Alignment as cosmic affiliation

I never use alignment in my games. It's a poor representation of human behavior, and I think it produces more trouble than benefits as a game mechanic.

But, back in the '00s or '10s or so, there was a lot of TTRPG discourse around the idea that alignment could actually be cool if you treated it as an objectively real phenomenon, a manifestation of some kind of cosmic conflict. That could make a bit more sense out of things like spells that detect alignment, magic items that work differently depending on the alignment of their wielder or target, and maybe even the much-derided concept of alignment languages.

I think this idea was much more closely associated with the older Law-vs.-Chaos alignment paradigm than the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons nine-box system (which would later become such a meme with "alignment charts" of things like sitcom characters and bread storage techniques). This makes loads of sense, given that D&D's Law/Chaos axis was famously inspired by Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (and probably influenced by Michael Moorcock's Elric / Eternal Champion saga), which absolutely casts those concepts as players in a metaphysical struggle. Also, there's something to be said for leaving the Good/Evil axis out of this conflict, separating cosmic ideals from mortal ones, and avoiding the declaration of any absolute, objective definitions of right and wrong.

Unfortunately, I never really saw any worked examples of this paradigm. Maybe they just stayed in people's home campaigns, or maybe they never really materialized beyond forum discussions. So I'll try developing the idea a bit myself.

A brief sidebar on terminology

So, I actually think that "Law" is a dumb word for a fundamental cosmic force. All respect to Anderson and Moorcock, but for me that word evokes very distinctly human concepts. Maybe it's my familiarity with superhero comics before fantasy novels, but I strongly prefer "Order" as the opposite of Chaos. (See Marvel's Lord Chaos and Master Order, and DC's Lords of Chaos and Order.)

That said, I also think it would be appropriate to discard those very loaded terms anyway.

Chthonos and Ouranos

Let's say that there are two opposing metaphysical forces that interfere with sapient beings in the mortal world. These aren't conscious entities like gods, but fundamental forces like gravity or electromagnetism. They've each got a lot of names (being named anew by each culture who encounters them), but I'll mostly call them Chthonos and Ouranos here. As you might guess, these names are derived from the chthonic and ouranic categories of Greek deities. I'd never use them as in-fiction terms (unless I'm setting my game in a Hellenic context), but I'll use them here to distance us from the D&D alignment system.

Chthonos drives people towards change and freedom. It's connected to innovation, creativity, whim, travel, revolution, individualism, transformation, and egalitarianism. It's associated with deep places (both caves and oceans) and the dark, but also with fire. Many of its symbols are variations on spiralling, squirming, or branching shapes, with snakes, trees, and torches also being used.

Ouranos encourages order and cooperation. Tradition, safety, community, permanence, hierarchy, control, and stability are important Ouranos concepts. It's associated with the sky and celestial bodies, with light, with stone and metal, with day and night and the seasons (but not with weather, usually). Its symbols tend towards wheel and circle themes, as well as the sun or moon (or both), stars, eyes (particularly singular, disembodied ones), and also trees (in places where that's not a Chthonos symbol).

Chthonos and Ouranos aren't self-aware, but they create something like a will or drive when in contact with mortal beings, like light shining through a prism to create a rainbow. The mortal involved will get the impression that the force has goals and might even feel that it gives them wordless commands, but those goals and commands are largely the product of the mortal's mind.

Ultimately, it's probably best to look at Chthonos and Ouranos as ideals, but ideals with an objective, external reality.

Alignment

By willingly aligning one's self with Chthonos or Ouranos, a being can become supernaturally connected to their chosen force. This usually involves induction by someone else who's already aligned to that ideal, but there are places, artifacts, and rituals that one might use to embrace a particular force without help. 

Alignment has a number of effects, largely beneficial but circumstantially harmful.

Identification

Anyone aligned to a given force can recognize that same alignment in others. They can't sense any alignment in people connected to the opposite force, though—not without using a spell or something.

Communication

Beings who share the same alignment can pretty much understand each other. This isn't telepathy as we normally understand it, nor is it a shared language. It's just that, when an aligned being speaks, the general meaning of their words is conveyed (loosely) to any nearby beings with the same alignment. This also makes it a lot easier to quickly learn the language involved for real, even without the help of a bilingual teacher.

