The worst part about writing fantasy is being keenly aware that you’re writing fantasy, which means that you always have to straddle a thin three-way line between anachronism, cliche, and clunk.
Take money, for example. You can’t just have people in a fictional fantasy world walk around using Euros. You consider something generic, like ‘silver coins,’ but before you know it your world starts sounding like a shitty ren faire.
So you think about the world you’ve built and its needs and its history to come up with some unique and relevant terms. But if your terms are too unique and relevant you wind up writing “yarr, you’ll be ransomed for a hundred Trade League Silver Gyrblonks” and realize your worldbuilding is now getting in the way of basic readability.
“They’re using golden valley coins!”
…didst thou mean dollars?
“Nevermind. They’re using some basic silver coin and then enough gold to be worth ten silver coins is called a ten-piece”
…Si, si, el Peso!
Trying over, they’re minted by the king so they’re called crown coins, or, these days, abbreviated, they’re just Crowns
Naturligvis, vi skifter Daler ud med Kroner!
—
The Lesson Of The Day is that all the names are already claimed by IRL, and all the almost-good-names that you could invent to get around that were used by some SFF author in the seventies e.g. I bet you can’t do Suns and Moons for your gold/silver coins, I bet some author did that already.
My fantasy nation uses solid gold coins marked by the dental impressions of the reigning king, as a sign of their purity and authenticity.
They’re called Bitcoins.
oh you can go the fuck to jail that’s what you can do, where you’ll be shackled to a chain gang hitting the blockchain with a pickaxe
TBH, I think the takeaway from “dollar” and “kroner” and whatnot is that you can name money after damn near anything. Like, the US Dollar has nothing to do with valleys, the word just evolved a lot - first you had the silver-mining town of Joachimsthal (literally “Joachim’s valley” or “Joachim’s dale”, named after St. Joachim), then the Bohemians started making silver coins there and called them “Joachimsthaler”, literally “things from Joachimsthal”, then that got shortened to just “thaler”, and then the spelling changed as it migrated around languages and ended up in the English word “dollar”.
So you can just… do this, with pretty much any word you want. You buy a sword with 50 Eeg, so called because they used to have eagles printed on them. That laser costs 200 orcs, or Oort Republic Credits, but a lot of people still call that 200 hippo because before the Belt War the Hippolyta Mining Co. scrip was the de facto standard currency around here and the name stuck around (and in some bars you can start a serious fight by using one name or the other). Your meal costs 10 cigs - originally short for cygnets, which was a hundredth of one swan, a coin named for the royal mint in Swansea - which are easily confused with the neighboring kingdom’s “sigs”, named for the banknotes that carry the signature of the royal treasurer (the exchange rate is not 1:1, but it’s close enough that along the border it’s fairly common for merchants to try to cheat you by “confusing” one for the other). The nation of Gofrandar issued crystal chits in a variety of colors for different denominations, and the blue ones were the most common and were produced mainly in factories in the city of Largon, leading to the name “blue largo”, and that was centuries ago and most people today haven’t even heard of Gofrandar, much less Largon, but six different nations still have currencies called blarg.
It costs 12 scuts. It costs 150 grovers. It costs 23 skidah. It costs a tail and a half. It costs two phyla and 28 points. You can just keep making up words.
