There used to be an RPG called “Human-Occupied Landfill“. It was totally crazy with almost no basis in reality. It used a mindless creature as currency. It was also edible. The larger it grew, the greaterit’s value. When full grown, it would suddenly become carnivorous, and attempt to eat everyone nearby.
That's.....honestly genius. Like what a cool metaphor for man's waste and the excesses of money. Holy crap I can't believe I've never heard about that!
I quite often run an apocalyptic setting where the world has been burnt to ash, freshwater is rare, the oceans turned to toxic salty sludge. Water is currency in this setting, the players needing it to trade, and a minimum amount each day to avoid dehydration. It makes the setting more desperate as you're literally drinking your money, and has lead to funny results like the wizard in the party going into deranged rants about finding a way to turn piss back into potable water after the party got lost in the ash wastes while transporting water they didn't own, but were forced to drink to not die when their own supply ran out.
Thats literally the reason why the bottlecap become the currency of Fallout. They represent the bottles used to store water since its very hard to carry water around
One thing I always thought was weird is that "gold" is just accepted with the understanding that it is valuable because we consider it valuable on Earth. But in a magical world, I think they would consider gold as valuable as plastic. Useful sometimes for a few things but can be thrown away. I think coins in a magical world would be made out of magical/powerful metals like mithral and adamantite. When a merchant sees it, everyone agrees it is valuable. To explain why the myths of treasure persevere, maybe there were hoards of gold in a den because goblins gather the useless gold because it is shiny. Similar to how crows gather shiny glass and we consider it cute and endearing that the creature doesn't understand it is useless. What this would accomplish would be that you get coins of different metals that can be melted down for whatever goals or just used to buy things. Optionally, using your deity idea, donating a certain metal to a specific shrine will please the deity to get a buff for some time. Magic as cryptocurrency. Mages donate mana daily for the chance of getting a part of a magic spell from the doge deity and gaemstonk deity. You can sell the spell or hoard it to keep use it to get the whole magic spell. The more mages that have spells from a deity, the more stonk power the deity gets, making the spells stronger. Yelling "To the moon" increases mana at the cost of hp.
There's an alternate-history novel called The Years of Rice and Salt wherein those two commodities become the defining resource of wealth that shapes history into the modern world. So you got Salt and Rice as currencies Also, Dune's "spice melange" is essentially a salt used for food that also has magical properties and defines who has power in the universe - control the Spice, control the transport (via spacecraft navigated by spice-given foresight of the safe path from A to B across the cosmos), control society. It really is a good example of using a "salt" in place of coinage.
Gold may be a bad base, but it can come in handy. Like a giants castle, water closet with solid gold fixtures. Characters spent 5 or 6 sessions, tearing it out and lugging it back. lol.
I like bags of holding because it means the player/players' wealth is entirely at the hands of a sentient banker they keep in their pocket they then must confy in and try to convince to give them the gold they need.
That lends itself nicely to Bags of Hording: Bags of Holding with much larger internal dimensions, but which are far stingier. May occasionally cause dreams that are quite convincing about the investment value of gold...
I want to write a game where the currency is deliberately obtuse and impossibly unwieldy - i want antique sideboards to be the standard of wealth and the use of chests and containers as money rather than their contents.
I’ll just copy paste what I wrote as a comment as a response to this since you might find it interesting: There is a danish roleplaying game called Viking that I think nails it with trade. They have made a price grouping system with group 1 being items the cheapest items and each subsequent group representing a doubling in value. So a sword of standard quality might be a group 5 value - roughly the same value as a cow. A chainmail on the other hand might be a group 6 because of all the extra work that goes into making it and is thus valued roughly as 2 swords. Coins are also on the price table but since it is a barter economy and coins come from all over the place thoins are valued by what they are made off and how much they weigh. Where the brilliance comes in is that when you trade with someone you make a contest of trade skill with modifiers based on how well aquainted you are with the kinds of items you are dealing with, the quality of the weapons in question, your local reputation and other stuff. If you for instance saved the chiefs daughter the day before everyone at the market might like you and you might get a bonus. And based on you success compared to the other trader you will find that the price changes. If your skill rolls are equal, then the sword will cost you something of price class 5 or items adding up to class 5 - ie 2 class 4 items, or a class 4 item and 4 class 2 items will buy you the sword. But if you get a better or worse result than the other guy there is a table adding or subtracting from the price. So you might end up having to pay the trader an additional item 2 groups below if the rolls were such and such, or if your roll was best by so and so you might for instance get your price reduced with a discount of an item of 2 price groups below the sword - or the trader might throw in an item 2 groups below the sword to sweeten the deal. You can of course back out if you don’t want to pay that, but if you then come back later to trade again you will have some serious penalties on your rolls. And based on the results these trades can be awesome for roleplaying. The trader might say that your cow is too scawny to trade for such a lovely sword. But since you won the drinking competition last night at the market and impressed everyone, he is willing to sell his very nice sword for just the cow and that there roll of fine cloth you also have brought. Or if you like he can take the cow off your hands and that lovely axe head you brought and then he will throw in a chicken and barrel of his homemade mead - but only because you seem like a nice guy. He might also accept the 6 small gold coins you brought, but only if his scales say they are as much worth as they appear or you might have to throw in something more. And different places might have different price ranges. If you trade at a coastal town in norway the GM might rule that dried fish is at a discount and rule that it ranks 1 group lower than it otherwise would, or if the winter is hard, he might surcharge you for grain and put it 1 group higher due to extra demand. You could seriously make entire adventures about traveling around selling stuff at markets - in fact both the prewritten adventures are about going places to trade for stuff with various obstackles in the way.
> Be me > Make a currency that works by using mana crystal > Explain how it works to my players > My players "That sounds too complicated, can we use gold instead?"
The main issue with currency is not what it is. It's how much is needed to buy something and how much they buying. As cool as these ideas are, they will lose their appeal when you need to make your 20th transaction and players will just want to spend what they need to with minimal fuss. If you can use your currency for more things like your salt idea, then thats what makes currency more interesting. At the end of the day, its not what it is that matters, its what you do with it
I get bigger numbers look cooler, but one issue I see is number inflation. Oh wow, this cool sword only costs 737,000 gold coins. What a steal! Can we be a little more reasonable with pricing? Can we be more reasonable with health and damage?
As strange as a concept as it is, Spice from Spore being used as the main commodity for getting Sporebucks implies Spice could very well be used as a form of currency. It's how you regularly generate your money after all. I can easily imagine using vials of different values of Spice for trade. Sprinkle some on a scale to help gauge price and then trade from there. It's the first time I've considered the concept of a dust being used for money at any rate.
1) IRL rulers would mint their own currency. These coins very valuable because they were backed by the local king. The local merchants could not deny accepting them as payment. 2) IRL you did not "just" buy a home, especially in a city. You had to be accepted by the local administration or ruler. This is where favors, contacts and reputation came into play. 3) In a magical world magical items ordinary people could use like potions of healing would always carry value. 4) High quality items especially stuff women like would always be easily tradable (Rare fabrics, well crafted dresses, perfume, jewelry, etc). Just make sure the woman sees the product.
Consider: fantasy great-tree amber. Melt it down and mold it into rings that can be slotted onto a rope for storage. The reason the rings are Amber is cause it's easily ahaped and made out of a limited resource that has Fantasy Bullshit that prob makes it magical or some shit
Also leads to some 1000 year old wizard going on about recalling the time they found some fossilized mosquitos, and before long they were cloning DNA...
Can be both jewelry, have magical properties, and as currency. Shaping it into rings can be both a signature of skill (better craftsmanship = more worth, as it was in some Germanic cultures) and of course there is some pre-determined “melt” value. And rings would also require less of the actual material, signaling its worth. Very interesting, definitely stealing it.
The value of gold today is like $2,500.00 per ounce, and the value of silver today is like $30.00 and ounce. Gold is MUCH more valuable than food, water, and shelter. A gold coin would be worth like $800.00. You would not trade an $800.00 coin for a burger.
Depends how hungry you are and how few other restaurants are around... Look up the prices in 1850's California during the Gold Rush. For example, "Edward Gould Buffum, author of Six Months in the Gold Mines (1850), described having a breakfast of bread, cheese, butter, sardines and two bottles of beer with a friend and receiving a bill for $43 - the equivalent today of about $1,200." That quote was written a few years ago when gold was a bit cheaper. $43 in gold would be somewhere over two ounces, so well over $5K today.
@@DesksAndDorks Another book you might find interesting is David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" , lots of discussion on how economies worked before the invention of coinage
I’ve recently got into Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and a couple of interesting things they use for currency is Aqua Ghyranis which is water that comes from the Realm of Life, and this water is essentially a super-cure for any injury or affliction. Which is very valuable in a universe constantly at war. Another is something called glimmerings, which are stones that can give almost anyone glimpses of prophecy. In one book, someone even used shavings of glimmerings to give herself a prophetic edge in battle, but she started developing a dependency on it, like a drug. It was pretty cool.
In the Magic as NFTs vein. In my setting, a small group of wizards have found a useless material, but incredibly magically taxing to make. They began their advocacy for this Coin by magically making tons of gold and screwing much of the kingdom and also its trade partners' economy, but rather than give in the kingdom instead moved to a fiat currency and gold is actually incredibly cheap now.
These videos gave me 2 ideas for RPG currencies. One is magical debit cards. Everyone just carries a magical talisman that has glowing numbers indicating your current balance. If you want to pay someone, you whisper the number and your password into it and tap your talisman against theirs. A perfect solution to high-magic settings and parties that don't want to get bogged down in the details of inventory management. The other is fairy souls. For some reason that most people don't question, everyone carries around little talismans that are all imbued with the soul of a fairy. They are lightweight, come in multiple denominations, universally accepted, and can't be counterfeited. It also gives you a great plot hook of exploring where exactly these fairy soul talismans are coming from (hint: it's probably really terrifying).
Two possible issues, could actually be hooks for expanding the world, one for each: 1) Debit card fraud. If they are magic, there will be a magical way to fraudulently raise the number which could eventually cause a return to physical currency due to the inflationary effects thereof. Could lead to interesting possibilities in the regulation of wizardry instead, where each wizard is forced to register and so on. Could be 2) How does one divide a soul? I also don't see why every fairy soul would be equivalent in value to one another. Those are two of the basic qualifications for a currency, the third being portability. So I just would like to hear that explained a little more. Also seems to lean towards a metaphysic where the soul of the most heinous murderer is worth the exact same as that of the most virtuous, charitable person.
That awkward moment when a fae ends up on the receiving end of their own shenanigans and ends up having to give a metric ton of souls to a particularly cunning individual named Fred Araell...
You know, I really hate it when my comments are deleted afterward and I only figure out because someone responded to something I responded to, but my comment does not exist there any longer
Personally I do like the idea of a storage skill being a rare ability that is very sought after for merchantile purposes, and potentially feared for use by thieves.
This is actually played with in Kagurabachi. A major villain has a magical ability that lets them store anything into a pocket dimension, and they used the ability as a storehouse for their underground auction.
I love the idea of something like Dust of Deliciousness, etc being used as both currency and culinary seasoning. As for the bag that shall not be named, I almost always hold off on these until very late game, when it just makes more sense to have access to such a powerful item, and there are bigger fish to fry than inventory challenges.
