Money as Worldbuilding
- Gideon Kalve Jarvis
- Jul 24
- 13 min read
One aspect of worldbuilding that regularly gets overlooked is the money. No, that's not quite accurate: there's a *lot* of aspects of worldbuilding that get overlooked all the time, but we allow it as readers and watchers and listeners because we suspend our disbelief and want to just get on with the plot without having to fret about stuff like, for some examples, where does the poo go, where does the water come from, where does the food come from and how does it get where it's needed, how do people clean their teeth (the short answer: usually they don't and that's one of the major reasons people didn't live so long in the days before fluoridated water: you lived just as long as your teeth held out), and what exactly *is* magic in the first place?
The answers to these questions are important because they tell us, the readers, a huge amount about the cultures that each had to answer the questions in their own ways.
In that same vein of inquiry, then, what exactly *is* money? I'm not talking about the typical gold, silver, and copper coins you see in typical fantasy settings since the earliest Gygaxian days. I mean what does that gold, silver, and copper actually *mean*? What does it represent? What makes those remarkably heavy little metal discs (or whatever shape they are) worth so much?
The simplest answer I can think of to that question, what money is, is this: it's an arbitrary unit of representative worth. The idea was first formalized, at least as far as we can tell, by Croesus, a Lydian king way back in the day, and now the origin of the phrase "rich as Croesus" (and if you don't use that phrase, I recommend that you try it out, if only to get people to give you funny looks) - since he was the guy who invented money, he naturally made sure he had the most of it for as long as possible. This isn't an unnatural progression of ideas, since with the advent of cities and bazaars, people quickly realized that actually bringing all the goods you intend to sell to market could be ridiculously taxing; far better to bring representations of your goods instead, at least if you were planning to sell in bulk, as was common with items like grain, flocks and herds, "job lots" of weapons for the warlord on the go, quarried stone, unworked timber, and so forth. From what I gather, these started as little clay figures that were then sealed inside of a jar along with promissory notes from the parties involved in the deal. When the parties intended to take their associated goods and go their separate ways, typically after said goods were brought for physical exchange, they would break the jar to tally up what went where, the origin of our term "breaking a contract." (A note about that link: do try to ignore the little chatbox trying desperately to get you to give the lawyers running that site your money; if you think you might be tempted, then I suggest you not click the link, even if it's an awfully good definition-article.)
Why is all of this important as a part of worldbuilding? Because it tells us exactly what is most valuable to a culture. In the example above, it's the stuff of life for bronze age society: food, building materials, equipage for military forces to allow you to take what you can't make yourself. What follows, then, are some examples of money in various fictional societies - and some real-world ones! - so that you can start to get an idea of what these peoples value most.
First off, of course, is my own fictional universe from The Man from Rock Bottom (and also the most in-depth review I'll conduct). In that book, while there are other spacefaring civilizations, we only encounter the Pan-Galactic Republic, which is at once a society that is very complicated and also very simple. For them, their money is made of up three types of coins: Solars, Lunars, and Sidereals ("sids"), each representing a unit of matter-to-energy conversion (or vice-versa as desired).
So what does this say about the people of the Republic? Well, for one it demonstrates that they've reached a point where they have sufficient technology that they're now in a post-scarcity society. In that kind of a society, the only real limits on what an individual can get are the practical ones. So, in order to put caps on how much any individual can draw from the reality forges of the Republic, which only have so much available conversion space at any given time, the introduction of money creates an easy way to keep track of all that.
But why bother with cash money at all? I mean physical coins, in the three denominations that I mention above. The simple answer: personal freedom. Cash money means that individual citizens of the Republic have portable, hard-to-trace wealth that they can spend however they please, whenever they please. This allows small businesses to spring up (in The Man from Rock Bottom these include a bakery and a smoothie vendor) and generally gives people another tool to use socially as well as financially.
More than just a matter of personal freedom, however, the meaning behind the money also carries philosophical importance. Last semester, when I asked my class of college first-year students (we're phasing out use of the word "freshmen," which I can understand might be seen as sexist, and since I don't want to alienate the people I might need to teach, since that would make the job much harder, I accept the change) what the formula "E=mC2" means (that "2" is "squared," but I haven't figured out how to do superscripts in this webpage format yet), none of them knew, or at least none of them would admit knowing. So as to avoid forcing a similar state of confusion on my readers, that's the formula for the conversion of matter to energy, the same formula used, for example, in generating the massive explosions of nuclear bombs as matter is converted violently into energy.
What this formula also means, however, is that everything is also made of "C." After all, you can turn a mathematical formula any which way you please, so that everything on one side can equal everything on the other. And what is "C"? It's the speed of light. To put it in even simpler terms: Einstein realized that everything is made of light. More than that, everything is infinite, without beginning or end, an infinite universe expanding infinitely into infinity.
