This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly in the context of modern fantasy and roleplaying settings. In particular, the notions I want to tackle are first how did ancient currency systems work in terms of value (what could you buy with how much) and then second how often were people likely to use physical currency at all? This is going to be a bit of a ‘fun one’ because while we’ll talk quite a bit about how money is used in historical societies, we are going to loop back around to fantasy settings at the end.
Brief Post-Publication Note: Someone opted to throw what I can only describe as a tantrum in the comments, for reasons that escape me. I have purged what I saw, as it added nothing to the discussion, though this may have orphaned some replies. If it starts up again, bans will follow; you may disagree, but you will do it in a polite, respectful, civil manner while you are on my website. If you want to shout and call names, please take that where it belongs, which is Twitter.
And the fantasy conceit that has sparked this is, of course, the ubiquitous general-purpose RPG currency, ‘gold,’ understood to mean gold coins or gold pieces. Now of course in many cases the trope-maker for ‘gold’ as the basic unit of currency is Dungeons and Dragons and folks will be quick to note that D&D coinage has always included smaller denominations: copper, silver, gold and platinum pieces on a decimal-system valuation. And sure, that chart exists in the rule-book and some common everyday things have their value listed in cp or sp, but even a casual glance at something like the weapon table reveals a ‘gp’ based currency system. The 3.5e weapon table, for instance, every weapon with the exception of sling bullets has its value denominated in gold. 5e is a bit better, but not much.
Meanwhile, in Baldur’s Gate III, almost certainly the most widespread and culturally pervasive form that D&D has taken in at least the last decade – far more people, I suspect, have played BG3 than have played any form of D&D tabletop – compresses the system down neatly to just the single currency type: gold. As did Neverwinter Nights before it. Likewise, the Elder Scrolls games, including Elder Scrolls Online and Skyrim have a single currency, called ‘gold,’ represented in game by very obviously gold coins.
(Credit where credit is due: Obsidian’s Eora, the universe where Pillars of Eternity takes place, dodges this problem: every culture has its own currency and you see them regularly as loot. The game then denominates them all in a copper currency unit of account, which is actually a lot like how the sestertius (a copper-alloy coin) is used in Roman accounting. As we’re going to see, the key here isn’t just ‘have currencies other than gold coins’ but also ‘have some sense of how big a unit of account a gold coin is going to be’ and Eora is one of the few settings that seems to have absorbed, correctly, that even a single gold coin is such a large unit of money as to be useless in most circumstances.)
So across a wide range of fantasy products – games, films, books and settings – this tends to be system: ‘gold,’ by which is meant gold coins, are the standard unit of account, values are reckoned in gold and when money needs to be shown, it is typically physical gold coins. If there are smaller units, we don’t see them often. Crucially, characters in dialogue will often use ‘gold’ or the names of gold coin denominations (‘crowns,’ ‘sovereigns,’ etc. shown in the fiction to be gold coins) as synonyms for money. Sometimes there’s a larger unit, almost invariably ‘platinum,’ which is also a pretty silly currency to have given that apart from some evidence that it was alloyed with gold in Egypt and South America (perhaps unknowingly so), no one is using platinum or aware of its existence before the 1500s.
And, as you may have guessed, there are some problems with this: functionally no one used gold in any amount in every-day transactions in the ancient or medieval Mediterranean (or most other places!), because a gold coin at almost any size was such an enormous monetary unit as to be unsuited to most transactions. That in turn conceals some of the sharpness of wealth and class distinctions in pre-modern society in ways that flatten and frankly ‘modernize’ these societies.1 And it also misunderstands the economic systems of these societies, because it doesn’t understand what sort of transactions people would even want to use money for, which further flattens and modernizes these societies.
Instead, what I want to do is lay out a couple of real historical currency systems – we’re going to look at ancient Greek and Roman currency, as well as the medieval pound/shilling/pence (or livre/sou/dinier) system – and talk about how they are denominated and why.
Behind, clockwise: an Attic tetradrachma (c. 449BC), a Roman denarius (41 BC), an Aeginetan drachma (c. 550 BC) and an early Roman denarius (c. 115 BC).
But first, as always, I too appreciate money and always wanted to take up collecting ancient coins (which, I should note, can be legally acquired at prices attainable by mortals, because we have so many – just be sure you are getting something with accurate provenance; any reputable dealer will cheerfully supply you with this). If you want to help me to take up expensive hobbies, you can support this project on Patreon! Amici of the blog at Patreon get monthly updates on my research progress (or lack thereof), while patrons at the Matres et Patres Conscripti level also get to vote on future topics. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates, or you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) or Twitter (@BretDevereaux) or (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings; I am probably more active these days on Bluesky than Twitter.
Introducing Our Currencies
Globally, both the idea of currency (by which I mean an abstract notional unit of value) and coinage (by which I mean a physical object representing that unit of value) were invented in more than one place at more than one time. These are, I should note, distinct ideas and it is the abstract unit of account which comes first, long before (and we mean centuries before) someone gets the bright idea of using specific objects to represent those notional units.
That said, all of the coinage systems of the broader Mediterranean world seem to spark from a single source, the development of coinage in the kingdom of Lydia in the seventh century.2 The way to understand these coins is this: these societies had already been using metals – measured by weight – to define abstract, notional units of value for accounting purposes and in some cases physical transactions. This is important to note: money in the abstract sense (and debt, for that matter) come first and coinage comes second. In practice, what a coin was simply a pre-measured amount of precious metal, stamped by the authorities to attest that it was the amount it claimed to be.
Note the immediate implication that has: the coin is only worth the metal it has in it. If you reduce the weight of the coin or dilute the precious metal in it (by alloying it with baser metals), you have lowered the value of the coin (and probably committed a serious crime, unless you are the state). This meant that while states could get cute and try to stretch the treasury by issuing coins with less precious metal in them (called ‘debasement’) in the long-run this effectively led to inflation: as folks realized there was less silver or gold or whatever in the coins, they’d raise prices accordingly. But we needn’t get into all of the complexities of minting and debasement here.
What I want to do first here is introduce our currency systems and what they’re called, so we have that on hand for when we discuss how they’re valued and used.
The first coinage in Lydia doesn’t seem to have penetrated very far in society – the coins seem (the evidence isn’t great) to have mostly been used for large transactions, long-distance trade, that sort of thing. Instead, it is in Greece, which adopts coinage from the Lydians, where we first see coins penetrating deep into society and becoming a standard way to do business. Now each Greek polis issued its own currency (except Sparta), so instead of just one set of ‘Greek currency’ you had a whole mess of different polis currency on different weight and purity standards. That said, successful currencies tended to be imitated and so a ‘standard’ (which other Greek currencies might deviate from) emerged: Attic coinage, the mostly widely used, eventually becomes that baseline.
The Attic currency standard was based – as nearly all Greek currencies were – on the drachma (shortened by numismatists to ‘drachm’) a silver coin that weighed around 4.3g and was about the size of an American dime (but a bit thicker). Four drachma made the aptly named tetradrachma, a silver coin of 17.2g, which was about the size of an American quarter (but thicker and about three times as heavy). Meanwhile a drachma could be split into six oboloi – invariably called obols in English. The obol was, apparently, originally a rod of tool metal (copper, bronze or even iron), which may have derived out of simply using a forge-ready billet as currency (although the ones we find don’t seem to have been used that way). However, by the classical period, the obol had become a standard very small silver coin, tariffed at 1/6th of a drachma and thus having a silver mass of just 0.7g or so; they tend to be around c. 8mm across, so a bit less than half the size of the smallest American coin (the dime).
The Greeks also had some larger ‘units of account’ which were not minted as coins, but were used in accounting to express large quantities of money. Thus 100 drachmae was a mina (435g of silver), and 6,000 drachmae was a talent (26.1kg on the Attic standard); note that both the mina and talent were units of weight, so you can have a mina or a talent of something other than silver, but in accounting, it is always silver-weight that is being calculated as value. This is a monometallic standard: basically all of the currency is in silver, there’s very little gold coinage at all (occasionally some electrum coinage and we do see gold coins in big denominations in the Hellenistic). Now all of this is for the Classical/Hellenistic Attic standard; again there were many standards and they changed over time, but this overview will do us for now.
So again: 6 obols = 1 drachma = 1/4th tetradrachma = 1/100th mina = 1/6000th talent.
Next up is Roman coinage and here we’re going to use the currency system as it existed in the reign of Augustus. The Romans pick up coinage relatively late; there are some experiments with big ‘ol bronze currency (the aes grave) but it’s really with the Second Punic War (218-201) that the Romans begin minting in earnest, initially on a bimetallic standard (silver and bronze) and then by Augustus’ day on a trimetallic standard (bronze, silver and gold), though really only the latter two metals are supporting the value of the coin. Now if you are wondering, “wait, how does a multi-metallic standard work if all of the metals have ‘floating’ (market determined) values?” And the answer is that the very fact that the state guarantees the issue of coinage on a set exchange anchors the metals to a set exchange rate, which mostly works because while metal prices did fluctuate somewhat over long periods, the basic relationship whereby gold was more precious than silver, which was more precious than copper, bronze or brass, remained steady.3
The Roman equivalent to the drachma was the denarius, a silver coin of – by Augustus – about 3.9g (it had been 4.5g in 211), which is a near perfect match for the drachma. The denarius could be broken into four sestertii (sing. sestertius); this had been a small silver coin in the Republic, but by Augustus, it was a big ol’ brass coin, around 25g or so and about 32mm across (so a third or so wider than an American quarter). One 16th of a denarius was the as (pl. asses), the Roman penny, a copper coin of 10.9g. Going the other way, 25 denarii made a single aureus, a gold coin of about 7.75g.
So again: 16 asses = 4 sestertii = 1denarius = 1/25th aureus.
Unlike the Greeks, the Romans don’t have jumbo-sized unminted accounting units. Instead, most Roman accounts are totaled in sestertii, with the modern abbreviation HS (soo 100HS is 100 sestertii or 25 denarii or 1 aureus).
Before we move on to the Middle Ages, I want to make one more note to avoid folks making an understandable and predictable error. We have a document from the ancient world, Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, which has a whole mess of maximum prices for goods and services in it. This is a source to be used with care: Diocletian is issuing the edict because his own carelessness with the money-system has sparked runaway inflation and he’s trying (unsuccessfully) to fix it with price controls. By Diocletian’s day (even before he sparked runaway inflation) the denarius had lost basically all of its silver content and was thus of far lower value than it had been pre-235, so the prices in the Edict are already much higher – potentially orders of magnitude higher – than first century prices. Moreover, it’s an Edict on maximum prices, not normal prices, which may either mean that Diocletian is setting the prices absurdly low (to curb the inflation) or absurdly high (because they’re maximum prices, after all); there’s no reason to suppose it even reflects average prices at the time. So: Diolcetian’s Price Edict has to be used very carefully and absolutely must not be used with first century Roman coinage in mind. In practice, just about the only useful thing to do with the Price Edict is to compare its prices internally (that is, to other prices in the same document).
Now for medieval European currency, things get tricky, because the European Middle Ages are defined by fragmentation and so you have a host of tiny polities potentially issuing currency on different standards. But in Western Europe, one common system were those derived from the Carolingian coinage system, put in place by Charlemagne in the 790s and it is common to see medieval prices denominated in these units, both at the time and in modern scholarship. Importantly, these are the units used by the very popular Medieval Price List put together by Kenneth Hodges, so its worth treating them here.
This system notionally had three units: the livre (or pound, from Latin libra, “pound,” abbreviated L or £), the sou (or shilling, from Latin solidus, a late Roman coin, abbreviated s) and the denier (or penny/pence, from Latin denarius, abbreviated d); please note that while Charlemagne is reusing the names of Roman coins, those coins had undergone massive debasement over the years and so looked nothing like their earlier Roman equivalents.
Instead the system was a monmetallic silver-standard: one livre was 408g of silver, while a sou was 1/20th of a livre (20.4g) and a denier was 1/240th of a livre (1.7g). In practice, only the smallest coin, the denier, was widely minted.
So £1 (or 1 L = pound) = 20 s (shillings) and 1 s (shilling) = 12 d (pence).
Now what makes this system…exciting…is that in the subsequent fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire, everyone is using this system but minting their own coins, leading to different weights and exciting amounts of debasement. Gresham’s Law is the principle, well-established, that if you have ‘good’ (more pure, heavier) and ‘bad’ (less pure or lighter) currency both circulating, ‘bad money drives out good,’ because people hoard the good money and use the bad money; this further complicated the drift of the pound-shilling-pence system off of its notional weight standard. By 1262, the most common French livre, the livre tournois had declined to just 80.8 grams (by 1726, it was just 4.5g…getting us basically back to the drachma!).
That said, as Europe got richer, those notional units of account (particularly the pound) which were never minted came into use and this gives us an awkward picture of the complications of this system where the actual currency weight had become so detached from its nominal value. In France, the livre tournois, notionally 80.8g of silver, was minted as a gold coin in the 1300s of about 3.76g. In the 1480s, the English begin minting a gold sovereign coin equal to £1 – by which they mean an actual pound sterling; it was 15.55g gold coin. Now some quick math and that kind of makes sense: 15.55g of gold representing c. 400g of silver (a c. 1:25 ratio) and 3.76g of gold representing just 80.8g of silver (1:21.5 ratio), but of course exactly what a pound was had changed drastically, though I should note that as far as I know, it was the English who were out of step here. Other popular late medieval gold currencies were the gold ducat (3.5g or so) and the gold florin (3.499g) and we can see those sit pretty close to the French livre tournois.
So when you are looking at Kenneth Hodges Medieval Price List, it is best to understand both that the currency systems in use here are fluctuating quite a bit, making price comparisons across dates tricky, especially in different places but that broadly speaking you might say that in the 1300s and beyond (where most of his data is from) a livre is around 80g of silver, a sou is thus around 4g (conveniently close to our drachma and denarius) and a pence is around just 0.33g in value.
I know that was a lot but I wanted to walk through it so you’ll understand the next bit – even if you didn’t get all of the particulars there – for the key conclusion which is:
A Gold Coin Is an Absurdly Large Unit of Money
For regular people, at least.
Whenever ancient or medieval coinage or currency comes up, the question folks always want to ask is, “what is that in today’s dollars?“4 And I absolutely understand this question, because if it could be answered – spoilers, it can’t be – it would provide the questioner with an immediate benchmark of value to apply.
And the answer is just: it isn’t. The problem is both that the value of commodities changes over time, but in particular that the second agricultural revolution and the industrial revolutions so wildly shifted the values of commodities as to make any possible translation of ancient or medieval currency values into modern ones misleading. I could calculate, for instance, based on labor time, making 1 day of work equal to the minimum wage equivalent (a denarius is worth $230), or by metal weight, so that a gram of silver is equal to its current commodity price (an unskilled Roman might earn c. $4 a day) or by grain equivalent (an unskilled Roman might make $1.62 per day) – all of those answers are wildly different and equally wrong, even though I am assessing the same data point: that a denarius was a reasonable wage for a day of labor in the first century. I have ended up concluding that $1.62 = $4 = $230; obviously something has gone very wrong! The earning and consumption patterns of ancient and medieval people are sufficiently different to our own to make any direct comparison useless and deceptive.
But there are other ways to think about the value of money (and in particular coinage) in the lives of everyday people: by thinking in terms of how much labor it took to get that money and how much it could buy.
Now we should be clear that wages and prices fluctuated in the past just as they do now.5 However, we can use historical price data – which almost always comes in the form of ‘snapshot’ prices that may or may not be ‘normal’ (indeed, prices often get cited in our sources precisely because they are unrepresentative high or low) to get a sense of at least the basic order of magnitude that things might cost.
For the ancient world, from the Classical period through to the early Roman Imperial period, we actually have one really convenient rule of thumb that shows up in a bunch of places: a drachma or denarius (remember, these are similarly sized silver coins) a day was a good wage; not a typical wage, mind you, but a good one. Athenian citizen rowers in the Athenian navy – who, to be clear, are enjoying the advantage of being able to vote themselves good wages from a treasury filled with tribute from subordinated poleis – were paid a drachma a day (Thuc. 3.17.3-4).6 A single drachma per day also appears to have been the standard wage for mercenaries in the Greek East during the Hellenistic period,7 and the pay of the Roman equites – the cavalry drawn from the upper-classes – in the army of the Roman Republic was more-or-less a denarius a day (Polyb. 6.39.12).8 Finally, famously the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) gives the wages of the workers as a denarius for a full day’s work, a generous but not entirely unreasonable wage.
(Also, note how sensitive these wages are to political economies: Athenian rowers are choosing to pay themselves quite generously (as they vote for such things), while Roman citizen-soldiers (by definition, both soldiers and tax-payers, assidui) opt to pay themselves quite a lot less (2 obols = 3 asses a day) – being compensated more in honor and their political role in the Republic. Who you are, politically and socially, matters quite a lot for how well you get paid or if you get paid at all.)
Instead, what I want to focus on is what an enormous unit a denarius or a drachma already is, likely somewhat more than the average daily wage. Now, because the productivity of pre-modern economies is so low, that’s a lot less than what the daily wage would be in a modern industrial economy, but its still a significant amount to the worker who earns it. Grain seems to have run anywhere from 2-3HS per modius (a Roman dry measure, about 6.75kg) outside of really big cities with higher prices.9 A modius of grain is close to a week’s worth of food (around 22,500 calories) for an adult human, so that denarius can buy close to week’s worth of a family’s primary foodstuff in most parts of the Roman world.10
(If you are doing the math and thinking that this sounds like a rate of pay inconsistent with the poverty you’ve been told most people lived with in the ancient world, the answer is that wage labor was scarce and intermittent. You can quickly see how a family whose adults can only get paying work a few days each week would be perpetually teetering on the edge of sustainability. That’s why a steady wage from something like service in the fleet or mercenary work (or jury pay in Athens!) was so useful to the poor.)
So a denarius or a drachma isn’t a unit so big that no normal person would ever use it, but it is a big enough unit that one is hardly going to use it casually: mostly you’d be using obols or asses for everyday transactions and perhaps break out a denarius or two for something like a week’s worth of grain or potentially quite a few denarii for durable goods like a new tunic. Even a slightly larger unit, like a tetradrachma might still be useful for a fairly chunky purchase, and you can imagine a day-laborer working on a week long project getting a tetradrachma and perhaps some change at the end of the job.