Here are my opinions on the currencies you suggested: 1. The salt idea sounds cool and is balanced and thought out. Just have to set its value, (Set the prices of items. Eg. Bread = 1g.) or be a bit dynamic and go with the flow. 2. The tiny god shrines would be interesting as a secondary barter system, but it is TOO dynamic for it to be the primary. Though it would be really amazing if somehow it was executed well as a primary. 3. Ironically, I think this would work, however, it is not thought out enough to be evaluated in its current state. Someone needs to flesh it out and how it works a little more. Maybe the gods give out the, 'NFT's? 4. Don't take this too seriously, but a little crazy idea I came up with, not sure if it's good: Points that you trade through minds telekinetically. With the points being inborn, (causing inflation) and/or given out by the gods. It would be a bit of a lazy way though.
Salt is equated to money through via Latin word "salarium" - so I don't see why salt could not be a good analog or substitute for currency in a fantasy setting. :)
Bone. I love bones as a currency. They are only made by biological creatures; magical summoned ones just turn to vapor once they pass away. Normal bone is probably quite worthless. People are not getting rich killing rats or wolves, but let's get boring and just say dragon bone. Say the world has all kinds of dragons but solo slaying one is very hard all you need to do is find out what dragon bone does and now it is currency. I have had evil creatures generate shadow plasma as skeletons and they would let non-magic beings cast spells and the plasma would turn to vapor. People just often need the stuff it was magic fuel, you could use it to power things I love it. Another is a form of glass in the same universe, the glass is made of an anti-magic dust and you heat it and it becomes a super powerful glass that can make magic circuits and runes. It also burns magic users but lets the spells be absurdly powerful. This dust is another very valuable currency. Many mages will melt the dust into the glass and then forge something over the glass just so the resource is more scarce, they have no intent of using it they just want it gone.
A sci-fi approach to the problem of magic (replicators) is Star Trek’s latinum which they arbitrarily decided was essentially the only thing that cannot be reproduced artificially - that always felt unsatisfying to me, but the idea of a liquid currency is pretty cool, so it had that going for it
It's so interesting because if it happened in real life we would rejoice but in fiction scarcity creates major issues/conflict so we make a new currency
I always enjoyed the Dragonlance setting. It was post apocolyptic, but enough time had passed that currency had become standardized again. Except steel was the main currency for its utility in a time where technology had broken down. Its still heldover after nations had reformed. Theres a fun dungeon crawl meta joke where the heros find the tomb of a legendary Elven king, and bars of gold, and they leave it since its heavy and worthless.
I personally am a sucker for food as currency, weather it be in general or just one really important food like rice. Its definitely a bit situational, but it can lead to some fun dynamics.
By the way i love the ways this subject is so emotive that it brings out not just debate but also argument (geeks chosing their hills to die on). Bravo Voice Over Kyle - you rock because you bring all those boys to your yard with your content of a flavoursome dairy based beverage.
just started bouncing through your videos after seeing your big vid on Low Fantasy and I gotta say this is so far my favorite; cuz up to now currency was something I was just ignoring in my own pair of ttrpgs I'm working on, at least one of which I'm now obsessed with the thought of salt as the defacto tender. As for the other one, I think I actually like the thought of livestock or even game animals and their byproducts as currency for a couple reasons. It makes the players' acquisition of wealth feel very tangible in an OSR kinda way, where more lengthy excursions or errands will tax the players by having them literally eat their money circumstances depending, and the bigger the players get in the world, the more land and servants they'll need to help manage their wealth. It also lends very well to the use of blood magic in a game where hp/ritual sacrifice can be used to achieve the DC on a spell check, and can lead to very organic ways of in-world conversion rates that don't take a genius to think of. Sure those two dozen cows you brought along can graze just fine and milk plenty, but you better find a beef-loving fisherman to trade em now cuz the next four towns we have to go through are on a bare coast region that only accepts dried eels as payment. or even something as simple as a halfling/gnome merchant who won't accept payment in any animals bigger than a pony
Really glad you're enjoying it and the content! The cattle currency idea is an awesome one (and it's why I went back and made the edit to the video) Thanks for giving this video some love it's one I feel like gets glossed over in our work.
@DesksAndDorks for sure! Your videos are great at giving food for thought and this and the first gold video especially point out some shortcomings of currency in games that I didn't even realize I had a problem with
Look into Max Gladstones book series “Craft Sequence”. In his books currency is small contracts using parts of your soul. Magic is just a complicated system of contracts with gods and each other to bring about an effect out change. In his world the Gods were defeated by the mages and turned into soul batteries to power commerce and civilizations advances.
One setting I made up long ago. A planet shattered by some cataclysm into floating islands. It is unable to sustain atmosphere, so air becomes very rare, especially in form suitable for breathing. So it becomes currency to trade for other goods. And, unlike any other currency, people cannot survive without constantly having stable income of it.
The best currency I've ever heard of comes from a chinese light novel. Im gonna use Western fantasy terms to describe it for simplicity. Basically, the currency was mana stones. They are all the same size and can restore a fixed amount of mana. You can buy things with them of course, and they are also used to break your level cap. While they are essentially an infinite resource, they get used up at a rate that offsets it.
For my current fantasy setting, which is fiction + TTRPG, what I went with was bills in various denominations up to 1,000. They're light and easy to hide. From that point up to 50,000, again in denominations, stamped coins are used. Larger ones for more value. After that, there's bullion for large amounts of money in metals, and promissory notes for lighter loads.
It is utterly brilliant! The way Rob Schwalb has made a simpler system that is still pretty close to the most commonly known 5e mechanics AND made lore that draws from a lot of real world stuff and recombines it in such clever ways is great.
Re magical salt currency: Using salt to protect against or banish ghosts and other undead is a pretty common element of folklore, and would give it huge utility in a setting during/after a magical apocalypse (like Earthdawn, even though it doesn't work there). It may be the only way non-wizards have to defend themselves when traveling. Also, salt was not commonly worth its weight in gold, or even silver. It is way too cheap to make when near the sea, and otherwise easier and more abundant to mine and refine than any metal. The only way I can believe that anecdote about Mansa Musa is if he wanted to buy the whole salt supply of that place (or at least way more than anyone wanted to sell) and didn't care what it costs.
In a magic setting, one of the most direct currencies would undoubtedly be time. For example, if someone does work for you, you would give them some amount of your life in hours, cutting short your life by that amount of time and extending the life of the worker by that amount. This has the interesting side effect of making those who constantly work essentially immortal, while those who only spend their time live quite short lives.
Very funny! Nobody (except maybe someone desperate or immortal, so frankly those that either might die if they don't bribe someone with a little extra time or those who have an infinite amount) would do that, no, not even a rich person! Hell, this would at best lead to people killing others to gain their time and criminals being killed to give time to a lord or a king or higher clergy etc.!
At its heart currency is about survival. We earn money to afford resources to keep us alive: food, water, clothing and shelter, etc. Then we use excess for luxuries. So why not cut out the middle section? The currency is life. At least it's your natural lifespan. You want to buy something from someone you give them an hour or so of time (Equivalent to how long you would have had to work for it). Of course, many die before their natural time from events like violent death, disease, etc. It hangs around after allowing others to take it. If that time goes back in a body by accident or intention you get undead. A dragon's hoard is literally in the lives it has taken and added to its own. The rich are basically immortal while the poor die young. It could be passed through magic or possibly bloodletting (making sacrificial rituals straight up transactions). And if you're using it for D&D then consumable cost spells like resurrecting the dead cost years of life. And deals with devils become more tempting when they can give you life or renewed youth to enjoy a long life. There would be enough excess life to serve as a currency because hardly anyone actually lives to their full natural lifespan with all the dangers of a fantasy world, even with plenty of laws in place. And do you really want to hold onto that 200 year lifespan you've built up when aging hasn't stopped? Morticians would be the ultimate tax collectors, conveniently also protecting against undead rising by harvesting that life before the body is cold.
Gold/coins/credits still remain the most straight foward and easy method to deal with currency in games, what i do is i tend to spice some regions with their local currencies, there was one setting where the main currencies were cocoa beans, maize and peppers, the reason they used that as currency is because their god lived among them and he liked those three ingredients for his food, so people would exchange them for good fortune or small blessings from their god. Not only that but being food items they all had a shelf life and could be consumed so that regulated inflation to a degree. Another region filled with mechanists and artificers used aether as a currency which is basically pure magic in gas form (could also be turned to liquid form by processing it) and because almost everything in their setting used aether to work, like their automatons, vehicles, furnaces, etc it was both a currency and useable material. Only specialized machines could harvest aether from the enviroment at a limited rate as such despite aether being harvested daily, its use in every day life and as a currency kept it a desireable material to have.
The game Caves of Qud uses water measured in drams as currency which leads to more of a barter system because to save weight you also carry trade goods that have set prices unaffected by your ego stat
I prefer favor as a currency. If the words are actually binding, it creates a more medieval and magic vibe imo. Or use magic as currency: a major favor to a Storm trades you twelve lightening spell on command. Not fungible, or fungible in some cases. Then you can enslave some magical beings like a goblin to squeeze out every tricks and pranks and labour out of it. It will act like an unsee servant, except very much visible and physical.
Rewatching this video and its great. Inspired me to change my game system's currency from a generic minted coin to magical crystals of divine power, and it fits so much better in my setting. Thanks for the video!
One thing I am currently considering for my fantasy setting is chips. Not fried starches, but electronics. See, this setting is post apocalyptic, collapsing because of inter dimensional nonsense being exploited for power generation. The supply chains that make these technologies possible is no longer around, and so computer chips are a limited resource, intensely valuable to those who still know how to use them, and for those who don’t can still appreciate that it’s partially made of gold, and impossible to counterfeit at the current achievable level of technology.
For a Sci fi setting I think that'd be a great plan! It's also true to life (there were multiple chip shortages during early 2020 that hamstring a few indistries
For RPG that is based around earth like backdrop, gold and silver make perfect sense, it's good anytime really for this backdrop, there's additional currency depending on the current age in the backdrop, spices for medieval and exploration age, industrial age technologies for industry age, and in our current era is oil and high tech technologies, for future can diverge into two path, military tech (if this is so, were F and a dominant power will rise to create one single entity to unite earth, all dissenter will die to this faction lol, even this united earth will still have faction warfare, and this is the people buying this military tech) or we go for sustainability and green tech... For fantasy world, crystal that provide magical enchantment and fantasy metal like mithril and adamantium would function as additional currency...
Magic crystals would be a good answer to this as well. Even in low fantasy settings particularly in very backwater places I do think bartering does work quite well and adds a nice texture to the game world.
A mana crystal currency sounds neat, where wizards can only make so many a day. Also they're like ammo if you plan on playing a wizard cause every casting you do spends money. The NFT thing sounds neat, but a wizard's level to bring a picture to life would have to be considered, and also how common wizards are I guess...
I came here to say this. It's the fantasy equivalent of how ammo is used for currency in post apocalyptic games like the Metro series or Mutant Year Zero. I've always loved how it plays out because not only does it make "money" less the product of an abstract exercise in practicing valuation, but it incentivizes players to think differently about how they kit themselves out and engage the enemy; "Can I afford to take this shot and miss?" But I think it has a lot of unexplored potential for use in a fantasy setting, especially based on how you decide the "mana crystals" might be generated. Is it just a day's worth of focus/energy from a gifted individual? Is it the proper combination or processing of supplies scarce to some places? Is it the soul of an orphan child?
