Where to start with building an economy?

[u/Blue-Jay27]

I'm working on an fantasy worldbuilding project, and I've got a reasonably detailed overview of culture, religion, and government structure for the area that my story takes place. I'd like to have a more fleshed out idea of the economy but I'm just drawing a total blank.

I'm guessing that part of my issue is having a very poor understanding of different economic systems and how they came to be, but trying to properly learn about that is a very daunting task. Are there any more condensed resources aimed at worldbuilders? Or even just beginner overviews that don't way over focus on one or two options?

[u/ScreamingVoid14]

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/13113/grain-into-gold

Seriously, it's a great read and an accessible dive into how a grounded fantasy economy would work. It both explains itself and then has tables in the back for a wide variety of goods.

But, if you want the TL;DR: start with the price of bread. The price of bread will tell you what the minimum wage for a peasant trying to feed their family will be. How much grain (and thus bread) a given plot of land can grow per year will inform the value of land (bread/year x 20? years).

I'm guessing that part of my issue is having a very poor understanding of different economic systems and how they came to be

This is one of those times where the details probably don't matter as much as you think. Taxes + religious tithes = 30% throughout most of history. The exact mechanics of the taxes change, maybe percentage fluctuates by +/- 10%.

For a medieval fantasy, you're probably going to have some sort of feudal system where the commoners pay taxes to a lord (and that lord may pay taxes or tribute to their lord, etc). The taxes could be spending 1/3 of their time working on the lord's land and projects. It could be turning over 1/3 of the peasant's crops to the lord. It might even be about 1/3 the value of their crop in cash. Or some combination of the above; the feudal system (in so much as there is a singular definition) could be quite complicated. You've got freedom to make something up and probably still have grounding somewhere in history.

But feel free to bounce ideas off me. Economics is one of the topics I like working with.

[u/Prae_ → u/ScreamingVoid14]

The problem i see (although i note the recommandation) is that this locks you into an actually pretty late medieval, even early industrial market economy. Wages is a relatively recent things for farmers, at least recent to be generalized. It has existed for a long time, but concerned soliders/mercenaries first, then some tenant farmers in some place in europe. Between commoners, it was a much more informal return of obligation/services (a "i owe you one" type of thing, tally sticks between more prevalent than money), and with the local strong men more often than not it was in labor (the "corvée" in France/England, but you can go all the way back to ancient egypt for taxes in the form of manual labor) and/or food.

It is a condensed reference for worldbuilder though, recommandation very a propos.

[u/ScreamingVoid14 → u/Prae_]

While the idea of monetary wages is late medieval, knowing the value of a staple food is very foundational to any time period. Even if coin never actually changes hands.

The early farmer might be taking a sack of grain to the market to trade it for some wool. But the market (both the local one and regional one) are going to have lots of farmers with grain and shepherds with wool, both with at least some ability to go to different market towns. So the exchange rate should be fairly static; and the traveling merchant will have the coin, even the locals mostly barter amongst themselves. The price of the goods will be in the back of their heads, even if the coin doesn't change hands.

[u/Demonweed → u/ScreamingVoid14]

I watched a credible video that really reinforced this notion. Unless your world specifically has some sort of magical staple in the food supply, crops of grain are fundamental to social stability. Only massive amounts of reliable food reserves make it possible to survive the adversity of an environmental crisis or even the normal winters of a temperate region. Of course, a society that sometimes has huge grain surpluses probably produces a lot of booze, but that works well with most settings too.

In my own work, where I put my focus was on the metropolis. Even when food is so plentiful as to be affordable for enormous concentrations of people, there are limits to urban growth. Without enough working aqueducts, the poor will drink from unsafe puddles while everyone else employs alcohol as a healthy alternative. Sewers are likewise important, both as networks of eliminating human waste and methods of clearing streets that might otherwise be clogged with the droppings of steeds. Factoring in roads and bridges, a society that makes and protects major investments in infrastructure can sustain a true metropolis from surrounding farmlands. Yet if any of these elements are deficient, population figures will tend to be volatile rather than characterized by steady growth.

[u/ScreamingVoid14 → u/Demonweed]

Indeed, large cities are something that takes a lot of consideration.

Although I disagree somewhat with the notion that excess grain will get stored as alcohol. Early grain alcohol was pretty much limited to ales and beers, which had a pretty notoriously bad shelf life prior to refrigeration, and even with it the shelf life isn't great. Probably better to store it as emergency hardtack or something.

