Fantasy Currency Suggestions

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Grains have also been used as a form of currency historically.

Indeed, they actually fullfill most of the requirements for a good currency: Quality is mostly even, They keep for a long time, and the supply is moderately stable... and if they run in short or long supply they were going to mess with your economy anyway. Mostly they're hard to transport.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Indeed, they actually fullfill most of the requirements for a good currency: Quality is mostly even, They keep for a long time, and the supply is moderately stable... and if they run in short or long supply they were going to mess with your economy anyway. Mostly they're hard to transport.

They don't keep all that long unless stored very carefully. Of course, you can solve that with banking since bulk grains are often treated as fungible, so if you own 10 bushels of barley but not any particular 10 bushels you don't have to worry about your checking account being eaten by rats.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I'm pretty sure the author meant base metals. Which solves the problem because gold isn't a base metal.

Oh, yeah, that would be a fairly simple fix - silver and gold coins would still be perfectly usable as currency. There is the small issue that those are typically worth a good deal, even in fairly small quantities, but you could potentially get around that by alloying silver with a base metal such as copper (which may be rather cheap if it can be produced with magic). "Chinese Silver" is apparently only 2% Silver, the rest being base metals (38% copper, 17.5% zinc, 11.5% nickel, 11% cobalt, according to Wikipedia). Japanese Shibuichi, on the other hand, is traditionally 25% silver and 75% copper, which would probably work quite well for low-value coinage (DF has a silver penny being worth $4, so a Shibuichi penny of comparable size would be worth $1).

Originally Posted by ericthered

If you've got access to earth to stone, the amount of bronze you can produce is staggering. Its cheap enough you should probably making clay items and using a single casting of earth to stone for each item, because the costs of smithing start dwarfing the cost of the material.

In the previously-referenced Stormlight Archives, a lot of items are made out of wood or clay or similar and then Soulcast into metal, rather than forged. There are mentions of things like steel railings still having the grain of the wood they were Soulcast from, for example.

[Pursuivant]

How about an anti-magical metal that's relatively easy to work?

Since the metal creates a short-ranged No Mana Zone around it, it can't can't be created, shaped or mined using magic. Spells to detect the metal just detect a NMZ, which could be caused by anything.

Along with its usefulness as a currency which can't be counterfeited using magic, it's also got dozens of practical anti-magic applications which makes it inherently valuable.

Even better, at least for most folks, large concentrations of anti-magic metal tend to have a repellent effect on the usually unreasonable number of mana-enhanced top predators found in your typical fantasy setting. It would be like cold iron against faeries, but effective against just about every magical boojum and creepy-crawly.

As for mining the anti-magical metal, the area where there are rich deposits of the metal are also Low Mana or No Mana Zones. They're inevitably filled with people who really don't want the material which forms their safe haven against magic to be dug up and taken away.

[Anthony]

An important issue here is: is the currency supposed to be valuable in itself, or is it supposed to a symbol of value? While fiat currencies are mostly a TL 5+ phenomenon, a variety of promissory notes are much older, and that really doesn't require anything except being easy to identify and hard to forge.

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I'm pretty sure the author meant base metals. Which solves the problem because gold isn't a base metal.

I tried to find a reasonable definition of what a base metal is, and just about the only thing the various definitions I found could agree upon is that specifically gold and platinum aren't base metals. Every other metal, at least ones I could verify as being used prior to the industrial revolution, has been described as a base metal in some text.

Some texts say steel is a base metal, others say it isn't. When brass is mentioned it is (almost) always considered a base metal, but bronze has texts where it isn't. Even silver and titanium are sometimes considered base metals.

Combining the above with Magic using the term "simple metal" (instead of base metal) makes me more inclined to personally go with my original suggestion of translating it into "not alloy". Unless the GM is willing to let Earth to Stone transmute earth and stone into any metal or alloy that doesn't contain gold or platinum.

While they can't create gold or platinum, they can create an effectively infinite supply of high quality steel or titanium alloys for weapons and armor production as well as construction purposes. If you have a couple of Earth mages, why build buildings out of wood? Heck, a crew of 2-4 mages could use Shape Earth and Earth to Stone and reasonably quickly create a house or other building made out of extremely tough materials (stone to insulate and metal to keep out the wind).

And if Earth mages are put to work like that, it's reasonable to expect that they will make enough money to not consider forging coins.

[warellis]

Could one reason why wizards don't flood the market with cheap gold or whatever via magic be that just because they can (assuming a particular level or age or power level), does not mean they want to?

