Chapter Twelve

Fast Money: Building the Wealth of Nations

It’s time for something you can immediately use in your city-building: hard numbers.

The first thing we need is the number of people in an area. From there we can approximate the amount of available money, and from there determine who’s likely to have it.

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Population Sizes

Once again, we want to lean on the core books as much as possible when building our system, and keep it as easy to use and understand as possible. 3rd edition had data on what types of settlements exist, and the population PCs could expect to find there, from a thorp to a metropolis. 5E doesn’t offer any such chart, or really any settlement details. However, they do offer levels of living standards, measured by the cost to maintain them:

• Wretched

• Squalid

• Poor

• Modest

• Comfortable

• Wealthy

• Aristocratic

Ideally, since we’re trying to use book information as much as possible, we could use these terms to describe the general wealth of a community. We can certainly keep the number of levels, but the terms… they work as descriptions of an individual’s lifestyle, but some of them don’t do so well in describing an entire community.

• Describing any but the most broken, destitute community as “wretched” is mean. That’s not a problem just because it seems rude; it’s also inaccurate. The description of a “wretched” lifestyle indicates a daily battle for survival. A little farming community might have very little money, work the fields dawn to dusk, get covered in slop, and have few opportunities to bathe—a life some city dwellers might truly consider wretched—but, in general, they still have food, shelter, and community. Is it a struggle? Yeah. Wretched, though? That seems like overkill.

• “Squalid” fails for similar reasons. It’s not quite as bad, but it’s still a term that treats a person’s entire way of living as low-quality, as opposed to just indicated a relatively small amount of money or wealth (which is really what we want in our terminology here). We can come up with better descriptors.

• Like the other two, “comfortable” is more descriptive of a person’s life and existence. It’s worth noting at this point that that makes sense, considering these terms were put to use as a way to describe individual lifestyle choices, and as a method for putting an price tag on what each of those lifestyle choices would cost. But again, this term doesn’t really fit a community—a city at a “comfortable” level of wealth would have some very wealthy people and a lot of quite poor people, making “comfortable” an awkward fit.

• “Aristocratic” isn’t good for reasons similar to those above, but also because the aristocracy refers to a particular, and small, class of people. That’s why the cost for an aristocratic lifestyle is listed as a minimum, not a flat amount. If you’re living an aristocratic lifestyle, there’s a baseline level of wealth necessary to keep it up, but what it means exactly is dependent on you. Because both the specific choices and the underlying cost of an aristocratic lifestyle applies to each individual differently, there’s really no such thing as an “aristocratic” city. Cities can be broadly considered “wealthy” with only a small percentage of the populous being legitimately wealthy because “wealth” can be used as a broad term in a way that “aristocratic” can’t.

So, we’re calling an audible and rejiggering the names on the list. It shouldn’t matter that much, since what’s important is remembering there are seven levels—a DM might want to use the terms when describing a settlement (e.g. “You ride into what appears to be a small town of modest wealth”), and that can certainly help players visualize the area, but it doesn’t really hurt anything if the DM forgets the terms. “You ride into a small town” is perfectly fine.

There are more possibilities than this, but these are the names I’m choosing to describe a settlement’s general level of wealth:

• Broke

• Meager

• Poor

• Modest

• Prosperous

• Affluent

• Wealthy

Now for settlement sizes. It’s easy enough to start with the list provided in 3rd edition: 

• Thorp

• Hamlet

• Village

• Small Town

• Large Town

• Small City

• Large City

• Metropolis

Seven levels of wealth, eight sizes of settlement. That’s awkward. If there were the same number of each, it would be easier to match them. And we’re so close… all we need to do is remove one of the types of settlement.

But which one?

The obvious choices are either “thorp” or “metropolis”. The definition of “thorp” is “a village or hamlet”, so it’s just a term for a smaller version of the same thing. It’s also not a term that sees much use outside of these types of games—you can still find places called “Village of X” and “Hamlet of Y”, but it’s exceedingly rare to see an actual jurisdiction called a “thorp”. Those are pretty good reasons to eliminate that term.

However, I’m choosing to take out “metropolis”. The reason is that a metropolis is often defined not just by the main city in an area, but the surrounding towns and villages, e.g. the “greater metropolitan area” around a major city. Although this shouldn’t lead to confusion in the context of this book—we’re only using the terms descriptively, and what matters are the numbers attached to them—the fact is that “shouldn’t” doesn’t necessarily mean “won’t”. People are going to read or hear “metropolis” and think of the whole surrounding area, and although I may not be able to foresee exactly what problems that might cause, the potential for that misunderstanding means something might get screwed up. “Thorp”, on the other hand, is at most a name people will find funny. As long as everyone grasps that it’s very small, there’s not much to misunderstand.

With seven settlement types and seven levels of wealth, we can make some easy connections.

• Thorp - Broke

• Hamlet - Meager

• Village - Poor

• Small Town - Modest

• Large Town - Prosperous

• Small City - Affluent

• Large City - Wealthy

Now let’s set up the number of people who live in each type of settlement, and dig into what an adventuring party is likely to find.

Note: In the original list, the largest type of city had a population of 25,000+. The numbers have been adjusted upward here mainly because source material from 3rd edition are frequently about 100 years behind source material from 5th edition (at least as it pertains to the Forgotten Realms), and population numbers related to 5th edition tend to be noticeably higher.

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Settlement Descriptions

• Thorp: A small community, usually based around farming or some other method of subsistence living. The residents make their own clothes and tools and can generally repair what they have. Thorps are essentially several farming families living near each other for community and, perhaps, a basic sense of protection, with their homes near the fields. Thorps may have a resident who speaks for the group or makes final decisions, but it’s unlikely that person hoards the wealth of the community—it doesn’t have enough to hoard. The money that does exist may be what little the people have saved for emergencies (they would have no other way to buy anything) or, in part, the taxes they have to pay for the year. Communities which exist to provide larger settlements with food would likely pay taxes to the larger settlement for protection, war, care in times of crisis, to keep greedy nobles happy, etc.

  Isolated communities of this size could exist anywhere, as long as bandits aren’t around to raid them out of house and home and no greater power wants to take over the land. Such settlements would be much more likely to have people who can make finished products, e.g. a brewer or a blacksmith. These workers may also spend most of their time farming, and be given leeway to leave the fields when their crafting work is needed.

  It is unlikely anything there is anything of interest to an adventuring party in the average thorp.

  • *-A settlement with fewer than twenty-five people has at most a few families, and may in fact be a homestead, inhabited solely by members of a single extended family. In either case, these areas would have a tiny amount of money. In fact, if they’re isolated, this type of settlement may have no trade or other dealings with outsiders; in that case, they may not have any money at all. Similarly to thorps, it is unlikely anything of interest to adventurers happens in these locations, though single isolated families can get a bit weird…

• Hamlets are similar to thorps in that they mainly consist of farmers, and as a community they simply have access to more land. Hamlets most likely have a blacksmith who makes metal tools, nails, and so on (no armor), but in more complex or less commonly needed tools may require traveling to the nearest village. Other commercial activity is limited to what makes sense for a given hamlet—for example, if the community is near a reasonably traveled road, they may have an inn or a general store. Like thorps, hamlets tend to exist in support of a larger community, but may spring up almost anywhere in isolation as long as residents are able to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.

