It seems it's all magicians making things for magicians. Who pays 5,000 a gram for orichalcum? Magicians. How do magicians make their money? By selling orichalcum for 5,000 a gram. I don't get it.

Who pays ¥5,000 a gram for orichalcum? Mostly corporations. How do magicians make their money? Working for corporations.

~J

Magicians make money by charging lots of nuyen for magical services.

Among them, environmental clean-up, providing magical trinkets for rich mundanes, creating entertaining illusions, running detox centers for the ultra-rich, and the part that shadowrunners are most concerned with- security and investigation services.

Wage mage. It's a common term for a reason. Not all magicians are sitting around making orichalcum. The ones that are are likely selling it as much to research groups, universities, corps, and yes, a few mages that buy and enchant their own stuff.

Look at it like this. If we all wanted to, we could learn the ins and outs of farming, growing crops, raising livestock. But we don't, because that's what farmers do.

All mages could learn to make orichalcum themselves, but they don't, because that's what mages that make orichalcum do.

(maybe a bad analogy, but it makes sense in my head; no coffee yet)

I see.

So, it's like a huge informal cartel that they run, charging a shitload of money? Sweet.

It's a tad more complicated than that, but basically.

Wait...is it canonical to call it a cartel, per se? I mean, yes, by default the number of producers would be fairly low (relatively speaking), but the other half (organized price fixing and limiting output) seems to be missing from the equation.

Not saying it wouldn't be easy/cool/whatever, just that I can't recall ever seeing that it was so.

What I meant by "informal cartel" was that if most mages charged 100 per hour to set up a ward and a random mage walks by to look at the job offer, he'll charge 100 . It's like a Stand-Alone Complex on a massive scale based on collective pride.

*Stab*

~J

I'll write up something on how the enchanting section of the magical economy works later.

i wouldn't say it's based on collective pride, or even that it's necessarily a cartel or a 'stand-alone complex'. webdesigners, today, charge upwards of $50/hr for their work, at the professional low end. why? because people are willing to pay that much. it's an important service that can only be performed by a relative few; therefore, those relative few can make people pay through the nose. it's just supply and demand. calling it a standalone complex implies, to those of us who've watched the anime (both seasons, plus the movie! i win!) that each mage individually and seperately comes to the price of 100¥/hr independently, with no outside influence. that's not how it works--each mage chooses to charge 100¥/hr because that's what all the other mages are charging. pretty much the opposite of a standalone complex. you fail at GitS, move back five spaces!

Magicians can spend their time conjuring spirits that provide movement and guard to things. That's a market worth billions of every year. Maybe trillions. If you can shave 3 weeks off of the transport time for a container ship, that's huge. And a water spirit can do that, and keep all the cargo and crew saf, and keep the weather clear at the same time. That's huge.

But while that does mean that there's big money filtering into magical workers, magicians don't actually want to do that. Spirits get annoyed doing the same thing for a week even more than getting sent into combat. Many traditions think hat doing that to spirits is unethical. What they'd rather be doing is exploring the astral mysteries and stuff.

So basically you've got a few corporate mages who give in to the big bucks and the other mages don't respect them so they charge those mages big bucks for any magic gear they need.

-Frank

that'd be an interesting factor--mages who perform such mundane services as speeding up shipping take a rep hit. obviously, anyone who has to resort to the shipping industry to keep bread on the table isn't much of a mage, right?

of course, the real problem with the magical economy in SR is how easy the rules make it to mine precious metals. anybody with the talismongering skill, in SR3, can get fucktastic amounts of gold and silver. why anybody'd waste their time actually enchanting is beyond me; talismongering is where the real money's at.

Right on. Thanks. I didn't think there had been.

That out of the way, looking forward to seeing your writeup.

that's only applicable if you view spirits as being created, rather than summoned, beings. besides, those cyberterminals aren't looking for pi, they're looking for god's 216-digit restocking number.

And the section I quoted is only applicable if you view spirits as being summoned, rather than created, beings.

Actually, even summoning a spirit that did not have independent desires/etc. ("sentience" isn't the word I'm looking for, but "being-ness" feels too casual) would be in line with my example.

~J

i should have explained further. i wasn't saying that FrankTrollman is right, just that he's not necessarily wrong. there's room in SR for spirits (summoned or created) with and without sentience/beingness, and maybe even for spirits that lack that quality to acquire it. it's a big, complex mess that's probably best off being described in terms of maybes and sometimeses.

it does? where/as of when? that's a big loss of really interesting flavor, if true.

edit: i'm not sure sapience is the word, either. the question is whether or not the spirit possesses independent desires. sapience does not measure that.

Oh, I'm certainly not claiming that all spirits are non-whatever, but the spirits that Sue Shaman and Hal Hermetic conjure up? Pfaugh.

~J

Reference? Backing material? Or is this just personal methodology/preference/etc? Because I honestly cannot recall a single creditable statement of "spirits are created".

SR3, p161: "Conjuring manipulates mana to call forth, create, or affect spirits." (In-character text)

SR3, p184: "The debate rages among academics whether or not spirits are summoned from somewhere else or created out of pure mana by those who summon them." (OOC rules text)

The fact that they /are/ created is just personal opinion, and I don't even run games that way (or rather, I'd never admit to it publicly—in my games, the debate rages as in canon). The fact that they /could be/ created, and that there's no clear preponderance of evidence either way, is pure canon.

