Contents ​

The reference is arranged as four books followed by a glossary and sources.

Book I · The System ​

• §1 Coinage
• §2 Converting Published Prices
• §3 Street Food & Market Prices
• §4 Inns, Lodging & Lifestyle
• §5 Wages & Services
• §6 Adventuring Gear
• §7 Weapons
• §8 Armor
• §9 Mounts, Vehicles & Livestock
• §10 Small Change & the Sub-Copper Economy
• §11 Treasure, Magic & Wealth
• §12 Magic & the Market
• §13 Property & Construction
• §14 Paper & Credit
• §15 How People Talk About Money

Book II · The Price Catalog ​

• §1 Annual Incomes (for intuition)
• §2 Food & Drink (expanded)
• §3 Clothing & Textiles
• §4 Household Goods
• §5 Tools & Working Gear
• §6 Raw Materials & Building
• §7 Land, Rent & Property
• §8 Animals (expanded)
• §9 Books, Writing & Education
• §10 Services (expanded)
• §11 Entertainment & Vice
• §12 Travel & Freight
• §13 Luxury & Status Goods
• §14 Ransoms, Fines & Taxes
• §15 Game-World Extrapolations ⟨est.⟩
• §16 Worked Intuitions

Book III · Taxes, Budgets & Treasuries ​

• §1 The Commoner's Tax Year
• §2 Manorial & Local Revenue (the lord's side)
• §3 Town & City Finance
• §4 Guild Finance
• §5 Crown Finance
• §6 Merchant & Company Capital
• §7 Noble Estates
• §8 Treasuries: Coin Actually in the Chest
• §9 The Fiscal Calendar
• §10 Where Dungeon Wealth Comes From
• §11 Adventurer Wealth & Treasure
• §12 Economies Without Lords

Book IV · Money Magic ​

• §1 Creation, Commission & Resale
• §2 The Shelf
• §3 Dials & Rejections

Back matter ​

• Glossary
• References

Book I: The System ​

A historically grounded pricing system for revised AD&D 2e, pegged to late-medieval European prices. The design anchor is independent of edition: 1 silver piece = 1 medieval silver penny (1d), calibrated so that an unskilled laborer earns 2 sp per day. The 2e books supply equipment and magical rules; the historical catalog supplies their prices.

§1. Coinage ​

Electrum (optional): if you keep the ep, it is a large "groat"-style silver coin worth 5 sp, minted by one particular realm and taken at a discount elsewhere.

Money of account: large contracts are written in pounds (pp) even when no coin changes hands — historically the pound and shilling were units of account for centuries before any coin represented them. Optionally add the mark (a pure accounting unit: two-thirds of a pp, exactly 66⅔ sp — see §15 and the glossary) for ransoms, fines, and land deals.

Metal basis: gold trades at 10:1 against silver by weight — the actual medieval bimetallic ratio (10:1–12:1 across the period). Every coin's face value matches its melt value: a gp is a standard-weight gold coin worth exactly 10 standard-weight silver coins, and the pp is simply ten gp-weights of gold in one slab. No fiat premium anywhere in the ladder except the copper, which is token money by design.

Coin weight: 50 coins per lb. for cp/sp/gp. Pound pieces: 5 per lb. Quarters and halves: 100 per lb. 1,000 sp is 20 lbs — large payments push naturally toward letters of credit, gems, trade bars, or pound pieces.

Coin trust ​

• Copper is local money. It works on trust in the issuing authority. Foreign copper trades at half value or is refused outright; a fallen kingdom's copper is worthless (its silver still spends). Dungeon copper hoards are mostly scrap.
• Silver is universal. Accepted anywhere by weight if not by stamp. Merchants carry small scales.
• Gold is scrutinized. Merchants bite it, weigh it, and often can't make change for it. Flashing gold in a village market draws attention.
• Moneychangers convert foreign coin and cut coin fragments for a 2–5% fee. Paper instruments and their magical authentication are covered in §14.

How coin is made, and why it looks the way it does: struck, not cast. A hand-shorn blank goes on an anvil die, the moneyer holds the upper die over it like a punch, and one hammer blow prints both faces. Nothing constrains the metal's spread, so no two coins are the same shape and none is truly round; off-center strikes, ghost-doubling, and the raised lump of a cracked die all pass as sound coin. The mint's obsession is weight and fineness, not geometry — heavy blanks are snipped to standard before striking, and the assay furnace answers for the alloy. Molds are the forger's tool: cast coin is porous under a file and rings dead on stone, which is why "struck, not cast" is itself the first mark of honest money. Clipping — shaving a sliver of silver from the rim of every coin that passes — is the standing plague, and the countermeasure is design: a cross struck clear to the rim, so a clipped coin confesses by its shortened arms (cutting along that same cross is how legitimate quarters and halves are made — see the coin table above). A machine-round coin with a patterned rim would end half of this; no mint in this world has one. Roundness proves nothing, and everyone knows it.

The touchstone — a black stone that reads an alloy in the color of the streak drawn across it, matched against needles of known fineness (see the glossary) — and the furnace belong to the mint and the exchange; the street polices its money with thumb, ear, and scale — which is why the moneychanger's counter is a slab of stone, and why a market that has handled ten thousand pennies cannot be fooled by the ten-thousand-and-first.

Setting-flavored coin names ​

Mechanical abbreviations (q/h/cp/sp/gp/pp) stay constant; the names below are what NPCs say. The mechanical quarter is one quarter of a copper piece, not the historical farthing: a medieval farthing was one quarter of a silver penny, equal to 2 cp 1 h on this book's decimal ladder. Use the setting names below—or plain “quarter-copper” and “half-copper”—for the two sub-copper denominations.

Forgotten Realms (Waterdhavian standard)

Variant coins:

• Taol — square brass coin, face value 2 gp, honored only in Waterdeep. A textbook token currency: outside the walls it's worth scrap brass. Visitors' taols are the classic moneychanger's harvest.
• Harbor moon — crescent-pierced gold coin inlaid with electrum, 50 gp face in Waterdeep, ~30 gp elsewhere. Used for dock-trade settlements.
• Blue eye — the electrum groat (5 sp slot), if you use it.
• Cormyrean mint — thumb (cp), falcon (sp), lion (gp). The crown stamps foreign coin at the border for a fee, a real medieval practice (re-coinage revenue).
• Sembian trade bars — stamped silver ingots in 10, 25, and 50 gp weights. Ingot money for merchant settlements; discounted a few percent when the stamp is unfamiliar.

Greyhawk (City of Greyhawk standard)

Variant notes:

• Lucky — the electrum groat (5 sp), considered good fortune in gambling houses and often the stake coin at gaming tables.
• Regional name collisions — neighboring realms strike their own coin and reuse names at different metals (more than one realm calls its gold coin a noble, while Greyhawk's noble is silver). Historically authentic and a working scam vector: quoting a price "in nobles" without specifying whose is an old merchant's trick.
• Old Imperial coinage — coins of the Great Kingdom's height still circulate at weight, not face; a debased late-Imperial common is refused outright. Hoards from ruins date themselves by their coins.

