[Michael Cule]

I've never really worried about the way Magery is allegedly 'broken': not nearly as much as the way a few of the spells are.

My only house rule, one that emerged from the discussion of exactly how magic worked in one campaign that was all about magic returning to the world was to decide that Magery-0, being able to sense magic and the mana field, was a physical advantage, one determined by the state of the brain which in turn was a genetically derived mutation/advantage.

The higher levels of Magery, we decided, were spiritual and based on the quality of the soul. They might be types of enlightenment (and therefore improvable) or they might be something fixed for the lifetime of the person.

Which meant that:

1) If you could find the right kind of body magic or genetic rewriting you could give anyone or everyone Magery 0.

2) There were people out there who had Magery 1+ but never knew it because they lacked the physical component that allowed them to perceive the mana flow.

3) If you could turn Magery 0 on you could turn it off as well and that would make taking Mages prisoner and holding them a lot easier.

4) You could have an actual detectable difference between Magery-0 'hedge-magicians' and the more powerful 'wizards'. This allowed Mages to be snobs which they have a tendency to be anyway.

EDITED TO ADD: I was writing up today a session of my current BANESTORM game where someone asked if Magic Resistance was a hereditary trait. After a brief amount of thought I ruled that this too was a soul based trait though no one had yet been found who had Magery 0 and Magic Resistance. I went on to say that families had been found in which one child had Magery and another Magic Resistance but none in the cases of identical twins. The magical tests were very new however and the ideas of DNA and Genetic Analysis had not yet been released by the Ministry of Serendipity.