If you have followed my website for any length of time, you are by now aware that I like using Reddit to get my article ideas. I search reddit for questions and then I answer them, here, though not often on Reddit. While I post answers here on my website daily, often 3 or more a day, I only post answers on Reddit once, maybe twice, a week, if that often. I dislike the toxic vibes of Reddit comment sections and so avoid dealing with them, by writing up very long comments and then NOT posting the comment on Reddit, but rather instead posting it here for you. my readers, because I know you guys are not toxic. And so, that is what this page is, yet again, today. I have found a question on reddit and I am going to answer it here instead of answering it o Reddit. Enjoy!
Today, let's do something a little bit different. Starting last week of July 2023, I have been testing out ChatGPT on my website. Today, let's see what ChatGPT has to say about this Reddit post.
I'm going to start out by answering the post myself, and then afterwards, I am going to paste the question into ChatGPT and see how similar or different AI's answer is from mine.
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>>>Currency in Worldbuilding. Is there any rules based around it?
>>>Is there a specific way to do it?
>>>Will we need to explain the currency in the book?
>>>I have decided to go with the basic; Gold & Silver currency as well as the usual trading amongst lower born characters. But would it also be safer to just make my own currency in this fantasy world rather than use a basic one.
>>>Help me figure out what I can use as currency?
>>>I have several races in my world, and while there’s no way to get around the necessity of having some kind of currency in the world, I can’t figure out what it would be. The world is divided into two continents, so it would make sense for there to be two different kinds of currency and some kind of exchange system. One continent I know would use gems and gold nuggets, but the races on the second continent have no ability to find those kinds of materials at the rate the races on the first continent do, and they aren’t common there to begin with. I feel like they need something else but I’m unsure what it could be. They’re rather primitive, so I imagine it would be something that can be found or farmed rather than crafted, and they live in a rainforest. The more powerful race on the continent are pretty much intelligent winged cats, and I’m stumped on trying to find things that are easily available in a rainforest that a cat would find valuable, besides food.
>>>Help me figure out what I can use as currency?
>>>I have several races in my world, and while there’s no way to get around the necessity of having some kind of currency in the world, I can’t figure out what it would be. The world is divided into two continents, so it would make sense for there to be two different kinds of currency and some kind of exchange system. One continent I know would use gems and gold nuggets, but the races on the second continent have no ability to find those kinds of materials at the rate the races on the first continent do, and they aren’t common there to begin with. I feel like they need something else but I’m unsure what it could be. They’re rather primitive, so I imagine it would be something that can be found or farmed rather than crafted, and they live in a rainforest. The more powerful race on the continent are pretty much intelligent winged cats, and I’m stumped on trying to find things that are easily available in a rainforest that a cat would find valuable, besides food.
My world is more like the real world, in that it has a huge variety in cultures, so, not sure how helpful this will be for you, but here is what I do. My world is spread across multiple planets, but the primary planet has thirteen continents, but no defined countries. Instead each continent has hundreds of small tribes and settlements, and a few large cities. So, it's a quasi city-state style government. Each has its own ruler, self proclaimed kings, chief, ect. End result is multiple thousands of cultures. The land itself is very harsh, as is the weather, and the monsters, making travel very difficult, so in most cases, each of these city states, settlements, and tribes are very isolated with little to no knowledge of the rest of the world.
Well, the end result of all of this, is that every single one of these places has its own individual, unique economy and currency, that only has value to itself and is of little to no value to any of the others. Meaning the global economy is very fractured and unstable, because there is no unity between the economics of each village.
The currency range is vast, depending on the region. For example there is a fishing village that uses clam shells as currency, while a different fishing village uses periwinkle shells, and yet another uses live lobsters as currency.
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There is a village that uses bushels of apples as currency.
One village uses sea glass that washes up on their beach.
Another uses mica chucks they find in the caves near their settlement, while not far away is another that uses tourmaline crystals as currency, found in the same caves.
One uses silk scarves and silk shawls and silk blankets as currency.
Another uses reed baskets as currency.
There is one village that is set up in the ruins of an ancient shattered, stained glass bio dome, that uses shards of colored glass they dig up from the ruins, as currency.
A sheep farming community uses various sheep products as currency (wool, milk, cheese, lanolin, yarn, blankets, and candles) with the items each being different values.
Coins exist in some of the big cities. These are made of various materials depending on the region. Some are metals (tin, iron, gold, silver, copper, brass, etc) others are carved from stones, gems, bones, ivory, or wood, depending on what is available in that region.
