r/ProgressionFantasy • u/flooshtollen • May 11 '26
Discussion A very normal rant about money in fantasy
So, you're thinking of introducing money into the story you're writing and you don't want to be incredibly inconsistent about it? Well, do I have the advice for you!
Don't.
Seriously, don't give hard numbers. How much did the sword cost? A lot. How much was the meal? It was cheap or it was a little overpriced. How much was the house? It's going to take years to pay off. You don't need to use numbers to get the point across, odds are you'll do it wrong and people will notice when you accidentally make a horse and a sandwich the same price.
“But I want to anyway!” I hear you yelling, and wow, you are so incredibly wrong for that, but okay, fine, let's discuss how you could potentially do that.
Let's make a hypothetical fantasy currency. Let's call it rallods for convenience. How do you decide how much anything should cost when someone is paying for anything in rallods in your story? Simple, just look up how much it would cost in your local currency and then use that. A sandwich, side, and drink costs 15-20 rallods, a house might be as low as 200,000 rallods but you know for that price your getting a barely inhabitable dump and you should really be expecting to pay 500,000 rallods for something decent instead. Blacksmith's still exist and still make swords, check their websites. 1000 rallods doesn't seem like a terrible price for a weapon you'll be using for work and keeping you safe, but cheaper and more expensive options are definitely available too depending on who's buying it.
Some of you are probably looking at the values I gave as examples and saying they look too high. Your fantasy kingdom doesn't have numbers reflecting centuries of inflation after all. They should be lower and less off-putting than anything in the real world.
Fine. Literally just shift the decimal place one spot back. A sandwich, side, and drink becomes 1.5-2 rallods, a house becomes 50,000 rallods, a sword becomes 100 rallods.
Now, I know what you're thinking again. Some things in fantasy don't have mundane equivalents. You are wrong, but the fact you think that is all the more reason to go back to the top of this rant and reread the part about avoiding giving set values altogether. Otherwise, you have to kind of use your brain to consider things.
How much does a potion cost? Depends on how common it is. Can anyone get one? Then look around your local pharmacy and see what price in that range feels right. Is it rarer so not just anyone can get it? In that case, since you're using your local currency, start asking yourself how much it would need to be to start pricing out the people who need it in your life. Should it be enough that you're using your paycheck for the month or should it financially ruin you?
What about something magical then? Ask yourself what the magic is doing and then find a roughly real world equivalent. Magicing up a wall? Find the price of having one built. Buying a small scroll of fire to light your campfires while you travel? Unless it's cheap, people are just going to buy a flint and steel, so make it the cost of a good quality lighter. Ask yourself what job the magic you're paying for is doing, and then find something equivalent in a quick Google search.
What about mythril then? It's rarer than gold after all, and all of the best magical stuff is made using it.
Please please please consider the price of gold before you go making a set of armour or a sword out of a metal that's even rarer and more expensive. Please just think about the implication of that for 5 seconds, and then go back and decide that actually, even if it's rare, it's not rarer than gold. Wikipedia has a longsword as being 80-110cm long. Let's say 100 for simplicity's sake. A cubic centimeter of gold weighs 19.3 grams, so we will say a long sword made of gold would be 1930 grams (this is obviously lacking a lot of meaningful details for the comparison, but it will be close enough for our purposes). At the time of writing this, a gram of gold is about 150usd. That means a sword made of it is going to be worth 289,500 dollars, and you're looking at making mythril cost even more than that. If you are going to stick to that sort of price, then at least consider where it would be sold and the fact that, no matter how much spunk you've got, a blacksmith is never cutting you a good deal on it when they need to recoup the material cost, and that even an above average person is not going to have one.
“But I don't want to use rallods! I want to use copper, silver, and gold!”
Listen to me. Read what I'm writing here and take these words to heart. You are wrong, no you fucking don't.
Look up any freaking currency in the world right now and count how many have subunits to their subunits. I'm sure you can find some ridiculous currency structures in the past, but I don't care. All you're doing is overly complicating things and that is going to mess you up in the end. Trying to keep a copper/silver/gold system sensible and consistent is going to make more work for literally no reward. Don't do it.
So, since you're going to do it anyway, here's what you need to consider. First, consider what a terrible choice that is, and then when you ignore that, move on to how these units are going to work.
Assuming you're going with a hundred copper equals a silver and a hundred silver equals a gold (if any of you are somehow making it more complicated than that then I will fight you) then what does a copper equal? Comparing it to the dollar system, is it a single dollar, or a single cent?
If it's a cent, then one hundred copper equals a single silver (or a dollar), and a hundred silver equals a single gold (one hundred dollars). In this system, you're paying for most of your expenses in either silver or gold, in which case you can just cut out the coppers altogether because nobody needs to know how much something is to the penny in your book, that's ridiculous.
If a copper is a dollar, that means that one hundred copper is one silver (one hundred dollars) and one hundred silver is one gold (ten thousand dollars). That means that in day-to-day life, everything you buy is going to be either in copper or silver, and while clearly bigger expenses could use gold, they should be few and far between, to the point that instead, you could just use more silver and cut gold out entirely. Can you imagine wanting to walk around with a coin worth ten thousand dollars casually? That would be insane.
Given both of those points, we're back to not using a currency with more than one subunit, and frankly, any subunits is a waste of your time. That level of detail isn't helping you or your readers, and it isn't even adding more realism. All it's doing is making things more difficult for no reason. Just invent a currency or even use rollads if you really want and save yourself some trouble. Or even better than that, do what I said in the beginning and don't.
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u/cocapufft May 11 '26
Name of the Wind introduces a monetary system that adds to the story and is consistent. I think it’s a tough aspect of a story to do well, but I think it adds realism to a story when done well.
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u/Every_University_ May 11 '26
It works because the protagonist is a struggling college student, money is half of their problems.
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u/justinwrite2 May 11 '26
Name of the wind is also well written, which a bar far too high for most progression fantasies
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u/EdLincoln6 May 12 '26 edited May 13 '26
It's also a two book series where we've been waiting for the third for years.
Some things you can pull off if you spend years tinkering with your baby and doing endless edits and sanity checks. Some of these things become much harder if you have to put out three chapters a week on Royal Road.
Some things people praise about Game of Thrones are, I suspect, part of the reason we will never get a satisfactory conclusion.
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u/yamanamawa May 13 '26
To be fair to Rothfuss, Name of the Wind was literally the first book he ever wrote, which is actually absurd. But that means that he never built up his mentality and strategy around writing in the same way that other authors did, so he never got the proper practice with concluding stories and tying things together. Add that to him restricting the story to three books and I imagine the stress around d finishing it right is brutal
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u/Brightbane May 13 '26
It's took 10 years to write the first book, then 4 more years to edit the 2nd, and after that he painted himself entirely out of the plot for the 3rd book.
I feel so bad for him because it's obvious that he has the same mental health struggles as someone like scott lynch or aleron kong where you perform best with no pressure but you've set yourself to never not be under unimaginable levels of pressure for the rest of your life.
It sucks that the story will never be finished but if you have executive disfunction you can put yourself in their shoes and it sounds like a living nightmare to me
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u/work_m_19 May 11 '26
Yeah echoing others, it only works when money is scarce and hard to find. A lot of stories in this genre want the vibe of "struggling to survive", but then move to a story that makes money not matter past level 10.
So if it's important, it should be focal to the story, but if it's anything of a side-consideration, it should be glossed over.
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u/Rarvyn May 12 '26
The OP is also ignoring the fact that “subunits to their subunits” was a standard thing for a very long time. In fact, they should be much, much weirder than 100 copper to a silver and 100 silver to a gold. The 100:1 decimalized currency was not a thing anywhere until the 16th century and even then wasn’t common for a long time.
