Skinning the Dead for Fun and Profit

Regular readers will know that I consider Classic D&D's Treasure Types to be a horrible, irredeemable mess that should have died a final death around 1989. So it should come as no surprise to hear I've been tinkering with treasure generation yet again.

Semi-related to which, here's a half-formed thought occasioned by the monster Yield mechanic of Hackmaster 4E and by the Egg Hunter campaign concept from Noism's epic Let's Read the Monstrous Compendium.*

Skin/gut/nest-rob a treasureless beastie: a party can garner 10 x lvl^2 gp per turn of gutting, up to a maximum gp value = its XP.

The form this treasure value takes is dependent upon the creature type (hide/fur, feathers/scales, organs/secretions, eggs/young, etc.), but usually has to be hauled back to town and converted to hard cash at a market.

Bigger, more dangerous creatures are worth more to interested purchasers (fur traders, tanners, haberdashers, corset-makers, wizards and what-not), but take longer to render down into sweet convertible value.

Why a value per turn? Coz more experienced adventurers are more practised in skinning and jointing beasties purely as a function of their experience as scavenging murderhobos. Pay a time penalty: derive extra loot.

And that is how you get value out of whales, beavers, owlbears, and similar loot-less beasties. 

*Ka-ching!*

* On the subject of Let's Reads. Yes, LRM will be returning. I intend to finish it if it drives me mad.

Pic Source: wikimedia commons.

Lets Read Mythus pt8

Welcome again to our weekly examination of the Dangerous Journeys: Mythus RPG, the post-TSR fantasy heartbreaker in which EGG parodied and deconstructed his own mystique as the father of role-playing. Look upon his works, ye nerdy, and despair.

Today we will be taking an exploratory spork to the heap of financial auditing tapioca that is Heroic Persona Resources, an especial delight exclusive to "...this game far beyond any other."

Chapter 10, part 6: Heroic Persona Resources

After several pages of legible and potentially usable tables (dissected for possible value last week) the infamous Mythus textwalls reappear with malicious intent and a decidedly rapey glint in their eyes. Most of pages 112-113 are a straight word-for-word reprint of the coinage and general item price notes from Mythus Prime. Even the Metal Values table and its accompanying footnotes are reproduced verbatim. This was windy and overlong first time around, and doesn't get any better on second reading.

There are short new sections on coinage and the value of money in inflationary or deflationary areas. This is exactly as dull as you picture it being. A copper standard (5x the value of Mythus normal BUC) is suggested for particularly high cost-of-living locales: worlds away from D&D's assumption that chunks of gold should be the normative coin of exchange. On which subject there is a note on converting prices to Mythus BUCs from unnamed 'other game systems' which use gold as the assumed price base.

There's also an aside on valuing gemstones in BUCS - 10,000 per carat up to 10, more per carat for larger stones. So many zeroes! Of such little use.

Determining HP Wealth
Another reprint of material we first saw in Mythus Prime: Net Worth, Cash on Hand, Bank Account and DMI are all defined again. There's an expanded Initial HP Finances table which contains the data on all these things orphaned on p114. Looking at this table rams home the point that it's really good to be high SEC in Advanced Mythus. Good as in, your starting money and kit can be up to five orders of magnitude richer than that of the low-caste peons with whom you associate. I sincerely wonder why any high SEC character ever bothers going off adventuring rather than sitting safe and comfortably at home atop their fat stacks of cash.

Wealth Adjustment For Age
A new wrinkle. One paragraph saying that the younger you are the poorer you are, and the older the richer. The accompanying table modifying starting money could be simplified down to two columns and a footnote with no loss of meaningful data.

Spot the potential for simplification

So between the skill adds and the wealth increases that accrue to older characters in Advanced Mythus that's everyone with an eye to the main chance playing rich fogies. In that respect Sadvanced Yiffus is little like Traveller, only with a chargen system that won't kill you (however much you might pray for the merciful release of death).


Net Worth
This is Bank Account + value of Possessions. Possessions are divided into Dwelling, Clothes, Weapons & Armour, Transportation, Misc. and Securities.

