[Steve Plambeck]

Magic items were the rarest and most priceless items in the world where my group set our adventures. They could only be introduced by the GM in the context of the story, and the few PCs that found or won one kept them 'til the day they died unless stolen -- there weren't any for sale, nowhere to buy them, and we had no Wizards Guild. And certainly no PC (or even NPC) had the means to make one. That's how we played from the start. When Advanced Wizard came out, we read it in horror and said oh no, this will never do, it'll ruin everything, and promptly crossed out the magic item creation spells.

That said, we had a number of interesting ones -- maybe one turned up every other adventure. And there were famous ones with their own backstories, heirlooms known to be kept by the rich and powerful, or rumored to be hidden away in ancient wizard's labyrinths -- always justification for underground exploration or trying a high-risk bit of burglary :)

Of course every one of these items was an antique, thousands of years old, dating back to the times before the skills of enchantment were lost -- how that happened was another big part of our backstory.

I honestly can't imagine the game as being interesting with magic items available on demand, or by custom order from a guild even at ten times the prices listed in LEITL. Or worse yet with PCs showing up with their own home-made ones!

Were I to start a new campaign world and players group, I'd house rule the Magic Item Creation spells not to be spells at all, but extremely expensive Wizard's talents well out of reach of any starting figures, and I'd look long and hard at the items available in ITL and tweak them individually where any seem to unbalance things.

My opinion is Magic Items are best left to the imagination of the GM, and introduced on a cautious case by case basis.