Where is the original write-up of the wish economy?

Laesin · Post by **Laesin** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:18 am

I see a lot of mentions of the wish economy and 15k gold limits but search engines just lead me to more references that assume it without explaining it and where it comes from, or to pages that no longer exist. I would greatly appreciate someone pointing me to where this first appeared. My apologies if this thread is in the wrong place.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:38 am

That's in the Book of Gears. I can't find the thread here, but it should be in the tome pdf.

EDIT: Oh wait, this appears to be it.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:41 am

I recommend grabbing and reading the whole Tomes PDF.

The post you're looking for is here though:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=28 ... sc&start=4

Laesin · Post by **Laesin** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:43 am

Many thanks. About to start reading through.

JesterZero · Post by **JesterZero** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 4:42 pm

If you're looking for the Tome material in it's (semi)entirety, the two best sources I know of are Lokathor's page and the Awesometome page.

There's some differences between the versions, but I couldn't tell you exactly what or why. I'm sure there's plenty of folks here who are more than conversant on the subject though.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Nov 10, 2011 5:59 pm

fectin wrote:I recommend grabbing and reading the whole Tomes PDF.

The post you're looking for is here though:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=28 ... sc&start=4

A slightly older version is here:
http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/ ... geonomicon

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 12:11 am

There's a very nice collection of homebrew sourcebooks on dnd-wiki, including all of the Tomes, with internal links to nicely-formatted and cross-referenced spells, classes, and creatures.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 12:50 am

hogarth wrote:
fectin wrote:I recommend grabbing and reading the whole Tomes PDF.

The post you're looking for is here though:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=28 ... sc&start=4
A slightly older version is here:
http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/ ... geonomicon

So I was reading through that and I had remembered an idea concerning the wish economy and the lack of viability of nationally issued currency.

Namely, throughout history you had wealthy, powerful banking families, some who even issued their own scrip/currency/bank notes. While the writing is correct in suggesting that the faith and credit of Kingdom XXX is silly and not sustainable, the question of what would be required of a D&D bank is a worthy question. It'd have to have a crapload of money, it'd have to be pretty secure (even extra-planar), and it'd have to be backed by badasses that nobody really wanted to screw with.

In other words, adventuring parties who have a shit ton of precious metal and nothing to buy with it. When there's only 5 other 13th level groups in a thousand miles of you, and you issue a note saying "this note is worth 500 gold pieces if you go here", that means something, since you're at the top of the food chain.

Which is why when I run fantasy economies I tend to make banking families & guilds. I'm partial to dwarf banking clans for a few reasons: First, they're insular and tight knitted. Second, they frequently make good adventurers and thus a strong dwarf clan has a lot of enforcers to protect deposits. Finally, I take a page from the Warhammer setting concerning dwarves and grudges. Even if you get the drop on a dwarven banking clan and take their money, you, and everyone you're associated with, and every descendant you will ever have, will be hunted by the clan until they feel they've gotten even with you. Unless you're on your way *out* of the plane of existence (and if you're that powerful and need money, you have the wish economy), or are just nuts or sociopathic, it's probably not worth the reward.

And since genocide is an anathema, that rules out slaughtering an entire clan/city of dwarves just to do a bank robbery to get a crap-ton of metal that you only will be able to purchase 15,000 gp items with anyway.

It's the same reason why hackers rarely attack the underlying infrastructure of the Internet: sure they could, and do some real damage, but it'd be shooting themselves in the foot. It benefits everyone to allow such independent infrastructures to exist. Occasionally you get nihilists who do so anyway, but they are the vast minority.