Coins Currency and Genies

 Genies? wait what?

When the economy of your world can be messed up with wishes

Ok, gave the plot away with the header, but hey, lets just make it clear and simple:

TL;DR; A Wish, can ruin your game. 

I Wish for a room filled with gold coins. for arguments sake, its 10,000 coins.

So, now, the Kingdom that used to have 10,000 gold coins in circulation, has 20,000.

The King used to be the richest with approx. 5,000 in storage, but he's not a stupid king, or at least the people in his city are not, so they mine gold, silver, copper, tin, and maybe some rarer platinum, zircon, etc, at an approximate rate that keeps the currency values around a 10:1 ratio,

except now, the gold in total has just flooded the market.

Are the players going to not spend it? um, no.. So there will be some very large purchases, which will put handfuls of the currency into the hands of a myriad of merchants. they in turn will buy more goods to replenish stock, but also some of their own purchases of personal reasons, and the trickle down happens, as it would / should in a medieval society. 

But it also means people are less likely to haggle, why bother wasting time over a 5% price difference, you can afford it, so you pay more, the shop keep gets used to this and doesn't need to sell his goods at a discount to feed his family, so his prices stay high, and his other customers seek cheaper goods elsewhere, or must raise their own prices to compensate for the rise of costs.

If you follow it along, ALL prices will, over the course of a few weeks and months, go up. people are greedy. Without some kind of agent to sweep in and force prices to stabilize, they'll always go up.

In comes the wizard. He casts a spell, and determines the price that a good should be, "mirror mirror on the wall, what was the price of fish last week?"

With some threats, or a charm spell, the prices are forced back to normal for this elite class, and people will come to grips with the ability of magi, thaumists and priests to divine more realistic prices. The Magi know.. if this gets out of hand, spell ingredients will go up in price, and master magi will be forced out into the forests to procure the weeds and flowers they need to create their potions and spells. Magi don't usually sell their goods to lowly folk. they sell once-off items, to the big fish.

Mid to low level adventurers buy healing potions, and sure that's come a little mainstream as a result, but all other magic rings, swords, gems, scrolls, these things are all once-off bespoke items and the magi only sells one every so often, usually for a years salary. So he's not used to having to deal with day to day price increases, no.. he comes to the little shop that has a boy that goes off into the forest once a year and pick the elderflower from the tall oak, that blooms only on 2nd winters solstice, and he pays 100 pewter for it, no more, no less. and if the boy didn't make it.. the magi will weight the costs of a teleport spell to go get it himself this year.. 

No, no no.. If a Priest was to enter the markets and found out he needed to pay double for all the candles and saffron and gold leaf and statues and marble, he might start flipping tables, and calling his god to come down and smite these greedy heathens. 

We, poor saps in the modern world can only grumble at the price of milk going up every year, We look at the real price increases on our expenditure and hope we can ask for an equal pay increase to match it.. just so we can 'stay still', but if we could summon a demon or a god or just the force of the universe to stop it in its tracks, I'm sure we would.

So, this gold.. since its got less ability to create inflation of prices.. the opposite happens.. its own worth changes. After the few months of prices going up and back down.. the gold is still so much more commonly about. more people have it, so people start to say, 'hey, I know I should give you 10:1 ratio on your gold, but I don't have as many pewter, so how about I give you 9:1, and since I kind-of don't 'need'  as much, as I got paid in more gold last week, I don't need more, then you make the choice, 9:1 for my goods, or go find a money lender, who'll exchange money, and take his cut.. greedy bastards.

That's right, you probably don't know. people didn't carry around large sums of cash in markets. they'd get robbed. the 'till' we have today would be emptied by thieves in moments. No, they had mobile bankers.. or moneylenders, who'd roam about with a couple of thugs for protection. thugs cost money, so the lender would charge a fee on exchanges and loans. If the going rate was 10:1, you might get 9.5:1 from the lender, or vice versa 1:10.5 if you wanted a lighter purse. You could call him over when a customer had currency you couldn't deal with, 

Now, lenders are more aware of the current flow of cash, so if they know there is a bucket or barrel of gold flowing into the purses, they're not going to stick with a 9:1 ratio. no, no.. they'll want to be ahead of the game, and have some street urchin go find out how much gold the heroes are accompanying themselves with. 

So, GMs, have you got that? Players enter town with chests or bags of goods. The Urchins should come up and ask, lots of questions, make them seem interested in what the heroes are brining home, what monster was killed and how much gold they've procured. As soon as the number is given, have the younger/dumber kids run off straight away, have the older kids ask more serious questions, make like they're not actually interested, maybe offer services or information on the town, have them very curious to look inside the adventurers purses..

Players will think they're going to be pick pocketed. Instead have all the money-lenders change their exchanges right away. No-body brings money into a city without 'paying' some kind of tax.

Which reminds me.. if your hero walks into a city with the same wealth of the city.. the king and his tax-man are going to want their share. if nothing less than to protect their currency rates.  Just another money lender really, with bigger guards and bigger pockets.   

Upgraded Currency

 In ye olde Dragon Warriors, Coin was Copper, Silver and Gold.. but in Dungeon World we have

A Multitude of Coinage

Each kingdom tend to make their own coinage, and the exchange rate is not common knowledge, for reasons (below). Common folk, within the kingdom are barely going to understand their coinage going up or down outside their own town, let alone country, if it costs a silver florin for a barrel of wine today, it'll cost a silver for a barrel next year, and anyone trying to tell you otherwise is a cheat, and a liar, and will be run out of town.

