Here's the situation: There's a mage. An old crabby one who got tired of thieves and pickpockets robbing him blind and stealing everything he owned, even his precious spellbooks. They left him destitute and begging, and the authorities basically laughed him off when he asked for help getting his property back, but finally, after an age of scrimping and saving and degrading jobs unworthy of a mage--and finally going up a level--he at last had a spellbook with two spell in it: Magic Mouth and Explosive Runes. He also scrimped and saved until he amassed a small amount of gold: miniscule as adventurers would see it, but sufficient for his purposes.
The enchantments are fairly straightforward: Magic Mouth on the face on the coin, saying, "You are a thief or had trade with one. Since my books were stolen, I am forced to guard coins. Never steal from a wizard!" whenever anyone aside from himself reads the coin's inscription. Explosive Runes are on the inscription itself.
The wizard then went out into those neighborhoods where you can't walk five feet without encountering a pickpocket. This has resulted in quite a few exploded thieves, as well as some exploded moneychangers, barkeeps, shopkeepers, and even the people who open the poorbox at some temples or are gauche enough to look at what someone else has tossed in the collection plate.
The question is, in the more lawful and legalistic portions of Golarion, what exactly is the law going to do about this? It's obviously terrible for commerce, and the spontaneous fires might take out large portions of the city. But once the means are known, there may even be some copy cats, since Magic Mouth and Explosive Runes are exceedingly common spells. And from a legal perspective, is there any difference between a book rigged to explode if stolen and coin rigged to explode if stolen?
And this doesn't even get into the international incidents when coinage is carried across borders before anyone bothers to look closely at it.
And if this happened in the less legal areas and coins started to slip into the more legal areas?
I'm thinking even magical detection would be exceedingly difficult, since trying to Scry some unknown wizard somewhere and your only link is a coin which has since been turned into so much golden slag.
How would the different nations deal with this?
I'm not looking for an exhaustive listing, but am interested in hearing what you think might happen in your favorite kingdoms.
Note: the coins won't start fires because Explosive Runes deals force damage, not fire damage.
Any society will take action once the body count starts running up. One or two dead cutpurses in back alleys in the ghettos won't draw too much attention, but when innkeepers and merchants and kindly old church ladies start bursting, the authorities will take action, even in the most evil and/or chaotic of societies.
Good societies want to protect the innocent from this evil murderer. Lawful societies want to catch and punish this criminal. All societies need to minimize crime and random death among the populace before the leadership seems weak and ineffective, which would lead to rioting and possibly revolution. Not to mention, the leaders of all society tend to be wealthy men with lots of gold (lots of chances that they might explode).
So spells will be cast. Speak with Dead, Commune, Contact Other Plane, Discern Location, whatever it takes.
The wizard will be found and dealt with in the harshest way allowed by that society's laws - whatever is appropriate for willful acts of murder and destruction, even treason (disrupting economy and endangering the foundations of the government, not to mention endangering the lives of the nobility).
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Sue the wizard!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_v_Shepherd
On a related note, I've wondered whether or not the common law approach or the civil law approach is used in Golarion.