Announcing the Contest Winner! (Plus Some Interesting US Coin Facts)

The third semi-annual Save Versus All Wands contest - What is the Value of this Coin Hoard - is over.

$1,000 was the winning guess, only a bit below the actual total of $1,216.

It was made by Mark Clover (AKA Dr. Evil) who made his guess via the above funny meme.

Thank you to everyone else for participating!

Mark is the owner of Creative Mountain Games and manages the Lake Geneva Games store in Lake Geneva Wisconsin. He started playing Dungeons & Dragons when it was first released in 1974, and attended the last Gen Con to be held at Horticultural Hall, one year later.

He'll be receiving the four Seven Voyages of Zylarthen booklets plus the Book of Spells supplement. Fittingly, Zylarthen was directly inspired by the original 1974 "three little brown books." 

Curiously, Mark's guess of $1,000 was also the highest guess, with no one guessing over the actual total. Most of the others were in the range of $200 to $500, with the mean being only $400 or so - only one-third of the actual value of the hoard. I'm not sure why the guesses were low. Perhaps it was partly due to the fact that few thought anyone be crazy enough to amass more than a thousand dollars worth of coins for use in a role-playing game.

Though, remember, it's not a sunk cost. In a sense it's only slightly less liquid than keeping money in a checking or savings account. Indeed, by one measure, it's more liquid! And, yes, I've at least partially "cashed out" twice since I started, eight years ago.  

I'm not a numismatist, but I've learned some interesting facts in the process of amassing my "hoard".

Here's one of them: If you throw out the "cheap" coins - pennies and nickels - and the more recent coins - the Susan B. Anthony, Sacagawea and Presidential dollars - the four basic original coins - dimes, quarters, half-dollars and dollars (those large diameter Eisenhowers) - all have  approximately the same volume and weight per dollar value. In other words, if you take a Arturo Fuente 8-5-8 cigar box and fill it to the brim with dimes, quarters, half-dollars or Eisenhower dollars, you'll always get approximately $200 of coins weighing about nine pounds.

Interestingly, that's about the value of the 25 cigars that the box was designed to contain, at least at walk-in cigar store prices. Though if you order a box online you can pick it up for about $125. And, by the way, if you're a cigar smoker, I highly recommend the 8-5-8's, especially those with the unusual green "Claro" wrapper. They're a great value for only five dollars a stick.

The figures below, break down the numbers and properties of the above pictured coins. Keep in mind that the in-game monetary and experience point values are based on the Zylarthen silver standard:      


Totals:

Total Number of Coins: 6,350

Game
Value: 288,870 Silver Pieces
Total Value: 288,870 xp
Total Weight: 5,020 lb. (1004 eu)

Actual
Total Value: $1,216
Total Weight: 60 lb. 4 oz.


Jefferson Nickel (iron scrip)

Total Number of Coins: 1,000

Game
Value: 1 iron scrip coin (1/20 of a Silver Piece)
Total Value: 50 xp
Total Weight: 50 lb. (10 eu)

Actual
Years: 1946-2018
Diameter: 0.835 inches
Thickness: 0.077 inches
Volume: 0.042 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.161 ounces
Composition: Copper
Total Value: $50
Total Weight: 10 lb. 1 oz.


Lincoln Penny (Copper Piece)

Total Number of Coins: 1,600

Game
Value: 1 Copper Piece (1/5 of a Silver Piece)
Total Value: 320 xp
Total Weight: 80 lb. (16 eu)

Actual
Years: 1947-1962/1962-1981/1982-2018
Diameter: 0.750 inches
Thickness: 0.059 inches
Volume: 0.026 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.080 ounces
Composition: Bronze/Copper/Zinc
Total Value: $16
Total Weight: 8 lb.


Roosevelt Dime (Silver Piece)

Total Number of Coins: 2,000

Game
Value: 1 Silver Piece
Total Value: 2,000 xp
Total Weight: 100 lb. (20 eu)

Actual
Years: 1965-2018
Diameter: 0.705 inches
Thickness: 0.053 inches
Volume: 0.021 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.073 ounces
Composition: Copper
Total Value: $200
Total Weight: 9 lb. 2 oz.