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A lot of regions do not use any formal currency system, instead using a bartering system. Family A has a cow so they trade milk and cheese with family B who has a goose feather mattress. Family C trades a bag of potatoes for a crate of sardines from family D. And so on.
Many regions have a honor system for good deeds as well, which act as a form of currency. For example, if you rescue a man from a pack of wolves, or after he fell through ice in a lake, or some other form of saving his life, he then owes you something in return. He may become your servant for a year or take your place in a challenge (like if some rebel cowboy challenges you to a shoot out at high noon, you can send this guy in your place).
My world is for a book series and the main character is a travelling merchant. He brings supplies to various locations and travels hundreds of miles visiting hundreds of villages. He buys goods from one to sell to another. But because each has vastly different currency systems, he has to keep stores of every single type of currency on his vardo. He makes sure to always have a supply of whatever currency is used in the regions he will be passing through on his trip.
I try to make the currency of each place, match with what is available in their region.
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>>>Currency in Worldbuilding. Is there any rules based around it?
Not that I'm aware of.
I think everyone just does what is best for their own world.
I think, if you wanted to get really into it, you could buy a book on world economics and study up on how the stock market is run. The stock market is what determines the actual value (which is different from face value) of currency (paper notes and minted coins) around the world. This is why a silver dollar has a face value of only one dollar if you use it to buy something at Walmart but can be sold for a hundred dollars at a pawn shop.
>>>Is there a specific way to do it?
I know, in the Fantasy genre, a lot of authors just use the Dungeons and Dragons standard from the Player's Handbook. Which in 2ADnDed is:
1 Electrolyte = 100 Platinum
1 Platinum = 1,000 Gold
1 Gold = 100 Silver
1 Silver = 1,000 Copper
Some editions add gemstones as well. Like:
1 Ruby = 10 Electrolyte
1 Diamond = 10 Platinum
Then the Player's Handbook has a Merchant Chart for how much basic items are, so you can figure out other values on your own. The chart says stuff like:
10 Candlesticks for 1cp
1 Walking Stick for 150cp
1 Bedroll for 5sp
1 Draft horse and wagon for 125gp
1 Bag Of Holding for 100pp
cp = copper pieces, sp = silver pieces, gp = gold pieces, pp = platinum pieces, ep = electrolyte pieces.
Those come from the 2ed ADnD handbook which is the one I use.
3.5ed and 5ed Player's Handbooks are the one most people on this sub seem to use, which is different.
In 2ed ADnD the coins have weight calculated in and the characters can only carry as much as their weight carry limit. For example a gold bar weighs over 100lbs and a character can only carry it if he has another character to help him pick it up and put it in the wagon for his draft horse to tow it. 2ed uses real would weights.
3.5ed and 5ed don't use THACO or add weight to coins, thus why 3.5ed characters can very unrealistically pick up and carry dozens of gold bars.
If you want to use gold coins in your books, I highly recommend you buy a few real world gold coins to find out just exactly how heavy they are. I own 12 real gold coins. Each is the size of a silver dollar, so only a tiny fraction bigger than a USA Quarter. Those 12 coins weigh well over 50lbs. I can not lift or carry the coin purse those 12 gold coins are in.
It is incredibly unreasonable and insanely unrealistic for a person to carry more than 3 gold coins at once. Unless they are a WWF wrestler they simply will not be able to lug around ten or more gold coins.
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Not to mention you can't put gold coins in your pocket…the extreme heavy weight will cause your pocket seams to break and the pocket to fall off your coat… I have tested this with several coats.
I bought the 12 gold coins I have, along with 12 silver coins as well, precisely so I could test out these sorts of carry weight issues, so that I could write my merchant more realistically. And I was completely unprepared for how incredibly massively heavy gold coins actually are. This caused me to completely change my currency system for my world.
I think writers seriously underestimate how extremely heavy a gold coin is.
>>>Will we need to explain the currency in the book?
Probably not.
I do in my own books (my world is for a series of books, some already published and more being written).
But my main character is a Persian silk merchant and every story includes scenes of him buying and selling in marketplaces and peddling to farm villages and bartering and haggling with customers and such.
The money, coins, and prices of things come into heavy play in the plot lines and do deeply impact a lot of the story.
He is a necromancer Di'Jinn and when people can't afford his items, he gives the items away seemingly for free, asking them to sign a contract giving him their soul. He controls a Lich which needs to eat souls to regenerate, thus my merchant is deliberately putting high prices on items, knowing people cannot afford them, so he can trick them into selling him their souls.