§2. Converting Published Prices ​

The Silver Standard is a historical repricing model, not a denomination filter applied blindly to a rulebook. Use this precedence:

1. Catalog. Use an existing price in Books I–II.
2. Historical analog. Price the new item from the nearest garment, tool, weapon, armor, animal, vessel, or service already in the catalog.
3. Materials and labor. Build the price from raw materials and the 2 sp common-labor day.
4. Quality and scarcity. Add premiums for fine work, unusual technology, institutional access, risk, status, or regional rarity.
5. One-step shift. Only when a fantastic or rules-specific cost has no grounded analog, keep its number and drop one denomination:

• X gp → X sp
• X sp → X cp
• X cp → X/10 cp (bundle, floor at 1 cp, or price in quarters/halves)

Mark a new price by its basis when that distinction helps:

| Label | Meaning | |---|---|---| | Catalog | Already supported by the historical model | | Analog | Newly priced from a close historical or catalog match | | Estimate | Fantastic or poorly documented; priced from scarcity, labor, creation rules, or a shifted rules cost |

Sanity check for any price you improvise: divide by 2 sp to express it in laborer-days, and ask whether that feels right.

The revised AD&D 2e books supply item names and mechanics, not economic authority. The campaign's adnd-2e-revised rules override the PHB or DMG where explicit; otherwise original 2e rules control. Repricing a weapon never silently changes its damage, speed, rate of fire, size, specialization, damage-versus-Large entry, or house-rule property tags.

Unless a row explicitly says wholesale, trade lot, institutional contract, or producer price, catalog figures are ordinary single-item retail in a mid-sized town. Bulk buying is a separate transaction built from the producer or wholesale commodity cost plus packaging, freight, loss, financing, and margin; it does not automatically discount bespoke or finished work.

§3. Street Food & Market Prices ​

The everyday economy runs on coppers, halves, and quarters. A laborer's 2 sp/day means his family's food budget is a handful of coppers.

Note the pattern: spices and sugar land naturally in gold — they were luxury imports, and a pound of pepper genuinely cost a week's skilled wages. Book II's saffron pound is a merchant or institutional quantity; the apothecary ounce here includes a small-lot premium for breaking it into trustworthy packets.

§4. Inns, Lodging & Lifestyle ​

The low end follows the 1331 Merton College travel account: outside London, beds for seven commonly cost 2d for the night (represented here as 2 sp), while four servants once slept two nights for 1d total; London could reach 1d per head. The same account's winter fodder ran much dearer than the beds. Fine chambers and suites are status purchases rather than a separate medieval hotel industry.

Home-base living expenses (per month). The PHB itemizes daily food and lodging but has no lifestyle ladder. The DMG uses four monthly categories—Squalid, Poor, Middle-Class, and Wealthy—not the seven later-edition daily categories previously listed here. These prices rebuild the four 2e categories from this book's rents, provisions, wages, and services:

The rate covers one character operating from an established home base. Away from home, use the itemized nightly lodging and meal tables above. Do not multiply the rate by character level: add the actual cost of dependents, servants, horses, livery, hospitality, and security. Once a character maintains a manor, castle, ship, or similar property, use its household and maintenance budget instead.

§5. Wages & Services ​

A listed day wage is the retail price of short hire, not a wholesale annual salary. Multiplying it by the 300-day working year is a cross-check, not a hiring rule: annual service commonly substitutes keep, lodging, livery, customary perquisites, and steadier employment for part of the cash. Thus the laborer's 2 sp across the full 300 is 6 pp, and §1's 5–7 pp range is employment luck — 250 found days is the 5, the full year the 6, and the 7 is a full year whose summer works at task rates, since mowing and reaping paid by the acre run 3–4 sp a day. The craftsman's 3–4 sp is his 9–12 pp. A master's 15–30 pp annual is shop income — the 8 sp – 1 gp day rate is what he costs when he can be got at all, not what 300 days of his year pay. The premium rows are premiums for a reason: harvest wages near-double because every farm is bidding for the same three weeks, and the gong farmer out-earns a craftsman for doing, at night, what no one else will do at all. The sailor's edge over the porter is likewise not the coin: keep aboard puts him ahead before he spends a copper, and portage — the seaman's customary right to a corner of freight-free cargo space, traded on his own account in every port (see the glossary) — pays a merchant's margin on a peddler's stake; what remains of the premium is danger pay, since Book III §6 prices the sea's total-loss risk at 10–15% a voyage, and the crew stands on the collateral. The washerwoman's two-thirds rate is the historical record, not a law of the setting — level it if your table prefers.

Literacy alone earns a laborer's wage, and the press is why (Book II §9): plain copying is the one scribal product print replaced, so the jobbing copyist lives at the bottom of the letters trade, racing the compositor. What still pays is form and trust, not penmanship — the scrivener knows which phrases make a deed stick and whose seal a court will credit, and the salaried clerk sells his master a year of accountability. The tutor's cash wage sits below all of them because it is bait: a young university man boards with the family, teaches the heir, and is really paid in patronage — the household's interest the next time a temple living or a secretaryship falls vacant. The exception prices accordingly: a scholar with a name tutors a great house at a priest's living, because what he sells is the name. The piece rates say the same thing: at 5 cp a letter, a scrivener with a morning queue has out-earned the copyist by dinner.

The ranks are functions, not titles. A man-at-arms is any fully armored rider — knight, squire, or career soldier; the wage is high because it rents his capital along with his skill: harness, warhorse, and remounts are his own (250+ gp standing in the stable, §§8–9), and they eat whether he fights or not. A knight draws double as rank pay for the same fighting job, and a banneret — a knight leading his own company under his own banner — double again for command. At the other end, the levy (see the glossary) is obligation, not employment: every free man owes armed turnout after his means, mustered a few days a year, serving his own district at its own charge and drawing crown wages only marched beyond it. It yields numbers — wall watch, baggage guard — not soldiers; realms that mean to win hire the companies, and knight's-fee holders buy out of the call with scutage. Book III §5 prices the war this all adds up to.

Why carry a spear for the porter's 2 sp? Because the wage is the floor of the package, not the whole of it. The guard's 2 sp comes every day of the year — no seasonal gaps, which is most of the difference between his 6–9 pp all-in (Book II §1) and the laborer's 5–7 — plus livery, often bread and a dry gatehouse, the standing of a lord's or town's man, and the fees of the post: the gate is where Book II §10's "lubricant" rows change hands, and everyone knows it. War pay adds the lottery: gains of war are owned under written rules (see the glossary) — a soldier keeps what he takes, less his captain's third — and Book II §14 prices the prisoners. One captured man-at-arms at 10–30 pp is three to ten years of a footman's wages; that arithmetic, not the day rate, is what fills the muster rolls.

Gate and passage charges are not admission prices levied indiscriminately on everyone. Ordinary roads are free; the road rows apply only at a chartered bridge, causeway, pass, or temporary pavage or pontage collection point. Citizens, privileged merchants, empty local carts, and designated provisions are commonly exempt or charged only a nominal amount. A loaded outsider's cart pays around one historical penny — 1 sp under this book's peg — while a heavy wagon or valuable cargo can owe a larger passage charge plus commodity-specific market, murage, or pavage tolls. The ferry ladder follows the documented 1315 Humber schedule: a halfpenny for a pedestrian, a penny for horse and rider, and twopence for a two-horse cart.