  Since farming is by far the most common profession in a medieval style world, farming communities such as thorps and hamlets will be the most common types of settlements. The higher population of a hamlet, however, makes them more likely to exist in isolation (e.g. Easthaven, the fishing hamlet where players start in Icewind Dale). Isolated hamlets are much more likely to have the capacity to fight back against bandits and other aggressors, and will be more likely to have people with the array of skills necessary to survive in potentially difficult areas.

Note on Thorps and Hamlets: Thorps and hamlets are treated as generally quite poor, because that’s how things were for medieval-style farming communities. However, if a noble family were to hold a relatively remote territory as a retreat, the community around it might remain quite small (especially if they decree it to be so). However, the presence of their wealth would necessarily skew the functioning of that community. For example, a hamlet surrounding a small castle could become a trading post just because of the merchants that come through to supply the noble household. This would likely lead to more people working in mercantile jobs or as guards for the area, which would then require more food be imported, and so on.

Nightstone from Storm King’s Thunder is an example of this type of settlement. There are a few farms the regular residents use to feed themselves, but it’s not likely enough to feed everyone within the walls, and definitely not enough to feed whoever stays in the castle as well. Therefore, it should be assumed that they had regular deliveries of food and other basic necessities.

It’s not at all uncommon for D&D books to introduce small communities with nobles or traders or other sources of outsized wealth given the number of people, and that’s perfectly fine. This book is not trying to suggest every rich person must necessarily live in a city or that every noble’s keep will eventually have a sizable town built around it. What this book is trying to set up is a world with many, many, many small communities, most of which do not benefit from that type of notable presence. PCs will bypass the vast majority that they see. But you can tell the PCs the settlements are there, adding to the verismilitude of the world, and you can quickly figure out what types of resources any random settlement has if the party decides they want to see what’s going on there.

• Village: Villages serve as the smallest type of settlement where travelers can expect to see basic goods and services. A village that serves farming communities will have businesses which focus on those needs; a village further afield will mainly focus on what travelers and passersby require. 

  Broadly speaking, PCs will see two types of villages.

  • A village in the midst of a large farming area that offers goods and services the hamlets around it can’t support individually. Since most people are necessarily engaged in agriculture or agriculture-adjacent work, these villages are the most common type.  They tend to develop about ten miles apart from each other, since a five-mile walk each way is about the most a peasant can travel, conduct business in the village, and make it back the same day. They can act as basic points of trade for farmers, and may be where people gather for cultural occasions like harvest festivals. When hamlets and villages are found near an urban area, villages will probably be located where hamlet residents can reach them, conduct business, and return home within the day. If enough farmers have to take multiple-day journeys to reach the nearest village, a basic market will form to serve them closer to where they live, and another village will grow.

  • Villages that grow due to the need for a settlement to exist in a given location, but without enough need to make it grow to town size. Red Larch, a village about one hundred miles northeast of Waterdeep, is a good example. As the point where three trails meet the Long Road between Waterdeep and the town of Triboar, it’s a good location for adventurous folk to set up shop and serve the travelers who come through. However, with Triboar a couple days north and the farming hamlets surrounding Waterdeep a few days to the southwest, most travelers only need a night of safety and some basic provisions to make the last stretch of their journey. They maintain a wider array of goods and services for hunters and adventurers who might be headed down one of the wilderness trails, but not necessarily anything rare.

  To add flavor, and also make it easier to track NPCs, some services that become available in villages may not have one person who specializes in them. For example, a village might have need of a blacksmith and a leatherworker, but it might be the same person. Or the blacksmith might double as the shoemaker while the leatherworker is also the furrier.

  Larger villages are much more likely to have individuals in each profession without doubling up. In that respect, such villages are more like small towns commercially, but with fewer options (or only one) for any profession present, and little, if any, entertainment outside of drinking in a tavern.

• Small Town: A regular town will be the first level of settlement a city-dweller might recognize as civilization. At this size, a settlement is likely to have multiple options for inns, as well as some basic entertainment options (which can exist within the inns or elsewhere). Most goods and services are available; for game purposes, it’s reasonable to say almost anything you want the PCs to have access to in a town is there, or that it isn’t if you want them to have to travel for it. A magic item shop could exist if the proprietor was very careful about security—such a shop would likely attract better thieves than local law enforcement could handle, and it would probably be too risky to sell anything more than a few common or uncommon items. (On the other hand, a tower just outside town, home to a scary hermit wizard who only sells items grudgingly in an effort to fund other projects, could have more available…)

  Around large cities, where farmland can extend outward for dozens of miles, small towns can easily grow along the roads, as places where residents of both hamlets and villages can go when they need something special or as a stopping point for travelers who prefer busier environs.

• Large Town: Because true cities are few and far between, large towns are often the most influential power across a wide area. Most often, a settlement exists in this population range because there needs to be a central point of civilization in the area, but for whatever reason (lack of arable land, high risk of monsters/bandits, etc.), it’s not able to grow to the size of a full-blown city. They can also exist as extensions of power supported by a larger city or a nation with a city relatively nearby, as long as there’s enough land to farm and no risk serious enough to keep the population from expanding. If the town is under the rule of a larger nation, the town’s leader may be appointed by that government, even if there’s nobility in the town or its area of influence (and the leader then has to juggle the demands of the nobility against the needs of everyone else). Otherwise, a noble family may pass leadership through the generations, or leadership can change however the DM decides.

  Large towns have all services available that don’t require a large population to support them, like a university. Relatively rare goods that the DM decides are available in a large town most likely have a shop devoted to their sale (e.g. this is the first settlement type likely to have a bookstore). Many types of business will have multiple competitors within the town. However you set it up, nearly anything relatively common that the PCs need should be available in some form or another. As with a smaller town, magic shops need to be careful about their own security, but adventurers are more likely to find one, especially if it’s in the middle of a dangerous area and sells items designed to handle local threats.

• Small City: Apart from highly specialized shops, PCs should find more than one of any type of store they’re likely to need. These merchants can compete with each other over the same type of stock or have their own specialized offerings (better quality, discounted rates, different selection, etc). A city is most likely home to some portion of the local aristocracy, who may live in splendorous homes or, if they’re in charge, perhaps a keep that acts as the city’s final defense. How the wealth is split between the aristocracy and the merchant class (and, potentially, religious institutions) goes a long way towards determining who holds power in the city.

• Large City: Often the capital of a nation, or its own city-state. Countries that control multiple large cities are often quite powerful, as it means they have a substantial quantity of arable land and the population to work it in order to support those cities and the many towns and villages that must also exist. (Of course, they may not be as powerful as their neighbors with even more large cities and more arable land…)

  Excluding goods or services found in a specific part of a campaign world, PCs should be able to find anything they’re looking for somewhere in a large city. Because these cities are usually relatively small in area—Waterdeep, for example, is only about five square miles—those things should not be too difficult to find, assuming they’re legal. However, because these cities nearly always have a very high population density, a huge proportion tend to be packed into small areas and have very little to their names. Unless PCs travel exclusively in higher-class neighborhoods, they are much more likely to run into people who will be drawn to anyone with even a whiff of money.

