Mail Call!

Yesterday was a giant smelly turd of a day. This week is turning into a pile of them. Readjusting to the third version of normal in 6 months. Maybe I'm suffering from normal fatigue. The floodgates have been opened and wow, now I want to go on a three month lockdown. However, my mail saved my day. Let me show you what I got. Be prepared to be jealous and cry. 

I'm starting off with Titan Dice. Over-sized, 25mm, dice that come in a cool wooden box. Here's the weird thing, they were sent to me in January and I got them today. Someone must have selected the expedited 6 month shipping option. The other weird thing is I already have the exact same set. I'm cool with that though. Dice are dice and I'll make my 1's larger. You can grab a set if these smoke colored with gold numbering Titan Dice on Amazon for $19.99. 

***ALERT ALERT AFFILIATE LINK***

I got these great coins from a site called Dice Dungeons. I hadn't heard of them before. I think I found them when I was scrolling through Intagram one night. They have a bunch of different coins. I grabbed the horde and zombie packs. There were five in each. The horde pack came with 3 goblin and orc coins and the zombie horde came with 5 coins. I love weird fantasy style coins. Especially when you're playing a face-to-face came and some NPC offers a 100sp to help save Timmy because he fell down the well, and then throw a pouch with a 100 coins on the table. You get a much better reaction than saying it. The weight of them hitting the table and the sound of the coins sliding over one another has a visceral effect. 

Oh yeah, I love me everything about Thieves World. This is one of the biggest holes in my gaming collection is the FASA books. They've been elusive because I forget about them or when I do look for them they are very expensive. I fell into these two on eBay for $25. They are just a fun read. I get flashbacks to the books pouring over the details of the S'danzo or strolling through the Maze or hearing about the Hell Hounds. This is my gaming gold. Have two of them now. Traitor and The Blue Camel are still missing. The latter maybe difficult to land because it was a promo item. Just checked eBay for a copy, $175 and $56.46. A bit too rich for me. 

So now you see how my day was saved by a good mail day. 

Breaking Down Metal Prices

Once in a while I get these questions in my head that I can't shake.  The one that's been bouncing around in my head had been price values of different metals.  Since I use a silver standard in my game I'm wondering how many 1oz silver pieces would be equivalent to a 1oz gold piece using today's prices?

Google research time.  I found at the time of my search gold is selling for $1730.50/oz.  Wow.  But then I watch shows like Gold Rush and think about how much they have to spend to get at the gold.  What a pain. Current silver prices are at $32.58/oz.  Wow again.  What a gigantic divide between values.  Using today's it would take 53.11 silver pieces to equal one gold.

I can see using this in game.  Round it to an even 50 silver and it makes for easy conversions.  Here's why I like using the silver standard.  It makes gold valuable.  When you make gold the standard it devalues the silver.  Since I only use a 3 metal coin system for sanity sake it makes sense to make silver the standard.

ERROR FOUND and Fixed...I think
Now let's take a look at the lowly copper piece.  The given price for copper is in pounds not ounces.  For one pound of copper you'll get handed $3.43 which works out to about .21cents/oz.  It would take 155 copper to make a silver.  I would round it again to 150.

So using today's metal prices the conversion rate would look like this.

	Copper	Silver	Gold
Copper	1	1/150	1/7500
Silver	1/150	1	1/50
Gold	1/7500	50	1

Let's say you like platinum in you game.  When I looked up its price I found something surprising for a gamer who always thought platinum was 5x more valuable than gold.  Not so.  Today's market will write you a check for $1559.40/oz.  Almost $200 less than gold.  Oh how the lofty have fallen.  That means platinum is only worth 47.86 silver pieces.  Over five silver less than gold.  Do I really need two metals that are almost the same value?  Not really.  So platinum gets the boot.  Maybe make it the 'gold' of another land.  Who knows.

And for my final calculation I thought it would be interesting to see how much tin, coal and iron ore are going for.  I think those are the three mines I usually set up in my game.  The prices in metric tons.  Tin came out way fricking ahead at $23,233.70/metric ton (for those unaware like me, a metric ton is about 2200 pounds).  Which gives it a price of $1056.07/lb and $66/oz.  Tin is more than twice the value of silver.

Coal comes in at $81.44/metric ton.  About 4 cents a pound.  And an ounce is not worth bending over to pick up.

Iron Ore is valued at $113.95/metric ton.  You can get a 5 cents/pound and again for an ounce it might be better to kick with your shoe.

I'm not sure exactly how knowing this will help me the the development of my campaign world, but its good to have a baseline.  Because it is a fantasy medieval setting I am thinking the prices for coal and iron would be high and the tin lower.  Either way what it shows me is tin barons would be hell of a lot wealthier than their coal counter parts.  Just interesting I think.

If anyone sees a problem with my math let me know.  As I've said.  I used the prices of the moment.  Since I wrote this gold went up to $1731.