Subject: Hey, The Entertainer has a 'Big Mac Index'...
Author:
Posted on: 2015-11-24 14:27:00 UTC
We can compare everything to alcohol! :D
I wouldn't call the Rye on the same level as spiced wine and Butterbeer - it's far cheaper. After all, the country's drunkards call this rye vodka their daily bread.
So who else has any fictional currency?
I have a bag of Ankh-Morpork half-dollars (I believe my bag is blue, not white, and might have more than five?); I also have the short-lived Ankh-Morpork cheque book - the Internet seems to suggest it was given away by Borders or Waterstones with Making Money. I've got a fair number of the Discworld stamps, too, which are used as currency by some people in Morpork.
Somewhere, I have the three Star Wars 1000 credit coins (Alderaan, Bespin, and Ord Mantell for some reason) that came with the Star Wars Monopoly computer game on CD. And right now I'm dangerously close to donating $60 through Kickstarter for a set of Middle-earth coins, including at that level a bag of 8 Shire pennies. Because sweet Aule, those things are pretty.
And the Shire Post, who're doing those, mint a lot of other fictional currency. I love the look of the Kingkiller Chronicle ones especially, but they do a lot of stuff (including the Wheel of Time books, which I know were popular around here once). And... well, I'm sure there's other fictional coinage out there. I would be frankly shocked if there weren't any Harry Potter stuff available.
So what else is out there? What have you got (or want?)? And what do you really wish they made, but no-one seems to?
hS
While poking through my stuff in search of the Star Wars coins (which I didn't find), I ran across these: Jurassic Park: The Lost World coins. I have the Stegosaurus, Pteranodon, and two Tyrannosaurus (all loose; their display packets are long gone). These were given away (?) with Tetley tea back in 1997.
I also have something that sort of qualifies: a set featuring a farthing, ha'penny, penny, and thuppenny bit. Fair enough, you say - but these were minted in around 1990 for Llechwedd, which at the time (and maybe still) had a historic Victorian village street where you could exchange your modern money for Victorian coins and buy things with them. I've no idea what my set came to (it was just 'bought' at the exchange ~2000, and got me very strange looks from the cashier), but it was a fair amount. Worth it, though.
I also have a replica Roman coin of some description from Dover, but that one's less interesting.
Oh, and yes: I went for the Shire Post Middle-earth coins Kickstarter. You should too, and you should tell all your friends! Because if it hits 80K in the next four days, I get a Red Hand of Saruman out of it. >:D
hS
That wouldn't surprise me in the least, actually.
Didn't they mint some physical bitcoins at some point...?
hS
Isn't that that thing you find inside eggs? No, wait, I'm thinking of the one you put on your oxen...
hS
One replica Galleon, Sickle, and Knut from the Harry Potter movies. And they are heavy. They're also very shiny; if you so much as touch one, your fingerprints get all over it.
As for want... hmm. whatever they use on Gallifrey please Moffat give us more info I don't really know. :P
I saw that the internet suggested those existed; I admit I was wondering if you'd have them. Aren't Galleons supposed to be pure gold? I'm not surprised it's heavy.
Do they use money on Gallifrey? I don't recall ever seeing any shops there... or anyone eating... or... yeah, Gallifrey's a weird place.
Though someone must have used currency in Doctor Who - off Earth, I mean. What about back in The Long Game, did we get any information about the fast food stands there?
(And since I've ended up in a conversation involving Doctor Who with you, I'll note that I deliberately didn't look at your(?) 'massive spoilers' thread and don't know what it was about, so please don't spoil it! :D)
hS
Well, we probably never see anyone eating on Gallifrey because in The Invasion of Time, Rodan explained to Leela that they used freeze-dried pills instead of food. (Maybe that's why Rassilon is so cranky all the time...?) The EU probably has more information on other shops and things, so it's a shame its canon is questionable at best. *coughLungbarrowcough*
I just think it's a shame we don't have more information on the day to day lives of Time Lords; we know a lot about the politicians, but not the normal people. And that makes me sad. :(
As for The Long Game, we know that the humans there use credit sticks as some sort of system, and that the door-in-the-brain surgery cost 10k credits. *shrugs*
And let's not forget in Rings of Akhaten, where the currency was 'something of personal significance', like Clara's mother's ring or that leaf.
Can we guesstimate that to be roughly equivalent to a generic brain surgery, which apparently costs around $50,000 in America these days? Given that we're looking at purchasing power, not exchange rates - and given that a pound and a dollar are worth about the same - that means one credit in the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire is worth about £5 - or roughly the same as a Galleon.
Which is nice to know. ^_^
As for Rings of Akhaten... actually, we can do quite well there! Clara trades a memory of her dead mother for a standard-length moped rental, which we'll call a day. This website will rent you a scooter for ~£50/day, which seems about right. So a memory of a dead loved one is worth about ten Galleons - slightly more than a wand.
Of course, that probably scales by how much you loved them...
hS
'Modern Gallifrey' doesn't use the currency system as we know it.
Also, I don't know how reliable this information is, but it is said that the Ancient Gallifreyans used currency known as 'Treazants'.
I have one Temerian oren, from the collector's edition of The Witcher.
I wonder what that metal is - my Ankh-Morpork currency looks the same. (Also, are those words around the outside? I can't make them into Latin letters - Cyrillic, maybe?)
hS
That's actually Glagolitic alphabet - one of the oldest Slavic alphabets, later replaced by Cyrillic.
No idea about the metal, though - sorry. Although I know that 1 oren can be 'divided' into a hundred groschen (like $1 is a hundred cents).
So... how easy is it to convert between these currencies?
The most difficult one will probably be LotR: the only value information we know is that Bill the pony was bought for 12 silver pennies, which was at least three times his value. Uh, good luck converting that! But actually, I bet there's a modern fantasy series (Kingkiller Chronicles or Song of Ice and Fire seem like possibilities) which gives the price of a horse. If someone can find that... Scapegrace, as our resident pseudomedievalist, any ideas on the comparative prices of horses and scratty ponies?