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The next matter is devising a formula for the wealth in a given location. 

Begin with the assumption that a larger settlement is wealthier than a smaller one. This works in two ways: first, a larger town will have more money than a smaller one simply because there are more people in it. That is to say, if we assume everyone in each town has five gold in their pouches, a town with 6,000 people will have twice as much money as a town with 3,000 people.

Secondly, larger settlements generally have more money per capita. Simply put, larger settlements have more economic investment in trade, and trade creates greater wealth. Not only does more money flow into these areas, but it also tends to stay there, because money is best kept near the areas of greatest opportunity. Therefore, while the poor people in a larger town may not have more money than the poor in a smaller town, the nobles and successful merchants in the larger town will have more than their small-town counterparts. It’s not because the people in the larger town are better or smarter with their money (though they could be); they simply have more opportunities to invest that money in profit-making ventures.

But even with these relative levels of wealth in mind, we still have to calculate how much actual money is in these areas. After all, no matter our assumptions of how much of a settlement’s money is in the hands of the top 10% or the bottom 50%, we need to know the amount to base those percentages on. But where to start? How do we know if it makes more sense for Waterdeep to have 5 million gold, or 50 million, or 500 million floating around?

There’s two things to keep in mind when figuring this out:

1. It’s important.

2. It doesn’t really matter.

Yeah, I know. Explanations ahoy.

• Why it’s important: The first part of the book included a calculation of how much money we can expect the PCs to earn during their adventuring careers, according to the DMG. It’s not necessary to follow that to the gold piece, but just using it as a guideline gives you a pretty good idea of how much the party is going to have at any given level. What it doesn’t tell us is how much money they’ll have relative to any given town or city (or continent or planet).

  And that relative wealth matters. If there’s 5 million gold in the city of Waterdeep, they’ll see a certain amount of economic activity in markets, trading ships coming and going from the port, dealing with guilds, etc. If there’s 500 million gold, that doesn’t mean they’ll see a hundred times as much economic activity, but a lot of trade—especially on the high-end, merchant organization level—is going to throw around a lot more hard money. Even if the party isn’t particularly interested in playing with the economics of the world, eventually they’ll attract the notice of influential people who will want their favor (a reliable mid-level adventuring group is hard to find. The more people of influence they meet, the more they’re likely to see either the clear trappings of such massive wealth or physical chests of gold and platinum being carted around. And that could change not just their interactions with the world, but their very incentives for adventuring.

  Consider: You’re an adventurer who has risked life and limb alongside your comrades for months, possibly even years. You’ve beaten the odds and, though you still have room to grow, you’ve reached significant levels of success in your profession. Then a Waterdeep baron calls you in for a meeting and you realize that if you sold everything you owned as a group, you couldn’t buy the house where the meeting is held. All the cash you have, even if you’ve saved most of it, wouldn’t even deck out the foyer. The baron probably spends more money on the goods that go on every one of their trading ships than you’ve made in your life. And even though there’s a level of prestige in becoming powerful adventurers that all the money in the world can’t buy, there’s a prestige in being fabulously wealthy that all the personal power in the world can’t win, either.

  On the flip side, if that high level party as a group has 40% as much money as all of Waterdeep, they might be able to buy an entire ward of the city. (The value of buildings, businesses, etc. is not included in the money a city has, but there is a correlation—you’re not going to find two cities of the same size where one has 5 million gp in cash and 500 million gp in wealth, while the other has 50 million gp in cash and only another 50 million gp in wealth.) Where the first party realizes they need to start sinking their adventuring income into investments if they want any chance at sniffing the levels of wealth that exist, the second party is immediately a group whose wealth almost everyone else envies.

  It also has an effect on how the party interacts with other aspects of the world economy. The smaller the amount of cash that exists, the more easily problematic fluctuations like inflation or deflation can occur (see Chapter 13 for more). If the total is too high, not only will what the party makes feel less and less consequential, but the book prices for everything, including basic goods and services, will make less sense. The wealthy may hoard as much as they can, but at some point a portion of it will filter out to the rest of society, which at some point has to affect how much things cost. Alternately, the rich may truly hoard it all, but see it’s in their interests to make sure everyone’s fed; that will cost a pittance relative to their total wealth, and it greatly reduces the risk of pitchforks coming out. However, if they buy a huge amount of basic necessities, that could also impact the cost of whatever’s left over. In either case, the prices offered for normal goods will start to seem too low if the party sees, or even senses, just how much money there is floating around.

• Why it doesn’t matter: There may be some potential issues at the far ends of the money spectrum, but for the most part, you can make any amount of total cash work in a campaign.

  First of all, while the previous section mentions the PCs noticing the money that exists, that assumes the DM uses this information and works it into the visible campaign setting. The party may rarely interact with the parts of society where most of that wealth resides, so that wealth only vaguely influences anything in the campaign. You may use it as a rationale for, say, a noble to offer a bigger or smaller reward for a given job, but to the party, they’re still doing the same work and getting paid whatever they think is an acceptable salary or reward.

  Second, the two Waterdeep examples above (w/ 5 million and 500 million gold) may create very different incentives for the party, and give them different perspectives on their wealth and influence in general, but neither of those examples are wrong. This is true throughout the campaign—the less money there is in large cities, the less there is in smaller towns, and vice versa when there’s more money. The party may perceive themselves differently, and perhaps be treated differently, based on their relative wealth no matter where they go. But that only affects their relationships. As long as they have places to spend their money, and there’s not so little wealth in the world that a level 5 party can buy a whole town off what they found in a bugbear cave, the system will work.

  Finally, if a DM makes certain assumptions about how much money exists in villages, towns, cities, etc., plays that out to the best of their ability, and finds that it either restricts the PCs too much or that random NPCs are way too willing to throw piles of gold at the party because they have bigger piles of gold themselves, those assumptions can always be altered to re-balance the game. In fact, no matter how perfectly we try to set up a money calculation system here, some DMs will find that the numbers don’t work perfectly for them because their campaign styles require a somewhat different approach. So, as long as we have a reasonable starting point that everyone should be able to use and then adjust if they decide it’s necessary, this chapter will have been successful.

So, if knowing the amount matters but there’s a large range of possibilities that might work, how do we determine the formula that will give us consistently useful, playble results? Trial and error until we find just the right approach can only work for the person doing the trials (ie. your humble author). Yes, I might decide I’ve found a good balance, but again, every DM is different. I like somewhat larger amounts of money floating around because then I have more levers to pull in terms of what it takes to not just buy goods and serves, but bribe someone, pay a bartender for good information, and so on. WotC-approved material, on the other hand, tends to work with numbers noticeably smaller than one would expect from the DMG averages, and that works fine for plenty of people—keeping the numbers smaller can make the DM’s job easier by keeping the PCs’ wealth from getting too out of control (at least until they have nothing more to buy).

Instead, let’s look to the real world again. Since we’re using a $35 USD = 1 gp exchange rate, let’s start there.

But the U.S. economy and the average D&D economy are nothing alike. How does the comparison hold up?

