Metodología Experimental

In contrast to the Threshold, where plunder economics rule the day, the Realm has a complex financial system. The Realm’s monetary systems feature central banking, financial instruments like bonds and equities, correspondent banking and the other trappings of an advanced trading and manufacturing economy.

The primary feature of the Realm’s economics was that they operated at the behest of and for the benefit of the Empress. All policies were set to either enrich her personally, or to control her potential rivals by sapping their financial might while still giving them the wherewithal to labor at her behest.

The Realm’s monetary system is bifurcated, with two circulating mediums of exchange. This is done to codify economic discrimination. Most individuals—not just peasants and slaves but even high ranking mortals—may legally have access only to a paper and copper-coin currency called “cash.”

Dragon-Blooded and their assignees are permitted to transact business in “high” currency— actual jade. Many controlled objects are freely available with no meaningful oversight by the state, save that the price is by law quoted in jade, rather than cash. Slaves, chests of opium, exotic sorcerous reagents, all can be bought from shopfronts or salons in the right part of town— if one has access to the currency of the Dragon-Blooded. The Empress sold cash in exchange for jade at favorable rates, using scrip to drain real wealth out of the economy.

The ability to purchase most items sold only for jade would not be worth much to the average citizen of the Realm, as there is no way they would ever be able to afford a yasal crystal or the lease on a manse. However, it is also used for making sure petty objects considered socially dangerous never get far outside the control of the Dynasty. Addictive drugs, military weapons and armor and the general materials of religious worship such as incense, votive candles and sacrificial wine are all examples of items kept out of the reach of commoners by controlling the currency they’re priced in.

The cash system and the jade system were both managed by separate bureaucracies within the Dragon-Blooded state. The cash system was operated by the Empress’s Private Purse, while the jade system was supervised by the Imperial Treasury. Payments in silver were strictly segregated within the Bursar of Barbarian Tribute’s office. The resulting morass created massive duplication of effort within the Realm’s state apparatus, which was precisely as the Empress desired it. It is for this reason that, like many of the Realm’s institutions, the financial system has had difficulty in its creator’s absence.

The Imperial Treasury is still relatively functional. It commands massive resources and the currency within it—jade—is desired for its ability to be forged into war-gear and other miracles. None wish to subvert it; all wish to control it so that it can be pillaged to arm their house in rare splendor. If it is undone by the chaos of the Imperial civil war, its collapse will mark the finale of the financial and economic milieu defined as the reign of the Empress.

On the other hand, the Imperial Purse is a much riper target for subversion. The controls on the bureaucracy have remained relatively intact. Some wish to control its ability to issue new cash, but these efforts have not yet gained traction because the massive reward of controlling the Realm’s central bank is obvious. However, different houses have begun to offer their own scrips, and the Purse lacks the authority or budget to suppress these alternative currencies.

They are all, for now, interchangeable, but the Houses are making a great show of favoring their own currencies, offering discounts for payment with house scrip, and forcing its payees to accept house scrip when they would have previously been paid in Imperial cash. Houses Ragara and V’neef have been particularly successful at promulgating their own currencies, and have done a good job keeping House Cynis’s scrip a voucher for drugs and sex rather than a serious currency of exchange.

The Cash System

The cash system contains two coins and two paper notes. The coins are by far the most popular—the worth of notes is somewhat high for common transactions, and the depictive character of their decoration bothers devout Immaculates, who see iconic art as idolatry inviting illicit worship.

The paper koku is worth 1/8th of a jade obol—the smallest coin in the Realm’s formal jade coinage. A koku is worth 8 paper qian, 16 brown copper siu or 128 green copper yen. It is shot through with purple and gold threads that form the image of a crane, and it bears the black and green imprint of eagles nesting on the Imperial mountain. A koku is worth only slightly less than a silver dinar, and the two are roughly interchangeable at the scale of common household finance. The paper qian is a note worth 2 brown copper siu or 16 green copper yen. The threads in this note form the image of a lion, rather than that of a crane. The qian

is printed with a black and red design depicting the skyline of the Imperial City. A qian is a week’s wages for a skilled commoner.

The brown siu is worth 8 yen. It is halved and quartered. A siu is adequate return for several days of labor by a skilled craftsman. The siu is struck from copper and specially treated to make the copper take on a dark brown color.

