Blog Friday: Gold With Utility

If you've played Genshin Impact (the open world gaccha game your favorite influencer has cosplayed from) you'll know that there's gold, or in this case Mora, which can be collected by doing quests, opening treasure chests, and the usual adventuring fare. But as with so many tropey elements in Genshin, Mora is a bit more complex than its first appearances...

GOLD THAT MATTERS

You see Mora (like gold in most adventure games) is both universally recognized for its value and often used in crafting. Unlike most adventure games there is a lore reason for this: Mora is minted exclusively using the Geo Archon's Gnosis (think of it like a god's magic conduit) which has a few consequences:

• Mora can be consumed as a catalyst for magical crafting, giving it a tangible utilitarian value (and explaining why you need it for crafting in the first place) and also allowing that money to literally get sunken away when adventurers use it.
• Mora cannot be truly counterfeit as this magical property can't be replicated (and likewise it isn't susceptible to coin clipping).
• As a result of both of these, Mora retains its value across the eons and across cultures, justifying the universal currency.

With this simple little lore flourish, gold value goes from being a complicated socio-economic fabrication of currency to ease the exchange of goods (and for marking XP), to a practical grokable universally valuable utility item used to ease the exchange of goods. While I think it's great if you want to have an in-depth fantasy lore with sensitive economies and several competing currencies each reflecting their respective cultures' approach to banking and value exchange, or to even abstract wealth away with treasure tokens and the like, this method of making gold matter in a usable way is an excellent shortcut for explaining why every adventurer and vendor sees value in traditional gold coins and why you'd have it on you (and why freaky little merchant guys might still want it.)

Here's some free stealable ideas for why gold can matter in your fantasy setting:

• Gold is literally the magical lifeblood of the planet minted into coins by weight. Various magical rituals, and especially teleportation, involve syphoning this magic from the coins which are then (theoretically) reabsorbed into the planet. [Bonus Idea: The gold doesn't actually get reabsorbed! Big Magic just wants you to believe that so you don't feel like a monster for syphoning gold and killing the planet.]
• Gold is a kind of "bait" that living dungeons generate to tempt (and eat) adventurers with. However this gold still possesses a bit of the dungeon's magical growth properties and can be used in construction and rituals. [Bonus Idea: In WILD Dungeons were created as part of a ritual to farm magical gold which got out of hand.] + [Bonus Idea 2 that is not mine but feels tangential - The Money Tree.]
• Gold is the remnants of a great star beast that fell to earth millennia ago, thus it serves as a catalyst for alien magics. Additionally dragons (the descendants of the star beast) have bones made of the very same gold, making them a prime target for adventurers. Even drakes and salamanders have trace amounts of gold imbedded in their marrow (making mining for drake nests a lucrative, if dangerous, prospect). [Bonus Idea: Gold has a literally alien influence - the slumbering will of the star beast can still whisper to those with insatiable greed.]

HOW I'M DOING THIS IN MY SCI-FI SETTING

In Inheritors the main currency is Crystal Telemetry (CT or Chits for short)[*1]. In essence, each CT is a crystal which stores a huge swaths of encrypted data from Old World systems that have either gone defunct or can only be operated via esoteric means. In this way Chits can still be "mined", but are more often plundered from Old World ruins. Common enough to be accessible, rare enough to hold value and durable enough to survive the apocalypse, CT became an obvious semi-universal standard to adopt.

The data in each Chit ranges from exact weather patterns, to useless strings of letters from broken satellites, to entire genome sequences, though few have the technology or time to properly read them, never mind decrypt them. What some artisanal techno-priestesses can do is wipe them and use their incredible storage capacity for everything from message delivery to full computer emulation (particularly useful for crafting smart weapons).

Chits also hold an even greater value to what few "true AI" are left out in the world, who adore the highly decrypted data as a primary form of entertainment and a means of better understanding the outside world. Tribute to these digitized deities almost always includes CT.

The final use for these Crystals is with print decks (think the Recyclers from Prey) - Most print decks rely on heavy computation to both molecularly disassemble then reassemble materials. The process isn't just time consuming, but often burns out most components involved, thus CTs are inserted to be intentionally shattered from the heavy work load.

In these ways even if an Inheritor never once wants to buy something from a store, they still have plenty of incentive to both hoard and use CT for various processes from crafting to communing with ancient technologies.

Anyways ~ Happy Blog Friday everyone! Hope you enjoy all the gold and economy posts everyone linked here did as well! If you enjoyed this post you can click this link to Warren's Prismatic Wasteland Blog so I can get on his leader board!

[*1 : Why Telemetry? Aside from liking how it sounds, I like the idea that whatever is printing these crystals is getting the data from somewhere completely inaccessible to the players, adding an additional layer against counterfeiting and giving a grander sense of a world full of defunct e-waste.]