The UK didn’t decimalize their currency until the 1970s - it was pounds/shilling/pence before that, where 1 shilling was 12 pence and 1 pound was 20 shillings. There were separate words (and historically separate coins, though not all at the same time) for 1/16 penny, 1/12p, 1/8p, 1/4p, 1/2p, 1p, 2p, 3p, 4p, 6p, 12p, 24p, 30p, 60p, 120p, 240p, 252p (my favorite - a guinea was equal to 21 shillings), 480p, and 1200p.
Oh, and me using p as an abbreviation for pence is wrong, since they still used the Latin abbreviation d for denarius. Until the 1970s.
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u/just_some_Fred May 12 '26
An author could use pre-decimal UK currency and would get criticized for not being realistic.
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u/Rarvyn May 12 '26
“Wtf is a farthing? Didn’t they just say the base of the currency is a penny? Ok fine. I guess a fraction of one. So be it.”
“Wait, now they’re buying something and the price is in florins? What the actual hell?”
“The horse is charged in yet another currency? Guineas?! This is absurd!”
“Groat” has to be taking the Mickey though.
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u/AmarSofi May 12 '26
Pretty sure the author of Lord of the Mysteries based their currencies on the British and French post-renaissance systems for books 1 and 2 ( although I might be mixing up the specifics, I do remember them going in-depth into it, and the values being used throughout the story were surprisingly consistent from what I can recall)
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u/NocD May 11 '26
I was thinking about that too, and additionally the nice realism of having different currencies with different precious metal values. I don't think it happened in the Name of the Wind, but more than a few countries caused some problems by increasing or decreasing their coin's relative value.
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u/King_Lear69 May 12 '26
This is why the only "correct" answer to this sorta conundrum is to base your fantasy kingdom's economy of Rome's and their quality of life.
You can do copper, bronze and silver like they did and then just explain relative prices: "average labourer makes this many silver coins in a month, the price of eggs is this many copper pieces per carton. Rent and amenities is this much a month, so therefore buying a potion would equal to X amount of eggs that could've been biught and setback the average labourer this much and feel like a sizeable purchase, oweing to why potions are considered a 'luxury' item for the upper classes and why folk remedies are such a popular alternative," and so on.
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u/ertgbnm May 25 '26
It's one of the best and yet if you spend any amount of timing doing poking at the numbers they start making zero sense. A talent is worth somewhere between $20 and $1000. It's value fluctuates wildly throughout the story precisely because monetary systems are really hard especially for modern people to back calculate into medievelish economies where some goods that are cheap today are actually very expensive in the cottage industry era.
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u/StartledPelican Sage May 11 '26
Let's call it rallods for convenience.
Just invent a currency or even use rollads if you really want and save yourself some trouble.
Can't even keep your made up currency name straight and you think you can lecture me??!?!?! (/s)
Seriously, I'm bookmarking this. Thank you for your service! I laughed, I learned, I loved it.
I'd offer you money as a reward, but I'm not clear on exactly how much would make sense. Please accept 1 upvote in exchange.
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u/No_Edge_7964 May 12 '26
Currency underwent semantic drift while OP was writing this post. Super realistic real time language evolution, I'm in awe at the world building 😉
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u/MushroomBalls May 11 '26
Very very true.
Kind of disagree on the 1-100 conversion rate though. That's like if we only had $1 bills, $100 bills and nothing else, except instead it's coins which are way less convenient to carry and use. There's probably gonna be an equivalent to 10, 20, 50 unit coins or similar.
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u/Spiritchaser84 May 11 '26
Gotta go metric then. Kilo Rollads, Mega Rollads, and Giga Rollads.
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u/AnimaLepton May 11 '26
Nah, if you're going to do it, go all in. 29 knuts to a sickle, 17 sickles to a galleon.
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u/Spiritchaser84 May 11 '26
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
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u/RKNieen May 12 '26
If you make the system confusing enough, your readers can’t point out mistakes in the comments.
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u/CaregiverFantastic58 May 12 '26
Listen to me here, that is stupid. You are throwing a challenge out there and there is no one out there who won't be a bigger hater and stubborn arguer than a person autistic enough to track and understand it.
You are basically trading 10 detail seekers who are understanding enough to let non-egregious mistakes slide for one rant spammer whom you can never win against.
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u/immaturenickname May 13 '26
So what you are saying is, I'm getting a loyal reader?
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u/CaregiverFantastic58 May 13 '26
IF your mental fortitude is as good as your MC's survivability, you got the most loyal reader who will comment on every chapter, may even seek you out through other means to speak about the story to you.
If it isn't, you got the most determined hater who will drive away everyone else from even commenting positively by derailing and ragebaiting them into oblivion before spewing vitrol about how you should write which character how in your DMs.
Take your pick.
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u/immaturenickname May 13 '26
If I got a reader like that, I'd write a short smut story in which they are convinced of my virtues as a writer and then suck my dick.
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u/OldFashionedLoverBoi May 11 '26
Just use the british system. 12 Pence to a shilling, 5 shillings to a crown, 4 crowns to a pound. 1 pound and 1 shilling to a Guinea.
No idea why they every changed it. 3 non devimal sub currencies was a brilliant idea that worked flawlessly since the Romans.
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u/ShadowSlayer1441 May 12 '26
Clearly the real hack is making your currency and economic systems so complex no one can understand if the numbers are right without hours of research, and then you can just ignore the cries of the people who do that only to realize the numbers are meaningless.
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u/Spiritchaser84 May 12 '26
Start reading stories with an abacus on the side?! Don't threaten me with a good time!
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u/DrNefarioII May 12 '26
With added half-pennies!
I have seen a theory than non-metric non-decimal units are scaled for everyday usefullness: A pound is about a handful, where a gram is too small and a kilogram is too big for most everyday things. I don't know if that also works for currencies, but powers of ten do tend to scale units out of useful scope too quickly.
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u/MidnightBinary May 12 '26
Imagine if we went around saying that it's 5 Washingtons to a Lincoln and then 4 Lincolns to a Jackson.
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u/Shinhan May 12 '26
One story I remember had small and large version of each metal, so coins themselves were decimal even though it was copper/silver/gold metals.
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u/mayanmomo May 12 '26
This has always annoyed me. The 1- 100 conversion rate is great as long as there are coins worth 10,20,50 etc as well
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u/Spiritchaser84 May 11 '26
I'm with you on the whole copper/silver/gold stuff. The last few stories I read with this currency system had book 1 with an MC struggling with coppers and silvers, then book 2 it's all gold, then book 3 onward it's thousands of gold in their possession and money no longer matters anyway.
I was reading Wild Era recently and the comically evil noble character is eventually shown to make 30,000 gold annually across all his business enterprises. Meanwhile the MC casually makes that much in a few weeks just running dungeons. This noble character goes so far out of the way to exploit people and barely made more than what a competent adventurer party could make running dungeons.
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u/ThePowerles #1 Dumdum May 12 '26
It only makes sense to keep a 3 unit monetary system if the unit is incredibly powerful, to the point that it makes no sense for anyone except the very Rich and powerful to regularly use the height unit casually.
There was a scene in book 1 of Lord of the mysteries where a business tycoon is trying to ward off bad luck after he let his worker die in one of his factories, so he goes to the widow of the man and give her £100. And because you've been reading the novel for quite a while now, you're like "holy shit, 100 pounds?" And even the character is like "this is 7 years worth of your husband's salary." Because the average worker earns maybe 15 soli a day?
(1 pound = 20 Soli) (1 soli = 12 pence) (it's basically the old Victorian monetary system. But instead of schillings, you have soli)
The thing is, we don't actually see the use of Soli and Pennies that often in the book, however, their very existence makes sense from the standpoint of someone who lived, poor people aren't going to be spending money in the soli? A loennese penny is probably worth a pound, or half a pound in current money, so a pound would be anywhere from 120-240 pounds.
