Is having the Gift part of your Essential Nature, or can a character acquire it after birth?
We know that magi can lose/break their Gift, so gaining the Gift seems not entirely impossible.
I mean the true Gift, not a faeries’ glamoured illusion, nor a demon’s False Gift.
Perhaps wish upon a falling star? Or catching one like from the book “Howl’s Moving Castle”?
Yes, using the Mystery rules you can gain the Gift. I don’t think it’s a good idea, mind, but it’s possible.
I hadn’t thought of the Mystery angle.
So a Gifted mage taking a Gifted apprentice and opening their Gift may be on the path to becoming a Gifted Mage who can grant an apprentice The Gift?
Now I know a plot reason why some magi take on apprentice after apprentice, just to research developing the Mystery. Would it be more difficult than granting Death Prophecy?
I’m not sure how you’d cost it. You strike the problem that Ars has only Major and Minor Virtues, and that The Gift is sort of packaged into the Hermetic Magus background which includes flaws (Magical Air generally, some sort of duty to the Order’s laws) and other virtues (magic resistance via the Parma Magica, Academic background, effectively Wealthy.) The pack is informally priced at 10 virtue points, because if you play a Mythic Companion, you get 10 virtue points in place of the package.
So, sure, you could argue it’s a major virtue and that apprenticeship is the process of developing that virtue.
Not that way. Inititations for non-Gifted persons are handled in HMRE (p.13, p.14 box UnGifted Initiations). Initiating non-Gifted persons to the real Gift would be a monumental task even for a magus, incur a serious Ordeal at least, and be experimental (TMRE p.18). Also ask your troupe for consent.
ADDITION: Take a look at Sub Rosa #13 Diédne the Theurge, especially the Conditional Gift (Major, Hermetic Flaw), for an example of a House bestowing the Gift.
There are 3 methods of the top of my head to gain a true Gift.
It is said that the Gift doesn’t always manifest at birth, and that some seem to have it manifest at a young age, which might lead some Magi to investigate this, and maybe it could lead to a breakthrough that will allow one to grant the Gift.
Another option is with Fertility Magic, which might be able to grant the fetus the Gift, but then you need to integrate Fertility Magic first, and then delve deeper into it.
I am uncertain if the post of Kodlak or that of Itzhak Even should be considered the solution.
Arguably, the homunculus faeries behind Homunculus Wizard do exactly that, grant the Gift, because the other way arround - that it’d be in someone’s essential nature to find an homunculus to regulate his Gift, doesn't seem to make much sense. There is also something darker called the false gift which could potentially be granted.
The fact is there are many methods to maybe grant the Gift- fertility magic is the most reliable (once you develop fertility magic), but only works before birth. The possibility of rituals which appear to grant the Gift during the child’s development (using hereditary traits, triggered by a ritual) would certainly encourage many magi to research this with uncertain results, and a few nearly impossible methods outside of hermetic magic and normal initiations certainly exist. Plus there is the ability in infernal magic to take the Gift from someone else, probably for a limited duration, or else contingent on living a life of unrepentant debauchery.
If you are trying to develop a ritual it is worth noting that while it is a separate effect, fertility magic treats the Gift as the same level of complexity as a major virtue, so that would be the bottom most threshold, and as per the rules for initiations and mundanes it would need an accompanying flaw of equal magnitude: so you might develop an initiation which grants the Gift but it must be accompanied with the Blatant Gift or some other major hermetic flaw.
As we can see in the Bjornaer chapter of HoH:MC, not every initiation REQUIRES getting a flaw. Not all of their House Mysteries require a flaw. It just means you need to add other things to compensate, because adding a flaw makes it easier, and makes the next two initiations easier.
No, initiations for the Gifted do not require gaining a flaw. Initiations for Mundanes do. If you have an initiation to gain the Gift then it is, by definition, being performed on (or by, depending on perspective) a mundane.
What’s interesting to me is that Exchange of the Two Minds states that
Magi who transport their own minds into younger, healthier bodies usually find that having a strong body entails having powerful passions that interfere with the clear thinking needed to pursue the magical Arts.
Which implies (at least to me) that the gift
While there’s nothing in canon, it makes me wonder by what method one could pluck The Gift from another’s mind and put it into your own. Perhaps conjuring the spirit of a dead mage and siphoning it off, or imprisoning them in your own head, or turning The Gift into a bird and eating that bird, as Inmost Companion. All of this would probably require the help of another mage and/or being part of some sort of hedge/rival tradition anyway, and you’d have to be at the point of power (magical or social) such that The Gift wouldn’t be as much of a big deal for you as it would be for like, John McPeasant.
That said, I could see a (questionable) Mystery Tradition wherein a Mage who can tell they’re on the verge of old age willingly wills their Gift to a chosen child.
I like it!
I can see a covenant of Criamon or Jerbiton who seek out mundanely accomplished youth when they get old to grant the gift. The old former magi than lives out the rest (expected to be comparatively shorter) of their life as a mundane scholar and respected elder in the covenant while the youth starts apprenticeship later than normal but also with skills, learning, interests and attitudes that are outside the norm for traditional mages.
What happens if you know Parma Magica but lose your gift? Are you effected by the negative social issues of other’s gifts? Do you still get Parma and perhaps even form magical defenses even if you can no longer gain XP in magical forms and techniques? Can you write magical books?
I really like this idea as a way to make a magical tradition that is about something other than gaining personal power; it is at least a twist on more normal ego projects.
Parma Magica is an Arcane Ability; and you do not need The Gift to learn or use Arcane Abilities -- although a person would (typically, at generation) need a virtue. Typically, the flavor of those virtues is 'how I found a teacher', so I think 'Was once a Mage who had many adventures' and the accompanying saga to get to that point should probably count as the underlaying virtue.
This leads to other questions -- what happens to their familiar? Their Talisman? They still have their Art scores; they (probably?) cannot cast spells, but can they teach? Write books?
My take is that they could still write books and their familiar is still connected to them and around but more of a magical friend. I would probably not allow them to teach any forms, techniques, or spells because they can’t cast.
By RAW you are right that they would still have a Parma score and it isn’t tied to the Gift in any way. I had forgotten that it counts as a normal arcane skill. Too much time thinking about my Ars hack that makes Parma Magic and Magic Theory into a special category of skills that can only be learned by someone with The Gift because otherwise I can not envision the Order in anyway near the way it is presented in the books.
And to subvert this:
I can see Damhan Allaidh infiltrating such a cult, and pretending to be passing on just the gift, while actually taking over the body entirely, and having to play-act the previous host until it died of “Natural Causes”
I would think this kind of willing of the Gift would require faerie intervention, similar to the way some faeries can transfer skills they “teach” from one person to another. YSMV of course.
Yeah I think “wills their Gift” was a poor phrasing, I was imagining something more like what Madmarcus was proposing about a ritualistic transfer towards the end of life, not after it. But agreed that this probably requires some non-hermetic intervention of some kind, and probably quite a bit of risk and questing to get there.
I doubt they could teach. Their familiar cords are functionally enchanted items, so I don’t think anything would happen to them. I would argue that they can still write books, but that they have an automatic level drop or cap - without The Gift they can’t access that ineffable thing that makes it possible to fully express the Arts.
So a mage who undertakes this probably then retires to write a low level, but perhaps resultingly high quality Summa reflecting on their long lives mastering [your favorite Art here].