Most role players don't roleplay as if they live in a setting. They roleplay, more often than not, as if they're outsiders wearing human/demihuman disguises and act really weirdly. So lots of ideas they have on how to break a setting are often not very "organic" but more of an "outsider having more info about a world than NPCs" kind of thing.

To use an example, if the real world was an RPG setting, would most people (NPCs) think of trying to counterfeit money and such? No. Nor would most have interest either.

In addition, if magic is widespread enough, it's possible magically generated base currency may be flagged as blatantly magic.

[malloyd]

Even if you come up with one, what are people going to spend it on?

The problem with creation spells isn't disrupting currency, it is disrupting the entire concept of a goods exchange economy. Sure the coins you would trade to buy a meal have gotten worthless. But the meal is [also] worthless if it can be conjured from nothing just as easily. And all those peasant farmers who might grow crops to make meals? What nonsense.... Science fiction has exactly the same problem with replicators. Easily available unrestricted creation of things destroys a [lot] of the assumptions people make about economies.

Attempting to build a substitute economy that "makes sense" in the face of such a miracle technology is likely impossible anyway (nobody is smart enough to determine [everything] that would be affected), and absolutely critically dependent on the fine details of how your miracle process works, which frankly for spells you just [don't know] - GURPS magic after all is full of possible options and consequences of unpredictable effect (are there material components?, or unmentioned pollution side effects?, or exactly how bad do those critical failure demons get?).

And if you do get something close to "sensible" is it going to be simple enough to use in play? Or for players to internalize it well enough to use naturally? Note that the biggest SF franchise with replicators has failed to evolve a coherent economy the writers understand well enough to use it as a plot element. Unreplicatable gold pressed latinum works for them when they need a currency, and that's also what the AFAIK oldest SF duplicator stories did too, with identium, so just make up something magic can't create and call it done is the precedented "solution" here.

[Whitewings]

Some of these problems are the result of not doing arithmetic. For one example, Create Food. Cost: 2 to 4. I’ll call it 2; organic matter is easy to get. Now, in my setting, one person in 150 is a trained mage. Of those, one in three knows the Food college. Almost all mages have Recover Energy 15, so can cast Create Food 6 times per hour. 60 meals a day! But that’s not nearly enough to replace farmers, herdsmen, etc. Add in Essential Food, which takes us to 360 meals per day, and that’s still not even half enough. And even that assumes the mage in question does nothing else for ten hours a day. Honestly, I’d expect most mages capable of such a feat to do it in advance of special occasions such as weddings and high holy days.

Now let’s take Earth to Stone. The base application, turning earth or clay into stone, is certainly useful: turn a sod house into a stone house over the course of a day, lay down roads at amazing speed, create retaining walls. Perhaps quarrying becomes less needful. But again, energy costs and availability of mages with the appropriate skills are limiting factors, as is short term thinking. One expensive mage might be a local lord’s second choice to a bunch of cheap peasants, even if the peasants cost more and take longer on balance.

From here, we can go to the turning of earth to metal: 2 cubic yards per hour. You can be certain that someone, or more likely a lot of someones acting individually, will end up flooding the market with whatever your currency metal or currency gem is, because the change is real and lasting. So if fiat currency is largely unworkable, this being a TL 3 campaign setting, some sort of non-metal/mineral currency becomes necessary. Or at least, a metal or mineral currency which is hard enough to duplicate that a few short-sighted mages can’t crash it in a few years.

So what might this be? It needs to be desirable, something that can be made into sought-after goods. All specie currencies must have three qualities to work well in the long term: durable, consistent and have accepted value. Divisible is nice, but not essential. So perhaps the currency is gemstones of specified weights and quality, stamped into coins with the die and stamp I spoke of earlier. These would also have the advantage of requiring a suitably trained mage to turn them from coinage to whatever else. Gems are not malleable.

Does this seem like a reasonably workable currency, assuming mages with the needed training to produce gemstones at all number about one in 450 people overall, and ones capable of creating die and striker sets not more than one person in about ten thousand?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by WingedKagouti

I tried to find a reasonable definition of what a base metal is, and just about the only thing the various definitions I found could agree upon is that specifically gold and platinum aren't base metals. Every other metal, at least ones I could verify as being used prior to the industrial revolution, has been described as a base metal in some text.

You could simply define what it means for your campaign. Maybe it means every metal up to iron (which would include titanium, but not copper). Maybe it's all the metals that result in the release of hydrogen gas when mixed with a weak acid like HCl (that's the chemistry definition, at least if going with "base metal means everything that isn't a noble metal"). Maybe it's an eclectic selection. The point is, if there are some metals that cannot be (easily) produced by magic, they may make for good coins.