Your challenge, should you choose to except it, is to help homebrew adamantine, mithril, and cold iron coins for purpose of game use as currency. The challenge asks you to calculate the value of these valuable metals and mint them based on the info supplied in the core rulebook.
Copper, silver, gold, and platinum are all well and good. But if you crave exotic monies with which to make purchases in exotic locales then put on your thinking helmets and crunch those numerals.
I would do all this myself, but I best not as my Intelligence score is a 9.
50 coins weighs a pound.
So that is 50 gp for a pound of gold.
An item made of mithral costs 500 gp per lb. That is for an item, the material cost is one third: Thus the price of mithral is 167 gp per lb.
So a coin of mithral would be equivalent to 3.33 gp (a third of a platinum piece. It might not makes sense that it is so cheap, if mithral is considered a rare metal.
Adamantine and cold iron is a bit more difficult, given that they don't have weight based prices.
From the PRD (Ultimate Equipment):
1 lb of Cold iron or gold = 50 gp
1 lb of Adamantine = 300 gp
1 lb of Mithral = 500gp
So purely on a basis of comparison:
1 CI piece = 1 gp
1 Ad piece = 6 gp
1 Mi piece = 10 gp
Found another source.
So we got a the following prices per lb:
Cold Iron - 50 gp
Adamantine - 300 gp
Mithral - 500 gp
The coin value of each is 1/50 of the lb price, or:
Cold Iron - 1 gp
Adamantine - 6 gp
Mithral - 10 gp
These figures are inconsistent with the crafting cost of mithral items however.
From CRB numbers and some extrapolations(because those are fun):
(EDIT: fixed mithral to account for the "weighs half as much" thing)
Mithral: 500 gp/lb -> 20 gp = 2 pp per coin; however, unlike platinum and gold, mithral is not just shiny - it's also useful - so maybe it would be worth more or less depending on availability.
Cold iron: double weapon price -> one pound of regular iron = 1 sp -> one pound of cold iron = 2 sp -> 0.4 cp per coin
Adamantine: +3000 gp for a dagger or a greatsword alike lets me believe only very little is needed to increase the stats of a weapon. So I would put it at 1000 gp per coin.
------- rant time ------
But rare metals can be hard for the unschooled to identify, so only in certain areas(and with black smiths, alchemists, jewelers) can the coins actually be used. Cold iron may be susceptible to rust, and therefore only valid as representative currency(debt), like magically created currency.
In my games most common merchants and shopkeepers don't accept platinum pieces because it is to similar to silver, and they don't like the risk of being cheated.
Also(which irritates my players): When something large is purchased the coins are not counted, but weighed; so for each 100 coins in the payment the price is an extra 1d4 coins, for each 1000 it's 1d10, and for each 10,000 it's an extra 1d%(larger quantities first).
This is due to wear and tear and from people filing the coins, etc...
(I also rule that copper, silver, gold, and platinum has fixed value because it can focus souls and magic essence like crystals and gems at a ratio of 1:2)
math is fun :D
What, this is awesome, I might have to implement this kind of currency in my own game. :)
Thank you, everyone. So far, I prefer Sweetman and Haroldklak's ideas.
Don Duckie, you sound like one tricky GM. Impressive observations!
I'm actually fairly new at GMing. I just try to make the game a little less "I have read the rulebook - so my character knows its contents."
Big rule: I allow everything, but it should be played out with "character interacting with the world through the GM", and not "player pointing in books at the GM" :)
If bulk cold iron costs 50 gp per pound, I'm gonna buy me a bunch of 2-pound cold iron light hammers for 2gp each and sell them (at half price) for 50gp each. Ker-ching.
How much does a cold iron club cost? 0x2 = 0gp. Sell it for 75gp. Ker-ching.
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If the weight of the item suggests that you can melt it and sell it for more the purchase price then we have to go out on a limb an guess that it is not purely the metal. Maybe you just coat the hammer heat in cold iron instead of making is solid.
Or maybe if you melt it, it stops being cold iron (har har!)
Don't forget the cost of working the coins. Gold coins are actually easy to mint because they're so malleable. Cold iron... not so much. Managing to print a king's head on one with a die isn't so easy. And what do you actually use to manage the pressing for an adamantine coin?
I'd suspect that excepting mithral it's just not practical to make such coinage.
For example: The coins of the far east (or whatever) would still be gold, but may be a different size and worth a different amount (which would be a headache admittedly).
In my games, I always assume large numbers of coins are being handled by weight instead of by count. (Because this lets you mix in trade bars, and face it, a merchant is not going to take your word for it on counting a thousand coins, he's going to weigh it and make sure the stack is 20 pounds.)
This also lets me deal with foreign/ancient/exotic currencies easily, because if you find a stash of '1,000 gp' from the Ancient Whatever Empire, what I'm really saying is you found 20 lbs of gold coins. The fact that it is only 1,342 coins because that empire used a different standard coin size is irrelevant. Large transactions are by weight and small transactions (like buying ale at the tavern) are not going to add up to enough of a discrepancy to screw up the game.
Offscreen, the barkeep might break out his merchant's scales to check up on unfamiliar coinage, or just refuse to take it, the same way you might today if someone showed up with Canadian money (sub American money if you're reading this from Canada). But it isn't worth slowing down the game with that kind of thing unless it's specifically an adventure hook.
YMMV, of course. Some people love that kind of nitty-gritty. I just think the necessary accounting is a pain.
Anyway, for commodities, Sweetman found the correct table for values, but as Shadowcat and Anguish point out, cold iron and adamantine are difficult to handle as coinage.
Cold iron still exists in commodity form (probably bars and ingots), which makes it a de-facto currency, but rejoining a number of cold-iron coins into a useful object, without melting them and thus making them normal iron with much less value, is very difficult, so coins would be of less value than larger pieces (the same way scraps of lumber are innately less valuable than single, larger beams.)
Adamantine is difficult to smelt and hard to work, but it doesn't lose properties the way cold iron does. Anyone who has a forge hot enough, or a hammer heavy enough to shape adamantine can probably use 50 coins the same way they could a 1-pound bar. So they don't lose value the way cold iron would, so it's 6 gp for an adamantine coin.
But why would you bother? It would be like stamping titanium or tungsten coins in the present. Sure, we can, but there isn't really an upside to doing so, except to show off that you can. Platinum, gold, silver, and copper are all shiny, relatively soft metals that are attractive as well as useful. Adamantine doesn't have the same draw, unless, as Shadowcat points out, you're doing it for prestige, which makes them collectors item/art objects of indeterminate value. (The same way gold jewelry can be more valuable than it's component metals.)