Hierarchy

Alignment carries with it a quantitative rank, an abstract degree of alignment. Everyone starts out at the same base level upon joining up, and their ranking is increased or decreased according to how they serve and aid (or betray) the ideals and individuals associated with their chosen force.

This isn't a social reputation, but an objectively real degree of alignment. The ranking phenomenon is mostly experienced subconsciously, but it has a lot of effect on social interaction: Aligned people tend to go along with higher-ranked people of their alignment, even if they've never met them before.

Note that the whole phenomenon works the same under egalitarian Chthonos as it does under hierarchical Ouranos; it's just expressed differently by the people involved.

Subjection

Alignment can increase the effectiveness of magical or supernatural phenomena applied to an aligned creature by another being of the same alignment. That is, your alignment buddies can heal and buff you more effectively, but they can also hurt you badly if they turn on you.

This effect is strongly dependent on alignment rank, though: Your spells don't get any bonuses when used on your alignment superiors, just your peers and underlings.

Induction

Aligned individuals can grant that same alignment to willing, cognizant, unaligned individuals. There's usually some ceremony involved with this (sometimes a lot of ceremony), but it's not technically necessary: Physical contact and informed consent will do the job. And it needs to really be consent: You can't force anybody to align through duress. It just won't work.

Alignment is generally permanent. That is, there's no built-in capability of alignment to be discarded by the individual or revoked by their superiors. However, very powerful mortal magic can de-align an aligned subject. This is soul manipulation stuff, so we're talking 5th- or 6th-level spells. Also, this is a lot easier if the caster is the target's alignment superior.

Persistence

For some folks, this is the big one. Alignment ties people into their chosen force at the soul level, and the more aligned a person is—the higher their alignment rank—the more of an impression their soul leaves on that interface between the primal force and the world. The ideal itself isn't changed, but the metaphysical shadow or footprint left behind by a person who maintained a high degree of alignment over a long time can even persist after that person's death. And that can be enough to shelter their soul, preserving them from the wheel of rebirth, from roving spiritual predators, and even from whatever divine power might otherwise have a claim on them.

Such souls become a kind of ghost, but without the usual psychological degradation and binding to a location or object. They become saints, ascended masters, even candidates for godhood, and they almost always continue to serve leadership roles within their alignment groups.

Neutrality

There's no such thing as "neutral alignment". There's just Chthonos-aligned,  Ouranos-aligned, and unaligned. The vast majority of beings are unaligned.

Society

As I mentioned, "Chthonos" and "Ouranos" are just terms of convenience here. In-fiction, nobody is using those terms. The dual forces they represent don't truly have names, and any culture who becomes aware of them generally comes up with their own terminology. One culture might frame all of reality as a struggle between the Skies and the Depths, while another might talk about the conflict between Fire and the Tree.

Additionally, societies can have wildly varying relationships with these powers. In some places, one force might be accepted—even to the point of making alignment to it a near-universal rite of passage—while the other is considered anathema. Other groups might consider both forces to be dangerous alien influences, and shun all initiation ceremonies as potential vectors for socially destabilizing influences. Some cultures could even regard both ideals as legitimate and morally neutral choices.

Many societies—especially geographically and culturally isolated ones—remain unaware of one or even both forces, at least for now. While Chthonos and Ouranos have presumably existed since the beginning of reality itself, the phenomenon of alignment has a distinct historical starting point—probably a few thousand years ago.

Every few generations or so, reports will emerge of a "third primal force". If any of these really were distinct phenomena on the same order of magnitude as Chthonos and Ouranos, though, their influence in the world must have somehow been curtailed (possibly by agents of the other two), because they never really stuck around. More likely, these other forces were just foreign names and traditions for one or another of the usual two, managing to go unrecognized for a while due to mortal cultural barriers. It's also possible that some alleged thirds really were distinct forces of a totally different type: gods, curses, plagues, cultural movements, etc.

The gods

Gods can be aligned with Chthonos or Ouranos just like any other conscious thing. It's extremely rare for an actual deity to be inducted into an alignment, but it's much less unusual for alignment to be part of a mortal's path to divinity. Souls who manage to persist after death through alignment are often revered within an organization or community of similarly aligned individuals, and that reverence can accrue as divine power across the generations.

