappen Names. While it's been difficult to fully study what they are, the running explanation is that they are the result of volatile magic mixing and clashing against each other, with the added introduction of a powerful spirit which then embodies all that clashing power and creates a small pocket of Umbra all their own, drawing in other spirits and unsuspecting victims to drain their life away. The reason this became so deadly to the Mages of Tacoma is because those pockets of Umbra functioned as their own realities, with their own rules on what was and was not possible, neutering True Magick to the bare bones of their abilities.
Luckily, despite having their numbers decimated, especially in the case of the Theocracy, the Mages were able to hide their true strongholds and survive the year-and-change of the vampires occupation before a unified supernatural front beat them back, and began to recover their places of power.
Currently, the Tradition Mages are doing alright for themselves. Many of their number were slain, but the vast majority of them could hide in places the vampiric sect did not care about, and their loose Chantries and Covens still exist. Now, with the Technocracy of Tacoma on the back foot, and strange fluctuations in the Weakness, it might just be time for a resergance of the Traditions once more.

Territories

The Council as a whole works mostly out of personally crafted dimensions, places where they can use their Magick in less constrained ways than out in reality, but even the various Chantries in reality work mostly integrated into an environment rather than the other way around. A Mages territory will be less about what they rule over, and more what space has been consecrated to work best with them, their Coven, or their Tradition.
In Tacoma, there are a handful of designated Chantries, although two of them are more free-form.

• The Pacific Ave. Chantry: A more recently built Chantry that disguises itself within and underneath the space of The University of Washington, Tacoma
• The Greenhouse Chantry: A Chantry focused on flora and alchemical processes that operate out of and around the large Wright's Park to the relative north of the city
• The No-Wall Chantry: A wandering group of Mages who work along the main strip of 6th Avenue and hide their secrets in tucked away pockets and cryptic graffiti
• The Defiant Chantry: An order that work out of Point Defiance Park, a large wooded area to the far northern point of Tacoma, not meeting in many physical locations but amongst the trees and the beaches. While they accept all who work with Nature, they are mostly made up of The Verbena with notable members from The Dreamspeakers and The Cult of Ecstasy 

There are also many Covens who meet up and work along various key locations in Tacoma, despite the areas general magical weakness, but they often do not have full Chantries to call their own.

Laws

As a unified force, the Council has several Protocols that serve as basic rules among Mages of the Traditions, especially when dealing with each other in Council environments. These protocols are:

1. Respect those of Greater Knowledge
2. A Tutor's debt must be repaid
3. A mage's Word is their Honor
4. The will of an Oracle must be obeyed
5. Do not betray your Coven or Chantry
6. Do not scheme with enemies of Ascension
7. Protect the Sleepers
8. Be subtle in your Arts

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Founding Date

June 21st, 1466 AD

Type

Research, Council

Alternative Names

The Traditions, The Council, The Order

Demonym

Traditions

Leader Title

Primus

Related Professions

• The Awakened

Demographics and Population

Tacoma has plenty of technical members of the Council, but by and large the common Mage is very uncertain about the actual workings and judgements of the Council. Because of this, most Mages are seen as halfway between a part of the Council and Independants by the outside Mage world, mainly because the city and it's magical Weakness have prevented many other Mages from gaining interest and settling roots within the area.
Still, out of the Mage population that does exist, a rough 60% of it belongs to the Traditions or specifically aligns themselves with the Council, with 25% being a part of the local Technocracy and the last 15% being either independant or new Mages who haven't been brought into any fold.

Key Covens

Outside of the full Chantries, structured or not, there are several important Covens that work within Tacoma

• The Coven of Commerce: Mages with a mind for modern mathmatics that wriggle out some economic justice
• Waterway Witches: Nature workers who keep the water going into the city from the Sound clean and fresh
• Tideflat Fishers: Researchers who work hard to keep the local Tideflats and the Ports tidy
• The Taggers: Rebellious Mages who fight for social causes throughout Tacoma's underground
• Grunge Queens: Gothic and grungy Mages who fight for the sake of Tacoma's homeless population
• Neo-dxʷdaʔəb: Members of the local native tribes who work together to protect and preserve native people and places of importance