So, I have to get something off my chest about a lot of fantasy settings. It's something I specifically tried to address in Thar Shaddin by coming up with a unique standard currency. This phenomenon is what I will henceforth call "gold inflation."
Many fantasy worlds, specifically game based ones like my dreaded Final Fantasy series, use GP or gold pieces as their standard currency. I presume this is based on a weak historical connection with gold as the standard currency on Earth in the past (and arguably in the present). This is, I suppose, acceptable to a certain extent in that one could go around using gold to trade for things that are worth more than the gold being exchanged for them. I could give you a bunch of gold coins for your piece of land, say, and that would make some sense. What does not make sense is giving you even one gold coin for a loaf of bread. A loaf of bread is worth a lot less than a coin made of gold, evidenced by the fact that people don't go around wearing slices of bread around their necks to show off their wealth.
To further the problem, many of these fantasy worlds go too far in their relation to our actual economic system, and introduce some bizarre form of inflation. Perhaps this is due to a lack of silver or copper on these worlds, but either way gold ends up being worth less and less. It gets to the point that a loaf of bread ends up costing a whole bunch of gold. Never mind something big, like a horse. A horse costs you so much gold you need your own horse to bring it in. What gives? Why don't these places come up with something more valuable than gold to use as currency, like... I don't know... Dirt.
Perhaps the mistake is a conceptual mistake on my part and these transactions do not actually involve the exchange of 500 gold coins, but rather involve only one 500 gold coin piece which itself references a group of 500 imperceptibly small bits of gold. So a 1 gold piece is really equal to a gold flake. That could make sense, but then what about the rate of inflation?
Inflation makes some sense in the modern world where it'll cost you a few thousand Japanese yen for a loaf of bread. Or, maybe it doesn't make much sense but then there are several million Japanese people who are stuck using it and the whole system is so complicated nobody expects it to make sense. But I don't see how this would arise in places that are so fresh out of the dark ages they're still using GP along with a lot of bartering.
What these fantasy worlds need is a central bank that can get a grip on that rampant inflation and lock the price of gold somewhere above the value of pocket lint.
Article: Gold Inflation in Fantasy Worlds
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Blood Ravenous
- Battlemage
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- Name: Ryxa
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