City and Guild Appendix: Price List
See Also
- The Ars Magica Reference Document
- The City & Guild Open Content page
- The City & Guild product page on this wiki
Appendix: Price List
Unlike other fantasy roleplaying games, Ars Magica has not typically concerned itself with prices for common goods. A character's personal possessions are determined by her Social Status Virtue and the troupe's general idea of appropriate starting items, rather than the amount of common coins she has jingling in her wallet. With a new emphasis on craftsman and merchants, however, stories may drift into the arena of personal expenses and available spending money. A fair will be more fun for a grog if he has twelve shillings to spend, for example, than if the storyguide waves her hands and says, "you have enough for a dagger and a night spent drinking."
This section details medieval money and offers a suggested price list for common goods. Prices are listed for story flavor, to help give storyguides an idea of how much an individual dagger will cost a player's character. These prices should not be used to detail annual incomes of merchants or crafters.
Medieval Money
There are two types of money used in an Ars Magica saga: actual money in the form of coins, and moneys-of-account. Moneys-ofaccount are easier to define because they exist only in accounting ledgers. While they use the same values as actual coin money, moneys-ofaccount are a method of trading a specified amount of one type of good for another. Thus, instead of determining how many cows, sheep, or barrels of wine a lot of swords is worth, it is easier to determine a monetary value for the swords and whatever item they are traded for. Moneys-of-account are a system for determining the value of goods, and serve as a method for reckoning values and accounting for them.
The system used in the West is a continuation of the monetary reforms created by Charlemagne in the late eighth century. Charlemagne fixed one pound of silver as the basis for his monetary system. This pound was subdivided into 20 silver solidi (shillings), and each solidus was divided into 12 silver denarii (pence). This relationship remains unchanged in 1220, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. The mark is another western moneyof-account, equal to two-thirds of a pound. In the West, neither mark nor pound exist physically, and are only moneys-of-account.
A variety of coins are in circulation, minted by kings, princes, and some few towns, each differing slightly in weight and in exchange rate with each other. While the actual coins differ, western tradesmen and merchants conveniently use the same Latin terms to describe the various coins. Regardless of whether the penny is called a penny in England, a denier in France, or a pfennig in Germany, it is written as denarius in the records. This commonality allows a universal system of coin values regardless of where an individual saga is set. In Latin, a pound is a libra, a shilling a solidus, and a penny a denarius, and the ratios between these monetary units was universally 1:20:240.
Eastern coins are based on the same Roman currency that Charlemagne used, but in a different way. The Roman solidus wasn't silver, but gold, a commodity too rare for the many coins that Charlemagne minted. But gold wasn't rare in the East, and the Arabs and Byzantines could continue the tradition of gold coins. A bezant, or "solidus of Byzantium" is a gold coin, as is the Arabic denar (denarius with the Latin "ius" removed). Both gold coins are worth approximately 10 western shillings.
In the West, a Mythic Pound equals 20 Mythic Shillings and 240 Mythic Pennies. In the East, a Mythic Pound equals two Mythic Bezants or Denars.
Price List
Prices for a fixed good fluctuate across Mythic Europe, depending on the availability of raw materials in an area and the proclivities of the craftsmen living there. Still, a hierarchy of prices exists, and shoes are cheaper than swords almost everywhere. Not every item desired by a character can be found, and these are only a few examples. Troupes must extrapolate from these listings to arrive at appropriate prices for unlisted goods. Historical prices for 13th century goods are difficult to find, and you should not feel that you are doing anything wrong by inventing the prices of specific goods.
| Item | Standard Price |
|---|---|
| Longbow | 15 shillings |
| Cart | 10 pennies |
| Chainmail, full | 2 pounds |
| Chainmail, partial | 1 pound |
| Chair | 8 pennies |
| Chamber pot | 20 pennies |
| Chest with lock | 2 and 1/2 pounds |
| Dagger | 6 pennies |
| Gallon of ale | half a penny |
| Great sword | 13 shillings |
| Heavy Leather, full | 2 and 1/2 shillings |
| Heavy Leather, partial | 15 pennies |
| House, luxurious | 50 pounds |
| House, peasant | 2 pounds |
| House, urban | 5 pounds |
| Leather Scale, full | 10 shillings |
| Leather Scale, partial | 5 shillings |
| Loaf of bread | half a penny |
| Long sword | 10 shillings |
| Non-Hermetic books | 11 shillings |
| Pair of shoes | 6 – 16 pennies |
| Shield, buckler | 3 shillings |
| Item | Standard Price |
|---|---|
| Shield, heater | 8 shillings |
| Shield, round | 8 pennies |
| Short sword | 3 shillings |
| Shovel | 4 pennies |
| Tunic, dyed | 8 shillings |
| Tunic, fur lined | 13 shillings |
| Tunic, peasant | 16 pennies |
| Tunic, wool | 5 shillings |
| Wagon | 20 pennies |
Adjust the price of an item by its quality.
| Quality | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| Shoddy | x0.5 |
| Standard | x1 |
| Superior | x2 |
| Excellent | x5 |
| Wondrous | x5 or more |
Attribution
Content originally published in Ars Magica: Definitive Edition, ©2024, licensed by Trident, Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games®, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license 4.0 ("CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Open License Markdown version by YR7 & OriginalMadman, https://github.com/OriginalMadman/Ars-Magica-Open-License