Fantasy Monetary Systems - Another Idea (2024)

Short version: Alternate game monetary system based on the Spanish dollar (aka pieces of eight) or rather the United States 90% silver coinage starting at Morgan and Peace dollars working all the way down to the copper penny. This easily handles everything from gold pieces all the way down to copper pieces in the game monetary scale. Let’s start at the high end & work our way down.

Replace the platinum piece with a gold half eagle $5 coin (8.359 grams, 1/4 the size of the $20 Saint Gaudens double eagle). Replace the gold piece with a silver coin that could look like a Spanish silver dollar or a Morgan or Peace silver dollar (26.7 grams). Replace the electrum piece with a Barber, Walking Liberty, Franklin, or JFK like half-dollar (12.5 grams). Replace the silver piece with a Barber, Winged Liberty (aka Mercury), or Roosevelt 90% silver dime (or disme at 2.5 grams). The copper piece could remain copper, but the United States copper alloy pennies, both brass and bronze, weigh in at 3.11 grams. Quarters would be a new spot between electrum and silver pieces worth 25 copper pieces, use them or not.

Half-dollars (12.5 grams), quarters (6.25 grams), and dimes (2.5 grams) all weigh in at 0.25 grams per one cent of value and making pennies and dollars fit into this weight dynamic you could simply multiply your penny weight value by 0.25 grams or your fractionalized gold piece total weight by 25 grams. Actual gold coins at the platinum piece level (so above the normal gold piece or gp) you could multiply by 8 grams per platinum piece value.

Many different editions of game systems want players to keep track of each type of coin they have collected and assume all the coins weigh exactly the same amount, 50 coins per pound. This kind of makes me think of 1 troy ounce bars and rounds in modern life, but if you make your way down to your local coin shop you’ll soon discover there’s a massive difference in value between that gold, silver, and copper. Even more so with all the economic shenanigans currently going on. Various gaming groups I’ve been a part of over time joked about buying gold and silver pieces. When the gold colored Sacagawea dollars (not actually gold) came out in 2000 we joked about finding gold pieces.

The combination of a couple of things going on and trying to write a book has me looking at monetary systems again. Remember the Ferengi gold-pressed latinum slips or strips? I think something akin to the Goldbacks and Silverbacks would actually work... But that would be modern or futuristic. For this article I want to look back into history and give some ideas for an alternate medieval fantasy monetary system.

For decades people have been complaining back and forth about the money system in this game or that game. The weights don’t make sense. The value doesn’t match. Lots of valid complaints for wanting something different.

Most campaigns I’ve been a part of the money was mostly a system of accounting running in the background and just a question of weight. For a few games with weird money systems it was interesting to begin with and then it got stuck in the minutiae of money changers when everybody just wanted to go on an adventure. There’s a lot of campaigns where players are running around with dragon hoards of gold and gold no longer has any meaning.

I wanted to come up with a bit more realistic metal monetary system with some basis in reality that I can simply slip into the existing gaming monetary system. I’ve been digging through various info I can find online about Roman coins and others. Something I noticed about Roman coins is that a good portion of them across the middle values were silver.

I remember somehow associating a gold piece for a dollar and then it just easily flowed down fractionally with copper pieces being United States one cent pieces (aka a penny). I’m sure I’m not the only person who decimalized it similarly. The part where it never clicked with weights though was because I was always looking at the paper currency and that really doesn’t equate very well to metals.

Back in March I finally picked up a less expensive circulated $20 Saint Gaudens double eagle to include with my 90% silver coins I’ve been using to educate people on older coins and their value. That’s a twenty dollar coin sitting amongst twenty Morgan dollars. After all these years something finally clicked that the paper currency never allowed for.

Talking with older generations about what they could get with our (United States) 90% silver coins I get different stories like a gallon of gas only cost a quarter. Depending where you are in the country today you should be able to take a 90% silver quarter to a coin shop and get enough cash to pay for a gallon of gas. My mom has stated she bought a dozen eggs for a quarter, but I wonder if it was two dozen? That same 90% silver quarter converted to cash could pay for one or two dozen eggs depending on type and brand. I may even be able to get three dozen depending on where I am in the country.

Eggs are something that did exist in medieval times and usually exists in several game systems pricing sheets. 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook for one system lists an egg or fresh vegetables at a cost of 1 copper piece. It also lists two dozen eggs at two silver pieces (20 copper pieces) and one hundred eggs at eight silver pieces (80 copper pieces). If we go back to 1 copper piece per egg and multiply by two dozen we end up with twenty four copper pieces, just 1 penny shy of a quarter. Hmm...

