Alternate Forms of Fantasy Currency

[Raven Bloodmoon]

Well, remember there are a couple requirements for money:
1. It must be portable.
2. It must be durable.
3. It must be divisible.
4. It must be worth something (by fiat or intrinsically).

As for suggestions, how about sea shells or beads?  It'd be easy enough to make a necklace out of them for transportation and different size/color shells and beads could represent different amounts of purchasing power.  The only thing that would be required is some social institution (be it a bank, government, or merely a common belief) to atribute value to the shells and beads.  It wouldn't even require much of any technology, and thus would be fitting for any setting.

If you're worried about inflation, remember that creating this money could take quite soem time, both to gather and then to carve into appropriate shapes.  That time spent could offset the amount of money that'd otherwise be earned if one just hunted a buck and sold it's skin.  Counterfeiting doesn't need to be illegal or difficult--just less profitable than other means of earning money.

[Higgs Boson]

How about something created magically? Like have government mages "printing" the money, and they have a unique magical aura, depending on which government mage imbued the coin.

Or, you could just not have currency at all, but instead a free bartering system.

[Porklet]

That's imaginative, but how would one use that as currency?

So the bearer would voluntarily give the "mark" to the other in payment.  I see.

[Porklet]

How about something created magically? Like have government mages "printing" the money, and they have a unique magical aura, depending on which government mage imbued the coin.

Or, you could just not have currency at all, but instead a free bartering system.

I had considered a magical aura, but the layman peddler would have no way of ensuring the currency was legit.

[Garanth]

There's a setting in I think Dragon magazine a while back that had a country where certain animal's teeth are used as currency. These animals are a rampant pest in the countryside, so a bounty has been placed on them by the crown. Teeth have thus become a sort of currency, since they can be turned in at any time in exchange for a portion of the bounty (assuming they are the teeth of the correct animal).

In practice, you could simply have different kinds of creature's teeth worth different amounts of money based on rarity. A simple knowledge check could be used to check for counterfeits (common animal teeth being passed off for bounty animals).

For a liquid currency, you could simply use a standard-sized small glass vial rather than a coin. Using drops would be arduous, but exchanging in varying sized vials wouldn't be much different than exchanging coins. You could do the same thing for a currency based on a powdered substance.

The liquid could be some sort of narcotic, a reagent used in the making of a local trade good, something with valuable medicinal qualities, or something magical that would be of interest to a local mages guild. My personal favourite is the narcotic, similar to the cigarette-based economies of prisons that i mentioned previously. An economy that runs on exchanging say opium for goods and services has an interestingly twisted and bizarre charm to it.


edit: Another cool medieval currency example has to do with the knight's templar. One of the templar's responsibilities was ensuring the safety of travellers making a pilgrimage to the holy lands. The main danger to these pilgrims was from armed bandits robbing them along the road. To protect the pilgrims and their belongings, the templars would buy the pilgrims belongings at the beginning of their trip, and give them an encoded receipt. Upon reaching the holy lands, they could then return this receipt to any templar office and receive the balance owed to them.

[Elemental_Elf]

I always thought it would be cool for a magical medieval currency to be in the form of a magical snake tattoo that wraps around one's arms and body. It would be divided into small equally sized scales. Each scale would be given an arbitrary value (probably based on how rare/common the scales are). To transfer money, one would have to inscribe a small transmutation circle and place one's hand and another's inside the circle, perhaps speak a few words, and the scales would crawl/slide off one man's arm, across the circle and crawl up the other man's arm.

What I think I find most interesting about this idea is that one cannot truly hide how rich one is. Granted you could wear long sleeves but a brigand/bandit, or even a local Lord, could easily hire some thugs to strip you bear. It would definitely make taxation a much easier process, as well as theft. To hide one's wealth, a person could transfer their scales to a slave/trusted friend but that's just as risky as handing a sack of money to a similar person in our world, if not more.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Elf, it's a cool idea in very high magic world. But in such a world, I think counterfeiting might still be an issue.

[Seraph]

How about something created magically? Like have government mages "printing" the money, and they have a unique magical aura, depending on which government mage imbued the coin.

Or, you could just not have currency at all, but instead a free bartering system.

I had considered a magical aura, but the layman peddler would have no way of ensuring the currency was legit.

In a fairly high magic world, there could be minor magic items that detected the government mage's aura.  Depending on how expensive they are and how wealthy/generous the govt. is, it could be possible that they are simply distributed to each business.