The cab ladder is priced by what pulls it — the whole ladder is ⟨est.⟩, since the historical record's coaches-for-hire arrive after our price sources; these are built from wages and feed. A runner's cart is a laborer's wage on wheels: ten fare-miles a day is the same 2 sp, and it weaves where coaches jam. (It undercuts the messenger per mile because the cab rank sells both directions; the messenger comes back empty.) The carrying chair is two porters' wages at walking pace with a better view. Mules plod cheaply; a coach's pair of horses eats 2 sp a day before the driver is paid, which is what the top rates amortize — and oxen never pull passengers, because two miles an hour is freight pace (Book II §12). Guides scale the same way laborers do — but the local guide is not the laborer in full work, who would be trading 2 sp for 2 sp; he is the cottager whose few acres cannot fill his year. His slack day is worth pennies in his own field and 2 sp on the road, and the road pays in the coin his rent is counted in (Book III §1). The corollary cuts the other way in the Harvestide weeks: every idle hand in the village is worth 3–4 sp with meals and his own grain is standing, so the casual guide is not for hire at any casual price. The wilderness guide is a skilled trade with your life in its hands, priced like a craftsman or better. And the guide who will take you where people shoot back charges danger rates and negotiates a share, because he has seen what happens to guides.

Minor magic as professional time ​

The house rules make prepared wizard cantrips and priest Minor Blessings repeatable. Their marginal spell-slot cost is zero, but preparation capacity and the caster's time remain scarce.

These are professional-time rates, not universal tariffs. Mending takes a full 10-minute turn and repairs only a small mundane break or tear. Scribe consumes supplied ink and paper. Detect Magic reveals presence only, while Read Magic reads notation but identifies no item. Message reaches 60 feet along an unobstructed path and is not a courier substitute. Minor Blessings expressly do not heal, preserve provisions, or replace shelter.

Leveled spellcasting ​

The 2e DMG's NPC Spell Costs table is not an economic price list. Its accompanying text begins with player characters in desperate need, says the caster knows the party is “over a barrel,” calls the figures minimums that can seldom be lowered, and states that the prices are meant to make it better for someone in the party to learn the spell. Shifting those numbers one denomination preserves that punitive game function; it does not turn them into historically derived retail prices.

Start with the caster's relationship to the beneficiary:

Only the first four spell levels support anything resembling a recurring service market in the grounded-caster baseline:

The arithmetic begins with the wage table above: a master professional costs 8 sp–1 gp for a day and a physician 3 sp–1 gp for a visit. Book II §10's 20–60 pp annual casting retainer is 200–600 gp, or roughly 7 sp–2 gp per duty day over 300 days, before keep, chapel, and patronage. An already-prepared 1st-level effect takes a fraction of that day; reserving tomorrow's preparation buys most or all of it. The 3rd–4th-level bands then add access to a much rarer institutional office and priority over its other duties. The sequence stops at 4th level because extrapolating it would falsely turn senior powers into vendors.

A quote is the applicable band plus consumed materials, unusual travel or preparation, danger, legal exposure, and urgency. A permanent or exceptionally valuable result may be priced against the benefit to the buyer, but that is a commission or bargain, not the cost of “one slot.”

Spell level alone can mislead. Identify is a 1st-level spell, but a useful commercial reading calls for an experienced wizard, eight uninterrupted hours of purification, dangerous handling of an unknown item, an uncertain result, and eight hours recovering the spell's Constitution loss. Treat one multi-item session as an established specialist service at 2–10 gp, not the DMG's shifted 100 gp per item. The client still bears the risk of false or incomplete readings.

Components are charged only when consumed or when an expensive reusable focus must be supplied. Identify's pearl is reusable professional equipment; Raise Dead has no priced component. Lower-level wizard spells may occupy higher-level slots under the house rules, improving a retained wizard's scheduling flexibility without strengthening the spell or creating an “upcast” premium. The priced 2e component list is in §11, and the consequences for medicine, death, and travel are in Book II §§10 and 12.

§6. Adventuring Gear ​

These are the revised 2e equipment names repriced from the historical catalog. They replace both the PHB cash column and the former shifted-SRD list.

Unless a row says otherwise, the quote is ordinary urban retail: one adventurer buying one article. A merchant buying a bale, crate, or gross starts from the producer or wholesale commodity price elsewhere in this book, then adds containers, freight, loss, and margin; do not apply an automatic bulk discount to finished gear. Where this section gives both units — a sheet and a quire, a single piece and a bundle, or a day and a week — the two prices intentionally coexist as retail and quantity/package quotes.

Sub-copper items from the books (chalk, string, a single candle-stub) are priced in quarters and halves or sold in bundles — see §10.

Lighting note: candles were genuinely expensive in period (tallow ran ~1.5d/lb), so a 1 cp tallow candle is historically honest. Poor households went to bed at dark.

Provisioning note: the 3–8 sp pickled-fish row includes both the fish and its cask; the 5 cp–1 sp barrel row is an empty small container. A trade buyer returning sound casks or furnishing their own pays for fish, packing labor, salt, and loss rather than buying the vessel again.

Writing note: the published prices for ink and paper collide with the record and Book II §9's print economy. Paper is 4 cp the quire and a lone sheet is sub-copper retail; that is a legitimate quantity discount, not two competing values for the same sale. The 1 gp bottle is arcanist's ink, the grade that holds a sigil; common oak-gall ink runs 2 cp the pint. Ink was never dear — the hand that drives the pen was (§5).

Clothing note: the packages reconcile with Book II §3 through the second-hand market. The house-rule Mending cantrip repairs one small mundane break or tear after a turn of work; it does not replace missing material or restore destroyed armor, weapons, or complex mechanisms. That helps old garments survive, but does not make cloth or tailoring free.

The rope, chain, grappling hook, piton, manacles, and thieves' picks rows are priced from the book's own iron, steel, leather, and textile costs rather than from a shifted modern list. Manacles cost more than an equal short length of chain because fitted cuffs, hinge or staple work, and a locking closure are smith's work rather than raw links.

§7. Weapons ​

Listed prices are ordinary retail for munitions-grade weapons: serviceable, unadorned, arsenal-quality. A crown, city, or mercenary company buying a standardized lot directly from makers may negotiate a lower bulk trade price; that is not a second retail price for the same sale. Use the original 2e damage, speed, rate of fire, size, proficiency, specialization, and damage-versus-Large entries; the house-rule property labels are presentation only.

PHB Table 44 supplies the weapon categories and PHB Table 45 their missile ranges, but its cash values do not control this table. A one-step shift would, for example, leave a short bow at 3 gp, a long bow at 7 gp 5 sp, and a hand crossbow at 30 gp; the prices above instead follow construction, scarcity, and the established weapon ladder.

Historical footnote: recorded English war bows bought in quantity could cost 1–2 shillings sterling, while a sheaf of forged war arrows could cost more than the bow. That is a bulk procurement observation, not a competing retail tag. The retail bow prices above allow for market variation; the war-arrow line preserves the important ammunition ratio. Use hunting arrows as the default if you don't want ammo cost to bite.

