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The first consideration when dealing with just money in general, in the aspect of medieval use, is that barter and practical goods and services were often traded much more than coin, especially for peasants and serfs, so any approximation of worth or modern equivelancy must be understood to be at best, rough translations of man-hours and abstract provisions (room and board, food, clothing, etc) as well as actual value of currency.

As far as role-playing games, first and foremost, the reasons for needing information about coins, currency and wages are for the player-characters to buy stuff. Naturally, this can be easily glossed over using either a simple system or making presumptions based on a character’s wealth level, etc. More detailed wage information is really only a necessity for die-hard simulationist approaches and completists, and while that’s fine, I myself only go so far into such an arena until I am satisfied for my own purposes, so this work will focus on coins and typical wages in the late 1300s to late 1400s, which covers a lot of ground and must be understood to therefore present a very wide gap of economic fluctuation.

Wages

Most people, nobility and royalty and others holding higher offices, didn’t make all that much in most cases, with even artisans and craftsman making only a few shillings per day. This work will assume, due to various online references too numerous to mention or link, the following:

Total Work Days Per Year: 250
Total Work Hours Per Day: 8
Total Work Days Per Week: 6

Historical references and varying theories by countless learned academians place the medieval total workdays anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 of a year (4-8 months). This reflects mostly active labor in the elements, such as farming and otherwise working and maintaining the land, but also to some extent, even military activity, as even armies would camp to wait out bad winters.  The 8 hours a day reflects what was likely worked, though some estimates place actual work anywhere from about 5 real hours of work per day (seems low) to up to 12 (seems high), plus (theoretically unpaid) breaks for meals and naps - so while averaging the vast amount of educated guesses would probably put the workday at about 10 hours, that again, does not account for breaks, which most accounts indicate peasants and serfs did receive.

People who worked out of structures, however, such as artisans, craftsmen and merchants and servants wouldn’t necessarily get “winter breaks”, but usually also were provided with additional benefits (room and board) or sometimes would have “dead days” for self-employed individuals - if you don’t work, you don’t get money and if you don’t get money, you don’t eat. It is decided for the purpose of this work that all professions across the board will use the above 250 work day model.

There really is no such thing as an “average peasant”, anymore than there is an “average person” in any society today. Some peasants were tradesmen, some were landed farmers, some serfs and laborers. We look first at an Unskilled Laborer, someone who could tote and lift and shovel, as our base, with a fairly established (by differing sources) base of about 1 penny per day, with only pages and some servants and slaves making less, usually 1-3 farthings.

Although the difference between the 21st Century and the 1400’s is far too fast to really develop any sort of realistic equivelancy, crude guesses could be made based on references available.

For a skilled individual who makes 1 shilling per day, this gives a wage of 1.5p/hour for an 8 hour day, with an equivalent of $6.00/hour, with each penny being equal to about $4.00. Necessarily, this remands our Unskilled Laborer to $4.00 (1p) per day, or roughly 50 cents USD per hour, making every 2 hours worth of work being worth only 1 farthing.

Coin Weights

Coin weights varied widely, a little more than today, from impractically small and light coins, some less than 1 or 2 grams (especially true for Farthings which were pennies literally cut into fourths) and pence, which were basically “one pound sterling” of silver, split up into 240 pieces or pence, about 1.55 grams each. Twelve pence made up 1 silver shilling, therefore a shilling was a larger coin, at its most primitive form, close to 19 grams, and lastly, 20 shillings made up the pound of silver.

Astute readers may realize that (1.55 x 240) doesn’t come out close to 500 or 454 grams (one av. pound), nor does it even come out to 373 grams (one troy pound); the original silver pound sterling was based on the much older and more coin-specific Tower Pound, slightly smaller than a troy pound, coming in at only about 350 grams.

So what does this mean? It means a “pound” of medieval coins doesn’t weigh anywhere near a “normal” or even troy pound from our time, but less.

Lastly…

Also note that this and other information on this site regarding values and coin types does not take into account or address coin “shaving”, debasement or assigned monetary value, but is based on the idea of pure bullion value, although this isn’t necessarily the best way to approach the subject, as Charlemagne, who established the first Paladins, actually standardized coinage and values under his rule.