[LordVreeg]

How about something created magically? Like have government mages "printing" the money, and they have a unique magical aura, depending on which government mage imbued the coin.

Or, you could just not have currency at all, but instead a free bartering system.

I had considered a magical aura, but the layman peddler would have no way of ensuring the currency was legit.

In a fairly high magic world, there could be minor magic items that detected the government mage's aura.  Depending on how expensive they are and how wealthy/generous the govt. is, it could be possible that they are simply distributed to each business.

That was I alluded to earlier.  Much as moneychangers had scales as tools, which were VERY expensive often, I can see some barely magiced items able to determine very specific items.

[Garanth]

How about something created magically? Like have government mages "printing" the money, and they have a unique magical aura, depending on which government mage imbued the coin.

Or, you could just not have currency at all, but instead a free bartering system.

I had considered a magical aura, but the layman peddler would have no way of ensuring the currency was legit.

In a fairly high magic world, there could be minor magic items that detected the government mage's aura.  Depending on how expensive they are and how wealthy/generous the govt. is, it could be possible that they are simply distributed to each business.

That was I alluded to earlier.  Much as moneychangers had scales as tools, which were VERY expensive often, I can see some barely magiced items able to determine very specific items.

You could also have some sort of trick that a layman could use to roughly ward against forgery. Something like how people would bite gold coins to determine whether they were real.

Perhaps touching the imbued coin with their tongue or finger, and judging the legitimacy of it based on how the magical aura makes their skin tingle.

[Elemental_Elf]

Elf, it's a cool idea in very high magic world. But in such a world, I think counterfeiting might still be an issue.

It depends on how the initial batch of scales were created. If they were created centuries ago in a long-forgotten ritual then I'd say true counterfeiting would be near impossible since no one could truly replicate the spell. However, that would also mean that there could never be any true inflation. The government could never 'print more scales' in the hopes of paying off debts. However, an interesting side-effect of the nature of the scales would be that impure inflation could definitely occur, meaning that if the PCs found an ancient preserved corpse and stole/took its scales then that would be a large infusion of new money directly into the system. This brings up 2 concepts I had not considered, the first is the obvious one - would the scales last in death? Do they implant themselves deep into your skin, piercing your bone? Perhaps they magically preserve any portion of the body they touch... I prefer the latter. The other issue is the idea of government hording money. They couldn't just stuff it all into a safe; the government would most certainly have to possess hosts that would voluntarily or involuntarily be imprisoned in a high security prison/vault. These hosts would spend days, if not years in their cell awaiting their use. Would these people be treated like royalty or less than human creatures? I suppose that would be for the government to decide.

This also brings up another idea - can only sentient creatures accept/take scales or can non-sentiments (like dogs, cows, etc.) do this as well? I suppose it would depend on the use of speech during the ritual. If both have to speak then most animals are out. But what of Parrots and similar species that can mimic speech? They could be trained to repeat the ritual's verbal component... Granted it would be a VERY dangerous proposition to transfer your wealth to a creature that could just fly away but I can foresee certain people who would 'risk it.'

This also brings us back to the idea of the dead and how they could 'give' their scales to another. I would bank on the idea that a dead person does not have to complete the verbal component as the scales would desire a living creature rather then a dead one. Of course this implies the scales either have an instinctual behavior (via the magic) or are parasitic life forms who sustain themselves by feeding on living hosts (for what ever purpose).

Now to get to the flip side of the coin - what if the ritual is common and/or well known? Well I'd have to say that if the ritual to create more scales is well known or easily re-created then basing your economy off of it would be a foolish endeavor.

Finally there is a third possibility - all sentient creatures are born with a small amount of scales already on them. This would definitely mean that counterfeiting is impossible. However it also means inflation would be very common in that every baby would be born with some scales, which means every birth increases the total number of scales and thus decreases their intrinsic value. Thus I'd predict baby farms would be a very common, and most likely illegal, activity. An easy way to counter this would be for the scales born on a child to be weighted based on how pious, honorable, or some other arbitrary concept (that favors the frugal and/or those less likely to abuse the system) the parents were at the time of conception. An even easier way of restricting inflation would be to have a single generation (for what ever reason) born with these scales and that was it. No new scales can be created; the total number of scales can only decrease (as people die in incontinent locations (tombs, the wild, drowning at sea, etc.). This means there would be a great intensive for adventurers to exist and retrieve the lost scales as they are, essentially, free/easy money.

[SA]

Another magic idea: significantly low-powered magical items, or stones possessing tiny amounts of arcane essence.

