Availability of Magic in a Campaign

I like to keep my game worlds magic-poor. There simply aren't high-level clerics in every town, and there are not high-level wizards, or even low-level, scattered throughout the countryside. This allows me to have a world which more or less makes sense without having to account for what a lot of magic would do to the world.

The PCs can be spellcasting classes of course, and I'll throw in an NPC here and there, but these guys are rare in the game world.

There is no resurrection in my campaign. Sure, I roll for spells on scrolls randomly so a Raise Dead might, might, show up sometime. But "awww Joe died... haul him back to town and let's visit the temple," simply doesn't exist in my game. Dead is dead.

There aren't even any clerics to cast Remove Curse or Remove Disease. In my game, everyone's waiting for the cleric to gain one more level so she gets access to these spells. One character has been afflicted with a rhyming curse for months of real time now, and just recently was shrunk to one foot in height (It didn't help that two Remove Curse spells have shown up on scrolls and the clerics in question have blown their failure rolls both times for casting spells above their level).

This creates other situations. A first level magic-user becomes potentially a real problem for a village or town because they are so rare that not only is there no contingency plans in place to deal with them, there is no perceived need for such a thing. I don't have to ask, "So why don't clerics just keep everyone fed and healthy?" It's just a world, with the weird stuff off to the side.

I also keep magic items rare. There are no magic shops. You can't go into town, not even a big one, and pick up some healing potions. I hand out potions and scrolls frequently as treasure in dungeons because I don't fear one-use items, and that gets interesting because I always randomly roll what sort they are and then forget about them once the players identify them. A couple weeks ago an encounter with a dragon, which could have been a party-killer, turned into a simple, yet tense, initiative roll. The player with the Potion of Dragon Control, which I'd forgotten I'd ever given out, won initiative and the dragon was simply commanded to fly, fly away.

I also keep monsters correspondingly rare. They're either in the deep wilderness, or in a dungeon, or else their presence indicates that Something is Wrong. But the average person (not average PC!) in my campaign world can expect to never have a first-hand experience with the supernatural.

But after reading this post, it's occurred to me that I might be doing it a bit strangely. Raising a second level character? Eek!

(Not that there is a total lack of magic in the campaign... just in the civilized lands. I think I've mentioned the brownie who kept a fox-coup that kept getting raided by a giant chicken. Did I mention the three orc brothers, one who lived in a straw house, one who lived in a wooden house, and one who lived in a brick house being harassed by a werewolf? Or the frog that after being kissed turned into a bullywug princess who fell in love with the one who broke her curse? This stuff side by side in the same campaign with the political adventures and the creepy horror and the rest... but I do fit my gonzo crazygonuts in there, thankyouverymuch. Another example is the Deck of Many Things I put in a dungeon, unguarded even, and watched one player pretty much deep-six two characters over the course of two weeks with the thing. But it's a (HUGE) gamble to use the thing and nobody else will draw. They were talking about handing it off to a particularly dastardly NPC...)

So how freely available is magic in your game?