Rethinking (and Ditching) Gold
FREEBIE: MCGW Annual #2! PRE-ORDER your print copy now!
For over three years, I ran a monthly DnD 5e campaign where no one ever used gold. The player characters didn’t have it. It was never given as a reward. Characters in the world didn’t carry it and didn’t spend it. Still, there were new and interesting items and services in the world to discover and make their own, but it was never as simple (and as boring) as buying it.
When I first sat down and started creating the campaign world, I wanted to create something that felt substantivally different than our real world. Some of this made itself known in the government and political structures of the PCs’ homeland, but the aspect that most regularly impacted play was imagining a world without cash, without currency or capital. Too often we limit our fantasy worlds to adhere to our own conditioning and what we feel are the borders of possibility within our own society, and truthfully, it is something that is very hard to break yourself out of and often requires a good faith exploration of history, other cultures, etc to un-learn. It is worthwhile work, of course, because I choose to venture into new worlds and embody new characters to leave our world behind, not to discard all of the unpleasantries of our own reality but to learn how to best imagine other ways of being.
In that campaign, PCs aided NPCs with long-term projects in exchange for room-and-board when they were in town. They learned what NPCs liked and disliked, what certain regions of the game world had in abundance and what others had need of, how to track down those specialized traders of rare and unique items. They navigated the world more richly, intelligently, and—perhaps most importantly—more socially because of the lack of currency. Gold acts as an abstraction and often a quick and easy paving over of the labor and those involved all along the path of a thing from its base parts to its final creation.
In our both our real lives and our fantasy ones, this abstraction may save us time and effort in purchasing something, but it also alienates us from the entirety of the process and allows that seperation to be weaponized against us—all those people involved, even the shopkeeper at times, are removed from our concerns, sometimes for better but often for worse. This does not lead to richer stories, only richer men (something we have an unfortunate abundance of these days).
On a purely mechanical level, removing currency from your game makes moments of supply and demand into bespoke social interactions. You are removing easily forgotten bookkeeping and replacing it with situations in which your players need to learn what NPCs have what they need, what makes them tick, what they have too much of and what they need. They can choose to spend any of their myriad resources to get what they want (rather than just one)—offering services, spending time, exchanging labor, passing along favors, and more.
For small purchases and basic needs, lean on the inherent kindness of others (this may vary from setting to setting, of course). If a man truly arrived at your doorstep dying of thirst, you would give him water to drink before you would ask for his credit card. Most of the denizens of your game world would react similarly, especially in a world in which they are far more used to dealing with and relying on one another than we are in the real world.
In the years since I ran that campaign, other games like Cloud Empress (and Eco Mofos, to some extent) have eschewed traditional TTRPG currency for something like barter or even simple social dealings—favors owed and favors granted. Just as I discovered in my DnD campaign, the interactions that result from throwing out currency in this way are so much richer and memorable (and at times impactful) than any shopping trip in a more traditional world/game.
In one Cloud Empress session, I can distinctly remember a wonderful scene between a hotel owner with a spare room and a party of exhausted travelers. They had little to offer and the owner was fairly demanding. It was the last weeks of the traveling season, and she wouldn’t let her last room be filled for free—winter was coming after all. The party left the first interaction empty-handed. The trinkets they hoped to swap weren’t of interest to her but they spent time in the bar, chatting with patrons and discovered her love of fresh veggies (especially onions and garlic) and how she rarely felt comfortable enough to barter for such precious ingredients for her own meals. Suddenly, something the group hadn’t even thought to trade, some of their special provisions, became a top currency. It secured them the room, and they had a new, memorable home base within the city… as long as they had more onions to trade, of course.
In another case while traveling far from Tack Town, another character traded one of their own valuable item to an NPC of questionable character for their last bullet—making a friend of them in the moment but allowing the party to follow the character and, if things went sideways, act against them with the knowledge that their gun was not loaded.
Outside of gold-for-xp, old-school dungeoncrawling where it is baked into the core gameplay loop of the systems and adventures, removing traditional currency (or at least taking time to consider its place within your game and its world) can be extremely valuable, especially for story/narrative-first styles of play. Plus, we worry enough about money in our real lives anyway. Let’s imagine something different.
MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2
This month’s freebie is MeatCastle GameWare Annual #2, in recognition of it being another full year of TTRPG freebies here as part of the Missives! This is a 44-page, full-color, A5 zine combining the last year’s freebies all in one place.
This year's collection includes two games, a dungeon, two Mothership supplements, a full awards zine, and the two most popular articles from the Missives’ second year.
Manifest Memory: A solo game of items out of time
Twelve Damned Coins: Do not play this game
Five Chambers in the Hill Beyond the Vale - Part One: An experimental five-room dungeon built to bring your other TTRPG books off the shelf and into play (system-free)
Goblin Class: Be a green little freak in a scary human universe (Mothership 1e)
Party Development Procedure: Backstory seeds for your crew (Mothership 1e)
2023 Meaties Awards: My favorite TTRPG things of last year
Thinking about Feedback: When engagement can hurt and hinder
In Defense of Fiction: Good games deserve good fiction
In keeping with the freebie spirit, you can download the zine on Itch.io now by paying what you want (which, of course, includes FREE)!
If you’d like to pick it up in print, I’m doing a limited print run and pre-orders are available now (shipping out ASAP after I order the print run on Dec. 1st) over at the MCGW store:
MOTHERSHIP MONTH
Mothership Month is now in full swing! 21 projects are funding now over on Backerkit (including a new first-party book of bounty hunters from Tuesday Knight Games), and I am involved in several of them!
