Fantasy Currency Suggestions

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Most powerstones won't be in the hands of mages who will use them for spellcasting. They'll be in the hands of merchants, restaurateurs, moneylenders/bankers, etc. All the powerstones that are sitting in someone's cashbox are completely useless, an utter waste of all the mage-hours that went into making them.

You make them sound like cryptocurrency.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

You make them sound like cryptocurrency.

The difference is that powerstones can be useful if not locked away as a store of value.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Suffers from the problem of being useful. You don't want useful things tied up in functioning as currency.

Same problem only even worse -- it's consumable, so you're likely to wind up with wild currency fluctuations. Depending on how it's made, it might also degrade with time.

Again, historically, cocoa beans were used as currency in Mesoamerica (I previously said South America, but that isn't quite right). And gold and silver are useful, if you consider the creation of works of art to be useful (and many civilizations have). Grains have also been used as a form of currency historically - indeed, it's believed the first official form of currency was barley, back in ancient Sumer. For fictional examples, the currency in The Stormlight Archives are gemstones that can be charged with Stormlight and used to power fabrials (magic items). They're priced based on how useful the items they can power are (Emeralds are worth the most because, in conjunction with a Soulcaster, they can turn rocks and rubble into edible grain), and they are consumable (using them with a fabrial taxes the stone and can eventually cause it to break, particularly for more extreme actions). And they can sorta be produced - large beasts called Greatshells form the gemstones deep in their chests, and the beasts are hunted in order to harvest such. In GURPS After The End, ammunition is used as currency.

Currency doesn't have to be perfectly stable and unusable as anything but a medium of exchange to be useful. Sure, that's probably the ideal, but there's no reason to let perfect be the enemy of good. Also, nobody should expect a setting someone made up for their friends to play in to be perfectly economically realistic - good enough for suspension of disbelief is good enough.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

The difference is that powerstones can be useful if not locked away as a store of value.

The energy used to mine cryptocurrency can also be useful for running things other than chips, or even running computers doing things other than mining. Apparently the energy that goes into cryptocurrency is a nontrivial amount.

[PTTG]

Since we're assuming very common magic, it follows that the currency could itself be magical, such as in the stormlight archive series. Since the currency itself glows like a candleflame, is even useful to non-mages.

Currency need not be universal from high to low. The commoners might use wooden tokens with a simple but secret magical ink that glitters in moonlight. The elites might trade in powerstones, including length haggling sessions over estimates of capacity (nobody knows what a FP is in character). A black market exchange might exist, but there may be no formal equivalency between the two systems.

Currency could be a blessing, literally. A person might have a transferrable blessing which in fact might have no utility except as an medium of exchange. A simple act of will and you can grant it to another. Kind of like selling a noble title.

Apart from souls, memories could be pressed into coins. Who's memory? Maybe taxpayers. Maybe captured enemies. Maybe loan recipients. Maybe they're fractional souls.

what if dragon scales are the currency? Kind of an inversion. But verrrry difficult to forge.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by 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.

A checkbook with a curse on defaulters?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

A checkbook with a curse on defaulters?

The Debt Note.

[Culture20]

Check the duration for Earth to Stone metals. It's not instant, so it's dispellable (and detectable as an active spell). I think there's a thread around about how much alteration/adulteration is required to make it irreversible like eating created food, and I believe the consensus was chemical alteration, so aqua regia for gold, rust/tarnish & refinement for most other metals. Earth mages get to replace miners, but there's still work needed to make the metals usable.

In a D&D campaign I ran once, the wealthiest port city exclusively used "minui" which were pearls too small to be of great value; in the city the moneychangers traded one pp per pearl and the pearls weighed next to nothing. Unless recognized as currency elsewhere, most other towns considered them worthless, so it was mostly a way for the money trade guild to have a monopoly in the city (and for everything in the city to be vastly overpriced, as it was the only currency).

[Culture20]

Originally Posted by Varyon

The Debt Note.

Held by the Tax gods. Fortunately for mortals, they never tire of mediocrity and thus hold on to their Debt Notes with a death-like grip.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The energy used to mine cryptocurrency can also be useful for running things other than chips, or even running computers doing things other than mining. Apparently the energy that goes into cryptocurrency is a nontrivial amount.

Yes, but that's a one-time cost of creating the crypto which can never be recovered. For powerstones, on the other hand, every day you hold them without making them useful you're wasting more potential use.