Currency Quest, getting away from gold

I had the pleasure of attending Coding Medieval Worlds recently. The description from the event’s website is a great summary: “Coding Medieval Worlds is a workshop series that brings together game developers and historians. Run as a fully online forum for discussing shared problems and ideas, CMW has had attendees from almost every part of the world discussing the issues of representing and encoding medieval themes into historical and medieval-fantasy gaming.”

But Currency Quests?

There was some impressive expertise on display, I was able to contribute to some conversations, while just nodding along and scribbling down notes in others.

One that was particularly striking was a small group discussing medieval currencies - how it worked, what it could be, issues around it. Especially what it meant in fantasy settings, and how many narrative possibilities we were missing out on by going with the familiar tropes. There is so much more to currency than gold.

( as a sidenote, I think “real medieval phenomenon that, treated authentically, would give us all better stories” unintentionally became the theme of the event because of the number of examples cited, Viking legal procedures for one )

As one of the participants was a GamesMaster it came up how interesting some of these ideas were for a fantasy TTRPG. So I started noting down the ideas that came to mind, and all the different aspects of those ideas that would generate interesting narratives. I’ve copied those notes below. As I spent a lot of time listening to the subject matter experts I like to think most of these were mine - but they were all in a shared document, so the authorship is unclear.

I’m listing them here in case they’re useful to others. Rather than just raiding the nearest dungeon, or meeting a mysterious stranger in the tavern - What happens if the party are hired to attack or protect the transportation of currency, but with an extra angle:

• Is the currency being smuggled to avoid being taxed, so it only needs to be hidden from some others but not all?
• Or are the party being hired as additional officers to find smuggled currency? Why is it being smuggled?
• Are the party there to steal the currency, or sabotage its transport, or just delay the delivery?
• Are the party there to destroy the currency? Does it only need to be rendered unusable? Are they tempted to steal it anyway and claim it was destroyed?

Why is the currency being transported:

• Is it to pay a fine, what happens if the deadline for payment is missed?
• Is it to pay a dowry? What happens to the wedding if it doesn’t arrive? And is it a wedding for diplomatic reasons? What happens if that wedding doesn’t take place through lack of dowry?
• Is it to pay a ransom? What happens if the deadline for payment is missed?
• Is it to take advantage of different exchange rates for currencies in different geographies? If the delivery is delayed, and the exchange rates have changed, what happens then?
• Is it a “diplomatic gift”, for example in support of, or to ward off, an invasion?
• Is it an insult? Unknown to the party, maybe gold is so common at the destination that it is valueless, what happens if they only discover this discrepancy when they arrive?

All of the following, at some point, have been used as currency in real world societies. How might that be reflected in a fantasy world, and what are the consequences?

• Fish
• Meat
• Shells
• Dyes and sources of dyes, such as insects.

For all of those currencies above, what happens if they’re delayed, damaged, destroyed, or replaced? What do you do when currency rots?

And for all of the scenarios above, is an attack intended to be overt or covert? If the party are tasked with preventing an amount of currency being transported, can they obviously attack the transport? Or must the currency just disappear? Or must they somehow replace the shipment in some way that won’t be discovered until it arrives at its destination?

One last set of ideas, relating to the most common scenarios that a traveling band of “murder hobos” might be surprised by:

• On raiding a dungeon - have the aged contents become valuable again? Older coins might contain a greater amount of the valuable metal than newer versions, so you can turn a small number of older coins into a larger number of newer coins.
• Has age simply made the contents of the dungeon exotic, and therefore valuable, again? The items might be small enough that they become a kind of currency. The connection to their heritage of the coins might give them value that they did not have a few years before.
• Are the party simply new members of a community, so while they carry currency with them it’s not worth anything here because the party themselves aren’t trustworthy?
• Are the party apparently wealthy by what they own, but traveling and fighting, sleeping in taverns and tents, they certainly don’t look like wealth. So the inhabitants of their destination can only assume that they are thieves, and should be treated appropriately?
• On arriving in a new community are the party clearly the wealthiest people who’ve ever been here, and have far more money than any inhabitant? Which presents its own dangers…