[Thaumatology] Setting magic item prices to make economic sense

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

). Maybe the item existing at all save as a unique creation of a mad elf makes no sense because 'who would want to pay for that?!' (id est it's just not worth it in comparison to other things that k?

Ina setting like Yrth, eccentric elves are probably a major source of magic items, because they have long enough lifespans that spending a few years making a cool gizmo is a relatively small time investment. Why is there a magic item that lets you talk to hedgehogs? Some elf wanted to ask them a lot of questions. What if you want a magic item that does something specific? Try to get some elf interested in your project.

Originally Posted by Anthony

I've seen plenty of settings where cheap magical items are plausible, they're just not rare magic settings, and they either aren't low tech (I mean, they might be TL 3+4 or something, but not TL 3) or the magic items have very limited functions.

There's tons of fantasy settings where magic items are plausibly way more common than on Yrth, which is the context in which the GURPS enchantment rules were created, and which are pretty harsh by the standards of settings where mortals can deliberately make magic items at all. In many settings, specialists can enchant items related to their specialty without having to be experts in ten other fields too, and often it's considerably faster and less punishing of intermittent work. Also some high-magic settings have more potential magic users than the Yrth default, sometimes a lot more, up to settings like Steven Brust's Dragaera where literally everyone in the Empire has Magery.