The merchant is seen by the people as somewhat foolish for giving expensive items away seemingly for free, and other times seen as kind, generous, and compassionate towards the poor for giving things away. But he's really conniving and deviated, and most people don't realize the true value of their soul until its too late.
Readers see first hand how exorbitantly wealthy the silk merchant is vs how poverty ridden and destitute the bulk of the world is.
So, on my own series, because my main character is a merchant with a soul gathering agenda and the plot deals heavily with the trades he makes, therefore the currency system was a very big part of my world building process.
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Every short story has scenes with deals being made. Every novel will have a dozen or more such scenes.
The plot itself revolves around the currency system and the fact that most of the world is poverty stricken, while only a few wealthy merchants live comfortably, with my main character being the wealthiest merchant of them all, making him also the wealthiest man alive.
>>>I have decided to go with the basic; Gold & Silver currency as well as the usual trading amongst lower born characters. But would it also be safer to just make my own currency in this fantasy world rather than use a basic one.
I would say, look at your plot and your main character and ask yourself how often will the reader see money being used.
If you only have one minor scene where the main character buys a drink at a Tavern, you could get by with saying: "He threw three coppers on the counter." and never explain what the value of those coins are, because knowing the coin value is not important to the story. Heck, you may not even need the basics. Just saying that one line shows that minted coins exists and are used and the reader will feel immersed and not need to know more.
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On the other hand, if your plot and character is like mine, where money itself is a primary plot point, and the reader needs to know coin values so they know where the plot is going, well then you may need more than basics.
This originally appeared as an answer to this question. If you would like to comment you can on the original thread.
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So, as often happens, in articles like this one you are reading right now, I am commenting to a Reddit thread. Today, in addition to replying to the original OP of the thread, I am ALSO responding to a comment made within the Reddit thread. The comment, going a bit off topic of the original thread, bt still on topic enough that I'm going to include my response here on this article as well, so that you, my readers, get to have all of my thoughts and opinions on the matter. Because of this, in addition to linking to the OP post of the thread, I am also linking to the comment which asked the question within the comment section. Here it is:
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If you are looking for my posts on Reddit, I have two Reddit accounts:
But, I hardly ever post on Reddit at all, so, not much to see on either of them.
I'm also here:
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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
This page contains sections written by an LLM AI, specifically OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.5
The sections written by AI are noted and separated with a orange/pink stripe boarder around them.
Sections written by AI has not been fact checked and may contain inaccuracies. They are included for entertainment purposes only. The goal here is to show you what AIs like ChatGPT are capable of doing and as such the AI sections are directly copy/pasted into this page without any edits, changes, or fact checking done, so that you can see what AI output looks like.
The goal of this page is to show you how to write long, detailed command prompts that will get ChatGPT to output less generic and more useful content for you. Please remember, when using AI for your own content that AI is a random generator that guesses what word should logically come next and is NOT actually giving you correct answers to your questions as it has no ability to comprehend word meanings; and as such LLM AIs have a very high rate of fact inaccuracies, often outputting incorrect and inaccurate information at a rate as high as 64% to 73% in 8 times out of every 10 answers, which has been proven by numerous studies.
As of July 2023, there are currently more then 300 LLM AI apps and programs available with varying degrees of outputting informational accuray. As of July 2023, MOST of those has an accuracy rate of only 2% to 3%.
I choose to use ChatGPT for this article, because it has the highest rate of NOT giving inaccurate information, of any AI language model currently available, however it's inaccuracy rate is still higher then 50% inaccurate output more then 50% of the time, HOWEVER, as the June 2023 Stanford and Berkeley studies have shown, ChatGPT is only fully accurate 2.4% of the time, and this 2.4% is the MOST accurate AI rate out there as of July 2023.
The fact that ChatGPT is only 100% accurate 2.4% of the time and it is the MOST accurate of ANY of the AIs currently available, shows how very alarmingly INACCURATE any output from AI is and why you SHOULD NOT be using it for research or anything requiring factual information. Please keep this in mind when using AI programs in your own writing.
If you choose to use LLM AI's such as ChatGPT for your content, please remember that t is NOT a research program, it is NOT a search engine, and 88 times out of 10 it is going to give you as much as 75% inaccurate information. DO NOT use LLM AIs to create your content, unless you plan on doing huge amounts of fact checking and actual research to ensure that the content you publish is accurate.