Most polearms are peasant tools or simple forged heads on long shafts, so their prices cluster more tightly than the PHB list. The arquebus remains a campaign-era option subject to the referee's permission.

For quality, the 2e DMG supports a broader spread than a single named-smith multiplier:

• Functional fine weapon: ×5 normal.
• Masterwork weapon with a game bonus: up to ×20 normal.
• Ornamentation: add materials and workmanship separately; ×10 is a useful starting point for conspicuous status work.

§8. Armor ​

Use the original 2e armor categories and the house rules' ascending-AC presentation: ascending AC = 20 − descending AC. Dual notation such as AC 18 [2] is useful during transition.

Armor Class is mechanical; price variation buys fit, finish, provenance, ornament, and availability. Plate mail, field plate, and full plate remain distinct rules entries even where their quality ranges overlap.

PHB Table 44 supplies these 2e armor categories, and Table 46 supplies their Armor Classes; neither supplies the target economy. A blind one-step shift would put chain mail at 7 gp 5 sp, field plate at 200 gp, and full plate at 400–1,000 gp. The first badly understates mail labor while the latter two happen to meet the lower ends of the historical ranges, so each row is checked independently rather than moved by one universal factor.

Helmets ​

Shields ​

Historical cross-check: chain mail at 300 sp sits in the recorded 240–1,200d range for a mail shirt, and mail has the same quality spread — riveted export mail at the listed price, fine double-mail 2–3×. Splint, banded mail, and brigandine remain above the naive denomination shift because their material and fitting costs cannot plausibly undercut simple leather or munitions plate. These are retail harness prices; a large arsenal contract may be cheaper, while bespoke fitting and decoration move upward through the listed ranges.

§9. Mounts, Vehicles & Livestock ​

DMG Table 25's horse-quality overlay remains available within a mount type: high-spirited stock costs ×2 and an exceptional charger ×4. Apply that multiplier only when its movement and carrying-capacity benefits are used; do not automatically stack it merely because a row is named courser, warhorse, or destrier.

Barding keeps the original 2e categories and weight rules, but uses the historical armor ladder. Fitting is armorer's work; a horse is measured like a lord.

PHB Table 44 supplies the animal, tack, barding, and vessel taxonomy, but its prices are uneven even after a one-step shift: that method would make a draft horse 20 gp yet a riding horse only 7 gp 5 sp, while full plate barding would still cost 200 gp. The table instead preserves historically plausible livestock relationships, charges trained riding and war stock for selection and training, and prices fitted barding from the human armor ladder. The oats/grain feed rate sits below §4's 1 sp 5 cp–2 sp inn-stabling rate; the difference pays for the stall, water, bedding, and hostler. Hay-only feed remains the cheap maintenance ration.

Small boats are priced from village timber and labor; named hulls are slotted by size, crew, rig, and military role. A heavy warhorse at 200 gp is the historical statement that it was the most expensive object a fighting man owned — nearly three years of laborer income, more than his plate.

Flying ships are a campaign dial, not a market row. Where a setting builds them at all, the hull is the cheap part: the lift — bound elementals, levitation engines, a dragon's bargain — is caster-work priced per §5, which is why the finished ship outprices the galley and is never truly for sale. They are built by the crowns, great temples, and chartered houses that intend to keep them, budgeted like a fleet flagship, and crewed by the scarcest labor in the world. Fares, where lines run, are in the Price Catalog's magical-passage table; freight they do not fix — an airship carries the post and the passengers, never the grain.

§10. Small Change & the Sub-Copper Economy ​

Three tools, use whichever fits the purchase:

1. Quarters and halves. For flavor purchases: an apple is a quarter, an egg is a quarter, a wafer is a half. Prices at this level are quoted aloud ("two quarters, and I'm robbing myself").
2. Bundles. Anything with mechanical weight sells in lots: torches 2/cp, pitons 2/cp, chalk 5/cp, candles 1 cp each.
3. Fixed price, floating quantity. The assize model: 1 sp always buys a "penny loaf" — the coin is the unit, while the loaf's weight flexes with the grain market. This is the large regulated loaf in §3, not the smaller 2–3 cp coarse or common retail loaf. Use the same principle for other measured staples when hand-waving provisioning.

Bookkeeping rule: quarters and halves exist in the fiction and in quoted prices, but the character sheet tracks whole coppers; loose fractions round away at day's end. (Or track them if a player enjoys it.)

§11. Treasure, Magic & Wealth ​

The one-step shift applies to treasure exactly as it does to prices, with one recomposition pass so coin finds look medieval:

Hoard composition, per 100 coins (mid tiers):

Priced 2e spell components ​

Use catalog material prices first. The values below are rules-specific costs without a better mundane analog, so the one-step shift applies.

The last column is not a new retail estimate: it is the stated PHB component value shifted one denomination and then expressed in the Silver Standard's account units. Reusable components remain capital equipment rather than a charge consumed by every casting.

Death-magic components and costs:

• Raise Dead has verbal and somatic components only.
• Priest Reincarnate has verbal and somatic components; wizard Reincarnation uses a referee-selected material, not fixed-price oils.
• Resurrection uses the priest's religious symbol and holy water.
• Restoration has no priced component but ages caster and recipient two years.
• Revivify and True Resurrection do not appear in the PHB Appendix 4 priest-spell corpus used by this campaign.
• PHB Appendix 4 has no priest counterpart to Gentle Repose. Supplemental 2e's Preserve Dead is an uncommon 1st-level wizard spell restricted to necromancers. Its pinch of quicklime costs less than the smallest useful coin unit; charge for scarce specialist access rather than the component.

House-rule cantrips and Minor Blessings have no priced component schedule. Price supplied mundane inputs — Scribe's ink and paper, chalk, thread, herbs, candles, or holy water — from Books I–II.

Magic items ​

The 5e Common-through-Legendary cash bands do not apply. In revised 2e:

• Potions and scrolls have ingredient, laboratory, time, and failure costs.
• Permanent items require extraordinary vessels, preparation, high-level spells, facilities, and a final success roll.
• XP Value ranks an item's significance but is not a cash price.
• Ordinary magic shops do not exist. Permanent items are found, inherited, gifted, captured, researched, or commissioned by institutions.

Book IV provides the creation, commission, and resale model. As a default, a known consumable may resell at 60–80% of replacement cost; an identified permanent item with a real institutional buyer at 30–60%; and a restricted, suspicious, or strategically dangerous item at 10–40%. Relics have no percentage price.

Building a treasure find ​

1. Start with the 2e Treasure Type or placed hoard appropriate to the source.
2. Shift coin, gem, and art-object values one denomination.
3. Recompose coin by local mint, age, and the silver-heavy table above.
4. Generate magic items from the 2e category tables; do not turn them into a balancing cash allowance.
5. Explain the source: tax chest, pay convoy, temple plate, merchant reserve, buried household savings, ransom, or older loot.

There is no wealth-by-level budget. Starting-above-1st-level funds are a referee decision; actual wealth comes from treasure, property, obligations, and campaign events.

§12. Magic & the Market ​

Why has magic not replaced the historical economy? Two facts do most of the work. First, labor is cheap — 2 sp buys a common laborer's day — so labor-saving magic competes against the least expensive input. Second, casters are scarce and concentrated in temples, guilds, courts, and cities. Magic disrupts a market only when it beats an expensive input — materials, land, light, risk, or time — and does so at sufficient scale.

