Pennies from Sartar

From: James Frusetta <gerakkag_at_wam.umd.edu>
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 12:27:13 -0500 (EST)


Jane Williams brought up coins:
> Oh, and while I've heard of coins made of copper, silver, and gold, how
And, ahem, lead.

> about other metals? Iron coins, for the ludicrously wealthy?
Why not? Or simply use iron ignots to trade wealth between the very wealthy, or between cults, or between governments.

> semi-precious stone? What do mermen use: they can't cast metal, surely?
Might be a cult secret of some kind, the ability to cast metal without fire. And I had a GM who used glass coins for mermen, the idea being that glassmaking would be difficult and rare underwater, but its attractive product a stable currency base.

>Who mints the coins in Sartar, anyway? Pre-occupation, that is.
>Is it a centralised thing, with a mint in Boldhome, or do all the tribes
>mint their own, or both, or what?

Trollish outsider that I am, how many coins would Sartar really mint, anyway?

Oh, some, sure. But coins take a long time to deteriorate, after all, so you can keep using the survivng coins from the EWF for quite a while. (For a RW example, Roman coins were still occasionally used in everyday exchange in outlying areas of 19th century France!*). Unless everyone's afraid of EWF coins ("Eeeek! Dragon money!") and you need to melt them down...?

>each tribal king brings out a new coin to advertise his latest victory.
Not as important among the tribes, but don't forget the importance of sticking your face on the coin so the peasants know you. I usually stuck the minting king of Sartar on the front, and the flame on the back when I wanted to distinguish sovereigns from each other (ho ho).

And you can play up political relations with various cults by minting special coins for them -- if you just love those Storm Bulls, you mint a few thousand coins with da Bull on 'em and present them to the cult as a present (or as your tithe!). Or mint special coins to honor the Telmori,

>Great fun, but maybe this gets too complicated to play?
Oh, no, I've fooled around with coins quite a bit while GMing, and it's a lot of fun. Just make a convention that for the most part, a silver is a silver -- the different weights and purities average out, unless you as GM _specifically_ say that the batch of coins the players just found is double-weight or worth more in terms of alloy, or something. I did try sticking in "rare" coins which the players could sell to collecters, but _that's_ problematic -- it used up too much time to sort through the coins, collecters were too rare (who has wealth to tie up in non-circulating coins? Or the spare time to learn about coins?), and it wasn't worth the bother.

For MGF, characters with a decent bit of World Lore or specialized history skills could sometimes use the coin troves to figure out when a particular bunch of treasure was "laid in." There was a Lhankor Mhy in a party I played in who collected coins, and planned on creating a giant chart that showed which coins came from where. (Needless to say, _her_ MGF was demanding the right to go through every single coin in all the treasure we ever found, to see if there were any "rares"...)

SUPER BONUS QUESTION:
I've asked before, but maybe people are in a better mood to coin a response. (Ho, ho, bit of crude uz humor there). How do people deal with _at_#$@# bolgs? Yeah, it was probably funny as heck when SP & GS wrote it up, but it's a pain and a half using them -- they don't save weight, so there's no real reason to use them instead of just barter.

I _tried_ creating a monstrous troll-sized bolg the party could roll around, but they got rid of it, quick.

So what to do? Is there a "companion" coin metal that the trolls use that Humans just don't see much -- a different kind of lead, or a secret metal of the deep darkness? Do they just use Human silvers and golds and like it? Is the rationale that trolls basically have a barter economy, and bolgs are only there to make small change?

Or is it a "plot" by the Argan Argarites? Since trollish prices are in bolgs for trolls and clacks for humans at Goggleguts, are bolgs basically just a way to skin the worthless Humans out of some dough? For that matter, since an AAer can buy up all the worthless bolgs Humans acquire dirt cheap then use them for money among trolls, there's profit to be had.

James Frusetta

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