First, remember, we’re only looking for a starting point. We may have to adjust substantially from there, both if there are logical concerns and in order to make this system as easy to use as possible. But when we’re only looking at cash, what matters is that the exchange rate and data on the total amount of money available are based in the same time frame. The $35 = 1 gp exchange is centered around basic goods, namely food, which exist in both places, so we have an apples to apples value comparison. Therefore, by figuring out the per capita quantity of currency available to people in the U.S., we should be able to shift that amount into gold pieces and get a reasonable idea of gp per capita in Waterdeep (which I keep using in my examples because it is, as far as I can tell, the largest and wealthiest city in the Forgotten Realms).

To hopefully preempt some critiques: I realize a large percentage of U.S. currency is in other countries, taking it out of the hands of Americans, but a lot of our money is also “held” digitally, which adds to the effective U.S. currency inside the country. Furthermore, modern economies can measure “money” a lot of different ways, which is useful when studying our economic systems but unhelpful at best when using our system to help figure out the currency in a fantasy world. Finally, while we could rely on the Federal Reserve’s M1 data (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is), it feels more in the spirit of this project to base the comparison on purely physical currency, since that’s what exists in the average fantasy world.

Moving right along…

The exchange rate article was written in 2018. According to Business Insider, in the same year, there was about $1.5 trillion worth of physical U.S. currency in existence. The population of the U.S. was approximately 327 million. This gives us the following calculations:

• $1,500,000,000,000 / 327,000,000 = $4,587.16 physical U.S. currency per capita

• $4,587.16 / $35 per gp = approximately 131 gp value per capita

There’s our starting value: a very large, wealthy D&D city possesses approximately 131 gp per resident in cash and cash-equivalents. Now let’s make some formulas.

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This is the part where game design needs to come into play: none of this matters if the system is too complex to use well. A DM has enough work without having to sift through some arcane equations. So, how do we make this easy to use?

1. Use the terms we already have. This means putting the list of lifestyle expenses (wretched, squalid, etc.) and the list of settlement sizes (hamlet, village, etc.) to use.

2. Use the lists in a way that gives the DM the least amount of data they need to remember. D&D is already a game that lends itself to looking through books for rules we’ve forgotten or never knew; give the DM the best chance possible to remember this information and be able to drop it into the game at a moment’s notice.

So, what will this look like? Even though we’ve connected each village size to a general lifestyle level, they are separate things. It is possible for a given settlement to have a wealth level different from what’s expected (this can have some effects, both short and long-term, which we’ll get into later). Therefore, we should have each type of settlement and each lifestyle level its own number, then multiply them together to see how much money there is per person in a given settlement.

For example:

The tables are pretty easy to use. In the average thorp, there’s 1 gp in cash or cash-equivalents for each person (hamlet -> wretched). If the hamlet has 100 people, there’s 100 gp floating around (1 x 1 x 100). A village (poor) with 1,500 people would have 13,500 gp (3 x 3 x 1,500). If you create a village that’s wealthier than normal, you could adjust them to “modest” and get a total of 18,000 gp (3 x 4 x 1,500).

But these are just samples. They don’t work with our starting value—6 x 6 = 36 gp per person, whereas we calculated 131 gp per person. How can we adjust these for a better match?

We can’t exactly match the starting value, because 131 is a prime number. No combination of multipliers will get us there. 132 is very close, and we can get there with 11 x 12; that’s better, but again, the tables will be easier to use if the numbers in both match. That makes 12 the best top-end choice, for a few reasons.

• If we’re using the modern U.S. as a comparison, it makes more sense to go up from 131 than down, since we know Americans have access to more money than just what exists in physical currency.

• People have an easier time doing multiplication with even numbers.

• People have an easier time dealing with even numbers in general. This is not effectively a restatement of the second point; it takes less mental energy for people to deal with even numbers under any circumstances. Therefore, we often want to use even numbers when we’re trying to create something easy for people to work with.

With all that in mind, here are tables based on the 12x top end multiplier:

Does this work? Does it make sense in terms of how much money the people in each wealth bracket have? Does it make for a functional game? To determine that, we must decide on how the money is split up across the population. In order to split it up in a reasonably sensible way, we need to make a few assumptions.

1. Most money is at the top. In Chapter 11, we discussed the percentage of wealth sitting with the top 10% of citizens. It ranges from 65-75% in Europe during the time frames usually connected with D&D, apart from catastrophic plagues. Likewise, if you want to make a modern-day comparison, 77% of wealth in the U.S. is in the hands of the top 10%.

   On the other hand, money is not the same as wealth, so the top 10% possessing 75% of the wealth doesn’t mean they possess 75% of the money. Still, it’s probably not that far off. Therefore, we’ll aim for the top 10% to have about 70% of the total money.

2. Nearly everyone will have at least a little money. Although comparisons to the modern day can help center these systems in a lot of ways, they break down when comparing wealth and money at the bottom of the economic spectrum. The reason is debt: we not only have it, many of us rely on it for the things we need. We have systems and laws designed to make sure we pay back our debts, most of them revolving around our current level of technology. People in a medieval world could certainly get into debt if they made bad decisions or things went very sideways on them, but by and large they had to live within their means. If they might need money for something in the future, they had to save for it themselves.

   It’s possible a small settlement may have people who don’t keep money themselves, but rather put it in a community pot for community needs or emergencies. This might make sense if you wanted a group to form a commune, for example. By and large, however, they’ll have something, especially in a city—they need to pay rent, buy food, etc., and it’s a lot harder to live paycheck to paycheck (so to speak) when you don’t have some form of reasonable temporary debt (like credit cards) as a backup.

   Note that although all totals are in gold pieces, people with very little money will generally have their money in silvers and coppers.

3. Things get less predictable in mid-size settlements. The example for this breakdown will again be Waterdeep, because while the specifics of how large cities thrive might change from place to place, the ways in which money and wealth tend to circulate won’t (or not to a substantial degree). Thorps and hamlets won’t have barrels of money, so there are only so many ways what they have can be split up. Villages and towns, however, can have a reasonable amount of wealth and influential individuals who can help that money spread out nicely or end up in very few pockets. If you want a location where one person or family has truly hoarded as much as possible and drastically skewed the numbers, villages and towns are fertile ground for such malfeasance.

Income and wealth breakdowns are often done by decile (each 10% of the whole), and that will work for us as well.

How did we land on these percentages for the various deciles? As previously mentioned, we’re putting 70% of the money with the top 10% as a baseline. The modern day also offers us a relatively easy number to work with at the low end—the bottom 50% of American households possess about 1% of the country’s total wealth. The people on the bottom of the scale will have a small amount of money, but it’ll less than 0.1% is negligible to the point it’s not really worth calculating, with the next four categories registering from 0.1-0.4% of the total money. The rest curves in a way that accelerates and then jumps sharply at the end, as befits a society with most wealth at the top.

