Where does Mage live?

Habitats for Mage are listed as 'Any' — no biome restriction applies.

Mage

· · CR Unknown

As a medium humanoid (neutral), Mage carries CR 6. AC 14, 18 hit dice, 30-ft speed. Common in any environments. Speaks common and any three languages. Sourced from Monster Manual (5.5e 2024) and Monster Manual (5e 2014).

Stat Block

Challenge Rating: Unknown
Type: —
Size: —
Alignment: —
Speed: —
Habitats: Any
Sources: Monster Manual (5.5e 2024), Monster Manual (5e 2014)

Ecology

Mages emerge from formal arcane training: guild colleges, court tutors, hidden academies, and apprenticeships under hedge-wizards. The path takes a decade or more and produces practitioners whose social rank often exceeds their combat power. Most mages serve a patron — a noble house, a temple, a merchant cartel — and earn living wages through divinations, enchanting, and consultation rather than spell-slinging. The wandering battlemage is rare; the salaried researcher is common, and even adventuring mages tend to be on sabbatical from a parent institution.

Behaviour

A mage carries themselves with the particular calm of someone who knows three different ways to ruin a room. They prefer negotiation to combat, since spells cost prepared slots and replacements take rest. Mages keep meticulous spellbooks, hate having them touched, and consider the loss of one a professional catastrophe. They form close, prickly friendships with peers and mentor relationships with apprentices, and they almost universally distrust sorcerers as undisciplined upstarts whose power lacks the dignity of proper study.

Origin

The mage tradition descends from ancient hermetic orders that catalogued the Weave centuries before modern kingdoms existed. Each region developed its own school: elemental specialists in the islands, divination guilds in court cities, abjuration colleges along contested borders. Modern mages inherit fragments of these traditions, often without realizing how local their practice is. A mage trained in one school feels uncanny working another's incantations, the way a musician feels the wrong key under their fingers.

Any