But you know what is a coin of such large value that a normal person is never going to use it? The aureus, the standard Roman gold coin. That coin, after all, is worth twenty-five denarii, which (given the irregularity of wage labor) is probably more than most laborers made in a month. Heck, professional Roman soldiers – full time citizen-professionals – in the first century made 900HS (=225 denarii) per year, so a single aureus is more than their gross monthly pay (75 sestertii compared to 100 sestertii for that aureus).11 You can imagine non-elite transactions that would be this large – there’s a tablet from Vindolanda (dates ranging from 85 to 130 AD) which notes the purchase of 90 pounds of iron for 32 denarii, for instance12 – but you have to imagine even the merchant would rather have 32 silver coins he can spend rather than one gigantic gold coin he’s going to have to pay a money-lender to break (also in those tablets, for comparison, a whole live chicken‘s price is a bit less than half a denarius, for reference, but equally a saddle-cloth goes for 12 denarii on its own).
If we consult the classic Medieval Price List, we see pretty similar breakdowns. Daily wages for a skilled thatcher (essentially a roofing specialist) range from 2d-6d (=pence, you will recall) per day (the change likely as much the product of inflation as improved purchasing power); his less skilled ‘mate’ makes anywhere from 1d to 4d. Keeping in mind that by this point the sou/shilling represents a similar amount of silver to the denarius or the drachma and is 12d, our thatcher is making that much every 3-6 days. Some get paid a less; a set of 14th century wages from the list, kitchen servants make 2s-4s (24-48d) per year, though admittedly that is in England where – as you will note above – the value of the coinage has been more carefully defended.
Once again, we see that who you were could matter a lot: from his 14th century wages, knights are earning 2-4s (24-48d) per day, whereas armored infantry earn just 6d per day, so the knight banneret gets paid eight times his infantryman to march in the same army.13 But that’s not the bottom! The bottom are the ‘Welsh infantry’ paid only 2d per day, a third as much as the higher status armored infantry and 1/24th what the knights are getting. Of course, part of the pay differential is that these combatants are expected to bring their own kit and the socio-economic elite has brought heavier (expensive!) armor and expects to be compensated accordingly.
But I want to note what no one is getting paid: any livre or pounds! Even the knight banneret‘s daily wage is 1/5th a livre. Indeed, very few things which are not clearly signalled as extravagances for the elite have their price denominated in pounds. Complete armors, presumably plate (in the 15th and 16th centuries), are priced at £8 and £3 (and change, in both cases), and a 12th century mail hauberk is listed at 100s (so £5). Those likely represent the best practical protection available in those periods and they’re priced in single digit numbers of pounds, which as noted above are equal to or very close to these gold coins (the livre tournais, ducat or florin). The things that do have costs in £ are things like buildings and expensive objects for elites (court gowns, books,14 war horses, the annual salary of a priest (just £4 13s 4d a year!)).
And that brings us to our first major conclusion: in most pre-industrial settings, a gold coin of any size is an impractical unit of exchange for ‘regular people.’ Instead, what your aurei or ducats or florins are for is facilitating the storage is substantial amounts of wealth and enabling large-scale transactions by merchants and elites, either of bulk goods or luxury goods. They could also, of course, function notionally as units of account (like the Greek talent or the Carolingian livre). Day to day currency was almost invariably minted in silver or copper (or copper-alloys).
But there’s a second implication here which is going to matter for the next section, which you may have already noticed in some of the prices and values being quoted: in these pre-modern, agrarian societies the economic divide between regular people and the wealthy elite was vast and functionally unbridgeable (and the coinage was designed for the elite first). As a result, often the wealthy landholding elite in these societies had access to entire classes of goods that might simply not be available under almost any circumstances to the commons, because they required quantities of money that might be relatively trivial to the elite but which were unobtainable for the masses. Blowing £5 to equip a heavy infantryman was not a huge expense for a baron who might bring in ~ £500 annually, but for a common laborer or peasant, £5 was going to be solidly out of reach.15
All That Glisters
So if it doesn’t make much sense to reward your Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party (let’s be honest why we’re all still reading this) with gold, what should you reward them with?
The relatively easy answer would be to rename your currency ‘silver,’ calculate assuming one or two silver coins is a reasonable wage for fighting, adventuring or other high-skill or high-risk professions and then retariff all of your other prices accordingly, keeping in mind that these are societies were manufactured goods are very expensive, but unspecialized agricultural labor is very cheap. And that’s not an entirely unreasonable thing to do. While you are at it, relatively few languages use ‘gold’ as a synecdoche for ‘money,’ but a lot of languages use their word for ‘silver’ that way: Latin argentum, Greek ἀργύριον, plata in Spanish, argent in French and so on.
But part of the reason these coinage systems work they way they do is that they operated in societies in which a lot of economic activity was non-monetary or at least, non-coinage. And here, we should go back to our ‘money’ vs. ‘currency’ or ‘coinage:’ remember, money came first. So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
Meanwhile, that small farmer also owes ‘taxes’ or rents to the state or the Big Man who owns their land – the line between ‘rents’ and ‘taxes’ in pre-modern states is very fuzzy – are also likely to be paid in kind. What that means is instead of paying in coin, a certain slice of the harvest or a certain amount of grain or a certain numbers of days of corvée labor is owed. That obligation too may have a notional monetary value, enabling fines or repayments for services to be docked against tax liability, once again removing much of the need for a physical currency.
Finally, you also have a ‘gift economy’ which is entirely non-monetary (almost by definition). We’ve talked about one form of this: the horizontal ‘banqueting your neighbors’ economy whereby small farmers create and maintain non-monetarily defined relationships of economic dependence: I banquet you when my harvest is good, so you help me out when it is bad and vice versa. You can also have vertical relationships of this sort: the Big Man, you will recall, is collecting lots of rents, but also has access to a lot more capital – tools, work animals, surplus labor and so on. Most of that capital is going to go into his own interests (politics or war, usually), but often the customs in these societies are that some of it are ‘gifted’ back – so, for instance, it was typical for the owner of a manor in a manorial medieval system to banquet the village on particular days (often the days where he collected rents).16 Access to those tools, capital and resources could thus potentially be ‘gifted’ downward, which might matter, as a single village might well not create sufficient economic demand to employ certain specialized craftworkers (blacksmiths, for instance) whose products are still necessary – but the Big Man’s much larger economic footprint can support such a worker. And of course the Big Men also have their own horizontal Big Man to Big Man gift economies, which you can see in the giving of elite gifts in works like the Iliad or Beowulf.
The result is that the basic normal condition of the pre-industrial countryside is generally non-coinage (if not non-monetary). “Monetizing” the countryside (an awkward term which really means ‘currency-izing’ the countryside) is typically something states have to intentionally do. The reason a state might want to do this is simple: the big advantage coinage has is to make transactions with unfamiliar parties (people you can’t trust to pay you back later) easier and the state often does a lot of business with unfamiliar parties, especially if it operates at scale. Consequently, it is often good for the state to be able to collect taxes in silver so that it can pay for goods and wages in silver. This is, of course, especially true if the soldiery the state relies on expects to get paid in silver: one of the huge challenges that the successors of Alexander the Great faced was that they inherited an army (the Macedonian one) that expected wages paid in silver coins, but subject economies (in Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau) which were not meaningfully monetized (again, meaning ‘not using a lot of coinage;’ yes the term is awkward, but it is the term used). For the Seleucids, the solution was to create market centers (usually cities or colonies of Greek military settlers accustomed to regularly using coinage), which could buy up agricultural surplus so that the local populace could be taxed in coin (and then minting a ton of coins to circulate in this system); for the Ptolemies, the solution was actually to keep Egypt a mostly closed currency system, but to sell the grain taxed in kind abroad and use that silver revenue (reminted on the lighter Ptolemaic standard) to pay their soldiers.17
That said, in the pre-modern world, comprehensively ‘coined’ economies exist but are the exception. If you are wondering where such economies tend to be (for your fantasy worldbuilding), they’re almost always urban, because it is cities, with their large populations of non-farmers, that create the organic demand for markets in bulk staples for the common population of the city to buy with the small-denomination coins they can earn from irregular wage-labor.
Outside those cities, however, the Big Men magnates in the countryside – ‘feudal’ lords, large rentier landholders or tribal Big Men – aren’t usually receiving money in rents, but bulk agricultural goods. They can sell these goods to get silver with which to buy things, but they can equally opt to support producers in their households out of the rents (in agricultural goods) they receive. This is, for instance, the classic model of the Bronze Age ‘redistribution’ or ‘palace’ economies: rents in agricultural goods flow into the palace, which doesn’t usually sell them, but rather uses them to support specialist producers, whose goods are then pushed back down as gifts or entitlements (for instance, the king graciously equipping his soldiery with weapons).
Rewarding Your Dungeons and Dragons Party
And so we can at last loop back around to the initial quandry, the tyranny of ‘gold’ as a standard reward for your fictional adventuring party in a Dungeons and Dragons (or similar) campaign or setting.
As you can tell, basically no one is going to hand a party gold for defeating a bunch of goblin raiders or getting that Aboleth out of the lake. But because different kinds of people in different pre-modern economies engage with coinage and money in different ways, they’ll probably try to pay in different ways.
The population most likely to want to pay with money are the burghers (townsfolk): as noted above, urban centers that have lots of non-farmers and populations too large for everyone to just know everyone else are ideal for the use of coinage and tend to be where coinage catches on most quickly and completely. There is thus something of an irony: the town will want to pay you in coins, which you will be best able to spend…in the town’s market. Remember: relatively little of this coinage is circulating back into the countryside (unless you have a state extracting rents and taxes in coin!), but then of course the town is likely to have all sorts of producers happy to convert your pretty silver coins into things you actually want. That’s well enough, you hardly want to travel with lots of coinage anyway: the weight is trivial and the coins are liable to get stolen in any event.
The villagers for a small rural village might be able to scrape up some silver coins – they probably keep some silver for dealing with merchants, craftsmen and so on – but that is a limited supply and they’d much rather pay in something they have in abundance: food (and other agricultural goods). That may seem silly, but remember looking above how large a chunk of a worker’s regular earnings just getting food and lodging could be: a big feast18 and then a two-weeks supply of grains (as much as you can carry, effectively) could actually be a pretty decent chunk of value.19 If they need something with a higher value-density, they might actually offer the other thing produced regularly in households: textiles. Good cloth was valuable, portable and useful; in the 14th century one price datapoint we have put high quality wool at 5s per yard. Of course there are going to be real limits to how much a rural village can even pay on these terms: for any larger problem, they’ll have to rely on their vertical contacts (in practice, they’d have relied on these first) and go up to the Big Man.
Now the Big Man on the hill, like the burghers in the town, has resources: he can pay for military service. Indeed, in a sense, his job is paying for military service: he holds his position in no small part because he takes the surplus production of his rural tenants/subjects (extracted through rents and taxes) and uses it to pay for military force with which he holds and enforces his claim to rents and taxes, both against any peasant’s dream of independence, but equally against other Big Men. And assuming this is a setting where coinage has been invented, the Big Man certainly has access to a sufficient amount to pay simply pay in cash for services rendered dealing with that Owlbear his retainers kept failing to track.20
But the Big Man would probably rather ‘pay’ your adventurers differently. After all, remember that the Big Man is running a business which converts agricultural surplus (extracted in rents) into military power (men, horses, weapons, armor) and legitimacy (often conferred with extravagant gifts: jewelry and such). So while he could simply transact business and pay you in silver and send you on your way, it would be a lot easier to compensate you with what he has as well: he might gift you a sword or set of armor from his armory, or a horse from his stables.
That gift isn’t just easier for him, it comes with broader social implications which are also better for him and for you. Whereas payment in money might not incur any great obligation, the exchange of gifts here – you have solved a problem, he has given you something in return – creates a social obligation, a bond between you, especially if the value of the gift exceeds the value of the service. You are now obligated to help out again, in the future, should he ask, out of ‘gratitude’ for the ‘gift’ (and for such services, you will receive more ‘gifts’). Meanwhile, remember up top about how much one’s place in the political economy matters for how well one is paid – just being a more important kind of person in these societies21 could radically change how you were compensated and thus your station in life?
Well, unlike a few coins, those gifts can change who you are: a man with a strong arm is a peasant; a man with a strong arm, gifted mail and a weapon is a man-at-arms, whose station entitles them to better treatment. That same man, gifted a horse and a lance, by the Big Man is a knight (or substitute the culturally appropriate moniker for minor mounted military aristocrat). That’s great for you – far better than just a few coins that make you merely a momentarily rich peasant – but also great for the Big Man who just bought himself a minor military aristocrat (remember: you’re obligated to be grateful for his generosity and to respond if he calls), minted out of stores of weapons he was keeping for just such an occasion. Indeed, Tacitus describes how the gift of weapons was what enabled a young man to take a full place in public life among Germanic tribes – a custom that we see echoes of in other non-state communities and so may assume did, in fact, occur – “But it is unusual for anyone to wear arms before the civitas has recognized their right to them. Then before the council, one of the principes or a father or a relative equips a young man with a spear and a shield. These are to them what the toga is to us: the first honor of a youth.”22
The other thing, of course, that the Big Man has in abundance is land and peasants (possibly serfs, possibly tenants, possibly slaves). Even better than a gift of status-changing weapons, he might offer instead to take you into his household, pulling you into his permanent retinue, with a promise of maintenance (food, clothing, equipment) equal to your new, elevated station. Alternately, he might try to ‘settle’ you to establish a permanent, lasting obligation: give you some land and peasants in exchange for a formal expectation of service (an oath of vassalage or homage in a medieval context). While there’s a tendency to think about this in terms of grand estates, such settlements could be ‘relatively’ small: Hellenistic military settlers in Ptolemaic Egypt often got plots that were 25-30 arourai (17-20 acres) for infantrymen – hardly a massive estate, but enough that the rents alone could maintain the infantryman and his household without having to do any actual farming himself.23 In at least some societies, such a gift might not even necessarily mean the end of adventuring; in medieval European vassalage-based polities, it was often possible to owe service to more than one liege and freelance some military activity on the side (though more effectively centralized states are more jealous about their military manpower).
To wrap up: in some ways pre-modern economies could be more complex than ours, because they hadn’t yet reduced nearly all transactions down to monetary exchange.24 ‘Gold’ isn’t going to be terribly useful in most contexts, but even where more common silver coins are available, its often going to be in an individuals interest to instead embed themselves into economies of patronage and gift-exchange which are non-monetary or to understand transactions as abstractly monetary, without physical gold or silver changing hands. But the most important gifts and payments in these societies were ones that changed a person’s status, which could often be as simple as a gift of proper weapons or a horse, perhaps appropriately witnessed by other elites.
And that sort of thing: working one’s way up from helping peasants who can’t pay with anything more than a good meal and supplies to the road up to gifts that come freighted with deep social significance and change a person’s very status in society – that’s a much richer tapestry to weave a story out of than ‘gold.’
And also, and I must stress this again: gold coins were enormous units of currency no one used on a daily basis. If I have to pay 100 ‘gold’ for a sword, that sword had better be jewel-encrusted, gilt, made of the finest steel imported from India.
- Which, to be clear, is fine if what one wants to do is simply tell a modern story in which people, for some reason, have swords. But I think fantasy, as a genre, is often more interesting when it is used to explore different societies, rather than just putting a bunch of characters with fundamentally modern outlooks in shields, swords and wizard robes.
- Metal coinage in China is, as far as I know, basically contemporary (perhaps just a hair later) but an entirely independent development.
- On that shifting relationship, see M. Treister, The Role of Metals in Ancient Greek History (1996), which has some price data over the relatively long run.
- I’m in the United States, so its dollars, but I imagine it must be the same question everywhere, denominated in the local currency, with just extra intense confusion if the local currency is still called the pound or the dinar or what have you.
- On this, see W.T. Loomis, Wages, Welfare Costs and Inflation in Classical Athens (1998).
- Athenian citizen soldiers, drawn from a somewhat higher socioeconomic class, were paid two drachmae a day, Thucydides notes, to account for the enslaved servant they’d invariably bring.
- On this see G.T. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (1935), 294-307. It’s probably a mistake to view this as a single mercenary ‘market’ (such recruiting instead seems very localized) and very clearly a mistake to assume that Carthage’s sort-of-kind-of mercenary armies were drawn from the same sources (they were not). More on both things another day.
- But it is necessary to convert his figures, as he gives the salary in Greek units (obols) but it would have been paid in Roman units (asses); that conversion gives us nine asses a day for the cavalryman (triple the infantryman’s three asses a day, importantly signalled by Plautus, Plaut. Mostell. 357, which on the sextantal as standard of the time (10 asses to a denarius) would have made for just short of a denarius a day.
- Price data from G. Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (1980).
- Calorie requirements vary a lot for humans depending on their work level and size, but 3,500 calories for an adult male doing strenuous labor makes a good upper limit; an adult female who is still quite active might require around 2,500 calories. In practice, most families will have fallen below these figures from time to time.
- And it should be noted that they weren’t just handed 75 sestertii every month: amounts were deducted for food, replacement equipment, clothing and also to pay for certain festivals in the camp.
- Discussed L. Bray, “Horrible, Speculative, Nasty, Dangerous’ Assessing the Value of Roman Iron,” Britannia 41 (2010).
- Except, of course, the knight banneret isn’t marching, he’s on a horse.
- We’ll talk later this year as to why those are so staggeringly expensive – but staggeringly expensive!
- Though not entirely out of reach for a skilled craftsman – it might represent something like half a year to year’s pay and we know that towns often expected such men to self-equip as heavy infantry, see for instance Verbruggen, The Art of War in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (1997), 170-1 on the heavy infantry burgher militia of Bruges.
