This is a post of  interpretive charts for fantasy RPG and medieval coinage, including (as much as can be done) direct historical-to-modern values of the different coins, in US Dollars as of May 2009. So if you’re ever looking through an RPG equipment list or finding out the prices of different services and wonder “How much would this be in today’s money?”, hopefully this will help give you an idea.

Because of the nature of the ratio of coins-to-goods, besides the use of Farthings for low cost and petty items, most of the time, goods were sold in multiples, until the total goods added up to equal the value of the coins of Pennies or larger – so a Penny might buy you up to five chickens, a Shilling might buy you one to three cows, etc. Although a totally unskilled menial labor made 1-2 pence per day, they were also usually serfs or in some other situation that allowed them to not have to worry about room and board, or worry about it a lot less, so a direct comparison between a day’s wages for a person then and now has the obstacle of modern people having a lot more things they need to pay for monthly, such as utility bills, rent, cell phones, satellite TV, etc. – a peasant had a house and some animals, tools and needed to feed himself and keep himself clothed and pay taxes when it came time – other than that, there weren’t many creature comforts or luxuries for most folks, but also no extra expenditures.

This first chart is based on the idea that 1 farthing could buy you a loaf of bread, which we could say for name brand bread now would be about $2.50, though for bargain basement store brands, it might be possible to find it at $ .89, while super-special organic free-range health-food pretentious bread might be $5.00 per loaf. This nicely coincides with the “wino standard”, where a day’s pay (1 penny) for unskilled work will buy you a bottle of cheap wine. Also notice in this and other charts that the very lowest value coin, the lead Tesserae, 1/8 of a Penny, fairly equates to the lowest “real” practical value in USD in everyday life – you’re just not going to find anything to buy that costs significantly less than $1.25.

As you can see from the above chart, flipping a Penny in the air would be like waving a $10 bill around, an Obol would be a $20, and a Shilling would actually be slightly more valuable than $100.00, while a Noble would be like holding twelve $100 bills, and on the low end of things, two Farthings  would be like a $5. A gold Sovereign might be able to pay for a semester’s community college tuition, and an Angel could get you a solid mid-sized new car.

Now let’s check out the really cheap side of things, just for the heck of it, and basically halve our above chart.

The interesting thing about this is that a Farthing would still buy (cheap) bread, a Penny could still buy either a good pint or an extremely cheap, nasty bottle of wine (or malt liquor?), or perhaps a smaller better quality one. If these coins were used today, Obols and Groats would become commonplace for low to medium cost day-to-day purchases, Shillings and Florins would also be quite frequent for larger or higher-end items, with Crowns and above being expensive appliances, for example. A platinum Angel could just about outright buy a small new car.

Although I’ve also come across a suggestion that a Farthing could directly translate (monetarily) to as low as $ .65, it would be pointless to even cipher out figures that low, as even a golden Sovereign, representing one troy pound of pure sterling silver, which a peasant might make for the year if he was lucky, would only be a little over $600.00, with a Penny valued at about $2.60, which admittedly could still buy a pint of ale, but no longer a bottle of wine or any other cheap alcohol, plus you really can’t find a loaf of bread for $ .64 anywhere.

So it is my belief and suggestion that for fantasy RPG money and coin conversions between historical/fictional medieval and modern, the Penny should be worth anywhere from $4.00 to $12.00, with the Farthings of course being worth $1.00 to $3.00 – raising Farthings into the realm of $4.00 to $5.00, making Pennies around $20.00 results in absolutely outrageous equivalent prices for a lot of things, with things that cost a Shilling in most RPG books and lists being $240.00, which for the most part just seems too much, although if you go by the “cow standard”, about 4-6 Shillings should buy you an “average” cow or hefty goat, and around $960 doesn’t sound unreasonable ($800-$4,000 average) for a 750-900 lb. steer or cow…

However, this makes things like a  nice longbow that costs “10 gold” work out to about $3,200.00, which seems high, considering that a modern 2009 top-of-the-line compound bow (which didn’t even exist) with 75 lb. test pull is still under $1,000.00, and usually between $250-$800. To be fair, however, in order to get that 10 gold longbow to be worth about $1,000.00, you’d have to lower the Farthing to $ .10, making a Shilling only worth $4.80 and a Sovereign only worth $9.60 – clearly, subjective judgment and disernment will have to be used to not only estimate historical and modern prices, but also to know when RPG items are just blatantly overpriced.

The 10 gold longbow in my example is from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition and is actually cheap compared to the lowest priced bow, which is a shortbow, in the D&D D20 SRD, which has a price of 30 gold, so three times as much, or to truly compare longbows between the two systems, 75 gold, so a longbow is seven and a half times as expensive in D&D as WFRP (more in fact, because the two systems’ coin values do not map compatibly), and both are still ridiculously overpriced, since a very expensive normal modern recurve bow varies from $80 to $500.00 so should be no more than probably one single gold Noble (or Half-Sovereign, 10p), which would have a $1.25 Farthing as the base.

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This entry was posted by J P on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 6:05 am and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.