How do you explain Wizards being able to produce magic items and potions with rare and exotic ingredients in a setting...

How do you explain Wizards being able to produce magic items and potions with rare and exotic ingredients in a setting with faux-medieval levels of technology? How could those goods get around everywhere enough to be available for the general magic using population?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Roman_trade_relations
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppe_Route
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_in_ancient_times
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_route_from_the_Varangians_to_the_Greeks
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road
twitter.com/AnonBabble

You can't. Before automobiles, no one ever traveled more than five miles from their homes.

By using magic instead of tech for the purposes of creating an infrastructure for the transportation of goods.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

This is why wizards adventure in the first place, along with the desire to unearth ancient spells/knowledge/artifacts.

Need a ruby the size of your fist as the catalyst to a spell? Better get plundering some abandoned temples. Dragon hearts don't grow on trees either.

GP cost for items crafted represents Gold equivalent of goods aquired.

A True wizard RPer catalouges all spell components, is constantly looting mundane items and emphasizes the importance of spell memorization and is versatile as the support of the group.

Also, it's not really at medevil tech, Faerun is a cluster fuck of sort of near roman age/Magic supplements actual progress, like the fact that there are ships, but no such thing as canons, instead fireball wizards or ballista, and gunpower does not exist but this magical shit called smokepowder does given by deity no less.

It's backwards as fuck.

Because if a bunch of actual doctors, astronomers, and philosophers can do it, an wizard with access to magic can easily follow.

*Waves hands*. by using magic user. Are you sure you didn't wander into the Mages' College by accident whilst looking for the Village Idiot College?

Because the ingredients as a whole are rare and exotic, but each one is only ever rare OR exotic.
Rare ones are found locally, but it's just a pain to get them. Think of truffles actually truffles might be magical reagents and the other ingredients of note are the common but exotic ones. Herbs and rocks you can't get in this climate or location and so are traded around.
Trading caravans from far off lands trade in them because wizards everywhere buy them, they're good shit.

Rare AND Exotic reagents are shit you quest for. You go to an eccentric collector of herbs and ask to buy his dried spellwort and he says he'll trade it for a dragon heartscale, that sort of thing.

Wizards in different areas and with differing access to trade routes will have different spells available to them, or use substantially different reagents to cast different spells to achieve the same effect.
Some wizards even specialise in using common and cheap reagents to achieve similar results, forever trying to squeeze out a little more magic from fantasy garlic and dandelions to compete with the rich bastards who can afford imported solar saffron and moon ash or whatever.

Nigga, we had continent-spanning trade routes in the fucking Bronze Age.

Fun fact, a good chunk of magic item crafting involves salt, which is in fact EXPENSIVE in D&D. You can cut massive costs if you ever get barrels of the stuff, or become a Dry lich to make INFINITE salt.

This. Hell, as soon as humans figured out copper was pretty cool, we had copper artifacts turning up continents away from the copper deposits where the material originated.

As ususal,
>But they didn't have X in the middle ages!
Yeah, they did.

Well, we always knew that D&D was a little bit shit when it came to economics.

Also how hard is it for a wizard to extract salt from seawater?

Actually, salt was pretty valuable way back when. and In D&D they've not the mining skills and tech to get that MUCH fucking salt, due to the high magic, Salt is actually used very commonly, magic circles, spell components, rituals and item crafting to boot.

It's going to take a lot of sea water.

...

It only takes 3/4 of a year to walk the entire east & west of Euroasia.
Which is why Nomadic migration tribes could even exist in the first place.

Its not hard, but its a logistic issue.
So you need 3-20 men to chop forests & a forest to chop
, some large storage area to dry the wood,
some way to store hundred of liters of water
, a container that doesn't ignite(and most metals rusts, even more so when you deal with BOILING SALT in them), so you need a more expensive metal vessel(i.e bronze),
some kind of filter on the vessel to increase efficiency
, storage area for the salt.

Never mind that yield is around 3.5% per volume of water, so 1000 liters is about 30 kilos of salt.
Its doable, but its not free, because you need access to 30-50 spare workers.

But there are wizards who can teleport...

Or you just get it from a salt mine or coastal salt deposit.

If your home is on your back half the day, it's pretty hard to go more than 5 miles from it.
He's also pretty blatantly embellishing.

first or second level spell I would think

Wall of Salt is a fourth level spell and make plenty of salt

>Wizards
>How do you explain
It's fucking wizards. They use magic. They don't need the regular technology. Holy shit, your answer writes itself. Depending on the setting an average power you can explain it away easily. Wizards teleport stuff, wizards send magical beasts to transport stuff, wizards can enchant mundane stuff so it will perform beyond its theoretical capabilities. Just because non-magical means are primitive doesn't mean that the infrastructure is - provided that magic is common and able to prop it.

Not how it works.

Tide goes out.
Water pools in very wide, very shallow areas you've built.
Sun dries the water.
Peasants scrape up the residue.
Tide comes in.

By lying through your teeth about the ingredients being rare.

It's almost entirely the preparation.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Roman_trade_relations
>India, China and the Arabian peninsula take one hundred million sesterces from our empire per annum at a conservative estimate: that is what our luxuries and women cost us. For what fraction of these imports is intended for sacrifices to the gods or the spirits of the dead?
>—Pliny, Historia Naturae 12.41.84.[16]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppe_Route

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_sources_and_trade_in_ancient_times

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_route_from_the_Varangians_to_the_Greeks

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road