Coinage and Wealth in Belkar

Background

The purpose of this article is to help players and any other dungeon master using this document to understand the fundamentals of how money works and scales in this world so they can play and create with breaking anything in an unforeseen way.

Ensuring players understand how money is key to understanding this world as much as our own. Players cannot carry around 4,384 gold coins, for the sheer weight and volume would make it impossible to fight, jump or maybe even move; not to mention every peasant, merchant, noble and sellsword would soon target the player.

Coinage

Coinage is a historical term to refer to a time period where some sort of currency became the common medium of exchange. Prior to coinage, goods were bartered. As societies became more complex, coinage systems were invented to provide easier price conversions between goods and services. (How many apples are equal to a pair of leather shoes?)

For the time period of this game, coinage is common, but bartering is still widely accepted. Also though coinage might be common, the is limited number of coins in circulation- meaning it’s unlikely anybody has a Scrooge Mcduck vault.

In the world of Belkar, only the Phenix Mint can produce coins. Other foreign currencies like coins from Veloth or the Pirate isles are typically not accepted by locals, though some travelling merchants might take them.

Money changers are located in most larger port cities.

The common currencies printed by the mint are below, with their modern dollar equivalent for comparison.

1 copper	$1
1 silver	$100
1 Gold	$1,000

On average, the typical peasant pays roughly 1 gold piece in taxes to the local baron each month. Sometimes these payments are paid in goods that the noble then sells for the taxes, other times they are paid in coins.

These taxes are mostly charges to use local infrastructure rather than taxes the way we see them today. For example it might cost a silver coin to rent a stall at the market for a day, and farmers pay that once per week to sell thier goods. The local noble family owns the market, so they collect this money in “taxes”.

On average a common farmer or labourer earns the value of 2 gold pieces a month- though they are almost never paid in a gold coins.

This relative income means about 90% of the population lives in a subsistence lifestyle. Making their clothes, growing their own food or doing other things to limit what they actually have to buy.

Sample Wages

Here are some examples of earnings for common jobs.

Job	Payment
Unskilled labour	2 silver/week
Server At Low End Inn	2 Silver/week
Whore	2 Silver/ week
Fisherman	3 Silver/week
Produce Farmer	3 Silver/ Week
Professional Soldier	5 silver/week
Stone mason	5 Silver /week
Engineer	8 silver/week
Master engineer	15 silver /week
Elite Bodyguard	3-5 gold /per week

Wealth

The other thing to remember is that although peasants all pay a small protection tax to the local noble almost all “own” the home they live in. A farmer might only make 25 gold pieces in a year, but the farm house that has been in his family for 3 generations might be worth 200-300 gold pieces or more.

This is important to keep in mind during raids or the burning of settlements. Destruction of property in this fashion takes decades to rebuild, (think 12 coins per year in income after they pay taxes, takes a long time to get to 250!)

For this reason, the creation of new settlements is extremely expensive for a noble family to undertake.

Rich vs Poor

This brings us to the large question- so how do expensive items get purchased? If a longsword is 14 gold pieces, it’s unlikely that a farmer earning 3 silver pieces per week is going to be able to afford it this.

The first thing to note is they don’t. These fighters are militia, not soldiers. A good longsword is well beyond the reach of 90% of the world. You can read more about that in War, Militia and Paying Soldiers .

However professional soldiers like the party obviously have these expensive items, so how do they get them? Gifts.

Professional soldiers have their starting equipment gifted to them by the noble who hired them. For powerful houses like House Aquilar, this might included a few hundred gold worth of equipment. For a small noble like House Evergreen it might be around 50.

Gifts, called patronage, is typically the only way such items can be acquired. Also gifts of coin are less common, in comparison to gifts of items. Even powerful nobles have less coin on hand than you think, so gifting a sword instead of 14 gold pieces is common.