- You may be saying, “wait a minute, that’s just a form of minor tax remission: he’s giving them back what they just gave him.” And you’re not wrong, but it might not be understood that way. If the Lord or Temple or King who has nominal ownership or overlordship has a legitimate claim, often backed up by God or the gods to their position, they’re not giving you your grain back; it was always their grain, with which they are now displaying their generosity and magnanimity (which is, of course, the mark of a good King, Lord or Priest). Again, everything depends on legitimacy. If you want to see this in action, actually, go watch Downton Abbey sometime and note how many of the ‘downstairs’ subplots are resolved by an act of ‘generosity’ from upstairs which the show happily frames as magnanimity despite the fact that this is a family that subsists entirely off of hereditary rents extracted from poor farmers.
- The reason the Ptolemies can’t mint their way out normally is that Egypt lacks major silver deposits. On these monetization strategies, see Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy (2004) and S. von Reden, Money in Ptolemaic Egypt (2007).
- In which meat, dairy and perhaps fresh fruit and vegetables are available. Humans require more nutrition than just grains can provide, but for the non-rich in the pre-modern world, access to more expensive foods was intermittent – so you might be getting a non-trivial amount of your protein requirement from that feast.
- This bit in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) where the villagers promise to pay the samurai in rice is thus not entirely unreasonable – they’re paying with what they have. Also, Seven Samurai has got to be one of the ur-texts for your D&D adventure group.
- As an aside, we’re brushing past the larger problem in the classic ‘adventuring fantasy’ framework, which is of course this Big Man has a retinue of armed violence-dealers who themselves look very much like an adventuring party. These guys get shoved into the background of most settings as ‘guards,’ but the knights of a baron’s household or the retinue of a Gallic princeps are going to be every bit as capable of handling the local Minotaur problem as an adventuring party. In practice, of course, the stories these settings are based on – like Beowulf, for instance – feature men who are already members of a retinue (like the titular Beowulf, a retainer of Hygelac, king of the Geats, at the poem’s opening) essentially ‘freelancing’ in their spare time because they’re very good at violence or alternately feature men from the ‘retainer class’ who are freelancing in the hopes someone will hire them permanently (this is the role of the classic ‘knight bachelor’).
- And, sadly, also our society.
- Tac. Germ. 13.1
- Cavalry allotments were much larger, typically 100 arourai (c. 68 acres). For comparison, a self-sufficient farm for a single family unit (5-7 individuals) is going to be around ~5-10 acres (on Ptolemaic land settlements see P. Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt (2020)). So these plots are jumbo-sized precisely so that they can be rented out and subsist the soldier in a life of leisure on the rents. Note by contrast, Roman veteran settlements are typically smaller (sometimes much smaller), because the Romans expect citizen-soldier-farmers to actually do some farming and seek to maximize the number of conscription-liable individuals.
- Which, to be clear, is often better: coinage and other forms of physical money can substantially lower transaction costs in these pre-modern societies, enabling more economic activity and thus more prosperity.
Obviosuly the ancients did not understand economics and the relationship between the money supply and the real economy, but it amazes me how many historians also fail to grasp this. Rulers who debased the currency are commonly portayed as profligate fools, without any reference to the fact that if your economy grows (more likely through conquest than progress in ancient times) and your metal supply does not (perhaps as in the post-Alexandrian example given by Brett), not to devalue would have been economically disastrous.
That relationship between money supply and size of economy you invoke is itself not universal, for the reasons Bret enumerates, so you’re jumping the gun in claiming historians are not considering economic theory.
Economic stagnation caused by the money supply being too small for the economic productivity is only a problem if the transactions have to be performed in specie (that is, actual coins), because then a lack of coins means the transaction can’t take place. But in the ancient, not fully monetized communities, a large part of transactions occurred without any coin, which made them immune to that effect – the main money flow is in grain, and as the economy grows, so does the amount of grain, problem solved.
Where money supply does become an issue is firstly in state expenses (which, as Bret lists, are more likely in coin), but there I’d argue it really is more of an issue of incompetence than economic pressure: Debasement means the ruler can’t figure out a way to budget with the coin they have, or to somehow shift expenses into things that aren’t precious metals, and it does long-term damage the economy for the reason that it devalues the coin in the international economy, making it harder to import and export in the future.
Secondly, it can become an issue in cities that are more highly monetized. And we can actually see something like that in the middle ages, when imports from the east drained the continent of silver (the only thing that the Muslism, Indians and Chinese considered worth having from Europe at that time) to the point where it both starved imports and caused owners of the few silver mines to become fantastically wealthy and important. But again, the effect is not as straightforward and the solution would not have been debasement: What was strangled off was international trade, not internal trade, and debasement would have done nothing to solve that, because the trading partners didn’t care about the nominal value of the coin, they cared about the silver that was in it.
There are good reasons of why a shift to first representative currencies and then fiat currencies was good economic policy, but they also required a global acceptance of that new system of currency. In a international community where the agreed upon, universally exchangeable unit of value is a precious metal commodity, then a currency that isn’t made of that precious metal is a real hindrance.
As it does today…
It may be a hindrance, but there are many cases of real-life early modern economics running their own internal economy with a multi-currency model. For example, the 17th century Sweden used copper plate money (nominally valued as silver) that didn’t circulate externally. In external commerce, they used silver.
The Swedes tried having a paper money that already in the 17th century, and their fiat paper currencies remained stable outside of major wars, circulating at a pretty fixed rate to specie money. The same happened in Russia, where paper and silver ruble had more or less constant 1:3 ratio from 1810’s until 1840’s’ war scare.
And debasement of currency didn’t strangle external trade, because for a foreign buyer, a debasement of a currency simply means a modified rate of exchange for new coinage. Because this kind of news travels fast, the impact on foreign trade is quite transient, except that the debasement happens usually during a war, and the peaceful trade is going to suffer due to that. A merchant doesn’t hold money but circulates it, so debasement doesn’t really impact his business. It is the rentiers and the ignorant, who don’t know about the debasement and sell at previous prices, who suffer from inflation.
And here, I would like to note that debasement of currency is simply one way of moving funds from private parties to the state. In practice, very few countries can run a major war with a specie currency. You end up issuing some kind of IOUs, debased coins or simply expropriating wealth if you are serious about your war effort. For example, even the US couldn’t really maintain free convertibililty of dollars to gold during WWII, and Britain, the powerhouse of pre-WWI economy, gave up the gold standard already during WWI for all real intents and purposes. In earlier cases, the various 18th and 17th century wars caused one or more parties to give up convertibility of paper money or to issue fiat currency quite routinely.
Was not *supposed* to circulate externally I should say. Apparently some dutch traders took advantage of increase in the copper price and simply sold them abroad for the copper value. (should be noted that Sweden was pretty much the only viable supplier of copper of any scale in the period, the main competitor being Japan (!) via the dutch)
I don’t think those “copper instead of silver” coins saw much use. They were so huge in size as to be impractical.
“That relationship between money supply and size of economy you invoke is itself not universal, for the reasons Bret enumerates, so you’re jumping the gun in claiming historians are not considering economic theory.
Economic stagnation caused by the money supply being too small for the economic productivity is only a problem if the transactions have to be performed in specie (that is, actual coins), because then a lack of coins means the transaction can’t take place. But in the ancient, not fully monetized communities, a large part of transactions occurred without any coin, which made them immune to that effect – the main money flow is in grain, and as the economy grows, so does the amount of grain, problem solved.”
Yes, exactly. The Bank of England published this https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy which is probably the single most important financial document for the ordinary non-specialist to read.
The situation’s surprisingly similar in non-modern economies: the money supply is much larger than the currency supply (ie the total number of coins) and money creation is in the hands of a lot of different institutions, even if currency creation is legally restricted to the royal mint. If the two of us have zero coins between us, and I give you a cow, and you write “I owe the bearer ten silver shillings” on a bit of paper and give it to me – we have now increased the money supply of our economy by 10s.
Yes – but unless the IOU is transferable it’s a very limited form of money. Treasuries and merchants could issue widely-recognised tokens (in Kipling’s Kim the boy is handed a note with the signature and thumb-print of Mahboob ‘known from Calcutta to the Hindu Kush’) – the still-existing hawala system.
It is highly realistic, on Discworld, that the newly invented stamps work as a surrogate form of money. Light. Portable. And you can always use them to mail something.
In exactly the way that mobile phone minutes work as a currency in East Africa – they are useful, they have a fixed conversion rate into money, and they can be easily transferred.
Perhaps worth noting that PTerry used a lot of Roundworld history facts, straight, in the Discworld novels. Including this one
Sir Pterry truly grew up in times of darkness. When he went to the librarian with The Lord of the Rings and said he wanted more books like that, the librarian pointed him to the mythology section.
But not all was lost. He noticed on the next shelf, a cover had a man wearing a helmet. Promising. Who knew, there might be runes! So he read every book on that shelf.
Which was marked History.
Tolkien had turned him onto a whole new world. It just happened to be the real one.
LotR is properly categorized as mythology, not fiction, though; even if it was written with the intent to produce myth.
And I would argue that Sir Pterry (thanks for the reminder) was just as deliberately producing mythology and is just as properly filed as such today.
That may well have been his inspiration, but it’s also true that actual stamps have been used from time to time as currency – for example during the US Civil War https://www.nytimes.com/1862/10/02/archives/postoffice-stamps-as-currency-it-is.html
The reason is that you can print as much paper currency as you like, but if the smallest note is $1 that leaves you a bit short of small change.
The “sign your name across a stamp to make it legal” thing in “Going Postal” sounds like an invented weird superstition, but it was also common – and indeed legally required – as a way of paying stamp duty on a transaction. The point was that by signing across the stamp you defaced it – so you’d effectively made a payment to the government. (Stamps bore the inscription “Postage and Revenue” for this reason.)
Of course, Ankh Morpork doesn’t charge stamp duty, so it’s a bit puzzling why they’re doing it!
@Ajay:
Indeed. I knew of the usages of stamps as paper money in our world when I dropped the reference.
(As for “weird superstition” – regardless of why it “worked”, I’d be willing to believe that most of the people in our world doing it didn’t know any deeper than “makes it legal, see”)
If you conquer the economy of an area, you conquer the existing circulating coin supply along with it. And even then, the total (stock) value of the coin supply is not all that large relative to the economy; as long as you are connected to the rest of the e.g. Mediterranean trade network, imbalances (e.g. increased need due to monetization of peasants) get evened out at a reasonable rate.
If you haven’t already, it’s worth taking a look at the HarnWorld RPG setting published by Columbia Games. It uses a silver standard (basically the Carolingian one described here), and outside of a few urban locales the bulk of the economy is transacted in kind rather than in cash. Feudal ties and the gift economy are front and center in the setting and very important. “Treasure” takes on a whole different meaning.- I once gave the PCs a “reward” of twenty loaves of bread, a cask of pickled eels and a live pig for helping rid a village of troublesome bandits.
I’m hanging out for a D&D game to use plutonium as the precious metal all coins are minted from – it is beyond shadow of a doubt, far, far more precious than mere gold. And its radioactivity serves as a warning against hoarding it, and its explosiveness is the ultimate warning against the Dragon Sickness Tolkien wrote about in The Hobbit.
Facetiously though, I have written an SF story where the “money” is bars of iron:
https://www.michaelmoorcock.net/forum/the-miscellany/enclave-at-the-end-of-time-%E2%97%A6-members-work/9599-the-vheratsho-in-the-nyerlika-eyrie
“[Vheratsho] would’ve given a solid iron bar to hear what they were saying; her experiences with Ilin were not pleasant.”
” [Praleyo] didn’t hammer on the table and disturb his tools or the iron-bar payment the Lord Erasis had stacked on it, either, [Vheratsho] noted cold-bloodedly.”
“Anyway, the lordling Erasis had accepted the Lady Ereha’s deposit of seventy iron, nicely cast with an indistinct image of one of the Sava’ ancestors, and most probably the half-eilakh Raosava’ – or his half-Rakhebuityan grandmother Shanyat, Lady Ereha wasn’t too sure …”
Share and Enjoy!
If I get it right, a plutonium-based currency would naturally debase itself over time… which gets me thinking about the impact of such currency on the economy. Somebody here an economist?
Pu-239, the famous one, has a half-life of 24110 years. Pu-238, the one used in RTGs, has a half-life of 87.7 years. Also, the radiation it emits is mostly alpha particles, which means your pocket (failing that, your skin) is sufficient shielding as long you don’t eat them.
There are basically four possibilities (others inter-/extrapolate trivially):
1) The total quantity of Pu-238 in circulation (and existence) decreases. Its price goes up in inverse proportion, keeping the value of coins constant. (Assuming that coinage and maybe decoration is the dominant use of the metal. Just as people fake gold, maybe people would put up decorations made of a similar-looking alloy and ran a current through them to replicate the warmth.)
2) The total quantity is kept up at state expense; you can take old coins to the mint and receive new ones at 1:1 face value (minus small fee). All coins trade at face value, the few people who care about plutonium content have the network to do the above.
3) The total quantity is kept up at user expense; the mint “merges” the total plutonium quantity of your old coins. (Minting new coins from freshly manufactured Pu-238 is presumably a royal monopoly.) This merely means that everyone will discount coins by age. The year of issue will be struck onto the coins, a small printed table (or nursery rhyme for the illiterate) is sufficient to look up how much they should be worth, GM counters to check their activity will be ubiquitous (compare UV lights to check the fluorescent markings on paper bills).
However, 87.7 years of half-life is a -0.79% “interest rate”. (0.9 at 13, .8 at 28, .7 at 45, .6 at 65, etc.) Before the early 20th century, parents lost children faster than these coins lose value. Sure, people will hold a bit less cash — but nowadays any number of savings products yielding more than cash exist, and the value of cash in circulation is either still increasing or only decreasing due to advances in non-cash payments. These coins burn a hole in your pocket literally rather than figuratively.
4) No reminting takes place, the state makes new plutonium and mints it, each year using less fresh plutonium per coin. Coins of different vintages are fully fungible. All you get is a 0.8% inflation rate, less than what modern currencies typically have.
“Also, the radiation it emits is mostly alpha particles, which means your pocket (failing that, your skin) is sufficient shielding as long you don’t eat them.”
On truly long time scales this depends on how old your Pu is. You have to account for the fact that decaying Pu drops into it’s decay chain, and the decay chain has Beta decay on it.
Pu-239 drops into the U-235 chain after it’s first decay, so it’s irrelevant on normal timescales given the hundreds of million year half-life, but Pu-238 drops into the U-234 chain, and U-234 decays rapidly enough that after some amount of a time untouched coins might accumulate enough of it’s daughters to emit significant amounts of beta particles. It’s still a 200000+ year half life, so you’d have to work out the equilibrium activity in a moderately complex math problem to figure out if it represents a containment issue on historical time scales, and I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime myself.
Of course all sorts of interesting chemistry and metallurgy is going to be happening regarding the integrity of a coin decaying from Pu into U, so it might not be a problem because your coin stops being a coin before then. And if your original Pu is now mostly U is the coin even worth anything? It’s not like U-234 isn’t valuable in and of itself, so we’re dealing with reasonable complicated conversions here. The beta decay activity might primarily be useful for determining how old the coin is at a glance, long before it becomes a health hazard, but you’d have to account for disequilibrium of daughter and parent isotopes through weathering of the coin…
Larry Niven once wrote a proposal to make money out of radioactive waste:
1) Money circulates fast.
2) Gold still valuable for shielding.
3) Miserliness get automatically punished.
4) People won’t let it get into the water or soil because that is losing money.
5) Foreign Aid can be delivered by ICBM.
Jack Vance wrote a couple of stories set on Big Planet – a large but light planet where heavy metals were rare. A dinner setting of iron was a mark of display for the very rich.
Thats not a sea turtle on the coin. It’s clearly a hermann’s tortoise. Just look at the legs and the shape of the crapace.
There are actually 2 versions of the famous Aeginetan “Turtles” One with a sea turtle on it, which is very common and was widely circulated until about 460 BC. At that point Athens attacked Aegina and blockaded its ports, thereby ruining its trade and forcing it to join the Delian League. After that Aegina was finished as an independent sea-faring Polis and it changed the turtle on its currency into a land turtle-like the one shown here. These coins are very rare, which speaks volumes for the decline of the Aeginetan economy.
Interestingly, another group of people who see each other often enough to work like this are merchants – not when dealing with customers, but when dealing with each other. In Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe there was an effectively paper-money-based microeconomy built on such written promissory notes, backed by particularly stable merchants’ or banks’ precious metals reserves and willingness to pay out their own (transferrable) accounts payable.
Obligatory shoutout to Dragon Age: Origins, a rare video game example which at least ‘feels’ authentic, while still being easy to parse for us moderns.
Currency is decimalised, 1:100:10000 gold:silver:copper.
Throughout the first half of the game you’re thinking in copper, with silver for significant expenses. By the endgame you’re a famous world-saving hero and thinking in silver… and may have, if you’ve been diligently saving, scraped together as many as *several* gold.
It’s still a fantasy RPG in which tempered steel is level-1 vendor trash. But it’s still fun to have gotten that sticker shock the first time you open a shop and see some sort of glowing neon unobtanium plate armour which costs *an entire gold piece*.
This reminded me of recently playing Zelda: Twilight Princess and first time visiting a shop that had a magical armour for sale, for 10 000 rupies. Yet my purse would only have room for 300 rupies, it would be thoroughly impossible to carry enough currency with me to purchase the armour. I would have to set up an instalment plan. Or complete a side quest that would significantly drop the price.
I have a question (for my fantasy worldbuilding) and might as well be direct: what about weregild? In societies that practice it, human lives (understandably) have pretty high value, and the source I’ve seen (literally just wikipedia) gives a millennium of different law codes with dozens to hundreds of gold coins per person.
In the event of such a killing and a legal action, would gold money actually change hands? Or how would that transaction be managed otherwise?
Often the constituent units of these societies were families rather than individuals. Thus in addition to all the property the household (sometimes clan) has, or is able to borrow, sometimes it would be necessary for them to sell — or possible to force them into selling, depending on your point of view — members into slavery. However, there can be other options open for negotiation, including the very elegant “give him to us, we give his corpse back to you, we freely admit guilt and that we have to pay wergeld to you, which exactly offsets the wergeld you have to pay to us”.