Gods born this way inevitably become even more strongly linked to Chthonos or Ouranos than they were in their mortal lives, and they come to represent their chosen force in the eyes of their followers, putting a name and face over a blind and mindless ideal (and possibly joining an existing host of similarly aligned deities). Alignment becomes a sacrament of the new religion, and the god gains the additional power of alignment rank over their subjects.

As a result of this, Chthonic and Ouranic gods (again, not something anyone would call them in-fiction) exist as distinct groups apart from each other, and from the more numerous unaligned deities. Co-aligned gods will often cooperate, even far outside of their own domains and originating cultures.

Elves, dwarves, and others

Somewhere in my giant scratch document, I've got this half-facetious and unexpounded fragment:

Elves are what happen when a human civilization succumbs to Chaos. Dwarves are what happen when a human civilization succumbs to Law.

I'm not actually interested enough in demihumans to develop the idea—for real, I generally want either a setting that's all humans or one that gets a little more interesting than pointy ears—but there might be something in it. Maybe elves, fairies, and goblins are all creatures of Chthonos, the end result of that primal force being allowed to influence human biology for generation after generation. And Ouranos, meanwhile, might have done the same thing to dwarves and, say, gnomes and giants, maybe. (Of course, in this paradigm, the elves would probably live underground while the dwarves live on mountaintops.)

You could also connect the traditionally Law/Chaos-designated devils and demons to the two primal forces as well: Maybe those flavors of fiend are just the fates of aligned souls who don't manage to hold onto the mortal world after death.

Back in the v.3.5 days, demons had a vulnerability to iron, while devils had a vulnerability to silver. (The latter quality remains in 5e, I think, but I think iron is no longer a mechanically distinct weapon material.) And, of course, fae creatures are frequently vulnerable to "cold iron". I tend to think of fairies as chaotic creatures, even if the Monster Manual doesn't back me up, so I always thought that maybe demons were vulnerable to iron because they were chaotic. And, really, doesn't iron feel like kind of a Law-aligned substance? You know, being associated with bars and chains and such? Whereas silver might be considered chaotic through its connection to the ever-changing moon? Of course, this paradigm really wants me to find a way to say that lycanthropes are especially lawful, which I can't honestly do. Oh well. But I definitely think you could extend the Chthonos and Ouranos correspondence chart to include materials, and iron and silver are thematically solid choices.

(I'm beginning to fear I overuse the word "paradigm" the way Gygax overused "millieu".)

Mechanics

Dang, maybe another time. This post is long enough. I might start working this alignment concept into the BX hack I'm developing, and nail down some mechanics in that process.

The City of Wolves

One day, I daydreamed a whole fairy tale, or at least the outline for one. I don't have a good explanation for this.

So it's known colloquially as "The City of Wolves", but that name is pretty much a massive spoiler, so on book covers and when told to children the first time, it's usually called "Ellisset and Her Siblings".

The story follows Ellisset—the sensible and dutiful eldest child of three—and her two younger siblings, whose names and genders are more variable. Let's say Ellisset is about nine, her middle sibling is a boy of about seven, and the youngest is a girl of five.

The three get lost on the way home from the market or something. They've probably got a terrible home life in the typical fairy tale mold—like their parents are dead and they're being nominally raised by a useless drunken uncle—and Ellisset basically has to function as an adult while keeping the other two in tow. Anyway, night falls and they're still on the road, and they're looking for some kind of shelter. And they find a whole town they never knew of before.

They knock at the first house they find with lit windows, and a kind woman takes them in—feeding them suspicious meat pies in some versions—and lets them all stay in a guest bedroom room. Sometimes there's a lot of focus on the exact sleeping arrangements, with the kids often getting separate beds in one room, or all sleeping in one big bed, with the youngest one being closest to the door.

Anyway, it turns out that the woman who took them in is really a wolf. She isn't described as a werewolf or a wolf in some kind of disguise, and it's not explained how, if she was always a wolf, the children ever thought she was human. Picture books take different approaches to resolving this, but the oral tradition leaves it frighteningly vague, as if suggesting that any person might in fact be a "wolf".

So, the woman-who-is-really-a-wolf sneaks into the guest room at night and either snatches the youngest child away or eats her right there in the bed. Either way, Ellisset and the middle child make up, discover in horror that their benefactor is a wolf, and that their little sister is either dead or doomed.

