Nebulous Numismatics - A Coin Generator

A Frog Sitting on Coins and Holding a Sphere; Allegory of Avarice by Jacob de Gheyn II

Magic Items as worldbuilding is well-trodden ground, I think. What better way to invest players in the history and texture of a game setting than to tie it directly to the ultimate rewards they're seeking out? It's great for the creative process too, giving you something to crystalize off of, whether your world is informing your magic item design or vice-versa.

Often neglected, however, is the most humble unit of treasure/experience/endorphin trigger, the coin. Especially in OSR circles, the coin is an ever-present carrot at the end of an outsized stick. It's the end-all be-all of character advancement in any treasure-as-xp system, but rarely used as a vector to reveal hidden information about the larger world and its history, at least not beyond a notable ruler on the obverse face. Lich Van Winkle did some ruminating on this issue in their thought-provoking piece on coins and advancement, which was the partial inspiration for this post. (The other inspiration, for the record, was my recent readthrough of Deep Carbon Observatory. Some fantastically weird and awkward coinage in that adventure!)

Coins also create a logistical challenge. Coins are a convenient way to circulate wealth, but an extremely inconvenient way to transport wealth. A few 200gp gems are going to be way easier to carry out of a dungeon than a thousand individual coins. I think there's more angles to explore this kind of thing. I'm interested in coins that exhibit odd behavior, perhaps magically, that change the logistics of moving and spending them in an interesting, gameable way.

So here's a coinage generator to inspire some interesting, educational, inconvenient and downright bizarre currencies for your game. Some tables, like Shape and Material, are very silly and possibly better left ignored. But roll them anyway, and see what speaks to you.

Material

1. Silver, shining like moonlight or tarnished nearly black
2. Gold, a classic. Value dependent on purity
3. Electrum. Nobody knows what this is apart from jewelers
4. Bone, yellowed or scrimshawed creamy-white
5. Clay, perhaps glazed, definitely prone to cracking
6. Tungsten, extremely, pointlessly dense and heavy. A pain in the ass to transport
7. Beach Glass, in infinite colors and clarities
8. Still-Living Flesh, throbbing slightly and leaving bloodstains everywhere
9. Woven Fiber, flexible but vulnerable to snags
10. A Leaf, alive or dry and brittle. The features on the faces grew naturally

Shape

1. Round, like a coin-coin
2. Oval, like a coin-coin that's been sat on
3. Rectangular, like one of those big poker chips
4. Triangular, pointy, useful as a lute-pick
5. Torus, thin like a ring or thick like a donut
6. Cube, stackable into larger cubes, good for impromptu dice games
7. Egg, 1-in-6 any given coin occasionally wobbles and makes scratching noises when scrutinized
8. Knife Blades, prone to tearing through sacks
9. Moon, changes shape and therefore size in phase with the real moon
10. Interlocking Links, like chainmail, or a fancy watchband. They can be taken apart into smaller denominations.

Obverse (front) Side

1. A stuffy-looking King or Empress or Whatever
2. A Magical Beast that symbolizes the minting nation, somehow
3. A Conservative Portrait of someone who's the spitting image of one of the characters or a member of their entourage
4. A Magnificent Tomb, nigh-mythical and its location long forgotten. A landmark that still exists today is visible in the background of the scene.
5. Blank, until used in a fraudulent transaction. Then a large, jagged X.
6. A Sprouting Wildflower, common in these parts and highly efficacious as medicine or narcotic. This property is not known to modern medicine, and these days the plant is largely ignored.
7. A Scene of Execution of a reviled traitor or usurped leader. This scene sharply contradicts common historical doctrine.
8. A Prayer in multiple languages, several of them dead - a rosetta stone, however limited.
9. A Single Eye. Occasionally you catch it blinking out of the corner of your vision. Does anything look through it?
10. Roll on Reverse table

Reverse Side

1. A Grand Structure with great historical import to someone
2. An animal, the Prized Pet of the ruler that minted the coin
3. Lines of Soldiers in ceremonial arms standing before a hole in the ground. Below, the date of a battle in which the unit was routed, a failure for which the surviving members were interred alive.
4. A Date of Minting. Practical. Businesslike. Boring. Maybe a date that doesn't make sense?
5. A Fingerprint with too many psychedelic whorls and plumes to it to be human
6. Esoteric Symbols, to communicate to a secret society, or just to drive conspiracists nutty
7. The Ass-End of whatever's on the other side, degree of rudeness up to the GM
8. A Map to somewhere. Each coin shows a tiny portion of a greater grid.
9. A Sequence of Chess Moves in algebraic notation. Several of the moves are illegal or nonsensical. Playing out the game on a physical board summons a smug logic elemental.
10. Roll on Obverse table

Quirk

1. Non-fungible. The coins simply cannot be funged, no matter how hard you try. This makes them essentially useless as a currency and a very stupid thing for someone to invent or own. They may only be used for barter, and must all be traded together in a single transaction. Nobody really understands how this works, but it's definitely magic, or at least magical thinking.
2. Aerodynamic. Perfectly shaped for tricks, tossing, skipping, rolling etc. Advantage on any DEX tests to put one of the coins somewhere skillfully.
3. Resonant. When struck, each coin vibrates with a pure tone unique to that coin. Arranged correctly, they could be formed into an instrument. If left to vibrate freely, they continue producing noise for up to a minute.
4. Tricky. Whenever a coin is flipped, it comes up on whichever side is called. This is because the faces all change to the called side in midair, and remain that way after. Hard to sell the ruse for coins with three-dimensional shapes.
5. Counterfeit. A small detail noticeable only by academics within a narrow historical field proves these coins were minted by counterfeiters many centuries before the currency was in circulation. These historians will pay several times the coins' face value.
6. Illicit. The coins are already in circulation in the local illegal economy, and are easy to exchange on the black market for a decent value. Flashing these around instantly marks you as involved with organized crime in these parts, for better or worse.
7. Anti-Magical. Spells cast on the coins themselves have no effect. Spells cast on a person holding them or with the coins in their area of effect evaporate 100 coins per spell level and fizzle. If there are not enough coins to fully counteract a spell, they still evaporate and the spell takes effect.
8. Gravity-variable. The weight of the coins shifts depending on the time of day - at midnight they are ten times lighter than a standard coin, and at noon they are ten times heavier. During notable holidays they weigh nothing at all. During eclipses and solstices, they fall upward.
9. Viable. The coins may be planted, and each will grow into a bush that produces d6 new coins per year. This practice is extremely illegal and hortofeiters are hunted down with zealous fervor by the powers that be, whoever they are. The coins are perfect copies apart from the inevitable clip-marks where they're removed from the stem.
10. Fluid. They slide off of each other near-frictionlessly, flow like jingly, shiny water. In sacks, they settle into the shape of whatever surrounds them. In pockets, they inevitably bounce and slide free. If gathered in enough number, you wonder if you might even be able to swim in them.

Sport of Tycoons - Carl Barks