You have to have money. Well, OK, I suppose you could just have your characters using what they grow, create, et cetera, as a means of trade, but when you are building a world with any kind of industrialisation, you need some form of token to trade with.
I could have used an existing system, such as pounds (which used to be about the value of a pound of gold) or dollars. I could have used metals: gold, silver and bronze, perhaps.
Apparently, I don't like to make life easy for myself (nor my readers), because I came up with a currency that is oddly similar to British money before the decimal system.
If you have never heard of British currency before we simplified Pounds and Pence, I suggest you watch an informative video by a chap called Lindybeige:
To be perfectly honest, he explains it far better than I believe I could and he manages to be amusing at the same time.
If you already know all about British "old money", you might enjoy the video anyway. However, you will not need it to understand my new page under The World Of Centrallis: Currency.
E.M., you might say, why did you copy a system so old fashioned and complicated?
Well, firstly, I didn't actually know that what I was coming up with was so similar to our old money system. I grew up with decimalised Pounds and Pence. My father likes old coins and showed me a few that he kept when everything changed, but that's as much as I knew about it. Besides that, Maths has never been my best subject, so I would not have remembered anything that he told me about the old coins when I was knee-height to a grasshopper.
Secondly, I just wanted to go about it differently. I wanted to be able to explore Centrallis and what it is that makes it unique. Currency seemed like a good place to start. If you watch Lindybeige's video, you might agree that my decision is a good one for a specific reason: Britain's money, pre-decimalisation, was created by Britain's history. Every invader to our shores made our money what it was.
I'm a little regretful that we've lost that valuable piece of our culture and history (though my terrible-at-mathematics brain is probably extremely thankful).
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