This sounds like something I brought up in, I think, the earlier video. My idea was taking inspiration from The Legend of Zelda, that rupees could be found on defeated monsters or dungeons. My idea of them is they can enchant an item or refill an enchantment. Keeping the currency in check is the crystals will degrade outside of proper containment, so an investment in a proper wallet can be upgrades. Higher quality wallets fuse the lesser quality crystals into higher levels so they can carry more. And simple tools can break them into smaller. Sounds complicated, but in practice people/players can have access to a universal currency that can avoid needing to be actively converted into larger or smaller denominatios. But also have an upper limit, that also could be spent on to be increased within reason.
Hello Desks & Dorks, I just found your channel and I'm glad I did. YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT ABOUT GOLD CURRENCY BEING NONSENSE!! I've been playing D&D and other RPGs since the 80s and, not to "date" myself, but I'm pretty "old school" where RPGs are concerned and it has ALWAYS bugged me why on earth you'd pay "three gp" for a backpack, "two gp" for a steel dagger, etc. First, you're 100% correct (I've seen both of your recent videos on this topic) about that much gold destabilizes a medieval-centric economy. Am I being pedantic? Don't care. I want believable immersion, verisimilitude, in my games and this ain't it. In modern terms, if we accept the D&D guideline that 3 coins of any type weigh about 1 ounce, then consider that 1 ounce of gold (at today's price) is worth a little over $2,700 dollars. I'M NOT GIVING YOU $2,700 DOLLARS FOR A BACKPACK, and assuming that 1 ounce of pure gold really is only worth the price of a backpack, then my sense of realism/verisimilitude is long gone. Further: if gold is that devalued in D&D, why the hell do copper & silver pieces exist at all? Old 1e era adventure modules would often tell you just how many thousands, or tens of thousands, of copper pieces were in a monster's hoard. Why? How many adventurers are going to weigh themselves down with copper pieces when the more valuable coins are also present? And don't get me started on that "copper pieces are the peasant's currency, silver pieces are the middle class/tradesman's currency, and gold pieces are the nobility's currency" bullcrap. This again wrecks realism & makes no sense. I ended up entirely re-working the D&D PHB equipment list to make a copper piece actually worth something: you pay for mugs of beer, food rations, a pair of socks, etc. with it, and silver coins are valuable and well guarded. (I reserve electrum as a curious, ancient currency only found in lost, ancient ruins from past civilizations and such, but it is still quite valuable.) Finding a cache of pure, solid gold in any form, even a small one, should take your breath away...not cause you to just shrug & write it down on your character sheet. And yes, you are 100% correct about bags of holding. I don't "eschew" them, but they ARE a too-convenient method to waive the encumbrance rules if the DM/GM is enforcing the "gold is freaking HEAVY" rule. (Sorry for the long rant; you really touched a nerve with me. Thank you.)
What most people fail to understand is that all forms of currency need someone as a contrlling authority, whether that be a bank, an overlord, ruler or even the (breaks fourth wall) GM themselves... The use of any kind of token based currency is based upon it being impossible to lug everythhing around so small and usually shiny must be somewhat a winning formula. But unless it is either a universal weight or minting any tokens or coins are subject to exchange values and then we are playing a different game called accountancy and that is no fun even for accountants (don't listen when they say its sexy, all accountants are liars and mostly they lie to themselves).
Create a mana based economy where mana is required to cast spells. Everyone can manufacture it but it's only nations that can manufacture it in large quantities to keep society running and fuel industry. mana can either be used to cast spells or traded for mana dollars which is used as normal currency. Spells users can cast all day long as long as they have mana (are rich) but the cost for an additional spell beyond that allowed for their level goes up with each spell. So the only time you'll ever see inflation is if everyone stops using magic or whenever more efficient use or creation of mana is discovered, which can be the basis of quests and stories due to how powerful/destabilizing it is.
In standard economic theory, there are several criteria to use in evaluating the possibility of any good being used as a currency. These criteria are due to rhe currency's use in three functions: as a store of value, as a unit of account, and as a medium of exchange. These criteria include portability, as you mentioned, but also fungibility, divisibility, durability, uniformity. It must also be limited in supply. You also mentioned it must be universally used, which is the another standard of universal acceptance within a given area. Salt does acceptably on these criteria, although it has some issues as there are many different types of salt. One pound of salt is, therefore, not exactly equivalent to another pound of salt gathered elsewhere with different techniques. Totems of gods, however, become more of a barter item than a currency. That's fine, and it does add interesting opportunities for roleplaying, but it is not a currency but a series of items. These totems are non-fungible, we can call them non-fungible totems, or NFTs for short. Why would an innkeeper care about a pendent that conveys a smell of strawberries? Unless he finds someone who very much desires one, that pendent is effectively useless to him. Additionally, how might one divide up the aforementioned strawberry pendent into smaller denominations? In the case of gold, you can just melt them down and cast them into smaller pieces, or melt them and form them into bars. This is because of the substance's uniformity, which allows a bar of gold in one place to be both the same as another bar of gold else where, either of which are divisible into smaller portions of gold. Salt is similar in that you can fairly easily divide it, but has the issue of different types as mentioned earlier. Tl;dr you didn't account for the basic functions and subsequent requirements of a currency, and inadvertently reinvented NFTs
My fantasy setting uses silver as the primary currency across the world and copper in some niche cases when there is a fraction of a silver coin, with various nations minting electrum (because they can adjust the blend to squeeze out profit) coins for larger purchases. Gold is mostly used for bulk value trading only. Finally some trade cities on borders impose using their rune-stamped wood slats (they aren't actually magic, but the layman doesn't know there isn't a spell on them) as notes to ensure the city makes fractions on the coin using money changers and to ensure they control how much money flows through the city. Gems are useful in certain cases because most people can't tell the value of a gem at a glance. For the most part players just track their wealth in silver, but half the group like keeping a list of all the various coins, gems, jewlery, and trinkets they collect.
Magic as currency! Yeah, I know it's been done a million times and suggested more than that. But what if the magic was toxic when it builds up? As it gets used, it converts to a highly unstable form that has to be disposed of. Production isn't easy with generators constantly needing maintenance or worse, causing industrial accidents that make Chernobyl look like spilt milk. That's what happened to the first reactor my dwarves built. Wiped out their capital and several nearby cities. Now mutants constantly assault the few remaining strongholds while resources run thin. They decide to open up to the surface for the first time since the start of the dragon wars.
An idea I never got around to developing to any real appreciable degree was that precious metals and gemstones are considered 'precious' because they could store magic in a world where magic was otherwise instantaneous; you do spell and spell immediately happens. Thus, gold might store the "most" magic (whatever arbitrary amount that is; perhaps enough to summon the rains during a drought), but that made it far too precious a resource to use as currency save as a flex. You then have silver, copper, various alloys like bronze, rubies, sapphires, etc, each that could store a certain amount and favoring a certain type of magic... ...and then iron is refined and, eventually, steel. This brings in a metal that is neither precious nor stores magic; on the contrary, it disrupts and "dispells' magic. And boom; I have either the weapon of choice for an existential threat (a horde of iron/steel armed barbarians) OR I have the "maguffin" for the protagonists to use against a corrupt world (a steel sword forged long ago and hidden away for its horrific implications).
You could make healing itself into a currency, where there is some object, piece of a monster, or bit of magic that can fight off an infection (antibiotics lol), close wounds, regain blood, or maybe particularly powerful/valuable ones could extend a dying person's life by a full day. To me its awesome to think about what such a world would be like - where kings consume large amounts of currency every day to remain alive and in power, and wars are exorbitantly expensive in every sense of the idea. It doesn't prevent someone from dying a violent and near instant death of course, because the have to live long enough to use the currency to heal/extend their life, but I wonder how this would change player and npc behavior.
Now we're cooking! That's a really interesting idea because it also changes how society works healers/church officials surgeons/ would have so much authority in this world and it would be interesting for that to play out.
Hello, I really appreciate your thoughts on your previous video on gold (As a currency in the fantasy setting) as well as the realistic/historic explanations behind it. I currently ("A DM") haven't had much time playing the TTRPG's. But I have been fascinated by the world creation and exploration of the D&D (TTRPG) Multiverse. (Lots of dense material to be unraveled there, but I'm happy to see the TTRPG Community aways has more info/facts to be discussed.)
What is the reasoning behind the prerequisite for salt currency on a arid world? Except for the the North African salt trade? People all over the world were trading in salt. In north germany for example the city of Lüneburg got very rich on salt trade during the middle age. They were boiling it out of a salty spring in the region. Another idea for currency I really liked comes from the game Caves of Qud. They use water to pay for goods, because far into the future most of the water is either politer or salty.
The water currency in qud was awesome As for the pre-requisite, it's because most of the examples I studied or was familiar with were from that time period or section of the world.
it reminds me of games like metro where the verry bullets you use in your guns are the currency or souls games where souls are both currency and your xp and you get to choose how you want to spend it
Dork, I'd like o sugg3st you look on Stormlight Archive's currency. In those books, they use gemstones as currencies. Those gemstones can hold an amount of magic potential energy inside of them. So magic users can suck up the energy of those gems to power up their powers, vut common folk use them both as currency as light sources inside their homes and castles. They have three sized coind for each of the 10 gemstones, with diamond being the least valeable, and emerald being the most valuable (since those stones can be used to turn rocks into food), and many gems have the same value as the others ,i think this may depend on the availability of those gems in a given region
@DesksAndDorks it's just 5 books and about 6000 pages.... but you probably may be able to find some videos or Fandom pages explaining how the currency works
In my ttrpg dragons crashed the economy by closing the market with gold and silver. Took hundreds of years of land-for-gold buybacks to absorb it into the treasury
@@DesksAndDorks I remember the name, just offering an example. The reality is, though, all kingdoms, republics, empires, and others, will have a currency that is theirs alone. The adventurer must find a way to make it portable. Gems are a common idea, trade notes are also good, and historically accurate. The vikings used something called "Hack" silver, where the amounts were literally hacked off and weighed.
@@DesksAndDorks so they use gemstones in glass balls the type of stone denotes the currency. However they have replicators* to know a gemstone is natural traders normally only accept spheres that are currently charged with Stormlight as fake stones will have imperfections in the crystal that make them less able to hold onto Stormlight for anywhere near as long as natural gemstones that's how the replicator problem is solved.
Heat can be a currancy in a nuclear winter setup, where 99% of earth suface is at sub zero. Heat can be trade in the form of chamical that their reaction produce heat and also be harvest by having a life being hugging a cooling pipe, transferring the body heat to the pipe and the content inside. It would highly likely to be slaves who hugs the pipe and the wealths who enjoy it. Cities and fortries built around volcanos and nuclear power plants were the most common ways of surviving, yet coal mines and oil wells dust the field, connecting those powerful, yet scarce heat giants.
I usually just do the silver standard 100 silver is 1 gold and 80 copper is 1 silver, a peasant per year would make about 8-10 silver while an aristocrat might make 1 gold. I would LOVE to pull from the Witcher and make every country use a different currency but then everyone would carry a hundred coins from each nation and that would be heavy.
A tamagachi! They were tiny little electronic pendents with little video game pets that kids had in the 90s. They were required care to keep "alive and were often traded for things by kids.
Thank you for calling upper crust conflict management. We hope to make your transition as smooth as butter. Would you like to A. Request information on our live and let rye plan for pun management. B. Submit an achy bakery heart complaint for emotional distress caused by puns. C. Speak to a representative?
