Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
Perhaps more important than "How"" is "Where?" and the answer is obviously in a setting where enchantment is both powerful and common.
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Not necessarily. The magitech fabrials in
The Stormlight Archives are moderately common (they're mostly in the hands of the very wealthy) but not very powerful, but Shardblades and Shardplate - the latter of which is outright magical powered armor - are extremely rare, irreproducible artifacts. Fortunately, the former are (at least to all appearances) indestructible, and the latter can be regenerated from even a tiny fragment (but not duplicated - as missing parts regenerate, the corresponding original collapses into dust). They are
highly coveted - at one point it states that they have been traded in exchange for entire (presumably small-ish)
kingdoms.
If you want them to be rare but still be producible (rather than irreproducible artifacts), you need to make them sufficiently difficult and expensive (in time and materials) to make to justify their rarity. Maybe the only thing that can power them is a special gemstone that must be harvested from an adult dragon (the guymelefs in
Vision of Escaflowne are like this, although those are generally produced on an industrial level by people who harvest the stones from dragon graveyards), and you have to carefully "grow" the armor around the gem so everything syncs up properly. Maybe they have to be inhabited by a spirit of some sort, and it's really tough to convince one to bind itself into such (and then find a "pilot" the spirit is willing to work with). Maybe only one relatively-rare race is able to produce some important component, and everyone else has to either commission them or cannibalize from existing technology (this is the case in
Knights & Magic, where IIRC elves are the only ones able to channel magic through their hands, which lets them shape otherwise-unworkable mythril like clay; the main character figures out a workaround - a special glove that can channel magic in the same way, letting him do the work himself - because of course he does).