The biggest problem is reconciling the costs, as the weight (in lbs) and effectiveness (an arbitrary but logical factor) seem to be relatively straight-forward. Various listings from medieval documents vary widely due to location and era, as well as a very fluid economy and lack of standardization or even partly workable exchange rate for different coins, therefore you get prices for suits of mail in 1600 for an English king, and prices for full plate in 1450 for a German baron, while peasants make anywhere from 1 penny a day to 3 shillings.

L = Lira or Pound Sterling (20 shillings or 240 pence)
c = crown (5 shillings)
s = shilling (12 pence)
p = penny or pence (4 farthings)

I always wondered about “classics” type roleplaying games, such as the Wizard of Oz setting, if it was something that could garner some interest, and it seems to be, from the look of the Adventures in Oz site and Mr. Wall’s blog, here: http://fdouglaswall.blogspot.com/ It seems he’s kept current and posted in it fairly consistently since about April of 08 - much more than I can say for myself.

There are PDFs free for download covering creating characters, the rules and a general summary of everything, available from the main site, here, in Downloads: http://ozrpg.50webs.com/

To me, though I’ve never had more than a passing interest in Wizard of Oz and the like, one main attraction of a game like Adventures in Oz is that (depending on your GM of course), the setting and style, taken from the original books, lend themselves very well to a fancifully optimistic, exploratory type of game, rather than one driven by combat or conquest (the Friends List is quite a neat mechanic), and moreso, AiO is something that one could definitely dig out from a bookshelf for a game with younger players and RPG newbies, and though there are some, and any could be run that way with the right GM and scenario, there aren’t enough games that provide a healthy, well-adjusted and incremental introduction to role-playing.

On the questionable side, the mythos of Oz is much more than we see by watching an hour of Judy Garland wander around in the movie, and the breadth and detail from Baum’s Oz could even be daunting or seen as too arcane and convoluted by some people who just want a pick-up-and-play game, but I dare say if someone’s main gripe would be there is too much material… that’s probably a complaint to be proud of.  Secondly, although some people have broad enough horizons that even hack and slashers might find Adventures in Oz a nice change, I would not look for a concept game like this to be something you’d plop down on the table on Saturday night in place of D&D or Call of Cthulhu - but that really isn’t a mark against the game, more the nature of players.

All in all, its an interesting project with a lot of promise and potential for roleplaying sessions in which parents could feel good about their kids’ participation. Who knows, it could even get people interested in reading again, and classics at that! Good luck to Adventures in Oz!

Random Magic Item Generator

This GURPS Update is, dated, to say the least, looks like 3rd Edition maybe? I never did wind up playing even one game of GURPS though I liked the modular and very open structure of the game.

Same with the FASA Star Trek game - I made a ton of characters, used their quite awesome tables to come up with entire solar systems and the planets in them… but I never managed to run it, nor play it.

Another one I inherited, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, based on the comic books, before the cartoons and such - I and a friend stayed up til 5 in the morning, and I uttered the phrase “My monkey has a strength of 2″, at which point another friend woke up, threw a pillow at me and growled “GO.TO.BED!” Never got to play this one either.

Super Squadron I actually bought, new, from a gamestore in Tulsa. Reading through it, I remember attempting to convince myself that I liked the rules and could see how it made sense to roll up entirely random characters, including powers. I don’t think I believed me, as I never ran or played this.

Marvel Heroes I also didn’t ever run or play but the system was certainly more user-friendly than DC Heroes. I’ve got a buttload of little cardboard superhero counters though!

Car Wars I bought from a friend at a garage sale for $3.00. He and I tried a number of times to run just one simple car chase and combat but found the rules and recordkeeping just entirely too much work. I did enjoy, for some reason, building my own car and worrying about how many power plants it had.

The Chill Companion, presumably, really opened the door for 2nd edition Mayfair Chill by providing a number of new optional rules including Resolve Points and modified fear checks, new disciplines of the Art, etc. Sadly, I only got to run one very brief game of chill and it was before I got this book.