Ellisset and her surviving sibling escape—sometimes by jumping daringly out a window, sometimes by sneaking away quietly while the wolf eats the little girl—and start screaming for help in the dark streets of this strange town. And that leads to the big moment: Wolves start pouring out of all the buildings around them, making it clear that every citizen of this place is a "wolf"—whatever that means in the story's cultural context, and in its allegorical intent, and in the minds of its young audience.

So, Ellisset and the middle child flee through the City of Wolves. Sometimes, this scene includes gruesome or suggestive details about the nature of this place, often suggesting that the meat pies the kids were fed contained human flesh. At some point, the middle child gets caught by the wolves, and Ellisset continues on alone. Different versions put different levels of emphasis on her leaving him behind—sometimes, it's at least implied that she sacrifices him for her own escape.

In the end, the wolves corner Ellisset, but they don't eat her. Sometimes they say that they're all full from eating the younger kids, and sometimes they say that they respect how clever and ruthless Ellisset has shown herself to be. They offer her the opportunity to become a wolf, making it clear that they'll eventually eat her if she refuses. And in most versions, the story ends there, leaving the audience to contemplate how Ellisset would answer, and how they would answer in her place. In other versions, Ellisset virtuously refuses, and either dies a human child or finds some way to escape.

Bernard Sleigh's maps of Fairyland

A while back, Jason Thompson (a very cool cartoonist, cartographer, and game developer) posted a thing on Bluesky about these Fairyland maps that Bernard Sleigh, an English artist from the "Arts and Crafts movement", created back in the early 20th century. They're pretty interesting! There's kind of a Lord Dunsany vibe there, and a bit of Tolkien, and a lot of that ache for a beautiful and ancient otherworld of dreams and adventures that suffused Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories. In fact, Sleigh even seemed to use the name "Dreamland" interchangeably with "Fairyland".

I love this obsessive paracosm stuff. Get a load of all of the details in there! It looks like Bernard found a place for every fairy tale, myth, nursery rhyme, or creepy conservative fantasy novel he knew. Makes me think of the way D&D's implied setting accreted from all the fantasy, pulp, and horror media its creators loved.

Bernard also made a guidebook to accompany the map, and for some reason I felt the need to convert it into a PDF. Did the best I could with the OCR. Check it out!

• Guide to the Map of Fairyland

There are a few interesting ideas in there, like this somewhat vague and troubling aside.

I know of one child who would have her own way, and she began this journey. "They" caught her and popped her into a hazelnut shell, and there she stayed for two hundred and fifty eight and a half years. She managed to escape back to the world again, but she had someone else's soul inside her—and one of the cross-grained, bothering sort too.

There's also this character sketch.

He is called Fridoline. He is an "hermaphrodite," neither girl nor boy, so I called him "it." "It" is about six-and-a-half inches high, but, to be more sociable, often jumps up to five or six, or even twelve feet high. "It" has grey-gold hair like winter moss, lovely twinkly eyes, and knows every place and fairy person you can possibly wish to see. Its only charge for its services is a mortal kiss or two.

I also really dig the mention of "the hidden Gates of Ivory & Pearl". It's a nice, specific, evocative way to talk about the entrance to this otherworld. It makes me think of Lovecraft's "Seventy Steps of Lighter Slumber" and the "gates of horn and ivory" that Gaiman borrowed from Greek myth . . . but without being connected to a notorious racist or rapist.

The guide is dedicated to Sleigh's kids, who I think would have been about 16 and 12 when this version of the map was released in 1918. He also made an earlier, much smaller version of the map in 1909, so I've gotta figure he might have started the whole project for them in the first place. The fact that Bernard divorced their mom in 1914 layers on another dynamic, I guess.

Finally, there's a ritual for reaching Fairyland at the end of the book! It involves a sprig of "vervain" (also known as verbena, and a plant with loads of folksy mystical connections) and a piece of "ematille" (or heliotrope, or bloodstone, also with loads of supernatural meaning).

A relevant aside

Back on the topic of Jason Thompson, though: I think there's a really solid chance you might want to check out his Dreamland TTRPG. It's still in playtesting, but it looks really cool!

