Detecting the Gift in potential apprentices.

Gah. Don't nail everything down here, I wouldn't think there is a single sure way to know or a single age the gift emerges. The Gift can be damaged, incomplete, latent, and even something else altogether (false gift from the infernal)...

My character's apprentice is Blatantly Gifted. She was left to die by exposure. Fortunately, the fairies rescued her from death and eventually the magi rescued her from the fairies.

I've used a house rule that allows a magi to investigate someone's Gift (or potential Gift) as a seasonal lab activity based off Intellego Vim. So, should one have reason to suspect that a someone has the Gift they can spend the season determining what sort of Gift-- what the magic is innately suited to, what Hermetic or Supernatural Virtues or Flaws are in play.

I don't know what to do about the Gentle Gift, though. I've heard the theory that the Gift works as a sort of Wierdness Magnet, which is one way to find it even in Gentle Gifted people.

A point to consider is that the acquisition of an apprentice should be a story event-- something that isn't done justice with the hand-waving approach of a season spent hunting, as suggested in the ArM5 book.

The mechanics of the Gift aren't necessarily all that important, are they? Does it really matter when one can sense the gift? Or how, per se? Sure, if you're playing a hoplite, like the one in GotF, or your saga pursues those sorts of arcs on regular basis, then Sniffing out the Witch seems like a good spell to develop...but for the most part, apprentices are the Hermetic equivalent of children, and the magus and apprentice will have such an impact on one another-- why not make it an arc? and why worry about 'lifting the hood' on the mechanic? As the story unfolds, the prospective apprentice should become apparent...

-Ben.

Well, what we're doing is trying to get clear in our own minds (and each person's Mythic Europe will vary) exactly what the situation is in the game world so that we can tell the stories that spring from the world. We do need to express them in game mechanical terms because we may need to use them. Yes, you can always hand wave things but I prefer my world's to be mechanically consistent.

My character's interest in this issue is only as part of his investigations on the way to a Major Breakthrough on controlling the anti-social effects of the Gift but he none the less has to ask all these questions.

I feel that a season's worth of activity to confirm that someone has a trainable Gift is just too much. Even a day long ritual seems too much. I'm going for a Gift detection spell: probably of high level but still just a spell.

One alternate route that occurs to me (which I won't be persuing since it doesn't help my character's long term obsession) is that you might create a Muto Vim spell that allows you to pass a spell you are maintaining to another person with the Gift but only to someone with the Gift. You cast something simple, like Palm of Flame and see if your potential apprentice can take it from you. If they can they're in!

Newborn babes get away with being smelly, incontinent, and unseasonably noisy because they don't know any better -- they are innocents. A newborn babe that unfailingly gave the impression of being dishonest and untrustworthy despite being unable even to speak would be quite a different matter.

... and it's still "discipline" with a 'c', dammit! Does the red underline tell you nothing? :wink:

Yeah, good. I agree. Don't gloss over these things ... they're character-building.

Yes and no ... it's one of those things that doesn't matter at all most of the time, but could occasionally be crucial to a story. Especially if the acquisition of an apprentice is made a story event.

It's not so much that it matters exactly what the mechanic is, right now, as that it may someday be necessary to use that mechanic in play -- and then it will be important.

I think that's actually a good attitude; and it may well be that good story-telling is more important than a rigid mechanic. Sadly, though, not every SG is a good story-teller (though thankfully ours is :slight_smile:) and sometimes one has to fall back on the mechanics.

And, by the time the baby grows older, his parents will have grown accustomed to his gift.

:angry: You are entirely missing the point (which was stated in my earlier post, but you snipped it) that mundane newborn babes are innocents, but gifted newborn babes -- if the gift manifests from birth -- would not be so regarded.

Just a suggestion:
Whatever in game mechanisms you will use to decect gifted children, it sometimes fails. Hence those failed apprentices, that turn up eventually. A stress die should be rolled when investigating the gift of a candidate. Upon botching, the person is falsely identified as having the gift, though he does not posess it. This also prevents the magus from casting the spell/ritual/what so ever on every person he meets. Because this way he will most likely end up with a bunch of people that do not posses the gift although the magus himself is convinced they do.
Just image one out of 1.000 poeple does posses the gift. The chance to botch in a divine aura of 3 is about 7.3%. If you check 1.000 people you will find the one with the gift and 73 (!) that do not have the gift but you think they do. That is a terrible result.... Even casting the spell twice on everyone this results in 5 falsely identified persons... :confused:

My suggestion is: Some kind of spell does exist in the order to identify a person as having the gift. The level of this spell should be below 30 as otherwise every apprentice would start his career with 1point of warping. This spell always (!) requires a stress die. The reason for this is that it is not fully incorporated into hermetic magic, maybe predating the order and being a mercurian ritual that does not need vis. Once a candidate identified by this spell can be investigated in the lab during a season. This requires no stress die (exept when experimenting :open_mouth: ). Use the magus' InVi labtotal as if he was investigating an item. To reveal any minor hernetical or supernaural virtue/flaw a result of 20 is sufficient (though targetnumber can be changed for different virtues/flaws). To identify a major virtue/flaw the investigation result should be aboove 30.

Tus it will be most promising to invetigate only those persons with your spell, that give you the impression they could posses the gift. Thus you dramatically reduce the chance of wasting your time on a person incapable to work magic. Then you take the identified child as apprentice and investigate it in your lab to detremin what is needed to open the arts.

IMS we have a magus with the 4th ed virtue "sense the gift" (i believe i posted about it a while ago) and he tends to spend occasional seasons searching for gifted kids.

I see that the order has a few of these magus' and they make a fair amount of money/vis selling off apprentices.

