Re: [DL] Makin' period money

[Allan Seyberth <darious@darious.com>]

At 04:23 PM 1/25/2002 -0600, you wrote:
 >Okay, so I'm paintin' excess poker chips gold and silver, thinking it's a
 >start.  Then I start looking around at the currency sites Allen's got listed
 >on his links pages.  And nothing quite seems to fit.

Nothing. . . quite. . . seems. . . to. . . fit.

What exactly are you looking for?  The links (afair) go straight to direct 
pictures of Civil War currency.  If you want complete accuracy, then you 
will have to deal with

Individual Bank notes - each one different for each different bank, both 
North and South.
Individual State notes - both North and South
Union Greenbacks - from 1863 the first green currency, which looks a lot 
like our current paper currency today.  Backed in faith by the government, 
instead of with hard coin.
Fractional currency - for a brief time the Union issued postage stamps as a 
form of currency.
Confederate Currency - of four (or five) different series, roughly one per 
year.  Incredibly easy to counterfeit.  Also backed in faith, but also 
massively overproduced until the CSA Currency reform act.

Both USA and CSA currency fluctuated directly with the tides of war - what 
was good for one was bad for the other, with a few interesting 
exceptions.  (Antietam was bad for both sides.  The author of an article I 
read attributes the Union devaluation to be likely to the Union learning 
without a doubt that this was not going to be a quick war.  There are a few 
other interesting variations from the good for one/bad for the other 
general pattern.  Ties to cotton, the possibility of Lincoln losing the 
election, CSA censorship of Gettysburg, etc)

And then there's the fluctuations of gold and silver values.  Gold was 
fixed at $20.67/ounce - until the Civil War which caused it's value to rise 
drastically - due to the higher personal value place on hard currency as 
well as the above mentioned fluctuations in paper value.  Reaching a peak 
of $47 and change in 1864, it decreased slowly back to 20.67 over the next 
15 years.  A fixed price that stayed until 1933 when Congress pulled the 
States off of the gold standard.

I am assuming that the above prices reflect Union values.  I haven't 
researched CSA gold values, nor have I looked into Silver.

That's a bit too much detail to implement into a game, imo.

What I do is use the play money from grocery stores - The white and black 
small versions of States money - 100's, 50's 20's etc and the really cheesy 
plastic coins - for Union Currency.
For CSA I created a series of templates from the currency sites and printed 
out a pile of front and back CSA notes - also too small to scale to be 
confused with real notes.

I have a series of gold painted poker chips - in 10, 20 and 100 
denominations.  The Eagle and double eagle I just penned in the value of 
"10" or "20" on.  I know that the $100 gold coin is not historical, but I 
used a bit of wax on black poker chips before painting to "spot" them with 
"ghost rock".
I got lazy and cheap and didn't want to buy, paint, and store the 100 or so 
$20 chips to get the required value I needed.

Silver is in $5 increments.

And for the DL specific - there is Republic of Deseret currency.  And I 
think Lost Angels as well.

All this was researched to best hose over my players.
Most savvy merchants tend to want hard coin and hand paper money back on 
all transactions.  In the Northeast, Union currency is valued anywhere from 
70-100% of "book" value for prices.  The same with CSA currency in the 
Southeast.   Crossing the border drop the value to mere pennies on the 
dollar - (greenback in the CSA are near worthless and vice-versa. )

While going West means that paper currency of both sides become more 
grudgeonly accepted - all "book" values for goods prices are weakened due 
to supply problems and boomtown mentalities (esp in California)  Dodge City 
is my reference point for paper - both Union and CSA are worth 50-70%.

Long story short - I can shave money off of the party just by manipulating 
the local economies - and back it up if they call me.

And an additional benefit I had was the dilemma a Texas Ranger in my game 
had when he had snuck North for a mission - he needed to buy something 
expensive and right before he bought it he realized that he had a pile of 
CSA greybacks. . . which would have spotlit him as having recently come 
from the South - which he didn't want.

:)





So now I'm seriously
 >thinking about using MS Publisher to create some period bills for the north
 >and south, and trying to figure out a way to paint/mark chips to different
 >values as well.
 >
 >however, it occurs that I'm ... sorta ... counterfeiting, even
 >unintentionally.  Anyone know any rules governing creating prop money?
 >
 >And does anyone have any suggestions for making it look good?  I'm going to
 >use the historical stuff as examples and standards, but i'm pretty sure it
 >won't look engraved--I don't have that kind of time/patience.  I'm also
 >going to rig it so I get max amount of bills on per page, so I don't waste
 >paper and time cutting it out.
 >
 >I'm looking for input; anyone wanna toss in their two cents?  (pun fully
 >intended!)
 >
 >Darkechilde
 >darkchil@rea-alp.com
 >ICQ#12901136
 >MSMessenger Darkechilde13@hotmail.com
 >AOLIM Darkechilde2001@aol.com
 >www.bill-hein.com
 >
 >
 >To unsubscribe, send a message to esquire@gamerz.net with
 >       unsubscribe deadlands
 >as the BODY of the message.  The SUBJECT is ignored.

-------------------
Allan Seyberth
darious@darious.com
Deadlands fan site - http://www.darious.com/

Death is God's way of telling you not to be such a wise guy.