Anglo-Saxon price for killing a free man was 200 shillings, for a thegn 1200 shillings. In Njal’s saga the were-gild for a free man is 200 in silver, for a chief 600. In the sagas the fines are paid in silver money before as many notable witnesses as one can get.
one would imagine too that the high weregild for a man’s life was intentional, as a way of deterring violence. individual troublemakers and small groups are less likely to casually consider going over the border and killing someone of the rival kingdom/town/clan/etc if they know that they’ll be charged with paying a life shattering price when word gets out what they did. and it even would deter action by nobles (who presumably would otherwise be able to scrape up such funds more easily) since it’s still likely to be a substantial portion of their wealth.. and selling off the goods they’ve collected from their lands to get the physical coinage needed might still hurt them badly.
Yet feud and revenge killing was common. In Iceland the witnesses to the settlement would often contribute to the payment in a show of noble generosity. If you could show good cause the kin and friends would rally round.
Which could also be intentional – if everybody agreed the victim needed killing, then presumably contributions to the weregild would offset enough of it for it to be significantly less problematic to pay. Wheras if you killed a much-beloved member of the community, the difficulty in getting your hands on enough specie for the weregild was part of the punishment.
It’s not explicitly stated, but what I would guess is that if a person could not afford the weregild, either their family or even whole village pool resources to pay it, or else the person paying it goes into ruinous unrepayable debt and suffers the consequences. Possibly both.
The obvious cumbersomeness of the system is probably part of why they moved away from it towards imprisonment, exile, and capital punishment.
Incidentally, I’ve just read through Peter Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and it and this post supplement each other so nicely.
A seemingly particularly common case study in regards to calculation of modern-day equivalent sums is, how much did exactly Judas get for selling Jesus. I saw that topic brought multiple times in various internet spaces (and probably a few IRL too). Going by the Gospel, it was enough to buy a plot of land, but going by an “average basket of daily goods”, it’s more like a few mean monthly salaries. Nothing to scoff at, but not what one’d expect with modern real estate prices. At least, that’s how I saw it explained most of the time.
Reply to myself: David. David Graeber. I don’t know how I could have made that mistake having had the name in front of my own eyes the same minute I hit the reply button.
“in these pre-modern, agrarian societies the economic divide between regular people and the wealthy elite was vast and functionally unbridgeable”
Ummm…
I came here to say the same. A, say, gas-station worker earning $12 an hour would have to do some saving up to afford a new iPhone. A skilled professional can choose to get one at any time, but has to save up to buy a house in a city. A successful owner of a medium company could buy multiple houses, but would need to save up to buy a superyacht. The extremely wealthy have multiple of those and can spend money to buy politicians, too:/
Social status as a source of wealth is sneakier here but also applies since it’s so common for “you need to save up for” things to be financed by a loan instead, and ability to get a loan for a larger amount is tied to perceived wealth. The wealthier can simply afford to *gain* more money for more things rather than just having more money.
I would think the distinction is the presence/absence of sharp discontinuities in socio-economic strata.
A pre-modern agrarian society has a pyramidal socio-economic structure in which a very broad base of peasants supports a small middle class of artisans and an even smaller aristocracy.
You already alluded the diamond(ish) socio-economic structure of developed economies: small underclass, large working and middle classes, and an upper middle class that merges fairly cleanly into the true socio-economic elite (the distinction between very successful UMC and “genuinely rich” is essentially arbitrary and frankly probably more social than economic).
If the modern economy were analogized to the pre-modern economy, you’d have the vast majority of people working near-minimum wage jobs, a thin layer of professionals, and a SE-elite consisting of megamillionaires and billionaires.
The One Ring RPG (and its official 5e conversion Adventures in Middle-Earth) is a lot better about how currency works than most other RPGs. They use the Carolingian coinage system as the basis of of their currency and list prices in “silver pennies”, which are equivalent to the sou or shilling. A suit of Heavy Mail (the best conventional armor) costs 75 silver pennies, or less than four gold pieces. This is about a third of the lifestyle cost assumed for an adventurer from the merchant city of Lake Town (the default lifestyle cost is determined by culture, and the books also seem to assume that a Lake-Man character is part of a merchant family). Likewise, a large hoard with a value of 100 gold pieces is a very rare and very significant find.
The Player’s Guide also mentions that much of the WIlderland (the area around Mirkwood and the Lonely Mountain) relies primarily on barter and gift-economies, with coinage being more widespread around urbanized cultures like Gondor and Erebor. It is also possible to receive a title and land in some cultures, with an annual income of 50 silver pennies (potentially more with the more extensive rules for Holdings added in one of the campaign books).
no doubt the choice to use ‘silver pennies’ as the basis for the currency system derives from their use in the Bree section of LOTR, where it costs 12 silver pennies to buy Bill the Pony from Bill Ferny (described as three times the normal price), and Butterbur gives Merry 18 more silver pennies on top of that as recompense for the hobbit’s 5 pony’s that were lost from Butterbur’s inn. which given the total of 30 silver pennies, suggests that he might well have been paying for supplies and tack lost at the same time (as 5 pony’s at 4 silver pieces each would only add up to 20.)
it was one of the few times that coinage is actually detailed in the books, and pretty much the only time we got a solid example of prices. as Bree was part of Arnor, i’d guess that the ‘silver pennies’ were arnorian coinage still in circulation. with perhaps the name being a post-fall nickname in bree.
though i wonder sometimes what the pennies that Bilbo gives out to the hobbit children prior to the party were. probably not silver pennies, given those have fairly high buying power. perhaps the Shire has its own coinage including some sort of copper (or other base metal) penny? which might explain the name, if an old arnorian silver coin is similar in size and look to the much less valuable pennies that the shire and bree use for day to day transactions.
It could also be dwarven or gondorian coinage
I too wonder where the coins came from in LOTR. Arnor had fallen some 11 centuries ago, so it is highly unlikely that any coinage would be left around. Someone must have been minting coins. The Hobbits of the Shire? Elrod? perhaps the Dwarfs of Erebor? I don’t think Tolkien addresses the issue in the Appendices.
Coins don’t go bad. Early modern French peasants who found Roman coins in their fields would simply use them as coins.
Coins don’t go bad, but they do get worn with time. After a few hundred years of changing hands, rubbing against other coins in purses, getting bitten to test its purity etc. a coin will be so worn that the letters will be illegible, the picture of the king, god or whatever unrecognisable, it will have lost its initial weight and be worth a lot less than a freshly minted one. A roman coin found in the field will have fared better than a coin that was never lost and changed hands all the time.
IRL old coins got regularly molten and minted again. In Middle Earth they would be probably turned into jewellery, cutlery or what have you. That is the whole point of precious metals: they don’t get bad, so they can be used, over and over again-and they are.
I read once in one of Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred Novells, that the Vikings wore silver arm rings that could be broken in tiny segments and used as currency. I am not sure this really happened or it is something the author imagined, but something like that would work very well in Middle Earth, in Arnor or Rohan.
kostaszag: > the Vikings wore silver arm rings that could be broken in tiny segments and used as currency. I am not sure this really happened or it is something the author imagined
I also don’t know if it really happened outside of Sagas, but I do know that “ringbreaker” is a common kenning for kings, who would have those arm rings they could break to reward their followers.
Source: This wikipedia article on kennings
He doesn’t address the issue, but it’s hardly unreasonable to think that the Shire had a minting system. They had a postal system, a museum, a civil government, a police force, etc. Plus they traded with dwarves, Breelanders, and a few others–not every day, but often enough that, while dwarves caused comment, no one spent their time in an inn saying “I think I saw a dwarf once”. Further, at least some Hobbits were wealthy–the master of Brandybuck Hall, Bilbo from his adventures, the Old Took–and there was therefore a periodic influx of coins from Outside.
There also wasn’t a lot of trust between Shire hobbits and Outsiders. It’s really, really hard to deal in direct exchanges or gift economies when you don’t trust one another. Coins, however, can be weighed and the volume measured; you don’t NEED to trust, you can verify. So even if the Shire lost their ability to mint coins at some point, they would have developed it again, or relied on coins minted nearby.
Coin-making isn’t that hard. It takes some skill, but it’s skill that someone with a reasonable background in metalworking can learn fairly quickly. I know this, because I have friends that make replica coins. There’s always more to learn, but you can make reasonable coins in a surprisingly short time–somewhere between an afternoon or a few days, depending on how complicated the die is.
hacksilver was a real method
I play in a LARP which has minted it’s own coinage, in rings/crowns/thrones, on a 20:8:1 ratio, as bronze/silverish/goldish. The game area is the Imperial capital (genre is fantasy, game is Empire), and even there most of the trading is in rings and crowns.
A couple of rings buys you cake, the cheapest magical herbs may be 10 rings, small ingots of precious metals will be 20 to 25 rings…. By the time you get to trading in Thrones (gold) you’re looking at (implied) wagonloads of magical building materials, suits of enchanted armour, or hiring an small military company for a season.
Prices are inflated due to Big City prices, and all the characters being at least wealthy farmers on the social scale, but I think we’ve got it pretty right 🙂
You’re spending 20-25 rings on ingots? Can I sell you some, please 😉
But more seriously: yes, Empire’s economic system is extremely complicated, interesting and – as you say – does focus far more on silver and copper than on gold coins.
Only thing I can think of is that the Thrones still sound like they’re a smaller currency than RL gold coins, but it sounds like the kind of things it’s actually used for is about what you’d expect, so it at least sounds about right for a monetised area in premodern times, and since it’s explicitly the Imperial Capital, then it being monetised is unsurprising.
Interesting article as always.
I would also briefly note that this chasm of value between gold and silver is also important to contextualise the hunger for precious metals that drove the conquistadores and the kingdom of Spain to explore, conquer and rule in the (super)continent of America.
As Keynes once noted, if your economy is based on metal coinaige, then getting more precious metal is required to grow said economy unless you find a way out of using metal, which is how you get paper currency and fractional reserve banking.
Then the population of the conquered areas collapse in less than a century ruinating the Spanish government.
I’ve been kicking around a fantasy worldbuilding beat that goes something like this:
1. Gold used to be absurdly rare and valuable
2. Alchemists discovered how to turn lead into gold
3. All the lead was turned to gold, so now it’s extremely common. It still has a historical association with wealth and power. Thus, it’s a good material to make coins out of.
4. Lead is absurdly rare and valuable, far too valuable to waste on coins or pipes.
As for D&D and similar settings…most of them need to be designed around how people like playing adventurers.
No one likes going on a quest just because they’re socially obligated to follow their fictional patron’s orders. So you need a society where armed people running around without any ties to local authorities are tolerated, or else where local authorities are too weak to stop them. This implies some degree of civil disorder or extreme political decentralization.
But at the same time, town hubs where you can easily exchange quest rewards for handy adventuring commodities or services (e.g. resting at an inn) are incredibly useful. What’s the point of accumulating treasure if you can’t buy a better sword? And quite frankly, haggling over which ancient artifacts that sword is worth isn’t fun for most people, so selling the artifacts for standardized currency that you can use to buy the sword is generally preferable.
Markets which can handle such transactions being reasonably common implies a highly monetized economy with lots of trade, such that the treasure-buyer can expect someone will come by to purchase the primordial gold ring or whatever before he dies of starvation, and the swordsmith can just pre-forge a bunch of +4 flaming burst longswords and assume someone will buy them. But that kind of economy doesn’t really fit with any kind of society where hooligans with swords can run around wherever they please.
There are ways to square this circle, but most of them require a society in dramatic transition, and for some reason fantasy authors in general and D&D setting writers in specific usually don’t do that. And it’s really easy to just not bother and assume your audience will go along with it.
I can think of several well regarded RPGs where you’re running around doing stuff for your patron because you’re obligated to. Pendragon, Runescape, and Legend of the Five Rings all come to mind.
Do you mean Runequest?
I so, that’s what I came here to mention.
As a fan of KoDP and Six Ages who got the latest Runequest version last year, I have to say that the main rulebook and starter pack don’t do a great job of setting things up for that. The big problem is that it’s got a lot of different homelands, which will probably inspire players to make characters from multiple homelands, and it doesn’t have a multinational organization. I mean, you’re either for or against the Lunars, probably against because there’s only one Lunar cult in the base book, but you’re probably obligated to different tribes. It gives no guidance on how you resolve this to have characters living their civilians lives within a hundred miles of each other.
Then the sample adventure pack could come straight out of DnD; you arrive in Boldhome, get in a fight with trolls and get arrested* and then get conscripted to investigate a disappearance, for which you will get your fine forgiven. The next two adventures are also being hired by the city leadership. Then there is another adventure booklet in the starter set where you wander into a town and have adventures.
More in keeping with the expressed goal of the game is the Six Seasons in Sartar campaign book, where you play a band of children coming of age in a single clan.
*I do not think this is a good design choice and it’s pretty explicitly intended to “teach your players a lesson” that should really be handled in Session 0
Tbh I feel like the rulebook I got is intended for people who played the previous versions in a way DnD books are not.
You’re probably right about the main rulebook, I came at Runequest from a slightly oblique angle of starting with Six Seasons, onto KoDP, and progressing from there, rather than starting with the core book. I probably have a skewed view on Runequest, trending more towards the ‘village life/tribal management’ style campaign than the ‘band of adventurers’ style.
The main rulebook’s commentary implies they want you to play a settled person in a clan who goes on adventures once a season and holds a job, so I think you’re actually playing it the intended way. But the character creation gives all the homelands equal billing and does not contain dire warnings that all characters should be from the same clan, and it doesn’t have a final step where it says the players should agree on which clan they’re playing and all outsiders have married into/otherwise joined this clan.
Then the sample adventures are designed to fit any non-Lunar characters, so the only assumption they make was that you were on Kallyr Starbrow’s side during a recent major battle, rather than assuming you’re all Sartarite, much less from the same clan.
@guy Yeah I definitely see the issue there. There’s ways around it, but you have to be looking for the problems in advance to solve it (which isn’t helped when the rulebook doesn’t highlight the problems).
I mentioned it in a comment below, but I’ve always been inspired by the whole Amber Road mercenary-elite complex going on between the Baltic and the Med in the Bronze Age as an example of how disparate folks could end up in the same boat. There was a surprising amount of mobility of the newly developed warrior class along that route, and into the Med. Folks from northern Germany and Scandinavia ended up all the way down in Mycenae (often seemingly in the employ of local elites).
One of my favourites in this vein is based on one of the interpretations of Tollense as a sort of ‘trade caravan gone wrong’ type deal. Start with them guarding a trade caravan as it wends its way along whatever trade route you like, solving whatever problems you fancy on the way. Leads to the big climax of getting ambushed in a river valley and having to escape with their lives (followed by whatever plot hooks you fancy afterwards).
I don’t think having a fictional patron is a dealbreaker for a lot of players; as Nate T notes a number of popular RPGs actually do have you as a retainer of some sort. There are, however, three big stresses with the patron model.
1. A landed patron relationship doesn’t give the players a lot of room to refuse quests. This might not be a practical gameplay problem; in most of the games I’ve played it’s understood that the DM has prepared *a* quest for tonight and we’re going to be doing it. However, other DMs will prepare multiple adventures or are more willing to just pull monsters out of the monster manual and run things on the fly, and players expect to select between multiple possible options.
2. Patrons tend to be local, and at some point you run out of local threats if you’re durably and satisfyingly resolving them.
3. If you’ve got serious progression in your RPG, which most but not all RPGs do, you’ll at some point outlevel your patron and you’ll need to find a new one, which can potentially be very awkward RP-wise.
One solution to this circle that’s spread from games to really quite a lot of Japanese fantasy and western derivatives of such is The Adventurer’s Guild, which I feel is a potentially good resolution that’s often lazily implemented. Basically, there’s an organization that acts as an intermediary for people to contract with adventurers, and generally enforces some standards on said adventurers such that they don’t murder you or run off with your payment. This is completely ahistoric but a useful device.
My main problems with them are that they’re usually weirdly systematized and often poorly integrated into the overall setting. The fact that they’re originally a game contrivance manifests in having a system of ranking adventurers and requests, which for some reason in litrpgs has little overlap with The System when that’s an objective thing where people with Appraise can see your stats.
Also, a lot of the time it’s pretty vague as to how The Guild relates to other power structures. It’s pretty rare for the local mayor to also be the guildmaster, and the guild is unified across multiple towns, which seems like it should create a great deal of stress.
Patronizing adventurers could be a prestige thing, outside times of war. Unless someone is literally invading your patron’s fiefdom, they’re very happy to see you slaying dragons in neighbouring countries. As long as you wear their colours while you do it, and thank them publicly at the feast afterward.
That solves #1 and #2 pretty cleanly, I think. Especially since nobody is going to invade the place defended by famous dragonslayers.
And perhaps bring them back a trophy dragon skull or something.
Witness that Beowulf killed Grendel and his mother, went home, and gave his king gifts of gold he had been given, and then the king gave them onward.
I like this idea and will steal it. Just like patronising artists and sculptors in less dragon-ridden societies, I suppose.
It actually sounds very like the Knights of the Round Table! In the Mallory version, King Arthur gets the table and then lets it be known that he’s looking for the best knights in the world to sit at it, and periodically go off on quests. What’s in it for Arthur? Well, he has the 100 best knights in the world as his retinue, and also they spend most of their time going round rescuing maidens and slaying giants, with a metaphorical large sign saying “Providing Maiden-Rescuing Solutions since 923 AD: Sir Lamorak, LLP (part of the King Arthur Group)”.
Very good PR for Arthur, lots of soft power opportunities. If Sir Lamorak turns up in your kingdom and delivers a turnkey multi-platform dragon-repurposing service in an agile and flexible manner, then you have two things: first, a sense of tremendous gratitude towards Sir Lamorak and his boss, and second, the uneasy awareness that Sir Lamorak’s boss employs a lot of very scary violent men.
“this video is sponsored by raid shadow legends”
– advertising your patron
– multiple patrons?
– leads to knights looking like Formula 1 race drivers (logos everywhere)
– lack of literacy so heraldry important
– conduct of knights important; killing someone while wearing a logo affects patron’s reputation
– patrons band together to enforce conduct?
– leads to Adventurer’s Guild as enforcer?
Having multiple patrons is a good point; you had this in real-life mediaeval societies with feudal hierarchies. So I am the Count of Brabant, and I do fealty to the King of France for my territory of Brabant; but I am also the Earl of Huntingdon, and I will do fealty to the King of England for Huntingdon. What happens if the King of England decides to go to war with the King of France is an interesting question – the way it sometimes worked is that I would have several feudal superiors but exactly one liege lord, who had priority on my services.
