In your campaign, how does a mage detect The Gift? Can you use spells? What about the Gentle Gift?
Can you detect The Gift if they've got their Parma raised? Can you detect the Parma itself?
Yes, this is canonical: the base guideline is Intellego Vim Level 10 "Detect the traces of powerful magic".
The spell would have to penetrate the Parma.
I'd treat Parma as a Rego Vim spell of magnitude equal to the Parma's level for purposes of detection; there is precedent for that under Wind of Mundane Silence. What's tricky is if Parma protects itself - i.e. if you have to penetrate the magus' magic resistance to detect the Parma; personally, I'd say that penetration is needed, again based on the precedent of Wind of Mundane Silence. Note that if all you want is to detect if someone is protected by magic resistance, all you have to do is cast any spell with 0 penetration and see if it penetrates.
Opposed to ezzelino, we do not make the abilities that detect a big glowing bubble of magical protection something you need to penetrate in order to detect. If you cast the spell, you just see it. You would not detect The Gift unless you penetrated, though, so it might be a param-ed grog or companion, for example. Happened before 
Second Sight and Magic Sensitivity detect it as if it was a spell of the parma's magnitude (5*parma)
Cheers,
Xavi
There is a detect the Gift spell in Hedge Magic, it's an InVi 20. I think it's an Eye/Mom spell, so the base would be 15? Not sure now, and I don't have the book at hand.
In my saga, I've houseruled this to be a ritual spell... otherwise finding apprentices and the like is child's play.
Well, that was exactly my thought - methods to detect future apprentices. I've only ever seen it rp'd as "an obviously unloved child with strange habits," and then they take him on the off chance that he might be Gifted.
Of course this is scrying and a strict no no against other magi in the order.
even casting a 0 pen spell which fails to do anything is enough to use magic to determine a fact and could be seen as scrying, and if it pings of their parma, then it's obvious to them you're casting something at them and if they can work out what you're doing, you could be up for scrying.
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Yea, that's why I've made the spell a ritual spell. You'll bring children you suspect to be Gifted, and cast the spell before commencing the apprenticeship. There has to be some way to know for sure if the child is Gifted.
But under the RAW, without the ritual requirement, you'd just walk around with a D:Sun version of the spell and take as may Gifted children as you can find.
Except the Gift isn't exactly common, so even with a sun/vision detect-gift spell you're not going to stumble across five potential apprentices each time you go and get milk.
People don't tend to travel around that much, and magi are no exception. If the tavernkeeper's daughter turns out to be Gifted then sure, you'll spot them. But if the charcoal-burner's son is Gifted chances are very high that a magus travelling through the village and the forest and even speaking with the charcoal-burner will never set eyes on his son.
As such, I don't have a major problem with 'see gift' spells. In most cases they're simply backup anyway - if a magus is looking around in an area where a Gifted child is it's most likely because they received some tip-offs already and have a good idea of what they are looking for.
In short: finding an apprentice is almost invariably a story event, even -with- this spell.
Well, it is frighteningly easy, even with rather medium level spells.
- Take a simple flight spell. You can even spont a ReCo spell to lift you vertically
- Cast eyes of the eagle.
- Cast your gift-vision thing.
Suddenly, you can survey a pretty vast region, having gifted individuals appear as little dots you'll perfectly see (thanks to eyes of the eagle).
You can even put these effects in some items, maybe even lesser ones, and give them to a grog (or a team of grogs!!) and have him fly around.
So I'm thinking long-range gift detection spells being rituals is actually a rather good idea if you want to keep the base assumption that it takes 1 season of search for a magus to find a gifted child.