The controlling spell corpus is the 2e PHB as modified by adnd-2e-revised. Its prepared wizard cantrips and priest Minor Blessings are repeatable but capacity-limited; stock 5e spell text does not apply.

Repeatable minor magic ​

| Effect | Economic result | |---|---|---| | Mending | One 10-minute turn repairs one small mundane break or tear no larger than about a foot. It cannot replace missing material or restore destroyed armor, weapons, or complex mechanisms. A mender can support pottery, clothing, and household-goods repair at 1–2 cp per eligible piece, but does not replace smiths or armorers. | | Prestidigitation | Cleaning, warming, chilling, flavoring, scenting, coloring, and other domestic effects are valuable luxury labor, not material creation. Until the house spell states a target or volume limit, this book assumes one small object or roughly one cubic foot per casting for market analysis. | | Conjure Flame, Light, Sacred Light | A prepared caster can replace portable flame or light for a party or household, but creates no fuel and no permanent lamp. The preparation choice and caster's presence limit scale. | | Detect Magic and Read Magic | These make simple magical screening and literacy professional-time services. They reveal neither item function nor command words and do not replace Identify, appraisal, or curse research. | | Scribe | Records speech using supplied ink and paper. A wizard costs more than a 2–3 sp/day copyist, so it wins only where speed, exact dictation, or secrecy matters. | | Message | A 60-foot unobstructed whisper improves local coordination but cannot replace Sending, a courier, or a message office. | | Measure, Count, Arcane Compass, Chronometer | Useful aids to clerks and surveyors, but they reveal no value, composition, route, title, boundary, or inaccessible dimension. | | Minor Blessings | Bless Meal, Comfort, Soothe, Ward Vermin, and Sense Affliction assist hospitality, pastoral care, handling, and triage. Their explicit limits preserve the markets for food, shelter, medicine, preservation, training, and pest control. |

Price these by professional time under §5, not by the leveled-spell table.

Leveled magic and market scars ​

Caster scarcity ​

This corpus assumes casters are rare — one in a thousand people at most — and leveled casters far rarer. For Book III §5's model kingdom of 2–5 million:

The ladder is a campaign-density assumption, not a count of sellers. It counts visible casters who could in principle be approached, excluding hidden monsters and hermits; office, oath, doctrine, loyalty, and personal purpose remove most high-level casters from commerce. Intelligence bonus wizard slots increase 1st–4th-level daily supply for ordinary Intelligence 13–20, but only exceptional Intelligence 21+ grants a bonus 5th-level slot. Higher slots may hold lower-level spells, improving a retainer's flexibility without improving a spell's effect.

Raise caster density like any supply shock: temporary and minor utility adjusts first, then permanent lighting, grain, and specialized craft. The wage peg moves last because bread and labor are the last things this spell corpus learns to make.

A second worked case — the horse fair. A destrier's price (§9) is years of grain plus conditioned courage plus bloodstock, and magic cannot buy any of the three cheaply. Speak with Animals does not make a horse brave — it makes the horse honest: a druid can ask whether it has been lamed, drugged, or doctored, which defeats a horse-coper's tricks wherever one attends. Charm effects make a horse friendly temporarily — a theft technology answered by brands, guarded stables, and an animal that may later testify. The house blessing Soothe calms an ordinary domestic animal for one turn but has no effect on hostile creatures or combatants. Conditioning still takes hundreds of sessions against a trainer's 4 sp day.

There is no PHB Awaken spell in this campaign. If an intelligent speaking stallion exists, it is a unique creature or setting-specific enchantment rather than a reproducible input to horse breeding.

§13. Property & Construction ​

These are campaign-scale total-project anchors, not a line-for-line transcription of a single DMG table. The fortified entries begin with the 2e stronghold scale after the denomination shift, then widen for site, quarrying, transport, earthworks, finish, and historical variation. The upper castle band is consistent with exceptional royal works: Conwy alone cost about £15,000, or roughly 3,600,000 silver-penny equivalents. Construction labor uses the wage table: a master mason at 1 gp/day and common laborers at 2 sp/day. Land, extraordinary foundations, siege urgency, imported stone, and garrison equipment are additional.

§14. Paper & Credit ​

No circulating banknotes — bearer paper is anachronistic for a European-model economy (China's Song/Yuan paper is the exception, and a distant eastern empire using it is period-appropriate flavor). What exists is paper credit, secured by verification magic:

These percentages are campaign bands, not universal medieval tariffs. Bills vary with term, route, currency, and the parties' credit; bottomry is older, while a recognizable standalone marine-insurance market belongs chiefly to major late-medieval Mediterranean ports. Use the low end inside a trusted network and the high end where distance, delay, or default risk is real.

Insurance. The sea trade invented the priced kind and mostly keeps it; everyone else insures the medieval way — mutually. Guild and fraternity dues are sickness, fire, and burial cover (and in the great companies, raising cover — the Price Catalog's death note); a village's insurance is its neighbors, and its lord's obligation in famine. Magic moves the premiums, not the principle: Sending offices cut the news-lag underwriters used to price blind, a divination-vetted voyage rides cheaper, and a claim that smells wrong gets a caster's investigation — scuttling a ship for its insurance is adventure-tier fraud, like forging a seal. Life insurance as a paper trade never emerges cleanly: great houses instead fund temples, negotiate raising obligations, and secure access to a willing high priest.

Magical authentication. Mundane forgery of paper would be trivial in a world with illusion magic, so no serious instrument circulates without an authenticated seal. Routine papers use the permanent signets described in Book IV, not a fresh casting of Wizard Mark: the stock 2e spell consumes diamond dust worth 100 gp, or 10 gp after the Silver Standard shift, and by itself neither proves institutional authority nor binds a seal to unaltered text. The reusable signet-and-touch-plate protocol is therefore explicit setting magic inspired by the spell, not an unstated power of it. Direct Wizard Mark remains available for singular high-value documents where its component cost is justified. This has structural consequences:

• The verification monopoly is the business. Whoever can attest and check seals — a banking family, a mercantile temple network (Waukeen in the Realms, Zilchus in Greyhawk) — collects the fee income on every instrument and becomes politically significant. This is the Medici position with magic as the moat.
• Verification is available in cities and large towns only. In a village, a letter of credit is fancy paper; carry coin.
• Counterfeiting is a magical arms race, not a craft crime. A forged seal implies a caster of real skill and an institutional victim with resources — adventure-tier crime, punished accordingly.
• Settlement between branches happens by periodic clearing of offsetting bills, not coin wagons. Coin only moves to cover the net difference, which is why the network cares about balanced trade between its cities.

Table rule: letters of credit are available between any two major cities on the same network at 2–5%; anything more exotic is a negotiation with the issuing house.