On the flip side, the Ankh-Morpork dollar is easy: we know from the price of stamps that it's roughly on a par with English currency in the Victorian era (backed up by the fact that new Watchmen make ~ AM$1 per day, which equates to about eight shillings... sounds pretty reasonable.) And I bet there's a price for a pint somewhere in the Discworld canon (and if not, we can figure out what it was in Victorian England!)... alcohol sounds like a good benchmark for buying power. Does Harry Potter mention the cost of a butterbeer? Can we calculate from there?
And what else is there? It might be hard to make the leap into sci-fi - how many comparable prices are there going to be between Middle-earth and Coruscant - but again, alcohol might be the key...
If you're imagining I want to end up with a table of comparisons that lets us describe the exact handful of assorted coins needed to buy something in the PPC General Store... you'd be right. ;) It's frivolous fun.
So who's up for it?
hS
I've got Memory Alpha open, and next to me is a stack of RPG sourcebooks for D&D, Dragonlance, Star Wars, and even Discworld, just to see if what's in there tallies with what we've got so far. This should be fun.
Latinum, Trekverse
Gold-pressed latinum comes in denominations of slips, strips, bars, and bricks; there are 100 slips to a strip and 20 strips to a bar; the conversion from bars to bricks is unknown. Here's what we know that might be useful for establishing exchange rates:
Quark charged 10 slips for a crate of root beer. Knowing Quark, this is probably more than it's actually worth.
5 strips gets you a Starfleet cadet's uniform, while 20-25 gets you a fine tailor-made dress from Garak's shop on DS9. (Meanwhile, a Pernese Weavercraft mark gets you a plain shirt or a child's frock, and a Tannercraft mark gets you a plain leather belt with bronze buckle or a pair of moccasins.)
During the Cardassian occupation of DS9, Quark paid his employees 1 slip per day. Later, their wages were 14 strips in a pay cycle. We don't know what this cycle is, but I'd guess two weeks, giving one strip per day.
Quark bought the wreckage of a ship for three bars. By comparison, he reckoned he could get five Nausicaan bodyguards, a fast ship, and few questions asked for five.
Credits, Star Wars
There isn't a whole lot of useful stuff listed in this book, but there are a couple things:
A regular melee knife goes for 25 credits.
A medpac costs 100 credits. (We can probably compare this to the cost of similar items in Fallout, etc.)
The cheapest blaster ("Hold-out blaster: Q2") costs 275 credits.
A Corellian Corvette (which seems to compare to Quark's fast ship plus bodyguards) goes for 3.5 million credits new or 1.5 million used.
Gold, D&D 3.5
Returning to fantasyland, we've got good old copper, silver, and gold. It's 10 copper to a silver, 10 silver to a gold, and 10 gold to a platinum piece, should we need to go that high. Easy-peasy.
Right off the bat, there's a nice chart of trade goods that gives us the following useful data:
one pound of flour or one chicken - 2 cp
one sheep - 2 gp
one cow - 10 gp
In the equipment and goods category:
a dagger - 2 gp
a mug of ale - 4 cp
a gallon of ale or a pitcher (2.7 liters) of common wine - 2 sp
a bottle of fine wine - 10 gp (good lord, that seems steep... maybe they meant 10 sp? Or maybe it's because a glass winebottle goes for 2 gp all by itself?)
meals/day in a good inn - 5 sp
in a common inn - 3 sp
in a poor inn - 1 sp
a half-pound (8 oz.) chunk of meat - 3 sp
a donkey or mule - 8 gp
a pony - 30 gp
a light horse - 75 gp
a peasant's outfit - 1 sp
a traveler or artisan's outfit - 1 gp
a monk, scholar, or cleric's outfit - 5 gp
an explorer's outfit - 10 gp
a courtier's outfit - 30 gp
Wages are a little tricky to figure out, but we're told that untrained laborers and assistants earn an average of 1 sp per day. PCs with ranks in the Profession skill get (1d20+[# of ranks])/2 gp per week. I guess the average for a first-level character would be (10+4)/2 = 7 gp per week. That's 70 silver per day.
Methinks this system is a bit wonky.
Gold, Dragonlance
This is easy: the sourcebook flat-out tells us that a D&D gold piece is equal to 1 Krynn steel piece.
Lesser denominations are copper (100 to a steel), gold (40 to a steel), silver (20 to a steel), and iron/bronze (2 to a steel).
Dollars, Discworld
This book uses the GURPS system, so these are not Ankh-Morpork dollars, but (I guess) GURPS dollars.
The monthly income for a watchman is given as $700 ($600 plus $100 living-out allowance for those who don't sleep in their watch-house). This is listed in a table with other Average Jobs (as opposed to Poor, Struggling, Comfortable, or Wealthy Jobs).
From tables of weapons and equipment:
small knife - $30
large knife - $40
donkey or small mule - $1,000
pony - $1,500
saddle horse - $1,200 (less than a pony? okay...)
racehorse or light warhorse - $4,000 (more if the racehorse is really really fast)
A meal and a drink at various inns/bars:
Classy - $5+ - $0.50+
Comfortable - $3 - $0.10
Ordinary - $1 - $0.05
Seedy - $0.25 - $0.02
They class the Drum as a Seedy or perhaps even Ordinary pub, though they note that "ordinary" doesn't quite seem the right word.
I'll let those of you with better heads for numbers figure out all the conversions. Lemme know if you want me to try to find numbers for other stuff.
~Neshomeh
How could I have forgotten gold-pressed latinum? Endless house of playing Star Trek: Armada and hearing 'Insufficient -- Latinum' have all come rushing back. :D
I think the best comparison might be either the root beer or the pay. We can't use the clothes, unfortunately, because making clothes on Pern is way harder than in space. So... how big is a crate? 12 bottles? 24? We're charging a couple of Sickles for butterbeer, so it looks like approximately 1/2 to 1/4 slips to the Sickle. That would make a slip around, ehm, £0.60 - £1.20.