The total money in Waterdeep, using the 12x table, is 12 x 12 x 200,000 people. That gives us a sum of 28,800,000 gp. Breaking it down across the previously defined deciles, this is how it gets split:

When determining whether the monetary breakdown in a settlement makes sense, especially a city, the PHB’s lifestyle descriptions can actually help—like adventurers, city dwellers need to pay money for necessities such as food and shelter, so the costs for particular living arrangements will be similar. (Living in long-term housing, like apartments, will generally be cheaper than the temporary accommodations most adventurers use, so we can fairly assume people are able to take at least a small portion of their cost of living and save it if they so choose.) For each wealth bracket, an average is listed; this is an easy number to grab and use for anyone the PCs meet in that wealth bracket, if the money they possess becomes relevant. We need to gauge if those averages are a) logical and, more importantly, b) work well within the context of the game.

So. Do these numbers work?

…nope.

On the low end, we could justify almost anything that isn’t weirdly high. However, one and a half gold for the people who are supposed to be a step removed from the bottom is too low.

Even if you decided literally everyone in the bottom 20% has only cash and nothing of value (even cheap jewelry), it still creates a system that may be unnecessarily wonky for the DM to use. Consider that an awful lot of people in those bottom two deciles would still have effectively no money, and might already be going hungry to stretch out what little they do have or beg or earn at terrible jobs. If anything goes wrong, they’re screwed, and then the DM has to figure out what happens to them. Traditionally, medieval cities didn’t put up with many people who couldn’t maintain at least a place to live and the ability to eat (no matter how squalid the quarter or poor the food); homeless people simply got kicked out. That’s the kind of thing you only want to deal with if there’s a catastrophe, so putting at least a bit more money in their hands would help.

Of course, the poorest parts of society don’t usually come into direct play during campaigns, at least not in large numbers, so this can probably be ignored. The real problem for a D&D game is at the high end. The top of society, especially that of the wealthiest city in the world, includes the people who hire powerful adventurers to do major work. Sure, they can hire scrubs as well, but if they only have about 1k gold on hand, that’s all they can hire. It’s true that wealthy people have most of their wealth in property rather than cash, but wealthy people also try to keep enough liquid wealth on hand to buy whatever they consider valuable when the opportunity arises. At that level, a thousand gold on average just isn’t going to cut it. If they want to hire strong adventurers for a job, it’s a given they’ll need to offer some piece of their property (goods, land, magic), because they have almost no money relative to what a reward on that level is worth.

It’s even more stark when you consider the wealth of the 99th percentile versus those in the 90th. Look at the graph above again. The 90th percentile has just over 10% of the wealth of the 99th. If 1k is the average, then you’re looking at a situation where the 1% might average 5k, but the bottom of that top 10% only has 500 gp, or even less. Those people might not be mind-bogglingly wealthy, but they’re still rich as hell. They probably own multiple pieces of jewelry or art worth that much. This is way too low.

Since using the modern day baseline didn’t work, that means messing around with trial and error until we find something that works reasonably well across the board. Since we’ve now discussed the process of breaking this down, I won’t go through all the variants tested; here, instead, are the tables I recommend using.

Those numbers spiked pretty hard, right? But let’s go back to our numbers and show how they function in the context of the game.

This version of Waterdeep has 30 x 30 x 200,000, or 180,000,000 gp. Using the same wealth breakdown as above, we end up with these totals:

And, with these much larger numbers, it’s now worth breaking down the upper echelon even further:

To create an example of how this might look in an actual campaign let’s lay out who the PCs will generally find on each step of this ladder in a large, wealthy city like Waterdeep. Remember that, unless you have a safe bank where people can store their money (which would mostly be accessible by merchants and the wealthy), having a lot of coins can be risky. Those at the bottom end of the spectrum may only have cash, but the farther up you go, it makes sense for valuables like art and jewelry to often make up a larger and larger percentage of someone’s available “cash”.

For example: a neophyte group is offered 100 gp cash by a city accountant (50th percentile) to find a pilfered engagement ring. Later in their careers, a successful merchant (90th percentile) wants a large caravan of supplies found. The reward is 1,500 gp, but it comes in the form of 500 gp cash and two 500 gp-value necklaces. As designed, this is effectively the same reward for the characters, but befits the life of a successful merchant and can also lead to extra drama (oh no, one of those necklaces was a family heirloom!).

(Of course, if you prefer that people mostly have big stonking piles of gold and silver laying around, go for it. Running your hands through thousands of coins feels good.)

People at any level can have some type of valuable, of course. Just remember that the more valuable someone’s cash-equivalent possessions are relative to the average, the more unusual they are for having such valuables. When we play the game, we think of 50 gp as not being very much (just a healing potion!), so if we decide someone on the poor end of things has any valuables, a 25 gp gem or ring seems like no big deal. It’s much more likely, however, that they’re hanging on to some cheap ring or a chipped gem that’s only worth a few gold at most.

• The bottom 10%: Although it’s easy to think of the bottom of the economic chain as having absolutely nothing, in truth, that should describe only a small fraction of the population. Cities are more likely to throw homeless people outside the walls than let them sleep on the streets, though some may subsist on charity (shelters, food lines, etc.) if you decide those exist. Many others live hand to mouth and have little or no money at any given time. Such people can exist in any number of situations—sick or disabled individuals who struggle to work, lazy scrubs who only work enough to keep a roof over their heads, hard-working families with poor jobs that have trouble taking care of everyone, inveterate gamblers who could live better but lose all their money and so on. Others still are careful and tuck away coins where they can for emergencies or to try and get out of their terrible situations.

  Sharing living space is very common for people in this group. Individuals might rent a spot on a floor in a common room or flophouse. Families might have their own overcrowded apartment, if those exist; they might also share space with extended family or even other families. Basically no one in this range lives in safety, unless many of them as a group have combined efforts to make the area where they live safe. It’s more likely that they struggle with criminals in their midst, and those with any valuables or more than a few coins have had to be very careful to make sure they’re not stolen.

• The surviving 10%: People with generally consistent, low-paying jobs. Most aren’t in constant danger of being out on the street, though that can change quickly if they lose what form of income they have, especially if they try to live in a way that constantly stretches their income. Individuals in this group are still unlikely to have their own living space, though families may be less likely to need aunts and uncles or other friends to help pay the rent.

• The established, but poor, 20%: This group combines everyone from the 20th to 40th percentiles because they cover people who can be described in fairly similar ways. Individuals have steady work and may find additional ways to make money. Parents may have higher-paying jobs, to the extent that they might move up once their kids move out and they have fewer things to pay for. Children of middle-class parents who can’t (or won’t) find them middle-class jobs might be in this group and resent it. Children of middle or upper-class parents who received an inheritance but are wasting it and don’t work very hard could land here (and keep sinking). The jobs that support these groups will frequently pay more than that of an random unskilled worker (2 sp/day) but not that of a skilled laborer (2 gp/day). That might mean supervising unskilled work, dangerous work, or whatever else you think might fall in that middle ground.

  Towards the upper end of this spectrum may also exist small merchants who live in their shops to save money, or who keep a stall in an open-air market. Either way, they only pay to rent or keep up a single fixed property. (Keep in mind that this money represents a merchant’s personal cash. They might have access to more through the business, but drawing on that could adversely affect the business, and thus they would be generally disinclined to do so unless they considered it absolutely necessary.)