§15. How People Talk About Money ​

• Commoners quote in coppers and quarters; most never see gold.
• Merchants and adventurers quote in silver; "that'll be thirty silver" is normal for serious gear.
• Contracts, dowries, ransoms, and land quote in pounds (pp) — and, in law-books and formal instruments, in marks: a unit of account worth two-thirds of a pp (exactly 66⅔ sp; usually settled as 66 sp 7 cp), with no coin behind it. Medieval English accounts genuinely computed substantial fines, debts, and rents in marks; it was not merely decorative legal language. Either unit is still a ledger figure: actual settlement arrives as sacks of silver, letters of credit, or goods.
• Prices in this document are honest market rates in a mid-sized town. Village prices for local produce run lower; anything imported runs higher; siege or famine prices are unbounded.

Worked example: the food cart ​

A PC with 1 sp in her pouch wants a hot meat pie (4 cp). First thing in the morning the pieman's apron holds no six coppers of change, so he offers to make the silver worth itself: two pies and a mug of small ale apiece (1 cp) for her and her companion — 10 cp even, nothing owed back — or the pie now and the balance against tomorrow's breakfast, or she can come back after the lunch rush, when the apron is heavy. This tiny friction — silver being slightly too big for street purchases — is period-accurate and gives copper a real job.

Quick conversion card (for prices in published material) ​

Book II: The Price Catalog ​

Companion to the Silver Standard pricing system. Prices assume a mid-sized market town in peacetime; villages run cheaper for local produce, cities dearer for everything else. Anchors: 1 sp = 1 medieval silver penny; an unskilled laborer earns 2 sp/day, a craftsman 3–4 sp/day.

Sourcing: most entries are converted from 14th–15th century English and continental price records. Entries marked ⟨est.⟩ are extrapolations in the same spirit for goods without clean historical analogs. Ranges reflect quality and region, not haggling — haggling happens on top.

Sanity check for improvised prices: divide by 2 sp to express the price in laborer-days.

§1. Annual Incomes (for intuition) ​

The single most useful table for getting a feel for the economy. A "pound" here is the pp (100 sp).

Rule of thumb: anything costing more than ~5 pp is beyond a laborer's realistic lifetime savings; anything over ~100 pp is aristocrat-and-institution money.

§2. Food & Drink (expanded) ​

Staples ​

Meat, fish, dairy ​

Drink ​

Spices & luxury foods ​

§3. Clothing & Textiles ​

Cloth was dear and labor cheap, so a wardrobe was wealth — routinely named in wills, pawned, and stolen. A peasant family spends a tenth of its income keeping itself clothed. Magic bends this market without breaking it (Book I §12): the house-rule Mending cantrip can repair one small break or tear after a 10-minute turn, but it cannot replace missing material. Careful repair supports the second-hand market; it does not make garments immortal.

Cloth by the yard ​

A garment costs cloth plus tailoring — and the cloth is nearly all of it: a tailor's day is only 3–4 sp. Peasants sew their own. (An ell is the cloth measure for linens — 45 inches, a yard and a quarter; wool sells by the yard. See the glossary.)

Garments ​

Furs ​

Commissioned finery ​

For courts, audiences, weddings — anywhere rank is read at a glance. A commission is several bills: the cloth merchant's (the bulk of it), the tailor's (days at 3–4 sp), then the furrier's and embroiderer's, which are open-ended. Allow one to three weeks; a rush doubles the making. Where sumptuary laws run, some of this is illegal on the wrong back — the fine, or the favor that waives it, is part of the cost of dressing above your station.

Jewelry — the other half of court dress — is under §13: worn wealth is plate you can flee with.

§4. Household Goods ​

§5. Tools & Working Gear ​

The merchant's counter — the tools of weighing, counting, and proving. False weights and measures are assize business: pillory for the first offense, expulsion from trade for the third.

§6. Raw Materials & Building ​

Construction, all-in:

Wages per Book I: master mason 1 gp/day, craftsmen 3–4 sp, laborers 2 sp.

§7. Land, Rent & Property ​

§8. Animals (expanded) ​

Livestock and mounts are in Book I. Additions:

Farrier: shoeing, four shoes, 4–6 cp. Horse hire: 5 cp–1 sp/day plus feed and a deposit. Stud fee, good stallion: 5 sp–2 gp.

Book I's horse ladder supplies light, medium, and heavy warhorses at 75–100, 125–150, and 200 gp. The 2e horse-quality overlay can still be used: high-spirited ×2 and charger ×4.

Beasts of wonder ⟨est.⟩ ​

No historical ledger prices a griffon; these extrapolate the exotic-beast logic above — menagerie money, princes' gifts, and the hawking-law reflex — into the bestiary. Live capture is adventurer work, which is much of what the price is buying, and as with the goshawk, the making is the price: the beast is cheap beside the years of training, feeding, and burying the trainers.

§9. Books, Writing & Education ​

A print economy: most settings have the press (Baldur's Gate runs broadsheets; Eberron prints newspapers), so plain books below are print-priced — cheap enough for a craftsman's shelf, roughly 5–10× under what hand-copying would cost. The anatomy of the price: paper is cheap by the sheet but a book eats it by the quire (a 250-page quarto holds ~5 cp of paper); setting type and pulling the press are craftsman-months amortized over an edition of a few hundred; and the binding — boards, leather, clasps — is handwork the press never touches. Rule of thumb: an ordinary edition lands near ¼–½ cp the page, bound; learned texts printed a few score at a time run 2–4× that; and past the words, the dress can cost anything — see the prayer-book rows. What stays dear is the hand: scribal work, illumination, anything sealed, and anything magical. Where your setting has no press, multiply plain books by 5–10 and the manuscript economy returns.

§10. Services (expanded) ​

Medicine ​

Medicine in the revised 2e spell corpus: there is no generic Lesser Restoration/Greater Restoration pair. Specific problems require specific magic.

Disease remains class-shaped, but access is more important than a large checkout price. A laborer may receive charity from the local faith and a lord may command patronage, while neither can force an eligible priest to exist, prepare the spell, or approve the cure. The retained physician still sells regimen, prevention, diagnosis, childbirth and fertility care, long convalescence, and treatment at a scale spell slots cannot meet. In a plague, coin fails because mass mortality outruns caster supply, and temples triage by rank, piety, donation, and doctrine.

Death in the core revised 2e spell corpus: restoration of life is institutional, uncertain, and costly in more than coin. PHB Appendix 4 supplies no Revivify or True Resurrection; access depends on the caster, temple, subject, and spell limits.

Preserve Dead, from Wizard's Spell Compendium, Volume 3, is the direct 2e mechanical analog to later editions' Gentle Repose, but it is not part of the PHB spell list. Its cash quote follows Book I §5's bespoke 1st-level service band; scarcity appears as a failed search or refusal, not an automatic multiplier. The quicklime itself is ordinary material sold at 4–6 cp per quarter (§6) and does not drive the fee.

Set that against §1: a laborer's whole cash year is 50–70 gp, but the central gate is access rather than a component invoice. A village buries its dead. A prosperous guild or great house can petition a temple, fund its institutions, and accept the obligation afterward. Serious assassination still destroys or hides the body and pressures the spell's time limit—unless a rare necromancer can preserve it. Temple consent, resurrection survival, Constitution loss, recovery, and the subject's return are campaign events rather than checkout-line costs.