Coin sizes and values

Okay, new obsession. I've suddenly found myself spending a lot of time thinking about D&D currency (in connection with that oldschool/​newschool pseudo-retro hack I've been messing with, of course). And there are a whole pile of different factors influencing my angle, here. These include (in no particular order) the following.

• Real world values of standard fantasy coin metals
• XP for carousing
• Player expectations of what a treasure horde looks like
• How many pounds of coinage characters might have to haul around to buy an expensive thing
• Semi-realistic pre-modern prices for things derived from historical research
• Compatibility with adventures and prices lists made by other people
• The annoyance of tracking low-value cash
• Reasonably convenient coin sizes
• Starting cash and shopping during character creation
• The OSR silver standard

The silver standard

Actually, let's start with that last idea. It's kind of an assumed practice in some olsdchool/​neo-oldschool/​DIY RPG scenes right now that the default coins are silver, not gold. So values of things are given in silver, the cash-for-XP mechanics are balanced on 1 SP = 1 XP, dungeon treasures are light on gold, etc. There are a lot of different reasons given for this, but I think they mostly boil down to historical verisimilitude (folks didn't really throw around a lotta gold coins during the periods D&D mostly tries to emulate) and aesthetics (where silver just feels more fitting to grimy tales of desperate vagabonds and tomb-robbers). There are also some carrying capacity concerns, and the simple fact that it's just good design in a progression-focused game to start players off with low-value currency and let them work up to higher values.

The excellent Delta has had a lot of smart stuff to say on the silver issue, and this would be a good time to throw a couple links at you.

• Delta's D&D Hotspot: On Money
• Delta's D&D Hotspot: Money Results

Anyway, I dig the silver standard idea! I'm not terribly concerned about historicity, but a vaguely verisimilitudinous vibe is nice.

Relative values of denominations

Speaking of history, though, let's do a quick D&D edition comparison. As you may be aware, the relative values of the game's standard coin denominations have changed over the years! Here are the values of one gold piece in each edition.

edition	astral diamonds	platinum pieces	gold pieces	electrum pieces	silver pieces	copper pieces
OD&D, Holmes	—	0.2	1	2	10	50
B/X, BECMI, RC	—	0.2	1	2	10	100
AD&D 1e	—	0.2	1	2	20	200
AD&D 2e	—	0.2	1	2	10	100
D&D 3e	—	0.1	1	—	10	100
D&D 4e	0.0001	0.01	1	—	10	100
D&D 5e	—	0.1	1	2	10	100

Oh man, I forgot how crazy 4e got with the 100-gp platinum pieces and the astral diamond space money.

Anyway, the point is that these values have varied wildly! I think there's been a general trend towards decimalization over time—even the reintroduction of electrum in 5e was sorta highlighted as not really being part of the normal monetary system—and that seems like a damned sensible move to me.

However, I now ask you to consider . . . centimalization.

This is, admittedly, not a word. But I think the meaning is obvious: What if we made the whole scale look like the upper end of the 4e progression, and valued each currency at 100× the previous one?

Now, despite the fact that I had to make up a word for this, it has in fact already been done, and by no less a light than World of Warcraft, in which 1 gold = 100 silver = 10,000 copper. And, knowing how shamelessly other MMOs have imitated WoW over the years, I expect that there are loads more examples!

But here's a more interesting example. I just checked the current real-world values on a site called Daily Metal Prices, and it turns out that an ounce of gold costs $3,379.92, an ounce of silver costs $37.85, and an ounce of copper costs $0.27. And, folks, those are close enough to 100× steps for me!

By the way, platinum is only selling for $1,318.40 per ounce! Less than half gold's value! Is that a modern development? Is there any historical basis for platinum's high value in D&D? Wikipedia says "During periods of sustained economic stability and growth, the price of platinum can exceed that of the price of gold. ... In the 18th century, platinum's scarcity, traits, and intrinsic value made King Louis XV of France declare it 'the only metal fit for a king'." So that's interesting.

Anyway. These are obviously modern numbers, and silver used to be a lot rarer than it is now, but I'm less concerned with history than with things just feeling right. So I'm really interested in trying out centimal currency denominations! At this point, I've watched enough dumb reality shows where people get very excited about a few yellow pebbles to feel like a whole coin made out of gold should be worth a hell of a lot.

