Alzrius
The EN World kitten
It's interesting that a topic on special materials also discusses the "magic-mart" concept. IMO, they're both subsets of the same thing: the distribution (for lack of a better term) of magic in the game-world is something that a lot of DMs don't think too much about, or if they do it's more time and effort than they're willing/able to devote to it.
For example, one thing I've wanted to do for a long time in my home game was tailor the sorcerer/wizard spell list down to various regional sub-lists by country, and those were the spells wizards from that country typically learned (as a side-note, I found it to be important to resist the urge to just divide up schools of magic among various countries, since that makes things rather lopsided).
Ergo, wizards who were seen casting "foreign spells" were instantly objects of suspicion regarding their national loyalties. Beyond that, sorcerers were screwed from the get-go, as their spells known didn't have to cleave to these country-based divisions, and so they not only manifested powers that were clearly inhuman in origin (this used the bloodbound sorcerer rules from Octavirate Presents: Feared and Hated, though nowadays we'd just use Pathfinder sorcerer bloodlines), but naturally used spells that marked them as being suspected traitors.
This had further ripple-effects in that these country-based spells also affected what magic items were for sale in magic shops (though the universal nature of divine spellcasting - being a main reason why churches wielded such power - helped ameliorate this somewhat, as divine magic items were still to be found). Hence, you couldn't just buy whatever magic item you wanted, and just as with spellcasting certain magic items were clearly foreign in what magic they used, making the locals leery of you.
That said, all of this never got past the idea stage for me, simply because it required time and energy that I could never seem to muster for it. That's what I see a lot of this discussion really being about; these problems tend to solve themselves the more active the DM becomes in building his campaign world.
For example, one thing I've wanted to do for a long time in my home game was tailor the sorcerer/wizard spell list down to various regional sub-lists by country, and those were the spells wizards from that country typically learned (as a side-note, I found it to be important to resist the urge to just divide up schools of magic among various countries, since that makes things rather lopsided).
Ergo, wizards who were seen casting "foreign spells" were instantly objects of suspicion regarding their national loyalties. Beyond that, sorcerers were screwed from the get-go, as their spells known didn't have to cleave to these country-based divisions, and so they not only manifested powers that were clearly inhuman in origin (this used the bloodbound sorcerer rules from Octavirate Presents: Feared and Hated, though nowadays we'd just use Pathfinder sorcerer bloodlines), but naturally used spells that marked them as being suspected traitors.
This had further ripple-effects in that these country-based spells also affected what magic items were for sale in magic shops (though the universal nature of divine spellcasting - being a main reason why churches wielded such power - helped ameliorate this somewhat, as divine magic items were still to be found). Hence, you couldn't just buy whatever magic item you wanted, and just as with spellcasting certain magic items were clearly foreign in what magic they used, making the locals leery of you.
That said, all of this never got past the idea stage for me, simply because it required time and energy that I could never seem to muster for it. That's what I see a lot of this discussion really being about; these problems tend to solve themselves the more active the DM becomes in building his campaign world.