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So, I was over on Reddit, you like I often am, and found this question. And answered it, like I do. However, the answer I initially gave was a simple generic answer. If you want to read my original answer unaltered, simply click on Reddit's embed feature links which Reddit provides for webmasters to be able to post their answers on their websites, while linking back to the original thread on Reddit (if you didn't know Reddit offered and encouraged the use of this feature, look for it in the "share" features underneath every post, comment, and reply on Reddit).
I am answering random questions today about writing, self-publishing, character creation, and world building, over on Reddit and decided to take my answers from there and expand upon them even further over here. So that's what this page is. Me rambling on about various aspects of world building techniques I use when writing the Quaraun series. The questions I am answering are embedded here. Clicking the link in the embedded question will take you to the original Reddit page where you can see the original answer along with other people's answers. If you wish to comment, you can do so on the Reddit page where a place to do so is provided.
In any case, as with all of my Reddit answers found on my site here, my original post on Reddit is much shorter then the article here.
I'm an author. This is an author home page. It's about me, my life, my books, my hobbies, my home town, and anything else that applies to me and my life.
Since starting my writing career in 1978, I have written 130+ novels, 2,000+ short stories, 6,000+ non-fiction articles (ALL are found on this site), a few dozen stage plays, 12,000+ blog posts, and a few comic book scripts for Disney's Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck (I only worked for Disney one year (in 2005) and only wrote a few stories for their Danish comic books).
NOTE: I ONLY write the Quaraun series (aka The Twighlight Manor series aka The Adventures of Quaraun the Insane). In recent years there has been an issue with impersonators trying to pass books off as written by me, notably several non-fiction and Erotica books. I write neither nonfiction nor Erotica.
ALL of my books and their cover arts are listed on my website here. Beware of any books you find claiming to be me. If the books are NOT listed here on my website, they are NOT my books.
In fiction works, I specialize in Weird/Bizarro Tales set in 40th century CyberPunk-Quasi Medieval, Cozy Dark Fantasy and Science Fiction worlds featuring an intersex Elf and his Faerie husband main characters. I DO NOT WRITE ANY OTHER SERIES - THIS SERIES IS THE ONLY ONE I WRITE.
Non-fiction (found ONLY here on my site) is daily updates of events in my life, and how-tos on how I write my novels.
I DO NOT write Erotica.
I DO NOT write books with HUMAN characters.
The Erotica books and books with Human characters, that you are finding, are written by scammers trying to impersonate me.
There is an ongoing FBI investigation into this matter. If you find any such books, please report them to FBI Agent Andy Drewer @207–774–9322
146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine, is NOT FOR SALE.
And I'm sick of real estate agents who are too incompetent to research land ownership before they show up to stick a for sale sign in my yard.
The fact of the matter is, my son was murdered in 2013, and the friends and family of the murderer think it is funny to keep ILLEGALLY listing my land for sale, because apparently their child murdering bitch friend didn't hurt me enough by crippling me with a golf club, ripping my baby out of my 8 month pregnant belly and beating his brains out on the ground with a golf club.
Also, her friends and family like to gaslight me by doxing me on ufo and alien abduction forums, while pretending to be me, and trying to make it look like I believe in ufos or aliens, even though I think people who believe in ufos are raving lunatics and people who claim to be alien abductees are crazy.
So, yeah, my son was murdered and the murder's friends and family endlessly harass me, my friends, and my family both online and offline, and I'm not happy with it at all.
There is an ongoing FBI investigation into this matter.
The FBI is looking for information into:
I'm going to repeat it because I'm tired of people showing up and making offers:
146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine, is NOT FOR SALE.
How did you build your audience?
Not online, that's for sure.
aka How to sell ten million books
aka How I sold ten million books.
The Park Bench Method of Writing
(just the article)
or
The Park Bench Method of Writing
(with the list of 10k writing prompts - takes a LONG TIME to load - SEVERAL MINUTES!)
I Think UFO and Alien Believers Are Weird Here's Why...
Does every writer have to deal with this shit?
Thank you for stopping by and have a nice day! ꧁✨🌸🔮🦄🔮🌸✨꧂ And if it’s your birthday today: ִֶָ𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🐇་༘࿐꧁ᴴᵃᵖᵖʸ☆ᵇⁱʳᵗʰᵈᵃʸ꧂🤍🎀🧸🌷🍭 |
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Get an email whenever Wendy Christine Allen 🌸💖🦄 aka EelKat 🧿💛🔮👻 publishes on Medium.
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