Religion & rites of passage ​

Law & administration ​

§11. Entertainment & Vice ​

§12. Travel & Freight ​

The toll rows describe specific chartered collection points, not a charge on every road or every traveler. Local citizens and privileged merchants may be exempt, while murage, pavage, pontage, market toll, and commodity duty can be distinct charges collected during the same journey. The ferry prices use a person/animal/vehicle ladder so a lone traveler is not charged like a freight cart.

The freight table is the medieval economy in miniature: land transport can double the price of grain within a few dozen miles, so bulk goods move by water or not at all, and inland towns eat local.

Magical passage ​

Apply the relationship and access rules in Book I §5 under the grounded-scarcity premise of Book I §12. High-level casters live in the greatest cities, temples, courts, and guildhalls, but existence does not imply availability for hire. Magic moves words and worthies when an institution or caster has a reason to help—not freight on demand.

The PHB has no Teleportation Circle. Permanent circles are setting-specific infrastructure and must be labeled as such rather than treated as the default transport network. The house-rule Message cantrip reaches only 60 feet and does not compete with Sending.

Run the rest through the Book I §12 filter and it stays mundane: Phantom Steed requires a reusable engraved gold tube worth at least 100 gp and competes with a 1 sp-a-day hired horse; no spell moves a laden cog's cargo. Even an airship lifts a few tons at flagship prices, carrying post, passengers, and plate, never grain. Bulk still travels by water.

An adventuring wizard does not automatically multiply the table by daily slots to earn downtime income. Demand is thin, trust and legal authority matter, and the established traffic belongs to institutions with retained casters and correspondent networks. A player character who joins such an office receives salary, patronage, or a share of its fees; a player character who travels with the party receives a treasure share.

§13. Luxury & Status Goods ​

§14. Ransoms, Fines & Taxes ​

§15. Game-World Extrapolations ⟨est.⟩ ​

No direct historical basis. Price these from the same wages, materials, scarcity, and 2e creation rules as the rest of the book; use a denomination shift only when no better basis exists.

The healing-potion price is not a rarity band. A 2e potion consumes 20–100 gp of shifted ingredients, requires two to ten uninterrupted days, a laboratory worth at least 200 gp with monthly upkeep, and a success roll that may instead produce poison or delusion. Even the cheapest successful batch averages about 27 gp in ingredients before labor, amortization, brokerage, and profit.

§16. Worked Intuitions ​

• A laborer's family lives on ~1 sp/day for food; against that budget the 4 cp meat pie is a treat. Luxuries measure against income, not the stew-pot: a 5–10 gp fur trim is one to two months of the man's entire wages — not a splurge but a fantasy.
• A craftsman saving hard puts away 2–3 pp a year; a yeoman farmer perhaps 1. A made goshawk at ~20 gp (§8) is two years of the yeoman's savings — for the bird the courtesy books assign to the yeoman's own station. That gap is what hawking laws police.
• A starting adventurer with 100 sp of gear walks around wearing a farmhand's annual cash income.
• A knight's warhorse (200 gp) + plate (150 gp) + weapons and remounts ≈ 400+ gp, or 40+ pp — a full year of a middling manor's entire gross. Knighthood is a capital-intensive profession, which is what the feudal land grant is for.
• A 30–40 gp healing potion equals five to eight months of common cash wages: villages will have none, and even a market-town temple treats a few bottles as treasury assets. Commoners use the 1 cp barber-surgeon instead. A 2–10 gp institutional Cure Disease is still a major household expense, but the deeper divide is access: temple doctrine and triage can admit a penniless parishioner or refuse a wealthy stranger. Restoration is a faith- and service-gated 7th-level rite rather than a tariff.
• The party's 2,000 sp dungeon haul is a manor's annual revenue. Spending it in a village is impossible; spending it in a town is an event people discuss.

Book III: Taxes, Budgets & Treasuries ​

Third document in the Silver Standard set. Covers who taxes whom, what institutions earn and spend, and — the gameable part — how much coin is actually sitting in any given chest.

Historical basis is 14th–15th century English fiscal records (manorial accounts, borough records, exchequer rolls), converted at 1d = 1 sp, so £1 = 240 sp = 2.4 pp. Large figures are quoted in pp (100 sp). Entries marked ⟨est.⟩ are extrapolations.

The fiscal facts of life in this economy:

1. Wealth is not coin. Nobles hold land and plate; merchants hold goods and debts owed; the crown holds jewels it can pawn. Coin is a thin working layer over everything, which is why even great institutions borrow for lump sums.
2. Revenue arrives in lumps, not streams. Rents fall due on quarter days; customs follow the shipping season; taxes are one-off grants. Everyone runs on arrears and credit between lumps.
3. There is no general income tax. Taxation attaches to things — land, movables, trade, salt, heads — and to events — death, marriage, inheritance, entry.
4. Tax collection is farmed and fee-ridden. Collectors take a cut, officials take fees, and the gap between what's levied and what arrives is a permanent scandal.

§1. The Commoner's Tax Year ​

Villein household (unfree tenant, 20–30 acres) ​

Gross annual output ~8–12 pp equivalent (mostly in kind). Annual obligations:

Life-event charges: merchet (daughter's marriage) 1–5 gp; heriot (death duty: on the tenant's death the lord takes the household's best animal — usually the cow, so a ~9 gp capital loss at the worst possible moment); entry fine on taking over the holding 5 gp – 12 pp; chevage (license to live off the manor) 2–5 sp/yr; leyrwite and similar morals fines 5 sp – 2 gp.

Total burden: 25–40% of gross output in a normal year. The manorial court is as much a revenue instrument as a justice one.

Free townsman (craftsman, income ~10 pp/yr) ​

The townsman pays less as a share of income (~15–25%) but almost entirely in coin, where the villein pays largely in kind and labor. Freedom of the city — the right to trade retail and vote — costs 4 gp – 5 pp to purchase, or comes free by apprenticeship.

§2. Manorial & Local Revenue (the lord's side) ​

A manor is a revenue machine. Typical annual account for a middling manor (gross ~20–50 pp):

Expenses run 20–40% of gross: bailiff and reeve (bailiff 2–4 pp/yr cash, plus keep and fees — see §2's workforce table), repairs, seed and stock if farming the demesne, steward's fees. Net proceeds flow to the lord's receiver — the central books they land in are §7's. Note what is not in the account: no payment to the lord's own overlord — feudal dues upward are owed in service and on events, not as an annual share (§7).

The labor bill, and why it is so small ​

Measured in hired laborer-years (5–7 pp each, per the Price Catalog's incomes table), a manor's gross looks far too small to staff a working estate. The resolution: the cash account is only the lord's skim, and almost none of the manor's labor is hired. Two things to hold separate:

The account is not the economy. A middling manor of 25–40 tenant households, at §1's gross output of 8–12 pp per household, is a 200–400 pp/yr real economy, most of it in kind. The 20–50 pp manorial account is the 10–25% the lord extracts from it. The village feeds itself first; the account records what leaves.

The workforce, by source and cost to the account:

The 2 sp day-wage is the marginal price of labor, not its average cost: a manor run on hired hands year-round would be insolvent at once, which is precisely the arrangement villeinage exists to avoid. Where §1 shows services commuted, the labor doesn't vanish from the system — it reappears in the account as money rent, and the demesne hires or leases instead. This is also the machine's failure mode: when plague doubles wages and tenants buy out their services, farming the demesne with paid labor stops paying, and lords fall back on leasing it whole — the "or lease" in the revenue table above.