One of the roles of the Adventurers’ Guild would no doubt be to provide a boilerplate fealty contract for adventurers to use, defining their obligations; another would be helping to deconflict the diaries of particularly overcommitted adventurers (“sorry, your eminence, Boris the Strangler is fully booked at present exploring the Dungeon of Ominosity, but he could probably manage early next week to take care of your basilisk problem if that works for you?”)
John Scalzi’s short story “Denise Jones, Super Booker” explains how this works with superheroes.
I feel like the Pathfinder Society from Pathfinder’s organised play is a good adventurer’s-guild model. It is unified internationally, but its missions are usually either with the request and approval of a local bigwig, or (sometimes secret) interventions for the Society’s own political goals.
It also sort of deals with the money issue, by acting as a bank. PCs are nominally paid in gold, but in practice this is a unit of account, as the only significant things you’ll be buying are magic items, from the Pathfinder Society’s own vaults.
Re 3.:
A very simple solution would be to have the Patron “loan” the adventures to their higher ups.
Remember taxes are paid in kind, and answered with gifts. Sending the next Bigger Man up the ladder, four or five highly enthusiastic specialists, that are almost as good in solving problems, as they are in creating them, might count against the patrons tax burden.
And everyone is happy. The PCs can tackle bigger problems, and a gift giver with deeper pockets. The lord of the old patron get’s a few more tools in his problem solving box. And the patron gets
those armed trouble makers of his landhis tardy tax payments overlooked.When you are that high level, what happens is your liege writes to his liege, offering your services. Too many retainers, let alone high-level ones, inspires thoughts that you may intend a revolt.
“So you need a society where armed people running around without any ties to local authorities are tolerated.”
In all honesty, a Bronze Age setting could well give you all you need to do this (#RunequestFan).
Yes you have to pose yourself as one of the warrior elite, but there’s good evidence these elites were fantastically mobile. There’s the naval route of trading/raiding down the Atlantic coast/along the shores of the Mediterranean/down the Red Sea/across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Then there’s also the continental amber road route connecting the Baltic with the powerful Mesopotamian cultures via Northern Italy and the Mycenaeans (there’s strong evidence for high levels of elite mobility along this route, presumably guarding caravans).
Throw in some local mercenary jobs on the way and you’re off to a winner in my eyes. Could even end up as part of some grand kingdom’s army, or as a personal emissary required to travel to distant lands to deliver messages.
Also, good solid starting point for low-level players in the various koryos traditions of PIE peeps. Bunch of warrior youths chucked out of the community and told to make a living raiding and pillaging before being reintegrated into society.
Most often led by a charismatic older fellow who never quite got reintegrated (your Cuchulainn’s of the world), giving both the option of a quest-giver and a potential development route for the party (leading their own koryoses in the future).
Could you describe some of this evidence for elite mobility? I’m curious and have never heard much of anything about this, beyond knowing broadly what the Amber Road was.
“There are ways to square this circle, but most of them require a society in dramatic transition, and for some reason fantasy authors in general and D&D setting writers in specific usually don’t do that.”
There’s a reason that my homebrew D&D setting is basically Reformation-era Europe, in which you have a time of transition from centralized to decentralized spiritual authority (a Very Big Deal in a setting where the gods regularly intervene) while shifting from decentralized to centralized political authority. A buddy of mine did a campaign based on The Last Kingdom, which I think also counts as a society in dramatic transition.
And the reason that a lot of fantasy authors and D&D writers don’t do that is that they don’t understand how societal dynamics works, they don’t really care, and they know that their audience doesn’t really care either.
i think this is why a lot of fantasy settings invent stuff like the ‘adventurers guild’.. it bypasses the “who would let a bunch of people with no social obligations run around armed?” issue by creating organizations said people have to belong to to be counted as something other than brigands and bandits. thus replacing feudal social obligations with largely contractual business ones. usually these also come with some degree of ‘internal affairs’ policing so the guild can ensure that their members aren’t acting like brigands and bandits, as well as upper leadership that ends up heavily involved in local and kingdom politics.
it isn’t always done well of course, but it’s clear that some setting creators did give some thought to the issue.
Moe Lane’s Fermi Resolution is good. We have an Adventurers’ Guild in one novel, and a story with a party licensed and bonded in the Free State of Kentucky, reasonable rates, references available on request.
In my stories, there is a clear line between the Wilds, where law does not apply and anything more than a single dwelling is forbidden, and settled lands (the land itself decides where the line is). So a group can go into a Wild, come back with whatever valuables they can find and sell them (minus the small tax often levied at the border).
One of the early (both publishing order and designed for low level parties) published adventures for D&D 3E noted that the lord in whose demenese the adventure is set in makes a particular effort to maintain a more than sufficient amount of currency in the local economy by various means. I don’t recall if they were specified, and if so what the methods were, but that struck me particularly when I was reading through it
I believe 3E also specifically mentioned that most peasants have nothing to do with gold, and may even go their whole lives without seeing a gold coin. Adventurers are just in a different experience altogether.
Great article, but to play the Devil’s advocate and defend the gold standard in fantasy roleplaying games, these historical references do not take into account that your typical fantasy world has a history of advanced civilizations stretching back tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands, with dwarfs and goblins and whatnot devoting their entire economies to mining and carving out the insides of entire mountains. So you end up with something close to the pre-modern world in terms of demographics, but with an accumulated supply of precious metals and gems comparable to a post-industrial global society, even if a significant portion of said supply at any time is hoarded by monsters or sequestered in ancient tombs.
Then you need an explanation for civilisation not having advanced further. I would suggest something in the workings of the world causing the collapse of civilisation every few thousand years. Then civilisation is efficiently reset at some early state such as the Chalcolithic. Before the next such collapse happens it can’t advance too far.
“you need an explanation for civilisation not having advanced further”
I think a common unstated assumption is that “fantasy medieval” is as far as things can advance in the world. Gunpowder and steam engines and electricity aren’t possible, vaccines and antibiotics aren’t relevant, etc. Any real ‘advancement’ is in magic, with its own handwaving of why past heights (if any) aren’t reached again, like “magic resource was used up” or “high magic knowledge was handed down, not discovered, and can’t be rediscovered”.
Of course, one problem with the former assumption is that there are better-than-medieval advancements which are compatible with simple folk physics and social organization and thus can’t be ruled out with “no funky chemistry”. Having an imperial bureaucracy — or an 1812 USA democratic government. Having a postal service. Horse-drawn omnibuses. Clipper ships. Printing press, whether woodcut or movable type (including wood or ceramic types, so lack of Gutenberg typemetal can’t be a blockage.) Spending taxes on canals and roads and stockpiling vs. famine instead of on wars and bling. Heated floors, cavity walls, Franklin stoves.
OTOH, history shows that none of this is all that inevitable. Some of the earliest civilizations quickly had planned cities, sewers, standardized weights, and bureaucracy, and then many later ones… didn’t.
Yes, people can make technological progress within an agrarian society. If you want a very long span of civilisation without industrialism you can at least make technology progress considerably slower than in real life. One method is to simply make the population smaller. At the time of Columbus the Americas likely accounted for less than 1/5 of humanity. Consequentially, Native Americans lived in the Bronze age at best. However, this requires avoiding the trap of just making up big numbers like George Martin.
As has been pointed out elsewhere you also need a reason why the population has not increased more over the millennia. To continue the analogy with the Americas you could do that by stating there are no suitable animals for plough teams. This would mean there are no horses, donkeys, yaks, cattle, Bali cattle, water buffaloes or anything comparable. I don’t know if camels (Arabian or Bactrian) have ever been used for plough teams.
And deeply embedded in the text, my personal pet peeve, ‘Inflation adjusted values are bullshit’.
Doesn’t even need to have an industrial revolution or columbian exchange between then and now. Even inflation-adjusted values between, say, 1980 and 2024 already get utterly nonsensical results.
Athenian citizen rowers in the Athenian navy – who, to be clear, are enjoying the advantage of being able to vote themselves good wages from a treasury filled with tribute from subordinated poleis – were paid a drachma a day (Thuc. 3.17.3-4).6 That, plus the building and maintenance of triremes was a working class jobs program. Which is why Themistocles was able to get the Athenian Assembly, into which some of the poorer classes had been admitted, to vote for his wooden wall. He did not need to be a great orator. A one time windfall doesn’t do a poor man much good. By the time he has paid off debts, bought his wife a new chiton, provided dowries for daughters and probably nieces as well, he will be lucky to get new sandals and a warm mantle for himself.
At the time of the Persian wars the “thetes”, the social class that supplied the city of Athens with rowers, had no full citizen’s rights, i.e. could not vote in the assembly. That happened only much later, around 460-450 BC, which shows that Themistocles must have been a formidable orator indeed.
“he has paid off debts, bought his wife a new chiton, provided dowries for daughters and probably nieces as well, he will be lucky to get new sandals and a warm mantle for himself.”
Wow. What a wonderful windfall that was! (He’d be very glad of that and think it a great good.)
It’s often said that what emerged out of Lydia wasn’t just coinage but the touchstone: a quick, easy and reliable method of assaying the purity of a coin, guaranteeing that debasement would be inevitably detected.
I think Chinese languages (and Japanese) are the only ones that come readily to mind that use “gold” and gold-derived terms for money/currency/coins, where even the character for “silver” is formed from the character for “gold”. And China is currently the world’s largest producer of gold, so that kind of makes sense.
金 means “metal”, and in the earliest texts refers to copper since that was the default metal. It came to mean “gold” only later, probably connected to folk etymologies which derive the character from 王 “king”. The _character_ 銀 (“silver”) uses 金 “metal” for its semantic value and 艮 (“blunt, tough”) for its phonetic value, but the _word_ is unrelated to the word for “metal”.
The native Japanese word for “metal” is *kane*, which was written with both 金 and 銀 and is now written 金 purely because it’s fewer strokes; the polysemy of using it for “money” and “gold” was inherited from China. Its word for “silver” is the compound *shirogane* “white metal”—I don’t know if Japan had a native silver supply to exploit or if it got it entirely from China.
Japan had a native silver supply, with Sado producing silver as far back as the Heian period. By the early 1600s it was produced in sufficient amounts for Japan to export roughly 60 tons of silver per year.
Oh dear god, someone said this last week as well.
As Ketsuban points out, 金 meant “copper” first, then was generalised to “metal”. The meaning of metal is still fairly common in compound phrases relating to metallic objects (an alloy is 合金, combined metal), though the single character 金 increasingly only means gold (awkwardly leaving the modern vernacular without a single-character term for a generic metal).
Silver 银 (apologies for my simplified Chinese keyboard) has the metal radical, which looks like a 金 character in traditional Chinese. The semantic radicals pretty much always reflect meanings from when the characters were created (something between 2000 and 3000 years ago, for many of them), so its use in the character almost certainly reflects the “metal” meaning (as does the use of this radical in the names of every other metallic element). Silver is no more derived from gold than copper 铜, iron 铁 or even the very modern aluminium 铝.
(Side note, Chinese characters tend not to reflect any older etymology. The actual word for silver most likely goes back to a hypothesised PST form that also means silver, and is not etymologically related to the word represented by 金.)
Thank you. Modern English spelling prioritizes indicating etymology over any and every other utility, even pronunciation and meaning. This makes native English speakers terrible at intuitively knowing what writing does for most languages. The top utility of an alphabet is that it shows pronunciation, and almost all languages that use them prioritize that utility; likewise the top utility of characters like the Chinese system is conveying meaning, and Chinese uses that.
The use of non-specific ‘metal’ to mean gold while other metals get specifiers is like the way that in the US Northwoods everyone lives fairly close to a lake but when writing “the Lake” is always referring to one of the Great Lakes.
Minor addition: Chinese actually has a MUCH worse historical spelling problem than English. It’s actually kind of funny how bad it is, to the extent that most people might not realise it even exists because the original “spelling” that went into the character composition is functionally unreadable to a modern speaker.
A few very basic Chinese characters are wholly semantic (think things like water 水, tree 木, person 人), and those are occasionally legible as their original pictograms with (a lot of) squinting. However, most of them are phono-semantic compound characters with a (usually) semantic radical and a (usually) phonetic component. (There’s some complexities with characters which might have both parts be semantic or even more than two components, but I’ll avoid going into them here.) The phonetic component typically uses the pictogram for a simpler word that sounds similar (compare and contrast how other logographic writing systems represent abstract concepts), and it’s thought that the semantic radical was added later for disambiguation.
Now the problem: most Chinese characters gained their basic forms in the Old Chinese period. Some of the phonetic components are still somewhat legible (有 友 右 又 are all /joʊ̯/ with different tones in Mandarin), but some of them are utterly illegible. An example of this is the character 许 (to allow), which has a speech radical and the phonetic component 午. In modern Mandarin, 许 is pronounced /ɕy²¹⁴/ and 午 is pronounced /u²¹⁴/. Those are different consonants AND different vowels. And the sound shift between them isn’t straightforward either (许 Old Chinese /*qʰ(r)aʔ/->Middle Chinese /hɨʌX/->Mandarin /ɕy²¹⁴/, 午 Old Chinese /*m-qʰˁaʔ/->Middle Chinese /nguX/->Mandarin /u²¹⁴/). Without knowing this, it would probably never occur to a modern Mandarin speaker that 许 is supposed to be in any way phono-semantic. (And no, it’s not better in most of the other Sinitic languages.)
The semantic component is still useful for getting some idea of what the character means (assuming you know your radicals, since not all of them are obviously linked to their root characters), but that absolute disaster of a phonetic component is probably one of the world’s most egregious examples of historical spelling. English’s spelling quirks don’t even come close. This is useful for communicating in writing (the Sinitic languages are largely mutually intelligible in writing but not at all in speech), but in some ways it’s as much deference to the historical form of a character as English’s etymology-preserving spelling.
Sort of. While orthographically, all characters for metals and many of those for money contain the character for ‘gold’:
a) That character originally meant bronze, then was extended to the entire concept of metal, and then narrowed down to gold over time; even then you occasionally see the compound ‘yellow metal’ for disambiguation.
b) Script ≠ language, and while the written forms of these terms include that character, they aren’t phonologically linked.
“I think Chinese languages (and Japanese) are the only ones that come readily to mind that use “gold” and gold-derived terms for money/currency/coins”
And German and Dutch? “Gelt”?
Poland today uses the złoty or gold piece as its unit of currency as well.
I always assumed that gold and gelt were related etymologically, but it turns out they’re separate. Apparently one comes from a PIE root meaning “yellow”, and the other “to pay”.
Of course fantasy realms typically have dwarves and dwarves are much much better at mining precious metals then the real world civilizations ever were.
It being hard to grow food underground it’s entirely likely these precious metals find their way into circulation through trade.
Dwarves don’t even have to be close or common.
It’s easy for even one extremely rich mountain mine to effect WORLD WIDE exchange rates (I am looking at you Cerro Rico)
This means precious metals are reasonable far far more common in fantasy lands then they were in the real world.
“Of course fantasy realms typically have dwarves and dwarves are much much better at mining precious metals then the real world civilizations ever were.”
The way I handle it in my fantasy world-building is something along these lines. Money started out as standardized units of metal among soldiers, who exchanged bits of spare gear with each other, and caught on with artisans because having standardized units of stuff turns out to be really useful. Eventually counterfeiting started, which annoyed the dwarves, who then introduced “coins” in the shape of gems carved in specific ways (plus magical anti-counterfeit measures). Folks decided that this was a good idea, there was a bit of empire-building going on at the time (which required manufacturing a shared culture, including money), and so folks mostly adopted it (with a LOT of notable exceptions), while retaining the old terms for coins.
In OUR world such gems are rare, but the benefit of fantasy worlds is that you don’t need to limit yourself to real-world geological processes.
Something I’ve always enjoyed about world-building as a hobby is that it forces you to think about these things. You start with the premise “I want rubies and opals and such in place of coins.” Then you have to figure out the sociological forces necessary to get you there and the implications of it!
“Finally, you also have a ‘gift economy’ which is entirely non-monetary (almost by definition).”
No, it isn´t.
Gifts or “gifts” of money are common – but commonly have some properties of gift.
Like the donatives. Yes, it was partly an expectation – but in contrast to the regular stipendium (which was not paid monthly, it was paid by tetramester, with deductions for food etc, and due to small and non-round total was likely to be counted out in silver), the donatives were 1) clear of deductions 2) typically round sums in terms of 100s HS, which non-coincidentally was the value of an aureus and 3) somewhat substantial sums. The first donative (of Augustus´ will) was probably noncoincidentally the sum of one tetramester instalment of pay (ranging from 3 aurei to legions to 10 aurei for praetorians), and it was emphatically unanticipated (the legionaries were contracted to just their regular stipendium plus discharge premium, no promise of anything extra on accession). The donative of Claudius for making him Emperor over express objections of Senate was HS 15 000 for each praetorian – if paid in silver, it would have been 3750 denarii, hard to count and at over 15 kg, hard to carry. As 150 aurei, it would have been easier to count and at about 1200 g, easier to carry.
And yet the donative did continue to have an aspect of gift, not pure purchase/hire deal. When the praetorians auctioned off Roman Empire and closed with the HS 25 000 offer of Didius Julianus, the legions objected.
I’m far from an expert, but it seems to me that you’ve misunderstood the term ‘gift economy’ in this instance.
It’s referring to the way families will feast their neighbours in times of plenty in exchange for their support when times are lean. Or where your family will help erect a barn for another, who will then help you build yours. No money (real or not) changes hands here.
It’s still live and kicking in the modern day too. Giving your mates pizza for helping move house is one example. Personally, I’d feel lightly affronted if a mate of mine attempted to pay me for helping them out moving, so that’s definitively a non-monetary interaction.
‘A gift’ is a different thing to ‘a gift economy’. Though the latter functions on the former, ‘gifts’ occur frequently outside of gift economies.
