The Campaign Builder's Guild

My d20 group has never done a post apoc game with me before, and I've never DM'd one.  So now I'm making up a post apoc world taking place some 175-275 years after some Event long faded from human memory.  A player and I are heshing out the details of the world here and there, and we came across a point of contention.  Here are the basic facts:

The "Region" has say 4 cities built around a large vacation river/lake area.  These cities are all new additions built from vacation communities along the shore of the lake or the river itself.  They are walled and have between 5,000 and 9,000 people in them.  They exert control over a given area by economic domination (city state), and their economies are generally based around services and light manufacturing.  Towns are pretty much a primary manufacturing zone with some production capacity in the food market (mostly for internal consumption, supplemented elsewhere) and smaller settlements exist near exploitable resources like arable land or ruins as primary producers.  The local city calls the shots over a number of towns, which in turn may or may not have control over the smaller settlements.

At first I figured the economy would be right up barter, but my player figured that currency in some form would probably have resurfaced within the same Event generation simply because we are so used to it as a concept.  While I can't really say either way on that, I did think that maybe currency for internal use could be kind of interesting, the potential for some kind of conflict or plot point.  But, unfortunately, I never quite figured what it would be backed by.

In Fallout, money was bottle caps, which were scarce and "backed" by the authority of the myriad traders in The Hub.  By custom they would always take these caps, which means that when I buy something from you with Hubbucks (caps), you are basically receiving the ability to get whatever you want from the traders in the Hub, who had a lot.  Nobody could forge these, as they'd have to be stamped properly, painted and enameled.  In Fallout 2 they were using gold again, struck as coins by someone, probably the NCR or maybe the Hub (which wasn't in 2).  I can't speak for any other Post Apoc games, I'm afraid.

I was figuring that maybe the player's city is beginning to introduce currency, perhaps over the last generation.  Most "workhorse" trades are done by barter or service-trade (clean your roof for a new spade handle).  But, some trades, especially at the largest point of exchange (a market) are being done in promissory notes (backed currency).  But, what exactly would back currency, I wonder?  Gold?  Gold's useless and I don't see you finding a whole lot of it in a small area around a relatively large lake that used to be a retirement/vacation area.  I'd have to be something useful, but something you couldn't find in places like steel or lumber or stone.  Then I decided that it would be backed by refined food.

Basically, I came up with the idea that the player's city of Westfield has a number of trade guilds that exist to make sure the handful of "original" workshops for their trade are protected against newcomers.  Newcomers have to earn their way (buy their way) into the guild in order to open a workshop, and workshops have to have their apprentices approved by the guild before they can become approved journeymen and masters (masters can open shops but nobody else can).  Basically this regulates the trade at hand so that you don't end up with 500 bakeries in a city of only 8,000 people.

So in Westfield, the Baker's guild got powerful because early on the bakers managed to clamp down on all sources of grain (mostly corn and barley).  There were a few farms around the area early on, of course, allowing seed to proliferate over the following generations of handwaving.  Well, in any case the Baker's guild got big because at their will you live or die.  They began to finance a few personal projects with IOU notes worth a given amount of bread to be paid to the people who were doing the project for them.  Basically, I owe you 3 pounds of bread and I can only spare 1 pound for you; call me later about the other 2 says this note.  Well, some of those workers traded those notes for other things they wanted to people who figured that these IOU's must be worth something to the guild still.  Turns out they honored it for the few secondary people who turned it in.  Very nice of them.  The guild issued a few more here and there to "pad" pay for projects, and some of these got traded around, eventually finding themselves quite far from the people they were paid to.  The guild, half afraid dishonoring them would cause other people to buy their bread from the other smaller settlements (or worse, try making their own), kept honoring them.  Eventually, nobody really turned them in anymore -- they simply became the object of the barter, still redeemable for a loaf of bread on demand from the Guild's collective members.  Talk about your breadbasket.

So there it is, currency backed by the promise of bread.  Thought I'd share that here for those of you who didn't see it on the IRC.

M.

That is actually... quite brilliant. Just a small idea here but you should totally have the locals call them crusts the same way we use bucks/bills for our money.

Thanks for checking it out Nomadic.  Consider the crusts suggestion taken, as it sounds much better than chits or notes.

