What would the market for magic items realistically look like in the Order of Hermes?
The sources books tell us that the primary market are Verditius magi crafting high-end items without a particular buyer in mind and then trying to sell them for extremely high prices after finishing crafting.
This strikes me as an extremely strange business model since it is highly unlikely that most buyers for magic items want to buy high end invested items with a bunch of effects combined. Sure an individual buyer might want one or two of the effects invested but not likely all of them.
This thread is for sharing experiences of what kinds of magic items you have sold or bought in games and also for theorycrafting about what kinds of items you would think that there is a market for in the Order of Hermes.
Here are a few ideas I have considered on top of my head:
I think that there is a small market for high-end bespoke items crafted on order, primarly from Verditius magi. But that these items are always, or almost always sold with a beforehand agreement as to what powers they will contain, what for the item will take etc. The primary customers for such items are (established) covenants that can afford to spend tons of vis on items to improve the covenant. Examples include: magical climate control items, items that make a whole class of employee obsolete by e.g. cleaning or cooking and items that defend that covenant.
I think that there is a large market for second hand items. These are items that a mage crafted to solve a particular problem. An example could include the charged wand that casts Agony of the beast from the core rulebook. Assuming that Mari managed to agonize the particular beast she was after without expending all of the charges.
Craft magic items that perform low skill jobs. I think that there is a big market for items with craft magic spells that perform jobs that dont require high finesse scores. Things like digging ditches or casting the carpentry spells from the Covenants book. These items will allow new covenants in particular to save money on hiring mundane specialists to perform this labor for them. These items also likely see significant second hand sales as covenants grow and outgrow their need to magic away a specific problem.
A service where a magus enchants an effect into an invested item on behalf of another magus, typically in an area where the buyer is weak magically. There is practically no end to the possibilities here. Though I imagine that effects that make travel easier, faster or more comfortable are particularly sought after along with things that make the magus more comfortable or appear more in line with how they want to appear.
I like your idea of selling used items; that hadn’t occurred to me. My PCs are all hoarders.
Magi of Hermes has a few characters in it who explicitly craft items for sale, and this includes charged items which must sell relatively cheaply. Covenants and Through the Aegis include a variety of useful items as well. There’s also a market for Magic animals; multiple covenants in ArM5 are described as breeding such animals for sale. It’s from old editions, but covenants in the Roman tribunal explicitly sell enchanted items to wealthy nobles for income; in my Saga this tribunal is a magical service economy.
I went through various books and assembled a shopping list for player character magi. It’s not exhaustive, but it gets new players thinking about the kind of things they’d like to buy. This list doesn’t include items crafted by Verditius in the tribunal, Items of Quality as well as much more expensive items available nowhere else. Here is that list, stripped of formatting:
Enchantments for Sale!
All items are contracted, deliverable within one year. Thank you for your patronage.
Labour Saving Devices
Magical Oven (4p) Cook your food without the need for firewood.
Stone-Cutting Knife (4p) Tired of that stone wall? Cut yourself a window.
Enchanted Porter (4p) A glove enchanted with an Unseen Porter, to carry heavy burdens from afar.
Bath Rock (4p) This stone is constantly warm. Heat your tub without untidy coals or backbreaking labor.
Motivated Plow (4p) This plow can be pushed along with the slightest touch and breaks up the hardest ground.
Vitalizer of Provisions (4p) This chest preserves food placed within it.
Death of Vermin (4p) A trap that lures in all nearby vermin.
Abluere Magica (4p) Get your robes, and the clothes of your covenfolk, magically clean.
Nailed Down Chamber Pot (4p) Destroys all human waste which enters it. Never needs washing!
Balance of the Honest Merchant (4p) Never be cheated by merchants or millers again.
Vermin Ward (6p) Prevents small animals from entering your tower.
Wards Against Rot (8p) Prevents stored goods inside a tower or grain silo from rotting.
Dumb Waiter (8p) Transports food from the kitchen to anywhere within 50 paces... including your plate!