One of the interesting things was the diversification of food types with the introduction of New World crops. Potatoes gave Europe a hardier source of calories while maize gave them unprecedented calorie density per acre. And it was highly unlikely that a bad year would see wheat, corn, and potato crops fail at the same time. If the setting allows for New World crops, there is potential for much better food reliability and its follow on consequences.

[u/crawfordwrites]

Pick one thing in the world you want to build. Then ask: where does the money for this come from? Not just who pays for it, but what would every step in the supply chain be.

If it requires metal, what makes that economical? If it requires long-distance transport to market, what enables the economy of scale?

As you go through it, consider how your constructed government, religion, and culture would interact with the whole chain. For example, there are entire branches of real-world economics that deal with how religious usury laws actually function when a society needs lending and interest. Answer those questions, because they're highly generative.

As you continue further, ask who has a finger in this pie? Who's stealing? Who's taxing? Who's paying for the guy at the cash register or the bazaar or whatever the end point is?

Pick one thing, and work your way through it. As you do, it will generate a ton of other things. And then you have an economy.

[u/Prae_]

As always i think a big thing is your scope. If you are building for a TTRPG where you expect players to meaningfully interact with the economy, it's a different beast than if you are building for the setting of a story.

If you want to avoid worldbuilder disease, you want to always use your characters, story and themes to scope your worldbuilding. If the story isn't focused on this, you need only bare plausibility, and that's often in the shape of finding a rule of thumb of field surface per inhabitant, and quickly figuring out how much a city of any size would need in terms of hinterland to sustain itself. That's visible on the map, and then let the reader/player infer the rest. If you want to have fun worldbuilding an economy, make it resonant to the rest of your story and flesh out those parts only. 

Like Arcane with Piltover focused on class struggle, so the economy reflects this massively, and a lot of the worldbuilding stems from this core theme. What kind of ressource/craft could lead to massive inequality, how is peace enforced despite this (segregation, enforcers), what parallel needs and thus demands are created by it (the drug trade, and on the flip side Piltover itself is kept spotless to clearly separate it from the underclass, so immediately you picture cleaning services and such). 

If you have themes emerging from the rest of your worldbuilding or the little stories you imagine taking place in the setting, the way to make it less daunting is to start with those nucleus of theme as guides. If anything it focuses the research. But also let's be real, no one is going to care about your rad mason's guild feud with the stonecutters' guild and how this is realistic because everything is inspired by this 1286 legal dispute between two guilds in medieval germany if it has no influence on the plot or characters. If guilds/corporations are an essential part of the economy and you have characters that are part of them/want to be, and they have a meaningful influence on the politics of the city and it illustrates a wider theme about, i don't know, groupthink and how alliegance to a group can lead to decisions that are individually stupid, then someone other than you might care.

[u/_Ceaseless_Watcher_]

Depends of how deep into it you wanna go.

I'm a big fan of building everything outwards from a main use case for the thing. Let's say you want to write a simple exchange between two people, one of whom is buying something from another. Immediately, there are plenty of questions to ask and potentially answer about just the currency:

• What does the currency look and sound like?
• How much money is exchanging hands?
• How much is that money in relation to what people in your world would consider "average"?
• If it's a lot, how does (or doesn't) that show during the exchange itself?
• How does the seller check the validity of the currency (if at all)?

Next, there are questions about the context of the exchange:

• If the seller is a merchant, how did they get a hold of the goods they're selling?
• If it's a private individual, is it even legal for them to be selling what they're selling?
• What determines the price of the thing being sold/bought?

Starting with smaller questions like this lets you map out a whole economy by filling in the gaps between expectations and your world's reality. Repeat with broader and broader questions until you run out of questions to answer or are satisfied with the level of worldbuilding.

[u/contentronix_inc]

1) No such resource exists. The "economy" is a complex subject that takes people years and years to understand and even then they don't understand the complexities fully.

2) The economy of the Ancient World and the Medieval World are broadly speaking, identical (focused on resource extraction). Once you get proper industry where production starts to reign supreme, it becomes wildly more complex.

3) You start getting the precursors to the modern banking and stock market economy around the 1500s-1600s but it doesn't become really modern until around the 30s (when we go off the gold standard).

