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Mages, as a group, are a very strange people indeed. They are scholars who can't help but see the consequences of what they do, or don't do, and thus have an unfortunate tendency to meddle.
These characters tend to be rugged individualists, who are drawn to each other by the recognition that the other person is also a mage, yet pushed apart by the strength of their belief in themselves.
They also tend to be "self starters", who act because they see that now is the time when someone must act, and usually by this time, they have managed to deduce what sort of action it is that is needed.
They tend to be advisers, and are often seen as harbingers of bad news, and so they tend to develop an aura of protective colouration, often using the tools of the conjurer to hide just how much they actually know.
It is usually not a good idea to try to push a mage too far, as you tend to end up on the wrong end of the sticky situation that you have just instigated.
Friends of mages tend to be few and far between, because of the somewhat prickly nature of the personality of wizards, but both friend and mage tend to be loyal to each other past the point of ordinary friendship, and thus tend to find themselves helping each other in dangerous situations where one or the other of them could not just stand by and do nothing.
As well as the reductionist skills of the scholar and the skills of a , the mage will also develop the ability of applied wombling, the ability to take the elements of knowledge, and things around them, and from them fix, or replace any piece of technology that they need, to any level that the available stuff and knowledge allows them. When you get large groups of mages in any one place for any length of time, things happen.
A real life example of this is the building of the internet, which is very clearly documented in the book Where wizards stay up late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.
You will often find that there is an archmage around, keeping the prickliness of the wizards from causing too many problems between them.
One mage that we know of is , and another mage is Zyra, and both are working on the human mind - a users guide.