/tg/ - Traditional Games

An army is a kind of wealth. Often it is the only kind of wealth that matters. Of course, armies are not often simply bought and sold unless they are made of golems or mindless undead but armies are often rented. Mercenaries would often pledge their soldiers to a cause for money. Lords would also pledge their army's to a king in return for protection and lordly rights.

It is said that hell has endless legions of devils and tortured souls pressed into service. For a high price a lord of hell could press the service of his serf souls into the service of your army in a crucial battle.

The forces of heaven also have many soldiers. But these services are freely given and go to help where they can most through divine inspiration.

Necromancer lords deep beneath the earth have large armies of the dead. More than one apprentice has inherited his army from his master.

What good is an empty kingdom? People are a form of wealth.

Orcs, goblins and other monstrous sorts make for fierce soldiers but also for fierce bandits. They are best kept busy with wars or weak with famines.

Dwarfs are industrious hardworking sorts but they dig deep and disturb foul things best left unknown.

Halflings are humble folk but are inveterate thiefs and liers.

Elfs and Humans are fine workers and educated sorts but they also have pretensions to nobility that are a political threat.

The best form of human capital is the gnome. Gnomes are hardworking, intelligent and also humble.

>>226587

I think a more abstract form of wealth would also be reputation since you can leverage it for deals or gifts.

5 minutes into the future setting. Credits are becoming a thing, but cash is common.

If I were doing a fantasy setting, wealth would probably be mostly raw materials and magical ability. You could sell yourself as a 'mana battery', leaving yourself drained but somewhat richer at the end of the day. Or if you had the materials to inscribe a basic "lunch box"–in recent D&D/Pathfinder rules, a spell trap of Create Food–then you could sell that.

>>226609

Perhaps some necromancers make magic candles out of the skulls of mages that can be used as spellslot batteries?

>>226612

That would be a little bit hard to justify in civilized society. More likely, it might be possible with the right materials to make a battery.

Perhaps magic is kind of belief-based–the more effort that goes into the magic, the more effect that comes out. So carving a stick makes it magic, because you put effort and thought into the stick. In this way, people might peddle cheap trinkets as low-capacity magic reservoirs, while better/harder-to-work materials create better batteries.

You guys are all lame. Obviously, WEALTH is the most wealthy wealth.

>>226609

>credits

I remember some old far-future setting I was working on. Credits were basically allotted CPU time. Since humanity moved on to living in giant O'Neill cylinders as space colonies, every necessity ended up being made by computers. Your food, your clothes, meds, everything. So when you go and buy some stuff, you say to the giant computer "hey, I need you to set some time aside from calculating all that important stuff and spend some time on making me a tuxedo". That's why you had pay more for the more complex stuff - the computer needed more time to calculate how to make that shit.

Of course, this being a cyberpunk western in an O'Neill cylinder, everyone used so much CPU time that the giant machine became increasingly hostile to humanity (because it had to avert computing power from less important self-preservation systems to fulfilling their demands) and that it calculated too late that it's off course and heading straight into a star.

In my setting what currency is used is based on how developed the particular planet is, with Earth, and the oldest, developed colonies having a more digital based economy, with printed legal tender being made for back up, or shadier dealings, while less developed colonies use a more traditional method, and failed colonies reverting back to a bartering system.

>>226673

I've done somthing similar tangentially similar to this in my modern fantasy brew. As in, resource-based wealth.

Since mostly everything everywhere is powered by crystal batteries and crystal batteries only, power is currency.

Things are priced in gempower units, mostly bought with ground crystal dust, power plants are the new banks.

And since people have been finding crystal deposits in the new world…