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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: Quantus on July 25, 2015, 05:25:27 PM
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I am an engineer. Accounting and economics might as well be Voodoo to me. But I need help in that realm, preferably using small words :P
I have a fictional setting. It's a high-fantasy place, where magic is common in everyday life; there are some cultural divergences but for the most part the magical development of the time is roughly equivalent to early-20th century science, though the caste gap is pretty large. The society heavy into families and bloodlines, and is organized around various strata of Noble Houses that are the landowners, built around a framework of 7 Guilds that serve various roles that I typically associate with government and/or church. For example the Seer's are the essentially the priesthood (abstract astrology more than pantheistic deities), but are also the record keepers and so contracts and deeds and other bureaucratic matters are in their purview. Ive modeled it somewhat after the Pern Novel's i read as a kid, with the Holder landowners and then Crafthalls, if that gives you a point of reference.
Now my thought is that the common denomination of the Currency would not be an object like coinage or rare metals, rather they would trade Elemental Energies, which would be distilled/"minted" by the Elementalist Guild (and possibly others). So there would be four types or energy, each with a standardized measurement of energy and a regulated exchange rate, Dollar&penny would be Flame&Spark, Splash&Drop, etc (still working on those) and each energy unit would have a specific definition of it's actual usefulness. Kind of like how a Calorie is defined in terms of it's ability to raise a set amount of water a single degree, which would work for Fire, Earth might be the amount of energy needed to raise X Stones a certain distance (ie potential gravitational energy).
What I dont know is how much regulation would be necessary? Would counter-fitting be an issue, or would it not matter because the energy has inherent value rather than symbolic. I mean, if we used Electricity as a currency, it wouldnt matter who generated the voltage and charged your wallet/battery, the Charge exists.
Thoughts? I dont know enough about how those sorts of systems to even know where to begin...
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Redacted for reasons. :-X
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the thing to remember that value is based on rarity and perceived value. the4 reason that diamonds are valuable are thar rhey are precieed as rar band hard to get the same is true with gold.
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the thing to remember that value is based on rarity and perceived value. the4 reason that diamonds are valuable are thar rhey are precieed as rar band hard to get the same is true with gold.
I agree. Knowing nothing about the world, is seems unlikely that a dog stand worker would sell spiced sausages for magic coinage. I common coin that can be used by everyone for almost anything would seem to be best. Guild/Silver/Copper would be simple and easy to understand. But anything involving magical craftsmanship, from jewellery to spells to weapons to tools, could be paid for in the 'mana' exchange.
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I mean, if we used Electricity as a currency, it wouldnt matter who generated the voltage and charged your wallet/battery, the Charge exists.
In a society where the money has actual value (gold, silver, etc.) it is very possible that raw metal would be acceptable. The problem is that unless you are an expert, it might be easy for someone to fool you (gold covered lead for instance). Coinage that has been certified by some authority, usually the government, is considered safe because you know exactly what you're getting. I could see the same thing in a society that trades in elemental energy. Any elemental energy would have value but most people would feel more secure using "coinage" that has been certified by the Guild. Anyone that tried to fake the Guild's certification would call down the wrath of the elementals.
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IDEA (you are free to take it and run with it if you like)
If it's a high fantasy world, perhaps have your magical coinage be created not by men at all, but by elementals. The elementals want things for their coins, appropriate to their type.
This would allow you to create a truly frightening counterfeiting penalty, if the elementals have to refresh the coins periodically (re-minting). If people make the coins themselves, and the elemental tries to refresh them, the elemental *knows* they didn't make it. They won't act on only a few here and there. But they keep *every* counterfeit coin.
That's when the fun starts. After enough value is lost to any given individual's counterfeiting, the elemental will seek out the counterfeiter and *take* payment. The greater the counterfeiting crime, the less likely to be lenient. If you have been counterfeiting flame currency, and don't happen to have a forest on your land, or a lot of shrubbery, you'd best hope you have a lot of firewood, or else he's burning everything in your house. Perhaps the house itself. And if he's not satisfied, he'll come back later and do it again.