How does that stack up with the pay scale? 1 strip per day (I'm guessing that's the non-Cardassian, Federation-approved pay?) makes the strip precisely equal in value to the AM$ (assuming Sam Vimes gives fair pay, which... well, it's Sam Vimes). At 100 strips to the slip, a slip is thus worth £0.40. Oh, hey, look, a near match. Neither number jiggles well (the pay number will tend to wander down, while the drink one can only really go up), so let's just split the difference and say £0.50.
(So how about that ship? Five bars is equivalent to, I'd say the used Corvette - Star Wars ships are larger, after all. A credit is worth £0.65 on the booze standard, so the Corvette costs... £975,000. That's less than some cars, suggesting that either spaceships are dead easy to make, or it's marked down for RP purposes.
But okay, five bars makes a touch under a million pounds. Five bars is only 10,000 slips - that would make a slip worth £100! Yeah, I don't think that's viable.)
Now, onto D&D. Let's compare it to Pernese marks, because we have a lot of the same information.
Fowl: 2 cp = 1/4 mark.
Cow/bovine: 10 gp = 8 mark.
Peasant clothes: 1 sp = 1 mark.
And by drinkonomics: 4 cp = 1/8 mark.
Those give us conversion rates of 8cp/mark, 120 cp/mark, 10 cp/mark, and 32 cp/mark, respectively. Okay, real-world sanity check time! Those values will get you a pint down at the pub for: £7.50 (yikes!), £1.00 (yum!), £12 (yerk!) or £3.75. I'm pretty confident of the Pernese 1/8 mark drink, because that's about the cost of two loaves of bread, which sounds right. So, yeah, I'm going to say 30 cp/mark, which makes a cp worth a nice £1. That gives £4 for a drink, £100 for a decent set of clothes, £800 for a donkey (okay, that's a bit steep), £1000 for an expensive wine (that's just about doable), and £200 for a quality weapon. All of those ballpark as okay for me, so I'm happy with that. (They also turn out to be exactly equal to the GURPS dollar; go figure.)
And of course, Dragonlance is lovely and simple. ^^
Now to use D&D to check on Bill's price... a decent pony would be 3000 cp, but poor Bill is half-dead. Call him 10 gp (which means his master's 'overcharge' was essentially claiming he was the best pony in the world), or £1000. That makes our silver penny worth... hrm, £250, some five times the value deduced from Pern (£65). Which one makes more sense?
Luckily, we can deduce that. ^^ There are two known coin names in Middle earth, the castar and the tharni - and 'tharni' translates as 'farthing' or 'quarter'. That means it's reasonable to think there's a 1/4 penny coin. Furthermore, silver clearly isn't the base unit of currency - otherwise Butterbur's paying out of 30 silver would be small change. Copper is a common lower-denomination metal.
In this sort of setting, coins are valued based on their metal content. I looked it up, and did you know that copper is worth about 1/12th the value of silver? Given that a shilling is twelve pence, the two coins being roughly the same size and made of silver and copper respectively... yeah, that surprised me. ^^ But it means there's probably a copper penny in Middle-earth, and a copper farthing too.
That farthing is worth (1/12 /4 =) 1/50th of the value of the silver penny, and is probably one of the lowest denomination coins. Is it more likely to be worth ~ £1 or £5 in modern money? Yeah, I'm going to stick with the lower value.
~
Phew, that was lots of words. Here, have a picture to make up for it!
I've had to invent descriptions/symbols for some currencies. The Middle-earth currencies use the first letters of castar and tharni, with copper unmodified, and silver pre-or-post-fixed with a c for silver (celeb in Sindarin, kibil in Khuzdul). Orens get the letter 'O' in the Glagolitic alphabet, Dragon Age currency gets its nicknames (copper bits, silver crowns), Game of Thrones gets initials, and Elder Scrolls gets <a href="http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Septim(Coin)">the dragon from the back of the coin.
And since I haven't linked it for a while: The Booze Standard spreadsheet.
hS
(The highest-value coin listed on there is the Westeros Gold Dragon, worth over £7000. The next ones down are the D&D platinum piece and the bar of gold-pressed latinum, at a mere £1000 each. Though, come to think of it, the 100-mark piece sneaks in at £3000...)
The 3 copper stars for a piece bread value is from the end of Game of Thrones, the first book in the series. But since then, the War of Five Kings happened and the value of Westerosi currency plunged hard. After that, six copper stars only bough you a single melon and a Gold Dragon only bought either a side of beef or six skinny piglets. So it's very likely that it isn't worth over £7000 anymore.
That's the trouble with using purchasing power - it varies a lot. The Galactic Standard Credit was apparently long-term stable... but only until the rise of Palpatine, at which time inflation kicked in. The Pernese mark varies randomly over time and between locations... it's kind of a mess.
Also, uh-oh moment: is it 3 copper stars, or 3 copper pennies? The GoT wiki just says 'Coppers', and doesn't mention stars; the Wiki of Ice and Fire (has an amazing name and) says the star is eight pennies, but doesn't mention prices - except the melon thing, which it again just says 'coppers'. Helpful, guys!
Anyway, if they're confirmed to be stars, please let me know so I can chop the Dragon down to under a thousand (and laugh maniacally).
hS
But I should probably mention that the Iron Throne is currently in debt of at least nearly 4 million Gold Dragons, so it probably can't be worth as much as over 7000 pounds anyway.
But a Gold Dragon is worth 210 silver stags, which are worth 56 copper pennies each. That means that each Dragon is worth over 10,000 pennies. Unless the value of a penny is really, really low - which it isn't, unless bread is super-duper cheap - a Dragon has a very high value.
My guess is that the '210' figure came in at a different time to the various values, so he never realised how expensive they'd have to be.
hS
I don't know what it should be, though - the spreadsheet? The spreadsheet in article form? A full-fledged Javascript currency converter?
I'unno. That sounds like brain. And not the fun sort of brain like working it all out was (this may be why I am not integrated into society).