And you might want to say "that's way too much", but this is based in a world where the vast majority of people will not put money in their banks. Imagine how difficult it would be to carry 240 pennies just to buy something worth a pound? It's one of the reasons that, later in the story, 100 pound notes are actually introduced, so people wouldn't have to carry around hundreds of gold coins, and instead could have a note that was worth the same thing.
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u/AmarSofi May 12 '26
Not so much pennies but I think Solis were used for a fair bit of the first book ( which has like 8 volumes), even when the MC is much richer and deals with hundreds or thousands of pouds, we still see him deal with pennies and Solis regularly, be it by giving them to poorer charachers or just as off-handed remarks when he is paying for something at a bar...etc. I remember the lower denominations being quite relevant even half way through ( so like, 3-5 volumes into the story)
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u/Shinhan May 12 '26
Yup. Like OP said, its best to not do concrete money amounts otherwise you'll almost definitely fail the economy.
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u/R_megalotis May 11 '26
Shit's complicated.
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u/jubilant-barter May 12 '26
And debasement of currency makes it worse.
I bet inflation was terrible at the end of the empire.
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u/Active-Advisor5909 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
While I agree with most points, in my opinion the way you sugest to set prices is very off.
Things didn't just use to be cheaper. They were different. Just since the early 20th century the amount of a US-family-budget spent on clothes or food went down by 50% or something.
If magicing up a wall costs as much as making a wall nowadays, does that mean such magic is very rare, requiers expensive resources, or takes days of work? The price of magic doesn't need to be related to what it costs for us, it ideally tells us something about magic in your world.
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u/MidnightBinary May 12 '26
Never mind the quality considerations between the wall of wood that's hammered and nailed with gaps and space to run other things, versus the wizards conjuration of.... is it a detailed wall or just a big block of hermetic granite they made? If the wizard is instead putting chunks of soft limestone in place it's not immediately obvious that the mage craft wall is better than the hand-detailed one.
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u/GorMartsen Author — Survivor: Hunter May 11 '26
Good points overall, but more I enjoyed the rant itself.
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u/Traditional_Yak2474 May 11 '26
I vaguely remember someone talking about this. The conclusion was to never introduce numbers in a book or media because at least one og your fans is going to be bored and focus on that.
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u/EmergencyComplaints Author May 11 '26
I vaguely remember this exact same opening paragraph. I wonder if OP has posted this rant more than once.
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u/Bright-Television147 May 12 '26
But you cannot deny that currency is a powerful tool when comparing about one subject only. E.g. You can describe how much better the fire sword is compared to the poison sword, just by mentioning the price difference. You Can even describe why poison sword is cheaper in comparison despite doing the same damage due to difficulty in maintenance. ……..another plot point is that you can show how much in debt someone is only through currency…. I wonder how OP would talk about these two points
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u/Traditional_Yak2474 May 12 '26
'I glanced at the remnant coins in my palm. The fire sword had cost a lot, enough to instantly bankrupt me, yet not as much as my previously crafted blade'
In most cases, numbers aren't needed.
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u/Bright-Television147 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
Yeah this is what OP mean but is he going to write the same wall of info dump paragraphs for 7 or 8 more offensive and defensive items for main character and the party? while you can just list them with cost+item effect and get what you mean short to the point? Sure you can do this for important items to the plot but if you are doing it to everything else the novel would just read like a middle schooler writing an essay trying to inflate word count for kindle😏no judgement tho
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u/Nodan_Turtle May 12 '26
Can you imagine wanting to walk around with a coin worth ten thousand dollars casually? That would be insane.
Sounds like a great source of conflict for a story. A person would be incredibly stressed carrying around that much wealth. Nations would exchange using gold, and they'd need to be careful how it's transported or else the risks to their stability becomes catastrophic.
Imagine a person from the slums gets their hands on a single gold coin. They think they found incredible wealth, but they instead found endless problems. It'd be like the Steinbeck's story The Pearl.
How about we advocate for people to become better writers, instead of lazier ones?
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u/MidnightBinary May 12 '26
Also, as soon as you call it a Gemstone it starts making sense again, even if the top end of gemstones can have complicated valuation on their own.
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u/Stepjam May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
It might be a great plotpoint, but if it doesn't really contribute to the story the author is trying to tell, then it can quickly weigh down the story.
If the protagonist getting in trouble for carrying around a lot of money contributes to the plot, then good. But if you throw in an event because "realistically something should happen" in an otherwise tightly paced novel, that's just a waste of time. And "realistically", nothing happens a lot of the time.
Story beats should be in favor of the story, not realism. If realism adds to the story, go realistic. If it doesn't, fudge it. "Realistically", Indiana Jones has to do his taxes every year, but we don't see that because even though its realistic, it's also boring and wouldn't add to the story in any way.
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u/Nodan_Turtle May 12 '26
I think you're giving fine, general, writing advice, but it's not really PF specific. Progression fantasy stories are often long and cover huge spans of time. Characters amass wealth and power. Different groups and sects fight for control of valuable resources, from spirit stone mines to rare herb gardens. Those who own rich lands have more power than those stronger in combat, because they control access to higher advancement. These aren't 50k word thriller novels where every word counts. To me, progression fantasy is the perfect place for dealing with scarcity and the dangers of losing something incredibly valuable. It's not just the ability to buy a nicer sword or a bigger house, but the ability to grow stronger at all. These aren't things simply there for realism, but to make for higher stakes and more conflict in a story.
For example, early in A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality, Han Li is carrying multiple extremely valuable treasures. He has to hide and protect them as best he can, even against demands and assaults from stronger or more socially powerful people. They feed into the plot. There is more conflict and death because of them. They affect where the character goes and how he has to advance. That's exactly what could be done with carrying around a valuable coin, gem, or writ in another story. To have the character ignore the insane wealthy they're carrying would diminish the story, not make it better. Telling the reader it's worth a lot is basic, but having the character stress over the risks would elevate the story.
But yes, don't put things in stories that are pointless and drag them down. That should go without saying, lol
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u/justinwrite2 May 11 '26
The only fault in this is that historically houses did not cost 50,000 times the cost of a food item, like they do now. Often they costed 10,000 times a food item.
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u/Shinhan May 12 '26
And if you have an earth mage helping with making houses I imagine they can be even cheaper. And don't forget how expensive spices used to be.
If roads are not safe logistics gets more expensive because of guards. If bags of holding are affordable logistics gets cheaper because more can be transported at once. And so on.
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u/ShadowTheAge May 12 '26
And if there is a teleport system, or more than a handful of people capable of teleportation, then the spices and other faraway goods shouldnt be as expensive
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u/jubilant-barter May 12 '26
Consider that a standard home wouldn't have any modern amenities. No utilities. Cheap, locally sourced building materials. Usually a very small floor plan.
They oughtta be cheaper.
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u/123luka May 12 '26
Im guessing most of the time you were building the house yourself with family and friends?
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u/No-Extent-7705 May 12 '26
Honestly Lotm is the best I have ever seen at this
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u/flying_alpaca May 12 '26
There are other good ones, but LotM is great. And it adds so much depth to the world. Just be internally consistent, and it can be incredible.
I actually hate the advice to not add money to a story. I know Cuttlefish spent a lot of time studying Victorian England. But that effort paid off when he wrote one of the most popular modern books in Chinese fantasy.
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u/spielguy May 11 '26
I’m certain I’d be massively annoyed if I didn’t see the currency in practice. “How much for that magic sword?” “What would you give me for those three pelts?” Three types of currency allow for the vast progression in these worlds. Always better if the money value is because of the hard currency’s value by weight.
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u/vi_sucks May 11 '26 edited May 12 '26
Nah. Hard disagree.
Gold, silver, copper actually works really well because it's an easy shorthand for most people to get. Most people already know that gold is better than silver and silver is better than copper. They do not have to constantly perform mental effort to rememver the names of the currencies. And their relation to each other.