Oh look - DC Heroes! The most memorable thing about this game was how long I spent translating the Action Points of speed that Superman and the Flash had, and determining how fast each was, down to the miles per hour - I swear I was doing higher math. The second most memorable thing about this game was my attempt to run it, or rather, just to try it out, and set up a fight between a neighbor who played Superman, and Darkside. He said “I punch him”, which started close to a 30 minute search through the rules on what that meant, and how to do it, and all the details. It wound up with Superman doing enough damage to KO Darkside and enough knockback to put him in a wheelbarrow at a construction site, which Superman used to cart him off to Supervillain Jail. Neither of us were terribly impressed with the DC Heroes rules.

I am fairly proud of The Best of Dragon Magazine Games by TSR, a diverse compilation of mini-games, using chardboard counters and chits, for everything from boxing to food fights to building a fantasy empire and running races and even making your own RPG. My clearest memory of this game is that my mom kept beating me at the furry humanoid racing game. I probably managed to play each game at least once, though I honestly don’t know how people played games using only little lightweight cardboard chits like this game uses - they’re insanely hard to keep from blowing away or sliding all around and getting lost.

The Complete Guide to the World of Lone Wolf and Grey Star: The Magnamund Companion was a little like a holy grail I didn’t know existed. It was a couple years after I really stopped reading and keeping up with all the Lone Wolf Kai adventure books that I came across this on a shelf at B. Dalton or Waldenbooks in Tulsa, out of the blue - I had to have it and am glad I got it, though there really isn’t all that much to do in it - it’s more a reference book (duh) though it did come with its own mini tavern game. I treasure this one and have serious nostalgia moments involving picking my Kai powers and cheating on the “dice rolls”, when looking through it.

Sports Illustrated Pro Golf … is sort of a role-playing game, as it came with a number of tiny little glossy cards, sequentially numbered, each representing a particular golfer, and with each card also having a number of arcane stats and a D6% (hard to explain) dice roll and the results of each number. The game also included a “course” booklet, which had I think three different entire 18 hole courses in it, each of which changed the dynamics of the dice rolls and results of the cards, which I still have to admit is pretty clever. I did indeed play this more than a few times by myself, and a couple times with friends and family, though I eventually tired of it because even with all the statted cards, it still seemed a bit too vague and pure random chance based, which it was and in fact, it was weighted toward bad rolls, which usually wound up with me yoinking the ball into a sandtrap or the water.

And that is the end of this set of RPG reviews, though I feel myself almost trying to be inspired to go dig up a few more RPGs to put together one more RPG Gallery/Review post. We’ll see.

Run a game of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu for Halloween 2008 for a 40-something friend, his  son, nephew, son’s two friends and a cousin of mine and his girlfriend? Sure, no problem. I even beat the rush by cramming for almost a full twenty minutes, trying to remember all the rules to this system I haven’t played in years, and ran even less recently (and only ran a couple of times in total).

And let’s see… I’ll take Michael LaBossiere’s free “The Black Stone” CoC adventure, and combine it with “Lanier House”, a very brief haunted house style drop-in from first edition Chill.

In a surprising turn of events, this didn’t work out nearly as well as I know you (and I) were anticipating it would. Sure, it all sounded like it was a winning combination of diverse players, under-preparedness and cobbled together freebie stuff, but contrary to my belief up until that point, things did not auto-magically resolve themselves to help a brother out.

This is not to say things went badly - just a bit rough, for me, mostly. The first clue, finding a dark stone inscribed with an Elder Sign in a kindly old lady’s house, should have taken at least two trips back to talk to her, but a combination of sterling Spot Hidden rolls and overzealous Monty Hauling by myself, not to mention the extremely curious coincidence of the only experienced CoC player spontaneously took “Stone Art” as one of his arts, for this scenario, called the Black Stone. And I left all my scenario and adventure stuff at his house the night before… I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

At any rate, as has a tendancy to happen, the cry of “burn the cabin” signaled the beginning of the downhill side of the scenario as it coasted toward resolution - even though there was nothing wrong with the structure, meaning the PCs burned a perfectly good creepy cabin in the woods where a triple murder occurred within the last day. There was supposed to be at least another day, possibly two, in the scenario, with the monster doing various nefarious things like spying and sending zombies against the PCs and the town, but in some ways I think I pressed the game forward, both to keep my own and the interest of the players (the kids sure do enjoy their table crosstalk about music, Family Guy, football, Playstations, etc.) and also because I was unsure of how long the game need to go, when was a good time to call it quits.

