Mercantilism & Magic - How Magic Affects Shopping
Player’s Handbook, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
Living in a non-magical world, it can be difficult to know how a fantasy world would react when it comes to magic and merchants. Magic has to have some effect and merchants would have to have some defense against mind-altering magic as well as detect if a magical item is fake and what something actually does. This, of course, assumes that your merchants are residing in a medium or high magical world, whereas in a low magic setting only a few people may even know anything about magic.
With that said, traders in a magical world are going to need to know how to protect themselves from magic, detect when something is magical, and have ways of counter-acting people who have more power than they do - else they are going to end up very poor and with nothing to sell. To that end, a merchant is going to need three things to keep doing business. They need a product to sell, they need customers with the appropriate wealth for their product, and they need protection from their customers.
Products
Products can range anywhere from farm produce to expensive weapons and magical items. A merchant who only sells produce from their farm is not going to be able to protect themselves as much as one who buys and sells expensive jewelry or magical items, but they also don’t need as much protection as someone who does sell those high-valued items. Those who need increased protection have high-valued items to sell.
In this situation, a merchant might hire a single guard to protect them if they are transporting a wagon of vegetables to the city, or only guard them while they are in the city, but more often than not, they won’t be able to afford the services of a guard and still come home with enough money for them and their family. A merchant who sells high-value items though can afford multiple guards and will have to, to help protect them if they travel from city to city or even just in the city. They may even pay more in protection costs than in their salary, as they won’t have a salary if they lose everything to thieves.
Customers
Just as merchants have different products they will sell, they are going to have different customers that they sell to. Someone who sells produce is going to be selling to the common folk and servants to the wealthier classes. Someone who sells high-value items, like a ring of protection, is not going to be able to sell their goods to the common folk, but rather to the wealthier classes who have the income to spend thousands of gold.
Player’s Handbook, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
What this means is that there are fewer people that someone selling high-value items can sell to, and so again they must charge more for their products because they aren’t making a sale every day. On the other hand, selling produce, a very common item, merchants will be selling for as cheap as possible to try and outsell their competitors (other produce farmers) while still trying to make enough of a profit to feed their family.
Protection
Those who sell low-value items are not going to need as much protection as one who is selling high-value items. Low-value items can be found anywhere and merchants who sell those goods will be more likely targeted for crimes of opportunity. It is simply a convenient theft for the thief like if the merchant is distracted at their stall or the merchant is heading home but passes by some hidden bandits. They would steal from anyone, it wasn’t because they wanted a lot of lettuce that day.
High-value merchants will experience crimes of opportunity still, but the vast majority of times it will be because they are specifically being targeted. A magic item is far more valuable and will attract the attention of any thief. It now is reliant on the merchant to always have protection to encourage thieves to look for an easier target to steal from.
What a high-value merchant is going to need in the way of protection largely depends on what their abilities are, what they are selling, and just how high-value it is. If all they sell are spell scrolls, they may not need as much protection as someone who sells magic items that can work for anyone. In either case, both will need guards to help protect them and their product while traveling, and probably also if they are in a city unless they are allowed to set up traps and hire magic-users to put up wards.
As you get to sell more valuable objects, the merchant may even have to ‘buy’ some of those valuable things from themselves, like a ring of mind-shielding to prevent others from trying to manipulate their mind. They’ll also need better guards who may even have their magic items to help protect the merchant, as more powerful people will have greater interests in what they have to sell. It is an arms race between merchants and thieves as to who is the more powerful. But if a merchant can ensure that a thief finds trying to steal from the merchant too risky, they can ensure that their goods are not stolen… at least until another thief comes along who finds that level of risk to be acceptable.
Guards
There are several ways that a merchant can go about protecting themselves, though the most common approach is to utilize guards. Hiring people who look strong is a great deterrent for many and is much cheaper than hiring very competent guards. Competent guards can command a higher price, as they have the experience to recognize threats and properly defend a merchant, but for some merchants, they may think having a lot of thugs is better than one or two guards when it comes to spending gold.
