A collective of mages intent on understanding the world, performing all sorts of research on their island south of Aurenvale without always having proper regard for appropriate safety measures. They’ve been responsible for many of the major magical advancements made over the last few centuries, but have also been the cause of at least two magical plagues and countless eldritch abominations that have escaped containment.

Note to Players: Stratos Isle is intended as a “troublemaker and/or accidental villain” organization, something that spawns problems that your characters need to solve. Your character can have in their backstory that they interacted with a mad mage from Stratos or they visited it briefly, but cannot be from the island or a member of the organization.

Stratesian society is both highly complex and intensely stratified. The relative rankings of the hundreds of social classes are notoriously difficult for outsiders to understand, but there are four general tiers that one can usually use to understand where on the societal ladder a given Stratesian stands:

• The Magos are the ruling class of the Isle, archmages or master politicians who use their arcane might, political connections, and obscene wealth to exert their wills upon the rest of Stratesian society.
• The Lumeni are the mages without the skill at magic, politics, or scholarly pursuits to claw their way into the ranks of the Magos. They make up the majority of the upper classes of society, and do most of the actual work of keeping Stratos running. It’s technically possible for the child of an Ardesian or Peon to become Lumeni by learning magic, but the upper classes exert extremely tight control over who can learn magic, which makes this feat extraordinarily rare in Stratesian society.
• The Ardesians are non-mages with skills that are deemed “useful” to the upper tiers of Stratesian society. They are functionally second-class citizens, with far fewer rights than the Magos or Lumeni, but so long as they remember their place in society they are not treated harshly by their mage overlords.
• The Peons are the under-class, given the worst jobs and regularly rounded up to be used as experimental subjects by the Magos class.