Fantasy Currency Suggestions

[Anthony]

Realistically, the effect of anything being magically creatable is to collapse its value to the cost of hiring a mage to create it, so if you want the price table to remain more less as is, you have to limit permanent creation spells to things that aren't worth more than something like $(energy cost -1). The permanent creation spells in GURPS are create acid (4/gallon), create air (area, base 1), create earth (2/cubic yard), create food (2-4 per gal), create fuel (1/lb), create ice (2/gal), create plant (area, base cost 4-15), create spring (5 per gallon output... but not actually permanent, it's really the "dig well" spell), create water (2/gal). Of those spells, only create acid, create earth, create plant, and create spring are problematic, and only earth is a significant problem.

So, in general the fix is to change all the earth spells to something more reasonable. Offhand:

1. All Earth Spells that claim to affect cubic yards affect cubic feet instead.
2. Remove all references to metal from Earth to Stone.

[ronwit]

Originally Posted by Whitewings

I don't see why replicated gold would disappear. It's still gold, just as real as any other, not a trick or illusion.

The idea is that almost all replicated materials in Trek are converted from raw energy. So objects the are used to detect magic created money would treat replicated money as fake.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Whitewings

That's why the stamped gems are the main currency: the die and striker sets are few and far between, so the size and quality of the material in the coins is known. It's not 100% reliable, but it's sufficiently reliable. Oh, and the coins are usually about the size of a dime. I imagine the coins to run in value from red through to violet: ruby, orange citrine, amber, emerald, sapphire, amethyst

Sure, why not.

But the counterpoint being made is that since gems can be created too, possibly already in the correct shape, that the value of these isn't any different from a chunk of gold (or a sheet of paper) stamped with the same seal by the same authority. It's just a particular implementation of a fiat currency, and not really any harder to counterfeit than any other one. Not that this isn't fairly clear from the rainbow ordering that doesn't reflect the relative values of real world stones either.

[Whitewings]

Having recently revisited this question, and considered the question of which materials sorcery can create, I settled on several currencies. The most common is the red cowrie shell. The next most common is the bead, made from a resin that drips from certain trees in the north in the spring. Then there are pearls of various shapes, sizes and colour. Pearl cultivation makes them common enough to be workable higher value currencies, the difficulty of cultivation keeps them rare enough to remain high value, and cheap ones, with large cores under thin shells of nacre, can be told from the real kind by any sorceror; pearls are astrological touchstones, resonant with the Moon, the planet associated with Phthenoth, decan of Healing, which every sorceror studies at least a little, and a cheap cultured pearl doesn't work. The highest value is the pressed petal of the royal lily, an exotic bloom that grows only on the graves of monarchs whose subjects regarded them as legitimate in their lives. Not necessarily good, just legitimate.

Non-practical metals are still valued; silver is good for storing water and food, and it's beautiful and a good material for carving into jewelry. Gold is beautiful and it's prized by alchemists and natural philosophers. And so it goes.

[tshiggins]

A couple of comments, even though the OP apparently has made a decision.

Use of Power Stones: Take a look at G:Technomancer. It provides a conversion for mana points to horsepower/kWH, which provides a baseline measure of the work that can be done with each point of energy in a power stone. I found it phenomenally useful in my Facets campaign, because it meant an economy could be based on the amount of energy available, regardless of its source.

Nerf Some Stuff

Also in Facets, I took a cue from traditional fairy tales as implemented in Castle Falkenstein. Iron disrupts the energy matrix that forms the core of fairy minds, which causes the energy pattern to devolve into chaos. Violently.

So, in Facets, ferrous metals disrupted magic of all sorts -- and that meant enchantments couldn't work on iron or steel; nor could magic create ferrous metals. Enchantments required the use of non-ferrous metals, of which the various alloys that form bronzes were the most common.

In that same campaign, I decided lead was magically inert. It didn't disrupt magic, the way ferrous metals did, but it blocked any magic that tried to affect it, and no magic could pass through it. As such, it couldn't be made by magic, either.

By contrast, I decided orichalcum should be an isotope of copper mixed with tin that formed a "bronze" that not only gave a bonus to any attempt to enchant it, but when used as a lattice to connect power stones of identical strength into a matrix, they acted as a single power stone with the sum total of all the component stones.

As a limitation on that, I said the lattices could only be formed in the shape of Platonic Solids, so the maximum number of stones that could be used in a matrix was 20, in icosahedrons.

It made orichalcum (mostly only found in Atlantis, since I said magic couldn't create the alloy) an incredibly valuable commodity since the Platonic Solid matrices powered the strongest techno-magical engines.

Letters of Credit

I used these in a G:Harn campaign, many years ago. Any merchant (but usually only those such as jewelers who had plenty of precious metals and coins sitting around...) could issue a letter of credit in exchange for any currency deposited with them (minus a service fee, of course).

These letters were redeemable if brought in by anyone, but only with the merchant who issued them (who kept records of the transactions and creations of the letters).

Since they could only be redeemed with the merchant who issued them, they weren't terribly useful to known bandits, or anybody who didn't grasp the concept. Additionally, because travel in Harn is so hazardous, the "face value" of the letter decreased the further away they went from the point of origin.

So, a merchant who regularly traveled between established destinations (which was most of them) could purchase letters issued in those places, and redeem them as needed while minimizing risks associated with carrying hard currency from one town to another.

They also gave my players excuses to travel around the island, since they could purchase letters from distant places at discounts, and then travel to the issuers to redeem them for profit.