Someone who looks strong is very useful because they ensure that people do not see the merchant as a target. Unfortunately, not everyone is as rational when it comes to who they are willing to attack and who they won’t attack. Some people may see a big, strong brute and think that they can sneak past them. If you have only hired strong-looking brutes who are not competent guards, they will be more susceptible to having people sneak past them and rob the merchant.
Player’s Handbook, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
Those who are competent won’t only look physically intimidating, and will often cost more than someone who just looks strong. Why someone competent can command a higher salary is because they have experience and know what tricks and subterfuge to look out for from thieves, cutpurses, and other criminals. So while they might cost more, they offer a greater degree of protection for the merchant and their wares.
In this trade-off, is it worth it to the merchant to have a bunch of strong thugs or is it better to have only one or two highly competent individuals?
Magical Protection
After a merchant has guards, they might have enough money to start looking at personal protection. They might end up taking classes on spellcasting or buy themselves a fancy magic item that offers protection or magical abilities, like a wand of magic missiles or a ring of protection.
A merchant with a lot of money can thus afford even more magical items or more classes to learn more powerful magic. If a merchant can afford a lot of magic items, they can be very well protected, in which case they could become overconfident in their abilities and have fewer guards than another merchant might have.
Merchants will often be interested in items that will protect their products and themselves, with little thought about the guards they have hired. They’d be interested in magic items that can help obscure their high-value items, like traveling with them in a bag of holding or being able to cast an arcanist's magic aura on the goods to make them appear nonmagical.
Another item of great importance is something like a ring of mind shielding which will help ward them from the magical influence of others. This item can help ensure that magic is never used against them or by others to force them to agree to a price they wouldn’t normally sell at. Otherwise, they will have to rely on their guards to notice when spells are cast and to protect them while vulnerable.
Noticing Magic
Guards are useful for ensuring that no one uses magic around the merchant, and if they do, the merchant is immediately made aware that it has happened. If this is a medium- or high-magic world, a merchant must ensure that they are familiar with all sorts of magic and what effects they could have, regardless of whether or not they can cast any. Of course, just because they are aware of what magic can do doesn’t mean that they will allow people to cast magic around them.
Some people might try to pass off a charm person spell as simply an identify spell, to ensure that the merchant is telling the truth, but that is something that a merchant isn’t likely to allow to happen. That is a big risk for the merchant who could have someone cast dominate person just as easily as identify, and so it is easier to just tell people that no magic is allowed in the establishment. If they don’t trust the merchant’s word, they can leave and find someone else.
If magic does end up being cast upon the merchant, a merchant will have guards to ensure that they know magic was cast around them. For example, if it is a friends cantrip, they know with that type of magic they can just wait a few minutes and tell if any spell ends. For something like charm person, they may impose a rule that there are no friends or family discounts, that everyone pays the same price regardless of how the merchant feels towards them. Since charm person is not mind control, only makes someone friendly, a merchant can simply have a rule that they always follow or have the guards prepared for any unexpected friendliness the merchant might show to strangers.
A merchant who can learn and understand magic will be focused on divination and abjuration spells. These spells focus on identification as well as protection spells, hopefully finding spells that will ensure that no one can augment their mind. In addition, they may even have access to spells that players may not have or know about that can guard their mind. Just because a spell is not printed in a rulebook, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It simply means it is not that valuable of a spell for adventurers to use. There are more spells and magic than what could ever be printed in an official sourcebook.
If your players express an interest in such magic, you can always allow them to learn it or have the merchant offer to sell them a spell scroll of it, but it will typically be very low-level magic, most likely a 1st-level spell, maybe 2nd-level, and very rarely a 3rd-level spell.
Player’s Handbook, 2014 Wizards of the Coast
Why So Much Travel?
There is a trope of the traveling merchant, but it isn’t merely just a convenient way to break up the monotony of travel at your table. Merchants travel around a lot because they need a variety of people to sell to so long as they have a limited pool of customers in a single location and niche items. A farmer is not going to travel the world trying to sell their lettuce because they already have a large pool of customers in a single location and what they are selling is not that niche.
