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Average Starting Wealth for the Swashbuckler campaign is $1000 in "Gurps dollars". The English equivalent is 10 pounds (�10) or 200 shillings (200 s). Wealth and poverty levels for the campaign are as follows:
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Starting Wealth: In Pounds In Shillings In Gurps $ Dead Broke �0 0 s $0 Poor �2 40 s $200 Struggling �5 100 s $500 Average �10 200 s $1000 Comfortable �20 400 s $2000 Wealthy �50 1000 s $5000 Very Wealthy �200 4000 s $20,000 Filthy Rich �1000 20,000 s $100,000
English money used to be very interesting, if a trifle difficult for the uninitiated. The key to remembering the English money system (as it was before it was "decimalized") is L.S.D. The "L"., or as it is traditionally written, �, is the symbol for the British pound (� stands for the Latin word for pound). S similarly stands for shillings. The "d"--it's used lower case--stands for "denarius" or "denarii"--the Greek words for penny and pence. Thus, "�3/4s/6d" means three pounds, four shillings, and sixpence, or 774 pence or sixty-four and a half shillings.
Just how much are a shilling or a pound? There are twelve pence in a shilling, and twenty shillings in a pound. It's easy to see that there are 240 pence in a pound.
But it gets a little weirder. There was, during the period of the campaign, no such thing as a pound unit of coin or currency; the pound was an accountant's unit only. There were gold coins, "guineas," that were worth 21 shillings (252 pence) but that was as close as any coin came to a pound. There was also a coin called a "crown" worth 5 shillings or sixty pence or one-fourth of a pound. There were also half-crowns, half-pence and quarter-pence (called farthings), but too much detail just gets confusing.
Here's a table to make the main coins clearer.
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Guinea Pound Crown Shilling Penny GURPS $
(Gold) (Acct.) (Silver) (Silver) (Copper)
1 Guinea 1 1.05 1.33 21 252 $105
1 Pound 1 4 20 240 $100
1 Crown 1 5 60 $25
1 Shilling 1 12 $5
1 Penny 1 $0.40
(Source: Gurps Swashbucklers)
Spanish money was very important because it was the only minted money that was present in any significant amounts in the New World. Thus, it became the main medium of exchange in the Caribbean and a great deal of the rest of the swashbucklers' world. Certainly, if one plans to plunder Spanish gold, one should have an idea what the stuff is worth.
The key units of Spanish coinage were the silver realand the peso de ocho, or piece of eight (the term peso is still in use in many former Spanish colonies). There were eight reals to the peso--as one might guess--but the really interesting thing was that they actually would cut up the peso into eight edges, or "bits" as change. Even today, "two bits" is a quarter of a dollar. There was also the gold doblon, or doubloon, and so on and so forth. Here's another table:
Doblon Peso Real Maravedi GURPS $
(Gold) (Silver) (Silver) (Copper)
1 Doblon (Doubloon) 1 4 32 1088 $80
1 Peso (Piece of Eight) 1 8 272 $20
1 Real or "Bit" 1 34 $2
1 Maravedi 1 10 cents
(Source: Gurps Swashbucklers)
Modern American equivalents in so-called "Gurps dollars" to money values and prices have been given in this guide to help facilitate comparison and to allow estimation of prices of items not listed. If one is able to divide or multiply at all, one will see that the Gurps dollar equivalents are only estimates, rounded off.
If a player wishes, she may ignore pounds, shillings, and doubloons and simply keep track of her money in Gurps dollars. This is less romantic, but much simpler. Better yet, keep track of both. For simple transactions use your Gurps dollars, but in some situations it may be important how much of what kind of money you have. Thirty Guineas and 3 reals in your pocket may be equivalent to $3162, but in a Spanish port you would only have $12 you could spend--safely, that is.
As an arbitrary rule, let $1000 worth of silver--in coins of any nation--weigh 1 pound, and $32,000 in gold weigh 1 pound. The same applies to bullion. Carrying a fortune in silver can require a strong back.
Paper money as we understand it is non-existent, but letters of credit are available. Issued by a bank or other financial institution, they are the forerunners of paper money, but are more like a cashier's check. They are not legal tender, and the average shopkeeper won't accept them (well, sometimes) but another lending house, bank, or major merchant will. Most such people wish to do only legitimate business with respectable merchants, but some are not so picky; the governor of Tortuga, for example, was not a government official, but an official of the French West Indies Company. He frequently issued letters of credit on the company to people who came in with ships loaded with Spanish gold and goods. If you don't believe me, see Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood.
As one might expect, the New World ports can be a confusing mish-mash of mixed coinage. A shilling is roughly equivalent to two reals, but some places you can get three reals for a shilling, while in others--Spanish ports, for example--shillings won't be taken except on the black market. Supply and demand, as ever, play a big role in determining the relative value of coinage.
Copyright � 1998, Paul C. Pinkosh
Revised--October 31, 1998
URL: http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Station/1178/gurps/swashbucklers/swash1.html
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