Uh-oh, unless I’ve fumbled by reading roll… it looks like the Definitive Edition pdf are missing the Level 10 Intellego Vim guidelines (detect traces of powerful magic, detect recent presence of weak magic)?
Hope I’m wrong here because it’s well past too late to fix for the physical book, I’m thinking.
General: • Detect the traces of magic of negative magnitude up to the magnitude of the guideline used – 2.
So level 10, being 2nd magnitude, detects traces down to -(2-2)=0, which is any non-negative trace, which is what that guideline was supposed to handle. But it extends that guideline further, as you can use a higher base.
Yes, they’re not there, although Base 10 is used in the calculation line for Sense the Lingering Magic. It’s not great, but I think it’s minor.
Unfortunately, the level 10 guideline is the one used for detecting the Gift… and I don’t believe there’s an example spell using it in DE. Somewhat important for quite a few games.
Actually, that’s a different level-10 guideline. Not all the guidelines from other books were brought into DE; most were not.
Well, it uses the General guideline. Note that the spell was changed since core. It now says
The residue must be of at least zero magnitude.
Base 10 is 2nd magnitude. 2-2=0. Those match.
David decided to bring this one guideline in from HoH:TL because it expands the old InVi 10 to InVi general without losing the old InVi 10. But then listing both of them would be redundant, so he deleted the redundant part.
The forum is telling me not to reply, because the thread has been marked solved. I am replying to say that I was the one who did that.
Where was the guideline to detect The Gift? (It is a different guideline from this one.)
Printing has finished, so it is just as well this was not a mistake.
I’d assumed it was the InVi “detect traces of powerful magic” guideline since Sight of the Lazy Parens (from Apprentices), Scent of the Gift & Detect the Gift (from Through the Aegis), and Numbness of the Gift (from Hedge Magic) all use a base 10 in their level calculations.
If not that, I guess its an unwritten guideline.
Although it's not complete - usually the first place I look for questions like that is the supplemental guidelines PDF from the atlas website. Short answer: HMRE p.6 and App p.33
Heh. Apprentices p33: ‘Intellego Vim spells can detect The Gift. The base level is 10: “detect the traces of powerful magic,”’ (HMRE is more… convoluted.)
OK, that got missed in the pass through. Oh well…
HMRE just says it's base 10 to detect the Gift.
If you want to use the Apprentices version, you know you want 2-2=0, so you use base 10 (magnitude 2).
It works either way. Maybe it would have been good to include that as a separate guideline, but many guidelines were left out.
The main problem here is that there isn't an example spell in DE to detect the Gift. The sidebar on InVi Guidelines mentions that you can detect magical creatures, by Might or by using the highest Art of Hermetic magi to calculate the "effective residue magnitude" -- but that's extremely non-intuitive for someone looking for how to detect the Gift in a target that has no Arts.
Wanting to detect the Gift has come up in every Ars game I've been in as magi start looking for potential apprentices. Without an example spell or less obscure guidance its not clear in DE to new Ars players how you'd do that. Unfortunate.