Two of the earliest formal mage organizations on record, the Cupbearers and Reeds were gathered from all the magi and wise folk summoned to the court of Pharaoh Thothmes III. The Cupbearers were healers and diviners, while the Reeds were scribes and masons. Eventually, their divergent approaches to magick and conflicting desires for the kingdom caused their fracture and dissolution, in what is considered by many to be a distant prelude to the Ascension War.

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• History Repeats: Their mutual destruction does not presage hope for the future of the Ascension War...

Lasting from the tail end of the Shang Dynasty all the way up to the early 20th century, the Dalou'laoshi (sometimes known as the Elemental Dragons or the Five-Metal Dragons) hold the honor of being the longest lasting technomancer organization in the world. They were tenuous frenemies with both the Wu Lung and the western Order of Reason and its predecessors for millennia, but never really got along with the Akashayana.

While they remained an independent Craft longer than most technomancer groups to be scouted by the Technocracy, they ultimately accepted Technocratic assistance with modernizing China and were dissolved into the other Conventions at some point in the early 1900s.

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• Bold Explorer: They are the first magi to ever reach and document Autochthonia.
• Clock Punk / Sandal Punk: They were pretty consistently on the cutting edge of their era's technomancy, and "their era" is most of history.
• Retcon: The Five-Metal Dragons as portrayed in the Dragons of the East Sourcebook are... uh... well, they are explicitly and confusingly a conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy that had its own five Conventions, each with broadly pan-Asian theming. More modern material retcons this as (more than a bit racist) in-universe fearmongering, indicating that, while East Asia has regional variance to its Reality Zones like anywhere else, it does not, in fact, have an entire second Technocracy that allows for open displays of Ki Manipulation.

Previously Known As: Natural Philosophers Guild

A minor thorn in the Order of Reason's side since the Order's founding, the Pupils of Parmenides were a thinly-spread but oddly resilient minor Craft of natural-philosopher mages, who were inspired by an ancient metaphysical treatise called the Kitab al-Alacir or Book of Ether to pursue all manner of impossible theories and apply them to the creation of wondrous inventions. Eventually, the Order of Reason gave up trying to manipulate them from the outside and used the promise of emerging galvanic technologies to recruit them into the Order, transforming them into the Voltarian Order. This would turn out to be a pretty big mistake for the Daedalans.

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• Mythology Gag: The name is mostly a reference to the original name for the Etherites in pre-release material for 1e.
• Non-Indicative Name: Played With. It's mentioned that most interpretations of the actual Parmenides's philosophy is seemingly at odds with the Etherite philosophy, but while the option is presented to have it be a mistranslation of the name Parmenesthese, the same book actually does make a solid argument for why Parmenides works anyway.
• Small Role, Big Impact: They appear as a throwaway mention in a couple of backstory paragraphs and don't really figure into the broader Metaplot until after they're absorbed into the Order of Reason. That said, they're still very consequential for two reasons:
  • First and most obviously, they are technically the longest-lasting incarnation of what would eventually become the Etherites, even if we know functionally nothing about what they were doing during that time.
  • Second and perhaps more surprisingly, they apparently originated the idea of referring to reality backlash in the face of willwork (then largely known as "The Scourge") as "Paradox".

Norse rune mages whose knowledge comes directly from Odin Allfather himself. They were a proud and independent lot during the Dark Ages, but the ascendancy of other powers in the region forced them to throw in their lot with the Verbena during the Convocation Era.

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• Geometric Magic: The Futhark weren't their only practice, but certainly one of the most distinctive.
• Ghostapo: Tragically for anyone attempting to study the magic of the lost Valdaermen, their techniques' most prominent users in the past several centuries were the Iron Circle, a conspiracy of Nazi Wotanists.
• Horny Vikings: Subverted. The Valdaermen were generally masculine and hardy, but were also introspective and quite erudite and cultured, albeit not in a way that would be recognizable to the more urban mages of the era.