Fantasy Currency Suggestions

[Whitewings]

In a setting I’m working on, magic is real and has been for a long time. So the question arises: how does magic fit into the economy? A mage’s services aren’t a great problem, the mage does a thing and gets payment. But the spell Shape Earth causes a problem: I have no problem allowing it to be used to create gemstone, but since it can also be used to create metals, what might used in this setting for currency? Red cowrie shells were used in West Africa for many centuries, and I have no real attachment to metals and gems as currency.

Perhaps cast bronze statuettes? The currencies won’t be impossible to forge, no currency ever is, it just needs to be more trouble than it’s worth to forge. For example, if there’s a spell to duplicate an object, but it only works if you already have the needed materials and anything requiring high levels of detail requires a suitable skill and a successful check, it’s easier to earn a dozen than to forge just one.

So what suggestions might you have? Most mages know Healing, Knowledge, Protection, Animal and Plant, and a fair number have Body Control. Mages are also relatively common, about one in 150, and the average is IQ 12, Magery 1. Human sorcery is Ritual Magic, using Hermetic Astrology.

[Dalillama]

Coins made of something shiny, or pieces of paper with text and/or pictures on. The existence of spells that duplicate things makes counterfeiting a fundamental issue; possibly currency has small amounts of meteoric iron in it to mak it easy to tell the difference, or some kind of magical tag applied by an enchanted embosser or printing press.

[Whitewings]

The problem is that fiat currency runs on trust, specifically the trust that your tokens can be redeemed more or less at will. Historically, such trust has often been in short supply, especially between nations. The Tang dynasty managed to make fiat currencies work, mostly internally, and banknotes became accepted in Europe, with a lot of provisos, starting in the 14th century. But if you took an Italian banknote to France, you might only get 80% of its face value, and a French note in England might simply be rejected. So I’m looking for suggestions for specie currencies that are hard enough to duplicate with the spells in GURPS Magic that they won’t be immediately be counterfeited into uselessness.

[Donny Brook]

Someone has probably devised an Authentication spell, a magic version of NFTs.

[Ulzgoroth]

Why make magic be the problem but not the solution?

The problem of low-tech money-changing is communication and transport. Magic plentiful enough that people can use it to make lots of currency is also plentiful enough to enormously simplify those. (Not that you'll zero your money-changing cost, we haven't even now.)

The easy way to completely kill counterfeiting is to set your currency face value very close to the cost of minting. (Note: low-tech rulers frequently did not do this because minting was a government profit center - currency was expected to trade well above not just its bullion value but that plus minting expense!)

For small change, that's workable, but it obviously gets hard to mint portable high-value currency if magic has worn away all the durable, fungible, high value density substances.

So...don't. Pretty much nobody (except maybe criminals) needs large bills anymore IRL. So if they've made gold cheap, let it be cheap, and have people spend notional pounds or tons of it as a unit of account as accounting-sheet transactions where nobody actually touches a coin.

[Anthony]

Fundamentally, currency should be useless, hard to forge, and with a stable enough source that it doesn't result in significant inflation or deflation. For magic, just decide what can be made with magic, and use something that either can't be made with magic, or is sufficiently inconvenient that people won't bother; the details will depend on what limits you assign to magic.

[Prince Charon]

For some currencies it will depend on the culture, and what is accessible. Souls (in most settings) cannot be forged, and are of variable value, but while most fantasy cultures would not wish to use them (or would make such trade very illegal), it's fairly easy to imagine a society of devils who have a very formal system for trading souls for goods and services.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

For some currencies it will depend on the culture, and what is accessible. Souls (in most settings) cannot be forged, and are of variable value, but while most fantasy cultures would not wish to use them (or would make such trade very illegal), it's fairly easy to imagine a society of devils who have a very formal system for trading souls for goods and services.

"soul coins" are a currency in D&D (I think the idea was introduced in Descent Into Avernus, but it caught on).

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Whitewings

The problem is that fiat currency runs on trust, specifically the trust that your tokens can be redeemed more or less at will.

So does a gold (or whatever) standard. It relies on people locally pegging their local currency to the same metals as your own. This was common across Eurasia and North Africa because there have been extensive trading links all through them for millenia uncounted, and everyone agreeing in some fashion on what constitutes money was part of that. When Europeans went to sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands, their money was no good, because the consensus that money is made of gold or silver wasn't current there. If magic has been around since forever, there's no particular reason anyone would set weight of gold as a currency standard to begin with. The ostensible unit of account might be Energy Points, Mage-Hours, livestock, diamonds, whatever. If you can pay your taxes with it, it's money.

. But if you took an Italian banknote to France, you might only get 80% of its face value, and a French note in England might simply be rejected

Historically, that happens with gold and silver coin as well (or indeed "gold" and "silver" coins, which is part of the problem). If the coins aren't recognized locally, the merchant will only get buillon value for them unlese they regularly trade.with people from wherever the coins are from. An English pound won't spend at face value in France in any era, nor a Franc in England. In the 17th century, Venetian Ducats were good anywhere in Europe and most of North Africa because they were of absolutely guaranteed purity (and also because Venice was a major shipping hub, and you could buy almost anything in Venice, where everyone wanted Venetian currency no matter where they were from because that's what the tariff was paid in); later, the Spanish Dollar/ Peso de Ocho was good throughout Europe and her colonies because Spain had vast reserves of Argentine silver. The thing is, the gold and silver are still only symbols; the point is what you can buy and where, and that in turn is a factor of the issuing body's economic clout. In a magical setting, it's quite possible that it's the Mage's Guild or some manner of banking temple (a more common thing than one might expect) that actually issues the
currency dominant in the campaign area. If every practicing(in the sense of a doctor or lawyer; doing magic for money) mage on the continent will accept Magebucks for spells at a specified rate per energy point, everyone will want to have Magebucks, and they'll be currency good anywhere on the continent. Counterfeit Magebucks will bring the wrath of the Council of Archmages down upon you, who have the best scryers in the world available. You can run but you can't hide.

So I’m looking for suggestions for specie currencies that are hard enough to duplicate with the spells in GURPS Magic that they won’t be immediately be counterfeited into uselessness.

That is a valid question. Like I said, some kind of magical tag would seem to be necessary. I can't think offhand of any spell in RAW that would specifically do that, but based on the RAW example of the Magic Items books, "a proprietary spell of the Mages' Guild enchanted into the mint machinery" is a valid answer.

[Whitewings]

I just had an idea. Perhaps the "Reshape" spell, enchanted into a die and striker, could be used to stamp out granite coins of various denominations. Easy to make, very hard to counterfeit, no value in the materials, so they aren't worth forging even if you steal the equipment.