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Redacted for reasons. :-X
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Heck, with all these ideas floating around, you could probably create a 'Sam Spade, High Fantasy Investment Banker' story, completely based around the currency system!
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Heck, with all these ideas floating around, you could probably create a 'Sam Spade, High Fantasy Investment Banker' story, completely based around the currency system!
Yeah, I've got this character idea that doesn't fit in any of my three worlds I've got developing, but would fit perfectly into a magic/fantasy world. I kind of want to play in Quantus' world. ;D
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Wow, Time Warner fails at their job for a day or two and you guys come back with complete monetary systems! The awesome here knows no bounds.
To answer one comment, yes basically everyone will be using magic "currency" though I dont like the term. It's more about having a commodity-based money, since they arent "minted" in the traditional sense, but are used up. Picture common towns as looking something like the old west; any manufactured good like a pocket-watch or fancy kitchen tool would instead be some magical gizmo equivalent. In the case of the pocket-watch, "modern" clocks for them are enchanted sticks of varying sizes (finger sized for pocket-watch up to building sized Clock-pillars) that glow different colors and shift a line up and down, as a throwback to when all their time measurement was bases on standardized Candles with graduated markings to tick of hours and minutes (as opposed to our round clock faces that are Sun-dial descended). Fancy ones might have a small magical light dispay (safe), when ancient ones would embed fireworks in the wax, but this is basically a cookoo clock equivalent. But magic stoves and lanterns and other common household items would be the norm at all levels of society, though of course the high-society will have to display more extravagance.
What I pictured was that each of the 4 elements had an energy that could be stored in mundane objects (in a straightforward process by nearly anyone), as everyone has what it takes to use basic magic, even if they dont have the talent and/or skills for advanced work. In terms of value they would each occupy a different order of magnitude of currency, but in a way that would be a physical-law conservation-of-energy sort of exchange, rather than a regulated/floating value. So it would take so many Sparks (fire denomination, equivalent to a unit measurement of thermal energy) to equal one Stone (Earth denomination) because it take exactly that many units of Fire Magic to generate that single unit of Earth Magic. Im thinking Fire/Water/Earth would be the Low/Middle/High values; Ill leave Air as a more exotic item, since anyone can imbue Breaths (but they are of miniscule relative value), but it is astronomically more difficult to contain and store permanently, so it's rarely done. When it is, it's generally considered an extravagant show of wealth, and the pursuit of a way to store Air is like the medieval search for Gold from Lead widely viewed as a would-be Game-Changer for the society since it could be the key to things like weather manipulation and easy sea travel, even the holy grail of Flight-for-the-Masses.
My current concerns about all this are:
1)How does a commodity-based currency work? I know destroying minted currency devalues it, but what if it was intended to be Used Up from the get-go? How did it work way back in the day when Salt was a standard of trade?
2)Is it safe to leave it directly tied to the effort of empowering? It prevents a need for regulated currency, and counterfeiting wouldn't be much of an issue with properly defined and common measuring tools. But it does establish a direct monetary value for /effort/, which seems like it would have broad implications, as it could take bargaining for wages all but non-existent, and anyone could just sit river-side and churn out money to the limit of the containers they could beg/borrow/steal
3)Should I instead force the standardized currency to be issued by one of the guilds? It could be a useful story detail for the political interplay of the world, if one of them is in charge of the Currency. Perhaps anyone can technically empower a bucket of water, but to do it properly requires a larger volume than is practical outside of an organization? Counter-fitting still wouldnt be too much of an issue since they'd still have an objective value in their energy content.
4)Should purity of the container be an issue? It would make sense if pure water held energy more efficiently than a mud-puddle, and I could see different gems holding a different amount. But I want it to focus on the energy as the Money, and the Gem/Water/whatever physical object being viewed more along the lines of a disposable purse.
5)What am I not even thinking of, because I dont know enough about how economies function?
