The Booze Standard! by
Huinesoron
on 2019-05-30 09:15:00 UTC
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As seen on the Rudi's Specials menu, and derived ultimately from this spreadsheet.
I feel sure there's more distinctive currencies that could be added to the list. The magnificent Shire Post Mint produces coins for Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, Kingkiller Chronicles, Mistborn, and others; while I know they can be prone to embellishing on their source material (see: the entire Middle-earth catalogue), I suspect it's based on something.
hS
HQ economics ramblage by
Tomash
on 2019-05-30 08:05:00 UTC
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Part of my headcanon, once I started thinking about it, is that attempting to establish a single standard for currency value (let alone an HQ dollar) is a great way to earn a one-way trip to FicPsych.
One rather reasonable possibility is that there're actually multiple currency exchange standards depending on what you're buying: Rudi's and the like likely run on the Booze Standard, the Cafeteria, DoSAT, and similar places run on the "just take some, but don't ask too many questions, and bring us relevant things when you get them" standard, less usual goods (official or not) probably run on barter, negotiation, and some best-guess conversions, and so on.
Finance clearly (per hS) spends a lot of time trying to keep all this stuff straight, and it hasn't been too successful. The closest they've got is a big database of prices, which is inevitably extremely tricky to query.
To make everything worse, time travel is the sort of thing that makes accountants tear their hair out because you have to somehow deal with when money came from or open up some nasty exploitable gaps in your system. The Time Gentry are, sadly, not sharing their methods for fixing this. The problem gets nastier if anyone starts doing fun things like repeatedly looping money and goods back and forward in time to take advantage of inflation.
Sources of free wealth are probably sitting around in a few places if you go looking for them, but a lot of them might be tricky to exploit. For a hypothetical example, "Finance memo 458: Don't go taking entire planets off of the Culture. This is how we get caught. The occasional asteroid is fine though." I figure the broad summary of Finance policy is "don't get greedy and don't get caught", since they'd rather not crash an economy or expose the PPC.
On the other hand, things like video games and magic are probably why HQ fundamentally doesn't have problems with food, clothes, ammo, or anything else important.
And I didn't know about the Thieves' Guild being something that could help there.
- Tomash, who's writing this late at night and will be happy to expand further
