First, let's outline the reality of today:

1) Many magic adventuring classes cannot place their magic on others, including communers.
2) No PC class can craft any magical items.
3) Purchasable magic items are unlimited and cheap (mostly because gold is fairly easy to get).
4) This encourages solo play, because there is no reliance on others for basic magical "necessities"

This was partly spawned by someone's post below about having a basic prep bag available for purchase and including things such as: detects, enlarge/reduce, protection vs. align, flight, etc.

How are magical consumables created in CF's world? Clearly by magic. And not even the kind of magic that has rules, but the kind of crappy DM magic where you can make up whatever you want and the players will never have access to those abilities/spells/magic affects/whatever. What if this wasn't the case?

First, let's look at potions. How are they created? Presumably you need some raw materials. Glass for vials, feathers of the fire phoenix (or whatever) for their magical properties, a magically receptive suspension liquid. A lab in which to distill and transmute said materials. Some amount of mana pushed into the process to give it that spark. This whole setup should be fairly expensive, yes? Contrast that with scroll creation. Probably you need a nice piece of paper. Maybe you need some magic ink or a nice pen. Then you inscribe your spell, imbue it with magic, and poof! Scroll. Why can't PC mages use pen (the useless skill) to create scrolls of spells they know? I'm not saying CF needs crafting... but this seems straightforwardly possible.

So you've got your whole lab setup and you're in the potion creation business. Large capital investment on your part, but it's time to make money. You open up your shop and first adventurer through buys 20 return potions and 50 teleport potions. Lucky for you there is an infinite inventory that takes up no space? Also you sell them for cheap, because they clearly cost nothing to produce? What if this wasn't the case. What if shopkeepers in CF had a limited number of any given item in their available inventory? What if they only produced more at some predefined rate? What if the price of items reflected their demand and the strain that would naturally put on the supply of source materials?

To take a specific example, the druid? in Ysigrath presumably farms or otherwise gathers violet, yellow, and black roots in that swamp... But they are purchased by the hundreds... Why do they never run out? Why are they so cheap when demand is so high?

What if he gathered 1 root per game day, and only kept 20 in stock, and the price was a function of the overall availability of detect invis consumables (pills/potions) available anywhere in game?

In an alternative scenario, what if pills and potions were simply gone, or prohibitively expensive barring special circumstances, but the restrictions on casting/communing on others were lifted and mages (and priests?) could pen magical scrolls. Would this encourage group play? Would it unfairly nerf melee classes, or simply make it so that they are more likely to make friends with and run around with a mage or priest ally if possible?

To be clear, I'm not suggesting this is the direction CF should take, but I think there is something to be said about how useless a powerful mage (like a shapeshifter) can feel compared to a warrior when the only real difference between them is that one can have barrier and the other cannot. I also think this is partly why Nexus and the bond was mostly a failure. There just wasn't enough there you couldn't get elsewhere to really make it advantageous to stick to a bonded pair.