[Garanth]

Elf, it's a cool idea in very high magic world. But in such a world, I think counterfeiting might still be an issue.

It depends on how the initial batch of scales were created. If they were created centuries ago in a long-forgotten ritual then I'd say true counterfeiting would be near impossible since no one could truly replicate the spell. However, that would also mean that there could never be any true inflation. The government could never 'print more scales' in the hopes of paying off debts.

While inflation likely wouldn't occur, deflation most certainly would. The value of money has to do with the ratio between money and the amount of goods and services in the economy (thus the overall size of the economy). For inflation to occur, the money supply must be growing faster than the economy. However, should the economy be growing and the money supply be fixed, *de*flation would occur, as the amount of money available shrank in proportion of the number of things meant to buy it.

If the population and economy both continued to grow in proportion to the number of scales, you would suddenly run into the problem where scales were too valuable to be used in regular transactions and some other form of money must be used instead.

Also remember that in small towns that have little contact with the outside world, any currency is likely to be rejected in favour of a simple bartering system.

For the scale system to work, you may want to give the scales some kind of ritual or magic significance. Perhaps gathering a certain number of scales allowed an individual to perform a ritual that imparted the bearer with great power. Or perhaps scales increase certain physical or mental attributes of their bearer, tying a character's wealth to his ability. This way warriors would literally gain the strength of their defeated foes, and a warrior in dire straights could trade some of his strength in exchange for food or lodging.

[Porklet]

There's a setting in I think Dragon magazine a while back that had a country where certain animal's teeth are used as currency. These animals are a rampant pest in the countryside, so a bounty has been placed on them by the crown. Teeth have thus become a sort of currency, since they can be turned in at any time in exchange for a portion of the bounty (assuming they are the teeth of the correct animal).

In practice, you could simply have different kinds of creature's teeth worth different amounts of money based on rarity. A simple knowledge check could be used to check for counterfeits (common animal teeth being passed off for bounty animals).

For a liquid currency, you could simply use a standard-sized small glass vial rather than a coin. Using drops would be arduous, but exchanging in varying sized vials wouldn't be much different than exchanging coins. You could do the same thing for a currency based on a powdered substance.

The liquid could be some sort of narcotic, a reagent used in the making of a local trade good, something with valuable medicinal qualities, or something magical that would be of interest to a local mages guild. My personal favourite is the narcotic, similar to the cigarette-based economies of prisons that i mentioned previously. An economy that runs on exchanging say opium for goods and services has an interestingly twisted and bizarre charm to it.


edit: Another cool medieval currency example has to do with the knight's templar. One of the templar's responsibilities was ensuring the safety of travellers making a pilgrimage to the holy lands. The main danger to these pilgrims was from armed bandits robbing them along the road. To protect the pilgrims and their belongings, the templars would buy the pilgrims belongings at the beginning of their trip, and give them an encoded receipt. Upon reaching the holy lands, they could then return this receipt to any templar office and receive the balance owed to them.

I had heard of the Templar's using those notes.  I have considered using a form of "check" backed by the royal treasury.

It would interesting to use the animal's teeth angle for a primitive jungle tribe (or group of them) along with the "medicinal" sap as the higher denomination.

[Porklet]

I always thought it would be cool for a magical medieval currency to be in the form of a magical snake tattoo that wraps around one's arms and body. It would be divided into small equally sized scales. Each scale would be given an arbitrary value (probably based on how rare/common the scales are). To transfer money, one would have to inscribe a small transmutation circle and place one's hand and another's inside the circle, perhaps speak a few words, and the scales would crawl/slide off one man's arm, across the circle and crawl up the other man's arm.

What I think I find most interesting about this idea is that one cannot truly hide how rich one is. Granted you could wear long sleeves but a brigand/bandit, or even a local Lord, could easily hire some thugs to strip you bear. It would definitely make taxation a much easier process, as well as theft. To hide one's wealth, a person could transfer their scales to a slave/trusted friend but that's just as risky as handing a sack of money to a similar person in our world, if not more.

Nomadic offered up something similar.  It certainly is an imaginative idea.  I would be more inclined to use that as a transfer of power in a small magical group like a cabal or religous institution.  Perhaps used during a power transfer ceremony.

One could counterfeit it my simply being tatooed.  Then the currency would need some sort of magical aura or design feature to show the tatoo was legit.  My main obstacle, so far, has been how to use a magical aura, or something similar, without leaving the layman peddler at the mercy of the system.