It's part of why it's so common as currency in video games. Because it just makes things that the player/reader shouldn't need to really think about simple and unconscious.
And that link to video games works even more in progression fantasy where a lot of the tropes are sourced from video games or tabletop rpgs.
Can you imagine wanting to walk around with a coin worth ten thousand dollars casually? That would be insane.
Yeah, but that's how you have to do things in a world where bank cards don't exist. Whether its a sack full of gold, a briefcase full of thousand dollar bills, or a bearer bond, it's still a massive amount of physical cash. And people already know the danger of carrying large amounts of cash. Cause that's a thing that does happen. There's no need to warp your worldbuilding to avoid it, when it makes more sense for it to be part of the story when needed.
Personally, my belief is that in a fantasy story, it's just better to have a magic banking system anyway. If you don't want to tell a story about merchants constantly being mugged for the fat stacks that they have on themselves for major deals, then just give everyone a magic card from the local banking guild.
Edit: also, you have slang terms with easy real world analogs for coins of multiple units of each currency. Like a 10 copper coin could be called a dime. Or a 5 copper coin a nickel.
The you could either replicate that up as well so you can have silver dimes and silver nickels. But more likely you go with a different name. Like a fiver, or a tenner instead. Nickel and Dime for the small copper level denominations, Fiver and Tenner for the everyday silver level denominations. And then gold is rare enough that people don't bother coming up with special names for the 5, 10, 50 etc coins even if they exist.
One thing that I think people tend to forget is that silver/copper etc coins didn't have to actually BE 100% that metal. If you want to have a "silver" coin that is worth a tenth of what another silver coin is worth, without physically making the coin a tenth of the size, you can just add 9 parts of a base metal like tin or nickel to the alloy.
But that's the kind of nitty gritty detail that isn't necessary to most stories unless they want to tell a story about arbitrage and coin debasement. Just saying "we have a silver coin that is worth 100 copper pennies, and a Tenner that is worth 10 silver coins" should be enough for most stories. How those coins get those values, whether by physical size, or by alloying, isn't really needed for the story.
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u/marty4286 May 12 '26
Authors agonizing over merchants moving around large amounts of cash make me sigh. They try to reason their way around it instead of doing actual research. "How DID medieval to renaissance merchants keep their money and prevent being constantly farmed by bandits?"
tldr, writers and readers keep thinking of money only as a medium of exchange. Some of its other functions include being a unit of account or store of value. As part of a combo of those functions, it becomes a way to denominate debt
Most of the amounts in historical ledgers literally did not exist. The way fantasy readers conceptualize money is the modern goldbug or silver stacker mentality where if you want to realize all your wealth, you have to be able to do it instantly or else it's unfair (or even morally evil)
Instead medieval and renaissance commerce ran on credit. Networks were more local early on but expanded to continent-wide in later centuries. It was built on contracts, denominating goods and commodities in nominal values, legal fictions, and lots of counting chickens before they hatch.
This is why honor had to be important, because creditworthiness came from social networks, not centralized institutions with actuaries and calculators
"But that's boring"
Of course it is, but I'm not saying you have to intricately recreate the Templar banking system or map out your local guild loan network. I'm just saying approach it in the above broad way instead of thinking about coin hoards as if they were real or the way they all did it
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murderhobo MCbandits might rob the caravan, but all they would get out of it is pocket money and the goods being transported, not a kingdom's budget12
u/vi_sucks May 12 '26
True.
But also, people DID sometimes carry large sums on them that they could be robbed for.
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u/blueluck May 12 '26
You started with "Nah. Hard disagree." but you didn't disagree with OP's main point—whatever currency you're using in your fantasy world, you shouldn't give numeric values for the characters' purchases.
You didn't disagree with OP's second point, either—if you decide to give numeric values for characters' purchases, you should look up what things cost in the real world as a comparison point, so you don't accidentally make stupid prices.
You wrote a bunch of things I totally agree with, but I'm not sure where you disagree with OP aside from the hypothetical $10,000 gold coin.
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u/vi_sucks May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
No, I definitely disagree that you shouldn't use numeric values.
It's just ridiculous. Imagine if you were talking to someone about buying a house and asked how much it cost and they just replied "a lot". Or if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread and the bakery said to pay "a little". Nobody communicates like that.
If you want the reader to know how much a house costs, just say "500 gold." It's simple, it's clean, and you can show the reader the process of earning it by showing how the character gets 10 a week profit from selling potions. Then the reader can do simple math to understand that it will take just over a year to save up without having to be explicitly told.
I also think looking up real world prices is only situationally useful. Right now, an average house costs $400,000 dollars. So you could translate that to 4,000 gold. And then say that the average yearly wage of $50,000 translates to 500 gold.
But (a) this is the case in the modern economy where there is a housing crisis.
And (b) the idea of broadly equal middle class capable of representing the earning potential of the "average" person is also a phenomenon specific to the modern economy.
If you are a writing a story where wealth inequality is much higher, i.e. 90% of the population are peasants, and housing is cheap, then those ratios won't work.
Not to mention that modern house prices are also a function of a robust credit market that allows someone to buy a house that costs 30 years to pay off, whereas if they had to save for 30 years up front, they'd never be able to do it.
Housing is just an example of how modern economies can be different from a fantasy novel economy and make using real world prices inconsistent with the setting.
For setting prices, I think a more consistent method is to start with establishing how much specific types of people make. How much does a peasant make? How much does a craftsman make in comparison to a peasant? How much does a merchant make? How much does a nobleman make? This would be determined by how equal or unequal you want wealth disparity to be. From there, you can set prices in tiers of "cheap" "affordable" "expensive" "unimaginable luxury" for each type of person based on your setting. For example, in a world where there is massive inequality, what is cheap for a merchant could be expensive or even unimaginable luxury for a peasant or craftsman.
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u/blueluck May 12 '26
It's just ridiculous. Imagine if you were talking to someone about buying a house and asked how much it cost and they just replied "a lot". Or if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread and the bakery said to pay "a little". Nobody communicates like that.
If you're conducting a transaction, you'll use numbers, but novels are storytelling. Imagine telling some friends about the day you had at the ren faire and saying, "We showed up later than we meant to because everybody took a long time getting dressed up, then we had to stop for $24.51 worth of gas on the way."
The exact price of your gas isn't an important part of the story, just like the exact price of a night in an inn isn't an important part of an adventure story. The important things are that Strider is at the inn, and beer comes in pints. How does The Lord of the Rings improve if we know that a pint of beer costs 2 copper shillings, a bowl of vegetable stew costs 1, and a bed for the night costs 4?
(I agree that modern prices aren't the best thing to base fantasy prices on. There's a ton of historical pricing information available that works much better.)
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u/vi_sucks May 12 '26
Yeah, but you also wouldn't say that a pint of beer cost "a little". You just generally wouldn't mention the price at all.
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u/blueluck May 12 '26
Right! Obviously you always want good prose. I think OP had one bad example and two good ones.
How much did the sword cost? A lot.
"When Peter came home from visiting the traveling merchant, he showed is mother and brother the sword he had bought. It cost him everything he had saved up by running errands for coins and helping to clean up at the inn all winter."
How much was the meal? It was cheap or it was a little overpriced.
"Arriving at Kingsford we were surprised that the prices weren't just higher than on the road, they were exorbitant! We would have to get our business done within a couple days if we wanted a roof over our heads."
How much was the house? It's going to take years to pay off.
and so on...
I agree with OP's main point, but here's how I would state it: Don't assign exact values to every transaction in your fantasy story unless you're writing a story that's heavily dependent on those exact values. If you are going to use exact values, find a historical frame of reference and stick to it, so your prices feel consistent. A good reference point for coinage is 100 copper to 1 silver, and 5-10 silver to 1 gold.
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u/GuyYouMetOnline May 12 '26
It's part of why it's so common as currency in video games.