I remember an RPG among my dad’s collection of games, which was centered around “heroic age” Greece (the default campaign had you taking a place on the Argo – as in the “Jason and the Argonauts” Argo). It didn’t have coinage at all – the game had a list of different trade goods, sorted into categories, with relative value between them (iirc, one item of a given category was something like 5-10 times the value of one item of the category below it). I have tried adapting that into a bronze age inspired setting using the Pathfinder rules, but I don’t think I did away with coins completely – it’s just too useful for something like a typical fantasy RPG (although having to deal with not having them does drive home quite well just why we started stamping funny pictures onto little bits of precious metals. I do think something built from the ground up to use these sorts of non-monetary (or partially monetary) societies would be very fun, just takes quite a bit of work from both GM and players to adapt coming from a modern mindset.
I do have a question – in societies like ancient Rome where money was reasonably common, how were coins of a state that no longer existed to back up its value treated? If a Roman in, say, the early Imperial period is wandering around Asia Minor and stumbles on a cache of Lydian coins from several hundred years ago, would he be able to actually turn that into a financial windfall (once he gets away from the man in the weird hat shouting something about a “museum” in a language he doesn’t understand)? I would assume that you either find a shopkeeper who will accept the coins based on the weight of silver, or go to a money changer (who would probably charge an extra premium to swap the coins to proper Roman currency, moreso than a typical exchange)?
For individual coins you could just present them and accept whatever value the merchant offered, and in Europe this happened all the time. Sometimes it worked in your favour – an example is the Venetian soldino, which used to be known as a galleyman’s ha’penny. Sailors would pick them up in Venice and spend them in England which was struggling with a shortage of locally struck half pennies, and traders would accept them even though they were slightly thinner than English coins
This is a valuable point. Many small coins are useful for making change. This is important to the economy.
In pre-Euro Italy, you would sometimes get change in small-denomination postage stamps, the smallest domination coins being in short supply.
I’ve often seen that the dotted border around coins was to prevent clipping, but it seems to have been a bit of a just-so story. If the purpose of the border was primarily functional rather than decorative, then it would have no reason to also appear on copper-alloy coinages which derived their value from fiat rather than weight of metal.
You forget that in money, “decorative” is a function, as traditional decorations build legitimacy. This is extremely visible in Euro coins, which all have some kind of edge decoration. These would make clipping visible, which is, of course, a non-issue. The formal function is to allow visually impaired people to feel the denomination. However, these round decorations also make the coins feel like older forms of coinage, and thus build legitimacy. Just like the fact that 1, 2 and 5 cents look like copper (actually, they are copper-plated steel), the 10, 20 and 50 cents look like gold (being so-called Nordic Gold alloy that doesn’t tarnish) and the euro coins are bimetallic, like most pre-euro era large denomination coins. These coins felt and looked like money immediately when you saw them in 2001.
The edge decoration at the Euro and Euro-Cent coins, are there to make them easier to differantiate by people who are visually impaired, or in low light, like in a purse.
And they make it really easy. You can differatiate the 10, 20 and 50 cent coins easily by their edge. Same for the 1, 2 and 5 cent coins, back when they had any meaning.
No, security features from weight-value coins appear on fiat-value coins because it makes them look like coins. It’s normal for humans to make things look like what they are, even when it’s nonsensical. The Soviets even had to put Lenin’s face on some of their bills.
Less nonsensical within the Soviet ideological framework than building a giant mausoleum where Lenin’s body is put on display so that the masses might come and venerate his earthly remains.
To step away from medieval-inspired fantasy settings, this post actually made me think of the John Wick movies. Both for the unique currency apparently used only by assassins, but also for the idea that the reward for a service is a gift, which then incurs further obligations, and so on. A few years before the first movie, John did “one last job” to get himself out of “the life”, presumably to wipe away all the obligations he’d accumulated over the years (well, not quite all of them, going by the sequels).
The idea that, the more jobs you do, the more obligations and debts you accumulate could be an interesting one to explore in an RPG, along with the proverbial “one last job” to get out.
I’m working my way through
horny jailCP 2077 right now, and in the first chapter, one of the NPCs is explicitly doing One Last Job and plans to “burn [their] bridges” and have no contact at all with their previous life afterwards (the job itself is not One Last Big Job, so I took the notion that this NPC has been diligently saving for retirement).And of course “informal economies” and “informal governments” of the underworld are (at least memetically) presented in all sorts of media as running as much on barter of favors as money and currency. Plus the real-world phenomenon of trade goods as currency, tide and whatnot
“As you can tell, basically no one is going to hand a party gold for defeating a bunch of goblin raiders or getting that Aboleth out of the lake.”
To the contrary. It is precisely something the party is likely to be handed gold for.
Look at say the pay of Roman soldiers. Caesar to Domitianus, the pay during regular service was paid tetramestrically (that is, 3 times a year for 4 months each time), with deductions for food, clothes, arms… the nominal gross was HS 300, but if the net was much smaller and a non-round sum, say HS116, it would be much easier to handle 29 denarii than to handle 1 aureus and 4 denarii.
Whereas in contrast to stipendium, the donative was a substantial sum at a time, and a round one in terms of gold pieces. Clear of deductions. And the actual sum was not strictly predecided in a manner that might have forced a non-round sum – bunch of emperors paid “the usual donative”, which was a round sum to start with, but some paid rather more because they were generous or vulnerable.
So… if you get hired as a mercenary for routine stint, you might well be paid a non-round sum in small silver – “the going rate for a mercenary on foot is 4p per diem, you served for 94 days, so we owe you 376 pence, and we will count it out in silver pence, or maybe groats, which are bigger silver coins at fourpence”. But if you get a substantial bonus which is not on a preset standard, you would be likely to have a round sum – and that might be in gold. Like “You were the first man on the castle wall, and lived to collect the bonus”. Or “You took the enemy Big Man alive and did not kill him offhand, so we will keep the lion´s share of his ransom, but you´ll get a bonus much over what you normally get for service, to encourage other common soldiers to take ransomworthy prisoners”. Or – “You delivered the head of enemy Big Man and will be rewarded with its weight in gold” – actually happened to one of the Gracchi!
Bret is rather clearly referring to a *local* and indeed mostly post-Roman (or pre-Roman) context, where a local “big man” (“the Big Men magnates in the countryside – ‘feudal’ lords, large rentier landholders or tribal Big Men”) doesn’t have the currency resources of the central Roman government. So what the Senate or Caesar or an Emperor might be able to do in some circumstances isn’t very relevant.
Given the low value of gold in the rules, I recommend that the party be paid directly in magic items for most jobs. In a world where it is possible to make magic items, governments will certainly be minting them as a source of wealth and power. The unit of account is ‘item’ rather than ‘gold’.
https://www.legogm.com/2022/03/money-in-d-5e.html
I’m currently bingeing the light novels of Ascendance of a Bookworm (the early parts of which have an anime adaptation), and I think it does a lot of this relatively well. The setting has a base-10 copper-silver-gold system, and the gold denominations are suitably huge. Most “lower-city” commoners (ie, urban laborers and craftspeople) go their whole lives without seeing one, an item priced in gold might as well be priced in moon rocks for them, and sometimes they’d rather receive food than any sort of coin. The gold denominations play a larger role later, when high-class merchants are trading in production methods and exclusive sale rights (which will be enforced via contracts, guilds, and/or magic) or when nobles are buying prestige goods (including hand-copied parchment books). Still, providing an item costing 3-5 small golds for each of their children is shown to be out of reach for many minor nobles. As the series goes on, we also see people in different places relating differently to money: farming villages are less monetized and pay taxes in kind, a provincial lord makes a large capital investment for the sake of political connections and prestige without much concern for monetary profit, etc.
“That same man, gifted a horse and a lance, by the Big Man is a knight (or substitute the culturally appropriate moniker for minor mounted military aristocrat)”
It seems to me that, despite out host’s specialisation, this is rather more typical for the Mediaeval period than Antiquity. Would really anyone with a horse and lance be counted as an aristocrat in a Greek poleis or the Roman Empire? Doubtlessly this would make the person in question seem wealthy and important, but from my reading status in Ancient Greece and Rome relied much more on citizenship and taxation
Depends. Rome and Greek cities were states, and our host refers here to non-state societies where you have Big Men who are legitimate sources of power in their own right. This might go as well for Homeric Greece as pre-Roman Gaul, as for early Middle Ages Western Europe.
You’ve missed a critical part of that sentence – it’s not just what they get, but also who gave it to them.
And, indeed, in the Dark Ages, we have unmounted knights in England. (The term “knight” deriving from a word that means “boy” or “servant.”)
In Dutch, ‘knecht’ still means ‘servant’, and it can even be used as a verb describing subjugation or enslavement. The Dutch word for knight on the other hand, is ‘ridder’, which is cognate to the German ‘ritter’ and the English ‘rider’.
Archaic Greek nobility were seemingly largely horsemen (or, earlier, chariot men) despite not being considered cavalry by modern historians; ancient Gallic nobility seem to have adequately fit the criteria for both. Hop over to Iberia, Numidia, Thrace, the majority of the middle east — “antiquity” doesn’t mean “classical Greece and Rome”, and elite horsemen are all over the place outside the two notably mountainous horse hellscapes that we are so prone to focusing on.
It’s interesting how the roleplaying game “Exalted” seems to have always had a lot of this awareness, with things like a preponderance of silver currency, reference to units of account, ideas of non-currency transactions, and recognition that the currency of highest value (which in that setting is not made from gold but a magical form of the stone jade) is vastly above the transactional range of everybody but the most elite (and is indeed straight up illegal for most non-elites to use). I’m given to understand that the game’s original developer was actually trained in economics.
Mind, I sometimes wonder what feasibility there might be to a currency carved from stone rather than made of metal, since you can’t debase it. I suppose it’s meant to carry implications for how limited the actual use of that coinage even for the elites is and how stable the wealth of the empire that issues it is, but I’d still be interested if more knowledgeable people had thoughts on its feasibility.
Slight debasement was a critical part of the profit to the state from minting currency (seigniorage). A system which doesn’t have it would be in several important ways less functional for the people creating and issuing the currencies.
And then there are some other problems. How do you _make_ them? Minting coins is pretty easy, carving stone doesn’t scale. How do they take damage or wear? How do you _remake_ them? Etc.
Could you elaborate on the value of debasement beyond the fact that it allows one to control the total supply of coinage?
Stone carving at least scales to the point where a society can construct buildings out of them, doesn’t it? In any case, it’s a fantasy setting, and at least one of its Editions has provided the empire’s government with magically automated tools for the process.
Even then, it’s supposed to be a very exclusive currency, primarily used by an elite class numbering in the tens of thousands and even then with use of financial instruments that keep most transactions of it in ledgers. That (and its hardness) might account for limiting damage and wear in the first place.
Is remaking a necessity if the coins aren’t being debased?
Debasement allows you to pocket some of the “money” for yourself. Premodern rulers weren’t exactly thinking in terms of M0 supply.
As for Exalted’s jade, I’d say it’s another answer to the “gold problem” – in this case a literary answer to D&D’s debasement of gold. A trove of jade fulfills the same role as a trove of gold should fulfill, but can’t because people think 15gp is a good price for a knife.
Certainly, there’s an extent to which the original worldbuilding of Exalted was being done as a response to Dungeons and Dragons. Its First Edition book concerned with some of the economics of the setting is very clear on setting things out such as the degree of copper coinage used for everyday transactions, while a single coin of jade is equivalent to an average farmer’s earnings for a year.
I think it was also written in terms of taking that initial writing priority and expanding on it for verisimilitude. The setting’s backstory for a jade standard of coinage was an empress motivated to concentrate the supply in her own control to manage access to its magical capabilities, and this scarcity increased its value to the point where it made sense to introduce it as the standard for financial transactions (which continues to serve that original function by making it more worthwhile to use the jade to pay for things than consume it as a sorcerous material).
I think the answer to debasement is meant to be somewhere between the fact that the empress maintained large stockpiles of the raw material that could be issued at will and the fact that milling down the original slabs into smaller units is always losing some of the value as dust (that still gets used to make magical steel alloys).
Looking back at the original description, I also think it somewhat addresses the matter of economy of carving by describing the coins as only very lightly scored.
The term to look up is “seigniorage”, which for precious metal coinage is basically the difference between the nominal value of a coin and its actual value in precious metal. That difference is a profit for the maker of the coins (generally the king/state, often indirectly).
So as a worked example, Bret mentions in the post a denier of silver at 1.7g. This wouldn’t actually be 1.7g of pure silver though – you’d provide 1.7g of pure silver to the moneyer, who would slightly debase it and return you a coin that might have 1.6g of silver in it. The shortage is their profit. Or you’d provide 1.7g of silver and they’d return you a coin which just weighed 1.6g – again, the shortage is their profit.
This is pretty much _the_ way the state extracts a profit from coinage, at least in A-S England (which is the main place I’ve studied this directly), so it’s quite key to the system. One of the main ways of raising a tax is to renew the coinage, letting you collect another wave of income from this process.
The other reason you want to remake coins is breakage. Small fragments of precious stone are not exactly the most durable things – but here you can’t take those bits and turn them back into coins. With precious metals you can. Yes the stone is hard, but hardness also means brittleness generally, do you want to have the risk of coins snapping in half if you take a hard fall on your purse?
The scaling point is that every time you carve one of these stone coins you have to do all the fine detail work from scratch – and carving precious stone is not easy! Any slip and you’ve got another one you want to remake, see previous point. And of course this is very much specialist labour, so you need detailed work from a craftsman for every single coin.
Conversely with minting precious metals, the craftsman’s job is just making the die – which is still hard (comparably so to carving your jade coin) but once that’s been done once it can stamp out thousands of silver coins with no real skill required. Any mis-stampings are easily recycled back into the crucible, cast into blanks and stamped again.
Sure, you can wave the word “magic” enough and paper over all of the objections – but even with a lot of magic, I think metal coinage is still very much going to be the path of least resistance.
Without going into too much detail on this game setting, I’d just say that it’s presented in terms where the economic model employed by the monarch issuing the jade currency is probably other than increasing the face value of the coins relative to their material content, the stone is presented as hard in a manner that is not fully beholden to real world properties in a way that limits how brittle it would be, value can be retained even if it breaks down because the fragments can be incorporated into steel from which magical objects are created, and the resistance is presented as part of the value of the coinage in the exclusivity of who can issue it in the first place (and then issued only for the use of a very small number of tremendously rich people).
Like I said, silver is still presented as the default standard for currency in the majority of the setting.
“The term to look up is “seigniorage”, which for precious metal coinage is basically the difference between the nominal value of a coin and its actual value in precious metal. That difference is a profit for the maker of the coins (generally the king/state, often indirectly).
So as a worked example, Bret mentions in the post a denier of silver at 1.7g. This wouldn’t actually be 1.7g of pure silver though – you’d provide 1.7g of pure silver to the moneyer, who would slightly debase it and return you a coin that might have 1.6g of silver in it. The shortage is their profit. Or you’d provide 1.7g of silver and they’d return you a coin which just weighed 1.6g – again, the shortage is their profit.
This is pretty much _the_ way the state extracts a profit from coinage,”
Not the only way, by far. Arguably not even the main way!
“at least in A-S England (which is the main place I’ve studied this directly), so it’s quite key to the system. One of the main ways of raising a tax is to renew the coinage, letting you collect another wave of income from this process.”
Specifically NOT in Anglo-Saxon England, or especially medieval England!
“The other reason you want to remake coins is breakage. Small fragments of precious stone are not exactly the most durable things – but here you can’t take those bits and turn them back into coins. With precious metals you can. Yes the stone is hard, but hardness also means brittleness generally, do you want to have the risk of coins snapping in half if you take a hard fall on your purse?”
Now look at it this way:
Money inevitably gets worn, broken and damaged.
For some types of money materials, some of the material can be recycled – but never all. Some material is lost in ways where it is not available for recycling, like precious metal abraded away as fine powder.
When damaged and worn coins are returned for recycling, some of the coins are at their full weight (bent out of shape but all material sticking to it) but many are underweight – worn away.
If you recycle coins for new coins, you have to somehow 1) replace the lost metals and 2) cover the cost of reshaping the metals. How?
Three options:
1) with a loss – the mint gives a new 1,7 g coin for a damaged 1,7 g coin weighing just 1,65 g, adding the extra 0,05 g plus making costs, paid somehow by general tax revenues
2) with devaluation – the mint takes a damaged 1,7 g coin now weighing 1,65 g, and returns a new design coin that weighs just 1,6 g or weighs still 1,7 g but contains just 1,6 g silver, taking the 0,05 g for minting costs plus state profits
3) at a discount – the state gives new coins weighing exactly the same and containing as much as the old coins had when new, but you need to pay more damaged coins in count than you are getting new coins back, and even the combined weight of damaged coins must be bigger to cover the minting costs and state profit.
Now, look at the history of £ devaluation.
About 790, £ was about 408 g sterling both in Charlemagne´s France and Offa´s Mercia.
About 1200, in England £ sterling was 350 g, in France £ Parisis was 110 g, £ Tournais 88 g, and £ chipotensis about 70 g. Lira in some regions of Italy even less.
Why?
Because the continentals took option 2), and paid for renewal of money with devaluation. England took option 3), and renewed money mainly at discount.
£ sterling was constant at about 350 years since before 1000 to about 1330, and then again constant at about 120 g (shifting from silver peg to gold peg at par) from 1601 to 1931.
Roman solidus was constant from 4th century AD to 11th century AD.
The only way to achieve it was sticking to option 3) over 2) – recoinage at discount.
“Sure, you can wave the word “magic” enough and paper over all of the objections – but even with a lot of magic, I think metal coinage is still very much going to be the path of least resistance.”
“Paper over” – paper is a good example of option 1).
Most central banks now operating will accept damaged and worn paper bills at face value when they represent unambiguously one bill.
They still have to pay for the cost of making new paper bills – damaged paper bills are not fit to recycle, because if you pulp them the pulp is coloured not white. Somehow some revenues cover making new paper bills, and new coins.
But the thing is, for the 20th…21th century…
1) Token paper bills, and even base metal token coins are not very remunerative to clip – you could pass a torn $20 bill at face value at some banks with bother, but pieces of paper torn from $20 bills are worthless. Even if you deliberately clip say €2 coins and pass your damaged coins at face values, the clippings from €2 coins are not awfully remunerative for the effort.