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Redacted for reasons. :-X
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The use of consumables as currency isn't limited to salt.
Look into how Japan used rice as currency. They couldn't make coinage work, and kept going back to rice over the centuries.
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The use of consumables as currency isn't limited to salt.
Look into how Japan used rice as currency. They couldn't make coinage work, and kept going back to rice over the centuries.
The thing is, rice has a direct and obvious value to everyone. Regardless of social standing, everyone can eat rice. Farmers can plant rice.
Salt didn't. It was like the platinum of its day. It was highly valued due to its scarcity, but it wasn't the only currency. Throughout most of history, there was still gold and silver used for regular transactions.
This is an exerpt from Wikipedia.
It has long been assumed that metals, where available, were favored for use as proto-money over such commodities as cattle, cowry shells, or salt, because metals are at once durable, portable, and easily divisible.[43] The use of gold as proto-money has been traced back to the fourth millennium BC when the Egyptians used gold bars of a set weight as a medium of exchange,[citation needed] as had been done earlier in Mesopotamia with silver bars.[citation needed]
[43] I I Rubin, 'A History of Economic Thought', translated Donald Filtzer, Ink Links, 1979 (original Moscow, 1929)
Since magic is a consumable currency, like salt or rice, there's no economic value for a society. A nation can't claim worth based on consumables alone, as they're not consistent.
Perhaps in a world of magic, magic itself is readily available. But if magic currency were the only currency, and a war suddenly depleted the Guild/nation's reserves, then the citizenry would be left to an unregulated barter system for everything until sufficient resources could be re-gathered to reform the currency.
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Wouldn't a reduced supply in the face of normal or accelerated need in a rice-based economy just be inflation? Each unit of rice has a value. If there is less rice, the value goes up. Sure, if it gets too bad, everything goes into the crapper, but gold also fluctuates in supply as well. A new gold mine, or gold shipments lost at sea, etc. If the price of staple food and goods goes to extremes for whatever reason, economic shenanigans happen, even in a gold economy. The great depression took place when the US was on the gold standard.
In a high fantasy scenario, I can't imagine many ways where normal coinage or raw materials would be viable for an economic base. People could counterfeit it too easily.
What I could imagine is an actual trade in mana itself. Magic potential. You might be able to take it from other people, but you literally couldn't counterfeit it.
Magically gifted people could be rich, if they wanted to be. Magical creatures might be absurdly rich, if they wanted to trade away their magic to humans for goods.
Dragons might simply hoard magic power, making them highly irritable. First you bother them, then they realize they have to expend magical power to kill you? *grrr*
Magic potential would then be a great deal like a rice economy. People would buy commodities with it. With effort, anyone could make/grow some, but most people won't bother if they aren't good at it.
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Wouldn't a reduced supply in the face of normal or accelerated need in a rice-based economy just be inflation? Each unit of rice has a value. If there is less rice, the value goes up. Sure, if it gets too bad, everything goes into the crapper, but gold also fluctuates in supply as well. A new gold mine, or gold shipments lost at sea, etc. If the price of staple food and goods goes to extremes for whatever reason, economic shenanigans happen, even in a gold economy. The great depression took place when the US was on the gold standard.
In a high fantasy scenario, I can't imagine many ways where normal coinage or raw materials would be viable for an economic base. People could counterfeit it too easily.
What I could imagine is an actual trade in mana itself. Magic potential. You might be able to take it from other people, but you literally couldn't counterfeit it.
Magically gifted people could be rich, if they wanted to be. Magical creatures might be absurdly rich, if they wanted to trade away their magic to humans for goods.
Dragons might simply hoard magic power, making them highly irritable. First you bother them, then they realize they have to expend magical power to kill you? *grrr*
Magic potential would then be a great deal like a rice economy. People would buy commodities with it. With effort, anyone could make/grow some, but most people won't bother if they aren't good at it.