Coin size

But just what is "a whole coin", anyway? Would you believe the answer to that question has also varied from one edition of D&D to another? But it seems to be a much simpler story than the wild journey of coin values. As far as I can tell, all coins (regardless of denomination) started off weighing 1/10 of a pound each, then switched to 1/50 in AD&D 2e, and that's where they've been ever since. (That's what one source I found said, anyway. I couldn't find any mention of coin weight in 2e. So maybe it was really 3e when the 1/50 lb. thing showed up.)

Just for kicks, let's see what coins of those weights would be worth today.

If we're going with the modern 50-per-pound coins, a copper piece would be worth 9 cents—which ain't bad, given that it's only 3.6 times the weight of a penny. A silver piece would be $12.11, which honestly makes the silver standard idea sound very reasonable. Finally, a gold piece the size of a fat penny would be worth $1,081.57, which certainly lines up with expectations calibrated by all of those gold grabber shows.

Obviously, if we use the old 10-per-pound coin weight, everything works out to five times as much. A copper piece would be $0.43, silver would be $60.56, and a single damn GP would be worth $5,407.87. I'm not going to calculate how many of those it would take to make a proper horde for a dragon to sleep on.

Anyway, since we know the weights of these coins and the densities of their metals—I'll leave alloys out of the question—we can find their volumes really easily.

	copper	silver	gold
1/10 pound	5.077 cm3	4.319 cm3	2.352 cm3
1/50 pound	1.015 cm3	0.864 cm3	0.470 cm3

Then, with these volumes in mind, we can figure out how big these coins might actually be. I think the easy way for me to do this is to just start with some familiar United States coin sizes and work out how thick our fantasy money would have to be to hit those same diameters. I'm going to use the diameters of the dime, nickel, quarter, half dollar, and silver dollar, since they represent a good spread of sizes. This calls for an infographic!

Obviously, a lot of these proposed diameter/thickness ratios are straight-up silly. Those really flat 1/50-pound gold coins would be crazy bendable, while the small-diameter 1/10-pound coins would roll like barrels if you dropped 'em.

Honestly, most of those 1/10 arrangements are pretty goofy. I think the thick-as-fuck quarter-diameter gold coin seems really pleasing (if a little cartoony), but the silver and copper coins would have to be crazy huge to hit that oldschool coin weigh. They'd seem more like Olympic medals than money. It's hard to believe a society that produced such coins wouldn't also make much smaller ones.

I like the 1/50 scale better. In that paradigm, I'd go with the dime diameter for the gold piece, the nickel for the silver piece, and the quarter for the copper piece. Those seem like more reasonable, believable coins.

Again, I'm neglecting the whole question of alloys here. Coins throughout history have been quite famously not made out of pure, elemental precious metals! But it's a messy and indefinite area, and I'm not inclined to try factoring it in. Anything you'd alloy a coin with is likely to be lighter than the primary metal, so we can just assume that these coins should maybe be fractionally larger by some ignorable degree.

Purchasing power

So, the real issue behind this whole distraction is the question of what these coins should actually be worth in the game. As I said, I'd like it if their values actually approach something like the real world values of similar quantities of such metals. That's a lot easier to do with the modern 1/50-pound coin weight and the silver standard. I'm pretty comfortable rounding off their approximate purchasing power to something like $0.10 for a copper piece, $10.00 for a silver piece, and $1,000.00 for a gold piece.

Time for a couple more RPG blog links, this time from esteemed indie game designer Skerples.

• Coins and Scrolls: Currency in OSR Games
• Coins and Scrolls: OSR: Medieval Price List

In addition to a lot of cool ideas and research, Skerples describes a monetary scale in which a copper piece is valued at roughly $1.00, a silver at $10.00, and a gold at $100.00. I really like this, because it makes copper pieces feel more meaningful than they typically do in D&D, but my own current fixation on modern metal values would make it hard to adopt. As we established, even a giant oldschool copper piece would be less than 50 cents' worth of metal!