• The stuff you own is valued at half purchase price for the purpose of determining Net Worth. Your stuff is worth what you could get for it if you sold it, not what you paid for it.
• Your horse doesn't count as part of your Net Worth at all. Which is odd...
• Exception to the 'half value' rule is Securities (real estate, gems and coins), which are always costed at full purchase value. No one cares if a house/gold/jewel is 'used'. Quite how this last ties into the earlier 'gemstones in BUCS' section's assertion that purchase price mark-up on gems is 2-7 times their resale value is gracefully ignored.

There is also some non-useful guidance on buying equipment: "Housing, clothing, weapons, armour and transportation should take top priority."

This whole section is almost tear-inducingly dull and makes me actively hate it. As a taster for the tone of the section, here's a table from the worked example of an HP's Net Worth:

I hear Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser weeping.

No, they are not joking.

This part of the Papers and Paychecks Advanced Mythus comprehensive chargen mini-game is absolutely not fun; it is a nitpicking, beancounting chore above-and-beyond the standards of earlier sections. Any sane gamer should just disregard this whole mess and use something like ckutalik's Quick Start Gear Tables (to be found at his damn fine Hill Cantons blog): 4 quick die rolls and you're ready to go. Life is too short for aught else.

Special Connections
HPs get one NPC contact for each Trait they have at >90. So an HP can either be skilled and popular, or they can end up with crap stats ~and~ no mates. This particular 'reward for winning' at chargen is a classic gygaxism, much like extra XP for high stats in Classic D&D (a rule I never grokked).

The actual Special Connection tables (orphaned overleaf from their parent text) are naff: d20 gives you the occupation of your special imaginary friend's imaginary friend, and that's it. I presume you're expected to roll on the Instant HP Information Tables we looked at last week for more on these characters; no guidance is given. There is nothing here that the One True DMG's Quick NPC Generation tables didn't do first and better.

Possessions
Page 116 has more waffle on stuff your HP owns, including a snidey little rule that 'if you forget where your character is carrying it, he left it at home'. I quote: "...what your Heroic Persona has on hand must be known at all times." This just screws players over in the name of simulation IMO. Your mates at the table will not - and arguably shouldn't - take as much care and attention over the imaginary gear of their imaginary character as actual real people will take over preparing for an actual expedition. YMMV however.

Encumbrance
After the avuncular advice that any soldier (or boy scout) knows the importance of distributing carried weight evenly, encumbrance gets handwaved. No, really. After all the nitpicking we've endured so far Enc is handled via player discretion and GM fiat.

So let's just unpack that last in the light of recent reading, shall we? According to Advanced Mythus calculating every last brass razoo of net worth and the location of each and every carried item are worthwhile investments of player time and effort, but tracking the bulk and weight of this same swag and survival gear is just *snerk* absurd.

Now that's just lazy. If you're going to be comprehensive in the "...elective complexities..." of your 400+ page RPG then you don't knock off early when it comes to putting actual numbers to things that might be some use in play. It's not like Advanced Mythus lacks sufficient mechanical detail on which to hang some quick-and-dirty Encumbrance rules. Simply writing something like

"An HP suffers a cumulative -10% to move rate and all skill checks each time pounds weight carried exceeds his/her Physical Muscular Power Attribute" 

ain't rocket surgery. (note: it actually took me longer to look up what the Advanced Mythus Strength stat was called than it did to think that rule up!)

Instead of any actual useful bloody rules the Encumbrance sub-section is padded out by paragraphs of waffle about situational kit lists (adventurers don't march around town in full fighting kit, you don't go ghoul-hunting in courtly garb, etc.), an unexpected tangent about how players are expected to "...think, reason, imagine and solve problems on your own against a background of sketchy information...", and by repeated admonitions on the importance of tracking nature, cost and location of each item.

I can (*gluk gluk*) feel... my... (*gluk gluk*) braurgh... (*gluk gluk*) melgipublin...

Thus far the Heroic Persona Resources section has been 5 pages of non-useful gab: an 'orrible mishmash of the overly specific and the hand-wavey which has kept my drinking arm even busier than expected and filled me with uncharitable feelings to all involved in the creation of this game.

Oh well, I'm the one who volunteered to scour this particular Augean Stables of a game. Press on.

Special Equipment
Some notes on equipment scarcity: Standard, Specially Constructed and Rare items (in order of increasing rarity). You'll probably have to wait for non-standard kit to be made to order. Again, vague to the point of uselessness; I know what 'rare' means as an abstract concept. Give me actual mechanics or GTFO. (*gluk gluk*) For the record: WFRP has better (for which read ‘actual’) scarcity rules.