• The trained 10%: This group mostly includes people with actual skills, though in general they’re at the bottom of their professions. It includes most civil servants, skilled trades workers who have regular employment, and most others with a desired skill who don’t run their own businesses. Merchants who are at least successful enough to not fear paying their shop’s costs may be here as well. This group can generally afford modest lifestyles, as long as they don’t have any expensive vices on top of that. This may involve individuals renting space in nicer neighborhoods, or purchasing a small, inexpensive home. Such homes would not be in poor areas (too dangerous), but they might be located on the edge of a sketchy neighborhood.

  Consider this the group most likely to be “skilled laborers” making 2 gp per day. Although there are people at this level who aren’t interested in owning valuables, it’s the first decile where such ownership could be considered likely, even if only in the form of a cheap ring or necklace.

• The better-paid 10%: Essentially the same as the previous 10%, except they make more money. These may be individuals who started in the previous 10% and moved up through the ranks of civil service or whatever business they’re a part of to enjoy a noticeably higher standard of living, or merchants who have become established and have no reason to fear failing unless something dramatic impacts their industry. Home ownership and comfortable lifestyles are the norm, and their incomes frequently let them save money and/or purchase valuables that catch their eye. Displays of wealth, however small, become expected.

• The entrepreneurial and highly skilled 20%: Well-known shop owners and higher-priced specialists. This group includes workers in well-paid professions such as barristers (lawyers), who tend to have substantially more money saved than those at the level below. Merchants are doing well for themselves, and may have access to substantial sums of money through their businesses. At the higher end of this spectrum exists the same types of work, only with better pay for more experienced or more talented workers, and the profits of more successful businesses.

  At this level, wealth starts skewing more towards valuable items. Whereas poorer groups will largely have coins with the occasional person having a valuable item, wealthier people turn more and more of their money into expensive things.

• The influential 10%: Although most money is still further up the chain, the wealth at this level allows this group to start wielding influence over their communities. Major officials in Waterdeep have to look beyond just the city, into whatever their responsibilities are to the hundreds of square miles of farmland and villages surrounding the city, foreign policy, and other issues more important than what’s happening in a particular neighborhood. People with this kind of money are viewed as successful, pretty much regardless of how they obtained their wealth, and are often viewed as leaders unless there’s a reason for others to mistrust them. They can then spend their resources positively, helping the community, or negatively, undercutting their opponents, with an eye towards increasing their influence either way.

  This can go to some dark places. Properly trained assassins may be difficult to afford (unless the person already has connections with the thieves’ guild or other underworld forces), but paying someone to pay someone to hire some thugs that can make a troublesome meddler disappear without it ever being traced back becomes more viable. If someone wants to do that kind of dirt, that is.

• The wildly successful 5%: Influential nobility normally starts here and exists in every rank to the top, unless you decide otherwise. Highly profitable merchants—if you decide corporations are an aspect of your campaign world, a person would likely need to have at least this level of wealth to be a player in that type of organization. Political leaders who look like they’re on top of the world to those under them, but who have more powerful people always looking over their shoulders and rivals ready to snatch their positions. If someone is incredibly good at something that’s incredibly valuable—a real-world example would be top-level professional athletes and actors—they might enter this group as well.

• The high-influence 4%: These individuals either exert some influence through personal wealth and connections, major influence in conjunction with business partners, or both. They can often get what they want politically, as long as no one more powerful than them wants something else or dislikes them enough to thwart them for the sake of doing so.

• The aristocratic 0.9%: Nobles who come from old money, or the nouveau-riche who have bought their way into the highest echelons of society. They throw money at problems and expect those problems to go away. This is the group that spends thousands of gold pieces to throw a party, which means those thousands of gold pieces are only a relatively small percentage of what they have available. Nobles especially may have the luxury of spending themselves dry and running on credit if they have a family history of this type of wealth, but most of them have more money than the average person can comprehend possessing.

• The ruling .1%: In a place where one person is in charge (e.g. a lord or king), the largest portion of the money in this bracket will likely be in that person’s hands. Anyone with similar wealth will usually be viewed as a threat on some level, and rulers will often not let such people maintain that type of wealth if they can help it. In smaller areas, like a town headed by a noble, the top 0.1% may consist entirely of the noble family, leaving this entire chunk of the town’s wealth, and the tax money, in their hands.

  However, in a city like Waterdeep, where the four Lords have hidden identities and a number of people have similar levels of power and influence, the money at this level may be more evenly split.

This is just one way of thinking about how wealth is split up in one famous D&D city. You can make this type of list for the settlements in your campaign if it helps you figure out what the places are like, but if all you need are the basic numbers, you can stick around the averages depending on how rich or poor any NPC is and everything should work out fine.

Of course, there are a lot of levels of wealth in a city like this, more than exist in smaller settlements. Even larger towns will often not be easily grouped into quite so many different levels of wealth. So, here are some tables you can use to get a quick amount of money in the pockets of anyone in an average version of each type of settlement.

Thorps and hamlets are very straightforward because they consist of nearly all laborers, and in nearly all cases those laborers are farmers. Residents of thorps might keep what little they have for themselves, or put it all together for community needs. Similarly, the few businesses in a hamlet may have the great majority of the money (since they account for what regular economic activity occurs there), or the businesses may be essentially owned and funded by the community. The people who run them will have a bit more money because they have skills to keep the businesses running, but each business’ costs and profits are the community’s as a whole.

Villages and small towns are where real economic activity starts to take hold. The largest percentage jumps in personal wealth show up here, as people go from having very little to at least having the possibility of tasting something better.

That said, most people in the average village are still laborers, so they don’t make or save much money. The businesses that a village can support will offer jobs besides farming or other manual labor, and give (some) workers and entrepreneurs a chance to be a little better off than their compatriots in the fields. Greater success can often just be a matter of running the right business—if a village is in the midst of numerous farming communities, an extraordinary tavern will still probably not make as much money as business which sells decent farm equipment.

The village types:

1. Reasonably well-run, with a mayor or village council responsible for making decisions that affect everyone. Nobody is outrageously influential, which generally keeps people’s ambitions in check. Someone charismatic could rile the villagers up about something, but that’s not based on their wealth. This is the most likely type of village that would be found in the shadow of a greater city, since nobody has enough wealth to get the attention of powerful interests.

2. Through politics or mercantilism, a handful of individuals have cornered a large part of the community’s wealth. This could be for fair reasons (being central to a trade critical to the area), or… less fair ones (gouging customers, demanding bribes, etc). There might even be someone installed in a political position by someone much wealthier and more important in a nearby city; their money comes from their patron, and they push the town to do what the patron wants. By world standards the people at the top end of these villages aren’t huge deals, but they’re able to get just about whatever they want in these smaller locations. These villages could be shadowed by a larger city (especially if someone in the city sees value in letting those few people keep their wealth), or they might be isolated (where the richer citizens get up to shenanigans away from prying eyes). The latter example could make for a good hero mission—the people asking the party to take down the evil merchant who pulls everyone’s strings, for example.