But Skerples offers another cool thing here, and that's a simplified D&D gear price list based on actual historical data from various sources (notably Kenneth Hodges and Steven Proctor, I think)! I'm always the first to announce that my D&D settings are emphatically not Medieval Europe, but it does seem like a really useful and verisimilitudinous set of benchmarks, easily translated from Skerples' decimal scale to my centimal one. If a torch costs about a dollar (equivalent), a sword is about 200 bucks, and a suit of plate armor is something like $10,000, that's something I can work with! The differing costs and availability between urban and rural markets is a cool touch, too. (I can't quite make sense out of those hireling wages, though. I think I'd have to rework those.)

Portability

One really nice thing about using something like real world values for silver and gold is that paying for expensive stuff won't often require whole cartloads of coins. If you want to buy a suit of that ten-thousand-dollar plate armor with silver, you only need to bring 1,000 nickel-sized coins with you. That'd fit in a pretty small sack. Or hey, how about the most expensive thing on Skerples' Medieval price list, the galley? That price would work out to $80,000. Pay for it in gold, and it's just 80 dime-sized coins! That's like belt-pouchy territory. But you'd be a fool to keep it somewhere so accessible.

Cash-to-XP conversion

Another factor here is my interest in using a carousing system for XP. Actually, that's just part of it, and some readers might not know about that kind of XP mechanic anyway, so let me start from the top.

The great strength of the whole XP concept—and the reason we see it deployed all over the place right now, including uses outside of game systems entirely—is its power as an incentive. If you want a player to do something, you make that thing reward them with numerical increases that build slowly but noticeably towards more tangible payoffs. Whatever the players need to do to get those rewards, that's what the game is going to ultimately be about.

If you want the game to be about fighting monsters, you award XP for killing or otherwise defeating monsters. If you want the game to be about looting dungeons, you link XP to recovering treasure.

The XP-for-GP system has an obvious side effect, though: player characters who become extremely wealthy over time. For various reasons—not the least of them being a preference for protagonists who are perennially broke vagabonds—that might not be ideal. So that's where the idea of "XP for carousing" comes in. The idea there is that you only get the XP if you waste the money. That is, you actually enjoy it, instead of spending it on sensible things. Generally, there's also a table to roll on, making it possible for all kinds of additional benefits or adventure-provoking problems to come out of your high living.

Personally, I love XP-for-carousing mechanics because they encourage players to have their characters act like real people instead of game pieces. But not everybody is playing a character who would want to spend all their money drinking and gambling and whoring or whatever. For some PCs, sensible spending is in character. So I'd like to include two more options besides carousing: training and magical research. They both let the characters turn cash into XP, but training would do it without the random table, and research would use a very different random table. There'd also be a special fourth option where you could have a funeral for a fallen PC and get a better return on your money than normal.

But all of that is stuff for a different blog post. Right now, I'm thinking about how this all fits alongside my intended cash values. If it takes, say, 2,000 XP to get to 2nd level, and my carousing system gives people 1 XP per silver piece spent, and I'm valuing silver at something like 10 USD per coin . . . then I'm requiring PCs to blow $20,000 dollars each on luxury degenerate benders at the start their careers. And the numbers just go up from there!

Folks, I am not a party person. I could be real far off in my party calibration. But that seems fucking ludicrous.

So do I decrease the value of a silver piece in spite of all that figuring I just did? Do I decrease the numbers on XP tables and give out way less treasure as well? Do I change my SP-to-XP exchange rate to something more generous (and also give out less treasure)?

Right now, I'm considering option 2. I feel like a 1-XP-for-1-SP carousing payout rate is nice and intuitive, so I don't want to mess with that. Instead, I could just start my level progression tables at something like 100 XP (effectively $1,000) to reach level 2. And I'd cut treasure payouts, but not quite as much as I'm decreasing XP requirements—say, 10% as opposed to 5%—since the PCs would still need to spend some money on sensible stuff!

So, let's say I've got an adventure module that was originally calibrated to get a party of four PCs from 1st to 2nd level. That would probably mean a bunch of smart, motivated players could wring about 8,000 GP from it. Under the silver standard, that would be 8,000 SP, and with my treasure adjustment it would be a mere 800 SP. The PCs would inevitably spend at least 100 SP each carousing themselves up to 2nd level, leaving them each with 100 SP. If I'm going to value plate armor at 1,000 SP, that's going to mean a lot more dungeon delves before anybody's clanking around in heavy armor. Or more likely they'll just loot some armor from somewhere.

Yeah, I think I'm okay with the sound of that paradigm.