Transportation
Half a page on how the various types of horses, camels and elephants you can buy to ride around on differ. Do you need to know the difference between a genet, a garron and a palfrey? Nope, me neither. And if I do I can look it up in an encyclopaedia. (*gluk gluk*)

Equipment Lists
Pages 118-122 are kit lists, a dull but necessary element of traditional RPGs. Rarely have I been so relieved to see page-after-page of bland price lists. It may just be Mythus Stockholm Syndrome setting in, but mere well-tabulated dullness is a relief after the dense-yet-vague blah blah of what has come before.

You have separate price lists for Standard, Specially Constructed and Rare general equipment, and then additional tables for specialist Heka Equipment, Mounts, Land Vehicles and Ships.

General kit (Standard, Specially Constructed or Rare) is as you'd expect for a fantasy RPG. The list entries will be immediately familiar to anyone who has perused the AD&D equipment lists, albeit with a couple of extra zeroes tacked on the prices. Livestock, tools, musical instruments, furs, broadcloth, torture devices; its all in there. Its nice that EGG was able to recycle his research into the costs of the minutiae of medieval life. All told it's a dull but worthy, and at least logically organised in a way that is entirely too rare in Advanced Mythus.

Heka Gear is non-magical but necessary trappings for ‘doing magic’, and covers everything from tweezers and magnifying glasses up to tomes of spells and alanthors. Some Heka gear (cauldrons, prayer beads, tomes, etc) is marked as being able to store Heka points. Such things are expensive, which keeps alchemy a rich man's hobby.

The Mounts table is *insanely* specific. Even the King Arthur Pendragon RPG - a game which is entirely about guys with a horse-centric lifestyle - isn't as exhaustive as Advanced Mythus in the sheer variety of horseflesh on offer. Nor does KAP have prices for three types of camel and two types of elephant.

Two letdowns from what's an otherwise pretty comprehensive table:

1. No footnote to explain if the prices for the exotic mounts are local or import price: shame that.
2. No actual fantasy mounts. Mythus is supposed to be a fantasy game, so where's my thoats, war lizards, pegasi, riding tigers and Tarns at?

The Land Vehicles table offers prices for five types of increasingly elaborate cart, from two-wheeled tipcart up to royal carriage. Damage points are listed in case you need to smash them up.

Boats
Last but not least in the gear section is p122, a full-page boxout containing a very familiar list of medieval ship types (raft, galley, warship, etc.) along with rules for damage, movement speeds, turning radius and seaworthiness. In effect it’s a potted system of sailing rules, and stands as poignant proof that EGG could actually pack a lot of info into a small word count when required.

And that concludes our examination of the character generation chapter of Advanced Mythus. It's been...emotional. Section 6 in particular has been an unremitting desolation of tosh that makes me want to take those responsible by the scruff of the neck and rub their noses in it. Even the last little surprise Easter egg of unexpected sailing rules only throws the preceding waste of words into stark high relief. There is literally NOTHING here for players of Classic D&D (except possibly that unacknowledged silent minority of accountancy fetishists).

Let us depart (staggering and veering) and never speak of this again.

The only thing I've come away with from this week's masochistic exercise? Desolation of Tosh would make a good name for the wasteland left when a civilisation collapses under the weight of an infestation of banalising systemisers (accountants, auditors, actuaries, etc). The numbingly tedious records they created are still uncovered by unfortunate archaeologists, who recoup their losses by selling them on as insomnia cures, wards against interesting people, and/or the material components of sleep spells.

Next Time: Chapter 11: Core Game Systems - doan stuffs in Advanced Mythus games. Forthcoming delights include combined efforts, rolling via guesswork, 'try and try again', and why ten degrees of difficulty is not excessive.

Pic Sources: Mythus rulebook, Jollyjack's Collected Curios

Auctions, or "What you want for it?" "What you got?"

I've been watching “Deadwood” and reading up on the South African diamond rush recently. People in boomtowns were often cash rich, but they blew through this windfall wealth at an accelerated rate, living the high life and paying wildly inflated prices for the simplest of necessities. The applicability of these violent boomtown settings to traditional D&D is so obvious as to need no further context.