Incidentally, you like(d?) Percy Jackson, right? Do you remember anyone ever using golden drachmas to buy anything tangible? I feel like some of the various 'buy food from monsters/gods' bits must have included it. Maybe Iris' brownies in, er, Son of Neptune? I'd really like to get them onto the list, but I don't think I can calculate from 'Iris message'. (Long-distance telephone call, maybe?)
hS
Well, it did also cost one gold drachma to pay for a Grey Sisters taxi ride to Camp Half-Blood, and Percy used "a handful" of them to mail Medusa's head to Olympus via Hermes' postal service. Those are the only thing that are coming to mind, unfortunately.
And I meant the image being put on the Rudi's page, because it amused me greatly. :P
I don't suppose I'm lucky enough that Harry Potter had to pay to use the Knight Bus in... whatever book/film that was, am I? ^_~
That is also fine.
hS
To get from Little Whinging to London, it's eleven Sickles for the standard ride, but for thirteen you get hot chocolate, and for fifteen you get a hot water bottle and a toothbrush in the color of your choice. :P
(For reference, in PJO, they catch the taxi in downtown Manhattan, and Camp Half-Blood is in Long Island.)
The internet thinks that Little Whinging might be in the vicinity of Staines, about 25 miles (by road) from King's Cross. You can't really list a 'price per mile' for buses, but if you could, that would be about 2 1/4 Sickles/mile.
The Gray Sisters think the far end of Long Island is out of their service area, so let's assume they usually serve only New York City itself. NYC, according to Google Maps, is also about 25 miles long (that's Brighton Beach to Mount Vernon, for the record; I'm ignoring Staten Island entirely). Oh, hey, look at that. ^^ So straightaway, 1 drachma = 11 sickles. Since a Sickle is about 30p, a gold drachma is worth about £3.20.
Which is alarmingly cheap for a taxi to the other side of town, but hey, they're magic. Harry went from LW to London for less than twice the price of butterbeer for three.
(Of course, gold drachmas are only used in whole numbers, and mostly it's 'one'...)
hS, happy now ^^
Annabeth used one drachma to summon the Grey Sisters, but she paid them an extra three for going outside of their service range (and for taking Tyson the cyclops with them).
The Department of Finance's Payroll Division has a direct line to FicPsych. Actually, that could be an interesting little story. I'll get on that.
Because I know you'll like this, hS. {= ) I'll drag out all our RPG sourcebooks and go to town on those later, too, but I only have a little time right now, so...
The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern has a lovely chart of what you can buy with a mark. The value varies somewhat between crafthalls, and as per supply and demand, naturally, but here's a nice little selection, starting with our booze standard.
1 Winecraft mark - 1 keg of ale or 2 bottles of "undistinguished" wine (I suppose this means average quality, not great, not awful)
1 Bakercraft mark - 1 full sack of fine-milled pastry flour, or 16 small (1-pound) loaves of bread, or half a sack of sweetener, or 192 bubbly pies
1 Smithcraft mark - 1 small knife
1 Minecraft mark - 2 sacks of coal, or 1 whetstone, or 1 agate or quartz graduated-bead necklace (I have no idea why a whetstone is so valuable... are they hard to get or something? Coal seems cheap, too, but I suppose it's that necessary.)
1 Beastcraft mark - 1 young ovine or 4 fowl (the accompanying article also notes that runnerbeasts go for 9 marks and up)
1 Keroon Hold mark - 1/8th of a bovine herdbeast
1 Harpercraft mark - An apprentice-made pipe (the article notes that musical instruments, presumably of journeyman quality or higher, go for 2 marks and up)
Marks come in denominations of 1/32, 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 5, 10, and a few 100-pieces.
~Neshomeh
Apparently a loaf of bread costs 3 copper pennies, whereas on Pern it would cost 1/16 marks (bakercraft, but I'm forced to assume rough equivalence). That translates as £1.80 for a loaf, which is a bit high, but sure; it means we're looking at about £0.60 to the copper penny.
Which, at 56 pennies to the silver stag and 210 stags to the gold dragon, means the base unit of Game of Thrones currency is worth £7350.
Speaking of which: I know Song of Ice and Fire is quarantined. Does the same extend to the TV series? (I personally don't care, but it seems like a question to ask of the Board).
hS
PS: There's something weird going on with Pernese prices. Why is a sugary pie worth a twelfth the price of a small loaf of bread? Are they bubbly canapes or something? I can buy a loaf of fresh bread for 80 pence these days; I'd be amazed to get even 6 small pies for less than £1.
I know for sure that a Gather baker wanted 1/32 mark for six pies in Dragonsinger (and then Piemur haggled him down to 1/32 for nine, since he had Menolly and Camo with him). My only guess is that he was charging low because it was a Gather and he expected to do more business that way, but knowing how expensive things get at fairs in the Real World, that doesn't really track for me.
I don't know where the information about flour and sugar comes from. Probably Word of God, but that doesn't make it make any more sense.
Incidentally, my instinct says that 9 marks probably gets you a decent runner, good for light riding around your fields or whatever, but with no particular pedigree. Price goes up if the animal comes from a prime bloodline, if it's prime breeding stock, if it's won races, if it's a giant draft animal, etc. The price probably goes down if it's in poor health and/or has serious conformation flaws.
By way of comparison, you can apparently get a whole cow for eating for 8 marks. That would have to pay not just for the meat, but for the herder's time and effort spent raising the thing to a proper weight, probably 1-2 Turns. I figure a bull for breeding or a cow for milking would be more, since you'd get many more Turns of use out of it and potentially a profit on the calves/milk.
Oh, and the fowl are probably chickens or geese. Ducks are rare and turkeys didn't make it, and they've got wherry as a turkey substitute anyway.
~Neshomeh
Ahem. Sorry about that, nothing to see here.
... no, that's a lie. SQUEE!
The alcohol is (as you guessed) the best way to bring Pern onto the Booze Standard: it's half a Winecraft mark for a bottle of okay wine. Per PoorCynic, wine is... very variable! We could make the half-mark equivalent to 10 bottle caps - about five times the price of a bottle of beer. That would mean we're talking about a £15 bottle of wine, which feels about right for 'undistinguished', and would give us a conversion rate of 1 Wine-mark = £30.
