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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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chapotraphouse
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That always pisses me of. Gold should be about 8-15 (13) silvers. Unless the silvers are tiny and the golds huge. if it's in the iron age, bronze should be company script. If it's not, bronze should be very expensive, to the point many farmers still use flint tools because they can't afford bronze. Think of how during the trail of tears the amerindians had holy tablets made of copper, because for a neolithic society copper was immensely precious. The ratios can be a little of, but not too much or else the geology of the planet is going to be very weird. Gold is mined first, so if you are writing a story and put the ratio very low, as in 1:3 or 1:4 then your civilization is relatively new to mining.
The reason the prices are so messed up today are financial shenanigans.
I think it’s in the book “Games of Empire” where the argument is made that the worlds in fantasy games are usually just recreations of our modern capitalist world, aforementioned financial shenanigans very much included. These games often have the aesthetics of a kind of mediaeval feudalism, but in-game economies feature very modern things like decimalised currency, auction houses, arbitrage, consumerist alienation, instant payments, and so on, all of which would be very out of place in a feudal world. Fantasy RPGs show us worlds that appear radically different from our own at first glance, but upon deeper examination they are another example of the social imaginary restrained by capitalist realism.
Good post, good points. It reminds me of those early modern depictions of classical antiquity, where people are dressed like tercios, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HumiliationValerianusHolbein.jpg
Perhaps most depictions of the past tend to be anachronistic because we are too immersed in the super structure we are part of that we become unable to imagine anything different.
Then again this fantasy worlds and games created under capitalism have every incentive to do the bare minimum and just copy each other without any nuance or research. It's also likely that a truly accurate world would not resonate with audiences.
And indeed the half assed fantasies reinforce the prejudices of their consumer.