I think this whole thing is based on some weird misunderstanding of how coins worked historically. The basic coin in medieval times, worth a daily wage of a manual worker, was HALF the weight of a 1 cent coin. Yeah turns out people didn't irrationally use unwieldy coins it's just that mainstream fantasy goes for cool visuals over any logic. Meanwhile you suggest just casually using scales, which were some of least used and least trusted instruments historically because they require precise manufacturing and can be falsified. Your suggestions really boil down to gimmicks which you either base the whole campaign around or they're cool first 2 times that they're used and then either people have better things to worry about or get annoyed at the inconvenience. Maybe cool as a way to diversify rewards, but replacing normal currency entirely? IMO trash advice that sounds cool at first and then doesn't work in an actual game.
@DesksAndDorks My idea was more sort of company credit system that was set up by organizations who create and manage adventurers in the setting. It works on a sort of commission basis for players and effectively became so synonymous in large settlements that everyone in the cities use it. (Both physically and digitally, but mostly the latter) It could be interesting and has serious potential imo. The parties actions could effect the economy mg4/cruelty squad style. They could loose their bank accounts after passing off the wrong people. And assuming it didn't annoy ppl too much, I could make taxes a thing 😈
Re: Salt, any setting where mages can fabricate or duplicate gold, making gold problematic, they would be able to do the same with salt. If you are just going to declare salt can’t be magically created, then you could do the same with gold. It’s arbitrary. I think a good example of fantasy currencies is in Exalted. You have Jade, which as one of the 5 Magical Materials cannot be magically created by mortals. You have Jade Scrip, paper money based on Jade, where the smallest unit of value is the Koku, the wages of a rice farmer. And then you have Silver, which is an up and coming currency trying to supplant Jade, but it runs the risk of being magically created and therefore has instability and inflationary problems and a lot of people don’t trust it.
@ there’s a couple other medieval/early modern examples too. Saffron and other spices had big speculative bubbles that involved even commoners getting in on the action.
Also this is my economist nerd side coming out, but one of the best portrayals of fantasy currency has to be Spice and Wolf. I was absolutely enraptured by an anime about a merchant trying to maximize the amount of coins he had of a specific type before those coins were taken out of circulation to be replaced by a new coin.
Because magic allows so many ways to destroy large amounts of coin, causing deflation or create massive amounts leading to Weimar Republic levels of inflation.
Essentially what highlorddarkstar pointed out. Magic alters reality so we need currency that is magic resistant to magic or otherwise unable to be affected by it.
@@DesksAndDorks I don't think there are spells in D&D, or any fantasy RPG for that matter, specifically that do anything like that though. I think you'd need to just assume that some homebrew magic system would emerge where mages would wantonly destroy currency and I'm not sure what the motivation for that would be. The other commenter claims there are existing ways to simply "destroy large amounts of coin" with spells, but I don't know of any spells that do that. Spells consume certain specific components, like gem dust, but you don't literally take actual gold and destroy it to cast spells.
@ArvelDreth so just extapolating on the basics the motivation is wealth and more of it. Wish, miracle, and transmute metal immediately come to mind for dnd and other systems for sure have them. Ultimately, it's just to get us thinking about more interesting currency
Assuming Mensa Musa really did massively overpay for salt, I don't see how that's relevant. A big problem with salt as currency is that it's not worth the same everywhere. It's going to be expensive in the middle of a desert, or really any landlocked area, and really cheap near the ocean where it's easy to collect. This isn't a problem for the people actually living in that society, of course. They each know how expensive salt is where they live. But it's going to be really confusing when you're designing the setting, and prices will vary dramatically based on the location of the city, not because things are actually more expensive, but simply because salt is cheaper. Gems also aren't a good currency because they're not fungible. You'd have to have someone appraising each individual gem whenever you buy stuff. Unless it's standardized somehow. Maybe they don't care about purity and size and all that, and just go by weight. Magic isn't all that different from technology. It could make a certain kind of currency useless, but it doesn't necessarily. You should definitely consider the existence of magic when making currency, and realize that anything that someone could easily counterfeit with magic wouldn't be useful currency, and you could use something related to magic for currency (for example, gems as currency makes a lot more sense in D&D, where they're used for a lot of spells so their value doesn't depend on how pretty that particular stone is, but only how magically useful it is), but it doesn't have to be related. I think one thing that might be useful is just having some super simple currency that you use for everything, except that the characters don't actually use it. It's just an abstraction. Characters might have to worry about non-decimal currency and exchange rates and making change, but that can be abstracted for the players.
How about that. I have two huge bags of salt in the cupboard. Like not just reg size but ... huge one's. Like at least a small pillow each. Slightly larger than a banana. Idk, it can't make this more accurate, sorry. I've also got pepper btw, and it's way more expensive than salt where I live...
This probably sounds over used or dumb but souls, blood, runes of power, secret skills. Not perfect currency. Clearly taken straight from FromSoftware games. But depending on you're world these are universal. All of these can a kind of currency used beyond the mortal realm. It's wanted by any who seek power or maybe a kind of pleasure. Very hard to obtain. But in a apocalyptic event we know how valuable these are based on how we seen other games use them.
@@DesksAndDorks Yeah I umm use it to make qubit coins... Like... They're quantum computer secure and stuff. Plus the bag o holding will bite you if you try to snatch it. Frankly, I can't get to the coins myself, cuz that bag ain't tame yet!
Walk me through this please: how does being able to shoot fire from your face make gold an unworkable currency, but doesn't do the same to salt? Gold was the currency of the US up into the 1970s. The invention of transcontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads didn't invalidate it. Nor did moving from muscle-power to steam to electricity and hydrocarbons. What did unseat gold was the reality that there was more wealth in the world than there was gold to measure it by, and we were approaching the point that to fully back all the US dollars would require the US to take everybody's gold, and then we'd still eventually run out. Gods as currency only works if you have an easy way to measure a god's value. Salt and gold can be weighed, allowing you to know exactly how much of either you have. But how do you quantify "godliness?" If you can't, then you're back to a barter system, with all the hassles of a barter system, just with cooler things to barter. In fact, since gods are not fungible, I don't think this works. The value of salt or gold might change depending on where you are, but it all changes together; that is, 1 gram of gold is the same as any other gram of gold in Bartertown. But the God of Shoelaces isn't the same as the God of Pleasant Memories. How do you compare the two? And you certainly can't do bills of credit, since the God of Pleasant Memories is in Portland, and not in Bartertown, so your bill of credit for one God of Pleasant Memories cannot be exchanged for said god. Meaning if you want to spend your god, you have to bring it with you everywhere.
For some reason, an economy based on Turnips being flung into the phantom zone, and peasants getting Turnip NFTs back is probably not the most outlandish idea. Their pantry/vault would look like the worst pokemon card collection ever, but the phantom zone probably counts as a cool, dry place for storage.
There used to be an RPG called “Human-Occupied Landfill“. It was totally crazy with almost no basis in reality.
It used a mindless creature as currency. It was also edible. The larger it grew, the greaterit’s value. When full grown, it would suddenly become carnivorous, and attempt to eat everyone nearby.
That's.....honestly genius. Like what a cool metaphor for man's waste and the excesses of money. Holy crap I can't believe I've never heard about that!
Makes me think of those weird little aliens in Jimmy Neutron that ripped off gremlins.
H.O.L is still alive and well
Early Medieval Iceland actually has a really interesting one, where bolts and sections of cloth, specially wool, were used as currency.
I did not know that that's awesome!
I quite often run an apocalyptic setting where the world has been burnt to ash, freshwater is rare, the oceans turned to toxic salty sludge. Water is currency in this setting, the players needing it to trade, and a minimum amount each day to avoid dehydration. It makes the setting more desperate as you're literally drinking your money, and has lead to funny results like the wizard in the party going into deranged rants about finding a way to turn piss back into potable water after the party got lost in the ash wastes while transporting water they didn't own, but were forced to drink to not die when their own supply ran out.
Oooooooh that's a great setting and a cool idea
Thats literally the reason why the bottlecap become the currency of Fallout. They represent the bottles used to store water since its very hard to carry water around
This is an excellent addition to a Dark Sun game
@geislar7682 it would work well for dark sun for sure!
If you havent heard of it i'd take a peak at the roguelike game Caves of Qud. Very similar to your setting. Like suspiciously.
One thing I always thought was weird is that "gold" is just accepted with the understanding that it is valuable because we consider it valuable on Earth. But in a magical world, I think they would consider gold as valuable as plastic. Useful sometimes for a few things but can be thrown away.
I think coins in a magical world would be made out of magical/powerful metals like mithral and adamantite. When a merchant sees it, everyone agrees it is valuable.
To explain why the myths of treasure persevere, maybe there were hoards of gold in a den because goblins gather the useless gold because it is shiny. Similar to how crows gather shiny glass and we consider it cute and endearing that the creature doesn't understand it is useless.
What this would accomplish would be that you get coins of different metals that can be melted down for whatever goals or just used to buy things. Optionally, using your deity idea, donating a certain metal to a specific shrine will please the deity to get a buff for some time.
Magic as cryptocurrency. Mages donate mana daily for the chance of getting a part of a magic spell from the doge deity and gaemstonk deity. You can sell the spell or hoard it to keep use it to get the whole magic spell. The more mages that have spells from a deity, the more stonk power the deity gets, making the spells stronger. Yelling "To the moon" increases mana at the cost of hp.
Honestly the whole thing of makes chanting too the moon over and over again is kinda peak.
There's an alternate-history novel called The Years of Rice and Salt wherein those two commodities become the defining resource of wealth that shapes history into the modern world. So you got Salt and Rice as currencies
Also, Dune's "spice melange" is essentially a salt used for food that also has magical properties and defines who has power in the universe - control the Spice, control the transport (via spacecraft navigated by spice-given foresight of the safe path from A to B across the cosmos), control society. It really is a good example of using a "salt" in place of coinage.
I will have to check the book out I love a compelling historical look at currencies!
Gold may be a bad base, but it can come in handy.
Like a giants castle, water closet with solid gold fixtures.
Characters spent 5 or 6 sessions, tearing it out and lugging it back. lol.
Honestly that's pretty peak rolplaying. Start as heroes. End as feral racoons stripping the bones from someone's house
I like bags of holding because it means the player/players' wealth is entirely at the hands of a sentient banker they keep in their pocket they then must confy in and try to convince to give them the gold they need.
That's honestly the best argument for a bag of holding.
Hahaha I love this idea
That lends itself nicely to Bags of Hording: Bags of Holding with much larger internal dimensions, but which are far stingier. May occasionally cause dreams that are quite convincing about the investment value of gold...
I want to write a game where the currency is deliberately obtuse and impossibly unwieldy - i want antique sideboards to be the standard of wealth and the use of chests and containers as money rather than their contents.
Crypto for peasant!
@@DesksAndDorks 🤣🤣🤣
Rapa Nui is that you?
I’ll just copy paste what I wrote as a comment as a response to this since you might find it interesting:
There is a danish roleplaying game called Viking that I think nails it with trade. They have made a price grouping system with group 1 being items the cheapest items and each subsequent group representing a doubling in value. So a sword of standard quality might be a group 5 value - roughly the same value as a cow. A chainmail on the other hand might be a group 6 because of all the extra work that goes into making it and is thus valued roughly as 2 swords. Coins are also on the price table but since it is a barter economy and coins come from all over the place thoins are valued by what they are made off and how much they weigh.
Where the brilliance comes in is that when you trade with someone you make a contest of trade skill with modifiers based on how well aquainted you are with the kinds of items you are dealing with, the quality of the weapons in question, your local reputation and other stuff. If you for instance saved the chiefs daughter the day before everyone at the market might like you and you might get a bonus.