Washington Quarter (Gold Piece)

Total Number of Coins: 800

Game
Value: 1 Gold Piece (10 Silver Pieces)
Total Value: 8,000 xp
Total Weight: 40 lb. (8 eu)

Actual
Years: 1965-2018
Diameter: 0.955 inches
Thickness: 0.069 inches
Volume: 0.049 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.182 ounces
Composition: Copper
Total Value: $200
Total Weight: 9 lb. 2 oz


Susan B. Anthony Dollar (token for multiple iron scrip coins)

Total Number of Coins: 100

Game
Value: 100 iron scrip coins (5 Silver Pieces)
Total Value: 500 xp
Total Weight: 500 lb. (100 eu)

Actual
Years: 1979-1981, 1999
Diameter: 1.043 inches
Thickness: 0.079 inches
Volume: 0.067 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.260 ounces
Composition: Copper/Nickel
Total Value: $100
Total Weight: 1 lb. 10 oz


Kennedy Half Dollar (token for multiple Copper Pieces)

Total Number of Coins: 400

Game
Value: 100 Copper Pieces (20 Silver Pieces)
Total Value: 8,000 xp
Total Weight: 2,000 lb. (400 eu)

Actual
Years: 1971-2001
Diameter: 1.205 inches
Thickness: 0.085 inches
Volume: 0.097 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.365 ounces
Composition: Copper
Total Value: $200
Total Weight: 9 lb. 2 oz


Eisenhower Dollar (token for multiple Silver Pieces)

Total Number of Coins: 200

Game
Value: 100 Silver Pieces
Total Value: 20,000 xp
Total Weight: 1,000 lb. (200 eu)

Actual
Years: 1971-1978
Diameter: 1.500 inches
Thickness: 0.102 inches
Volume: 0.180 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.729 ounces
Composition: Copper
Total Value: $200
Total Weight: 9 lb. 2 oz


Sacagawea/Presidential Dollar (token for multiple Gold Pieces)

Total Number of Coins: 250

Game
Value: 100 Gold Pieces (1000 Silver Pieces)
Total Value: 250,000 xp
Total Weight: 1,250 lb. (250 eu)

Actual
Years: 2000-2016
Diameter: 1.043 inches
Thickness: 0.079 inches
Volume: 0.067 cubic inches 
Mass: 0.260 ounces
Composition: Copper
Total Value: $250
Total Weight: 4 lb. 1 oz 

Save Versus All Wands Contest: What is the Value of the Coin Hoard?

Treasure Type H 

Announcing the third annual (well, not quite) Save Versus All Wands contest!

You can read about and see the results of the first two - Seven Voyages of Zylarthen: What's in a Name and the Jack Vance Dialogue Writing Contest here/here/here and here/here. They were four years ago. Apologies.

Okay, so here's the current contest question: How much money is in the above picture?

What does this have to do with anything? Well, here's the background:

In Characters and Combat, Vol. I of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, I talked about using actual United States coins as props for in-game copper pieces, silver pieces and gold pieces.

Using coin props is fun, especially for kids. I should say that I started doing this for AD&D before I wrote Zylarthen.

The idea for using actual coins as props is that U.S. metal currency is worth so little now that if you want props for fantasy money, US coinage is, weirdly enough, your cheapest bet. A penny, nickel or sometimes even a dime is in most cases cheaper than, say, a washer from a hardware store or a plastic toy imitation "dubloon". Plus, US coins look more like, well, coins than, say, washers do, and they clink more than plastic toy coins.

In fact, they're not merely cheaper, they're in a sense, free. You can't trade your washers or plastic dubloons back for what you paid for them. But you can do that with US coins. In a sense it's simply a way (albeit odd) of saving money while getting some neat game props in the meantime.

Here is what I wrote in Zylarthen:

Physical Coin Tokens (Optional): 

In our campaign we actually give players little bags of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and (for really nice hauls) half dollars and dollars to represent their coin hoards. Everyone has found this vastly more fun (and potentially less prone to error) than the usual method of crossing digits or hatch marks off of a piece of paper. It makes discovering treasure—or spending it—more real, and even mundane items or inexpensive weapons seem more valuable when you have to pay for them with physical money. 