2) Paper bills and base metal token coins are relatively cheap for the government to replace, compared to their face value. With the significant exception of small change – an US cent is profitable to smelt for scrap metal value.
3) Good quality printing and minting equipment means that modestly damaged coins will stick out, and won´t vanish into the mass of mint errors circulating at face value, as in case of handmade coins.
4) The 20th century numerous police and detective forces with their technologies can relatively easily track down counterfeiting or money damaging operations
5) The large tax revenue of 20th…21st century states make it easy for states to cover the modest cost of money damage.
Now, the reasonings 1) and 2) don´t apply to precious metal coins – but reasons 3) to 5) do.
It was actually at the very end of 19th century that different states took the obligation to accept worn and damaged coins at face value. Probably because of reasons 3) to 5). Did not last long – they gave up precious metal coins in 1914 to 1933.
IIRC Exalted had regional and political differences too.
Realm (the big central superpower): jade for high-end Dragonblooded trades; could be sheets of carved jade, “coins”, fragments of coin (still valuable)
Realm: also, jade scrip, a paper currency sort of backed by the Empress’s privy purse, what Realm commoners would actually be using.
much of the world: silver, pushed by the Guild, an implausibly world-wide trading organization.
the West, a land of islands: cowry shells.
As for other RPGs that used silver… RuneQuest 3, I think, though I’m only 100% sure that prices were in “pennies” and can’t be sure if “silver” was specified. Ars Magica, set in medieval Europe, so money was silver insofar as you used exact numbers at all and not vague wealth levels.
The older AD&D price tables had a lot more use of silver and copper, although still rather inflated. A knife or javelin was 5 silver, compared to a warhammer for 2 gold or a long sword for 15 gold. A chicken was two copper, a goat was 1 gold, and a war horse was 175-400 gold.
The 2e Dungeon Master’s Guide had a page encouraging more creative money systems where they described the predicament an adventurer in the real world (specifically a mercenary captain in 12th c Aquatain) would have with accounting when dealing with a few years worth of loot from various locations. And this was someone who had managed to get paid in cash – trouble was, it was all sorts of different coins plus a stash of bulk silver. Interestingly almost all of the money was in silver, suggesting whoever wrote that bit was aware gold was a problem.
The D&D gold pieces were 100 to a pound. At current prices that would put their value at around $350 to $400, which would be pretty inconvenient for daily use in a modern world too
“(specifically a mercenary captain in 12th c Aquatain) would have with accounting when dealing with a few years worth of loot from various locations. And this was someone who had managed to get paid in cash – trouble was, it was all sorts of different coins plus a stash of bulk silver. Interestingly almost all of the money was in silver, suggesting whoever wrote that bit was aware gold was a problem.”
No requirement of the writer being aware of any problems with gold.
It is completely sufficient to have been aware that money was overwhelmingly silver in 12th century France.
Gold nomismata and dinars continued to be common and prevalent in 12th century Roman Empire and Near East, a few of them were traded to France and called “bezants” – but only few, before Firenze started issuing florins in 1252.
A few years ago, on an now abandoned Discord server, we discused something we called “people as treasure”.
The idea was, designing adventures and quests in ways, that the reward was not monitary, but friendship with people in high places. Allowing the players access to goods or services that are hard to come by otherwise.
“The real treasure is the friends you made along the way, and she can grant access to the Serene Library to non-initiates.”
Connections.
Indeed, what distinguishes modern Western societies is that connections are weaker than they ever have been in history, thus cutting down many barriers to activity.
D&D and Pathfinder default settings (Forgotten Realms and Golarion) are no longer in the Middle Ages, they are very much in the Reinasseance with the biggest centers like Baldur’s Gate or Absalom squarely in the age of Sails when not with already a foot in the Industrial Revolution…
Yes the settings offer a salad of technological levels but to me the basic economy was always intended to be based on Merchant Republics with the PCs as Condottieri ready to sell their services to the best offering.
An aside, but the term condotteri for mercenary amuses me, because it’s derived from a term for contract; and meant, essentially, general contractor.
I’m Italian, so for me it’s just an archaic way of saying “leader” 😀
That’s English for you. Just because we steal your words doesn’t mean they mean the same thing.
This is called false friends.
A “General Contractor” is the leader of a horde of subcontractors.
(Parallel derivation as General Officer), so, not that far-fetched
I had to go check Archives of Nethys during the note on “re-benchmarking” to a silver economy, since that’s exactly what Pathfinder DID when they moved to 2nd edition.
And look at that, the rate for an unskilled laborer is 1 silver piece per day. (I dare not link for danger of alerting the spam filters, but it’s under “Equipment -> Services”).
Now, the rest of the economy still makes utterly no sense and you’ll eventually be purchasing things worth hundreds (or thousands!) of gold pieces, but hey.
Alas, somehow this post got dropped into the moderation bin anyway. I have rescued it from the purgatory of the moderation bin.
God I hate trying to make sense of pathfinder or dnd economies. Might as well have called 2e rewards magic tokens, they certainly don’t interact with any real economy of stuff given how crazy prices become. Trying to link them to any sort of economic activity. Starfinder was intolerably worse, but 2e gold is nearly as insane. Even a simple analysis shows that a high level party is walking around with the equivalent labour hours to the *Great Pyramid of Giza* on their backs, if you attempt to work out how many labor hours high level equipment represents in wages.
Unless a high level wizard is literally treated as the equivalent to the Manhattan project in lore-and the power dynamics and world building aren’t there for that-the economy is completely nonsensical. It’s also infuriating as a player at times, or as a GM, because the number inflation only serves to invalidate old equipment and make the numbers feel arbitrary.
If the money was just special magical fate tokens it’d be less diaegetic but more believable.
Those outrageous prices were the result of not wanting to owe up to the actual reality of magic items as common, even commodified, goods. Some designers wanted magic items to be “rare and mysterious,” and priced them accordingly (IIRC as late as 3e there was a note on the order of “if you can find one to buy at all.”) It gets particularly ludicrous from 3e onwards, when game balance depends on some classes carrying a khaqan’s treasure on their backs.
I think this is an unintended effect of the 2nd edition level balance overhaul: the system has been redesigned so that power grows linearly, so that a player needs to roll roughly a 10+ to succeed at a challenge exactly at their level.
While this works wonderfully for adventuring (PCs can trample anything below their level and feel threatened by anything above, allowing the DM to calibrate combat), it completely breaks anything remotely anchored in everyday activities.
It’s a clever solution, because epic fantasy doesn’t care much about reality… For that, there are much better systems, like the still fantastic GURPS, where the “normal life” of your character is at the centre.
I’ve never really been sold on that explanation.
For one, although this is an aside, that’s not really how the system works. In practice you’re expected to be able to push that as far as a 5 to 6 to succeed if you play optimally, and the system basically lives in getting that plus four on your side. The other side is building and playing so that you can survive or persevere even if you fail a challenge, because 50 percent is far too random to preserve tension otherwise-you would just die.
It’s more that 10 is the baseline, not that the system actually expects you to need to roll it-your supposed to move that number, only chumps just roll it. 50-50 is actually for either situations you screwed up, situations that should be harder which you’ve already crawled back to parity, or situations you aren’t really supposed to be point man on.
If course your point stands with 10 being the framework the actual odds are based on. I’m arguing semantics.
The other side is that epic fantasy absolutely cares about reality to establish a baseline you’ve deviated from.
This is why it’s a common writing mistake to make every fight occur in the air in comics or movies; there’s no sense of weight. Superman punches someone, they go flying, what does it mean? Everyone is weightless.
If you punch someone on the ground its much more understandable, the mechanics of violence have some understandable relationship to our reality. It’s harder to explain, but even fantastic settings need grounding for violence or risk to mean something in a visual medium.
Now tabletop gaming isn’t really an inherently visual medium, but dnd tends to work best when treated as such via description by the GM. You can play a truly story based dnd, but it has a distinct feel to it that can only be experienced-more like operatic or homeric epic than high fantasy.in the tradition of LOTR.
Hence you need grounding of the events in some form of reality, even with superpowers, for the high fantasy to make sense. Thus the players can be exceptional, but you need to show that they are every once in a while, or the verisimilitude of the story stops working. Part of the heroes journey is returning home, changed, and often dangerous.
And having such an insane gold economy that the players are interacting with breaks that, because it implies their 5% better sword is the same economic investment as building a pyramid for society. It’s better to decouple the sword from society and call money magic tokens instead, traded and used only by those ordained with power.
The pyramid of Khufu took around 20,000 people 28 years to build.
Based on the size of the built-up area at the foot of the Giza plateau the local pyramids must have been constructed year-round. It is estimated 15,000 – 25,000 people worked on building the pyramid of Khofu. Let us say they worked 260 days a year with an average workday being 10 hours. (You can’t work physically hard at the hottest time of the day.) It is sensible that Khofu started to build his pyramid as soon as he become pharaoh. We know he reigned for 28 or 29 years. This gives the following number of man-hours to build his pyramid:
¤ 15,000 workers X 2,600 hour work-year X 28 years = 1,092,000,000 man-hours.
¤ 20,000 workers X 2,600 hour work-year X 28 years = 1,456,000,000 man-hours.
¤ 25,000 workers X 2,600 hour work-year X 28 years = 1,820,000,000 man-hours.
The pyramid of Khafre is a little smaller but not much smaller. It was built in about 25 years. Then there are the foundations of a third pyramid in the area which was demolished by the Romans. Judging by the size of its footprint it was comparable in size to the pyramid of Khafre. These two would have required at least around 1,000,000,000 man-hours to build. I hope this is the order of magnitude Dan thought about.
To be fair, in Pathfinder Kingmaker your service IS indeed rewarded with a fief of your own to manage (quite a large one in fact). Turns out, it’s kind of a pain.
Huh, thanks to your article I just realized the the currency system for Warhammer Fantasy is probably based on the Carolingian one. Which makes even more sense when you consider that the current emperor’s name is Karl-Franz
The Old World’s Empire is quite explicitly “neither Holy Nor Roman”
I tend to worldbuild more science fiction than historical settings in my own roleplaying hobby, but definitely a lot of interesting things to think about in this article. The inability to compare prices across eras because economies and *economic systems* are just too different gives me a structured framework to organise some musings I’ve had about sci-fi settings I’ve worldbuilt.
Dr. Devereaux points out that it’s essentially meaningless to try and convert the value of ancient currencies into modern currencies, because the relative prices of different things were so different back then compared to now; labour was very cheap relative to manufactured goods back then. That also has implications for science fiction, I feel, because the thing that makes labour expensive – and makes manufactured goods cheaper relative to agricultural goods – is *labour productivity*, and we certainly aren’t at the end of productivity growth yet! As a different commentator pointed out above, relative prices between different goods changed significantly if you just compare 1980 to now.
It’s difficult to speculate on what’s going to be rare and valuable or trivially affordable in 2100, let alone in the “space sci-fi consensus setting” of c. 2300. It’s been observed in some parts that a lot of what we consider “middle class professional” roles are effectively information-processing jobs, more amenable (or so we currently think – technological speculation decades into the future is always going to be hard) to artificial intelligence automation than the trades; the doctor might lose their job to automation much earlier than the nurse does. What would that do to the relative affordability of different goods and services?
Beyond relative value, even the *method* by which we trade that value might be different. Dr. Devereaux also points out in the article that even the basic fundamental of our system – the commercial exchange of goods and services on the marketplace with currency – is specific to our historical era. In the distant past, he says, common people tended to rely more on things like accounting for debts without any actual exchange of specie (although, come to think of it, that might actually be comparable to modern debit cards – the only thing that moves around is numbers in digital ledgers, with centralised bank servers taking the role formerly occupied by social trust) or *gift exchanges establishing social status and mutual obligations*.
That second thing immediately clicked with some thoughts I had, when I read it.
I have a privileged perspective here because while I myself am the most boring person imaginable, I move in creative online circles and have a lot of acquaintances who are artists. Digital art is a deeply awkward fit in the modern marketplace, because in a sense they’re goods for which the design cost vastly vastly outweigh the manufacturing cost. An artist can easily put ten hours into one sketch of their original character, but once they have one sketch, it’s the work of less than five minutes to copy it on Discord chat and let a hundred other people enjoy it.
How do you price a good like this, which has a negative-slope supply curve (and you do need to price it, because artists have to eat too)? The total value generated for society is maximised if the good is traded at the marginal per-unit manufacturing cost, but of course you can’t actually do that because then who pays for the upfront design costs? Digital media is the most extreme example here, but as technology advances you also see more physical goods which are not universal public goods but whose upfront design/infrastructure cost is comparable to if not higher than the per-unit manufacturing costs.
If these sorts of trends end up continuing into the future, a Sci-Fi Price List of c. 2300 might end up looking every bit as strange to our sensibilities as the Medieval Price List does. More interestingly, a career is a big part of people’s self-identities. Perhaps not as much as it used to be, but still big. What happens to *culture* if the economic system and the labour market shifts so dramatically?
Argent’s Statement: Money is the accounting unit of time.
Monetary prices are a one-dimensional abstraction of a two-dimensional set. How much time did it take to create, and how much time did it take the creator to learn to create it.
(Yes, I am absolutely playing with my nom de net’s meaning in French. No, that’s not why I chose it)
“How do you price a good like this, which has a negative-slope supply curve”
I think this is more common than you think. For instance, the design and tooling costs are by far the biggest expenditure when creating cars to sell. Tooling especially. Panel presses are often the size of houses, and require non-trivial design themselves (a panel needs to be pressed out of shape so it springs back into the desired shape for instance), and cars often require dozens of big panels like that.
Once those are in place, actually churning out the cars themselves is comparatively dirt cheap.
From how both car sales and digital media seem to have gone, they will be priced primarily on how much people will tolerate paying for them, and less on how much time or expense it has taken to produce them.
Is that not analogous to something like the F-22 Raptor program? The United States military set requirements and held a bidding/trials process with manufacturers, who carried the costs of research, testing, and initial prototyping. Once the final design received approval, the per-unit cost was immense because the manufacturer had to recoup the development costs. The government could mitigate this by ordering larger lots, which would include a gradually down-scaled pricing scheme to reflect spreading those development costs across more production units. The per-unit price remains high when the government decides to cancel outstanding orders and limit purchasing, which that same government then uses to justify the decision to cancel those orders (in part so that they can make room for a new, inferior, graft-riddled successor project, which both ends up costing even more and doesn’t actually work).
In other words, an artist and a military-industrial super-corporation face the same problem of front-loaded costs which they must recoup to be profitable, and they should therefore be able to come to similar conclusions regarding how to solve it: charge more for smaller production runs.
Yes, high-end military equipment was what I had in mind when I observed that as technology advances, we also see actual physical goods that function the same way.
But the point I’m making is not just how a producer, as a digital artist or an aerospace engineer, would operate in this environment; as a producer you can get by on smaller runs with higher unit costs. But rather, I’m making a point about how *society at large* might deal with something like this.
Because doing those sorts of smaller runs is obviously suboptimal at a *social* level. For a quick example, if it costs the server five cents of operating costs for a user to download an image and there’s a potential customer who will derive one dollar’s worth of enjoyment of having it, the social net loss from turning this customer away by pricing it at above one dollar – because you have to, to recoup upfront expenses – is ninety-five cents.
The foundation of *our* economic system is a currency-based market exchange. I get stuff I want, and in return, I have to pay money. Dr. Devereaux observes that premodern rural economies didn’t really work this way, because it didn’t suit the subsistence basis of those societies. In premodern times I got stuff I wanted, and in exchange, there was a *social expectation* that I’d give stuff they wanted when I had it. I’m trying to argue that maybe *futuristic* societies wouldn’t work the way we work either, because the subsistence basis of *those* societies wouldn’t be well-suited.
I mean, we can see a hint of a reputation-and-status-based exchange system even today. Come right down to it, what is Patreon? There are writers who charge $5 or even $10 a month for the privilege of seeing their writing all of several days early, before they put their work on the internet for all the free-riders to read, too. Is seeing that fanfiction chapter a week earlier than everyone else really worth $10? Sure, for some people that’s definitely worth it, but I’d argue that this isn’t the rationale for *most* of their customer base. I occasionally chip into crowdfunding not because the perks are really worth the asking price, but because *I want the thing to exist* and I’m fortunate enough to have enough room in my budget to throw money at non-excludable services.
I will enjoy good government (or suffer from a bad one) regardless of whether or not I vote, and the odds that my one vote flips any election is so insignificant as to not be worth not thinking about. And yet I block out time and do my part for good government, because that’s my civic duty as a citizen of a democracy.
I will enjoy good entertainment from these writers, artists, and programmers whether I put up anything or not – all their art will be available on the internet for free – and the odds that it’s my $10 that makes the decisive difference between them having a career in the arts and not having one is so insignificant as to not be worth thinking about. And yet I sign up for such things and do my part for free art, because that’s my *economic* duty as a *consumer* of the internet age.
The thing I get for art on a crowdfunding platform is not *art*. It is the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that the art was produced in part with my support.
Science fiction is about speculation into the future, and I find it very interesting to speculate that maybe in the information-dominated future, a substantial share of the economy will be run off more sophisticated versions of these sorts of systems.
I think coins make a lot more sense as a ‘reward’ when the scenario is raiding some ruined complex where someone hoarded coins in the past, when following the standard tropes the world was richer and more sophisticated. Nowadays people trade in cloth and cereals, and bounties on goblins or robber-knights might be paid in cloth, wine, and horses, but during the Ancient Empire people used more coinage, and its elites secreted away a lot of it as it started to collapse, and never retrieved some of it.
The Flying Circus RPG (a game about fantasy WWI aviators) has an interesting money system. The universal currency in the game is “thalers,” a big gold coin which is mostly used by big trading companies (and pilots, who operate expensive airplanes). However, small purchases you make in town (single-use items, bribes, paying the damages for your last bar fight) are in “scrip,” a shorthand for whatever currency the local town uses, which probably isn’t accepted in other towns and is too small for a big important fighter pilot like yourself to worry about. You just tally up all the times you spent scrip, and then when it’s time to leave town you roll to see how many thalers it converts to.