In 1497 AD, following monetary reform in the Spanish Empire, the Spanish dollar was first minted. It was worth eight Spanish reales, hence the name pieces of eight. It became so popular that it became the first international currency because of its uniformity. Other nations stamped their seal on it in order for it to be traded locally with their own currency. The Spanish dollar became the “gold standard”, pun intended, for silver coins and was the coin used as the standard for what the United States silver dollar should be in 1857. For more real world history on this I suggest looking at the Spanish Dollar on Wikipedia as it may give some historical ideas for campaign background.

So what about weight? I’m used to dealing with troy ounces for metals, but we need a smaller unit of measure and grams seem to work for that. Our target unit of weight for games tends to be the pound for those of us in the States. Those using other units of weight will probably have an easier time with this conversion.

There are 453.59 grams in a pound and a Morgan dollar, according to Wikipedia, is 26.73 grams which would allow for 16.969 Morgan’s per pound (double check below when I standardize & re-weight). So with some wear and tear maybe we say 17 Morgan or Peace dollars in a pound. If you want to go for a heavier weighted coin we could use a one troy ounce round as an example and at 14.5833 troy ounces per pound you could say 14-15 coins per pound. But these weights should be for newly minted coins hot off the press. After many years of circulation and clipping or shaving would make them weigh less.

Going back to the 50 coins per pound and looking again at 90% silver coins where does this put us? At 453.59 grams in a pound the coins would have to weigh an average of 9.0718 grams. The 90% silver quarters weigh in at 6.25 grams, too light. The 90% silver half-dollars weigh in at 12.5 grams, too heavy. The 90% silver dimes weigh 2.5 grams, but the modern dimes come in at 2.268 grams... So about four of the modern dimes is the weight we’re looking for as the weight for one of those 50 coins coming in around 9 grams.

Multiplying this 50 coins in a pound number by the four dimes we need for that average weight puts us at 200 coins. Taking the 453.59 grams divided by the 2.268 grams of the modern dime gives us 199.99559. Initially I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with this, but figured it might be useful for someone else trying to math out some of this information. However, when I got to the end and rounded to 20 full size coins I ended up with 200 silver dimes per pound.

If the Morgan or Peace dollar takes the place of the gold piece, the 90% silver half-dollar (Barber, Walking Liberty, Franklin, or JFK) fit perfectly as the electrum piece, and the 90% silver dime (or disme as originally written in the Coin Act) is a 10th of the dollar and fits as the silver piece (which is a 10th of the gold piece). When we get down to the copper piece we can look at the United States’ copper coins. Nickels are 75% copper and 25% nickel.

The first one cent coins were about 100% copper and heavy (13.4 grams and then 10.8 grams), then an 88% copper and 12% nickel (4.6 grams) version, and then we get to the 3.1 gram 95% copper pennies that most people have seen. Most of the 95% copper pennies were bronze (5% tin and zinc), but a two year stint after the war were brass or gilded metal (5% zinc). During World War II when both copper and nickel were needed for other things we ended up with steel pennies (2.7 grams) and 35% silver nickels (56% copper and 9% manganese). The current modern pennies are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper with a weight of 2.5 grams.

Be aware that salt water will wear away the zinc in brass fairly quickly. This is why brass near the ocean is usually gilded with an overlay of copper or another metal to prevent the corrosion. The steel pennies had problems of their own, but it was a temporary stop gap for a year after which they melted them down as they were turned in.

Bouncing through all of these coins can we find a common weight? With the copper piece or penny being the lowest common denominator, let’s divide these weights down to their one cent value. The Morgan and Peace dollars come in at 0.2673 grams per cent. Half-dollars give us a weight of 0.25 grams per cent. Quarters at 6.25 grams give us a weight of 0.25 grams per cent. The dimes easily give us a cent weight of 0.25 grams. And the zinc penny gives us a weight of 2.5 grams.

Maybe we shave a bit off the Morgan and Peace dollars and rebalance them to be 0.25 grams per penny value so they weigh the same as the other silver coins? If we do that, then our gold piece dollar comes out at 25 grams allowing for 18.1436 “dollars” of silver per pound. This also means our dragon hoard of gold turns into a dragon hoard of silver

How then do we bring gold in? Gold is a much softer and denser metal and is usually mixed with copper or silver for stronger coins. The United States $20 Saint Gaudens double eagle weighs in at 33.436 grams. That’s 1.075 troy ounces, but there’s only 0.9675 troy ounces of gold in the coin. This makes it a 90% gold coin with the remaining 10% being copper. The UK gold coins in the above picture are one ounce of gold, 1/4 ounce of gold, and 1/10 ounce of gold. The smaller bar and round are one gram each. The jewelry piece I believe comes in at about 4 grams total, but only the three rocks are gold, the metal holding everything together is just colored to look gold.