Of course making a story out of it is always handy. In our case, our three apprentices (who are in the process of gauntleting atm) were all encountered as the result of other stories. One was our seneschals weird daughter. Her giftiness was revealed by her love of star gazing, fear of enclosed spaces and general mooniness. She has the gentle gift and is a rather gentle soul so everyone likes her, but she was definately weird. The visions and ability to predict the weather also were a clue.

Another apprentice we rescued on behalf of the parents. She'd been abducted by faeries who were attracted to her gift. She was just a kid at the time but our gift sensing magus noticed she was gifted after the rescue.

The third one was bought to our attention by his father who told us his kid was having visions. Turned out the kid had second sight and was visited by the ghost of a murdered monk. The heroic magi sorted out the ghosts and murderer then took the kid in as a ward.

In all cases the parents were very fond of their kids but were aware of their weirdness. Even the gently gifted kid was weird.

This is i think the definition of a gifted kid, not just that people are uneasy about them, but thst they are also, invariably, deeply weird. In our case, one thought Faeries were normal and wasn't at all bothered by all the weirdness of a faerie court, another spent hours staring at the sky and stars, ands the third was isolationist, talked to invisible friends and had a "detached genius" manner to him. In each case the social penalties of the gift were way down the list of clues to their giftiness.

... or, indeed, a person who does have The Gift is falsely identified as a mundane. That makes perfect sense -- magic is unreliable.

Good point.

Yes, you rely on spotting the strangeness of the child as a first clue that he might be gifted, and then have a magical means to verify that -- with a reasonable degree of confidence -- once the initial determination has been made. The spell should be sufficiently laborious that a magus wouldn't cast it on spec on every child that the dogs bark at (say).

Was that in a supplement? The only 4th Ed. book I have is the main rulebook, and it's not in that.

Absolutely, the play's the thing.

"gauntleting"? Surely when an apprentice is tested for and receives his gauntlet, he becomes "gauntleted". If any "gauntleting" is done it is done to the apprentice by his parens (or a quaesitor).

(There's a reason I put E+ in my ArM Code, even though it's not an "official" notation.)

Yes, that's a good way to look at it. It might even be that the uneasiness people feel in the presence of magi is caused by their weirdness -- think of Asperger's Syndrome -- and that magi who have The Gentle Gift have learned the social skills necessary to avoid freaking out the mundanes with their odd behaviour.

As this weirdness would be largely behavioural it couldn't manifest until the child was old enough to exhibit behaviour ... which nicely works around the problem of gifted newborns being rejected by their sensible parents.

All this does, however, suggest that children with The Gentle Gift ought to be harder to find, when looking for apprentices, and those with The Blatant Gift ought to be easier; at least until they start throwing actual magic around.

I don't think it can be just the acquisition of social skills that makes the Gentle Gift: the Gently Gifted are just as weird as the others or you would never be able to identify them as mages at all. The magic effect is seperate and lies on top of your ability to behave like a social human being: remember that some of the Founders were quite astonished when they first discovered that the Parma Magic made people they had hated and feared for years seem reasonable and decent human beings.

Yes, there should be both false positives and false negatives from the 'Find the Gift' spell although I rather suspect that most 'failed apprentices' come from lab accidents. (I have no idea why I think that: it's just my mental picture.)

For those poor sods who do get picked up by magi and misidentified it's a sad life: three or four years of academic preparation. More years of learning magic theory and then when it's time to 'open their Arts' they're suddenly not going to be a powerful wizard at all.... A sad life relegated to copying other people's lab texts. It's a wonder more of them aren't bitter and twisted...

This even seems to be the default assumption:

Hi,

For an alternate / additional approach, all people that have The Gift also have another supernatural ability:

You can potentially identify those with The Gift - at least in the first instance - because they have some sort of power. Of course, not all people with a supernatural power have The Gift, but it is a good start.

Whenever I've had my players encounter potential apprentice material (four times now), they've been brought to their attention by a social awkwardness (in 3 cases anyway; the fourth apprentice had The Blatant Gift) as well as an ability to use magic. This ability is nearly always lost when the apprentice is Opened to the Arts, since it requires a high InVi lab total to preserve the supernatural abilities (ArM5, page 107). Many of these Abilities were non-standard - not run-of-the-mill stuff like Second Sight, but full blown magical powers like Whistle Up The Wind and other Major Supernatual Virtues like those in HoH:S. I didn't need to worry about the effects of these powers on my game, since I knew that the magi couldn't possibly preserve them. But they added a certain amount of wierdness. Basically in my saga, many Gifted children effectively have an ill-defined Story Flaw which causes them to come to the notice of the players.

Rufus (the one with The Blatant Gift) had Hex; which became a Minor Focus in Misfortune. He was being chased by a lynch mob who wanted to burn the "devil-child", and ran straight into the PCs in the middle of town.

Drusilla could summon ghosts, which became a Major Focus in the Dead. She was the witness to a murder after the fact, since she could see victim, and the culprit came after her. When the PCs investigated the kidnapping, they discovered her Gift.

Xiphion was not only immune to drowning, but was perfectly at home in the sea; he has an Affinity with Aquam. He was an unusual situation - he was supposedly another magus's apprentice who had come to the covenant in fosterage; the PCs later discovered he had never been Opened to the Arts and had been trained purely in Hermetic Theory rather than practice. Our devious Tremere immediately Opened him and claimed him as an apprentice. A certamen at Tribunal settled the 'ownership' but broke an alliance.

Finally, Jocelyn...well, he hasn't been Opened to the Arts yet, and since his intended master reads this forum, I'd rather not say...However, they encountered him as the bastard son of a dead man, whose ghost could not pass on since Jocelyn had no-one to look after him.

All story events leading to apprentices. Not one of them had a "Sense The Gift" spell cast on him/her.

Hope this prompts some ideas

Mark