I'm not suggesting adding a sliding scale price system to LL (although a simple one would show why all those poor, put upon merchants on the RETs actually bother carting stuff hither and yon...), or even - Gygax forbid! - exhaustive price-adjusted trade tables (pace Alexius of Tao of D&D), I'm mainly interested in this for the purposes of varying the value of objects looted from the dungeon.

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine that one-of-a-kind dungeon goods are given a flat value of "blah many gp". Sure, it KISSes things, but it hardly reflects the chaotic "easy come, easy go" life of an adventurer. So, stealing a little from GW’s “Mordheim” (a game I love for being grimy, mercenary, and oh-so-D&D) I propose Random Value objets d'art.

Instead of listing a golden chalice as being worth 500gp, said item might have a random value of 2d8x50gp, with the specific price only being determined when the chalice is actually sold on. (note: using a 2dX bell curve keeps the probable resale value near the centre of the range, but allows for occasional wacky variation to reflect the vagaries of the market)

In the Dungeon
Just pop the description, weight and random value on a card and toss it to the players. How can they be expected to know the random value? Well, the Dwarf or *cough* Scout character does a thumbnail appraisal on the spot, of course. Yon guesstimate will do until it comes time to sell the gaudy trinket on.

At the Auction House
The kind of ancient and exotic curios recovered from dungeons have a specialised and limited market. Although many people desire them, only a select few have the ready cash on hand to purchase adventurers' loot. And a small, specialist market is glutted fast. At auction (what, did you think these things were hocked to the local blacksmith or something?) you'll get full price for the initial lot offered, then -20% for each successive lot sold. When a multiplier of x0gp (-100%) is reached the local antiquities market is saturated and no further goods can be sold for a worthwhile price.

E.g.: each lot of goods on offer has 2d6x50gp resale value. Lot 1 sells for full price. Lot 2 for 2d6x40, lot 3 for 2d6x30, etc…

Note: the DM only rolls for the item’s ~actual~ value when the lot is finally auctioned. Up until then only a rough idea of the resale value (the possible range of values) is possible.

Going back to the dungeon and gathering more loot resets the local auction price. While the PCs are off exploring, killing and stealing local buyers are busy replenishing their purses by selling on their new acquisitions, extending lines of credit, writing excitable letters to their business partners, and squabbling with the new sharks entering the bidding pool. All sales are final (barring the old standby of stealing goods back from the buyer).

Bright Lights, Big City
Market value of objet d’art is more stable in larger settlements. More money is chasing the same goods (less bid depreciation), but some of this larger pool of potential buyers will have their eyes only on specific lots (offsetting potential bid inflation). My KISS rule of thumb is that these factors cancel one another out.

Towns & Cities, and their impermanent counterparts Caravans and Trade Fairs, lose resale value more slowly than do boomtown adventureburgs. They lose only -15% and -10% value for each successive lot. This gives adventurers a reason to travel to the big city (you can't offload that big score in Hicksville), and to treat merchant caravans as something other than wandering piggy banks.

Lot	Ad'burg	Town or Merchant Caravan	City or Trade Fair
1st	x100%	x100%	x100%
2nd	x80%	x85%	x90%
3rd	x60%	x70%	x80%
4th	x40%	x55%	x70%
5th	x20%	x40%	x60%
6th	x0%	x25%	x50%
7th	-	x10%	x40%
8th	-	x0%	x30%
etc...	-	-	etc...

(Optional Rules)

• Paying for an appraiser (price?) allows a re-roll of the lowest die when determining auction value. The re-roll stands in all cases.
• Pawnbrokers, fences, kopje wallopers and other shady bottom feeders will buy up excess objet d'art in a glutted market, but will offer only 1d6x5% of the rolled value (rolled per lot). It’s better than nothing, but not by much...

Value by Weight
Sometimes, particularly when the market is already glutted by an embarrassment of riches, it'll be worth breaking objet d'art down for their bullion value. As seen in that masterful study of historically accurate high medieval chivalry "Knight's Tale", you simply knock a chunk off the item and sell it on as gold, silver or whatever, losing the value added of the workmanship. The DM will probably be able to pull a price out of his butt for this, but don’t expect to get more than 10+1d10% of the objet d’arts full auction value as a bullion price.

The Wider World
Normal farming and fishing villages, or logging or mining camps, have no interest in dungeon-derived objet d'arts. Quite apart from the fact that the entire village is probably worth about the same as the goods on offer, what good will these fancy toys do a bunch of turnip farmers over a hard winter? If anything they're just going to attract the cupidity of bandits, monsters or other adventurers.