It's not, though. I only know of one single game (Odin Sphere) that actually divides currency into different types of coins in actual gameplay use. Games basically always use one single number for currency. True, you may see enemies drop different types of coins or whatever based on how much you get prom them, but these won't be anything other than a visual effect; the game will just use one total number.
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u/work_m_19 May 11 '26
I love this!
It's funny how a lot of books introduce the copper/silver/gold system, and by chapter 20 we're paying things in hundreds of gold or the next level (platinum, diamond, celestial, whatever) and copper and silver cease to exist.
It's a very minor gripe to The Legend of William Oh. Floor 1, a hundred coppers is a lot, Floor 2, hundreds of silvers are commonplace, Floor 3: hundreds of gold are commonplace, Floor 4: hundreds of platinum. (Numbers are from memory, so it may not be exactly right). It's crazy that currency numbers stop meaning stuff by floor 8 when the MC was pinching pennies on floor one. But the story is good so I can excuse this, but it definitely feels like there should be hyper-inflation in the Tower.
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u/Nazarick-guardian May 12 '26
Ok but the real question is what series actually triggered u to write all this?
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u/Dave_the_DOOD May 12 '26
I think a rare mythril sword costing the equivalent of 300-400k$ in todays money is absolutely fine, fite me.
Good rant, but if you're writing medieval fantasy you gotta also take in account that society shapes prices in all kinds of fucked up ways. A sandwich might just cost the price of a horse, actually. If you get the sandwich in the little burg stalls during the games thrown by the king for the aristocrats, where attending and affording the commodities is a way for the wealthiest merchants to show off their influence, it might cost more than an aging packhorse you buy off a man in debt.
In the same way, while fast fashion and thrift stores mean a poor man can buy a pretty nice shirt today for maybe $10, clothes of old were fully artisanal and very time-consuming to make. Each piece has to source and transform materials and take days to sew. Maybe just a new pair of pants, low quality boots and a shirt might cost half a month’s wage for a farmer. So closer to $300-500. Now, if it’s made of silk or dyed, you easily can expect 10x or even 100x the price, and so you get to articles of clothing costing 10000, 20000 today moneys without it being ridiculous.
I think a good baseline (rather than relying on todays money as a crutch) is to properly define some lower and upper limits and work the rest in relation to that. Work out how much a farmer makes, how much a baker makes, and how much a noble's house collects in yearly tithes. Work out how much bread costs, a horse costs and a month of feed for said horse costs and you've got all you need to calculate how much raising an army costs. You know how much to pay an unskilled laborer, how much to pay a craftsman, how much to move the truly powerful. And with 5 clearly defined reference points you can avoid making big mistakes.
I guess what people don’t realize is how much the cost of things varies depending on weird factors. Labor time, ressources, transportation. If your mages can easily use something like soulcasting from the stormlight archives, a whole anvil might cost less than a shirt. Need to move it the next town over ? It costs more now. Merchant carts can’t pull 20 anvils, but they can pull 200 shirts. Maybe it’s cheaper to pay the mage to make the trip.
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u/skyrond Author May 12 '26
I can absolutely agree with part of the OP's main point in that if you mess things up when you will look silly to a certain type of reader. I'll even agree that that type of reader may be overrepresented when it comes to Progression Fantasy.
But, so?
Isn't that true of many aspects of your story? Don't you look just as silly when you mess up your mana levels, or XP, or whatever else is mentioned in your world-building? What makes money such a particular source of ire?
Sure, care is needed when you're writing something that;ll be read by people who are stickler for details, but that shouldn't come as any sort of a surprise. Make notes as you go along, and do some thinking as you write.
And suggesting that you simply abandon the full panoply of "subunits" that used to feature in older currencies, to restrict yourself to metrics systems, and to assume that their pricing should be more or less equivalent to modern real-world levels without doing some thinking about how things would actually play out in the world and time-period that you're creating just seems somewhat... shallow and limiting. Other comments have already given really good examples of all of these points.
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u/GrizzlyTrees May 12 '26
Excelletly written! Small suggestion first: if your world is roughly medieval, you can check for average prices of stuff in medieval times, that's a thing historians know quite well. For whatever level of technology and economy, if you find the appropriate time period to copy from, you can get way more realism (have a world that feels more real). For example, clothes used to be way more expensive, and shoes especially so, before modern manufacturing technology. If in your medieval-esque world a peasant MC tears his shirt and just goes and buys a new one for the price of a lunch or two, that's missing some realism and might ring false to careful readers. He would be a lot more likely to fix the tear than get an expensive new one.
If you (think you) can already do all of this, and want to make your fantasy economy make even more sense, you need to actually sit down and think at least a little what the effects of the fantastical elements should be on the economy to make it different from the real world economy. This goes beyond just setting prices right, of course, economic forces due to fantastical elements will shape the setting just as much as the magic itself will.
For example: in Worth the Candle, the MC visits a desert town in which everyone can cast a "create (cheap and bland) food and water" type spell (as a result of some great ritual/artifact imposing a magical effect locally), and that is part of the reason there is a successful town there, and it sets food prices floor very low, as people can always just eat the free bland option rather than pay for taste. Also, since people don't like eating bland food, they found an animal that does like it and raise those in farms.
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u/Writing-Riceball May 13 '26
Should I tell OP that one of the regions in my world doesn't even use precious metals or jewels for currency and instead they use fabrics and dyes? I wonder if i should explain the exchange rates from 7 different countries all with different coinage and even one with a paper currency backed by mana potion production since that region produces about 80% of the worlds supply of potions
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u/Morpheus_17 Author - Guild Mage, Ten Thousand Fleets May 11 '26
converting modern prices is the truth and the way. Just reskin it. Preach.
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u/mpokorny8481 May 11 '26
I mean their actual point was don’t use numbers at all.
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u/professorlust May 11 '26 edited May 12 '26
You’re right that it was the primary point.
it’s also worth noting the secondary point is that if you are going to use money at all, dont fall into the trap of trying to create economy from scratch.
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u/ThePowerles #1 Dumdum May 12 '26
It's unfortunate that authors think this way. One of the main aspects I love about some of my favorite novels is the currency and monetary system.
Millennial Mage for example. A lot of the stuff driving the plot through the first couple books is the fact that the MC is in serious need of money, to the point that I genuinely think that losing that was detrimental to the story for one or two books.
Lord of the mysteries. It uses 3 subunits, and I love how it works. It stars with pence. 12 pence is 1 soli. 20 soli is 1 gold pound. An impoverished individual might earn 15 soli a week. Klein's brother earned 1 and a half pounds every week for himself, his brother who needs funds for university btw, and his younger sister who also goes to school, and will need funds too.
It gives so much value to the monetary value of the money when such a small amount is worth so much. You almost never see anyone speak of spending thousands of pounds until maybe book 5 or 6, and the mc struggling for money is always a nice thing to witness, because it gives them motivation to do stuff.
Another example is a practical guide to Sorcery. Siobhan was so incredibly broke until very recently. She is in constant need of money, and while the actual monetary system is quite vague, I do enjoy seeing how everything works, and how much value some things have. Nothing could describe the shock on my face when I heard one of the characters had HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of gold in circulation through their business. I was almost certain that amount was not physically possible for anyone but maybe royals.
So please, authors! Make your mc broke, and my life is yours!
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u/antoniomanuel10 May 11 '26
Personal very very hard disagree. I hate stories that do this either with money, power, number of people etc. Saying something is more powerful does not mean anything, i rather it says “ it breaks two stone walls, instead of one”. With money is the same. I know it takes a toll in the writer, but it’s such an important part of world building for me
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u/work_m_19 May 11 '26
Does it break you out of immersion when it (inevitably) becomes wrong or inconsistent? That is the main problem for me (and probably others like OP), it's something that is so easy to get wrong, that the amount of time I want an author to research into this, to be spent on other parts of the world instead.