“Where’s the graveyard?” asked one astute young monster-hunter further along in the adventure. I froze and blinked, checked through the printed out scenario and just sighed. “I’m sure the town has one but to be honest, it’s not included anywhere in the adventure, so apparently there’s nothing relevant there”. That was a horrendous cop-out on my part and I can only blame my own attitude and recent difficulty thinking on my feet.

On one hand, surprisingly, but on the other hand, also as I predicted and expected, dropping the haunted house into the town helped draw out the length of the Stone scenario, while providing some admittedly totally irrelevant investigating and adventuring and even a fight, for the kids, though… now that I think about it, my friend, Dick, who burned the cabin down, also one-shotted the giant rat. Hmm. He also found the Elder Sign rock and gained the Elder Sign spell and 4% Cthulhu Mythos from a journal. That’s like Mark Spitz winning your local high school’s swim meet. Okay that was my fault, I wasn’t paying attention to who was doing what - my bad.

And speaking of not paying attention to who was doing what, what do you do when there is a mysterious killer running around out in the woods and slitting people’s throats, and the PCs ask if the guy they’ve got handcuffed in the backseat from earlier in the adventure knows anything about the killer. Yeah, the guy in the backseat is who that killer is supposed to be. Talk about a major disconnect. I apparently spaced out a fairly important group action that everybody but me remembered: “We’re handcuffing the guy and taking him with us”.

That should have put a fairly sizable crimp in the activities of the knife-wielding maniac, since he was actually pumped full of morphine and locked to a car door. I have to admit I boobed out and just said “Well… he just disappeared earlier an hour or so ago”. This was met with… it would be kind to say a mixture of disbelief, understanding and not a little indignation, since it did effectively take me cheating in the game to allow another part of the plot to develop, and nullied good player instinct and preparation in the process.

In retrospect, I really should have just announced the part about the knife-killings didn’t happen, but for some reason, I overdid it and retroactively altered the history of the game entirely - bad form, especially when the guy also got a shot off with his automatic handgun at the young lady who came up with the idea of handcuffing the guy in the first place. But by this time I was without pity and required not only a sanity roll for her for taking massive damage, but also one for the PC who was with her and saw it happen - but in actuality, because of my misstep earlier, I allowed the surgeon PC to arrive in time to first-aid her to consciousness.

Easily the silliest thing to happen during the adventure was the “astronaut farmer” (he picked his skills instead of choosing an Occupation), “Max Johnson” (facepalm) who was wheeled around in a wheelchair the entire time by one of his two chauffeurs. Yeah I know it is unlikely that a romp in the woods would have included this wheelchair-bound gentleman but I let it pass for the sake of just letting everyone do their own thing, though I did at least convince him not to carry dynamite in his wheelchair. And to top it off, he wasn’t disabled anyway, it was some … I’m still not sure why he wanted all the other players to think he was lame, but he came out of the chair at the end of the scenario and beat up the hapless, mind-controlled, mentally unbalanced Great War veteran.

Dick was also the one to place the Elder Sign back into the ring of stones surrounding the giant black obelisk. There were at least 4 zombies and skeletons hanging around but honestly I was discouraged and frustrated by all my own mistakes, the crosstalk and even a little bit, Dick’s over-participation, so I just took consolation in the fact that Dick took 6 damage and lost 10 magic points from the re-sealing ceremony, though there really wasn’t any more to the scenario.

Insanity by Jaime R. Curlin

The worst part, the absolute worst part, was that I totally forgot that when someone blew their Sanity check, and it only happened a couple of times, out of all the times I called for them, out of all the people that were playing, besides losing sanity, the PC is also supposed to have an episode of temporary insanity - but only a couple of san loss rolls in the entire game were large enough to have even qualified, in my mind.

I don’t think my head is right to run something as cerebral as CoC right now, and I think that game may have helped prove it, to myself and possibly to the other people playing. I do think I picked the right scenario(s) for this group and was glad one of the new 15 year old players said “this game is awesome!” and stayed at the table when his two peers went off to play video games. I guess that’s what makes it worth it, to have someone just enjoy PLAYING, not necessarily winning, and not necessarily appreciating your own work as a GM/Keeper, but just enjoying the shared imagination space and relative autonomy within a game framework.

