One of two things happened that allowed me to buy from mage shops all over Arcanum, and even receive automatically favourable reactions, all with a tech-aligned Player Character.

A) By becoming a Master Healer by training under Fawn (aka Kal-N'driel), I am "regarded favourably all over Arcanum", according to the Reputation log entry. This probably isn't the reason, since I get "Hey, you trained under Kal-N'driel, didn't you? Good show!" from various NPCs like random civilians.

B) I have a straight-up magick user in my party (in this case, Jormund). I don't know how this affects the way NPCs view my alignment, unless there's some sort of unified "party alignment" that the 100% magick user just skewed.

These are the only significant events I can think of that happened before Magick Shop owners started accepting my custom. Has anyone else noticed anything similar?

Just to be clear, what's your Tech alignment at present?

83. I've learned a ton of schematics, but I also mastered three of the more utilitarian (read: Useful) spell colleges like Necromantic White, Conveyance (for Teleportation, which is the best investment I've ever made), and Temporal. It doesn't allow for any singularly powerful (aka "one-hit kill") blows, but I'm fast enough to storm through just about anything.