§3. Town & City Finance ​

The fee farm ​

Chartered towns pay the crown a fixed annual sum — the fee farm — for the right to govern and collect their own revenues. A provincial city's farm runs 250–400 pp/yr; the greatest cities 700+ pp. It's the first charge on the civic budget and towns fall into arrears on it chronically.

Budgets by settlement size ​

Where it goes ​

Special levies: murage (walls), pavage (streets), pontage (bridge) — temporary toll grants for capital works. A town in crisis (siege repair, plague, royal fine) assesses its citizens directly by ward, which is deeply unpopular and generates evasion cases for years.

§4. Guild Finance ​

Guild scale tracks town scale. A craft organizes when it has enough masters to fill a feast table and fund a candle; below that threshold the trades pool into one composite fraternity. Note that "masters" is the paying membership — each master stands for a workshop of journeymen, apprentices, and servants, so a 40-master craft answers for 150–250 people.

Guild sizes at a glance ​

Journeymen sometimes keep a "yeomen's fraternity" of their own on penny dues — tolerated as a burial club, watched as a wage cartel, periodically banned.

The master's shop ​

The atom everything above is built from. A master is a household firm: his own hands, a journeyman hired by the day when work warrants, one or two apprentices bound for seven years, and a wife and children — unpaid, essential, and invisible in the accounts.

Setting up:

Against a journeyman's realistic savings of 2–3 pp a year, that is one to three years of hard scraping — which is why the usual routes in are a wife's dowry, an inheritance, or marrying a master's widow, who comes with shop, tools, and standing all at once.

The year's account (middling shop: master, one journeyman part of the year, two apprentices):

The columns are ranges across shops, not one ledger — a busy shop sits high on sales and wages together. A worked middle: sales 50 pp, plus 2 pp in premiums and sidelines; against materials 22, journeyman 5, apprentices' keep 3, rent 2, fuel 1, dues 1.5 — 34.5 pp out, call it 17 pp to the household. That is the Price Catalog's "master craftsman, shop owner, 15–30 pp" made from parts; the leading masters of the big crafts — two or three journeymen, standing contracts, a stall at the fair — clear the top of that range and supply the guild's wardens, while a struggling master in a soft year nets little more than his journeyman's wage. Guild court rolls are full of masters excused quarterage for poverty.

Where the money actually is: not in the box. Tools and stock come to 10–40 gp; the debt book — work delivered against payment at the quarter days — runs 5–15 pp owed at any moment and is usually the shop's largest asset; the box itself holds 1–5 pp, and the master owes his own suppliers in turn. A shop can be solvent on parchment and illiquid in fact, and one defaulting customer or a rained-out fair pushes it to the guild's loan fund or the pawnbroker. This is why quarterage arrears are the classic guild-court case, and why the §9 calendar matters as much to a cobbler as to an earl.

Ordinary craft guild (30–60 masters, provincial town) ​

Expenses: the annual feast (1–4 pp), candles and chantry obligations (a full chantry priest, if endowed, 12–17 pp/yr), alms to sick members — the great companies keep a raising fund besides (the Price Catalog's death note) — pageant costs, hall rent or upkeep. The guild box holds 10–100 pp between obligations, plus the guild's plate — cups and a garland worth as much again.

Great craft guild (large city, 100–300 masters) ​

The same machine at civic scale. It owns or covets a hall, funds one of the city's pageant plays outright, and exercises the search in earnest.

The box holds 50–300 pp between obligations; plate to match. Half of every search forfeiture typically goes to the town or crown — which is why the authorities keep renewing the right.

The livery company (capital city) ​

A craft or merchant fraternity grown into a chartered, property-holding corporation. The name is literal: the livery is the company's ceremonial clothing, and the right to wear it marks the inner circle. Structure, outside in: freemen — every member, made free by apprenticeship, patrimony, or purchase (redemption); liverymen — the 30–150 seniors "of the clothing," who vote in city elections; the court of assistants — the sitting board; a master and wardens — annually elected, personally liable executives. A great company counts 150–600 freemen; its livery dines with the mayor, because the mayor is usually one of them.

The surplus buys more property and plate, and extends loans — to members, and collectively to the crown. Effectively a bank, an insurer, a regulator, a charity, and a political bloc in one hall; the treasury runs 200–1,000 pp in coin with plate worth 500–2,500 pp (see §8). Wardens' accounts are audited annually, and embezzlement scandals are a genre of civic drama.

Merchant staple & venture companies ​

Regulated companies, not joint-stock: each merchant trades on his own capital under company rules, paying for the privilege. The staplers control a compulsory export (wool through the staple port — see the glossary); the venturers run the cloth fleets to the foreign marts. Membership 150–400 merchants across the realm, entered cheaply by apprenticeship or dearly by redemption.

The company's own chest is modest beside what flows through its members' hands: the crown's customs line (§5, 25,000–60,000 pp/yr) is a tax on this membership's turnover, which is why the company negotiates with the crown as a peer — and why it is often the crown's largest single creditor after the foreign banks.

§5. Crown Finance ​

Sizing a realm ​

The revenue tables below assume a mid-sized kingdom — the 14th-century English model: 2–5 million people, moderately commercialized, with a functioning central fiscal apparatus. Scale to other realms with the per-capita rule:

Ordinary revenue ≈ 2 sp per subject per year, modified by:

• ×2–5 for heavy commercialization (customs and excise on trade flowing through the realm — this is how city-states punch far above their population)
• ×0.5 or less for weak fiscal penetration (feudal fragmentation, mountains, a crown that can't count its subjects)
• Extraordinary taxation can roughly double a given year's take, per the grant table below

For context, gross output runs ~5–8 pp per household per year (§1), so a competent medieval state captures only 1–2% of the economy in an ordinary year, 3–5% at full wartime stretch. That ceiling — not greed — is why war finance is loans and pawned jewels.

Setting examples ​

Populations are approximate canon figures; revenues follow from the rule above.

Cross-check these against §7: Sembia's revenue implies its merchant council collectively outweighs any neighboring crown, which matches its fiction; a single Dale's fisc is a baron's income, which is why the Dales field militias, not armies.

Ordinary revenue (~70,000–75,000 pp/yr for the mid-sized model) ​

Notice whose money this isn't: the barons'. No rent flows up the pyramid (§7), so the crown lives exactly the way its lords do, one level up — its own manors (the royal demesne, run per §2, plus the towns' fee farms), its own courts (justice at national scale), and its own tenants' events (the incidents: the same reliefs and wardships a baron takes from his knights, taken from the barons). What only a crown has is the border and the whole commons: customs sit at the ports where trade must pass, and the granted taxes below fall on every community directly — the fifteenth-and-tenth is assessed village by village and ward by ward, collected beside the lord's rents, never through them (it is the "national tenth" line in §1's villein budget). The pyramid owes the king an army; it does not owe him an income.

Extraordinary revenue (requires a grant) ​

A grant is the realm's assembly consenting to one levy, once (see the glossary). The crown must come back and ask each time, and the asking is never free — supply is traded for redress, which is why war finance is where assemblies learn their strength.