Gold reserves attributed to a nation's wealth wouldn't be shipped by cargo ship (unless it's WW2 and you're shipping your valuables to the U.S. to keep them out of Nazi hands). It sits in a vault and waits to be used as needed. Your can't do that with consumables like rice. If one nation tried to pay another with rice, and the other nation is in a gold standard, then the rice nation would be laughed away.
Using solidified magic is certainly more stable then perishable goods, but it'd still be susceptible to depletion via necessary use in some circumstances. The same for gold being paid out for aide or services, except that gold can be used in credit. A nation literally using its magical reserves in war would leave it's citizens without any monetary units until it could be replaced.
I don't know any more about Quantus' world then what he's shared, but in the system I'm proposing, getting rich off of gold alone would be pointless, since the higher value is the magic gems. Those that could use magic well enough to make fake or counterfeit gold wouldn't see the point. Their world would received instead around the gems, which would be policed by the Guild. And the only violation there would be passing off unauthorized work as the standard, which they would punish with impunity.
So if war broke out, and the magic was needed to fuel weapons and such, the citizens would still have coinage to use day to day. Magical reserves might dwindle, leaving some unable to power gadgets and tools, but the food makes could remain open.
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Well...No and Yes, and a little more no. Im not describing this well. There /is/ a naturally occurring ambient field of energy (though that doesnt really capture its shape very well), and in fact there are 4 of them, each like a different layer (Weather Jetstreams, Ley Line Network, etc; they are simply a natural feature of the World. People CANNOT store energy in themselves, that's fundamental. With the possible exception of some small internal/self-only things the Bloodmages can do (or Plot Items), all workings require an external Power Source. Certain locations have higher concentrations of a given energy; some are epic scale (like a volcano or Niagara-scale waterfall) but most are frontier mundane (a bend in the river with enough flow to turn a Mill-wheel, or the magic energy equivalent). This energy can be tapped by anyone in it's raw form, for example every farmhouse has a bowl of Fire-chits (I need a better name) on the mantle to spark the morning cook fire. It's not a magic trinket or curiosity, it's a simple match and a part of everyday life. It takes skill (and often equipment) to do more complex things with the energy (up to massive complex scientific Circles, done by University Mages), and Power is
often sometimes judged by how much energy one can channel at a given time, but every man/woman/child can do enough to release the energy (either raw or channeled into more complex manufactured devices).
I like the idea of any person being able to manufacture these base currencies (given a source like a bonfire or a natural "well" of some kind) because then the presence or lack of a supply chain would be less of an issue, so all regions could reasonably have all/most elements. But that has broader implications on the way labor and effort are valued, which makes me leery.
The alternative would be that while anyone could technically create such things (as in anyone can concentrate energy and fill these containers) but that it is simply not efficient enough on a small scale to be worth the time. The equivalent would be commodity chemicals: in modern times a Nation's Sulfur export is considered one of the better measures of it's overall wealth, and while anyone is capable of distilling sulfur from naturally occurring sources the processes that work on a small (hobby chemist) scale are far less efficient than those on a large/industrial scale, so nobody bothers. In this way it wouldnt be impossible for the landlocked desert folk to have some Water Magic in the village, but it wouldnt be common enough for them to have and use lots of the minted currency. The more I talk about this, the more I think it makes the most sense. It would still mirror a Commodity Currency (http://www.theperfectcurrency.org/main-commodity-based-currency/commodity-based-currency) but it would still be a geographically restricted resource, rather than a pure labor resource (which would encourage some farily despicable slavery motivations). So instead of a family becoming New Money because they found an oil field in texas, they might become rich because they find a new hot spring on the side of their otherwise useless mountain. And on the other end of the spectrum, the hermit in the woods could still charge a container of Fire Magic with a lot of effort and firewood, and in so doing will have enough to stay warm through a snowstorm, but it simply wouldnt generate enough efficiently enough to be a route to wealth.
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No time to read the whole thread, but there is a market argument to be made here.