Beyond these three projects though, be sure to check out the full list because there are a lot of good-looking projects in that list. I’m especially excited for Not Enough Scoundrels, Awaiting the Burning Gods, and Devil’s Due, but honestly, it does not look like you can go wrong with any of the projects.
Parasitic Leeches have overrun Trellick Station, a luxury living space station built for white collar workers.
A young adult trans sex worker, Brianna Pilgrim, was murdered and a mysterious doctor running a practice in organ replacing leeches disappeared.
The system is on the verge of a war. Reactionary evangelists, radical feminist separatists, and corporate fascists are squaring up against the Interstellar Sex Workers Union.
Are you able to solve the murder in time? Can you find justice for Brianna before her death is used as a pawn in the political game?
I did some very early developmental editing on this really ambitious and unique project written by Violet Ballard. I had to step away due to lack of time in my own schedule as it developed, but that means I’m now just as excited as anyone to see it in its final form. There’s a lot of very interesting and new stuff happening in this one!
Welcome to Operation Golden Cut, a military heist sci-fi horror adventure for the Mothership RPG. The war-torn moon of Bonaccio is a nightmare of violence and betrayal, with two mega-corporations locked in a deadly conflict over a mysterious metal simillar to gold, "FiboGold," which, due to its unique molecular structure, is valued way more then the old shiny metal itself.
You and your crew are not here to choose sides and be pawns in corporal chess; you're here to steal as much of it possible and get out safely.
I am editing this one! I worked with kin a while back on Karthian Manhunter, and I'm really excited to dig into their biggest project yet. Military stories are rarer than I expected they’d be in Mothership after some early scenarios like Ian Yusem’s The Drain showed how the horrors of war could be just that: horror!
Harpy Tower is the former headquarters of Ferdinand Financial Holdings located deep within the Choke. Now it is a vault and stash house run by the Golyanovo II Bratva underboss Radmir the Wolf and his crew the Wolf’s Grin to hide their ill gotten gains.
Now you’re going to rob it.
I am doing developmental and copyediting on this one! It is really cool to see a module that is building on and expanding Prospero’s Dream, one of Mothership’s few well-known locations (from the classic first-party module A Pound of Flesh). Heists are wonderful setups for memorable TTRPG adventures because they are always brimming with lots of spinning plates, powerful factions, fallible individuals, and high stakes. I’m excited to help make this into the harshest pressure cooker possible.
MORE COOL STUFF
Housekeeping Note: I am now entirely off Twitter and have replaced it with Bluesky (and just less time in general on social media). Find me HERE!
The Song of Eastlake, a multiversal, system-free hexcrawl I wrote a world for, is now available to download for FREE (print-on-demand copies available to at cost)! Created by Stella Condrey, each writer started with the same bestiary prompts, wrote their own descriptions of each monster, and filled out the same hexmap with basic prompts befitting of the world their creatures would inhabit. My entry, The Wandering World, is a dark fantasy planet that escape it’s mother sun’s orbit and flew for thousands of years in the darkness between the stars before being caught by a new home. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written in a long time. Check it out HERE!
Rascal recently published an exhaustive (and darkly entertaining) investigation into World of Game Design’s exploitative business practices. This is a company that operated in the Mothership and indie TTRPG space for some time and, for some intangible reason, I’d always been wary of. This piece is one of the best I’ve read in the TTRPG space since the OGL debacle a while back. It’s well worth the read (and worth paying Rascal for)! Check it out HERE!
I recently posted a devlog for Tacticians of Ahm, giving a brief update on the upcoming update (and showed off the new piece of art above this very sentence)! Check out the devlog HERE!
PHANthasmal recently released the first fan expansion for FIREDROP, my quick n’ dirty game of drop pod warfare heavily inspired by Helldivers, for FREE! It’s still a work in progress, but it already features 12 new soldier abilities, 6 new mission modifiers, a new difficulty, and a larger/tougher map. It’s really cool to see someone engaging with the base game in this way and choosing to expand it for everyone (even me)! Check it out HERE!
Thank you so much, as always, for your continued time, attention, and support! Here’s to a third year of Missives from the Meatcastle, which I’m hoping will be our strongest yet. A lot of good life changes have come my way in recent months, paving the way for more creative time and energy that I’m excited to unleash on you all as soon as possible. - Christian
I've likewise been playing RPGs for a while now without gold or defined currency of any kind – it's less so been an intentional choice on the part of myself or my players, but more so that acquiring or spending currency hasn't felt particularly important or exciting in our campaigns. I've had good times employing something very similar to what you describe here: basic needs are basic enough that they can be abstracted, and bigger things can be resolved with some kind of favor system. Thanks for articulating this so neatly!
Great post!
I love to see the desire of world that works different slip into our fantasy worlds, and I'm totally on board with the "question your world through fantasy" kind of approach to the hobby, it can led to insights that are very necessary for rethinking our world. And coin/currency/economy is a big one to think about, it is weird/enlightening to see how different approaches to it can quench or boost relations with NPCs, and it's scary to think how much of our lack of community in the real world is driven by the same process. I would love to explore something beyond barter, like gift "economy" or a full library economy (I have been thinking on putting library economy as the main mode of economy in one of my games to see to where it takes the players, but we will see where that games ends up).
Thanks for the post and sorry for the long comment!