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.

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).

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...)

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.

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

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

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