Twilight: 2000 - Although slightly older friends of mine continue to sing the praises of T2K, I only got to play in one brief scenario, in which we mistakenly attacked the convoy we were supposed to meet up with, ending the game. And leading up to that, we had to keep track of how many MRE’s and cans of water we were carrying on our convoy, and how much everything weighed. It didn’t strike me as a game I would want to try twice.

Toon - From the makers of, and using the same basic setup as GURPS; Again, I only got to play one brief session of this, and I was assigned the role of a hairy porcupine, rather than getting to make my own character, and we didn’t finish the game, so I can’t say that much about it, although I like the concept and almost bought the Lovecraftian Crawl of Cutchooloo (?).

Amazing Engine - Tabloid! Much as I learned quickly to dislike TSR as they slowly began ruining everything by shoveling complication on top of complexity in their games, I had high hopes for this, with such skills as “RPG Mind Control” and backgrounds like the Inivisble College, combining every myth, urban legend and conspiracy theory under the sun, and capping them off with tabloid headlines “Giraffe Boy Eats Nuclear Missile”, this should have been easy and quick, but its existance as part of the Amazing Engine system, which I’d never heard of before or since, meant characters were supposed to be movable from one AE game to another, so used a mind-boggling and needlessly involved double framework actor/character system, and I never cared enough to try to get this working.

Hahlmabrea - I cannot take the blame for this one - a friend of mine bought this used, as both he and I were wont to do, to check out the mechanics and equipment and skills lists. I usually wound up with most of the books my friend bought when he was done with them, which is fine by me but left me with a lot of random gaming odds and ends, and this one is no exception, as it takes the standard fantasy tropes of elves, dwarves, goblins, etc. and places them ALL on the same side, all living more or less in harmony, with the player-characters’ only true enemies the undead, and featuring the “so prosaic it was almost novel” idea of the Adventurer License. Mechanically, the game was nothing to write home about, cubed, so this never made it into the pile of potentially playable material.

Swordbearer, The Quick and the Dead and Masterbook were all castoffs either from my friend or exceptionally cheap used pick-ups done on a whim, and as such, were just as easily forgettable as they sound, though I do recall the Masterbook core book was for use with the RPG version of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope.

Prime Directive, the RPG variation of the Starfleet Battles tactical tabletop game, took the typical FASA Star Trek and messed things around a bit, leaving a bit of a different system and setup, which wasn’t necessarily bad, but if you’re going to change what is canon so much that none of the previous material (such as Star Trek episodes and movies) applies, why not just create an entirely new and different game? Anyway, we made characters for this (in some ways, not as complicated as FASA Trek) and might have began one game but that was it.

Palladium is certainly well-ingrained in gamer culture and history, but I never played a single Palladium game that I recall. Looking through it, it sure was an extremely thick AD&D ripoff, and if I recall, Rolemaster looked similar - fantasy heartbreakers I think they’re called now, trying to fix or make better, a different system, instead of coming up with their own.

Shades of Fantasy, speaking of fantasy heartbreakers, looked identical to Palladium, to my perhaps untrained eye, though it did have a few good bits of resource that I was able to use for other games. Never played.

Rapture I bought only a few years ago, just so I wouldn’t be left out of having a religious apocalypse RPG, but it turned out it wasn’t a Christian game at all, merely one that used Christian theology. Ah well. Never played.

It Came From The Late, Late, Late Show is, much like its cousin The Expendables, from the same company, Stellar Games, one of my favorite games I’ll probably never play. ICFTLLLS is a mix between standard RPGs owing their base to D&D, and some original content and ideas, tending toward the somewhat more rules-lite, though this is debatable when you look at the skills and stats. Designed to emulate crappy late night horror movies, supposedly, it does seem to have some mechanism for hitting around that target, though there are definitely parts left out that could have really put this one on the map.

Batman the RPG, from Mayfair Games, used pretty much the same system as D.C. Heroes, which could be a good or bad thing - the friend’s son I gave it too listed it in the “bad thing” column, as far too complicated and reference-heavy to be usable or fun, and I tend to agree. Never played.

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