Rebuilding Science in a Magic World

I continued digging the tunnel for another twelve days until the snow on the mountain started to melt again.  It seems like the merchant is not going to make it back this year.  It seems that the safest time to travel between here and the mainland is winter, so now that the season is changing, I'm expecting he won't make it back until next year.  Hopefully by that point I can have the village bought into the idea of using currency, and I won't be the only one with trade requests.

Rather than go through all the stages of making the currency myself, I'm going to offer to pay a few of the goblins that helped Katarko to make copper ingots for me.  I'll need quite a lot of the metal, so while I excavate the native copper on the mountain, the goblins can melt it down and form it into ingots down in the village.  Once I think I have enough copper, I'll make some molds for coins and a press to use for imprinting a design on them.  I'll also need to dig a secret vault somewhere in the mountain where I can keep excess currency I make.

I spent sixteen days gathering copper from the mountain, and a decent chunk of that time was spent finding new veins from existing ones using tectonic sense.  Since I also had to cut new paths to those veins, I ended up shipping a decent amount of stone down the mountain as well to use for construction projects.

In the evenings, I spent my time designing the coinage for our initial currency while making lightstone to use for both the casts and the press to make the coins.  I settled on using three different coins for now.  All three coins are going to be circular and have the same sized square hole in the center of the coin, so that a string could be run through to easily keep your money together. 

The smallest value coin will also be the smallest in size with a simple wave pattern across the coin.  They'll be relatively thin and made of copper.  The middle value coin will also be made of copper, but will be both thicker and larger than the first coin.  Since this is the coin that I want to use as the basis for entering the fishing area, I figured it would be fitting to have the coin themed with the more popular kinds of fish that are eaten.  I intend to set the value of this coin at ten times that of the smallest coin.

The last coin is going to be slightly smaller than the biggest coin, with a design of our mountain on one side, and a river on the other.  These coins will be made from the higher quality metal that Katarko helped refine a lot of.  I plan on having these coins be worth 25 of the large copper coins, so that they're generally used for large purchases, and to store wealth.  Zaka will be given most of these coins to handle, at least until some form of bank is figured out.  Then if someone wants to exchange a whole bunch of the lower currency for the larger one, we can trade it out for them.

We intend to give all the goblins an equal starting point with the currency, but since we'll be collecting from some places, we'll also have to introduce currency back in through paid work projects.  With the road project fast approaching, that will be one place where we can re-introduce currency into the market via manual labor.  The guards will also make a certain amount of money, which should trickle through by some method back into the market, but we'll need to keep an eye on currency circulation to see how the balance is being handled.

So, despite the fact that I only intend to give 5 of the middle tier of coins worth of value to each village member to start out, I'll still need to make a significant amount of coinage overall.  First, I think that two middle tier coins, and thirty small coins is probably about the right denomination to start distribution at.  With almost 500 villagers, that comes out to an absolutely absurd amount of coins.  However, I also want to have more than triple that number actually manufactured in the first batch, so that we're prepped for both population growth and any unknown factors that might spring up.  As for the highest value coins, I think just 200 of those coins should be more than enough to last us a long time.

Which means I'll need to bring in some goblins to help with making the coins.  That means I'll also need to keep the minting equipment sealed away in the hidden vault as well, so that no one tries to make counterfeit currency.  I suppose that means I should also get specific with some of the coin designs, so that a trained eye can spot counterfeits.

Once I get the hidden vault made, I'll actually make the molds and presses for each of the coins.  Initially, we'll pour the copper onto a slate with many molds on it.  Next, a bar will be run across the whole mold to remove excess liquid copper.  Finally, as the copper starts to harden, but is still hot, the press plate will be lowered down onto the mold, giving the second face it's pattern. For the smallest coins, I plan on doing slates that have indents for about 500 coins in total.  For the medium value coins I plan on doing 200 coins per slate, and for the highest value coins, 100 coins per slate.

Down in the cavern, I spent two weeks excavating the hidden vault.  I'm not going to say exactly where or how its hidden, but there are multiple measures in place to make it difficult to both access and discover.  It's got plenty of room for storing all the equipment for making the coins along with a significant amount of coins.  I've even made denomination buckets inside so that I can easily remove exactly how much currency I need at any given point.

After the vault was completed I made all the various items necessary for the minting process, which took me another week in total.  I've got all the ingots ready, so it should just be a matter of melting and casting coins from here on out.  My hope is that I can pay the same goblins that helped make the ingots, since they're already familiar with metal working.

After a bit of a rocky start, we managed to start producing coins at a pretty decent pace.  All in all, production of all the coins was eventually completed in 24 days.  If I had done it all myself it would have taken significantly longer.  As payment for their work, I gave each of the three goblins three middle value coins.  Once they had left, I spent another two days just moving things to and from the hidden vault, and sorting them.

Finally, on the third morning after they left, I loaded up a cart with all the coinage and manually lowered the first batch of coins down the mountain.  Moving the coins from one cart to the next took quite a while, and I ended up not getting back to the village until late in the evening.  I got a guard's attention, and had him go get Zeb and Zaka while I protected the coins.

For tonight, we'll keep them in Zaka's house, and both Zeb and I will stay over to ensure that no one steals any coins before we get a chance to distribute them.

Finally, the time to distribute coins, and explain the changes to the way things were going to run has arrived.  The initial explanation to the villagers took about a half of an hour, and didn't go over particularly well.  Most of the goblins saw the whole thing as an unnecessary convolution to the way things already work.  After all, they can already just bargain with each other for supplies.  Not only that, but now a bunch of things that were free are now going to have a cost to them.  The most vocal group to complain actually surprised me.

I expected that the goblins who rarely worked would be the ones to complain the most, but surprisingly most of them were quiet on the matter.  The group that complained the most were actually the fisherman, who were upset that they would have to pay money when they're already providing something to everyone else for free.  Despite attempts at convincing them to trade their fish for currency again to make back more than they spend going in, they weren't convinced.

If the baseline providers aren't going to buy in, then we would have a serious problem on our hands.  The other workshops also were a little upset that they'd be charged for some portions of what they owned, seemingly arbitrarily.  For some individuals, it would be less, based on exchanges I'd made with them in the past to construct things in exchange for goods, but others who I built things for free are being retroactively charged for the work, but in a lot of ways, they see it as unfair.

A few compromises were drafted up as a result in order to get these groups on board.  First, to the fishermen, I eventually negotiated that we'd build an open marketplace where they can sell their fish.  For fishermen and farmers, use of marketplace stalls will be free.  For others, stalls will be rented out at a fixed rate per day.  For the craftsgoblins, we've dropped the costs of their workshops for existing craftsgoblins, but the warehousing charges will be kept in place.

After those negotiations, it seemed like the majority of the goblins were at least willing to give the currency a try.  At that point, we had the goblins form lines, and we distributed the currency to each of them.