And based on you success compared to the other trader you will find that the price changes. If your skill rolls are equal, then the sword will cost you something of price class 5 or items adding up to class 5 - ie 2 class 4 items, or a class 4 item and 4 class 2 items will buy you the sword. But if you get a better or worse result than the other guy there is a table adding or subtracting from the price. So you might end up having to pay the trader an additional item 2 groups below if the rolls were such and such, or if your roll was best by so and so you might for instance get your price reduced with a discount of an item of 2 price groups below the sword - or the trader might throw in an item 2 groups below the sword to sweeten the deal. You can of course back out if you don’t want to pay that, but if you then come back later to trade again you will have some serious penalties on your rolls.
And based on the results these trades can be awesome for roleplaying. The trader might say that your cow is too scawny to trade for such a lovely sword. But since you won the drinking competition last night at the market and impressed everyone, he is willing to sell his very nice sword for just the cow and that there roll of fine cloth you also have brought. Or if you like he can take the cow off your hands and that lovely axe head you brought and then he will throw in a chicken and barrel of his homemade mead - but only because you seem like a nice guy. He might also accept the 6 small gold coins you brought, but only if his scales say they are as much worth as they appear or you might have to throw in something more.
And different places might have different price ranges. If you trade at a coastal town in norway the GM might rule that dried fish is at a discount and rule that it ranks 1 group lower than it otherwise would, or if the winter is hard, he might surcharge you for grain and put it 1 group higher due to extra demand. You could seriously make entire adventures about traveling around selling stuff at markets - in fact both the prewritten adventures are about going places to trade for stuff with various obstackles in the way.
Why would a society develop inconvenient currency? Is it like a Spartan thing where they want to avoid commercial activity?
> Be me
> Make a currency that works by using mana crystal
> Explain how it works to my players
> My players "That sounds too complicated, can we use gold instead?"
Thas sad.
@@DesksAndDorks Also, are you going to talk about "Credits" in sci fi RPGs in the future?
The main issue with currency is not what it is. It's how much is needed to buy something and how much they buying. As cool as these ideas are, they will lose their appeal when you need to make your 20th transaction and players will just want to spend what they need to with minimal fuss. If you can use your currency for more things like your salt idea, then thats what makes currency more interesting. At the end of the day, its not what it is that matters, its what you do with it
I get bigger numbers look cooler, but one issue I see is number inflation. Oh wow, this cool sword only costs 737,000 gold coins. What a steal!
Can we be a little more reasonable with pricing? Can we be more reasonable with health and damage?
As strange as a concept as it is, Spice from Spore being used as the main commodity for getting Sporebucks implies Spice could very well be used as a form of currency. It's how you regularly generate your money after all. I can easily imagine using vials of different values of Spice for trade. Sprinkle some on a scale to help gauge price and then trade from there. It's the first time I've considered the concept of a dust being used for money at any rate.
Spore bucks being used through spice is definitely a good version of this.
1) IRL rulers would mint their own currency. These coins very valuable because they were backed by the local king. The local merchants could not deny accepting them as payment.
2) IRL you did not "just" buy a home, especially in a city. You had to be accepted by the local administration or ruler. This is where favors, contacts and reputation came into play.
3) In a magical world magical items ordinary people could use like potions of healing would always carry value.
4) High quality items especially stuff women like would always be easily tradable (Rare fabrics, well crafted dresses, perfume, jewelry, etc). Just make sure the woman sees the product.
Consider: fantasy great-tree amber. Melt it down and mold it into rings that can be slotted onto a rope for storage. The reason the rings are Amber is cause it's easily ahaped and made out of a limited resource that has Fantasy Bullshit that prob makes it magical or some shit
Honestly based. I for one support our tree amber overlords.
Also leads to some 1000 year old wizard going on about recalling the time they found some fossilized mosquitos, and before long they were cloning DNA...
Can be both jewelry, have magical properties, and as currency. Shaping it into rings can be both a signature of skill (better craftsmanship = more worth, as it was in some Germanic cultures) and of course there is some pre-determined “melt” value. And rings would also require less of the actual material, signaling its worth. Very interesting, definitely stealing it.
The value of gold today is like $2,500.00 per ounce, and the value of silver today is like $30.00 and ounce. Gold is MUCH more valuable than food, water, and shelter. A gold coin would be worth like $800.00. You would not trade an $800.00 coin for a burger.
All the more reason to make cooler currency
@@DBeskar6605 lol ty!
Depends how hungry you are and how few other restaurants are around... Look up the prices in 1850's California during the Gold Rush.
For example,
"Edward Gould Buffum, author of Six Months in the Gold Mines (1850), described having a breakfast of bread, cheese, butter, sardines and two bottles of beer with a friend and receiving a bill for $43 - the equivalent today of about $1,200."
That quote was written a few years ago when gold was a bit cheaper. $43 in gold would be somewhere over two ounces, so well over $5K today.
@frontiervirtcharter I have never heard of that book and I'm adding it to the reading list.
@@DesksAndDorks Another book you might find interesting is David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" , lots of discussion on how economies worked before the invention of coinage
I’ve recently got into Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and a couple of interesting things they use for currency is Aqua Ghyranis which is water that comes from the Realm of Life, and this water is essentially a super-cure for any injury or affliction. Which is very valuable in a universe constantly at war. Another is something called glimmerings, which are stones that can give almost anyone glimpses of prophecy. In one book, someone even used shavings of glimmerings to give herself a prophetic edge in battle, but she started developing a dependency on it, like a drug. It was pretty cool.
*Gets to Currency 3*
*looks up "how to cast fireball as a 15th level spell"*
That's usually how I feel when someone brings up cryptocurrency
In the Magic as NFTs vein. In my setting, a small group of wizards have found a useless material, but incredibly magically taxing to make. They began their advocacy for this Coin by magically making tons of gold and screwing much of the kingdom and also its trade partners' economy, but rather than give in the kingdom instead moved to a fiat currency and gold is actually incredibly cheap now.
These videos gave me 2 ideas for RPG currencies.
One is magical debit cards. Everyone just carries a magical talisman that has glowing numbers indicating your current balance. If you want to pay someone, you whisper the number and your password into it and tap your talisman against theirs. A perfect solution to high-magic settings and parties that don't want to get bogged down in the details of inventory management.
The other is fairy souls. For some reason that most people don't question, everyone carries around little talismans that are all imbued with the soul of a fairy. They are lightweight, come in multiple denominations, universally accepted, and can't be counterfeited. It also gives you a great plot hook of exploring where exactly these fairy soul talismans are coming from (hint: it's probably really terrifying).
Fae souls once freed would be a PROOOBLEM
Two possible issues, could actually be hooks for expanding the world, one for each:
1) Debit card fraud. If they are magic, there will be a magical way to fraudulently raise the number which could eventually cause a return to physical currency due to the inflationary effects thereof. Could lead to interesting possibilities in the regulation of wizardry instead, where each wizard is forced to register and so on. Could be
2) How does one divide a soul? I also don't see why every fairy soul would be equivalent in value to one another. Those are two of the basic qualifications for a currency, the third being portability. So I just would like to hear that explained a little more. Also seems to lean towards a metaphysic where the soul of the most heinous murderer is worth the exact same as that of the most virtuous, charitable person.
I'm reminded of people having daemons in the His Dark Materials universe. They're just born with it.
That awkward moment when a fae ends up on the receiving end of their own shenanigans and ends up having to give a metric ton of souls to a particularly cunning individual named Fred Araell...
You know, I really hate it when my comments are deleted afterward and I only figure out because someone responded to something I responded to, but my comment does not exist there any longer
Personally I do like the idea of a storage skill being a rare ability that is very sought after for merchantile purposes, and potentially feared for use by thieves.
A single bag of holding or similar effect in a low fantasy world would give rise to the most feared theives guild ever
This is actually played with in Kagurabachi. A major villain has a magical ability that lets them store anything into a pocket dimension, and they used the ability as a storehouse for their underground auction.
Cool video, I would also add spices, and for a more mature group, intoxicants power sources, like warpstone for Warhammer.
Warpstone definitely acts the same way. Shout out to it's use in Mordheim!
@@DesksAndDorks all im saying is Britain invaded over half the world to improve their food.
@jaykaye594 as the joke goes: the empire conquered half the world for spices and proceeded not to use a single one.
@@DesksAndDorks also Dune uses exactly this system
Lol the spice is essential for travel
I love the idea of something like Dust of Deliciousness, etc being used as both currency and culinary seasoning. As for the bag that shall not be named, I almost always hold off on these until very late game, when it just makes more sense to have access to such a powerful item, and there are bigger fish to fry than inventory challenges.
I have never in my life heard salt called the dust of deliciousness and I shall forever be using that now.
@@DesksAndDorksDust of Deliciousness is a magic item from Critical Role, also a great name for salt lol
Here are my opinions on the currencies you suggested:
1. The salt idea sounds cool and is balanced and thought out. Just have to set its value, (Set the prices of items. Eg. Bread = 1g.) or be a bit dynamic and go with the flow.
2. The tiny god shrines would be interesting as a secondary barter system, but it is TOO dynamic for it to be the primary. Though it would be really amazing if somehow it was executed well as a primary.
3. Ironically, I think this would work, however, it is not thought out enough to be evaluated in its current state. Someone needs to flesh it out and how it works a little more. Maybe the gods give out the, 'NFT's?
4. Don't take this too seriously, but a little crazy idea I came up with, not sure if it's good: Points that you trade through minds telekinetically. With the points being inborn, (causing inflation) and/or given out by the gods. It would be a bit of a lazy way though.
I'm sorry but like. How am I not going to take that seriously that last idea is really cool.
Salt is equated to money through via Latin word "salarium" - so I don't see why salt could not be a good analog or substitute for currency in a fantasy setting. :)
Ty! It's actually another of the reasons I really liked salt as a currency.
Bone. I love bones as a currency. They are only made by biological creatures; magical summoned ones just turn to vapor once they pass away. Normal bone is probably quite worthless. People are not getting rich killing rats or wolves, but let's get boring and just say dragon bone.
Say the world has all kinds of dragons but solo slaying one is very hard all you need to do is find out what dragon bone does and now it is currency. I have had evil creatures generate shadow plasma as skeletons and they would let non-magic beings cast spells and the plasma would turn to vapor. People just often need the stuff it was magic fuel, you could use it to power things I love it.
Another is a form of glass in the same universe, the glass is made of an anti-magic dust and you heat it and it becomes a super powerful glass that can make magic circuits and runes. It also burns magic users but lets the spells be absurdly powerful. This dust is another very valuable currency. Many mages will melt the dust into the glass and then forge something over the glass just so the resource is more scarce, they have no intent of using it they just want it gone.
If I do another follow up video I'd love to include this as a currency because that's absolutely RAW as a concept
16:30 I'd like a loaf of bread, that'll be one low tier god...? Wait....Did you basically suggest Pokémon as currency....
Yup pretty much!
My homebrew pirate empire uses a banking system
A sci-fi approach to the problem of magic (replicators) is Star Trek’s latinum which they arbitrarily decided was essentially the only thing that cannot be reproduced artificially - that always felt unsatisfying to me, but the idea of a liquid currency is pretty cool, so it had that going for it
Yeah matter replication in sci fi is a huge issue with the genre.
@@DesksAndDorksand is a very old one. “Venus equilateral” invented one and then had to invent a secure currency before the economy collapsed.
It's so interesting because if it happened in real life we would rejoice but in fiction scarcity creates major issues/conflict so we make a new currency
@@DesksAndDorks Conflict and issues that are interesting but no one wants to write about them
There have been some cool stories written about it. I liked the pendulum wars which was over water rights and waters impact on the economy
I always enjoyed the Dragonlance setting. It was post apocolyptic, but enough time had passed that currency had become standardized again. Except steel was the main currency for its utility in a time where technology had broken down. Its still heldover after nations had reformed.