On the other hand, a merchant selling high-value items like jewelry or magic items are going to have a smaller pool of customers in a single settlement. To expand the number of customers they have, they will travel to different settlements. This type of travel does mean that they have to worry about their reputation and ensure that people who need to know of their arrival, know.
Reputation
Merchants with no reputation, or one that is negative, are going to have a hard time trying to convince a new settlement of people to trust them. This is especially true if they don’t allow people to cast spells in their presence to guarantee that a magic item does as the merchant claims, which can be taken advantage of by thieves and shady merchants.
A merchant must then have to spend a portion of their money on advertising and spreading the word about their wares and trying to influence their reputation. A merchant that neglects their reputation will soon find that they have no one willing to buy from them.
Travel in Groups
Because merchants need guards to protect them while they are traveling, it can be quite expensive to be a wandering merchant. In this case, it makes a lot of sense for merchants to travel together as well as hire guards together. When enough people come together to travel to the next town over, it creates a trading caravan where safety in numbers comes to play and where you need fewer guards for all the merchants than if the merchants traveled by themselves and had to hire their own guards.
In this situation, a merchant who sells very expensive goods may be the organizer of a caravan due to having the most money to spend and the most to lose. They can then charge other merchants a set fee to travel with them, and then those merchants don’t have to worry about having their own guards to protect them.
Skirting Laws
Just as a merchant wishes to avoid thieves, they also wish to avoid paying high taxes that will take away their profit. This means they will have less to spend on protection and a lower salary for themselves. To avoid paying taxes, a merchant must get creative when they try to enter a settlement since taxes would’ve typically been taken at the gate of a city.
They might try to skirt these laws by investing in a bag of holding where they can hide their valuable items and then obscure the bag so that it isn’t detected as magical. This allows them to enter the city at a lower tax rate while bringing in higher taxed items, increasing their profit.
Another option is for the merchant to lie about being a merchant, and instead that they are an adventurer with a collection of magic items. Typically an adventurer would not be taxed arriving into the city, as they will be spending a lot of money within the city.
What Magic Affects Merchants
If you are on the other side of the counter, and you are trying to affect a merchant with magic to get better pricing, there are a few things you could try. Though, keep in mind that any type of manipulation is going to be considered quite illegal. Any kingdom is going to, probably, outright mental control spells as no king or queen wants to risk their entire court being mind controlled by some outside wizards. The punishment for casting mind-control magic could be your execution, your tongue cut off, or your fingers permanently broken in such a way you are unable to cast magic properly again.
While a friend cantrip costs you nothing to cast, as it is a cantrip, it does have a problem in that the target immediately dislikes you once the minute is up. Since most financial interactions are going to last for more than one minute, you are probably not going to have the item you wanted by the end of the spell, and if you do, the merchant is close enough to see you and call for their guards to stop you.
On the other hand, a charm person spell lasts for one hour, which means you have plenty of time to haggle for the price and get the item you want. Unfortunately, charm person only makes them your friend. It isn’t complete control, but rather gets them to a place of close friendship with you. This could be a waste as not only does it expose you to trouble for casting a spell, the merchant may not lower their prices for friends.
There are other spells that dominate and offer control, and even the suggestion spell that you can probably word to make it sound like a good deal, but the problem lasts for longer than the spell. Even just the next day, the merchant can think back on that deal and notice that they are out gold that they would normally expect to have for selling such an item and inform the guards that magic might’ve been used on them. Such dangers to the merchants, those who bring wealth to the city and will leave if there are routinely bad problems for the merchants, will be enough to get the guards investigating and find the spellcaster and make an example out of them.
Being a Merchant
It’s difficult being a merchant in any world, but especially in one with magic that can compel and trick. Merchants must keep apprised of magical spells, magic items, as well as the reputation of their customers, not wanting to deal with known backstabbers or those who are often labeled as ‘evil’ or ‘murderhobo’. But so long as you can keep your mind, and you have plenty of guards to protect you from bandits, being a merchant can be quite profitable.
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