If anyone can just sit and fill containers with energy and it's more lucrative than farming then more people will do so. This in turn will drive down the relative worth of a single "erg", until it's no longer worth doing so for most.
You'll still have people earning a minimum wage storing energy (since anyone can do it, and it is apparently a no-qualification job). Essentially, you'd have a class of energy-farmers (serfs/slaves? That would depend on society/technology more than the type of currency). Still, depending on the efficiency of such methods, you might have quite a lot of energy stored about.
Re:slaves, I'd argue that the social norms/technology would have more of an influence on this. One of the reasons the whole noble/serf (or samurai/peasant) institution was perpetuated because the nobility were better armed. If anyone can store/use this magic, it seems to me this would be something of an equalizer.
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Gold reserves attributed to a nation's wealth wouldn't be shipped by cargo ship (unless it's WW2 and you're shipping your valuables to the U.S. to keep them out of Nazi hands). It sits in a vault and waits to be used as needed. Your can't do that with consumables like rice. If one nation tried to pay another with rice, and the other nation is in a gold standard, then the rice nation would be laughed away.
Using solidified magic is certainly more stable then perishable goods, but it'd still be susceptible to depletion via necessary use in some circumstances. The same for gold being paid out for aide or services, except that gold can be used in credit. A nation literally using its magical reserves in war would leave it's citizens without any monetary units until it could be replaced.
I don't know any more about Quantus' world then what he's shared, but in the system I'm proposing, getting rich off of gold alone would be pointless, since the higher value is the magic gems. Those that could use magic well enough to make fake or counterfeit gold wouldn't see the point. Their world would received instead around the gems, which would be policed by the Guild. And the only violation there would be passing off unauthorized work as the standard, which they would punish with impunity.
So if war broke out, and the magic was needed to fuel weapons and such, the citizens would still have coinage to use day to day. Magical reserves might dwindle, leaving some unable to power gadgets and tools, but the food makes could remain open.
Wouldn't a reduced supply in the face of normal or accelerated need in a rice-based economy just be inflation? Each unit of rice has a value. If there is less rice, the value goes up. Sure, if it gets too bad, everything goes into the crapper, but gold also fluctuates in supply as well. A new gold mine, or gold shipments lost at sea, etc. If the price of staple food and goods goes to extremes for whatever reason, economic shenanigans happen, even in a gold economy. The great depression took place when the US was on the gold standard.
In a high fantasy scenario, I can't imagine many ways where normal coinage or raw materials would be viable for an economic base. People could counterfeit it too easily.
What I could imagine is an actual trade in mana itself. Magic potential. You might be able to take it from other people, but you literally couldn't counterfeit it.
Magically gifted people could be rich, if they wanted to be. Magical creatures might be absurdly rich, if they wanted to trade away their magic to humans for goods.
Dragons might simply hoard magic power, making them highly irritable. First you bother them, then they realize they have to expend magical power to kill you? *grrr*
Magic potential would then be a great deal like a rice economy. People would buy commodities with it. With effort, anyone could make/grow some, but most people won't bother if they aren't good at it.
The thing is, rice has a direct and obvious value to everyone. Regardless of social standing, everyone can eat rice. Farmers can plant rice.
Salt didn't. It was like the platinum of its day. It was highly valued due to its scarcity, but it wasn't the only currency. Throughout most of history, there was still gold and silver used for regular transactions.
This is an exerpt from Wikipedia.
Since magic is a consumable currency, like salt or rice, there's no economic value for a society. A nation can't claim worth based on consumables alone, as they're not consistent.
Perhaps in a world of magic, magic itself is readily available. But if magic currency were the only currency, and a war suddenly depleted the Guild/nation's reserves, then the citizenry would be left to an unregulated barter system for everything until sufficient resources could be re-gathered to reform the currency.
This is all more or less the shadow Im trying to brighten up. I know that representative currency is moderately useless on an international scale, and that real national wealth is instead measured in terms of its commodities and exports. But from what I can see, while Commodities have historically been used for daily trade currency, it is only in developing nations, and eventually they all transition to some minted representative currency. Why is that?