We keep about $200 worth of coins in a number of cigar boxes (these look very much like treasure chests), and have a dozen or so mock-velvet bags that we purchased for a few dollars at a jewelry store. To those who object that this is too great an expense, we would reply that it isn’t actually an expense—we still have the money (perhaps it’s even an admittedly odd way of saving money), and if we’re ever down to our last $200, we can always go back to hatch marks! 

Penny = Copper Piece 

Dime = Silver Piece 

Quarter = Gold Piece 

Kennedy Half Dollar = 100 Copper Pieces 

Presidential Dollar = 100 Silver Pieces 

Eisenhower Dollar = 100 Gold Pieces 

Small Washer = Iron Coin  

Nickel = 100 Iron Coins

Now, Zylarthen is on the silver standard, where 1 SP = 1 experience point. The exchange rates for coins are these:

5 CP = 1 SP 

10 SP = 1 GP 

4 iron scrip = 1 CP

Beginning player-characters get 30-180 silver pieces, and standard equipment is usually priced in silver pieces, to some extent roughly tracking the prices in OD&D and AD&D, though I twiddled things somewhat to make them more "realistic" relative to actual medieval prices.

I wrote about why I went on the silver standard here.

Among other things, the scheme makes copper pieces more valuable (thus giving people and monsters more reason to hoard them) and makes gold pieces rarer and more similar to, say gems. One of the problems with the treasure schemes in OD&D and AD&D is that gems and jewelry make up 97% (or whatever it is) of the value of treasure found on the charts. A silver standard goes some way towards solving that.

But back to using US coins as props.

I actually changed the original representation scheme, slightly.

The Eisenhower Dollar now represents 100 silver pieces and the Presidential or Sacagawea Dollar now represents 100 gold pieces. (This is because I came to believe that shiny Presidential and Sacagawea Dollar coins look more like gold.)

And nickels are now individual iron scrip coins, with Susan B. Anthony Dollars representing 100 of them.

Finding a large iron scrip hoard might be annoying.

So here's the current scheme:

Penny = Copper Piece 

Dime = Silver Piece 

Quarter = Gold Piece 

Kennedy Half Dollar = 100 Copper Pieces 

Eisenhower Dollar = 100 Silver Pieces 

Presidential Dollar = 100 Gold Pieces 

Nickel = 1 iron scrip  

Susan B. Anthony Dollar = 100 iron scrips

I'll write more later about how things have worked out - including tackling the knotty subject of are the coins really free? - but in the meantime I thought I'd launch a contest in the spirit of the first Zylarthen contest.

Above is my current hoard.

How much actual money (in US currency) is there in the picture?

Hint: it's not $200.

Vote once in the comments on this blog post.

The winner will receive the four original Zylarthen booklets plus the supplement Book of Spells. If you already own the five booklets, they makes a great gift!

Extra credit: What is the total Zylarthen equivalent in experience points? Include this estimate with your money guess. if the winner gets within 50% to 150% of the actual experience point total, I'll throw in the Zylarthen Electronic Edition, or if you already have it, some sort of equivalent.

Contest ends at midnight (CST) on Halloween.

Good luck!

OSR Art Friday: The Lace & Steel Illustrations of Donna Barr

From the original box cover

I bought the first edition of Lace & Steel--the game of faux-17th century swashbuckling and fancy court balls--in 1989, after seeing it on the shelf and flipping though it for thirty seconds. I never played it, but it has always enchanted me. Recently I realized that one of the reasons for that was its art. Unusual for its type, all of the illustrations are by one artist, Donna Barr. In addition, and also, somewhat unusually for the category, the pages are drenched in illustrations of all kinds. There are approximately 200 pages, distributed over four booklets. There are many full-page and even two-page drawings but also a huge number of smaller ones averaging out to at least three a page. Large-scale battles, duels, ladies and gentlemen at leisure or at fancy balls, monsters--warnets (intelligent giant hornets), pixies, harpies and "half-horses" (centaurs), to name a few--landscapes and maps, individual weapons, armor pieces or clothing, as well as musketeers with hangovers making faces into mirrors in the morning, are all covered.