Hermes's Horn (8p) Makes a herd of up to 1,000 animals passive and easy to control.
Enchanted Chef (10p) Insert raw materials, describe a recipe, this pot does all the work.
For the Laboratory
Bookstand of Hespera (4p) A wooden lectern that follows you around the room, so you can walk and read.
Ever-Burning Hearth (4p) This magical coal ignites and douses on command. No more cold winters!
Prodigious Plant Pot (6p) Grows a mature plant from a seed in a single day. Bring some green to your lab.
Magical Lamp (6p) Equivalent to direct sunlight on a clear day.
Tireless Servant (8p) This skeleton obeys your commands; manual labor and repetitive tasks only, please.
Arms & Armour
Impenetrable Doublet (4p) Silken clothing that never tears. Protect your skin in silky comfort.
Shield of Unbreakable Wood (4p) As strong as iron.
Adamantine Mail (6p) A full suit of magically-reinforced mail.
Mjolnir's Equal (6p) This hammer completely destroys any object of metal or wood it strikes.
Incendior Hominem (6p) This wand shoots Pilum of Fire. For an additional fee, increase its penetration.
Mail of Sublime Lightness (6p): Light as a feather, sturdy as steel.
Items of Convenience
Elixir of Morning's Afterthought (1p) This potion washes away the worst hangover.
Magic Spice (1p) Sprinkle this spice on any food, no matter how bad it is, and it tastes like whatever you choose.
Ink of the Unseen Circle (1p) Invisible ink for your circle spells. Your enemies won’t know what hit them.
Potion of Vulcan's Appeasement (1p) Dispels a fire up to the size of a large house.
Apollo's Lyre (2p) Plucking each string plays a different song, chosen by you before the lyre is made.
Vis Divining Rod (4p) You can hear vis within 30 paces.
Bracelet of Clandestine Insignificance (4p) No one will pay you the slightest notice.
Ferramenta Glacies (4p) When touched to water, this small pick freezes a block of ice.
The Face of Paris (4p) This blunt razor destroys all hair it comes into contact with.
Cloak of Wilderness Refuge (4p) Expands and reforms into a large tent with room for three.
Brooch of the Fish (6p) Breathe water.
Traveler’s Cloak (6p) This cloak transforms the earth beneath it to be soft and warm as a mattress.
Ribbon of Arcane Preservation (6p) Keeps an arcane connection from decaying.
Lancet of Good Health (6p) Improves disease recovery.
Bed of Rapid Convalescence (8p) Drastically improves recovery from all wounds.
The Beasts of Lambaird
By Special Arrangement with Dalton on FlambĂł. Deliverable immediately.
Horses Immune to the Gift, these are fine mounts for you or your shield grogs. Palfreys and jennets (gentle riding horses) are 3p. Rouncies of excellent quality, the riding horses of warriors and knights, cost 6p. A courser, a true warhorse ready to do battle against the darkest foe, is 10p.
Hawks Gyrfalcons immune to the Gift, they make elegant pets, hunting animals, and familiars. 4p.
Hounds Lambaird’s mastiffs can smell vis, regios, and other magical effects. 4p.
In Thebes, charged/enchanted items might be worth tokens instead of vis.
In general, a grocery market sells all kinds of goods without a pending commission. So I think that items of general usefulness should be "mass" produced for convenience.
I imagine (and depicted in game in the past) Veriditius as also seeking to mass produce low-ish level items: items in the Lab total 10-20 range, that they could make in big batches within their specialty. So they'd show up at the Tribunal with a stand displaying examples of their work.
to use @Doctorcomics' example above, Rhesus of Verditus of Florum shows up at Tribunal and shows Impenetrable Doublets made with wool spun in Flanders by his flunkies. He will try to convince as many people as possible, in particular fresh new magi to order one, and then he'll spend a season making 4 at once (to maximise his lab total) and promises to ship them with X years by Redcap.