The game-mechanical benefit is (1) the designer doesn’t have to put exact prices on lots of small items, and (2) it makes the party inherently somewhat bad at managing their money, which encourages them to look for work so they can pay their tab.
Stupid WordPress, ate my comment with “Nonce verification failed.” Let’s see if I can reconstruct it.
If you want more historical coin values, and assuming same weight of all coins, it should be more like 1 gold = 10-20 silver, and 1 silver = 60-100 copper. If you do 1 GP = 10 SP = 1000 CP, you might be able to ‘fix’ the D&D price list by treating all prices in ‘GP’ as silver, ‘SP’ as 10 copper, and ‘CP’ as itself.
I’d had an idea of running B4: The Lost City where the ancient coins were electrum, unlike modern ones, having been made before reliable refining of gold and silver.
Some games do have something like a mission structure. I think it’s built into SG-1 or Delta Green; you’re government teams. Buffy games will be reacting to the Monster of the Week. Longest Eberron game I was in, we were mostly given tasks by our mysterious patron.
A different take for “wandering adventurers” might be to make them exorcists or ghostbusters; this way the PCs can have an advantage over existing retinue and army, while not being able to beat up that army. If the Baron has an undead problem, a handful of clerics can be very useful, without implying they can take over society.
Magic item value is annoying, yeah. A +1 sword is 2000 GP in D&D 3e if I recall correctly; it’s a minor bonus in most combat (though essential for hitting some monsters); it’s also enough to live on for 50 years at a modest lifestyle of 1 SP/day. “Buy marginally better sword, retire, or make 100 poor people much better off” is a hard choice if you get into playing a really altruistic character. Though it’s also true that for combat you want the best you can get, so rich people might well bid up the +1 as if their life depended on it, because it kind of does.
Partly it’s a matter of “Who has that kind of money?”
Other game systems handle it in other ways. Even D&D has introduced “cost of living” systems, where you only deal with money as coins occasionally.
Exalted, which is somewhat more based on Eastern societies (or Western ideas of them anyway) tends to abstract artifacts (magic items basically) using a point system. Which has the disadvantage that you could be playing someone who does indeed have the money, but not the spare points.
They also go into a bit of detail where there’s *two* currency systems (there was a world-wide empire which crashed, so there’s some justification for more or less universal currency).
The two are silver and *jade*, a magical material that can be used either as currency or to make magic items with. If you’re a peasant, you might encounter silver. If you’re a noble, or someone with magic, you tend to deal in items that cost jade. The interface is the (somewhat) despised merchant class, which deals in both, depending on what they sell and how much.
I may be getting confused over nothing, but I can’t quite make out what’s going on with the currency in roofer section. It says the pay is 2p-6d for the master and 1p to 4d for the assistant, with that meaning a denarius equivalent every 3 to 6 days – but p is an abbreviation for penny and d is an abbreviation for… penny. Why are two different abbreviations for penny being used? And I can’t reconcile this with being 3-6 days for the denarius if a denarius is 12d, since at 6d wages that would be 2 days… what’s going on here?
I had the same question! I think the ps here are meant to be ds, and that Bret had an editing fail.
Yup, typo, fixing.
Ok, now I’m wondering, in Star Wars “Skeleton Crew” the planet with the Republic mint is is called “at AttiN”… It’s an intentional riff on “Attic” or just a random coincidence?
In your wrap up I was immediately reminded of the 7 Samurai. Where the peasants really only have food to pay with, which is indeed of value to the poor and hungry Ronin.
To a different extent it also makes me think of the Last Valley, book and film, where the need for food and where it goes and who gets to have it drives many of the decisions made, at least in the background.
Money only has the value we agree to give it. Once it’s value changes we’re back on Maslows pyramid of needs…. and I’m aware it’s not really accurate…. it is useful.
‘…And also, and I must stress this again: gold coins were enormous units of currency no one used on a daily basis. If I have to pay 100 ‘gold’ for a sword, that sword had better be jewel-encrusted, gilt, made of the finest steel imported from India.’
2nd edition AD&D adult red dragon is sitting on ‘treasure’ of types ‘H’, ‘S’, and ‘T’ according to the Monstrous Manual (page 68). Cross-referencing this to the DM Guide (page 180), type ‘H’ is the one applicable to coinage and includes:
25% chance of 3,000 – 18,000 copper pieces.
40% chance of 2,000 – 20,000 silver pieces.
55% chance of 2,000 – 20,000 gold pieces.
40% chance of 1,000 – 8,000 platinum or electrum pieces (DM’s choice of platinum or electrum.)
Plus possibly gems, ‘art objects’, and ‘magic items’.
And despite the dozens of dragons sitting on treasure hoards, there is still apparently gold, electrum, and platinum coinage in circulation. I think we need to just assume that there’s a lot more gold and platinum around in at least some fantasy settings than in the real world.
I should probably add that, double-checking the 2nd Edition AD&D Player’s Handbook for comparison, the list price of a ‘Broad Sword’ or ‘Short Sword’ is 10 gold pieces in the ‘money and equipment’ chapter (page 95). Bigger or fancier sword go up to 25 gold pieces (the ‘Bastard Sword’ at the top end of the range.)
Eh. Overlooked the ‘Two Handed Sword’ which hits 50 gold pieces. Tended not to use that much myself when at the gaming table. Sword in one hand and a heavily enchanted shield in the other to boost armour class much advised…
“55% chance of 2,000 – 20,000 gold pieces.
40% chance of 1,000 – 8,000 platinum or electrum pieces (DM’s choice of platinum or electrum.)
Plus possibly gems, ‘art objects’, and ‘magic items’.
And despite the dozens of dragons sitting on treasure hoards, there is still apparently gold, electrum, and platinum coinage in circulation. I think we need to just assume that there’s a lot more gold and platinum around in at least some fantasy settings than in the real world.”
You are underestimating the amount of treasure that circulated in real world.
A score of dragons sitting on treasure hoards, 55% of which contain 2000 to 20 000 gold pieces? That is, 11 hoards of 2000 to 20 000 gold pieces?
We in 20th century have found about one of them. The Trier treasure of about 2500 gold pieces. But there were more of them.
11 hoards of 2000 to 20 000 gold pieces total 22 000 to 220 000 gold pieces, probably towards the lower end of that.
Attila in 447 received one time payment of 432 000 gold pieces – more than the hoards of a score of dragons. And 151 200 gold pieces annually thereafter.
Bulgarians in early 9th century captured a consignment of 79 200 gold pieces – enough for 11 dragon hoards on the smaller end as well. It was payroll of the Roman army – the Roman plan had been to distribute it to their field army, mostly 9 gold pieces apiece for close to 8000 rank and file soldiers, as their annual pay.
Justinian the First, the literal demon whose head occasionally vanished or lost shape and who wrote his Code and killed a short scale trillion people, sat on a treasure of 23 040 000 gold pieces (which he threw away mainly on killing these 1 000 000 000 000 people).
A different issue is if people get worried about the dragons actively acquiring hoards!
You might encounter a setting, or a region, where people pay with and hoard cowry shells (because dragons are rumoured to hunt precious metals) – and girls are slutty (because dragons are rumoured to eat maidens).
That last point was even brought up in a 2002 novel The Moth Diaries*, set at a girls’ boarding school. During an ancient history lesson, the subject of virgin sacrifices is brought up, and one of the teenagers half-jokes that the rational thing to do would have been to lose virginity as fast as possible.
That episode is there to set up the protagonist’s ominous response (she asks herself if “it’s worth dying to remain pure”, which is one of the many ways the book foreshadows she is not the straightforward protagonist her diary is trying to present to us), but the underlying point seems sound. I even wonder if there’s actually historical evidence of such a thing happening in those societies which did practice virgin sacrifice.
*Please ignore the 2011 film! Though done by the same director as the American Psycho adaptation, it appears to have totally missed the point of the book (i.e. taking the diary at face value when there are so many hints the narrator is unreliable) and has a completely deserved poor reputation as the result.
There were certainly human sacrifices of young girls. That they were specifically virgins was made up by Chirstian clergy.
When you talk about real life “gold pieces” it is unclear how many grams they weigh.
“unclear how many grams”
Yeah, gold coins I know of range from around 4 grams (solidus) to a troy ounce (Kruggerand: 34 grams total weight, 31 grams of gold.)
If I ever run a game I’ll probably have 100 coins to a pound, a nice drachma weight of 4.35 grams. Also, 100 copper pieces to 1 silver piece. Though apparently a more Roman approach would have been 10 cp to 1sp, but 1 cp = 10x the weight of 1 sp (10 coins of 43 grams of copper/bronze = value of one 4.3 gram silver coin.)
On a further dragon related note, I don’t think (at the time and date of this post in January 2025) that Forbes have even attempted to do a ‘Fictional 15’ rich list since the year Peter Jackson’s ‘The Desolation of Smaug’ instalment of his ‘Hobbit’ film trilogy released.
I speculate the dragon hoard shown there may have caused their Fictional 15 list assessor(s) to throw their hands in the air and just give up…
Pardon me for asking, Highestsun, but is there a reason you’re going off on hysterical, provocative tirades about political beliefs & posters on here, especially when it’s focused on a discussion from months ago??? This behavior seems rather strange.
I have no idea, but her behavior is bordering on slander and libel. (And, frankly, is not the kind of thing I would think OGH would want on his blog.)
Why do you think they’re female?
their tone comes off as very much “male” to me.
If I have to pay 100 gold for a sword, forget gem encrusted (unless it’s in the pommel or the crosspiece, any gem is going to bite into the hand that wields it), it had better be magic too!
Of course, it doesn’t do to haggle too much with the smith or innkeeper or old woman in the forest; you might not like the turn the negotiations take… And since most of us are Americans around here, and young ones too, the ancient art of haggling is not one much used or even known…you can’t even get a better price on a used car if you pay cash anymore *sigh*./
Great piece – could you expand on this to point out that the best fantasy books do not fall into the gold trap (The Lord of the Rings, duh). Money is used but exactly as you described, and poor Bill the Pony, in his original condition, was not worth the seven silver pennies that Bill Ferney gouged from Barliman Butterburr…
Fantastic wealth was saved for the riches of the Dwarves of Erebor, and the Arkenstone. And no king of Dwarves, Elves or Men would ever mint a coin of mithril…it was too useful and precious to waste on coinage.
Or if we want to take a Syfy turn, lathnum in Star Trek – every drop is of value, but since it’s a liquid at room temp, it has to be encased in gold to be used as currency, and it seems the lowest denomination is the strip, followed by bars and bricks. They definitely weren’t thinking it through when they came up with this, but eh, the Ferrengi like it, so that’s one thing off the Federation’s to do list…
There’s no way to get a magical sword for a mere 100 gp.
While in D&D the value of precious metals is entirely fantasy, in 5th edition otherwise the prices strongly resemble those on the classic medieval price list (at least for non-magical goods and services). Since 5th edition (and most previous ones) list a bunch of mundane trade goods there are plenty of points of comparison, and generally GP are approximately equivalent to shillings, and SP with pence.
When I’ve seen someone ask how much a single D&D gold piece is worth (they’re often confused by how the prices for mundane equipment *don’t* seem to convert to modern ones) I’ve been known to point them *here* to articles about pre-industrial economies, to explain why D&D prices don’t resemble modern ones.
1st edition AD&D actually tries to explain and justify the huge amounts of gold. The Players Handbook suggests prices are inflated “similar to Alaskan boom towns during the gold rush days”, and the Dungeon Masters Guide (in a section titled ECONOMICS) states that “prices and costs of the game are based on inflationary economy, one where a sudden influx of silver and gold has driven everything well beyond its normal value.” I don’t think this is a great justification, but it does show how Gygax et al. consciously *chose* fantasy gold instead of realistic coins, and even tried (a little) to avoid misinforming readers about real medieval prices.
The next paragraph in the DMG even explains *why* they chose to use huge (AD&D coins are 10 to a pound) fantasy gold coins instead of something more grounded. Gygax writes “…what kind of a dragon hoard, for example, doesn’t have gold and gems? It is simply more heroic for players to have their characters swaggering around with pouches full of gems and tossing out gold pieces than it is for them to have coppers. Heroic fantasy is made of fortunes and king’s ransoms…” and “The ‘reality’ AD&D seeks to create through role playing is that of the mythical heroes such as Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Kothar, Elric, and their ilk.”
The D&D 3.5 price list also seems somewhat historically plausible in its non-adventurer prices, especially if you redefined coin weight to be 100:1 instead of 50:1. Anything PCs might want though, like arms and armor or adventuring tools, whee that gets expensive… which kind of makes it difficult to have a PC motivated by wealth, you can plausibly retire after a few levels.
I don’t know if you played Kingdom Come: Deliverance much or at all, but it’s currency is called the Groschen, it’s mentioned to be minted mostly from Silver (locally, too, owing to the historical locations signifiact silver mines) and a plot point has to do with how a very small chest of fake coins would be poised to roin the entire local economy.
The game’s base unit is 0.1 groschen, and I swear behind the scenes the game calculates even 0.01, though I can’t prove it.
A cursory google search shows its roughly worth one shilling, apparently.
So from what I am getting, the game’s basic economy (player input notwhistanding) is actually quite normal. Merchants labour to fix a thing tends to be around 50 groschen per item (depending on it’s state), service in a bath (which includes healing) is around 30, and a stay one of one night in an inn (only sleep) is 2 gorschen. All negotiable to 0.1 of a groschen, so roughly a penny.
weapons go into the hundreds depending on quality, while an expensive horse goes into the 3000 range. Good armor plate for the body can be into the 2k range as well.
but point being, you can haggle about the price, and the best unit of coin isn’t a gold coin, it’s technically a 0.1 of a silver coin.
Kingdom Come’s in-game codex actually discusses a Carolingian-like coin system! Those notes also say that everything is normalized into decimalized Prague Groschen to make cash amounts easier for modern players to understand (and presumably also easier for software developers to program).
Great article as usual! On the topic of fantasy currencies, I wonder what you or anyone else here would think of the approach taken by this free fantasy game developed by a singly hobbyist dev in his free time, Shadow of the Wyrm.
https://jcd748.itch.io/shadow-of-the-wyrm
Basically, the “coins” there are ivory pieces, which is justified in the following manner:
“Gold and silver are unevenly distributed, with some regions being far richer than the others. As a result, different cultures, when looking to trade with each other, turned to the one thing both rare and yet available everywhere: ivory. Ivory is the universal currency, taken from sea creatures such whales and walruses, land animals such as rhinoceroses, elephants and elk. Rarest of all are the spiralling ivory pieces cut from the tusk of the narwhal, sea-porpoises that live in the deadly cold waters of the far northern seas.”
(If you are curious, the game can offer up a paragraph like that to describe everything and everyone, and has enough text volume to rival a classic Final Fantasy game or an Western RPG like Deus Ex. There is even an >100-page ballad about an elven couple hidden within the game, for what it’s worth.)
Now, one doesn’t need to be a genius to realize that unless such a system ends up in most such animals getting hunted to extinction quickly, it would VERY strongly incentivize the captive breeding of elephants and elk, meaning that some land nations would still likely end up with an advantage over the various islands soon enough. In theory, breeding could even occur fast enough to result in measurable inflation. Whoever can manage breeding would end up massively wealthy – and successful rhino hunters + whalers would be very rich too. In theory, they may be collectively successful enough to result in measurable inflation occurring indefinitely.
Still, the above seems like a fairly novel idea for a fantasy setting (in a game which otherwise hews rather closely to “classic” fantasy tropes – i.e. while the protagonist can be anyone and have any alignment, non-player characters from the fair races like elves, dwarves and fae are generally good and ugly ones like goblins, snakelings and trolls are nearly always “evil”) and it would cool if anyone else wanted to discuss this idea further.
In theory, they may be collectively successful enough to result in measurable inflation occurring indefinitely.
This is more or less what tanked the use of cowries shells as a form of currency, I think. They weren’t farmed, but unlike gold or silver they’re an animal that naturally reproduces themselves.
A common “head canon” for D&D economy is that, due to magic and planar travel, the real monetary standard is in diamonds. Resurrection magic especially is priced in diamonds or diamond dust, and by the time you start trying to buy Spelljammers and Legendary magic items you’re looking at far more in coinage that is readily portable. A diamond/diamond dust standard lets the high-tier economy establish a baseline unit of account to which localized currencies wind up aligning (naturally, artificially, or by divine mandate).
For my D&D setting, I used medieval Roman military pay as a baseline, at 9 gp (nomismata, or solidi) for a year’s pay (which itself began as a sliding scale based on veterancy but was averaged to 9/year for everyone to make accounting more feasible), with equipment and supplies either being issued or being purchased by the soldier on his own. I combined this with 1 cp being enough for one meal for a small family (with a loaf of bread being 1/4 of a copper piece). I then went through the entire Player’s Handbook equipment list and figured out rough conversions. For larger items and things that I didn’t want to have to think about too much, I used a simple /50 conversion.
Speaking of medieval Roman military pay, as I understand it compensation would be annual, with folks lining up to receive their pay in gold, and with donatives, loot distributions, and other extraordinary payments also being in gold. You also saw compensation in the form of incomes, often valued in nomismata or in pounds of gold per year (typically from land holdings, as I understand it, but with palace titles also having incomes attached, kind of like annuities or pensions). Certainly international subsidies (moneys out) and tributes (moneys in) were accounted using pounds of gold. This isn’t to say that the basic unit of life was the nomisma. It seems rather to have been one or another of the copper or copper alloy coins (the bronze follis, perhaps). If I remember correct, silver actually fell out of use for a time before being re-introduced as a mid-value alternative to the copper/bronze and gold coins.
One other small observation I wanted to make. I know that Bret Devereaux is well-aware of TVTropes – i.e. it was directly referenced in the “punching through armour myths” post. It would probably please him if I noted that said website already did a decent job of making complete laymen aware of this subject many years ago.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheapGoldCoins
I am sure that the page above could benefit from being updated with the facts collected on this blog (indeed, quite a few pages on TV Tropes are probably in the same position), but it is still worth mentioning.
The chelonian on the Aiginetan drachma is not a sea turtle – it looks like a tortoise to me. There are three species indigenous to Greece, all in the genus , and they all look a lot like the image on the coin, from above. The stumpy limbs are another clue.