Power is money

For my setting the players are adventuring on a crashed giant spaceship. As such standard gems seemed a little out of place. What I did was replace gems with crystals as a major form of treasure and currency. This is reflected in the treasure allocations from last week's map.

Energy crystals in this setting are abundant given most items were powered by them when the ship was fully operational. But the secret to their creation is restricted to the Visitor admirality and as such they are a limited resource. This makes them the perfect currency. Most quests will be for crystals, they are in strong demand and are the main form of exchange outside of silver based coins minted by the various kingdoms.

Aside from the standard fully charged crystal in BCK I include half and quarter full crystals. Their value decreases disproportionately to their charge with less charged crystals having value lower than their charge. This reflects their lack of endurance when used in technological items, and from a game perspective choice for the characters. All crystals use the same weight categories as gems, so you can carry 1,000 of any type for one stone of encumbrance.

Energy crystal type, charge and values:

• Dim, quarter charge, 5 gp value
• Luminescent, half charge, 25 gp value
• Incandescent, full charge, 100 gp value

To facilitate this in play I altered the coinage and gems tables on the treasure table in ACKS as follows using three terms for crystals in place of the gem types:

Worldship adjusted tresure table

Type	Method	Avg. gp	1000s of Slivers	1000s of Grands	Energy crystals
A	Incidental	275	35% 1d8	None	30% 1d4 stashes
B	Hoarder	500	80% 2d6	None	70% 1d4 stashes
C	Incidental	700	50% 3d4	None	40% 1d6 caches
D	Hoarder	1,000	80% 3d8	None	80% 1d6 stashes
E	Raider	1,250	80% 3d10	15% 1d3	60% 1d4 stashes
F	Incidental	1,500	35% 1d8	15% 1d4	40% 1d6 caches
G	Raider	2,000	80% 3d20	15% 1d3	50% 1d6 stashes
H	Hoarder	2,500	80% 5d12	None	80% 1d6 caches
I	Incidental	3,250	40% 1d6	25% 1d6	50% 1d8 caches
J	Raider	4,000	80% 4d20	40% 1d6	50% 1d6 caches
K	Incidental	5,000	30% 2d8	25% 1d8	25% 1d4 troves
L	Raider	6,000	80% 5d20	55% 1d8	60% 1d6 caches
M	Incidental	8,000	35% 4d6	35% 1d10	30% 1d6 troves
N	Hoarder	9,000	70% 8d12	80% 1d6	80% 1d8 caches
O	Raider	12,000	80% 6d20	70% 2d6	30% 1d4 troves
P	Incidental	17,000	35% 4d6	30% 2d6	40% 1d4 troves
Q	Hoarder	22,000	70% 5d12	75% 4d6	60% 1d6 troves
R	Hoarder	45,000	60% 7d6	75% 8d6	70% 1d4 troves

The three types of crystal treasure types are:

Crystal Stash

1d6 dims

1d2-1 luminescent 

Crystal Cache

1d4 dim

1d10 luminescent 

1d2-1 incandescent 

Crystal Trove

4d20 incandescent

Simplifying coins

My players like hordes of treasure but can be terrible bookkeepers at times. As such I greatly simplified coins for my game. Looking at the historical coinage from Guns at War made me consider alternative coinage. 

The silver Grand replaces the gold coin. This is a large silver piece with the same value as a gold coin (maintaining gp as the standard term to partly avoid confusion). Gold is not easy to find onboard an alien vessel and tends to be reserved for non-coin uses. These coins follow a 2,000 gp to a stone in terms of weight. 

The silver Sliver fits between copper and silver, being worth 1/20th of a gp. Slivers can be tiny minted coins or Grand coins cut into half, or quarters, but they are always reflected in an sp value regardless of their size. They follow a 40,000 per stone weight value similar to the soldi in GoW. This means they follow the same weight to gold value found in gold coins.

The convenience of this is that all coins can be recorded as 2,000 gp per stone, So the value can be used instead of the number, this helps later on to just enable the recording of a single amount.

Tracking treasure

Combining these two changes allows characters to just track four things for most treasure, the gp value of coins (2,000 gp per stone), and the three crystal types (1,000 crystals per stone). This has greatly speed up my inventory checks and maintenance in game. 

This allows me to have vast hordes of treasure in my game and simplify the tracking. Treasure is fun and treasure for XP drives my sandbox style games very nicely. So, the thought of removing this elements completely is not something I want to do. I have played many different games over time that reward attendance for XP, missions for xp and treasure for XP. All create their own style of game and for sandbox play I find the treasure for XP model works really well. To simplify it on my end i keep a running tally on a piece of paper of using the gp value of treasure and monster xp then add and divide the amounts when they get to town, this takes less effort than i originally thought it would once you get in the habit, again the key is to keeping it simple.

Another element common to these treasure types is that many different items enter play through these random tables. In the past I thought of that as a negative, but my players are loving it. Many items are discarded, handed to henchmen or sold off. But the items themselves become a part of the characters advancement. They become prized possessions with a story that help build the characters.