In a roundabout way, Lace & Steel was one of the inspirations for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen. I wanted to make a 17th century "Lace & Steel" version of OD&D. That became a 16th century pseudo-Catholic version, which finally became a more conventional swords & sorcery-fairy tale version. But a few things from Lace & Steel survived almost intact--for example, the idea of using physical tokens to represent money in the game:

The author has found that a new dimension is added to game play when a player character’s funds are simulated by solid objects. One or two cent pieces can simulate copper groats, and heavy washers make good silver and gold pieces. Washers or disks can be had from any hardware store. Go for big washers (20 to 25mm is good) with small central holes, such as muffler washers. Brass washers are used for gold marks, and steel washers for silver schillings. 

“Real” money is excellent fun to use, and players soon develop odd habits such as fondling their money or stacking it into neat little piles. Parting with money can be a traumatic experience for miserly players, since they are handing over a physical object rather than just crossing a number off a piece of paper. Players will also tend to keep a less ready tag on their wealth, which adds a bit of spice to play.

A man bathing in coins

But to get back to the art. Is it OSR? Well, the game itself--authored by the still active Paul Kidd--certainly features some supposed new school elements, such as skills. But it is twenty-five years old, released at a time when 1e AD&D was still (barely) the standard. And to me, the evocative line-drawings of Donna Barr are the polar-opposites of the video-gamish color splatterings of most contemporary RPG art. But in any case, OSR Art Friday was never intended to be ideologically rigid (whatever that might mean in this context). And part of the fun is to choose a diverse variety of examples. Donna Barr's drawings are cool. They work. In the end, that's what matters.

Who is Donna Barr? One way to get to know her is to read her long-running and frequently updated blog. As many of you know, she's an incredibly prolific and still very active writer and illustrator, known primarily for comic books or "graphic novels" (though, she prefers the label "drawn-fiction"). Her output is distinctive. Her major works or series are The Desert Peach--about Erwin Rommel's fictional brother Pfirsich, an exuberantly homosexual Nazi general who leads a North African unit of homosexuals and assorted misfits--Stinz--about centaurs or "half-horses" interacting with normal men in a stylized German valley setting--and Bosom Enemies about two normal men who find themselves enslaved and transformed into half-horses. Obviously there's a sexual subtext to much of her material (also involving animals or, rather people that are half-animals), but without (on the main) being graphic or pornographic. Let us say, she at least occupies a niche. (Occupies? Scratch that. She dominates it and then uses it as a bridgehead.)

Musketeer with hangover making faces into his mirror in the morning

Wait, Nazis? Flamboyant, leather-clad, homosexual Nazis (that are to some extent made fun of, albeit affectionately), sexual themes involving animals or people half-way transformed into animals and then quasi-sexually dominated by other people?

BAN IT! BAN IT! BAN IT! BAN IT!

(Oh, sorry. I was temporarily seized by the spirit of the age.)

Emphasizing the sexual part doesn't do the whole justice. Her series are witty and funny and at times moving and, yes, profound. See for yourself if you can.

In the late 1980's she also did some drawings for Traveller and GURPS. But her work for Lace & Steel was her most thorough RPG effort. That the game is now long out of print does not diminish its value or influence. For example, I would be surprised if James Raggi did not riff off of it for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Used copies of the first edition are now hard to find and expensive. A second edition came out in 1998 but featured an inferior cover and a somewhat different one-volume layout. Inexplicably it discarded many of the best and largest drawings.

Donna Barr is a great asset to the wider hobby. OSR Art Friday is proud to feature her.

Why a Silver Standard?

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen uses a silver standard. That is, the prices for adventuring items are quoted in silver pieces and the experience points needed to gain levels (which approximately track the numbers of OD&D) match up with silver pieces, not the gold pieces of OD&D.

It's not original.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess does it. And even Gary Gygax himself implied that he might have done it if given the chance to do Dungeons & Dragons over again.

