I know the mice in the territories use coins as currency. I’m just curious if the type of metal or how it is made into coins is ever mentioned. If not, do you guys have any ideas?
Also, who issues the money and are there different coin for different cities?
I’m not sure of an official answer, but I think the best one is: Whatever works best for your games!
Copper has been a popular coinage metal type (at least until zinc came along). And as one of the cities in the Territories is called Copperwood, I’d imagine most of the coins being of this particular metal.
Copper is also fairly light, which makes it easier for tiny mice to carry.
two metals can be hammer-worked easily from their ores: Copper and Gold.
Nugget gold and vein gold can both be worked with hammers into something useful without large scale tools.
Some forms of copper ore are metalic copper. These can be readily worked into copper tools by hammering. Almost all known deposits on earth, however, are worked out.
In the past, I’ve used regional coinage as justification for the loss of a Resources die – Sprucetuck bits, say, are only exchanged at half face value in Copperwood for farthings, while mice hoard Ferndale marks in memory of the fallen. Regional coinage also lets you map economic troubles past and present onto the Territories – post-WWI Germany-type inflation, say. Lockhaven currency could cause an uproar between mice who feel that it’s an underhanded attempt at Territorial unification and those who feel cheated by local monetary variations. All sort of great (i.e. troublesome) situations tie into money, and perceived differences in value just serve to highlight them.
~Gary
I’m fairly certain that copper is readily available in the Territories from rock that breaks the surface of the forest floor.
In the descriptions of the cities in the game is mentioned that some cities mint coins and that some others use the same coins as other specific cities (of course there will also be mixing of types of coins since mice trade) so there could be openings for valueing coins from different cities different based on what NN thinks of city X’s credability. In for example the ancient mediterranean world the romans started to use less and less silver in their coins with the effect that greek coins were valued higher regardless of the nominal values of the coins. This had the effect that people saved their greek coin and spent their roman coin which started a spiral with more and more hogging of the greek coins. Of course the romans issued more coins with less silver to counter this and it just went overboard.
If mice only use copper coins I guess there isn’t much to fiddle with, maybe a little with the size of the coin, since the value will be almost only nominal. If the use any more precious metal as silver or gold there are openings for a lot of fiddling and ‘‘value wars’’.
On the other hand, maybe, copper is harder to get at for mice then for humans which would mean that copper could be nearer ‘‘precious metals’’. On the third hand copper can’t be that valuable since that would make ordinary stuff like cooking bowls and so on too expensive.
I’ve collected picturs from the comics in a gallery and I found a picture of coins and there are both ‘‘yellow’’ and ‘‘white’’ coins. One of the coins read ‘‘four’’ so obviousliy there are coins symbolizing a bunch of units in the same coin.
Also I stumbled on the fact that they use tea pot, that’s charming. I guess it’s most herbal tea and not real tea but there’s something charming about tea pots.
Also the iron rich ground around one of the cities, Ironwood?, is mentioned. One could have coins of iron with a nominal value (just as copper coins). The important thing here, I guess, is that a creditable power, issues the coins and back up the value of the coin. If the power loses creditability, the value goes down.
Just remember: iron ores are almost always going to require heat treatment to rather hot (bellows and charcoal) to convert to useful iron. Meteoric iron is cold-workable (but gracious, it’s gonna be hard work!).