There's a bit more to the setting that I'm working on, maybe I'll post it up here when I get some time.  Have yet to create a real hot one, so let's hope a sci-fi/postapoc one does it for me.

M.

The only problem with this is that you can not store the backed value for any length of time. Bread goes stale, gets eaten, whatever. It is also produced. Although these crusts are traded, someone, somewhere, is buying bread directly. You've stapled the inflation rate to the going price of a food staple (no pun intended), which are notoriously unstable. They've been backed by subsidies in the modern world essentially since the end of WWI, because we as humans produce too much of it.

You're going to have issues with massive, massive amounts of inflation, with no way to really stop it. The guild can't very well buy off the farmers with crusts, as they're backing it with what they're manufacturing. It would be like going to a gold mine owner and telling him to slow production in exchange for some gold. No point. Similarly, the only way to bump demand of bread and, therefore, the worth of the crust, is to get a bit of hunger going on in society or let grain spoil, neither of which makes your society happy.

My advice is to, maybe, deregulate the bread, but regulate the grain. If you have a large co-op of farmers growing massive acres of barley and wheat, issuing promissory notes for a portion of the crop come harvest time, this removes the regulation problem, as its in the co-op's best interest to regulate, and they have the means to do so directly. This also ties wealth to land which is, historically, where the power tends to lie, and makes this society look a little bit more inline with pre-modern levels of thinking (back in the day when bought bread was a luxury, and you were much more likely to buy flour). This doesn't remove the risk of a large fluctuation from competitors or a particularly good harvest (paradoxically, a bumper crop has a much more real threat of crashing the market than a poor season. Hmm.), but I think it would model in a much more stable manner.

Just my two large cents on the matter.

While you make a good point (I think, anyways), part of the point is the instability.  They're not issuing 1 note for every unit they produce; in theory they are on a bread surplus, as they still work partially in barter.  There is more potential bread than the collective number of notes in circulation.  There isn't that many loaves, however.  It's very run-risky, but that's part of what I'm going for -- this isn't a stable economy at all.  Really, I'm not going to store 10,000 loaves of bread to be ready for the 10,000 notes worth out there; I'm banking on the potential of being able to make (in this case) 10,000 loaves within a reasonable time period.  I grab them out of the oven, not off the shelf, that is.

M.

Well if the currency is unstable, then why is anyone using it?

I think I get what you're talking about, though. It's a grain-backed currency run through a service. Interesting and potentially viable but, like you said, incredibly unstable.

You're not assuming they're the only ones who know how to make bread, are you?

[blockquote=Stargate525]Well if the currency is unstable, then why is anyone using it?
[/blockquote] People still used currency in the Weimar Republic for awhile at least, didn't they?  I mean, the situation was absurd but people didn't entirely revert to barter.  Likewise with Emperor Norton's currency in San Francisco - a totally worthless form of currency without any real representative value at all (i.e. no national assets, land, or resources baking it), but that was still used as legal tender.

The feel I get from the system described is that barter is still pervasive or at least very common, but that one sees these notes around, and that these notes weren't created consciously as currency per se but have started to function as such.  It's a community currency of convenience to facilitate bartering rather than a real representation of national assets or even the real power of the guild to make bread.  Sounds pretty credible to me, even if some whacky economic problems come out of it - could lead to some interesting adventures.  Like, if there's a drought and thus a famine, and everyone starts redeeming their crusts with the guild... perhaps the guild hire the players to look into fixing some ancient weather-control technology or something.

Exactly, both Stargate and Steerpike.  Now, I took a course in Economics but I can't say I'm an expert in it, so even if I wanted this to be a viable economic system, I don't think I could.

Barter is very pervasive, in fact you as an average Joe would do most of your business with it, but it's difficult as not everyone wants your Y, but you want everyone's X (double entente for those who follow).  These notes are just a currency of convenience that could evaporate overnight in reality, but in most people's minds it's solid.

Also, while most people can make bread, in this particular place getting the ability to do so would be akin to getting the materials to make crack these days -- possible, but risky.  Pretty much all the grain from the associated harvesting lands (mostly corn, for cornbread, which is gross :( ) goes directly to guild silos in exchange for rather reasonable (and reliable) compensation.  There's leakage, of course, and they don't own ALL the corn that could flow in, but such a sizable majority of it that everything else is petty exchange.

Now if only they could buy out the other food guilds or the watercarting guild...

M.