Theres a fun dungeon crawl meta joke where the heros find the tomb of a legendary Elven king, and bars of gold, and they leave it since its heavy and worthless.
Looooooool yhats pretty great tbh
I personally am a sucker for food as currency, weather it be in general or just one really important food like rice.
Its definitely a bit situational, but it can lead to some fun dynamics.
It is pretty awesome. It also works in other settings too (wheat being currency in pre-mint Babylon for example)
Rice (in a volume measurement called koku) was a measure of wealth in Japan throughout most of its history
By the way i love the ways this subject is so emotive that it brings out not just debate but also argument (geeks chosing their hills to die on).
Bravo Voice Over Kyle - you rock because you bring all those boys to your yard with your content of a flavoursome dairy based beverage.
I'm going to screenshot that because I adore it. Bring on the beverages!
just started bouncing through your videos after seeing your big vid on Low Fantasy and I gotta say this is so far my favorite; cuz up to now currency was something I was just ignoring in my own pair of ttrpgs I'm working on, at least one of which I'm now obsessed with the thought of salt as the defacto tender. As for the other one, I think I actually like the thought of livestock or even game animals and their byproducts as currency for a couple reasons. It makes the players' acquisition of wealth feel very tangible in an OSR kinda way, where more lengthy excursions or errands will tax the players by having them literally eat their money circumstances depending, and the bigger the players get in the world, the more land and servants they'll need to help manage their wealth. It also lends very well to the use of blood magic in a game where hp/ritual sacrifice can be used to achieve the DC on a spell check, and can lead to very organic ways of in-world conversion rates that don't take a genius to think of. Sure those two dozen cows you brought along can graze just fine and milk plenty, but you better find a beef-loving fisherman to trade em now cuz the next four towns we have to go through are on a bare coast region that only accepts dried eels as payment. or even something as simple as a halfling/gnome merchant who won't accept payment in any animals bigger than a pony
Really glad you're enjoying it and the content! The cattle currency idea is an awesome one (and it's why I went back and made the edit to the video)
Thanks for giving this video some love it's one I feel like gets glossed over in our work.
@DesksAndDorks for sure! Your videos are great at giving food for thought and this and the first gold video especially point out some shortcomings of currency in games that I didn't even realize I had a problem with
Well the support is much appreciated man!
Look into Max Gladstones book series “Craft Sequence”. In his books currency is small contracts using parts of your soul. Magic is just a complicated system of contracts with gods and each other to bring about an effect out change. In his world the Gods were defeated by the mages and turned into soul batteries to power commerce and civilizations advances.
Oooooooh that is a really cool system!
Also reminds me if the God binder from DIE
Great series and both the currency and magic are a deep part rather than flavouring with regards to worldbuilding.
One setting I made up long ago. A planet shattered by some cataclysm into floating islands. It is unable to sustain atmosphere, so air becomes very rare, especially in form suitable for breathing. So it becomes currency to trade for other goods. And, unlike any other currency, people cannot survive without constantly having stable income of it.
That is awesome and it would make places that offer free air big economic hubs
The best currency I've ever heard of comes from a chinese light novel. Im gonna use Western fantasy terms to describe it for simplicity. Basically, the currency was mana stones. They are all the same size and can restore a fixed amount of mana. You can buy things with them of course, and they are also used to break your level cap. While they are essentially an infinite resource, they get used up at a rate that offsets it.
It's been cool to see how often mana stones or mana crystals come up in currency conversation.
For my current fantasy setting, which is fiction + TTRPG, what I went with was bills in various denominations up to 1,000. They're light and easy to hide.
From that point up to 50,000, again in denominations, stamped coins are used. Larger ones for more value.
After that, there's bullion for large amounts of money in metals, and promissory notes for lighter loads.
That feels very much like the early age of exploration and makes a ton of sense!
12:35 Hell yeah! Shadow Of The Demon Lord is badass!
Still one of my all time favorites!
It is utterly brilliant! The way Rob Schwalb has made a simpler system that is still pretty close to the most commonly known 5e mechanics AND made lore that draws from a lot of real world stuff and recombines it in such clever ways is great.
I also love me dome rpg charts and there are lots of those.
Love Shadow of the Demon Lord!!
Dozens of us!
Re magical salt currency: Using salt to protect against or banish ghosts and other undead is a pretty common element of folklore, and would give it huge utility in a setting during/after a magical apocalypse (like Earthdawn, even though it doesn't work there). It may be the only way non-wizards have to defend themselves when traveling.
Also, salt was not commonly worth its weight in gold, or even silver. It is way too cheap to make when near the sea, and otherwise easier and more abundant to mine and refine than any metal. The only way I can believe that anecdote about Mansa Musa is if he wanted to buy the whole salt supply of that place (or at least way more than anyone wanted to sell) and didn't care what it costs.
In a magic setting, one of the most direct currencies would undoubtedly be time. For example, if someone does work for you, you would give them some amount of your life in hours, cutting short your life by that amount of time and extending the life of the worker by that amount. This has the interesting side effect of making those who constantly work essentially immortal, while those who only spend their time live quite short lives.
Honestly undead bankers who act as time keepers would be terrifying and also somehow in keeping with a lot of modern banking practices.
You have got to watch the movie "In Time"
@Xeridanus I've seen it! It was the first thing I thought of actually when this comment popped up. Cillian Murphy is great in it as always
Very funny! Nobody (except maybe someone desperate or immortal, so frankly those that either might die if they don't bribe someone with a little extra time or those who have an infinite amount) would do that, no, not even a rich person! Hell, this would at best lead to people killing others to gain their time and criminals being killed to give time to a lord or a king or higher clergy etc.!
At its heart currency is about survival. We earn money to afford resources to keep us alive: food, water, clothing and shelter, etc. Then we use excess for luxuries. So why not cut out the middle section? The currency is life. At least it's your natural lifespan. You want to buy something from someone you give them an hour or so of time (Equivalent to how long you would have had to work for it). Of course, many die before their natural time from events like violent death, disease, etc. It hangs around after allowing others to take it. If that time goes back in a body by accident or intention you get undead. A dragon's hoard is literally in the lives it has taken and added to its own. The rich are basically immortal while the poor die young.
It could be passed through magic or possibly bloodletting (making sacrificial rituals straight up transactions). And if you're using it for D&D then consumable cost spells like resurrecting the dead cost years of life. And deals with devils become more tempting when they can give you life or renewed youth to enjoy a long life.
There would be enough excess life to serve as a currency because hardly anyone actually lives to their full natural lifespan with all the dangers of a fantasy world, even with plenty of laws in place. And do you really want to hold onto that 200 year lifespan you've built up when aging hasn't stopped? Morticians would be the ultimate tax collectors, conveniently also protecting against undead rising by harvesting that life before the body is cold.
You need to watch "In Time"
@@Xeridanus I think I do. Thanks for the movie recommendation.
Very much a schlocky product of the mid 2000s but the premise is great and Cillian Murphy plays am excellent antagonist
Gold/coins/credits still remain the most straight foward and easy method to deal with currency in games, what i do is i tend to spice some regions with their local currencies, there was one setting where the main currencies were cocoa beans, maize and peppers, the reason they used that as currency is because their god lived among them and he liked those three ingredients for his food, so people would exchange them for good fortune or small blessings from their god. Not only that but being food items they all had a shelf life and could be consumed so that regulated inflation to a degree.
Another region filled with mechanists and artificers used aether as a currency which is basically pure magic in gas form (could also be turned to liquid form by processing it) and because almost everything in their setting used aether to work, like their automatons, vehicles, furnaces, etc it was both a currency and useable material. Only specialized machines could harvest aether from the enviroment at a limited rate as such despite aether being harvested daily, its use in every day life and as a currency kept it a desireable material to have.
As much as I like the gods idea, I really don't like that it would necessitate a barter economy.
Nice video, thought provoking for sure
Let us know when the Non Fungible Treasures adventure is released
That is an INCREDIBLE title
The game Caves of Qud uses water measured in drams as currency which leads to more of a barter system because to save weight you also carry trade goods that have set prices unaffected by your ego stat
You're not the first person to bring up Caves of Qud which means I probably need to check it out!
I prefer favor as a currency. If the words are actually binding, it creates a more medieval and magic vibe imo. Or use magic as currency: a major favor to a Storm trades you twelve lightening spell on command. Not fungible, or fungible in some cases.
Then you can enslave some magical beings like a goblin to squeeze out every tricks and pranks and labour out of it. It will act like an unsee servant, except very much visible and physical.
I enjoy it as well and it's why I use it a lot but I mentioned it in our precious video so I didn't want to bring it up here
Rewatching this video and its great. Inspired me to change my game system's currency from a generic minted coin to magical crystals of divine power, and it fits so much better in my setting. Thanks for the video!
One thing I am currently considering for my fantasy setting is chips. Not fried starches, but electronics. See, this setting is post apocalyptic, collapsing because of inter dimensional nonsense being exploited for power generation. The supply chains that make these technologies possible is no longer around, and so computer chips are a limited resource, intensely valuable to those who still know how to use them, and for those who don’t can still appreciate that it’s partially made of gold, and impossible to counterfeit at the current achievable level of technology.
For a Sci fi setting I think that'd be a great plan! It's also true to life (there were multiple chip shortages during early 2020 that hamstring a few indistries
I chose the exact same thing for my post apocalypse game.
For RPG that is based around earth like backdrop, gold and silver make perfect sense, it's good anytime really for this backdrop, there's additional currency depending on the current age in the backdrop, spices for medieval and exploration age, industrial age technologies for industry age, and in our current era is oil and high tech technologies, for future can diverge into two path, military tech (if this is so, were F and a dominant power will rise to create one single entity to unite earth, all dissenter will die to this faction lol, even this united earth will still have faction warfare, and this is the people buying this military tech) or we go for sustainability and green tech... For fantasy world, crystal that provide magical enchantment and fantasy metal like mithril and adamantium would function as additional currency...
Magic crystals would be a good answer to this as well. Even in low fantasy settings particularly in very backwater places I do think bartering does work quite well and adds a nice texture to the game world.
A mana crystal currency sounds neat, where wizards can only make so many a day. Also they're like ammo if you plan on playing a wizard cause every casting you do spends money.
The NFT thing sounds neat, but a wizard's level to bring a picture to life would have to be considered, and also how common wizards are I guess...
Yes yes yes to this.
I came here to say this. It's the fantasy equivalent of how ammo is used for currency in post apocalyptic games like the Metro series or Mutant Year Zero. I've always loved how it plays out because not only does it make "money" less the product of an abstract exercise in practicing valuation, but it incentivizes players to think differently about how they kit themselves out and engage the enemy; "Can I afford to take this shot and miss?"
But I think it has a lot of unexplored potential for use in a fantasy setting, especially based on how you decide the "mana crystals" might be generated. Is it just a day's worth of focus/energy from a gifted individual? Is it the proper combination or processing of supplies scarce to some places? Is it the soul of an orphan child?
If you like Mana currency you'll love the Stormlight archive
This sounds like something I brought up in, I think, the earlier video. My idea was taking inspiration from The Legend of Zelda, that rupees could be found on defeated monsters or dungeons.
My idea of them is they can enchant an item or refill an enchantment. Keeping the currency in check is the crystals will degrade outside of proper containment, so an investment in a proper wallet can be upgrades. Higher quality wallets fuse the lesser quality crystals into higher levels so they can carry more. And simple tools can break them into smaller.