That's on a par with the AM$, and lets us draw another comparison: fowl. One fowl (do I remember them being turkeys?) is 1/4 Beastcraft marks on Pern; on the Disc, a chicken varies from $1 (in the city) to 10p (in the countryside). So what does our £30 mark give? It means we're spending £7.50 on a single fowl, while on the Disc they range from £4 to £40. That, I think, makes sense.
And one last comparison: CMOT Dibbler sells his pies, according to the Compleat Ankh-Morpork, for (from random memory) 20p, or a bit more than a curry. That comes out as about £8 - a bit steep, but no doubt he'll cut his own throat and make it cheaper.
In contrast, a hot bubbly pie will set you back 1/192 Bakercraft marks - all of 15 pence.
... I know which I'd rather have.
hS
BUBBLY PIES
Every Hold has its own special method for making bubbly pies. The traditional fruit used in this special dessert is Terran blueberries, though any berry can be substituted. This recipe makes half a dozen dessert-sized tarts or a dozen hand-sized Gather-pies.
Crust:
1/2 cup butter or margarine
2 Tbsp granulated sweetener (sugar)
2½ cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup ice water
Cut the butter into chunks. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl. Work the butter gently into the dry mixture with a fork until pieces the size of peas form. Sprinkle the water over and work it in. (Do not overwork the dough.) Form the dough into a ball.
Filling:
5 cups blueberries (or 20 oz frozen)
1 cup granulated sweetener
1/4 tsp klah bark (cinnamon)
2 tsp citrus juice (I'm guessing lemon; it doesn't say)
1-2 Tbsp butter or margarine
Gently toss berries with sweetening and klah bark in a large bowl. Sprinkle citrus juice over mixture. Spoon berries into crust and dot with butter.
For Six Tarts:
1 crust recipe
1 filling recipe
Divide the ball into two pieces. Work with one at a time. Form each into a ball and press out into a circle. Divide each circle into six. Roll each piece into a ball. Flatten to 1/8-inch, cut into 5-inch circles, and fit six into tart pans. Fill with berry mixture. Moisten the edge of each tart and top with second circle of dough. Seal and flute the edges. Cut slits in the top of each tart with a knife. Cover edge of each tart with foil.
Bake at 375° for ten minutes. Remove foil. Bake for 8-12 minutes more, or until crust is golden. Serve hot.
For Twelve Gather-Pies:
1 crust recipe
1/2 filling recipe
1 beaten egg
Roll out dough on a floured surface to 1/8-inch thickness. Using a 3-inch cookie cutter, cut out 24 circles. Lay out 12 on a lightly greased cookie sheet. Divide filling among circles, spooning approximately 2-3 Tbsp into the center of each, leaving a 1/4-inch border.
Brush the border with egg. Lay the second circle on top of each pie, and press edges together with a fork all the way around. (Stretch the top crust gently to if necessary.) If desired, mix together 1/4 cup water with 1½ Tbsp sweetening; brush top of each pie with mixture for a sugary glaze. With a knife, cut three or four short slits in the top of each pie.
Bake at 400° for 20-25 minutes, until crust is golden. Slide gently off cookie sheet with spatula. Serve hot.
---
Have fun!
~Neshomeh
You may notice there's only half a batch left. There is a reason for that.
(Can confirm from Pern canon that they are a) bubble, b) messy, and c) much nicer when hot.)
hS
They look great! I really gotta try this sometime. Too bad it's cookie season right now; no time for extracurricular baking.
~Neshomeh, who has somehow never made bubbly pies despite theoretically being capable it for years and years.
She said that I had to make them again, and provide klah next time.
-- hmm, it looks like your klah recipe has dropped off the Board. Do you still stand by your modified recipe? (For archive purposes, I'm also going to link to the original recipe, mostly to remind me to add actual ground chocolate... ^~)
hS
PS: I am also baffled to discover that, amid all this fantasy coinage, there don't seem to be any Pernese marks out there. They're wooden disks with numbers 'burned, carved, or stamped onto them', how hard can they be? ~hS
PPS: LotR coin kickstarter has passed $80,000, which means I get a Red Hand of Saruman. I am a happy geek. ^^ hS
'Cause dark cocoa powder is extremely bitter in a suck-all-the-moisture-out-of-your-mouth kind of way, and that's the bulk of the official recipe. The narrative makes fun of F'lar's sweet tooth, but three generous spoons of sugar is about what it takes to make it palatable, IMO. Since you're a fellow non-coffee-drinker, I'm guessing your palate is probably similar to mine. {= )
The hard part of making marks would be coming up with the tools to cut out circles and imprint them with numbers and your Hall or Hold emblem(s) of choice, unless you wanted to spend a lot of time hand-crafting them individually. You'd have to find wood of an appropriate thickness, too... or maybe thick dowels you could slice up, I guess.
Maybe back in the `80s or so you could find marks at Pern conventions... but I dunno. Geek culture is practically mainstream these days, so there's enough of a market to support people who happen to be blacksmiths or have access to a wood shop to expand their business into fandom, but maybe that wasn't the case back in the day, even in a big fandom like Pern. And now the Pern fandom, while still large, isn't exactly in its prime anymore. Maybe we missed a crucial intersection of some sort. {= /
~Neshomeh
It's not like I have a shortage of materials, with all this chocolate lying around...!
I'm thinking dowel is the best option. It wouldn't take too long to slice off disks - really fast if you have an electric saw, of course, but even without it's not long. Then you sand down the edges (if you want), and... hrm. Given that it's not feasible to create metal stamps (for me, I mean)...
Well, there's pyrography. You can buy a set for less than £15 (or about one half-mark), and while it would mean doing them by hand, are Hold/Hall marks that tricky? ('Overlined number' is very simple, of course.) Alternately, I'm wondering whether thick wire could be bent into shape and used as a rudimentary stamp (ie, hammered into the wood).
