Monetary System - Gilders

The world of Tosarch, for most of its known history, has followed the monetary system of "gilders". Gilders are paper bills, gilded in metals like copper, silver, gold and very rarely - platinum.

## History

Before gilders, people used a coin system, however it was abandoned with time, as the authorities disliked mine owners minting their own coins.

Gilders became the primary and only monetary system sometime around 500 A.A., as the Chant garnered enough popular (and direct) power at that time to start pushing the authorities that be around to implement their desired systems. The whole reasoning behind the gilders was that the old pre-imperial coin system was easy to manipulate and move around, with owners of even copper mines managing to accrue wealth beyond what the metals themselves were worth, giving rise to rampant inflation in some locales - something that the Chant wanted to curtail.

## The Apple Standard

The value of a gilder has been forever tied to apples - the favorite food of the Firstlings, forming what's called the Apple Standard. A single bronze gilder is equivalent to 1 apple (~100 grams). A single silver gilder - 10 kg of apples, a single gold gilder ~1 tonne of apples. As a result, the Chant themselves regulate the orchard business everywhere where orchards are present.

## The Bills

There are 4 gilded bills in total, each having incremental values of multiples of a 100.

### Bronze Gilder - Harvest

The lowest value gilder is also the most common, as it is the most widely used gilder amongst the common folk. The bronze gilder (or BG) is used in markets, taverns and shops to pay for goods and services. There's no money worth less than a bronze gilder, so people have to sometimes buy more than they want to, to get the most value out of their gilder. An image depicting Harvest is present on the bronze gilder.

### Silver Gilder - Conquest

The silver gilder is more common when buying luxury goods or paying for things in bulk. Worth 100 bronze gilders, the SG is favorite amongst merchants and traders. Thematically, most military personnel are paid in SGs as well. An image depicting Conquest is present on this gilder.

### Golden Gilder - Aerinth

The golden gilder is worth 100 silver gilders, and is used amongst the burghers, nobility and bulk traders. Most goods, traded between city-states, are traded en-masse, and so - they use the golden gilder as a result. The image depicting Aerinth is present on this gilder.

### Platinum Gilder - Tosarch

The platinum gilder is very, very rarely used and is probably only kept as reserve within the Chants very own vaults. It's worth 100 golden gilders and has the depiction of Tosarch imprinted onto it.

## Art of Gilding

The art of gilding is a well-kept secret of the Chant, and only the Chant is allowed to gild new bills into existence, anyone else doing this is committing a great crime, directly punishable by death, however the danger of that is low - not like anyone outside the Chant knows how to do it.

The art of gilding is known to be a very delicate process, that hasn't been replicated outside of the Chants confines. The process produces bills, that seemingly blend the metal used with the paper in a manner that makes the two inseparable. Trying to extract the metal out of the paper always ends up in failure, producing only an oddly colored wet paper lump, using magic or alchemy has never helped either. So making counterfeit gilders is simply impossible and unheard of.

## Meta Talk

To put things into perspective in the context of the game:

* A single orchard level produces 22 fruit goods, each of which is worth 5 GGs. If we default that to apples (with a tonne of apples being worth 1 golden gilder), that means that a single orchard produces 110 tonnes of apples per half year, or 220 tonnes of apples per year (vaguely). Following some quick research and clinging onto the fact that an apple orchard produces ~60 tonnes of apples/he per year, we can gauge that a single orchard level is around 3.6 hectares large (~170x170 meters), which is very respectable.
* We can also vaguely calculate the amount of money a person needs to survive in a year. Just to keep calories afloat a person needs ~25 apples per day, that means ~9200 apples per year. We plug in the numbers and we get ~1 golden gilder per year as a minimum for a single person to go by for a single year. This isn't perfect, as something like grain would be cheaper than apples and we aren't accounting for things like a roof over your head or clothes, but its good enough to put the cost of living into perspective.
* Even so, you might see some discrepancies in costs (like shop items for example) - those are there to keep the game balanced rather than fit within RP or lore consistency.