The question is 'where do they come from; creating magic is time- and resources-consuming. But to answer my own question: first, there are people who are not entirely rational on Glorantha; second, what is useless to one person might be frigging important to another. Some day (aaargh, hate when I say these things) I must give you my dwarven background on Why Mostali Produce Useless Stuff, but for the moment I'll just give you some useless stuff they've produced:
*A wind-up toy which looks like a beetle and is made of bronze. It
has three settings: on setting A, it walks, in random semi-spiral
patterns, on setting B, it flies, in random semi-spiral patterns, on
setting C, it flies straight to where the dwarf who made it was when
it made it - as far as it's spring allows it to fly, that is.
*A pyramid-shaped piece of gold, hard as enchanted iron, which flies
up in the air and gives of a B sharp 'pling' when the temperature
reaches exactly 56,76 gold temperature units (ie 23 degrees Celsius).
*A flat tin box, engraved with fractal patterns, which contains 6
pieces of what looks and tastes like brown sugar, shaped like
daggers, and one piece of what looks and tastes like white sugar,
shaped like a pickax. They are in most ways indistinguishable from
normal sugar and are in no way poisonous or anything like that.
However, they will not melt, regardless of the heat.
*A nilmerg which is trained to, and extremely skilled at, spit into
spittoons. It needs merely a little scrap of food every day and
becomes wild with joy if you actually give it some tobacco to chew
and spit.
*A crossbow quarrel which refuses to hit its target, regardless of
circumstances. Well, perhaps DI to Golden Bow might work, but again
it might not.
*An aluminium statue of a grinning imp with a large nose, which turns
to quicksilver if exposed to water. The quicksilver blob cannot be
separated into smaller parts, and when sufficiently dry, it reforms
into an imp again, but it's nose gets bigger each time, without the
rest of the statue losing any mass whatsoever.
*A clear liquid which turns into a certain colour when someone
mentions the word for that colour in Mostali out loud within 10
paces. Notice that Mostali has thousands of words for exact nuances
of colour, as long as we are talking nuances of stone and metal.
*A eleven inches tall replica of the Spike, made from dark blue
glass. If someone touches a certain spot, the glass sculpture will
shatter into a zillion small sharp pieces. The spot is thought to
correspond to the Enthropy Flaw caused by the failed subroutine RTSLF
at Creation.
"The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green boat..."
>From "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear
Erik Sieurin
bv9521_at_bhs.utb.hb.se
Bodagatan 39, 2 tr
50742 Bor=E5s
Sweden
033/141731
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