In a minor effort to reduce skill bloat/redundancy I'm thinking of dropping the Magical Sight skill from my game and simply allowing Careers with the arcane trait to use Observation for seeing the winds of magic instead. Also it seems to me that wizards should have different skills based on their order, such as Amber and Jade Wizards who seem to cry out for Nature Lore, so this would allow for an additional skill to take the place of Magical Sight. Another example of this would be Grey Wizards seeming to need stealth and/or skullduggery. Perhaps I'm missing something, and that's why I'm posting this first before implementation. Any thoughts?

As written, it is set to be an advanced skill variation of Observation such as Education is to Folklore or Medicine is to First Aid. It allows a few more options to gain a variation of the same sort of information with a differing set of drawbacks.

Arguably, altering it as you describe, could result in an Academic career using Folklore to gain the benefits of an Education check, or relevant Specialists to use First Aid as though it was Medicine. It amounts to the same results, and has both benefits and drawbacks.

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Magical Sight has long been an awkward skill to implement in WFRP systems -- 2e had the same issues as 3e. Personally, I think Magical Sight would have been better integrated as a Focus or Order talent and socketed as such. Something to effect of:

[Order] Exhaust this card with 4 tokens. While it is recharging, you may view the winds of magic and gain [f] to Observation rolls regarding the winds. While this talent is exhausted, you may still replace it with another talent by using a maneuver, ending the effect prematurely.

Thanks for the thoughts. I hear what you are saying about the comparison of Observation/Magical Sight with Folklore/Education or First/Medicine, but I still don't think one must affect the other. It seems I should be able to drop Magical Sight as a skill and it have no effect on other skills, advanced or otherwise. Still I will think on it more especially your idea of Magical Sight as a talent card. Thanks again. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Love the idea of using the Order card as a "Talent" for viewing the Winds of Magic, very thematic! You could also use an idea that another contributer (their name eludes me) on these forums has experiemented with...give the Wizard player a diagram of the Winds of Magic (i.e.):

http://cutlass.be/rpg/wfrp/afbeeldingen/wom.jpg

Use tracking tokens to show them what winds are strongest and which are weakest.

Though if you're looking to simplify the component bloat, just making Magical Sight a Specialization of Observation (gained for free at character creation) should do the trick.

I've actually made Magical Sight a sometimes dangerous skill to use, for instance:

My groups Celestial apprentice wants to use Magical Sight in the Garden of Morr, not knowing that a Necromancer has set up shop in the garden's crypt and has begun a ritual that has flooded the garden with Darr (dark Winds). So his Magical Sight check comes up with a success, two banes, and a Chaos Star. He definitely sees the Darr, but also suffers a stress (the two banes) and must make a resilience check or suffer the Blinded condition for several rounds/minutes due to the flooding of Darr into his field of vision. Haha! How's that for perilous...

I've been considering making Magical Sight an action. Take a look at the Intuition and Observation based actions and go from there.

Interesting idea. Perhaps have the two sides of the card provide different benefits/hindrances, such as the reckless side allowing the wizard to see more detail (various colors winds in area, power levels of different colors, etc) and a chaos star applying the Blinded condition temporarily.

Being able to see and separate the various winds, with their eddies and flows, is really a separate and unique skill compared to being observant of your normal surroundings.

Magical Sight is the skill to alter your sight from the normal world to the Aether, as well as the ability to identify different Winds, their individual strengths, their movement and patterns, their sources (potentially), and so on.

Think of Observation as the PC's awareness of the real world, and Magical Sight as their awareness of the Aethereal world.