Chatty Coinage

Using coins as an adventure hook or piece of worldbuilding seems like a splendid idea, but in my experience it rarely is. 

Take using different denominations, for example. Settings are either rough-and-tumble enough that specific denomination is irrelevant when compared with metal content, or well-advanced enough that exchange services are available. So having different levels or subdivisions of coins beyond the standard copper/silver/gold is at best futile and at worst extra bookkeeping. Now, having currencies be faction-specific, like in that one video game which we are all aware of, is a more engaging idea. I have yet to try it, but it could work nicely. As for what actually adorns the money of a game, it seems to me that only a very numismatically inclined player would investigate each coin, that is unless an NPC tasked the players with finding examples of different coins in the world. Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic when I said coinage rarely generates fun gameplay. Regardless, I have come up with another idea for a fun tabletop coin-themed mechanic: Talking coins.

Perhaps the idea was not mine specifically. I find sometimes that taking a joke seriously can lead to some fun places, so let us extrapolate what talking money really means. But first, I will define how I would work it:

• Not all coins can talk, just every coin bearing the face of X emperor from Y defunct empire. These coins are hardly rare, but also not the most common form.
• You can only hear them when you're holding them. Lying down naked on a pile of money will also work, though it may be rather loud.
• Each coin can only see what the face can see.
• Every coin is an individual, but they were all made with the same starting personality.
• They contain a not-insignificant amount of precious metal, more than modern coins.

These coins might seem like a great source of information and forbidden knowledge, but they have spent most of the past few hundred years in pockets, chests, and forgotten corners of dank dungeons. In the short term they can certainly provide limited information about nearby threats while dungeoneering, but beyond that most have not lived interesting lives. Some speculate they were made to offer advice from a regal figure to the common people, others think they were created to spy on the population, perhaps both are true. If the players are able to befriend some (Keeping them somewhere with a nice view could be a good start) they might serve as a surveillance system. But, for this to work the coins would have to be retrieved to relay their intelligence, assuming they had not been stolen in the interim. That is only the start of what I assume players could get up to with this type of item. The higher count of precious metals does introduce a dilemma too, where the party might not want to spend these extra-valuable coins because of their semi-sentience, or at least they might feel a little guilty while shaving edges and sweating dust from the coins.

Credit as always to Fallen London for teaching me the word numismatics.