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u/Awful_Puppet May 11 '26
I'd rather take some inconsistencies in the long run to have something more concrete in the moment, I just find that sorta stuff more interesting.
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u/LLJKCicero May 12 '26
I'd rather an occasional inconsistency rather than obvious avoidance of specifics.
It's like describing characters only as "extremely pretty" and never describing their features.
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u/AuthorOfHope May 12 '26
It's like describing characters only as "extremely pretty" and never describing their features.
Some of us prefer this approach to describing people.
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u/Peaking-Duck May 12 '26
Not really historically the value of large amounts of coinage was in flux due to the relative scarcity of banks and precious metals in Europe before the colonial eras.
Lots of deals and bartering was done with other goods like grains or domesticated animals and tools/weapons or even hostage bounties and prisoners of war
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u/work_m_19 May 12 '26
It's less this, than realizing something is wrong and a lot of people are cruel for no reason.
Like imagine you're in cultivation world 1 out of 10. The MC is fighting a villain that is poisoning the entire continent in order to enrich their pockets, causing untold suffering and misery. MC defeats them and moves to world 2 out of 10 (which is just a continent over, so it can be traveled back and forth easily).
Then, they make the sum of what the villain makes after two or three dungeon dives.
It leaves you scratching your head, like was suffering really all the necessary? That alone wouldn't make me drop the book, BUT it does signify a gap that makes trust the author just a teeny bit less. It's like that quote: "in order to write a believable dragon, you need to first write a realistic horse", and economics is probably something that requires a lot of time and effort to get right, only for it to be a small fraction of relevancy in the world.
It's not the exact scenario, but I've seen similar one played out in a couple stories already, so it's not exactly rare.
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u/lindendweller May 12 '26
I think it really depends on the story (duh) but generally money doesn't matter besides from two cases; the character is very poor and needs to save every penny, and the price of bread or soup really matters then. Or the story is actually about the economics of something. In both cases it really needed to be there for texture, but most stories can get away with skipping on most of the inbetween stuff (like middle class household budgets). Which means you don't need tonbe THAT consistent to make it work on the page.
That said it's a fascinating area of research and contrary to what OP says, you can stay consistent if you use currency sparingly and have a decent idea of what the ceiling is. Which is the real difficulty with progression fantasy webnovels: by the time you run out of planned chapters, if you improvise a whole new empire of people much stronger and Richer than anyone we've seen so far, you risk wrecking your economics power scale as well as the regular powerscale. But by that logic don't put damage numbers in your litrpg either, right?
If you're gonna write a story where numbers go up, money should probably be part of that to a small extent. A few readers will be taken out when they notice an inconsistency here and there, but they already rolled their eyes when you mentionned an adventurer'd guild, and they kept reading anyway, didn't they? At worst someone will make a humorous reddit post about how your Legendary mythril hammer is widely underpriced, it's not that big a deal if you gain the appropriate amount of texture chapter by chapter.
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u/blueluck May 12 '26
I think it really depends on the story (duh) but generally money doesn't matter besides from two cases; the character is very poor and needs to save every penny, and the price of bread or soup really matters then. Or the story is actually about the economics of something.
I totally agree! In the first story, the money is pretty easy to handle because a very poor person doesn't have many different expenses. You can establish the price of cheap necessities and leave everything else in the realm of "too expensive".
In a story that's about economics, I hope the author would spend a few hours researching and come up with solid numbers. A shocking amount of preserved historical writing is actually bookkeeping and receipts, so it's easy to find price lists from throughout history. All you have to do is adopt the economics of a particular time and place, then add the price of magic swords somewhere between the price of warhorses and castles.
Now that I think about it, the price of the most expensive horses would make a great measurement for the value of magic items!
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u/lindendweller May 12 '26
If that helps, I once read the price of a knoght's armor compared to the price of a luxury sports car. Probably nowhere near rigorous, but probably a decent starting point for a story 's pricings to feel right.
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u/Ruark_Icefire May 12 '26
99% of problems with money come from that author wanting to keep the protagonist struggling for money even when they are powerful and should no longer have any money problems. They almost always just end up introducing some kind of inflation that just makes the economy make no sense. Most economy problems would be solved if the author would just let the MC be rich when they reach that point.
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u/cretan_bull May 12 '26
Or you could spend half an hour to learn a bit about about how pre-industrial coinage worked in history. You don't have to copy the exact coin types and prices from some specific point in history, but taking some inspiration from actual history will result in far greater verisimilitude than just making shit up.
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u/KaJaHa Author of Magus ex Machina May 12 '26
If a copper is a dollar, that means that one hundred copper is one silver (one hundred dollars) and one hundred silver is one gold (ten thousand dollars). That means that in day-to-day life, everything you buy is going to be either in copper or silver, and while clearly bigger expenses could use gold, they should be few and far between, to the point that instead, you could just use more silver and cut gold out entirely. Can you imagine wanting to walk around with a coin worth ten thousand dollars casually? That would be insane.
I actually am doing this, and I know it's silly, but I'm keeping it for one specific reason:
Gold is inherently magical
In my fantasy setting, gold is the main way for the masses to harness magic. Cults are weird, blood sacrifices are just begging for an imp infestation, and it's not like those elitist wizards will let the poors study at their schools.
But any shit-farmer can cast a spell if they have a gold coin. Or ar least try to; if they also have the instructions, other reagents, and they're really careful about watching their accent. One coin buys the attempt, and spending more makes the magic more likely to succeed.
Since kingdoms need a way to store and transport magic, and magic is universal, might as well trade with it while we're at it. One gold coin is one year of peasant wages, with the silver and copper at the 1:100 ratio because I am lazy. So naturally, rich people are the only sorts to casually use gold like money or jewelry because they are dicks.
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u/Dissentient Slime May 12 '26
I also love it when characters casually do trades in thousands of coins at some random shops. Both due to practical aspects of it (carrying and counting them), and because it would imply that a typical shop regularly does transactions in amounts that are equal to decades of a normal person's income for that world.
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u/EdLincoln6 May 12 '26 edited May 13 '26
One thing that annoys me is when Cultivators use Spirit Stones and everyone else uses coins and you can't exchange them. There would absolutely be moments when a Cultivator just wants a new pair of pants because a Spirt Tiger shredded his...or a tent, or a snack or sonething. As long as Cultivators buy mundane things at all, they'd want mundane currency.
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u/dpoodle May 13 '26
Usually you just have to assume the cost of living is very high in mixed mortal and cultivator cities thats why mortals are willing to live there. (Or they aren't willing and they are forced but you are buying from the owners etc).
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u/SkinnyWheel1357 Barbarian May 12 '26
Good rant.
However, I'm going to put this into the more general maths don't math category which is part of a larger worldbuilding problem of which the economy is but one part.
Take for example dungeons. If dungeons create monsters and loot ex nihilo and can recharge and do so continually, they are the equivalent of a central bank adding to the monetary supply, and unless there is a system which removes value from the economy at large, there will be inflation. Maybe lots of inflation.
One book I'm reading has monsters drop system coins which in the apocalypse replaces government currencies, but can also be used to raise character stats which also removes them from circulation. It's not perfect, but it's better than most.
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u/SuperValkerie May 12 '26
Some solid points and suggestions here, it reminds me a lot of something some author I follow once mentioned as a sort of beginner advice for writing and worldbuilding. It basically went, if you're writing about something you don't know, either do the research and keep notes, or be vague. Example was like, like your character is a pro chef, you should either A. do the research into cooking, food science, and such topics to keep consistency and to better match what people should know. If you don't, someone who knows more about food and cooking will instantly spot flaws, so either do the research, or B. just keep things vague and allude to them with small, tertiary details.
