Fantastic Economics

Creating fantasy economies is hard.

First, one needs to have an understanding of the kind of economy they are attempting to model.  In fantasy, this is usually a medieval economy.  Second, one needs to be able to extrapolate how additional services and required materials will disrupt and modify that baseline.

There has already been a bit of work in that vein.  Some of it is good, some of it doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Extrapolating particular technologies and wizardry can have unintended consequences for your setting; you can easily accidentally industrialize it if particular things are easy and cheap.  Feudal economies came about to grapple with particular sets of problems using particular resources and skills that they had at their disposal.  They depended on conditions where there was relatively little trade, education or marketable goods.  With an increase of these three you begin to see larger cities, specialized professions and general growth in society.

Thus, magic and wizardry will likely both depend on and contribute to a society's economic growth.  You need academies for wizards-or, at least, mentors that receive some rumination for teaching and doing wizardly things.  That is, unless wizardly things take care of basic necessities like food, shelter, etc., in which case everybody wants to be a wizard.  So there has to be an infrastructure there to support them.  For an infrastructure to be there, wizards have to provide some sort of service.  A service that likely enhances economic conditions in some way, whether through producing goods or blowing up other people who want to take them away/are competing with you/have land you want, etc.

Do you provide services and/or fireballs?

Shoot, maybe the wizards are the ones in charge of the feudal society.  In a lot of cases this makes a lot of sense, as the upper echelons are the only ones that have time for education.

One therefore needs to figure out what conditions will be like to have a plausible basis for the number of wizards running around their world and what they can do.  This is a LOT of devil in the details work, and as much as I wish I could provide further thought on the matter building something like that is highly dependent on what you are attempting to accomplish.

An area that has not received a great deal of thought that I have been able to find is how one might model a magitech society.  That is, a magically industrialized economy.  This is particularly relevant to me because I've had to design one from scratch.

More on that later.