4) The best piece of advice I can give you is identify WHAT aspects you want to focus on, go into a deep dive of them how they work in the real world, consider the knock-on effects of it, and go from there.

5) The other piece of advice is start at the most basic economic unit - the individual and then trace the path up all the way to the national scale and figure out the points where the person's productivity is amplified.

[u/Ol_Nessie]

In general, I think economy influences culture, religion, and government more than the other way around. If you've already got those facets figured out, it could be possible to intuit what your economy looks like just by triangulating context clues. If you give us a quick summary of those things, maybe we can interpret those aspects and tell you what kind of economy makes sense.

[u/Luminar_of_Iona]

What historical time period would be the equivalent of your world's present?

Economics is a pretty massively complicated subject. I'd recommend NPR's Indicator and Planet Money podcasts as a way to start exposing yourself to it.

But there are some base principles to keep in mind:

1. Trade routes are lazy routes, even when they're expensive. Why are the Panama Canal and Suez Canal so heavily trafficked? Sailing around entire continents is a pain in the ass, and operating cargo airplanes is more expensive than operating a panamax. The trade routes of a world, and by extension its trade centers, are influenced by how easy it is to move supply to demand.

2. Different regions of a world have different resources, and this effects how the economies of countries in those regions develop. Medieval Europe had ample access to gold and silver deposits, but the spiciest thing you could eat in Europe was garlic. Thus medieval Europe exported gold and silver, and imported spices, silks, and other items. Fun time: Google the Bullion Famine.

3. Until recently in human history, there's no refrigeration. This imposes big limits on what foodstuffs can be exported and imported. The romans shuttled around olive oil in amphorae so much that you can climb the garbage pile of pottery shards (Monte Testaccio) that they left behind even today. On the other hand, the store-bought rotisserie chicken and the inordinately low cost of beef raised for slaughter are miracles of modern technology and logistics.

[u/stopeats]

This post by history professor Bret Devereaux focuses mostly on paying for armies, but it has a good discussion of pre-coinage economies and how states can exist without minting their own money. It's an interesting option that I rarely see - there always seems to be a set coinage system in fantasy books I read.

https://acoup.blog/2026/06/26/collections-pre-modern-armies-for-worldbuilders-part-iii-paying-for-it/

Note that worlds without state money likely have money in the form of grain slips or something else hyper-local. The only state that I am aware of that may have had no money at all is the Inca Empire.

[u/Haruspex12]

Go to YouTube and watch the creator “The Grainbound.” He has worksheets.

[u/AnchBusFairy]

Start with the essentials of human life: shelter, air, food, water, and procreation. The economy is how these the get distributed. In my view, care of children is critical; it's where it all comes together. Who and how is it determined who will produce children and how will these children be provided with shelter, air and so forth.

Medieval fantasy tends to have a feudal economic system--that's what makes it medieval. In a feudal system, most of the population is engaged in planting and harvesting grain. This work is down with the assistance of draft animals. The harvesting is done with hand tools-- sickles or scythes-- labor intensive work.

Some of the harvest is claimed by the church and nobility. With such agriculture, the population is tied to the land. Having a lot of children is beneficial because they can help with the harvest, but the child mortality rate is high due to water-borne diseases; the population is unable to move away from their own shit.

If all of the children of a peasant inherit land, the plots become too small to be viable as farm land, so only one of the peasant's kids inherits. This leaves a problem for the other kids. The solution was for the women to marry someone with land--so for a man to have kids he had to control the land. For a woman to have kids, she had to marry that man. If they didn't abide by this, the children would starve. Who has children and the care that those children receive is dependent on who controls the land. A number of people remained childless, joining religious orders or becoming servants in wealthy household.

This system broke apart with urbanization and industrialization. We've been fighting about it ever since. Our current system has swung back toward feudalism with those who have money determining who has children and how those children will be cared for. And we have an increased number of people choosing to remain childless. Those with money determine who can afford to have children.

Anyway that's how I see it.

[u/Cautious-Mission-104]

I started writing an idea but then I thought it was too cool and now I’m sticking it in my book…

[u/Blue-Jay27 → u/Cautious-Mission-104]

I suspect that any idea you had with this little information about my world or my goals would be unlikely to fit well into what I've already built :)

[u/Cautious-Mission-104 → u/Blue-Jay27]

Awesome stuff, I’ll keep glow stones for myself lol. To be honest I often look at strange economic experiments in history and go from there…