>Sure, but my problem is with the magicians telling them apart.
IMO it's really a task no self-respecting magician should be able to fail at anymore than a hunter figuring out whether a particular beast eats plant or meat.
>What sort of differences would magical practitioners perceive?
At a first approximation, entities from different realms would be harder to make out. The magician would know there's a entity there but he can't see it clearly because he is not looking at it the right way.
Thus when an Orlanthi weatherworker looks at the source of the wind to identify its daimone type and can't make it out, he knows he is dealing with a alien wind. He could still try and figure out the the alien winds attributes but the penalty would be at least -20.
Distinguishing between types of alien entities can be done and probably depends on the exact phenomenon that obscures the magician's perception of the entity.
For spirits, this might be an excessive fluidity in form, for essences, a subtle intangibility in its presence (the determination of essential characteristics from pitch, amplitude etc being beyond non-sorcerers) and daimones generally appear bland and indistinct (due to lack of individuality).
These obscuring effects will not be apparent to the magician of the same realm from which the entity comes from (i.e. a shaman does not see spirits as being fluid in shape because he is not looking at its shape).
--Peter Metcalfe
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