If we go back to our game system monetary chart we see that a platinum piece is supposed to be worth five of the gold pieces. Since we are using a Morgan silver dollar as a gold piece we should be looking for a gold coin worth five dollars. This would line up with the United States half eagle gold coin which is 1/4 the weight of the double eagle Saint Gaudens coin making it about a quarter ounce of gold.

The above picture should give you an idea of the size difference between similarly weighted/sized coins between gold and silver. The Morgan and Peace dollar is 26.7 grams and the Saint Gaudens coin is 33.436 grams, a full 6.7 grams heavier. The 90% silver quarters are 6.25 grams while the 1/4 troy ounce gold coin on top of it is about 7.77 grams. The 90% silver dime is 2.5 grams while the 1/10 troy ounce gold coin on top of it is about 3.11 grams. The gold is heavier so a close to similar weight is going to be a smaller coin.

If we want to expand upon this and have a framework for coins of different sizes and weights beyond what the game system has we can keep with the dollar value framework. Looking at the value of the Morgan silver dollar and the $20 gold double eagle we have a value of 20 of the silver coins for 1 of the gold coins of the same size. If for some reason you want to do the same with copper we can look at the penny and dime are about the same size and weight so maybe you say it takes 10 copper coins to equal a silver of the same size. I’m not sure how many civilizations would have a coin about the size of a Morgan or Saint Gaudens that’s only worth a dime. Maybe if that civilization has massive amounts of copper, but little to no gold or silver?

We can keep track of the metal and the “gold piece” or “dollar value” (or the Morgan value, or your own name value). Say my civilization likes Crowns and Moons so they have gold crowns and silver moons. Base the silver moon the same as the Morgan silver dollar and it slides into the gold piece (1 gp) slot. They also mint a half-moon (1 ep or 2 sp), a quarter moon (25 cp or 2 sp and 5 cp), a moon disme(1 sp) as silver coins. Now they also have a gold crown (20 gp), half-crown (10 gp), quarter crown (5 gp or 1 pp), a crown disme(2 gp). They also have a pan (5 cp) and a dink (1 cp). They also tried a silver tiger (2 gp), but most natives don’t like it as they tend to use silver half-moons or smaller for groceries and shopping.

My base silver moon is 25 grams and my base gold crown is 25 grams. Using the above calculated weight for silver dollars per pound, every 18.1436 of silver moons weighs a pound. Likewise, every 362.872 (gp or silver moon value) of gold crowns weighs a pound.

Those numbers are a bit complex so let’s simplify and round up. Every 20 of the base coin weighs a pound. That means every 20 silver moons (that’s 20 gp) weighs a pound. Every 20 full gold crowns (or 400 gp of value) weighs a pound. Every 20 copper based coin that a dink is a 10th of would weigh a pound.

A dink (1 cp) is a 10th size of a copper coin that would be the same size as a Morgan, or in this case a silver moon. The copper coin the size of the silver moon would take 20 of the coin to weigh a pound so at a 10th it would take 200 of these coins to weigh a pound. The pan, if made only of copper, would essentially be a half size of the full copper coin only allowing for 40 per pound. If instead the pan was a mixed metal and more the size of a quarter you could have 80 per pound.

In this way a character could be carrying around 10 dinks; 4 pans; 10 moon dismes, 8 quarter moons, 10 half moons, 7 silver moons (total of 15 moons); and 2 quarter crowns, 3 half crown, and 1 crown (3 gold crowns) weighing a full pound. The total gold piece (gp) of value he’s carrying around would be (10 / 100) + ((4 x 5) / 100)+ 15 + (3 x 20) = 75.3gp. Or copper (cp) value to gold (gp) 10 + (4 x 5) + (15 x 100) + (3 x 2000) = 7,530 cp / 100 = 75.3 gp.

Now I have my currency based somewhat on old real money. Weights and values make a little bit more sense and there’s a bit of room to fit other metals in.

Electrum is just a naturally occurring instance of gold and silver together. In the modern world it’s just considered an alloy as some of the gold coins use silver, instead of copper, to make them more resistant to wear and tear. That second metal is what gives the gold coins their different hues.

Platinum and palladium are mostly industrial metals these days. Platinum coins were attempted by Spain in Spanish colonized America and later by the Russian Empire. Other countries including the United States and Britain attempted to make coins out of platinum as well. Counterfeiters used it to fake gold and silver coins. Platinum is a very hard metal and not very malleable, plus it tends to be confused for other metals like silver.

While most governments found the metal frustrating for coinage merchants actually preferred the platinum because the coins wouldn’t melt in fires. It wasn’t until over 100 years later that Russia started creating commemorative coins for the 1980 Summer Olympics that got other countries looking at minting coins in platinum again. Canada has a platinum Maple Leaf and Australia has a platinum Koala among them.