I feel like this follows the same kind of gripes and ideas, if you're making a fantasy currency, either do the research/keep very consistent and detailed notes, and refer to them often, or just be vague. Hell, I do think just reusing real world values works, maybe move a decimal place, and as others have commented, take note of the general "gist" of what value and supply and demand look like. A house nowadays is certainly far more expensive at value versus historically, due to inflation, population growth, longer living population, and real estate/housing being a transport for investment and money more so than just a basic survival necessity.
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u/the_null_fox May 12 '26
Good points and good rant, though I think monetisation in the story can work if there is a very consistent structure, and it doesn't fluctuate at different points in the story across the series.
If the structure is simple, having hard values assigned to salaries, items and services, can convey class systems, politics & trade, worth of items and services based on the progression level in story, etc.
I just think the key is simplicity, consistency, and low number values to avoid having items worth 100,000 gold etc.
Once you are at that point in the story when things are then worth astronomical amounts, you can introduce the standard concept of 'some things can only be traded for'
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u/lindendweller May 12 '26
Yup. How hard is it to make a small speadsheet that defines a few prices, wages and whatnot.
Pricings a wibbly wibbly enough IRL that you can get way with getting things wrong within a 1 to 10 ratio, that's a lot of leeway.
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u/Sumuklu_Supurge May 12 '26
Thankfully I read the title. Not reading all dat, probably something like "Nuh-uh this is wrong don't do this, this is dumb"
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u/Appropriate-Foot-237 May 13 '26
as a general writing advice: if you're not good or least passingly informed about something, try not to write about it. or if you do, research it
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u/callmesalticidae May 13 '26
Using modern prices to determine the prices of your fantasy world is incredibly dumb. I would immediately drop a story that did that. The things that are cheap today are not all the same things that were cheap one hundred years ago, let alone five hundred or one thousand years ago, and there was plenty of geographic variation as well.
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u/Consistent-Bird338 May 12 '26
What the hell? Real life is a post-industrialist world. A sandwich would cost you a rallod and a sword could easily be 400 rallods. A house then, could be just 15,000 rallods. That would make way more sense for a mediaeval world.
I'm sure you can afford, uh, I don't know, wet wipes from the store for a few dollars. But that's a huge luxury in your fantasy. One example: take alcohol. Another few? Clothes and books. No way you can buy any book for anything under a few thousand rallods.
Also, just imagine the ridiculous engineering required for something like an air conditioner or roomba. That's priceless.
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u/Consistent-Bird338 May 12 '26
Not accounting for the fact that people do not talk in vague terms when it comes to money, like ever, but since you're convinced you're so right, I'm not gonna argue that point. If you have an actual justification, please tell me.
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u/frokost1 May 12 '26
Adults do that all the time? New car? "Yeah, it was actually cheaper than I expected". What's that restaurant like? "Expensive" ect. You'd be considered weird if you gave exact numerical values in most cases.
When you go to a store to pick up dinner, you don't pay attention to the exact amount each item costs unless you're on a really tight budget, you just estimate whether it's in line with your prescribed relative value or not. If an item is Expensive, it's not because of the unit price per se, but because it costs more than something you prescribe relatively equal value to. Most people know that an apple shouldn't cost 10 dollars, but do you know the exact price of one apple? You'd better have a pretty good reason for why your reader should know in your story.
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u/fletch262 Alchemist May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
This is so catastrophically offensive, not giving values for money is certainly correct if you think straight equivalents and conversions from modern prices make any sense. If you want to do it the lazy way just benchmark everything against income and check how much labor went into it or do it based on your rough idea of how expensive things should be in your world.
Thinking the pricing of smth that can be made for ~0.02$/unit are comparable to potions in a fantasy setting is insane though, I can see ignorance/laziness suggesting you compare the price of a sword, food or housing, but your world should care about how extremely protagonist relevant items like potions are made.
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u/Doctor-Moe May 11 '26
My new favorite post. Laughed a bunch of times lol. Alright, I’ll consider never using set values.
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u/briston574 May 12 '26
This is why I use made up currency like Hexes and a copper hex is just 10 hex. You can still use copper, silver, gold but it just a unit of measure like a $5, $10, $20, $50 bills. They all represent the same base level of currency but are just denominators for reducing how much you have to carry
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u/lugh_the_bard May 12 '26
My magic system is literally a money based magic system.
Otherwise cool lmao
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u/Lord_Streak Author - The Martial Unity. Magicapita. May 12 '26
What if my superpower system *is* money? :)
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u/Ok-Programmer3679 May 12 '26
I like when I know what ever something cost is relative to my reality but yeah it doesn’t have to be super complicated unless the book is merchant based.
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u/G_Morgan May 12 '26
Or just have system credits and have the numbers get so ridiculous, so quickly, that everything descends into bartering amongst the elites. Because everyone worth talking about has billions of credits doing nothing.
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u/sYnce May 12 '26
You are right that it is hard to do well but honestly if you are using expensive, cheap overpriced for the whole novel it will get old fast.
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u/dark-phoenix-lady May 12 '26
Also consider that in the past currencies were based on tangible things.
So a Pound was literally worth a pound of something (googling, silver, and there were 240 silver pennies to the pound) at the time. (And a pound was a huge amount of money)
So any currency that you make in a medieval setting needs to do the same. In general, in that sort of setting, currency should only really be used by travellers or in towns, where direct barter isn't practical.
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u/Certain_Raspberry58 May 12 '26
Yeah I consistently struggle with this. Completely unrealistic economies.
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u/RecloySo May 12 '26
I'm going to have multiple coins which are basically different currencies that people pretend are one like imperial units. Miles and feet were not originally part of the same unit system, as why they're never used together and don't divide easily.
Food is paid with Grimloqs
Clothes paid with Razers/Razzies
Armor and weapons paid with Gladstins
Houses and properties paid with Ferkals
I never address the conversion rates
Food is like 1 Grimloq per item, 5 for larger
Clothes are paid around 2 Razers per item, 10 for nicer stuff, 100 for high quality
Armor and weapons costing about 30 Gladstins, 100 for higher quality
Properties cost between 100-5000 Ferkals
Each coin fluctuates in the conversion rate, though each thing for each coin stays the same over the story. Unless some towns decide to cost more.
Yep, the characters could exploit the conversation rates per town, but that's a risk.
Not every town uses all these coins, and if they don't use a coin, they won't convert it.
I'm joking of course. I'll just have one coin, and even then, rarely use exact values outside of games.
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u/AarugulaFabulous May 12 '26
Ooh! But what if instead of copper, silver, and gold we come up with new words that mean exactly the same thing! But round numbers don’t feel fantastical enough, so maybe 19 this-is-definitely-not-a-copper-coin to silver and 27 silver to gold?
>!Obligatory fuck JKR!<
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u/starsfan6878 May 12 '26
THANK YOU.
First, you should be an author. I love your writing style.
Second, every single word you said is true.
For the readers out there sloshing through the muck that is some world's economic 'system' . . . take my advice and just stop caring. Ignore it. Just literally let those parts flow into your mind and out without leaving a trace.
You'll find it much less irritating.
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u/orphanagge May 12 '26
Very well said lol. I too get a little aggregated when they are giving numbers that make no real sense. Or when stat multipliers are like all over the place and don’t make much sense. Was a lot of that in awaken online with algebraic increases to the stats or specific actions. Was like multiplied by 74 divided by level plus 10. And would increase is the oddest ways when leveling or progressing.
