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Weekly roundup 9/28
🕑 Added 2025-09-28 17:31:06 +0000 UTCMore cool facts, remembered as best I could from my notes:
In places in Renaissance Italy, businesses would only accept payments in gold coins because they were the most difficult to counterfeit. However, a single gold coin was a huge amount of money for most people (like, 2 would be a year's salary iirc), so this led to merchants doing a bunch of complex math to track debt. Generally, a person would rack up months worth of debt across multiple businesses, then pay someone--say, the baker--a single gold coin. This would pay off their debt across the multiple businesses in the neighborhood that were all talking to each other.
This is all to say: in modern society, we're used to everyone having physical money. In ancient, medieval, and even early modern times, the rarity and problems with coinage meant that almost all exchanges between normal people wasn't done with coins, but some sort of alternate debt tracking system, mutual community assistance that didn't involve money, or elaborate setups that compensated for the relative scarcity of rare metals.
This is something fantasy authors rarely reproduce with any accuracy. In Enteria, I tried to make gold a rarity. There's coral beadcoins that can be put on strings for small exchanges and silver coins, but then Mirian went and made money irrelevant to her by doing counterfeiting and bank robbery, so it hasn't come up for some time. Crime: simplifying worldbuilding immensely.
Anyways here's the chapters that got released this week:
Extra-Advanced Tier
Chapter 250
Chapter 251
Advanced Tier
Chapter 240
Chapter 241
Writing little things I learned from the two cons I went to (or that connects with stuff I know) is something I've been trying out lately. Let me know below if you want more stuff like that, more stuff focused on Enteria, or would rather these weekly updates just have story updates only.
Comments
Erebus
That’s cool.
Leaf
likewise
Adam Woods
I for one enjoy the random asides.