Since almost any town will have some kind of 'barrel' of 'alcohol' which will invariably costs 1 silver, there will always be some kind of pushback on inflation. Also, because the god of inflation has been imprisoned by several very powerful heroes who want prices to stay the same.

So, Coinage never has to worry about being devalued, prices will, with fluctuations from supply and demand, always hover around the same value. and lifestyles as well.

Copper is for the poor, people who need to trade in copper are considered lower class, and the lower class love it, because they always managed to get the better end of a deal when some middle class pays for things with silver, and no change.

Silver is the trademans and merchants main coin, they will happily deal with all varied forms of coinage, and with the help of a street mage, always ensured that they don't get ripped off.

Gold is the coin of Kings.. and Nobles, and Gentry and people who want to be Nobles and or Gentry, and Heroes.. because Heroes somehow seem to be finding so much of the stuff.

But, Like many things in life, its not so easy to be carrying around all this coinage.

In The old Dragon Warriors, with a 10:1 ratio on things, and 10 coins to enough to carry let alone 100, Buying a peasants house at 10 gold, is only 1000 x the cheapest coin, so 1000 hours labour = a house? right?

Well, Then along came realism.. Dungeon World started looking at the metals in circulation and determined that Pewter, at least medieval, magical world Pewter, was slightly more expensive to make than silver (which bends and can technically be magic'd away) has magic resistant properties, To the point where a coin of pewter is worth 10 silver, and a gold is worth 10 pewter. Interestingly, Pewter contains lead, and is constantly poisoning people, but with an abundance of magical healing, its not noticed like we know of on Earth.

Then too, the common class decided that since wood is a worthy substance by itself, and people of certain class want a kind of recognition, certain woods, stained and sealed in a resin like substance, would count as a kind of thieves world coinage. Not as simple to make as just melting down some copper, but still plentiful enough, its has an almost 15:1 ration to copper.

Well of course, its a little easier to carry half a coin, than 5 other coins, and don't clink so much in the wallet, so snipped coins started to make circulation, til the powers that be decided that we can't have snipped chunks of metal where its unsure if its 45% or 55%. So the Moons started to make an appearance, and you can get gold, pewter, silver and copper moons in many states.

Then later, magical fused coinage, Gelds were discovered in magic councils, considered as worth much more to a mage than anyone else, they are often stamped differently by the magi, but not required. A geld might be accidentally traded by non magi for their metal worth, and the lucky mage will pick one up at the metal price, but its usually considered to be 20x the worth of the coin to a magi, and as such as become a worthy coin for the wealthy.

Note: Copper and Silver Gelds can cope with only 1 magic point, as they tend to melt with more infused, and as such are closer to 10x worth for a mage, but while Gold can normally cope with 3 magic points, Gold has been known when fused with some metals to cope with as much as 7 magic points. 

Rarer is the Octiron Coin, rumoured to be created when 8 magic points are infused into a gold coin using a crystal rod, The Octiron coin is somewhere in the range of 1000x gold crowns. 

We have not touched on the chunkier and heavier Dwarven varieties, which are typically twice the size and three times the worth, as they resist any tampering, and the artistic elven varieties which are only worth more for their beauty, as a coinage, they lose worth as soon as human hands mar and tarnish their faces, and return to bland versions within a few days of common usage. though, still worth 1.5 times normal worth to a clever eye.

Many 'lesser' races still trade goods, but use human coinage if its available, yet, pewter and silver tend to be pooled together.

In the Demon realms, trapped souls exist in a crystal like structure when touched, but in a softer form when not, are both used as a currency and a consumable, and when brought to the surface are traded in back alleys and black markets. 

Pretty much, once anything is common enough, it becomes a kind of currency, as such the apothecary world trades internally with empty vials as they can cost somewhere between a pewter and a gold to manufacture, and are only really used by apothecaries and heroes. 

So what of these exchanges? well, the kings of the world, have for the most part discovered one thing to keep their countries in flow. exchanging currency between traders and Adventurers can be, in itself, profitable enough to maintain the border guards, passes, diplomats and trade relations, instead of war. War is costly, the benefit is limited, but currency exchange?

So when players get to the edge of the country, there might be a border guard who can 'change' their money.. its ALWAYS a rip off.. 10 Zonti for 9 Jebas? but on return, 10 Jebas for 9 Zonti? hang on?

but in town, no-one is going to.. legally.. exchange other coins.. except of course, for a fee. 

World Build October Part 25

Its World-Build-Tober: 

Thursday the 25th - World-build-tober

"Draw (or describe) a prey animal from your world"

Besides all the standard earth world predator-prey examples that you can google, and all the ones that match, i.e. any animal that tries to catch and eat another, and this can include alot of ones that might be world-buildy.. i.e.

the plant that captures other plant/animals and eats them?

or the animal that captures sentient plants that walk around?

or the rock elemental that chases down dust-bunnies?

How about this one:

Living coins.

For some strange reason, magic tends to give everyday objects sentience and purpose, without any reason. The weirder variety of these are living coins.

They can cause themselves to roll, if they manage to fall from a shelf or high enough surface, in order to move themselves around the world. They tend to 'park' themselves upright against walls or furniture so they can move off at a later point, because if they ever end up flat on the ground, they are immobile.

They tend to want to be picked up by humanoids, placing themselves in places to get noticed. If they get into an empty bag of coins, they escape. Working their way up the sides with each jostle until they jump out. Sometimes, its noted that they take other coins hostage?

But they are, for the most part, trying to escape the dungeon they are located in, because eventually the mimic will find them and eat them.