Leaving dwarves aside -- since they have a very effective, very specific way to protect their special items -- cults may be effective in concentrating certain items. IMG, any puny hooman wandering around with a +2 lead mace is going to eventually hear a troll say "Hey, fork dat mace over, dat's holy Darkness metal, pinkie." Same thing might occur for other runemetals, for crystals (when they're the blood of a certain kind of god), etc. After all, you've gotta keep your runelevels armed and armored, and in part it'll come by keeping special items out of the hands of initiates. ("Good job, initiate Bob! This fine sword will smite many in the hands of your runelord! Take your pick of the spirit magic, you've earned it.")
More organized societies may formally regulate it: no doubt the Lunars are _very_ precise on who can have moon-made items, etc. (Maybe treating the weapons like the Ottomans treated "timur" land grants -- usable for the life of the recipient but _not_ hereditary, unless the authorities wish it.)
> I think there is an unwritten law which says that valueable stuff,
> magical or not, tends to spread out to cover the largest possible area.
Perhaps limited, though, by the rate at which valuable items break beyond
repair: I have no idea what it'd be like for weapons in Glorantha (or the
RW), but if the rate of breakage approaches the rate of creation, there
aren't a lot of items out there (re: the pikes in Sun County discussion,
some weapons don't seem to last too long). Most of the RQ campaigns I've
been in have been "Conan" campaigns: get a magic sword, lose the magic
sword. Get a crystal, lose a crystal. (Though that's a style issue, and
not shaped by the rules).
It might be there are waves or cycles of magic item commonality: there were probably a _lot_ fewer magic items in circulation in central Glorantha after Dragonkill (except for the troll lands, where it jumped). And a lot more in regions that have just won a successful war, and had the soldiers come home with the stuff they stripped from the enemy and their camp.
One other thought: one GM I played with had a rule of thumb that most magic items _weren't_ weapons; seemd like 90% of the treasure we usually found was in kind ("you find... two hundred-odd lunars in dressed bison meat!") or non-combat special/magical items: a system I like quite a bit. If every Johnny Orlanth or Sally Vinga is toting around a +1 sword (if they're common), then is every peasant using a +1 hoe? D&D doesn't even address it since peasants aren't a part of the game (except as orc fodder), but Glorantha doesn't have that quirk.
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