Enchanting Objects
Where those things come from
I've mentioned magical objects before. What they should be1, and what role they play in defense.2
But how do these objects come about?
This gets little play in RPG rules, because players don't want to spend their sessions on the tedium. And even less in novels, where the reader wants to go step by step even less.
The thing is, making magic objects is probably the most world-changing thing a spell-slinger can do.
Not so much the consumable ones. A potion is not that much more useful than a spell-slinger. Gulp this one down, and you are as strong as iron until it wears off, just as your foe is because his wizard threw a spell on him.
When you carry a shield that makes you as strong as iron, you are beginning to change to the world. One shield here, two shields there -- at first they are at most a boost to the warrior who bears one. But the Bronze Age was noted for its warrior elite, and the Iron Age for its ability to marshal large portions of a city's population, changing warfare. If your shield is as easy to obtain as normal armor, it doesn't change warfare that much; perhaps making offense more difficult, which may have ripple effects. If it's harder, the world gets pushed back toward an elite aristocracy. If it's easier, if any peasant can make a shield of wood and have protection as good as the richest man of the city, it pushes toward still larger armies.
At that, are the objects mobile or not? A shield protects its bearer, but an enchantment on land might be able to defend all its defenders. Likewise, a cornucopia that feeds the army on the march enables attacking, but a magical store room that feeds the besieged city enables defense only. A magical wall would also help defend the city, but cities are notorious for sprawling even when all transportation is boat, foot, or beast.
War is not the only thing affected. If a city has a wizard who enchants its court of law so that people can not tell lies in it, rampant theft of such objects would transfer where a court could be held. If the object is stationary, the problem arises that it may cease to be otherwise a good place for a city. Let the port silt up, a drought make the land good only for pasture, not farming, or a plague hit this city with particular severity, and you have a city that continues claim importance because of its court. Perhaps it even extorts a living for all its inhabitants out of having that enchantment.
Unless, of course, another wizard makes another court room with the same magic.
The two biggest factors in how many such things there are are how easy they are to make, and how many people can make them. The easier the more plentiful, of course, but if fewer people can make them, even if a wizard who can make one can do a dozen a day on whim, they are likely to have been made at specific times, with the circumstances bearing down on them.
At least rare ability does explain one thing: why the wizard makes (or enchants) the object rather than cast the spell on the fly. This gives the many mundane souls the object to use in his absence. I have heard questions floated about, concerning why Hogwarts has a potions class. Why go to all that effort instead of waving your wand and shouting the incantation? It's not like they hand them out to Muggles. On the other hand, there are potions that do things that we do not see a spell do.
If you really wanted to enliven life, you could decree that all magic is like that. The making of magical object is not infusing magic into a mundane object. It is giving the form of a mundane object into magical material. A smith who make magic swords knows how to recognize magical metals, and what it can do, and how to forge it into swords -- or horseshoes, or nails, or whatever form best uses the inherent magic. Healing potions are to magical herbs what aspirin is to willow bark. The firetree's branches can be used to make fireball wands. Adventure parties go out to hunt monsters and butcher their bodies in hopes that the parts will prove useful -- which is just another way that the making of magical objects affects the world-building
Magic and Things
Ah, those classics of fantasy, the enchanted -- things. Some are age-old; magical rings are found in the folklore of every culture that wears rings, and magical swords, every culture that uses swords. Some are newfangled; magical trains sprung up only after trains.
Defense From Magic
In a world where powerful wizards -- high-level, if you prefer -- can blast armies to smoking ashes with a single fireball spell, why don't wizards rule the world?
I have just started to reread Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, which starts off with a witch casting a sword from lightning bolts (or meteorites, though that word is never used) gathered from her garden, the metal melted with the heat of an arcanely enhanced fire, while she casts spell after spell upon it, all to prepare a suitable weapon for the hero to venture "beyond the fields we know." Now, that is a magic sword!
> The making of magical object is not infusing magic into a mundane object. It is giving the form of a mundane object into magical material. A smith who make magic swords knows how to recognize magical metals, and what it can do, and how to forge it into swords -- or horseshoes, or nails, or whatever form best uses the inherent magic. Healing potions are to magical herbs what aspirin is to willow bark. The firetree's branches can be used to make fireball wands. Adventure parties go out to hunt monsters and butcher their bodies in hopes that the parts will prove useful -- which is just another way that the making of magical objects affects the world-building
Isn't this basically how technology works?