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GameMastery Guide / Creating a World / Cultural Considerations / Core Elements of the People

Economics

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 149
Every civilization that rises does so via the use of resources: goods that have both utility and scarcity. As noted above, people require shelter, food, clothing, and other goods simply to survive. Basic innovations help store food and create clothing faster, and these innovations free members of society to help produce still more inventions. At some point, communal wealth tends to move toward private ownership, which then requires trade. The earliest form of trade is barter, or the exchange of one good or service for another (or for social status). But what happens when one party needs something and the other doesn’t require his resources?

This leads to the introduction of commodity money, or trading for an agreed-upon middle resource such as obsidian, cocoa beans, bushels of wheat, or other useful goods. In time, intermediate forms of broadly accepted currency develop, based on stored value—in our world, a shekel indicated 1 bushel of barley, and basic coins were used as storage chits. With the invention of mining, metals could be extracted and used, and in time, the metal coins created came to represent stored value themselves. Thus the English pound came to represent 1 pound of silver. The appropriate coin could then be used to claim the value indicated from governments or banks.

An economy is a dynamic system, and what goes into it must affect another part. Using metal coins as money functions only as long as the supply remains relatively constant. If a major new silver mine introduces too much silver into the economy, the value of a silver coin decreases correspondingly. If a dragon hoards thousands of coins, they have essentially disappeared from the economy, causing the value of the remaining coins to increase; their reintroduction upon the dragon’s death causes the devaluation of the rest of the coins in circulation. That is to say: Too great a supply of anything decreases demand and therefore decreases value; too little increases the demand and thus increases value. It is the world builder’s job to determine what goods and services are valuable in the culture—be they hard coins, precious gems, or ephemera such as honor.

The following pages outline several types of societies.

Archives of Nethys

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Economics