Then you stain or varnish to get a decent colour... this really wouldn't be hard to do.
hS, a schemer
The wire thing sounds like it could work. Making a harp, with strings and all, might be tricky, though... and I know you want to make a Harper Hall one. {= )
Healercraft's got a caduceus, Smithcraft's got an anvil (that might be easiest), Starcraft's got an eight-pointed star with the north, south, east, and west points being long and the in-between points being short... any others you particularly want to know?
Holds... I don't know how they'd work, come to think of it. They have more proper heraldry. Fort Hold: on a brown field, a yellow Lattice. Benden Hold: on a violet field, three red Bends Sinister. (Ow, that's got to be hard to look at.) Ruatha Hold: Chequy, bright red and dark brown. Et cetera. What their devices for stamping marks might be, I do not know.
~Neshomeh
I'll just have to wait until Christmas to make some, I suppose, since we made apple and pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving. :(
They're just so good, though, aren't they? :D We have to eat ours out of the little pie dishes over a second plate because they spill so much. And yes, hot is the only right way to eat them.
Those look really tasty. Like, really tasty. Is that going to be plain flour? I bet I could make those this weekend...
About the Dragonlover's Guide - how good is it, really? I can see from Amazon that it's not a terribly pretty book (seriously, that dragon is terrifying), but how's the inside? It looks like the most recent edition was '97, which means it doesn't include telekinesis (oh no teh horrar) or any of Todd's Third Pass stuff (that probably is a shame), but does cover everything else.
The reason I'm asking is that my mother is a) a huge Pern fan and b) impossible to buy Christmas presents for. Would the DLG be a suitable gift?
hS
It was indispensable to me back when I was running Pern RPs on Neopets, and it's good to have around even now. It's not 100% perfect—the feet vs. meters controversy springs to mind; for some reason a floor plan of what I know to be the main Harper Hall is located across the page from a paragraph about a secondary one on Ista; and there's a truly horrifying illustration of Menolly on page 164—but for the most part, it's quite informative and easy on the eyes. MOST of the illustrations are nice, and the maps and things, too. Plus the occasional recipe to try. {= )
You're correct that it's only current as far as, I think, Dolphins of Pern. It is a shame there's not much about watch-whers, but I've happily done without any reference to dragon telekinesis and weird Redwall-esque time shenanigans. {= P
So, yeah, I'd say go for it. Especially if you can find a nice used one for three pounds!
And yeah, definitely use plain old all-purpose flour for the pie crust. You want the agglutination the higher protein content gives you (just not too much of it, hence the note about not overworking the dough). The only reason to use cake flour is for, well, cakes.
~Neshomeh, who watches a lot of cooking shows.
That saves me some trouble in December...
En Angleterre, we don't describe our flours by what they make - you can buy plain, self-raising, and strong flour. I think that's normal, cake, and bread to you, but honestly, who knows? But you're probably right about plain, since it sounds like something approaching shortcrust pastry.
hS, who... did food tech at school, I guess?
Self raising flour is really just flour with salt and baking powder mixed in, it's cheatsy.
Cake flour's less glutinous- difference in the wheat used, I think it's a mix.
Strong flour I'm guessing uses hard wheat?
It's honestly quite complex.
-July, who once made a meter high column of fire while frying a pan of sausages once.
...into 'Biggest Kitchen Mistakes'. :P
I never got a meter high column of flame to shoot out of anything, but I did once manage to flood the kitchen with popcorn because I forgot to put a lid on the pan while popping it.
That it was intentional?
-July, a Mad Chef. Or just pyromaniac.
Okay, so it was a Welsh teatowel I used to put out my one and only attempt to make chips (er, 'fries', I guess?)... but still, it was clearly the crater formed by a gigantic explosion.
hS, happily derailing this branch
I'm a pretty ropey cook. My mother, on the other hand, is actively hazardous. Verdun Surprise. Rhubarb pizza. Chicken ripple. And many more besides. Her usual dish is a concoction called, in the manner of a classic French dish, "choses en boule".
To make:-
Thing In Bowl
1 Le Creuset large saucepan
1 fridge
Step 1: Take fridge
Step 2: Upend entire contents of fridge into saucepan
Step 3: Simmer while reading an enormous tome on medieval bestiaries
Step 4: Compliment firemen for accepting your advance booking
Step 5: Serve
I recognize that recipe. It's what my mom uses to make blueberry mini-pies.
SHE'S BEEN USING A PERN RECIPE THIS WHOLE TIME AND NEVER TOLD ME?
*runs off screaming for bubbly pies because those are so good you have no idea*
:D :D :D :D :D
So runnerbeasts go for 9 Beastcraft marks or more. That means that 9 marks is a good price for the low end variety - you know, the small, slow ones... the scratty little ponies.
:D :D :D :D :D
So 9 Pernese marks are equal in value to 4 silver pennies from the Shire. That means one mark is worth just under half a penny. That means that a silver penny is worth going on UK£60 - about £65, more accurately.
Which means Bill the pony was worth £260, or just over 50 Galleons, or AM$6.50. And the 30 silver pennies Barliman Butterbur paid Merry back come to very nearly £2000. No wonder it was a strain on his finances!
:D :D :D :D :D
hS
Let's see what I know...
Before analyzing Orens, let's look at another currency from the universe - Floren - the currency of the Empire of Nilfgaard. It is based on florins, the currencly of Renaissance Florence.
1 Renaissance Florin = c. $140
45 Nilfgaardian Floren = 500 Orens
1 Nilfgaardian Floren = c. 11 Orens
1 Oren = c. $1540
I'm gonna bring up the exchange using vodka (because Poland)
A bottle of the most common vodka - the Temerian Rye - is 20 orens when bought, and 4 orens when sold. A high quality spirit is usually 30 orens bought, and 6 sold. Those are all in classic, 0.5 liter bottles (about 17 fl oz).
So, uh... did you just say that a bottle of cheap vodka is worth ~$30000? Because that seems a bit steep. ^_^ I think we have to assume conversion rates to real money simply don't apply in cases like this - otherwise we end up in spirals of nonsense.
