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I wanted to see what Pathfinder money would feel like in the hand in real life, so I researched and went and got one. Only a copper piece, unfortunately. Silver, Gold, and Platinum are a bit beyond my budget.
I started with the standard weight of 50 per pound. This comes out to 9.0718474 grams. I looked for some rarer coins (there is notably a couple India coins that weigh 9.07 grams) Research started on Wikipedia and ended up in the 2013 standard catelogue of world coins.
The closest coin I could find at the local coin collectors shop weighed in at 9.000 grams, was 92% copper, 6% aluminum, and 2% nickel - close to perfect for 1 cp. 9.000 grams is 99.2% of the target weight - a pound of them would be 50.4 coins - so close as to make little difference.
Even better, it is a common coin - some of you might even have some in your pockets right now. The Australian 1 dollar coin, an almost perfect fit for a physical Copper Piece. I bought one, and its nice to have around to give a feel for transactions.
All values of coins are the same weight, just different sizes. A Silver Piece would be only slightly smaller. Gold and Platinum pieces could be the same diameter and half the thickness.
THe Aussie 1 dollar coin is similar in weight to the NZ $2 coin. Biggest RL treasure horde of coins found IIRC was around 7000 coins dug out of the ground at least. Not sure if Spanish shipwrecks have more.
NZ 2 dollar coin weighs in at 10 grams, which would be 45.4 coins per pound, or 110% of the target weight. It is also aluminum/bronze, which I think would make it larger than a copper coin of the same weight. Lots of coins come within 10% like that, but I was looking for something a little more exact.
Not that it really matters, of course. Using imagination or m&ms would work just as well as finding a real-life cp
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You can get a 1 ounce silver piece from a bank for about the price of one Paizo Book. That would be about 3x the size of a coin in PF. (28.4 grams... though most new coins are slightly heavier due to legal reasons). If you cut it up into 3rds, and bang them into rough pieces with Illeosa's image on them you would have some nice Korvosan keepsakes. Note: Doing so is not illegal, but trying to then pass them as currency is.
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Passing them off as a specific other currency is illegal. :-)