~J

Not necessarily. The section in the SR4 core book implies it with its use of the word "dislike", but nothing in that passage indicates it.

~J

Right on. Been a while since I read the magic chapter. The "could be but nobody's sure" is what I remembered from canon.

Personally, I see much more in canon and otherwise that points to calling existing beings to our "here" than I do the "creation from mana" aspect.

Frankly, I think the "debate" in canon is there to assuage people that get squishy about sentience and "summoning" and all that. Either that, or they really just thought it would add to the game's ambiance.

Given that the SR world is ostensibly dystopian, it would seem to fit more appropriately that they're sentient beings being forced to do the bidding of their masters. That's what leads me to run them as such, anyway, and why mages in my games that do treat their spirits badly can expect less from them than a mage that treats them well.

Oh. Hm. Well then.

~J

Right, but my character doesn't lie awake nights thinking about the nature of the Sixth World. I do, and when something gets explained too much (@#$%ing Brainscan/Technobabel), it becomes one less interesting thing to think about.

~J

What'd they explain in Brainscan and Technobabel?

Otaku. It wasnae pretty.

Er? I don't remember them explaining Otaku in the larger sense, just the Deus-created Otaku.

No, they took Deus, a wonderful, beautiful, totally inhuman intelligence, and gave him ordinary human motivations, fears, and desires. Instead of being inscrutable, he's now motivated by the familiar: fear of betrayal and desire for survival. I'm sure there are ways for it to have turned out more lame, but not much more.

~J

That's their argument. Their financial problems were multi-faceted, and based mostly on poor business decisions and large fixed costs.

Ironically, bankruptcy was the best thing that happened to United, for instance.

The magical goods market is a significant one. The demand for magical goods not only includes magicians but the credulous, the superstitious, and theoretical researchers. It covers both experimentation, personal, and professional uses, and most magical goods are consumable, which means demand will continue for the foreseeable future.

Making a profit off of magical goods, however, can be tricksy. This is why it falls in between a cottage industry and big business. Many posters ask why magicians don't just design and build their own foci from scratch, but how many ask themselves why they don't design and build their own cars? The process of creating magical goods takes time and nuyen.

First, you have to locate and obtain the rites to extract reagents from a proper site. Then you have to actually do it. Following that, a magician has process the raw reagents into refined reagents, and sometimes the refined reagents into radical reagents. With refined and radical reagents, the enchanter can make all manner of magical goods, orichalcum, or even foci if they have the proper plans.

The individual effort of a lone enchanter is not going to supply a single talismonger, much less provide a decent income. Worse, it certainly will not answer the needs of corporate, university, and government research programs.

So talismonger associations and megacorps work on a different scale. For starters, they bring significant investment: tools, land, security, packaging, and transportation costs increase as the volume of magical goods being dealt with increases - and that doesn't event ouch research, batch testing, or marketing costs. These are the "invisible costs" that keep even the low-end raw reagents at 50 for a couple twigs or a bit of lizard blood.

A megacorp, once they have a suitable location, will bring in a group of underpaid, barely skilled workers to hand-pick raw reagents. More experienced, educated, and better trained harvesters will be sent in ahead to locate any natural refined reagents or natural radical reagents in the area. None of them need magical ability, which is an asset from the megacorporate perspective: they're cheap, relatively efficient in large numbers, easy to find, and expendable.

Refining raw reagents does require magicians, however, and paying for their tools, rarity, and ability is responsible for the 100% price hike. A megacorporation will probably separate the "take" of raw reagents into several different lots to be worked on either by groups of beginning enchanters and students, possible headed, taught, or organized by those few enchanters who specialize in the process and can handle larger numbers.

This "Enchanting Team" paradigm extends well both to making radical reagents and most magical goods (fetishes, talismans, binding materials, etc.) because it tends to even out skill and magical ability while enabling magicians to share facilities. Smaller talismonger associations, who have a higher percentage (but smaller number) of experienced personnel might achieve better results by tasking individual talismongers - especially if those enchanters are specialists.

However, when it comes to orichalcum and foci, things probably break up a little. Whether the market is still glutted after the Orichalcum Rush or not, the artificially-inflated price of orichalcum is lower, but you still don't want to waste the metahuman-hours spent making four radical reagents to go to waste. Orichalcum synthesizers and focus enchanters typically handle materials worth thousands of nuyen on a daily basis, and are expected to produce items that equal or exceed the value of many vehicles. Of course, you could go to your local college and ask a grad student to make you a focus - hell, they might have results - but in many cases, especially a High Force focus, only a professional will do.

Of course, the economics of magical goods also includes things which are either strictly magical goods but are related - such as enchanting kits, alchemy microfacs, and all other assorted tools and peripherals - which, rest assured, the megacorps have as close to a vertical monopoly on as they can get.

Our RL economy has some really irrational things going on that you can consider, too. Why do some crappy actors make 20 mil per film while some really good ones struggle to pay the rent? Why do people shell out a hundred bucks to watch a sports event when they never participate in that sport themselves? Why can I charge three times as much for a denim jacket by stitching a recognizable brand label on it?
You can apply the principles behind these questions to anything a mage does as well.

If Keanu Reeves can get by with that, how come I don't have a booming Hollywood career?

I can do a great grumpy!:)

Ameriflot? PSA?