So, how does a bottle of Temerian Rye compare to Skyrim spiced wine and Hogsmeade butterbeer? Actually, I'd guess that the cheapest alcohol is probably (broadly) equivalent in value across pre-hygienic societies - you charge people about the same for 'something you can drink without dying', whatever world you live in.
Now, if we can get the price of a drink in Ankh, we can tie this into the firm foundation of UK£/AM$/Galleon drinkonomics...
hS
Who actually deals with the money in the PPC? I know the DoF guys, but they seem more like the archivists and bookkeepers to me - who has the access to the actual money? Is there some kind of a bank?
I know (because I've said) that Legal's Trans-Normal Accountancy Division deals with issues involving currency from time to time. It's possible that they're involved, or maybe Finance.
If I had to guess, I'd say that agents are paid electronically, and that somewhere, there's someone who will convert that to the cash of your choice. But maybe the console prints coins or something, it wouldn't be too farfetched.
hS
We can compare everything to alcohol! :D
I wouldn't call the Rye on the same level as spiced wine and Butterbeer - it's far cheaper. After all, the country's drunkards call this rye vodka their daily bread.
Is it something they'd drink in a tavern, or at home? If the former, it probably is equivalent to a mug of cheap ale in Standard FantasyLand. If they're taking it home, though, the price would be lower.
Actually, it's funny you should mention the Big Mac Index... I've just run into an article about Galactic Standard Credits (Star Wars), which concludes that 1 credit is worth about £0.40 - by discussing the price of burgers. ^_^ That pricing makes Luke Skywalker's old, battered landspeeder worth about £800, which is about what you'd pay for a car parked on the side of the road with a 'For Sale' sign in the window. (Though we have to allow for planetary differences... the burgers are from the heart of Coruscant, while the landspeeder's on Tatooine. But it's approximately right).
So, the Galactic Standard Credit has roughly the buying power of... a Sickle and a half from Harry Potter. I guess that explains why they make 1000+ credit coins...
hS
There is no longer a Sci-Fi Currency Converter - it appears to have died sometime in the last two years - but there is a working WayBack Machine mirror.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130716230150/http://www.moneyinadvance.co.uk/sci-fi-currency-converter/
Ta-da!
Their reported conversions, as fractions or multiples of the UK£:
-1 Star Trek Federation credit = £0.63, based on extensive calculations involving wages. Doesn't really measure purchasing power, though.
-1 Star Wars Galactic credit = £0.65, based on calculations from the burger menu again. ^_^
-1 Fallout bottle cap = £0.87. That's based on the value of gold, which makes it not a measure of purchasing power.
-1 Sims Simoleon = £0.32, based on wages, so not purchasing power.
-1 Skyrim Septim = £1.47, based on 'an ounce of gold will buy you a fine suit'. Er, I guess?
-1 Harry Potter Galleon = £5, per Word of God. That's purchasing power.
-1 Game of Thrones Gold Dragon = £10800 (!!!), based on the price of wine. Purchasing power, but may well be an understatement (!!!!!) since I think they've assumed fine wine is as readily available in Westeros as it is in 21st century America. (Also, sweet mercy, that's closing on £100,000 for a barrel of wine! Maybe I'm wrong about the timeframe they used?)
-1 Discworld Ankh-Morpork dollar = £18, about half our previous estimate. They're basing that on the price of a stamp, but since the AM$ has smaller coins available than the UK£ back in 1840, I think I prefer the higher value.
-1 Red Dwarf dollarpound = £1.28, based on... keeping the prices the same. Kinda works.
-1 Judge Dredd cred = £0.50, based on the price of an undefined ice cream that they decided to define arbitrarily. Hmm.
I don't think there's a lot of new information there - the Game of Thrones stuff, maybe (and we can use that as an in to the fine wines market) - but there it is.
hS
Might have saved me a bit of time. Don't I feel silly now.
I think drinkonomics is a more solid foundation than 'let's buy expensive clothes'. And, actually, I'm amazed that the two values match up - you got 1 septim = £1.55, they said £1.47. Your bottle caps are twice the value of theirs, which suggests that gold is worth more in Fallout than they estimated - probably because a lot of it is radioactive these days!
So based on all this information - and you all knew it was coming - I'm working up a spreadsheet. ^_^ Have I left off anything that's been discussed in detail?
hS
I'd feel remiss not adding it. Fallout's famous Nuka-Cola (yes, I've been playing Fallout 4 a lot; does it show?) goes for 20 caps per bottle. I assume the price is so high compared to beer because it's a pre-war luxury. Brewing beer at home is likely much easier than creating a soft drink. Sunset Sarsaparilla from Fallout: New Vegas goes for a much more reasonable three caps; this difference may be due to both comparative scarcity and the fact that Sunset Sarsaparilla can be made with basic ingredients.
Didn't you say beer was 2 caps? I think that makes Fallout the only place where soft drinks are confirmed more expensive than hard ones.
Which is probably because fermentation kills the germs, while adding sugar or whatnot doesn't (I think). You need clean water to make Sunset Sarsaparilla (even though you don't in-game), while you can get away with moderately-clean water for beer. Drives the price up.
hS
I'm just going to leave this link here.
I'm not saying it's wrong, MatPat came to some pretty good conclusions. But as a lore nut, I was somewhat irked at the little details. Like, the timeline split. We don't need to go off songs played on the radio or whatever. That's culture, that doesn't tell us anything. The exact same songs could have been made by one eyed one horned flying purple people eaters. We know the exact date of the timeline split from our universe to Fallout's: December 23, 1947. The day the transistor was invented. Well, more appropriately, demonstrated to the public, but the point still stands. The transistor was made far, far later in Fallout's timeline then our own, instead, focusing on atomic power and how to harness the atom in other ways. That is where the split is, not when some dude decided not to write a song.
Other then that, it was a fair analysis. Reasonable, and lightly informative. Just messed up on some lore fronts, is all.
You're wrong. The split between our universe and the one of Fallout is much, much earlier than 1947.
In the Fallout universe, a recording of Abraham Lincoln's voice exists. No such thing exists in our universe.