Sounds complicated, but in practice people/players can have access to a universal currency that can avoid needing to be actively converted into larger or smaller denominatios. But also have an upper limit, that also could be spent on to be increased within reason.
Hello Desks & Dorks, I just found your channel and I'm glad I did. YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT ABOUT GOLD CURRENCY BEING NONSENSE!! I've been playing D&D and other RPGs since the 80s and, not to "date" myself, but I'm pretty "old school" where RPGs are concerned and it has ALWAYS bugged me why on earth you'd pay "three gp" for a backpack, "two gp" for a steel dagger, etc. First, you're 100% correct (I've seen both of your recent videos on this topic) about that much gold destabilizes a medieval-centric economy. Am I being pedantic? Don't care. I want believable immersion, verisimilitude, in my games and this ain't it. In modern terms, if we accept the D&D guideline that 3 coins of any type weigh about 1 ounce, then consider that 1 ounce of gold (at today's price) is worth a little over $2,700 dollars. I'M NOT GIVING YOU $2,700 DOLLARS FOR A BACKPACK, and assuming that 1 ounce of pure gold really is only worth the price of a backpack, then my sense of realism/verisimilitude is long gone. Further: if gold is that devalued in D&D, why the hell do copper & silver pieces exist at all? Old 1e era adventure modules would often tell you just how many thousands, or tens of thousands, of copper pieces were in a monster's hoard. Why? How many adventurers are going to weigh themselves down with copper pieces when the more valuable coins are also present? And don't get me started on that "copper pieces are the peasant's currency, silver pieces are the middle class/tradesman's currency, and gold pieces are the nobility's currency" bullcrap. This again wrecks realism & makes no sense. I ended up entirely re-working the D&D PHB equipment list to make a copper piece actually worth something: you pay for mugs of beer, food rations, a pair of socks, etc. with it, and silver coins are valuable and well guarded. (I reserve electrum as a curious, ancient currency only found in lost, ancient ruins from past civilizations and such, but it is still quite valuable.) Finding a cache of pure, solid gold in any form, even a small one, should take your breath away...not cause you to just shrug & write it down on your character sheet. And yes, you are 100% correct about bags of holding. I don't "eschew" them, but they ARE a too-convenient method to waive the encumbrance rules if the DM/GM is enforcing the "gold is freaking HEAVY" rule. (Sorry for the long rant; you really touched a nerve with me. Thank you.)
What most people fail to understand is that all forms of currency need someone as a contrlling authority, whether that be a bank, an overlord, ruler or even the (breaks fourth wall) GM themselves... The use of any kind of token based currency is based upon it being impossible to lug everythhing around so small and usually shiny must be somewhat a winning formula. But unless it is either a universal weight or minting any tokens or coins are subject to exchange values and then we are playing a different game called accountancy and that is no fun even for accountants (don't listen when they say its sexy, all accountants are liars and mostly they lie to themselves).
So what you're saying is we need a salt authority
@@DesksAndDorks i 100% do think we need a Salt council
Create a mana based economy where mana is required to cast spells. Everyone can manufacture it but it's only nations that can manufacture it in large quantities to keep society running and fuel industry. mana can either be used to cast spells or traded for mana dollars which is used as normal currency.
Spells users can cast all day long as long as they have mana (are rich) but the cost for an additional spell beyond that allowed for their level goes up with each spell.
So the only time you'll ever see inflation is if everyone stops using magic or whenever more efficient use or creation of mana is discovered, which can be the basis of quests and stories due to how powerful/destabilizing it is.
To add to this personal consequences and danger when over using magic would also create additional checks
Salary means salt ration.
Here in Arkane City, we use spell slots as currency.
Would be pretty interesting. Especially if there are people stockpiling spell slots used for currency.
In standard economic theory, there are several criteria to use in evaluating the possibility of any good being used as a currency. These criteria are due to rhe currency's use in three functions: as a store of value, as a unit of account, and as a medium of exchange. These criteria include portability, as you mentioned, but also fungibility, divisibility, durability, uniformity. It must also be limited in supply. You also mentioned it must be universally used, which is the another standard of universal acceptance within a given area.
Salt does acceptably on these criteria, although it has some issues as there are many different types of salt. One pound of salt is, therefore, not exactly equivalent to another pound of salt gathered elsewhere with different techniques.
Totems of gods, however, become more of a barter item than a currency. That's fine, and it does add interesting opportunities for roleplaying, but it is not a currency but a series of items. These totems are non-fungible, we can call them non-fungible totems, or NFTs for short.
Why would an innkeeper care about a pendent that conveys a smell of strawberries? Unless he finds someone who very much desires one, that pendent is effectively useless to him. Additionally, how might one divide up the aforementioned strawberry pendent into smaller denominations? In the case of gold, you can just melt them down and cast them into smaller pieces, or melt them and form them into bars. This is because of the substance's uniformity, which allows a bar of gold in one place to be both the same as another bar of gold else where, either of which are divisible into smaller portions of gold. Salt is similar in that you can fairly easily divide it, but has the issue of different types as mentioned earlier.
Tl;dr you didn't account for the basic functions and subsequent requirements of a currency, and inadvertently reinvented NFTs
My fantasy setting uses silver as the primary currency across the world and copper in some niche cases when there is a fraction of a silver coin, with various nations minting electrum (because they can adjust the blend to squeeze out profit) coins for larger purchases. Gold is mostly used for bulk value trading only. Finally some trade cities on borders impose using their rune-stamped wood slats (they aren't actually magic, but the layman doesn't know there isn't a spell on them) as notes to ensure the city makes fractions on the coin using money changers and to ensure they control how much money flows through the city. Gems are useful in certain cases because most people can't tell the value of a gem at a glance.
For the most part players just track their wealth in silver, but half the group like keeping a list of all the various coins, gems, jewlery, and trinkets they collect.
That does also work for the system!
Magic as currency! Yeah, I know it's been done a million times and suggested more than that. But what if the magic was toxic when it builds up? As it gets used, it converts to a highly unstable form that has to be disposed of. Production isn't easy with generators constantly needing maintenance or worse, causing industrial accidents that make Chernobyl look like spilt milk. That's what happened to the first reactor my dwarves built. Wiped out their capital and several nearby cities. Now mutants constantly assault the few remaining strongholds while resources run thin. They decide to open up to the surface for the first time since the start of the dragon wars.
Yes yes yes. Toxic magic for freaking sure would be such a cool system
Character uses magic to create salt then uses salt to enhance their magic to make more salt .
So probably should have been more clear in the vid but salt is technically magic / fae resistant.
But you know what you could just food wars it and make infini-salt. However, it could be cool for their to be a black market of fake salt.
What's being described in the salt section is very similar to chalk in the Cloud Empress setting! I think it's really cool
I'm not familiar with that one I'll have to check it out!
An idea I never got around to developing to any real appreciable degree was that precious metals and gemstones are considered 'precious' because they could store magic in a world where magic was otherwise instantaneous; you do spell and spell immediately happens. Thus, gold might store the "most" magic (whatever arbitrary amount that is; perhaps enough to summon the rains during a drought), but that made it far too precious a resource to use as currency save as a flex.
You then have silver, copper, various alloys like bronze, rubies, sapphires, etc, each that could store a certain amount and favoring a certain type of magic...
...and then iron is refined and, eventually, steel. This brings in a metal that is neither precious nor stores magic; on the contrary, it disrupts and "dispells' magic. And boom; I have either the weapon of choice for an existential threat (a horde of iron/steel armed barbarians) OR I have the "maguffin" for the protagonists to use against a corrupt world (a steel sword forged long ago and hidden away for its horrific implications).
Armaments-of-Legacy 5e verstion of the book you were talking about in the last video on the DM's Guild
You could make healing itself into a currency, where there is some object, piece of a monster, or bit of magic that can fight off an infection (antibiotics lol), close wounds, regain blood, or maybe particularly powerful/valuable ones could extend a dying person's life by a full day. To me its awesome to think about what such a world would be like - where kings consume large amounts of currency every day to remain alive and in power, and wars are exorbitantly expensive in every sense of the idea. It doesn't prevent someone from dying a violent and near instant death of course, because the have to live long enough to use the currency to heal/extend their life, but I wonder how this would change player and npc behavior.
Now we're cooking! That's a really interesting idea because it also changes how society works healers/church officials surgeons/ would have so much authority in this world and it would be interesting for that to play out.
Hello, I really appreciate your thoughts on your previous video on gold (As a currency in the fantasy setting) as well as the realistic/historic explanations behind it. I currently ("A DM") haven't had much time playing the TTRPG's. But I have been fascinated by the world creation and exploration of the D&D (TTRPG) Multiverse. (Lots of dense material to be unraveled there, but I'm happy to see the TTRPG Community aways has more info/facts to be discussed.)
What is the reasoning behind the prerequisite for salt currency on a arid world? Except for the the North African salt trade? People all over the world were trading in salt. In north germany for example the city of Lüneburg got very rich on salt trade during the middle age. They were boiling it out of a salty spring in the region.
Another idea for currency I really liked comes from the game Caves of Qud. They use water to pay for goods, because far into the future most of the water is either politer or salty.
The water currency in qud was awesome
As for the pre-requisite, it's because most of the examples I studied or was familiar with were from that time period or section of the world.
it reminds me of games like metro where the verry bullets you use in your guns are the currency or souls games where souls are both currency and your xp and you get to choose how you want to spend it
Metro mentioned. Neurons activated
Dork, I'd like o sugg3st you look on Stormlight Archive's currency. In those books, they use gemstones as currencies. Those gemstones can hold an amount of magic potential energy inside of them. So magic users can suck up the energy of those gems to power up their powers, vut common folk use them both as currency as light sources inside their homes and castles. They have three sized coind for each of the 10 gemstones, with diamond being the least valeable, and emerald being the most valuable (since those stones can be used to turn rocks into food), and many gems have the same value as the others ,i think this may depend on the availability of those gems in a given region
You are not the first to suggest this! Although after so so many suggestions I probably need to just buckle down and read it.
@DesksAndDorks it's just 5 books and about 6000 pages.... but you probably may be able to find some videos or Fandom pages explaining how the currency works
In my ttrpg dragons crashed the economy by closing the market with gold and silver. Took hundreds of years of land-for-gold buybacks to absorb it into the treasury
That feels accurate to how real life economic issues work!
I think the book series Dune, its use of Spice, is a pretty good example of this.
10000 percent agree!
There's a video game that has a bazaar area where the hero uses trade items to make purchases.
Maybe path of exile? I remember a similar market but it's been anhot minute since I've played?
@@DesksAndDorks I remember the name, just offering an example. The reality is, though, all kingdoms, republics, empires, and others, will have a currency that is theirs alone. The adventurer must find a way to make it portable. Gems are a common idea, trade notes are also good, and historically accurate. The vikings used something called "Hack" silver, where the amounts were literally hacked off and weighed.
I'm familiar with hack silver (former history grad here) just curious about the game!
@@DesksAndDorksThe game was "The secret of evermore", the bazaars was a mini-game in it.
@user-knightoftherealms I shall add it to the collection of games to try!
The puns are leeking and the script is corny. Lettuce carry on with the discussion.
I'm sorry I shall to turnip the quality
It really seems like you just made the "gold" magically useful and changed the name. 😅
In case i missed it what are your thoughts on the culture and use of spheres in the Stormlight archive
I can't speak on it as I haven't read the books
But it sounds neat!