Top tier items I would definitely see as being bespoke: our Covenant went o explore a ruin and there is a powerful magic ghost which tosses fireballs, we need a powerful item of Ward against the Flame with many daily uses so that we can just rush it and loot everything, none of us are ReIg experts so we turn to our local Redcap and ask to either be put in touch with the right person, or they might just take the Order and (partial?) pre-payement and then within X years we will receive the delivery that will have been made by a Verditius (or other whatever) on the other side of Europe for a fee. The Recaps would take a cut and the mage in question would expect full payement too.
The mass-produced, low-level items make a lot of sense. But honestly, this is where specialists get their hand in things better than Verditius magi do. Verditius magi only get to add Craft in these cases. If you have a Focus in the right area and you're looking at producing many, you'll almost guarantee being able to produce them more easily than a general Verditius. Sure, the same specialist with Verditius magic is even better. But the point is that there are many magi with foci who can outdo most Verditius magi.
I think this one of the areas where there is a huge difference between player characters, often playing a tactical game, and real magi of Mythic Europe with all their human vanity and laziness.
Top notch Verditius craftsmanship won't sell for its functionality, I don't think, but for the prestige. The wealthiest magi will want to buy one of these items just to show off. They are way to expensive for those who only need their practical function. This is never going to be a big market. Not only are the buyers limited, but it takes a senior Verditius to
I am unsure about the second hand market. Will items be sold, or simply pile up with magi and covenants who have an abundance of everything and won't care? Or maybe that's exactly what makes the market for the show pieces of the senior Verditius. Sell of the old the junk to afford something truly spectacular.
To the extent that we have introduced trade in items in our sagas, it has been the young Verditius from vis poor tribunals selling simple stuff to earn the vis to make what they want to make. Prepared items with no effects was a success. The PCs bought two, at 1p over the capacity. A great win-win given that the Verditius spend less vis to enchant to capacity.
All of the saga I have played in tended to have a fairly large market for lesser enchanted items. Ones that we classified as commodity items would actually often be available for purchase with little to no wait. These would be items the Redcaps would tend to buy stocks of. Being something Redcaps would want goes a long way towards commodity status since they are both the largest group and are unable to enchant items themselves. If you are enchanting things they want then you have a near sure market for sale.
To be a commodity enchanted item, it would have to generally be some combination of:
Very cheap to produce. 1p of Vis to make
Something that almost every Covenant could use and would want to have at least one of
Slightly more expensive items would need a common Redcap use. 2p ~ 3p of Vis to make
A cheap item that every Covenant could use is many of the simple light producing effects which can be enchanted for 1p each. Magical lanterns which produce light as bright as a torch for example (a level 9 enchantment, costing 1p and sold for 2p).
Slightly more expensive items that Redcaps would have common use for include many Vim effects specifically for dealing with Vis. Effects for identifying and moving it are important for their Vis banking when most of their members can't cast a spell to do it. So Scales of the Magical Weight, Sense the Nature of Vis, and Gather the Essence of the Best.
That's part of my assumption, the Verditius will try to mass make something within their specialty where they combine massive lab totals with the Verditius pie. I also think that a non-Verditius Re+ element specialist could make good business selling mass produced ward against fire or lightning artefacts, based on their specialty, while these wouldn't be the Bugatti prestige items, they would probably be the mainstream Toyota on the market.
This topic reminds me, in a saga I'm playing in we had an auction where a bunch of characters submitted items to sell and some NPCs had items to sell, and we had several guest players take the parts of NPCs for a session. I ended up only spending 1 vis on some charged items I could have made, but it wasn't worth the season of my time.
Few Verditius magi will lower themselves to mass-produce stuff. (Well, unless the pay is really good anyway.)
Verditius magi generally think of themselves as artists and master craftsmen, and they put effort into each item they create, making them as fine as possible. Mass production is contrary to their philosophy.