Adventureburgs are atypical of settlements of their size in that they are single industry boomtowns, that industry being the re-supply, entertainment and general mulcting of the walking goldmine that is a party of successful dungeon crawlers.

edit: little bit of editing and tidying

Money in the Vaults Game

D&D has a long and dishonourable history of treating things that are rare and precious as little more than vendor trash. Bad comedy like coins that weighed 1/10th of a pound, and the effective worthlessness of low denomination coinage beyond 1st level (typified as “grab the gold and platinum, leave the junk”) resulted in ridiculousness of people having to spend a cartload of gold on their training and living expenses.

Some people (“Hi Jeff. Hi Sham”) are happy to embrace the absurdity for the sake of old school authenticity, but my preference is to throw out the stupidity of the D&D monetary system (and replace it with new and improved stupidity of my own devising).


Coinage
“So that’s 200 pounds of gold for rent and training costs… WHAT?!”

First off the base coinage needs poking with the screwdriver. Back in the sepia-tinted days of 1E coins in D&D-land were supposed to be 10 to the pound. In fact this coin weight (abbreviated ‘cn’) was the standard measure of encumbrance. There were doubtless good game play reasons for this, but it sticks in my craw to imagine that a D&D copper piece is larger, and 60% heavier, than a £5 coin. 3E moderated the sheer gas-huffing insanity by reducing coins to 50 to the lb (a little more than the weight of a modern British 50p piece), which made them big enough to be visually impressive (see the illustration on pp 168 of the 3.5 PHB), but small and light enough to be used by humans.

3E’s simplification of the coinage system (“Bye-bye electrum, you screwy nowt-nor-sommat metal!”) did nothing to fix the sheer b0rkage of value scaling. Apparently in D&D-land a copper penny – the smallest small change available - has a purchasing power 1/100th that of gold.

…

Eh? Two cents worth of copper is worth 1/100th of $260 dollars of gold. That needs fixing.

So here’s my personal fix for phat lewts in D&D. It’s nice and simple, and retains a decimal counting system, so anyone intimidated by British old money needn’t flee the scene with their head afire, screaming that all is lost and a madman is on the loose. ;)

Copper coins retain their existing value
These new coppers are the same value as old coppers, but are shrunk so that there are 250 to the lb (about the weight of a British penny). This turns the copper piece into proper small change, which, even if it doesn’t redeem it from the status of ignored trash, at least redeems it from being the subtle encumbrance trap that OOTS talked about.
Historical aside: as late as the 19th century the British Royal Mint refused to coin in copper, deeming small change too lowly and fiddly to bother with. As people still needed copper coinage for low value purchases (food, beer, etc.) private local mints started to issue copper tokens of exchange that could be redeemed at nominated agents (banks, coin dealers, even breweries) for true legal tender. Selgin’s “Good Money”.

Bronze pieces replace silver
These are standard coin size (50/lb), which is a pretty big chunk of change. As a comparison a British reader might want to stack two 2p pieces; that’s what a bronze piece weighs.

Silver coins replace gold
I’ll state that explicitly: the sp is the new gp (waits for the uproar to die down). There are a couple of reasons for this grotesque heresy.

1) There is historical precedent for using silver as a primary coinage. Spanish pesos were silver, and they were the nearest thing to a universal coinage that the real world ever had.
2) Silver is a precious metal in its own right, and should be something more than yawn-worthy small change after the first couple of levels. Bear in mind that before the grotesque inflation of the 20th century a silver dollar or British crown was serious money in it own right.

Contemporary comparison: take a British 50p piece (or, even better, an old half crown), feel the heft of it. Now imagine that coin is enough to buy a decent meal for two. That’s a D&D silver.

Gold coins replace platinum
Historically gold has only been used for high value coins. It is not something that even the flashest of Flash Harries gives to a beggar. Increasing the purchasing power of gold by a factor of 10 puts it into something like the relationship that historical gold coins like the British sovereign or the French Louis d’Or had with their equivalent small change.

At the time of writing (March 2009) a troy ounce of gold is worth ~$900, or about $260 per 1/50th lb. Yes, your humble D&D gp really is a major store of value in its own right. When put in that perspective gold is a big deal again, and a chest of gold (you know, the proverbial king’s ransom) really is a treasure wholly worth talking about.