@@DesksAndDorks so they use gemstones in glass balls the type of stone denotes the currency. However they have replicators* to know a gemstone is natural traders normally only accept spheres that are currently charged with Stormlight as fake stones will have imperfections in the crystal that make them less able to hold onto Stormlight for anywhere near as long as natural gemstones that's how the replicator problem is solved.
Stormlight is very very very very basically the mana in the setting
@Buffaloguy1991 oh that's a really cool system!
I say there are silver pieces & gold pieces. Silver pieces often get chopped into four pieces, but in treasure they just get lumped together.
so if we don't want to use water buffalo's what about american buffalo's they are much tougher? 🙂
A little tougher to Wrangle together but I mean hey it's still free cureency!
Om I'd love an RPG about runaway banks and stuff. I call this game: Fantasy Book Keeping. I'm sure it's gonna be really popular!
In my games I run a base 100 coin conversion rather than the standard base 10 coin conversion. So 100cp = 1sp, 100sp = 1 gp, 100gp = 1pp
Salt as currency? And the first time a mage with a water creating spell can wipe out entire economies.
I love the ideas in this comment section. I will be using these ideas for sure xd
Please! That's what they're there for!
Heat can be a currancy in a nuclear winter setup, where 99% of earth suface is at sub zero. Heat can be trade in the form of chamical that their reaction produce heat and also be harvest by having a life being hugging a cooling pipe, transferring the body heat to the pipe and the content inside. It would highly likely to be slaves who hugs the pipe and the wealths who enjoy it.
Cities and fortries built around volcanos and nuclear power plants were the most common ways of surviving, yet coal mines and oil wells dust the field, connecting those powerful, yet scarce heat giants.
HOLY HECK YEAH THATS A GREAT CALL
Also very much like frost punk!
I usually just do the silver standard 100 silver is 1 gold and 80 copper is 1 silver, a peasant per year would make about 8-10 silver while an aristocrat might make 1 gold.
I would LOVE to pull from the Witcher and make every country use a different currency but then everyone would carry a hundred coins from each nation and that would be heavy.
I'm gonna turn you into a currency bub.
From my understanding I'm already being traded as a currency in Micronesia.
Subscribed and commented for the algorithm!
Much appreciated my friend!
A Tama-God-Chi?
A tamagachi! They were tiny little electronic pendents with little video game pets that kids had in the 90s. They were required care to keep "alive and were often traded for things by kids.
@@DesksAndDorks I know what they are, I was a kid in the 90's. Just doing a pun.
@JorneDeSmedt bro I am so dumb I totally misread your comment. That's an A + pun I ruined
for the algorithm, cheers
Thank you for the algorithm gods.
I just barter. Simply use the items value from the book, and add up items that equal that value to trade for.
Hallo? Customer service? I'd like to lodge a complaint against the frankly offensive amount of unnecessary bread puns. Yes, I'll hold.
Thank you for calling upper crust conflict management.
We hope to make your transition as smooth as butter.
Would you like to
A. Request information on our live and let rye plan for pun management.
B. Submit an achy bakery heart complaint for emotional distress caused by puns.
C. Speak to a representative?
@@DesksAndDorks *Sound of distant, pain-ed spluttering*
Multi-lingual pun detected you've been bumped up in the queue.
I think this whole thing is based on some weird misunderstanding of how coins worked historically.
The basic coin in medieval times, worth a daily wage of a manual worker, was HALF the weight of a 1 cent coin. Yeah turns out people didn't irrationally use unwieldy coins it's just that mainstream fantasy goes for cool visuals over any logic.
Meanwhile you suggest just casually using scales, which were some of least used and least trusted instruments historically because they require precise manufacturing and can be falsified.
Your suggestions really boil down to gimmicks which you either base the whole campaign around or they're cool first 2 times that they're used and then either people have better things to worry about or get annoyed at the inconvenience.
Maybe cool as a way to diversify rewards, but replacing normal currency entirely? IMO trash advice that sounds cool at first and then doesn't work in an actual game.
Bro is trying to convince me to make banking a game mechanic.
Adjusts monocle...yes.
@DesksAndDorks Well, my next game is a post-apocalyptic urban fantasy. So in universe, digital currency would exist.
@yusharider so......crypto currency which you could do some cool stuff with. Or you can assign values to commodities *water, bullets, medicine etc.
@DesksAndDorks My idea was more sort of company credit system that was set up by organizations who create and manage adventurers in the setting. It works on a sort of commission basis for players and effectively became so synonymous in large settlements that everyone in the cities use it. (Both physically and digitally, but mostly the latter)
It could be interesting and has serious potential imo. The parties actions could effect the economy mg4/cruelty squad style. They could loose their bank accounts after passing off the wrong people. And assuming it didn't annoy ppl too much, I could make taxes a thing 😈
Oh man a Cruelty squad reference? In my comment section? Let's goooo
Didn't Roman solders get paid in salt and that's where we get the word salary from.
You are correct sir!
Magic nfts? Scrolls with gambling and speculation effects that draw from the same well maybe?
Honestly wizard gambling sounds amazing.
Re: Salt, any setting where mages can fabricate or duplicate gold, making gold problematic, they would be able to do the same with salt. If you are just going to declare salt can’t be magically created, then you could do the same with gold. It’s arbitrary.
I think a good example of fantasy currencies is in Exalted. You have Jade, which as one of the 5 Magical Materials cannot be magically created by mortals. You have Jade Scrip, paper money based on Jade, where the smallest unit of value is the Koku, the wages of a rice farmer.
And then you have Silver, which is an up and coming currency trying to supplant Jade, but it runs the risk of being magically created and therefore has instability and inflationary problems and a lot of people don’t trust it.
Also re: explain stonks to a medieval peasant:
*stares in Dutch Tulip markets*
@thomastrinkle2294 bro I did not even THINK about the tulip markets. That is such a good point.
@ there’s a couple other medieval/early modern examples too. Saffron and other spices had big speculative bubbles that involved even commoners getting in on the action.
Saffron I did think about but it (and a lot of spices in general) had routinely commanded a lot of value. Also food taste good make peasant happy.
Also this is my economist nerd side coming out, but one of the best portrayals of fantasy currency has to be Spice and Wolf. I was absolutely enraptured by an anime about a merchant trying to maximize the amount of coins he had of a specific type before those coins were taken out of circulation to be replaced by a new coin.
I honestly don't follow how being able to cast spells renders coin currency pointless. I mean plenty of summoning spells effectively have a gold cost.
Because magic allows so many ways to destroy large amounts of coin, causing deflation or create massive amounts leading to Weimar Republic levels of inflation.
Essentially what highlorddarkstar pointed out. Magic alters reality so we need currency that is magic resistant to magic or otherwise unable to be affected by it.
@@DesksAndDorks I don't think there are spells in D&D, or any fantasy RPG for that matter, specifically that do anything like that though. I think you'd need to just assume that some homebrew magic system would emerge where mages would wantonly destroy currency and I'm not sure what the motivation for that would be.
The other commenter claims there are existing ways to simply "destroy large amounts of coin" with spells, but I don't know of any spells that do that. Spells consume certain specific components, like gem dust, but you don't literally take actual gold and destroy it to cast spells.
@ArvelDreth so just extapolating on the basics the motivation is wealth and more of it. Wish, miracle, and transmute metal immediately come to mind for dnd and other systems for sure have them. Ultimately, it's just to get us thinking about more interesting currency
@@highlorddarkstar could you give specific examples of spells that actually destroy coins?
The game Kingdom has a great currency system
What's the currency? I haven't played it so I'm curious
Eh, coins still handle the inflation problem best for games.
I just think we can make things a little more interesting!
Assuming Mensa Musa really did massively overpay for salt, I don't see how that's relevant.
A big problem with salt as currency is that it's not worth the same everywhere. It's going to be expensive in the middle of a desert, or really any landlocked area, and really cheap near the ocean where it's easy to collect. This isn't a problem for the people actually living in that society, of course. They each know how expensive salt is where they live. But it's going to be really confusing when you're designing the setting, and prices will vary dramatically based on the location of the city, not because things are actually more expensive, but simply because salt is cheaper.
Gems also aren't a good currency because they're not fungible. You'd have to have someone appraising each individual gem whenever you buy stuff. Unless it's standardized somehow. Maybe they don't care about purity and size and all that, and just go by weight.
Magic isn't all that different from technology. It could make a certain kind of currency useless, but it doesn't necessarily. You should definitely consider the existence of magic when making currency, and realize that anything that someone could easily counterfeit with magic wouldn't be useful currency, and you could use something related to magic for currency (for example, gems as currency makes a lot more sense in D&D, where they're used for a lot of spells so their value doesn't depend on how pretty that particular stone is, but only how magically useful it is), but it doesn't have to be related.
I think one thing that might be useful is just having some super simple currency that you use for everything, except that the characters don't actually use it. It's just an abstraction. Characters might have to worry about non-decimal currency and exchange rates and making change, but that can be abstracted for the players.
How about that. I have two huge bags of salt in the cupboard. Like not just reg size but ... huge one's. Like at least a small pillow each. Slightly larger than a banana. Idk, it can't make this more accurate, sorry. I've also got pepper btw, and it's way more expensive than salt where I live...
This probably sounds over used or dumb but souls, blood, runes of power, secret skills. Not perfect currency. Clearly taken straight from FromSoftware games. But depending on you're world these are universal. All of these can a kind of currency used beyond the mortal realm. It's wanted by any who seek power or maybe a kind of pleasure. Very hard to obtain. But in a apocalyptic event we know how valuable these are based on how we seen other games use them.
I have this here huge cucumber. Gonna put in muh bag of hodling! Also this is where I put all my bitcoins!!!
Lol it's a dnd crypto wallet
@@DesksAndDorks Yeah I umm use it to make qubit coins... Like... They're quantum computer secure and stuff. Plus the bag o holding will bite you if you try to snatch it. Frankly, I can't get to the coins myself, cuz that bag ain't tame yet!
Walk me through this please: how does being able to shoot fire from your face make gold an unworkable currency, but doesn't do the same to salt? Gold was the currency of the US up into the 1970s. The invention of transcontinental ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads didn't invalidate it. Nor did moving from muscle-power to steam to electricity and hydrocarbons. What did unseat gold was the reality that there was more wealth in the world than there was gold to measure it by, and we were approaching the point that to fully back all the US dollars would require the US to take everybody's gold, and then we'd still eventually run out.
Gods as currency only works if you have an easy way to measure a god's value. Salt and gold can be weighed, allowing you to know exactly how much of either you have. But how do you quantify "godliness?" If you can't, then you're back to a barter system, with all the hassles of a barter system, just with cooler things to barter. In fact, since gods are not fungible, I don't think this works. The value of salt or gold might change depending on where you are, but it all changes together; that is, 1 gram of gold is the same as any other gram of gold in Bartertown. But the God of Shoelaces isn't the same as the God of Pleasant Memories. How do you compare the two? And you certainly can't do bills of credit, since the God of Pleasant Memories is in Portland, and not in Bartertown, so your bill of credit for one God of Pleasant Memories cannot be exchanged for said god. Meaning if you want to spend your god, you have to bring it with you everywhere.
For some reason, an economy based on Turnips being flung into the phantom zone, and peasants getting Turnip NFTs back is probably not the most outlandish idea. Their pantry/vault would look like the worst pokemon card collection ever, but the phantom zone probably counts as a cool, dry place for storage.
I am in for turnip void
Hey you never brought up much in terms of medieval banking, that might have been a good area to explore. Idk