Everything is made of light. Everything is infinite. That means everything has value, has worth, and people - sapient beings - have the most worth of all, because even in the infinite expanse of the universe, sapient life is the rarest thing of all, and scarcity creates value. Even with all the advances of technology, with its ability to transfer light to matter to energy, the people of the Republic can't make life, that very specific configuration of light and matter and energy, out of nothing, only through the channels provided by nature, though enhanced and redirected via science. And of all the life that exists, they can't intentionally make people, though they can create situations and environments where people might come into being and reach their best potential.
This leads rather naturally to placing a great deal of value on individuals, especially those individuals who take full advantage of the many opportunities provided by the Republic, especially its free education and job placement - considered fundamental needs for society, since by getting their citizens trained and employed, making them productive, then giving them access to the freedom needed in order to reach their potential, as represented by the cash money used by street vendors, the Republic pays for itself. Of course, the policymakers of the Republic take this to its somewhat stretched extreme, which means that the life of a Republic citizen belongs to that citizen, not the government. Because of this, after appropriate counseling and/or conflict resolution mediation has been provided, and appropriate safety measures are put in place to keep non-participants in such acts from harm, if a Republic citizen wants to take their own life, or to spend it by engaging in mutually consensual duels or even street battles, then they are allowed. This is also why the military forces of the Republic are called "mercenaries": they're free citizens who choose to use their lives as collateral in their extremely hazardous jobs.
Legendary pulp writer E. E. "Doc" Smith pointed out in his Lensman series of books that Good as a concept is just pragmatic, though on a grander scale than most of us consider in our daily lives. Piers Anthony pointed out something similar (I believe it was in his Xanth novel The Source of Magic, but I may be misremembering, as it's been a hot minute since I last read that book) in a "prisoner's dilemma" situation: if you're presented with only one instance of being given the option to act Evil, to betray someone's trust for immediate gain, then you're better off going with that option. But if the situation is opened up, and assuming that people will refuse to cooperate with people who betray them, then it's much more sensible to be Good, to not betray people who don't betray you and turn in those who do betray you, to be honest and trustworthy and moral because of the long-term gains to be had. All of which, of course, requires higher order thinking and the capacity to consider long-term consequences, but as multiple sources indicate, that's the part of our brain that develops last of all.
All of which requires, then, that the people who run the Republic also be moral, honest, upright people. And they have to *mean* it: it has to be something real, not just a show put on for self-aggrandizement or selfish pragmatism. As Gret said in The Man from Rock Bottom, trying to explain what I've just written to one of the villains of that story: "There's no such thing as the Greater Good. There's just good."
Phew! Okay, that took us far afield from economics. But that's why I wanted to talk about money as a form of worldbuilding: see how much came out of just that simple starting point? Honestly, as the formula E=mC2 should make clear, when you're building a world it doesn't really matter where you start, since it all ends up at the same place in the end. All that matters is that you keep going, and you don't turn away just because the journey is going to be hard - and it will be! - because you trust that the end result will be worth it all.
And that's another life philosophy right there.
All right! Now for a few other examples I've taken from assorted sources, so you can see where other creators have placed the values of their societies, enough value that it's worth real money:
From the real world, and also from the Discworld (the novel Making Money, specifically), there's the idea that money should be based on something "real." Usually that means gold, since it's the "noble metal," immune to tarnish or degradation with age, besides being very pretty. It can also mean silver, or perhaps other precious items, such as gemstones. Mostly, though, what all of this boils down to in reality is the trust of the consumer that their money will be honored at the places where they shop. This is how the various e-currencies have been able to come into being, for example: because people believe that they should be worth something, so they are...for as long as that belief lasts.
Also present in Terry Pratchett's Making Money is basing currency on the potential productivity of a host of more-or-less mindless golems that the city of Ankh-Morpork holds in international trust. The rest of the nations of the world put up with this simply because it ensures the stability of their own markets, which can then base themselves on the Ankh-Morporkian Dollar. Stability comes into its own, and the wild and wooly world of the dungeoncrawling days of the Discworld come to a slow but certain decline even as the world itself becomes a much nicer place to live (as I believe one of the developers of the Paathfinder game setting world Golarion once wrote, though I'm having a hard time finding the direct quote at present - namely that the world wasn't written for living in; it was written for adventure).
