Editing The Wyzard Setting Essays (section)

== Almanac ==

=== Coinage and Precious Metals ===

The valuable coins of the current era are drastically, although uniformly, debased.  It was found by the ancient Thracians that there was insufficient in the way of genuine gold and silver to fuel their mighty trading empire.  So, they debased the coinage in order to accomplish two ends: One was to make the wealth of their nation more finely divisible than the large gold disks which were popular at the time, and the other was to defeat the worst of the coin shaving and similar undertakings.

So, they standardized their coinage into three major types, all of the same size: The copper coin, least valuable and pretty much all copper.  The Silver coin, of middle value and containing a substantial portion of silver, although other white metals went into its construction and made it more resistant to wear.  The Gold coin contained very little actual gold indeed, although it still had a pretty yellow color to it.  The new alloy was in fact many times stronger than pure gold, and so defeated those who would jingle their coins in a rough leather bag to gather gold-dust.  

All the coins were made with a ridged edge to defeat shaving, and were relatively simple flat slugs with some text or a simple symbol on them.  To defeat counterfeits, their alloys were precisely calculated and the formula kept secret, so that their density was precisely determinable.  In this fashion, a merchant with one of the standardized weights and a scale, a marked glass tube, and a bit of clear water could determine the genuine-ness of any coin with relative ease.

While the Thracian Hegemony is no more, the trade network they established was so widespread that their coinage became the standard in every civilized land in the world.  To this day, no kingdom with economic aspirations deviates from their formulae, and wealthy merchants take pride in having original Thracian weights with which to examine suspect monies.  The weights are crafted from adamantine, and so are practically beyond adulteration themselves.  In essence, coinage is treated as a kind of commodity.  It is created and dealt with by money-changers and similar persons of precise skills and grasping nature.  Nations and nobility rarely dabble in the minting business - the normal extent of that activity is to order all coins be stamped with some patriotic phrase, or a simple image commemorating some event.  Actually changing the value of coins is seen as too disruptive to the easy flow of commerce.

There are denominations of coin which are made of more valuable materials, or which are less-adulterated due to being minted in days ancient beyond reckoning.  These will be treated as special treasure.  The adulteration of the coinage is why a simple gold ring might be worth ten or even a hundred gold pieces, even though it has an encumbrance value equal to only a single one.

===The Calendar===
Each month consists of four weeks, each one of eight days.  The Eighth day of each week is, by tradition, some type of feast or holiday.  While the identity of that feast or holiday can vary wildly from city to city and nation to nation, it is nonetheless usually taken as a day of rest from labor.  A master who gives his slaves any great amount of work on the eighth-day is usually seen as a skinflint.  Each year consists of thirteen months, for a total of 416 days in a year.  The moon's orbital period used to precisely coincide with the months, but it was disrupted during the same disaster that caused the world to begin wobbling on its axis, thus creating the seasons.  They are now more distant, having an orbital period of five weeks.  The Lunar calendar is therefore of very little use.  

In cultures that keep track of Birthdays in any sense, it is most normal for a birthday to be recorded as the feast-day ending the week of that birth.  The other days of the week are undifferentiated in the mind of the populace, and are often not even named in anything other than an ordinal way.
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