The yen is the smallest coin struck by the Realm. Yen are halved, quartered and divided into eighths. A yen is actually larger than a siu and struck from the same copper, but it is chemically treated to be bright green straight through. Yen are pierced so they are easily carried—you can keep your wallet on a long string. A yen represents the day wages of an unskilled laborer doing work of no importance and will buy about a day’s worth of food. An eighth of a yen will purchase several beers or a jar of wine.

The Jade System

The Magical Materials represent what is truly precious to the Exalted. They are essential to the enchantments by which the Exalted make their influence upon the world more than a transient evanescence of their personal Essence. The Empress adopted it as a currency with the open and deliberate intention of making herself master of the Realm’s stocks of the material. In this she was largely successful. Several of the houses have accumulated significant stocks of jade — particularly Ragara, which uses it as the working capital for their banking operations. However, even Ragara’s bankroll paled compared to the Treasury‘s hoard, which totaled more than 50,000 talents.

A jade talent is the largest size measure of worth in the Imperial monetary system. In theory, it’s a thin slab of jade weighing 68 pounds. Those cut by the Imperial Treasury are engraved with a number and a seal, and etched on all corners to defy shavers.

A talent is worth 8 bars, 64 minae, 128 shekels, or 1,024 obols. It’s worth noting these values are for a ledger talent of jade—that is, a notional value of 1,024 obols easier to keep track of than writing “1,024” repeatedly. While a ledger talent is worth 8 jade bars, a true talent is worth 12 bars by weight—the difference is lost as a talent is cut down into smaller denominations. The vast majority of the time, the talent is a unit of account, used to represent large totals, rather than an actual discreet unit of physical jade.

The presence of actual physical talents is not unknown at the highest levels of Dragon-Blooded society, but they do not circulate commonly, both due to the difficulty of transporting them and their enormous value. When manses are constructed and need their interior geomantic structures fabricated, real talents are the raw materials, and for this reason the Empress only allowed the striking of physical talents from the finest and purest jade. Artificers and sorcerers who seek to purchase uncut jade talents for use as raw material have to pay significantly more than a ledger talent per block.

Reckoning its worth in Creation’s other monetary systems, a jade ledger talent is worth 5 talents of silver (320 pounds) or 8,192 koku. In real terms, a talent is

sufficient to pay for 1 million man/days of unskilled labor, including all the administrative expenses implied by such a huge payroll.

The bar is one-eighth of a talent of jade. It is traditionally scored to show how to divide it into 8 minae, and those cut down from the Imperial Treasury are marked with its crest and an identifying number.

The mina is one eighth of a bar. It is marked with a central scoring and sixteen circles, describing how to split it into two shekels or how to carve sixteen obols from it. Minae are circulated in large enough numbers that they do not bear an identifying number, although those manufactured by the Treasury bear their crest, as per normal.

A shekel is simply half a mina. It is almost always marked with an eight-circle template that describes how to cut it down into obols. As implied by the marks, a ledger mina is worth 8 obols. In ledger reckoning, a shekel is worth about 1/6th of a silver dirham.

A clean, intact shekel is one of the most commonly seen forms of large denomination jade currency, and they command significant premiums over their 8 obol face value, if the jade is of the right color and of uniformly fine quality. The cutting-down process between shekel and obol is where the majority of the loss of the powdered jade known as “Imperial bootblack” happens. This is a critical material in the manufacture of magical weapons and armor, and comprises 1/3rd the mass of the shekel—many artifacts created during the Second Age are forged from so-called “Jade-steel alloy” created by adding jade dust to molten steel and cementing the alloying process with certain occult treatments.

An obol is the most commonly circulated form of formally recognized coinage among the Dragon-Blooded. Obols struck by the Treasury are graven with one of several emblems. There are many such coins that circulate, struck by individuals outside the Realm, with irregular or whimsical markings.

The bit is an informal splitting of the obol into quarters to make it more spendable. They are formally illegal for commoners to possess in the Realm, and ownership of them is nominally discouraged among the Terrestrial Exalted, as they have links to an ancient rebellion. This has done nothing to discourage their circulation, and they represent a meaningful fraction of the circulating jade coinage of the Realm—perhaps 40%. These 40% of the coins do a large amount of the work, however. Even the Dragon-Blooded of the Dynasty are not rich enough to throw whole full obols at their expenses casually.