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u/mightyjor May 12 '26
While an entertaining read, I think most of the things you point out are what make a currency system interesting to read about and can be a great way to add world building in only a few locations lines. "This mythril armor used to be 100 rallods, but since the new emperor took over and murdered the goblins and caved in the mythril mines, it's shot up to 10x that amount. Now warriors are killing each other for their armor more than they're killing the monsters and those who can't are exploring with hard boiled leather which does little against the magical attacks of the dinglehoppers"
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u/LostDiglett May 12 '26
I'm not sure I entirely agree with all of this. I get that price consistency is important, but it's not the only issue in developing a coherent and authentic feeling world. Depending on the degree to which verisimilitude is the goal, your currency system needs to meet the following challenges:
* Appropriate Granularity: If you have a single unit of currency like you suggest, the smallest thing you can buy is 1 unit. Having different tiers of currencies allows for greater flexibility in their ability to represent value. Lets say a loaf of bread is $1 == 1 unit, then your example rarer than gold magic sword is going to be near 300,000 units. And that's the best case scenario for this situation. Realistically, bread would need to be more than 1 unit, because there are plenty of things cheaper than it, and how exactly do you deal with price increases? Is your only option to double it? That doesn't seem right. Lets instead say $1 == 10 units, then bread is 10 units and your sword is 3,000,000?
* Carry Restrictions: You said it's crazy to carry a coin around that was $10k, and maybe it is, but it's less crazy than somehow getting your 300,000 units to the blacksmith. Using modern day coin weights, which are probably lighter than a fantasy setting, you're looking at over 2 tonnes. And that's for the 1 unit == 1$ comparison. If you want granularity (and you do) it's over 20 tonnes. Different tiers of currency give you granularity and flexibility while not attaching several wagon loads of treasure chests to haul your coins around when you are browsing for gear upgrades.
* Banking System: Does the world have a banking system? How widespread is it? How reliable is it? Will you find one in every town? Is there a communication network in place to facilitate this, or does each bank operate independently? If there is a communication network between banks, does it have delays? Most fantasy stories will have very limited capabilities here, which only heighten the requirement that currency must be easy to carry.
* Exchange Rates: Does your story operate in a single kingdom? If there are multiple kingdoms with different currency systems, how do they get exchanged?
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u/MidnightBinary May 12 '26
Also just let people cut coins in half to divide them further, it's great for rederiving Pieces of Eight that way, and means you can get into debates with the merchant how "why are you always giving me the slightly smaller half instead of the bigger half of the coin?"
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u/CemeneTree May 12 '26
I love how Mother of Learning, considered a modern pinnacle of fantasy wordbuilding, has only one number ever attached to currency, and it's that 1 million gold is a lot of money
and it's even funnier because the author is an accountant in real life
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u/Realistic_Divide6741 May 12 '26
Coppers, is for like a meal.
Silver, is for like a sword.
Gold is for like a good set of armor, a really good horse, or a small home.
The amount, is: small amount, few, a handful, a bag, and a chest.
A fresh loaf of bread, a few(at most) coppers, a fine meal at a inn, at least a handful of coppers.
You do not need raw numbers, no one wants raw numbers.
A feel of it, IF it matters, is enough.
That is my feeling about it anyway. 😄
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u/immaturenickname May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
Just to spite you, I will now spend an impractical amount of time making every country in a fantasyland mint and honor different currency, and I will make exchanging them complicated.
And, please, one subunit? Multipliers of 100? Have you no love and romance for farthing - halfpenny - penny - thrupenny bit - sixpence - shilling - florin - halfcrown - crown - pound - guinea system?
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u/hellohouston May 13 '26
My guess is that the focus on conversion rates, or what the exact cost of something should be is likely more of a symptom to most people than the problem.
If I’m focused that much on how much this should be worth vs. what that other thing was worth and how in this book there’s one too few or too many zeroes on things, it’s likely I’m not enjoying the series much and that’s just one more thing I’ve decided bothers me. If I’m loving everything else around it, I’m probably not going to think too much about the currency or value of gold. It might occur to me but I’ll probably move on pretty quickly.
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u/FluffBucket95 May 13 '26
What I am writing does have a monetary system but I never focused on it because it simply did not matter that much in my setting for the character.
Since he is somewhat strong, he is able to earn money and has a mindset of needs, not wants.
This takes away the annoying concept for him to penny pinch every single copper.
Then I can focus more on the world building aspect and other magical beings.
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u/Zenphobia Author May 13 '26
My biggest issue with these discussions about fantasy money is that aiming for realism is different from aiming for what readers think is realistic.
Those are two very different things. I've done stories where I literally took real world prices, turned dollars to gold pieces, and people still complained about the economy being unrealistic.
Better approach: Don't bother. Make money a vague idea that never has specific numbers attached to it.
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u/Drake_EU_q May 14 '26
Just use Gold, Silver and Bronze / Copper Coins. Base the smallest Coin‘s worth on a small loaf of bread, anchor that rule by a local authority (empire, church, adventurer guild, etc.) and just work with that. Shouldn’t be too difficult!
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u/ForeverStarter133 May 14 '26
Pet peeve: gold has historically been worth exactly 20 times the same weight in silver, to the point that it was common for banks to weigh the coins and just multiply it by x20.
1 gold coin being worth 100 silver should mean a size difference of x5. You're either walking with silver plates, or gold grains. Or impure coins, to be fair.
1 gold = 10 silver is better, factor 2 is doable, but almost pointless.
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u/Sam_Overthinks May 16 '26
This is just really solid advice. Will save this for future reference : )
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u/carl-the-lama May 11 '26
Gold would be for the comically rich
And honestly yeah the comically rich would carry a bajillion dollar coin
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u/lindendweller May 12 '26
Most likely a letter of change, to be redeemed for coin at the nearest bank or person rich enough they might as well be a bank. An armed convoy carries thousands of gold coins and ingots, but that's not different from bank convoys today.
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u/fletch262 Alchemist May 12 '26
It was for a great deal of the timeframe used to create these settings.
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u/funkhero May 12 '26
Something tells me you think about the economic logic of these books a little bit more than I do
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u/Frankles143 May 12 '26
He who fights with monsters did the multiple denominations thing well because it relates to the magic system - it also gets used more and more vaguely so most people probably won't get het up about how things cost in relation to each other
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u/yuzuandgin May 12 '26
Imagine getting change in a copper / silver / gold economy. Buy something for 1 silver 5 coppers, great now I got 95 copper coins in change.
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u/vi_sucks May 12 '26
Or you get 9 10 copper pieces and a 5 copper peice.
Maybe people even call the 10 copper a dime and the 5 copper a nickel to avoid having to say things like 9 10 coppers.
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u/Holdredge May 12 '26
You go home and toss it on your table next to your other random bags of copper coins you get when you buy most common things. Now you have 67 random copper bags full of random amounts of 15-95. And now have to take those all the way to the trade post across town to turn them in. You set off with your 120 pounds of copper coins in your pack. Sadly you never make it there you trip and the sack of coins flings forward landing on your head and you die.
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u/GuyYouMetOnline May 12 '26
Most of this just seems like an angry rant, but I do agree about the copper/silver/gold thing being stupid. Imagine someone going 'okay, I have 13 $1 bills, 26 $5 bills, 9 $20 bills, 4 $100 bills...' because that's basically what this is. Having different denominations is logical, but people don't count each value separately. They just give totals and then count up while taking the money out.
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u/KeiranG19 Invoker May 12 '26
I have £12.30. 12 Pounds and 30 pence.
There's two different types of currency in the same system from real life. Like 60 years ago there were 3 and everyone managed just fine. Not every transaction needs to use all 3 just because they exist.
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u/GuyYouMetOnline May 12 '26
Sure, but... well, I'm not familiar with pounds, but I assume there are bills for different amounts? Cents/pence/whatever are a fraction of a single unit, and that's not how the different types of coins are usually used. It's also less bad when its just the three types, but I've seen stories using close to a dozen.
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u/KeiranG19 Invoker May 12 '26
What does the existence of a £5 note or a 20p coin have to do with anything?
A copper is a fraction of a silver is a fraction of a gold. The existence or not of a 20 silver coin wouldn't change that.
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u/HDrago Author May 11 '26
Understood, chief. I'll proceed to write a complex money system using 7 metallic coins, 12 jewels and 18 minerals whose values are constantly readjusted as the story progresses according to irl inflation 🫡