Re:slaves, I'd argue that the social norms/technology would have more of an influence on this. One of the reasons the whole noble/serf (or samurai/peasant) institution was perpetuated because the nobility were better armed. If anyone can store/use this magic, it seems to me this would be something of an equalizer.
That's a whole other cultural juggling game Ill be playing: The culture is VERY big on inborn Rights and Destiny. This is equal parts nepotism and an astro-religion (the dominant religion/philosophy based on Astrology, and a fairly elaborate natural sky dance of a pair of electrically active moons and a whole lot of smaller meteoroids swarming about). But they also have a concept of not living up to your Destiny, which is the motivating force trying (and failing) to prevent entrenched noble families from becoming too decadent and useless. Its an odd duality between an inescapable path lots of expectations, and a drive to prove oneself worthy of the responsibility.
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This is all more or less the shadow Im trying to brighten up. I know that representative currency is moderately useless on an international scale, and that real national wealth is instead measured in terms of its commodities and exports. But from what I can see, while Commodities have historically been used for daily trade currency, it is only in developing nations, and eventually they all transition to some minted representative currency. Why is that?
Primarily because Consumables trading is too unstable, at least in non-magical communities, and Commodities are only a little better.
Precious metals are precious because they're rare. Small parts per million/billion in earth's composition. A new gold mine is a boon for a nation, but one isn't going to change the fate of a nation. The value remains because the percentages remain small despite new discoveries. Diamonds, as a commodity, seem to have a lasting value, but that's actually heavily regulated because they've found too many. It's said that they have warehouses of unprocessed diamonds sitting around because they need to control the market.
With your current plan, there's never going to be a shortage of Gems, because everyone can make them. They'd be better than any other commodity or consumable, in that it can be easily and readily replenished. But my concerns about that are...
Well...No and Yes, and a little more no. Im not describing this well. There /is/ a naturally occurring ambient field of energy (though that doesnt really capture its shape very well), and in fact there are 4 of them, each like a different layer (Weather Jetstreams, Ley Line Network, etc; they are simply a natural feature of the World. People CANNOT store energy in themselves, that's fundamental. With the possible exception of some small internal/self-only things the Bloodmages can do (or Plot Items), all workings require an external Power Source. Certain locations have higher concentrations of a given energy; some are epic scale (like a volcano or Niagara-scale waterfall) but most are frontier mundane (a bend in the river with enough flow to turn a Mill-wheel, or the magic energy equivalent). This energy can be tapped by anyone in it's raw form, for example every farmhouse has a bowl of Fire-chits (I need a better name) on the mantle to spark the morning cook fire. It's not a magic trinket or curiosity, it's a simple match and a part of everyday life. It takes skill (and often equipment) to do more complex things with the energy (up to massive complex scientific Circles, done by University Mages), and Power is often sometimes judged by how much energy one can channel at a given time, but every man/woman/child can do enough to release the energy (either raw or channeled into more complex manufactured devices).
I like the idea of any person being able to manufacture these base currencies (given a source like a bonfire or a natural "well" of some kind) because then the presence or lack of a supply chain would be less of an issue, so all regions could reasonably have all/most elements. But that has broader implications on the way labor and effort are valued, which makes me leery.
The alternative would be that while anyone could technically create such things (as in anyone can concentrate energy and fill these containers) but that it is simply not efficient enough on a small scale to be worth the time. The equivalent would be commodity chemicals: in modern times a Nation's Sulfur export is considered one of the better measures of it's overall wealth, and while anyone is capable of distilling sulfur from naturally occurring sources the processes that work on a small (hobby chemist) scale are far less efficient than those on a large/industrial scale, so nobody bothers. In this way it wouldnt be impossible for the landlocked desert folk to have some Water Magic in the village, but it wouldnt be common enough for them to have and use lots of the minted currency. The more I talk about this, the more I think it makes the most sense. It would still mirror a Commodity Currency (http://www.theperfectcurrency.org/main-commodity-based-currency/commodity-based-currency) but it would still be a geographically restricted resource, rather than a pure labor resource (which would encourage some farily despicable slavery motivations). So instead of a family becoming New Money because they found an oil field in texas, they might become rich because they find a new hot spring on the side of their otherwise useless mountain. And on the other end of the spectrum, the hermit in the woods could still charge a container of Fire Magic with a lot of effort and firewood, and in so doing will have enough to stay warm through a snowstorm, but it simply wouldnt generate enough efficiently enough to be a route to wealth.
