One RPG Group’s 1 Year Campaign Had More Gold Than Was Ever Mined
In an article in a National Geographic Magazine:
The Real Price of Gold
By Brook Larmer
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/larmer-text/3
For all of its allure, gold’s human and environmental toll has never been so steep. Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years. Now the world’s richest deposits are fast being depleted, and new discoveries are rare. Gone are the hundred-mile-long gold reefs in South Africa or cherry-size nuggets in California. Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe. It’s an invitation to destruction. But there is no shortage of miners, big and small, who are willing to accept.
I recall there being a well-known assertion in gaming circles that in any one group’s tabletop RPG fantasy campaign lasting a year, they would encounter and maybe even amass something like 10x the real world historical total of gold ever mined, silver and copper and such probably following this trend. Maybe dragon hoards are from that aforementioned gold from the earth’s crust they mine themselves.
As bountiful as RPG’s make it seem, in reality, gold was used for currency in the form of crowns, nobles, sovereigns and the like, but these were fairly rare, comparatively, as usually only the upper classes and trade merchants and royalty had any need or cause to even SEE a gold coin, everybody else dealt in silver shillings and pennies, or similar systems for different cultures, so even then gold was extremely scarce and was worth an awful lot, and wasn’t the “base” coin for familiar monetary systems – silver was, with a troy pound of silver being where the British Pound and lb. abbreviation comes from, originating from the ancient Libre coin.
A gold Crown was worth about 5 silver shillings, a golden Noble about 10 and a golden Sovereign worth a whole pound (373g) of silver. Considering cows and other expensive livestock and tools still only cost in the mid-silver range, and a skilled farmer or laborer being lucky to earn 1 pound per year and a knight only earning maybe up to 7 pounds per year, it is easy to see even in the case of wages, gold never entered into common use, as it would be too easy to lose or have a Sovereign stolen, and most gold coins couldn’t be easily “broken” to pay for items costing less than a pound sterling or major fraction thereof – they were really just impractical for 90% of at least the feudal era.
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