-ahistorically July
So when the apocalypse comes, I'll be ready! :P
(I've currently got somewhere around 1700 of them, with 80 individual designs.)
I finally dumped out my nice big jar of bottle caps and counted.
219 individual designs. My seven favorites are in the top row of the first picture.
*long whistle* Not bad.
Next, according to the Exchange Bureau hS provided, you have $2291.30, while according to MatPat's video it's $2793.46. Yeah, I'd say you have a firm foundation of being Scrooge McDuck of the Apocalypse! :D
I haven't counted in a while.
The majority I have are these two:
But my favorite would have to be one with a red Eastern dragon. I've been trying to find a picture online but the brand isn't written on the cap and I never found out what it was, and I don't feel like digging into the bottle cap jar to find it right now. :P
When the apocalypse comes, I'll build a mighty empire out of my bottle cap start-up fund! ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR!
I mean, look at those caps, ten look at these:
The Sunset Sarsaparilla, New Belgium ones are almost scarily similar.
I myself have been saving caps too! I have about... 30. What? My family doesn't drink beer, so I only have Coke caps. Fitting, I think. But it's harder to collect the vast amounts others do.
...while on vacations, or when we eat out. Just ask if they keep their bottle caps in a container in the kitchen or what-have-you, because in my experience they hardly ever throw them away with the regular trash.
There was one bar and grille we went to for my dad's birthday this past year where they kept their caps in a huge bucket under the counter. We had to get bags from the car to take them all out!
So caps are actually pretty easy to acquire, you just have to ask. Individual caps, on the other hand, that's a bit harder. Just have to keep looking. :P
I'll put some pictures together and send you any ones you want. =]
I might have to start collecting those, aside from my usual collection of calling cards.
This is what came to my mind, after reading the last sentence:
I've been mulling this over for far longer than I'd care to admit. A good source for prices would probably be tabletop RPG sourcebooks, as everything is standardized and listed for the convenience of players and GMs alike. Some video games could be good for this as well, particularly RPGs again. I believe there is a LotR tabletop game. That could definitely help in some regards.
The major issue that I can see with using pints as a universal standard is related to measurements. By that, I mostly mean the difference between Imperial pints and U.S. liquid pints. According to Wikipedia, there are about 1.2009499255 U.S. liquid pints to every Imperial pint. Not even converting to fluid ounces helps due to, again, differences in measurements between the U.S. and U.K. And don't even get me started on trying to convert from beer bottles to pints.
Wine bottles could be a slightly more accurate standard (provided we assume that every bottle is the standard 750 milliliters). But then you have to take quality into account. For example:
— In the Dragon Age universe, wine varies from 20 copper pieces for the cheap stuff to 3 silver for a high quality vintage.
— Wine has a value of 10 bottle caps in the Capital and Mojave Wastelands (varying up or down depending on who's buying or selling). Quality is irrelevant, presumably because of the nuclear apocalypse.
— In Skyrim, spiced wine goes for 7 Septims (aka gold pieces). The most expensive, Firebrand wine, is valued at a whopping 179 gold.
How helpful that is may be up for debate.
Now where's that old Serenity sourcebook I had...
They tend to price things based on what the player needs, not what it would actually cost. To leap genres a bit lot, you can buy cars in The Sims 2 & 3 that cost less than most items of furniture.
But I suppose for things like RPG sourcebooks, they might have balanced the obvious items (so you're not paying more for a loaf of bread than for a pony, for instance); I don't know.
I take your point about wine - though in some settings it's sold by the skin, of course - except that... well, writers are less likely to have given the price of a bottle of wine than a mug of ale! While the 'mug' isn't a decent standard unit, it works as an approximate price.
There's a Wikibook on the Harry Potter currency, and apparently JKR was a bit inconsistent. Hrm... actually, the only thing inconsistent is the price of the Daily Prophet; everything else matches roughly with £5 to the Galleon. I think we can use that (particularly since it's Word Of God), and assume the 2 Sickle/£0.60 butterbeer is equivalent to a small bottle of Pepsi (which are currently hovering around £1).
Similarly, this L-space article looks at wages and the price of a curry in Ankh-Morpork, and concludes that AM$1 is worth about UK£40. Which would mean AM$1 = ʛ8. (Yes, there's a symbol for Galleons).
Which means a wand (7 galleons) costs about one AM dollar, or roughly 3 days rent in a cheap apartment in Ankh. Does that sound reasonable? Depends how expensive you think wands should be, I guess...
hS
Games like The Sims can throw everything out of wack. Pizza delivery for §40 is more than a little ridiculous. (I can see a big list of banned currencies on the wall of the PPC General Store, with simoleons near the top.) RPGs are slightly more balanced, and tabletop versions moreso.
I can see your point about beer as an approximate measure. I suppose specifics can be left to the mathematically inclined. Going by that, then, in Dragon Age a pint of ale is 10 copper (according to the tabletop game). There are 100 copper pieces in every silver piece, and 100 silver in every gold piece.
Beer by the bottle in the Capital and Mojave Wastelands is valued at two bottle caps; the price goes up to five in the Commonwealth. Two bottle caps is also equivalent to 5 NCR dollars. Caesar's Legion uses silver and gold coins, worth 4 and 100 caps respectively.
In Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, a bottle of beer costs two Septim, whereas in Skyrim a bottle of ale is five. That basically makes the Septim equal to the bottlecap. It makes sense from a meta standpoint (Bethesda makes both games), but it's still a little strange to me.
Now for some conversion. If we assume the lowest cost possible, then 1 bottlecap = 1 Septim = 5 Dragon Age copper pieces. That means there are 2,000 caps/Septims per gold piece. The price of a typical beer at a U.S. bar varies, but according to averagebeerprices.com the mean is $4.65. So (values are rounded):
$1 = £0.66 = .43 caps/Septims = 2.15 copper pieces
1 cap/Septim = 5 copper = $2.33 = £1.55
1 gold piece = 2,000 caps/Septims = $4,660 = £3,093.62
I think. If someone wants to check my math, I would be more than grateful. We are well out of my field of study.
