If a character with The Gift, who is not a hermetic magus nor a member of a hedge tradition, suffers 2+ Warping Points, what would his/her reaction to Warping be?
The closest guidance I can think of is the section on warping in Hedge Magic page 10 - "Usually, ungifted hedge wizards react similarly to mundane characters, gaining flaws and virtues (see ArM5 page 168), but Gifted hedge wizard react more uniquely and unpredictably (see individual chapters)."
Now this doesn't cover Gifted people who aren't part of a tradition. Assuming they receive magic warping (as the Realms of Power books cover divine or infernal warping for those who haven't previously been warped by other realms), I would assume they get warped like a mundane and get flawed up - it's in your interests to learn a tradition.
Apprentices does have the rules for Turbulae - uncontrolled magical experiences which result when Gifted children have warping. You could rule that in someone not in a tradition, turbulae don't stop with age but instead become more lethal.
I remember a reference to Criamon introducing Hermetic Twilight, but I can't remember if that's 5th edition canon or not and what happened before.
HMRE tmk does not address this.
Gifted Companions with at least single Realm-aligned Supernatural Ability but no Opening of the Arts and no obvious adherence to a tradition might look with the SG for an appropriate reaction:
from HMRE if Magic-aligned: Nátt-Thel is simple and quite often applicable
from RoP:TI if Infernal-aligned: there p.17f is universally applicable
from RoP:F if Faerie-aligned: this is described in p.119 Faerie Warping, and Sympathy Traits lead to Faerie Calling (p.119f)
from RoP:TD if Dominion.aligned: p.63ff Ascension gives three options - Divine Gloom, Divine Form and Divine Unity - for player and SG to choose from.
I found the reference to Criamon - Houses of Hermes: Mystery Cults p46 "Criamon magi believe that before the Founder discovered his refuge, warped magi simply died".
This is only a belief, who knows if it is true?
This is addressed very slightly in Grogs. If you look at the Flaw Warped by Magic, you can see that a Gifted person picking up 5 Warping Points before becoming a Hermetic apprentice will pick up a Flaw. That would seem to indicate they undergo regular Warping, unless of course they're tied to the special Warping of another realm.
Oho! Nice catch!
Precisely we have on Grogs p.85 only: "A magus may take this flaw to represent Warping gained before his apprenticeship." This does imply only, that some magi are Warped as "mundanes" before their apprenticeship.
Other magi - e. g. some with a Supernatural Ability before apprenticeship - may have had other reactions to early Warping.
Yes, that's why I qualified it, noting the other realms. However, for magic we have statements like "The response of each magic tradition to Warping is unique. Wizard’s Twilight is the response of the Order of Hermes, and no hedge tradition has this particular response." (HMRE p.10). There are multiple statements like this across multiple books. These responses to Warping are from and specific to a tradition and are "unique" to that tradition, so without that tradition you don't get it. But other realms are written differently.
I kind of like the idea of using Turbulence and having the character's Gift spiral out of control until a hedge tradition or Hermetic magic gives them a way to direct the warping.
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It is a fun idea, but there are practical problems:
- Turbulence is a reaction to Botching, not (necessarily) Warping.
- Turbulence, as written, becomes substantially less potent as the character in question ages.
- Turbulae would be less detrimental than almost any other Warping reaction (maybe Faerie Calling) and thus preferable to Wizard's Twilight - thought I suppose that might be said of 'default' Warping as well even if Criamon magi can manage to come out ahead more often than not.