Wealth in rpgs gets complicated and is often glossed over. Players are often dealing in thousands, or even millions, of gold coins; now individual gold coins don’t weigh that much but in their thousands they do. And new logistical issues get created, how long does it take to count a hundred thousand gold coins and how much space does that wealth take. So we need ways of handling, counting and transporting significant amounts of money.
D&D to a certain extent tries to handle this problem with portable holes and bags of holding and to a lesser extent with platinum coins; but that is a very high magic solution to the situation. High magic solutions don’t work in every setting.
First we should probably talk about the two issues that impact how wealth is stored at scale, and both of these are a spectrum. First is the portability of wealth, at the least portable you have real estate, while the most portable would be paper money. Second is the liquidity of wealth, basically how easy can you use this wealth to purchase something. Obviously coins or paper money is highly liquid, while say a magical tome may be worth.
So what are some ways we can store wealth? First, you can purchase land or buildings and while they may require some upkeep, will likely be a safe way park a lot of money. Real estate often appreciates in value so it may even be an investment. Next could be artwork, which could be paintings or sculptures, these are somewhat easier to move because they aren’t physically connected to or part of the earth, but probably still require significant effort to move if they are valuable. Art may also be hard to liquidate due to the value and sometimes niche interest specific art has. Books may also be an option, particularly in a world that cannot mass produce them. Tomes of arcane or religious lore, ancient histories, biology and anatomy could all be of significant value. They are likely highly portable, but may be difficult to quickly convert into cash. Another option is bars of precious/valuable metals, this could be real metals like gold and silver or fantasy materials like mithril or adamantine, similarly it you can use gems and precious stones. At scale, art, books, gems or metal ingots will all require some kind of infrastructure to store them properly, both to protect against theft but also to preserve them from damage. Many adventurers are also walking fortunes with magical items worth multiple king’s ransoms such as magic blades and enchanted staffs.
Separate from storing wealth is transporting wealth. Sure you can load up some strongboxes into a wagon and transport your riches that way, but every thief, bandit and other individual of questionable moral character nearby will take an interest. Now that might be useful to your goals, but often you want a low profile and a wagon full of gold is certainly not that. Gems and other precious stones are an option, in most settings any decent city would have business people that could trade those for coin. But those options are also both kind of boring, early versions of banks were basically groups of merchants or other wealthy people who would have networks. A traveler could give one person in the network coins, and that person would give the traveler a letter saying how much money someone else in the network should pay out to them. Of course the people involved in writing the letters and taking the cash took a couple percent for their trouble. In a fantasy setting there are all sorts of groups that could provide this service, from dwarven clans, to powerful religious organizations (one of the real reasons the knight’s templar got in trouble was they loaned the french King a mountain of money and he didn’t have the resources to make good on the debt), or perhaps my favorite, dragons. Sure dragons love gold, but they can make extra money by acting as a primitive bank, and it just creates interesting things for your party to have to do and gives a non-combat reason for them to interact with multiple dragons.
Now we get to loot. Let’s look at a dragon hoard, sure it can be a literal mountain of gold coins, and that poses some challenges because you have to figure out how to transport literal tons of metal. But dragons can obsess over things other than gold. What if the dragon is an art snob and their “hoard” is a carefully curated art collection. Of course it would need to be properly displayed in a way that the dragon could view its collection, but art needs to be stored the right way to protect it. And it would require restoration work from time to time. The dragon may have an entire staff of curators, preservationists, even an acquisition team to go out and purchase more items. What do you do with an art museum in a series of caverns? The same thing could happen with books, and a dragon could have the largest private library in the world. Or all its wealth might be invested in real estate and all you find in the dragon’s lair is a bunch of deeds for property scattered across the world. Of course a dragon’s hoard is never going to be entirely one thing so there easily can still be some magical items, books of rare arcane lore, huge gems or anything else of value. But don’t forget if a dragon has a useful magic item that is can wear, it probably should. It may give your players pause if they see a dragon with an amulet and a bunch of rings.
What interesting things did I not cover that you could use as holders of wealth in a fantasy setting? Are there other ways that adventurers could move their wealth around? How would you set up a dragon or other wealthy fantasy creature’s resources so that the players don’t just have a cash mountain?
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