Credit: The "credit" shows up in so many places that I'm not sure I could list them all, even with the powers of Google and Wikipedia combined (though TV Tropes does give it a pretty darn good try). Overall, though, the notion behind the credit (a lot of the time, anyway) is what I mentioned above: it's a way to ensure that people in a post-scarcity situation don't overtax the infrastructure in place, breaking paradise by demanding too much all at once. At the same time, the money is based on the trust its users have in the system of government that provides them credit; in Star Trek, this usually comes up only as window dressing, a part of the scenery that comprises the greater whole (since the crew needs something to gamble when they play cards), but in Star Wars, as seen in Episode I, Republic Credits aren't honored on Tatooine because they aren't "real."
David Brin's Uplift series uses access to the Galactic Library as a form of currency, since the Library is supposed to be the repository of all the knowledge of a civilization that spans millions upon millions of years of development and experience. This indicates the values of the society of the Uplift universe: conservatism, assuming that everything is already known or has already been experienced, but also with a strong reliance on education and technology as practical demonstrations of power. Also the idea that everything needs to be recorded and preserved, which includes ecological preservation.
Walter John Williams' cyberpunk setting (start with the book Hardwired) has a complex mix of designer drugs (both the illicit and the medical sorts), stock options, different currencies with highly variable values based on an ever-changing international money market, and a somewhat nebulous system of barter. It's messy and crazy and kind of cool, as are the books, in my opinion. Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash has a similar setup, though it uses more cash...though not US Dollars, since in that universe, they've been hit so hard with inflation as to be functionally useless outside of the million or even billion dollar bill denomination, and lots of them.
White Wolf Publishing had several monetary systems that were interesting. In their Wraith line, money was literally souls pounded down into a coin, called an obol after the pennies left on the eyes of the dead to pay the ferryman Charon, each obol made of a single forged soul, each of them moaning or weeping softly for all eternity. In their fantasy line, Exalted, money was of two types. One, actually the lesser of the two types of money, is of the more traditional Gygaxian sort, represented by silver bars. This monetary system demonstrated tangibly the rising power of the mercantile-based Guild that was trying to rival all world governments with the power of fantasy capitalism, especially with the sale of slaves and drugs. The other type, the more dominant one, was based on the natural magic of the Earth, solidified into a substance called jade, but which had more in common with metal than the mineral we'd recognize, and was an essential component for making items of power and for conducting various mystic rituals, so even jade dust had immense value. In other words, the majority of that fantasy world's economy was based on crystalized magic.
The game Fallen London (which I enjoy a very great deal - I'm on there as GideonKalveJarvis if you ever want an in-game hand or other appendage) makes use of the Echo as its basis of currency. As the game itself explains it, each Echo is the sound left behind after a secret has been spoken. An entire system of currency based on secrets given literal form. That game also gives you, the player, the option of creating another sort of currency when you get rather late in the game, and gives you a number of options for basing that currency's value, ranging from the promises of an eternal entity akin to a pagan god in power, the potential productive population of a location, and several others.
A system of favors runs deep through a lot of settings, as well as in the real world, though typically only to a limited degree. The Long Earth series, for example, makes use of this system on a small-scale, with people chipping in as needed, giving what they can and getting what they need. If you're a midwife, for instance, then your neighbors will typically provide you with what you need, bread and milk and clothes and other necessities, because they know that they'll need you the next time a mother is giving birth. In this kind of a rustic setting - akin to early Christianity and a few other small religious-based communities (but not, notably, much akin to the governmental philosophy that used the official slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need") - people share what they have because it's good sense, and they don't take more than they need because that could spell disaster, and if you break the unspoken rules then you quickly start to run out of favors. Typically these economic utopias don't last very long, though: as soon as the lure of enough profit looms as the people in such a system prosper, eventually some knucklehead almost invariably decides to cash in big all at once, and that's the end. Just as with all economic systems, eventually the system of favors relies on trust and faith, and falls apart just as thoroughly when that faith departs.
Sometimes "favors" take on a far more tangible form, and in far less kindly circumstances. In most criminal settings, "favors" or "markers" are functionally as close to "legal tender" as the illegal people in these settings can manage, as is shown to practical effect in the works of Damyon Runyon, such as the stories that eventually became "Guys and Dolls." White Wolf's Mind's Eye Theater makes heavy use of Influence as an essential game mechanic, which allows its players to "cash in" their influence in an assortment of fields, such as Business, the Church, the Streets, and Underworld criminal contacts, to accomplish various tasks, which can include generating quick cash. The John Wick universe, most visually and viscerally, puts these favors into a highly tangible form as gold coins and markers, the former for typical favors like sanctuary for a night or a gun, the latter for really serious favors, marked with blood to indicate just how serious they are, and whether they've been honored or not.
And here are a few other links that you might find useful:
https://list.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_fictional_currencies - I don't recommend this one unless you're very careful - it's a Fandom Wiki site after all (not to be confused with Wikipedia), and if you don't watch it closely, it can start to overload your systems with cookies and adware; the information presented is fairly comprehensive, though
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