On the other hand, it also holds an element of risk that enchanting a device from scratch does not.
When you enchant a device, you know very well if (and how quickly) you will succeed.
But when you investigate an unknown device, you may well end up wasting a season, or part of a season (if the power of the device is significantly weaker than yours). You may also fail to detect some dangerous effects that the device can and will produce unbidden. And, even if the investigation succeeds, it may well find that the device can only produce effects of very little use to you (and anyone else alive).
Doesn't need to be perfectly aligned.
The Lab Total needed to learn a power of an item is less than that needed to instill the power in the first place, and you can learn many powers each season without needing an extraordinarily high Lab Total.
If you don't have the lab total needed to investigate the item, you probably don't have the lab total to recreate it either.
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It is also possible (YSMV) that enchanted items have a slightly different form of accumulating warping. This also depends on how often a self affecting object "casts" on itself. A sword that transforms into a knife when sheathed can avoid warping by being stored outside of the sheath when in the covenant.
Until stolen by a naughty faerie.
And made into spirit stones to save them from being consumed by the Chaos God the faeries themselves created? I was thinking the same thing!
Also: I'd propose that a few old, powerful mages are worried about the Mystery of the Missing Items if I thought there was an interesting solution.
I like the idea of warping culling the number of items in circulation.
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You can generally get a rough idea of how many levels of effect have been enchanted into an item by looking at how much vis has been spun into it using the Intellego Vim guidelines:
Magical items have an effective residue magnitude equal to the number of pawns of vis used to open the enchantment (or the total pawns used for lesser enchanted devices). Magnitudes of non- Hermetic items must be set by the storyguide. A spell to detect items will not also detect effects or creatures, and vice versa.
If the effects you've detected add up to the maximum possible, you're probably safe.
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Unless it's a Verditius-made item, because you only detect how many pawns were instilled, and not the discount the Magi had.
Good point, that causes a problem for Invested Items (as it's the pawns used for opening the device which get reduced, not enchanting the effects). The devices do need to have Verditius runes on them to get this bonus, so you do get some warning as well.
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What I dislike is that the culling is very selective.
Enchanted devices under continuous effects warp, other devices do not (unless fequently subjected to external, high-power effects not tailored to them).
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Not a problem.
Item warping could be fun and interesting, and as a long-term phenomena explaining a dearth of enchanted items it's not even necessary to supply concrete mechanics. It can, if you wish, not be a "house rule" so much as simply part of the setting.
And, anyway, the wording in "Gaining Warping Points" is "main sources of warping" and not, for example, "this is the exhaustive list of sources of warping." So even by the published rules there's no reason not to have some warping of enchanted items. Not that I mean to endorse in any way the idea that, if there was such a rule - in the Magic Realm book? - we'd be bound by it.
RPG rules are always a smorgasbord, and you decide what's pudding.
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