Stavemaster and Sons, Ltd.
Stavemaster and Sons can exist in any world that has any sort of organized production of magical artifacts and weapons. The company does not specialize in actual enchanting; that’s for specialists – and in some universes, the not-quite-sane. What Stavemaster does is procure raw materials for enchanters; and for a truly esoteric value of ‘raw materials.’
To give one hypothetical example: say you are an enchanter who needs a sword that has ‘drunk the blood of a hundred enemies.’ Stavemaster and Sons can sell you that one practically at cost; they’ve made arrangements with any number of mercenary companies, army surplus vendors, a barbarian horde or three… anybody who might have large amounts of military hardware to unload, and a willingness to sell to a firm that only really cares whether you have clear title to the stuff that you’re selling. Generally, if an item is known to be a physical component of any spell, alchemical work, or enchanting project then Stavemaster and Sons will at least know where best to find it. And they’ll keep stocks of whatever is high-volume or valuable enough to justify long-term storage, too.
Ethically speaking, Stavemaster and Sons is, at worst, only dodgy. There are certain products it will not buy or sell, and certain customers it will not buy from or sell to. But it will buy or sell merely unsavory items, provided that the firm can prove that they were acquired from, say, a party of wandering adventurers who descended upon an unsanctioned Temple to the Dark Gods and made off with all the portable mystical-looking loot. The important thing for the firm is that it be able to say, reasonably truthfully, that it had no knowing hand in anything that was really awful. But if you happen to have a stack of ‘liberated’ Hands of Glory anyway, it can usually find the funds to take them off of yours. And thus the economic wheels turn and turn in their merry away…
.. s’pose it beats trying to, say, take the armor of invincible inscrutability to a pawn shop..
.
What’s the armor of invincible inscrutability? Hard to say, since it’s inscrutable, of course .. during normal wear it’s so aggressively *normal* the eye flicks right past it .. during combat, it’s the embodiment of “security through obscurity”.
.
Clearly, the slightly daft guildmaster who forged it believed if his opponent couldn’t *see* him, they couldn’t *hit* him … my rogue picked it up cheap at an estate sale.
.
Mew