Honestly, my concern with this is similar to knnn's. If every person can access every Element and make Gems, and the Gems are worth more than they'd make farming or baking or digging ditches or cleaning latrines, then why wouldn't they sit around and make Gems instead? There has to be a limiting factor in why people do what they do.
Religion and obligation is one thing, but it takes true faith to give up wealth readily available should you do something other than your designated part with a lower caste job and lower wages.
As I said before, if it were something I were developing, I'd make it so 100% can use magic, but a smaller percentage, perhaps even as low as 10%, can solidify it into Gems. Those that can make Gems do so, and those that can't do whatever trade they're good at. It could still fit into your religious system, as it will be considered that if you can make Gems, it's your calling and obligation to do so. Families that have generations of Gem-makers would be high class, but would have to walk the line between becoming decadent or superior.
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Honestly, my concern with this is similar to knnn's. If every person can access every Element and make Gems, and the Gems are worth more than they'd make farming or baking or digging ditches or cleaning latrines, then why wouldn't they sit around and make Gems instead? There has to be a limiting factor in why people do what they do.
Religion and obligation is one thing, but it takes true faith to give up wealth readily available should you do something other than your designated part with a lower caste job and lower wages.
Thats what I was trying to say in the last paragraph. It is /possible/ for anyone to make gems. It would not necessarily be easy or and would only be comparable to other more traditional occupations if you had access to some naturally occurring concentration, more or less equivalent to your own copper mine. In this way it would still be a natural resource, not something that is conjured out of thin air.
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As I said before, if it were something I were developing, I'd make it so 100% can use magic, but a smaller percentage, perhaps even as low as 10%, can solidify it into Gems. Those that can make Gems do so, and those that can't do whatever trade they're good at. It could still fit into your religious system, as it will be considered that if you can make Gems, it's your calling and obligation to do so. Families that have generations of Gem-makers would be high class, but would have to walk the line between becoming decadent or superior.
I do see where you are coming from on this, but for reasons I shouldnt go into too deeply here, it wont work. It's not as closely resembling the traditional fantasy setting as you describe, and Magic isnt nearly as...Magical I guess. It's very specific, very limited, and not as prone to supplanting everything else.
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Thats what I was trying to say in the last paragraph. It is /possible/ for anyone to make gems. It would not necessarily be easy or and would only be comparable to other more traditional occupations if you had access to some naturally occurring concentration, more or less equivalent to your own copper mine. In this way it would still be a natural resource, not something that is conjured out of thin air.
As I said before, if it were something I were developing, I'd make it so 100% can use magic, but a smaller percentage, perhaps even as low as 10%, can solidify it into Gems. Those that can make Gems do so, and those that can't do whatever trade they're good at. It could still fit into your religious system, as it will be considered that if you can make Gems, it's your calling and obligation to do so. Families that have generations of Gem-makers would be high class, but would have to walk the line between becoming decadent or superior.
I do see where you are coming from on this, but for reasons I shouldnt go into too deeply here, it wont work. It's not as closely resembling the traditional fantasy setting as you describe, and Magic isnt nearly as...Magical I guess. It's very specific, very limited, and not as prone to supplanting everything else.
Gotcha. Well, I guess you could get away with using magic itself as the common currency, but it sounds less and less like an organization would have any say in the condensed magical currency. Without their ability to oversee the actual 'gem' creation, I don't see how they're going to be involved.