I assumed they would GIVE me the armour but NO. Am I missing something? I realize there are ways to fleece the game of all ore (I'm getting a close to trying a few) but is there a semi kosher way of getting together enough scratch to afford things like the Shadow Armor?

The first armour is free. Talk to Raven, one of the men near Gomez. He should give it to you.

You have to buy the better armours yourself. Getting the ore isn't really a problem. Every trader has a stockpile of ore (at the very bottom of their trading list), so trade all your old weapons and random junk for ore. You can also trade in old armour.

There are various other ore-only purchases throughout the game so you'll want to trade items instead of ore with the regular traders.

-- and not to worry, you're not fleecing the merchants doing that. If you buy back later what you sell, its much more then what you sold it for :).

it is usually a good idea to hoard junk in this game. dont extremely overdo it though. just keep some ammount of ore to be safe, like for some rather expensive armor purhases. at the end of the game youll have a lot of spare ore. unlike most games, pretty much every game object is unique (no random item generation). so you cant just get ore out of nowhere by random drop. you can find however a nice loot by exploring the game ofcourse.

Aren't most of the chests random? Seems that if you reload and go to the chest again, the contents differ. Doesn't change your good advise, though.

No, they aren't, at least not in Gothic and Gothic 2. Gothic 3 is a different story.

In Gothic 2 parts of loot of orcs and npcs is random.