Why?

Well, first of all, it's more historically accurate. Silver has always been much more plentiful than gold (while remaining rare, with additional stocks difficult or costly to obtain) and thus better suited to minting coins. Here are some rough facts:

1. The silver penny of Medieval, Renaissance or Tudor times in England was about the size and weight of a modern dime.
2. The silver shilling (worth twelve pennies) was about the weight of an Eisenhower Dollar, though with a somewhat smaller volume.
3. Very very roughly, and taking into account expected oscillations, debasement and subsequent inflations, in-kind payments and so on, a shilling was often equal to a day's wage of a farmer or manual laborer. Or conversely, it was about what you needed to pay for a day of food and shelter. People often cut pennies into quarters to pay for cheap items.
4. Historically, gold was always 5-20 times more valuable by weight. Or since gold was twice as dense as silver, 2-10 times more valuable by volume.
5. Thus, depending on the ratio of gold to silver, one could carry a year's salary in a belt pouch and a large fortune in a small sack.
6. Silver shillings or gold sovereigns—'pound' coins equal to 20 shillings—weighed about half as much as the 1/10th of a pound stipulated in OD&D and AD&D. (For much of the period in question, 'pound' and sometimes even 'shilling' were so-called units of account, rather than names for actual coins.)

For More Things in Heaven and Earth (my '16th century' proto-Zylarthen) I created a very fussy (but fairly historically accurate) table of coin weights and values:

(An encumbrance 'item' is roughly equal to five pounds of weight, similar to the encumbrance scheme of Zylarthen.)

It was wise to jettison the above for Zylarthen, but I will probably use it in my pending 'Tudor' or 'Elizabethan' supplement.

However, much more important than 'realism' was the way that the monetary values and exchange rates of OD&D completely undercut a robust and varied coin system. Since even mundane and cheap items were expressed in terms of gold, it wasn't clear what purpose copper and silver really served. Why would any but unintelligent monsters hoard such coins? But the Dungeon Expedition example in The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures along with of course the Treasure Tables themselves, seemed to suggest that they did—'The chest with the poison needle is full of copper pieces—appears to be about 2,000 of them'. It was as if modern day gangsters did much of their business in pennies, going around with sacks of them, keeping them in elaborately protected safes, etc.

So for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen I, so to speak, shifted things one column to the left, with the standard metal of account now being in the middle of the other two. I kept the variance in values from lowest value coin to highest value coin at 1:50 the same as in OD&D, though this is much narrower than the 1:200 variance in AD&D that many of us are most familiar with. Here are the relevant comparisons:

OD&D:

AD&D:

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen:

The 1:5 copper to silver exchange rate allowed copper pieces to still maintain some meaningful value and give men and monsters a reason for hoarding them. On the other hand, I wanted gold to become something truly valuable, sort of like the status of gems in OD&D, which I thought made more sense both from the standpoint of 'realism' as well as how gold is usually treated in fantasy stories, fairytales and the like. Basically I wanted to give it more allure than just something you use to buy a coil of rope with.

I've heard that referees wanting to switch from a gold to a silver standard often run into opposition from their players—'he's taking our gold away!'. So I would be interested to hear from any Seven Voyages of Zylarthen play testers out there as to how the silver standard has worked in practice.

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UPDATE ON TEAM OLA: A number of wonderful and generous people have pledged $500 since last Wednesday to sponsor my Chicago Marathon run in support of the Our Lady of the Angels Mission on Chicago's West Side. Thank you again! I am very grateful. 

I still have $500 to raise by Marathon day, Sunday, October 12th. Only four days left! If you haven't already done so, please consider sponsoring me in support of a group that does great work! Any gift of $75 or more will launch either the four Seven Voyages of Zylarthen physical booklets or a cool Steve Prefontaine DVD on an inexorable trajectory towards your home. My donation page is here:

Donate to Team Member Oakes Spalding (again, it goes directly to the Mission, not me).

And more information is here:

Mission of Our Lady of the Angels

Team OLA page with cool Team OLA Motivational Video

 Cheers again and please pray for me if you can.