3. A single person controls the village and a substantial portion of its wealth. This will often be a noble, though someone with a bunch of money and a minor tyrannical streak might find a way to take over. This is the most likely type of village to have a defensive building like a fort, since a single ruler is most likely to have forms of income that help pay for its staff and upkeep. Even if it doesn’t, the noble will be expected to shoulder the village’s costs in exchange for having so much more wealth than the rest of the residents. Whether they do or not is another matter.

Small towns: Although a large city could support enough communities around it that settlements the size of small towns will rise to serve them, these will generally be on their own. They have enough people to defend them, and may even be surrounded by smaller farming communities that help support it.

A full-fledged town will have enough commerce flowing through it that some handful of skilled merchants, well-positioned leaders, and even wily thieves will gain a substantial wealth advantage on everyone else. The few at the top will call the shots, one way or another. In addition, like a village, a small town may be run directly by a noble; unlike a village, a noble can sit on plenty of wealth to live the appropriate lifestyle while still leaving enough for those a tier below to get pretty rich. In fact, the noble is quite likely to remind those wealthier townsfolk that they’re wealthy under the noble’s rule, and they better not forget it.

Although this explains how the system is set up, and should allow you to figure out how much money any particular person has, sometimes you need to make up a random NPC on the spot and then determine what they’re carrying immediately. It’s easiest to do that based on what we think about when we thrown an instant-NPC into the world—are they broke or successful? Are they criminals or law-abiding citizens? What do they do? We don’t think about their income or wealth bracket.

There are so many types of jobs, shops, and other sources of wealth that trying to break down what kind of money people in a given walk of life are likely to have would be very time-consuming. Instead, a more broad strokes type of chart should serve us well enough.

Essentially, just about everyone either works for a wage (including farmers who sell their excess crops), runs a business, is in charge (that is, has political influence and makes their living through it), or is independently wealthy and doesn’t bother working for money. Those broader categories can be broken down further, as this table shows. The decile range is used so you can apply it to any settlement.

Before we get into the more complicated task of determining how much money exists at each level of society in a given place, let’s deal with one more matter related to these tables: when does it make sense for a settlement to be more or less wealthy than expected? That is, when do we think of a village as possessing modest wealth rather than being relatively poor, giving it the 6x multiplier rather than 4x? What does having greater or less than expected wealth mean for a community?

We can handle this with a few simple guidelines.

1. Wealth adjustments always happen for a very good reason. In other words, if you have a small town that isn’t especially noteworthy in some way, treat it as having a modest amount of wealth. If you create a town where business is brisk, that’s not enough; business goes in cycles, and the upswing can very easily be followed by a downturn in fortunes.

   Consider it this way: say you have a town with 3,000 people. The available money is 6 x 6 x 3,000, or 108,000 gp. (That may seem like a lot, but as we’ll see later, it doesn’t leave very many people with a lot of money.) If you feel the town’s level of wealth should be considered prosperous, that’s 6 x 8 x 3,000, or 144,000 gp. This is a 33% increase in available cash, which could then have knock-on effects on the general wealth of the town (e.g. property values). If a town is getting by just fine, then travel increases as the road improves and all stores see, on average, a 10% jump in business, the owners of those stores will be extremely happy—but that’s not nearly enough to account for a full rank jump on the wealth table. Even if something occurs which pours a lot of cash into the town, it’s often more appropriate to make adjustments to the money held by specific people, namely those who benefit the most from whatever is bringing the money in.

   Wealth adjustments need to be based on something large and sustainable. For example, the aforementioned road improvement was, in fact, a shift from a wide dirt road to a brick-paved highway, and travel more than doubles along it. The town placed at an intersection between that road and another trade route shifts from being an important waypoint to a major center of commerce. A village that discovers a deep vein of iron in the nearby hills may become of central importance to the nation of which it’s a part, and once a mine is set up, the ore brings substantially more wealth into the community than farming and basic commercial activity ever could have. Or the mine that supports a town could run dry of ore, and suddenly the money coming into the community drops dramatically.

   In other words, changes in the foundation of how wealth comes to a settlement are how you tend to see changes in a settlement’s wealth rank.

2. Wealth adjustments are usually temporary. One core rule about economies is that, sooner or later, people end up where the opportunities are. How long that takes depends on how quickly word spreads and how easy or difficult travel is, but if new money, jobs, and overall wealth (or the expectation thereof) come to exist in a place, people who lack money, jobs, or overall wealth will head there to make a go of it. Likewise, if jobs and money leave an area, eventually some of the people will leave along with them.

   Consider the examples mentioned above. If a freshly-paved road brings lots of new travelers to a town, some individuals will stop there to take advantage of the business opportunities. The sheer amount of money coming through means that, though some businesses will fail, many will succeed. Some of those will need workers, perhaps a large number of workers. The town itself will need construction done to create housing for the immigrants. More guards will be required to keep the peace, more administrators to keep the town running smoothly, and so on. A new mine may cause the nearby village to grow in very different ways—that is, a larger percentage of the new residents are there for a single reason (to work at the mine), with a smaller percentage taking advantage of the need for additional overall services—but it still leads to more business, more trade, and so on.

   On the flip side, we can look at the American Rust Belt for some real world examples of what happens when opportunities leave an area. Detroit is probably the most noteworthy one; after the loss of so many of the industrial and manufacturing jobs that fueled the city’s growth, the wealth of the city declined dramatically, and the population went with it. Although Detroit still has a fairly large population (19th largest in the U.S. as of the 2010 census), its current population is only about 1/3 of the high it reached in the mid-20th century, and it’s the only city from the top 20 to have a substantial population decrease over the course of the past decade.

   Any settlement based around a single industry (or company, though that’s less likely in a D&D setting) is at particular risk for falling to pieces if the industry shrinks in importance or, worse, becomes no longer viable. Note that while small settlements might grow quite large due to discovering a valuable nearby resource or being located in an area that suddenly becomes important (a faraway civilization is discovered and people want a trade route, tensions grow after centuries of peace between two nations and a village near the border needs to become a resource hub for the army, etc.), farming hamlets are very unlikely to shrink to thorp size, and villages in the midst of a large farming area are unlikely to shrink into hamlets. Farming is always needed, and the land is expected to yield a certain quantity of crops each year. If this type of catastrophe does befall such small settlements, it’s likely for reasons beyond the purely economic (war, famine, etc).

3. If the settlement size and wealth level are permanently mismatched, there is always a reason. This will usually occur when a settlement has greater wealth than expected rather than less. Note that the basis for this wealth must not be particularly labor-intensive. A precious metal or gem deposit, or a trading hub, may be less efficient with fewer people, but they can still create noteworthy wealth. Mining less valuable material, large-scale fishing fleets, and similar industries which require a good deal of labor per unit of resource collected or created are not going to create substantial wealth without the people necessary to make those industries work properly.

   We can broadly categorize the reasons this might happen as either natural or intentional:

   • Natural

     • Geography

     • Climate

   • Intentional

     • Laws

     • Culture

   Here are some examples of how these reasons might take hold in the campaign world:

   1. Geography: A certain type of fish that can only be found off the coast of a small island hundreds of miles west of Faerun becomes a sensation up and down the Sword Coast. However, the island is small enough that the village or small town which makes up its only community also takes up pretty much all of the real estate. There’s nowhere to set up a large fishing operation, and the ocean between the island and the Sword Coast is too dangerous for fishing ships to regularly try and catch the fish themselves. Instead, a method of preserving the fish is developed (magical refrigeration from a wizard investor!) so that the island’s fishermen can sell their catches to merchant ships who come by regularly, boosting their wealth without the population growing very much.