Amounts in platinum are divided by 10
Platinum is rare and noteworthy. It was only discovered in the real world in the 1550s (and not subjected to scientific analysis before the 1740s) and, even in D&D land, something 10 times as valuable as gold should be rare and precious. As a DM I intend to make finding platinum – a metal no longer minted by modern smiths – a significant event in its own right.

New Currency Conversion Table

1 cp =	1/10 bp
10 cp =	1 bp =	1/10 sp
100 cp =	10 bp =	1 sp =	1/10 gp
1,000 cp =	100 cp =	10 sp =	1 gp	1/10 pp
10,000 cp =	1,000 bp =	100 sp =	10 gp =	1 pp

No, stop looking at the gp column. Silver is the new coinage standard. Gold is the rare and precious treasure that you go rooting around in tombs to find.

Note: For ease of understanding these values apply in my own games only. On this blog I’ll use the values that we all know and love from the SRD.


Cash in Bulk
“Can’t we melt these stupid coins down into something more portable?”

Money can found in coinage (1/50th lb) or in 2,000 coin treasury bars (40lb, approx 3 stones) for major purchases. Bars are an old friend of mine from Birthright days. I don’t know about you, but I always felt that the figures in the Stronghold Builders Guide and the Epic Level Joke Book could do with a few zeroes knocked off them. Having gold and silver bars, and even bronze ingots, knocking about allows you to build castles and the like while keeping the numbers within the realms of finger counting.

"So that's 280,000gp at 12,000gp a month..." or "So that's 140 bars at 6 bars a month..." Which do you find easier? Remember folks: spreadsheets are for work; not for fun. ;)


Beyond the Gold Standard
"There's nothing here but money. What a waste of time that was!"

So what do you do around the mid-high levels when even chests of gold and foot-high platinum idols doesn't get the PCs excited anymore? That's when 'power as currency' comes into play. I know some 4th Ed players talk about ‘gold at heroic levels, platinum at paragon, astral diamonds at epic level’ and, although I for one think of this as the ravings of a world entirely divorced from any connection with either history or heroic fantasy (at least as I know it), there is something to be said for having incredibly costly portable stores of value in a high fantasy setting. Fortunately D&D has low bulk, high value lewts in spades.

Gems – 100-5K gp
These have been around since at least 1E. And nothing else quite says big score like a ruby the size of your fist.

Ioun Stones – 4K-40K gp
Gems with added extra-planar power. What’s not to like? You know a guy is hardcore when he has the value of a kingdom orbiting his head.

Gem of Rebirth – ~20K gp
A one-shot contingent resurrection effect bound into a gem of 10K gp value (thereby acting as its own material component). Even if you can only carry one, how useful…

Power Components – value varies
Let’s say you know that a player wants to create a particular magic item (eg: a staff of earth). Why not have him quest for the eyes of a basilisk, the heart stone of a Gelab Duhr, a handful of elemental True Earth, or the finger bones of a great dwarven mason? Each of these has an XP value that discounts that of the item he, or someone willing to trade for them, wants to create. In effect, character power in the form of loot. And what’s more D&D than becoming stronger by killing and looting?

Planar Currencies – value varies
Planescape had planar pearls, 4E has astral diamonds. The Tome Series gave us incomplete (but really quite obvious with a little thought about power components) rules for the use of soul gems, Hope, Inspiration, and Raw Chaos. One currency for each of the four alignments, each especially suited to the creation of effects that match its alignment. The reagents quests practically write themselves!

Wishes – 25K gp
The wish spell as written in the SRD is ludicrously exploitable. Recently I’ve started using the Tome Series version of wish as the Stone of Jordan benchmark of the high level economy. Basically the Tome Series version of wish limits summoned creatures like Efreeti to casting “no XP cost effects” only (it's here, under "No Wishing for More Wishes"), and big and important people are happy to use (planar?) binding promissory notes issued by extra planar entities able to cast these wishes as a medium of exchange with a set value.

“The Sultan of All the Efreet / The Infernal Throne / The Celestial Bureaucracy (delete as appropriate) promises to pay the bearer on demand the sum of one wish.”

note: Bat in the Attic talks about money in his games here. What do you know: looks like I accidentally re-invented the monetary system from Harn. Oops.

terminal note added 24/03/09