I think you misunderstood what I was pointing out. Verditius are no more likely to have an applicable Focus than any other Gifted mage other than the Tremere. So for every Verditius with a useful (for these purposes) Focus, there will a bunch of non-Verditius magi with useful Foci. Unless there is something ridiculous where for every Verditius with a Focus has exactly the same Focus as another pile of non-Verditius magi have, the vast majority of those who can do this mass-production well will be non-Verditius magi. The Verditius magi will only win out in the rare instance where their Focus applies. And then there is the compounding issue that Verditius magi are best at the big stuff, opening items for enchantment for others, and doing things like Objects of Quality that draw Verditius magi away from mass production much more than others are drawn away. So, because the Verditius is required to have a useful Focus, we should expect the Verditius magi to be a small minority of those doing such mass production.
That may be true, but a young, and poor, Verditius may not yet have rised above such mass-production, and there be no lowering involved when they mass-produce stuff to make the starting capital to rise and shine.
IOS, our Tribunal meeting includes a fair, in which various magic items and products are displayed by magical craftsmen and covenants (Verditius are not the only magical craftsmen, nor magic items the only possibility), and assorted magical services are demonstrated or at least pitched. Of course, less magical but still exotic goods and services are also marketed.
How many vendors would there typically be? And how many attendees? Canon tribunal size?
We have had the same, but we have not played out every tribunal, and we have struggled to make the market interesting. If the market is big, there are too many NPCs to play, and if the market is small, it is either a tailor made free lunch for the players or a narrow selection of little relevance.
I agree in principle though I think that the situations in which charged items sell are skewed. Specifically I imagine that magi rarely but occasionally find themselves in situations where they can save a sufficient amount of work to impact at least one seasons worth of study (i.e. something taking 11 or more days to solve) where the situation could be solved by a single casting of a spell that the magus hasnt invented and/or is not specialized properly to invent easily. In this kind of situation the value of a single charge will skyrocket from basically nothing to whatever amount of vis the magus could have extracted in the lost time/whatever alternate metric the magus uses to estimate the value of their time.
I think that this happens regularly enough to cause a those random charged items covenants tend to make to solve exactly this kind of problem to change hands rather than just stay in vaults. Thus creating a market for second hand charged items, even though on paper they might appear worthless.
I don't think the price of a charge could ever skyrocket in general. You've left out two things. One is that Mechanicals / Rusticani can produce them in relatively minimal time. The more common, but not applicable for high-penetration combat spells, is that magi with the Formulaic spell could be hired to cast it, only costing them a day of their time. As both of these two methods don't impact the magus's season, they can be done at low cost and still make the magus a good profit. So if prices on charged items start to rise too much, this will become extremely worthwhile, and the market will quickly shift away from the expensive charged items. It's just those high-penetration combat spells that won't run into nearly as much competition.
Rusticani are few and far between, and if prices skyrocket, they would generally be better off making one at skyrocket price than to make a dozen to push prices down. And rusticani need to invent the spell first, so they need a season to launch a new design, and thus cannot trivially cover the entire range of the market.
Formulaic casters is an option if one is nearby when you need them, but if they have to travel they would be more expensive, and you cannot buy one at the fair to keep for when you need it.
I think you misread what I wrote, as I was writing specifically taking that into account. That's why I said high-penetration combat spells, where only the Mechanicals / Rusticani can compete, "won't run into nearly as much competition." Meanwhile, for the other competition I wrote "the more common..."
I'll give you a past-game case with a different thing. I had a mage who was really, really good at making food with Rego craft magic. (Like game-breaking good which exposed a problem with Faerie Sympathy.) Along with good Rego came fast flight and teleportation. It was worthwhile for covenants to hire that mage to show up for a few minutes to cast a few spells, or to make bread at home at deliver it to them. That one mage would crush the market for Lesser Enchanted Devices to make food.
Another case I saw someone else mention was a short-term need for something like Fast Grow. If there is a magus with that spell, they can just show up, cast it, and leave. That's a short bit of their time, and they could cast it several times. They can do this repeatedly with fees far below what you would need for a charged item, and they would make far more from these low fees than they could off a much greater time commitment to make a charged item.
These sorts of things can happen with any utility spell. Where they simply will not happen is when you need that high-penetration combat spell on hand just in case the scary bad thing comes knocking.