   2. Climate: A silver mine is found amidst the Ten Towns of Icewind Dale. It’s valuable, although not as valuable as gold, and it’s so damn cold up there that it’s difficult to for the towns to find people who will work the mines for a wage that will still let them make money. A few dozen take the job, perhaps, not enough to massively boost the population or require many others to come and start other businesses. But for settlements no bigger than hamlets, the silver those few dozen collect creates a relatively substantial influx of wealth across the community.

   3. Laws: If you look up Neverwinter’s population on Google, you get 23,200 as the answer. That puts it squarely in “small city” category. However, it’s also described as highly cosmopolitan and civilized, even as compared to its wealthy peers further south along the Sword Coast, so ranking it as “wealthy” makes sense. It’s pretty cold around Neverwinter, but the city itself is warmed by the heated Neverwinter River, so climate itself wouldn’t necessarily put people off moving there. But the rulers of the city certainly could limit immigration in order to avoid the problem of overcrowded districts, since the heating effect of the river only spreads so far.

   4. Culture: This one can be hard. The problem is that, if there are opportunities in an area and people who otherwise would move there don’t due to cultural friction, that can very easily be a racist or culturally racist situation, whether you want it to be one or not. But it’s an unfortunately plausible scenario, so it shouldn’t be ignored. (If you’ve never heard of “cultural racism”, it’s exactly what it sounds like—prejudice and discrimination based on culture rather than race.)

      If it’s unclear why this is the case, look at the basic setup for such a situation:

      • Group A’s town grows as a trading hub and gains prosperity.

      • People from group B want to move to the town to be part of that prosperity.

      • Even though the town needs more people to maximize the business it can do (and its overall affluence), people from group A want people from group B to fuck off.

      Now, what are some reasons for group A to not want group B around?

      • “We don’t like those people”, no apparent reason given: Pretty clearly racist.

      • “We don’t want them here because (insert negative stereotype)”: Pretty racist.

      • “We don’t trust them because their ancestors killed/oppressed our ancestors”: Group B isn’t responsible for their forebears’ actions, and if group A has the upper hand now, this is clearly not still an issue. You can set up group A as feeling justified in pushing out group B due to this long-standing grudge, but it’s still clearly prejudice at work.

      • “We don’t trust them because we’ve been at war a bunch of times”: A lot of people will think this is fair because group B would do the same thing if the situation was reversed. And, yes, that can offer a sense of balance. But the fact group B would be just as discriminatory if they had the upper hand doesn’t mean group A isn’t being discriminatory now.

      • “We don’t trust them because we were just at war a few years ago and a bunch of them killed our people”: The scars of war run deep, and if many of those who survived it are still around, forgiveness can be a hard thing to ask of them. It may be prejudicial, but it’s a prejudice I think a lot of us can understand.

        In that case, however, ask this question: If these scars are so fresh, does it make sense for the people from group B to want to go to group A’s town in the first place? They have to know that things could be rough for them, on top of their own scars and inherent prejudices. The opportunities may well be good enough for many of them to try, of course. But the leadership in group A’s town have to know that if people from group B start moving in, there’s going to be friction, so they have to decide how they want to handle it.

        This could lead to some interesting situations. The leadership might set rules making it easier for group B members to immigrate in support of the town or whatever businesses will benefit from their presence, so angry townsfolk direct their hire at the heads of the town rather than (or on top of) group B. (Perhaps finding a way to make peace might become a PC party’s heroic act for the month. Or just escorting the leadership out of town, if you decide everything’s gone pear-shaped.)

        Alternately, the leadership might rule that group B can’t come in, which is still discrimination, but under the “laws” rationale as well as culture. Or the leadership might accept members of group B but not help them, which, as we’ve seen in similar situations throughout human history, often results in powderkeg situations that inevitably erupt in time.

      To be clear, I am absolutely not saying that you shouldn’t use these reasons or create these kinds of scenarios. What I am saying is to think through and understand the situation you’re creating if you do so. Not only is a world with these types of prejudices plausible, a world without them would be, frankly, unrealistic. The question is whether you want your game to include those aspects of the world, rather than whether or not they exist.

As stated above, it’s unlikely a settlement or an area will have lower wealth than expected for the population and nobody leaves. The core issue is that wealth isn’t disconnected from the necessities of life. Wealth makes it easier to acquire those necessities, but those necessities become linked with the economics that created the wealth in the first place. If the wealth leaves, it’s not just the fancy people and their fancy stuff that goes—it becomes harder for everyone else to get by. The population doesn’t decline because everyone is chasing money; it declines because many of them can no longer survive in that place.

If it’s impossible for anyone to leave the area, and the loss of wealth doesn’t crush the settlement’s ability to feed itself, you might end up in this type of situation. However, the larger the settlement, the more likely it is to depend on outside trade to afford its necessities, and thus the more catastrophic a situation where no one can leave would be.

Another possibility for this type of settlement is if it’s in an area that is very pleasant in terms of climate with little in the way of resources outside of food and shelter. Because such areas are likely to attract outsiders, this might require that the residents make sure no one else who finds the area (and might bring in more material wealth) sticks around, by whatever means you feel are appropriate. However, even if you have an area with little actual money, they’ll still most likely have resources or other items of value; they’re not poor, their systems just run differently than what the PCs are used to seeing. Thus, you might end up with an area that has few coins but many valuables (cash alternatives).

————

What you may notice is that while this adds up to 320 million gold when split among a population of 200,000, a substantial portion of the city’s residents won’t have any money—kids. If two populations are of the exact same size in settlements of equivalent wealth, the settlement with more kids will have less money in the hands of individuals, because there are fewer people engaged in maximally productive labor. (Remember that in this type of society, “kids” are likely those twelve or thirteen and younger, not under eighteen.) Kids who work on the family farm aren’t as capable as the adults around them, kids who are apprentices in a trade aren’t able to produce as much work or at the appropriate standard of quality, and so on.

Some of their money also goes to a variety of organizations. While the money available to individual merchants is reflected in their cash on hand, some organizations are funded by a wide membership. These include governments, churches, guilds, and schools or universities. 

As a rule of thumb, assume the amount of money available to the people in a settlement adds up to around half the baseline number. More money will be in the hands of various organizations.

With regards to governments: The money available in public coffers will be determined separately from the individual money available to those in charge. However, in the common case of a single-ruler government (king, lord, etc), they effectively have access to all public money since that person has the final say in how it’s spent. Not that they should spend tax money on purely personal interests, but they usually can and very well may, at least to some extent. They will also usually name assistants and advisors with the power to spend out of the treasury in ways connected with their jobs.

Similarly, because those funds are viewed as the ruler’s, it’s unlikely any of their subjects will object unless the personal spending is excessive and/or those subjects are suffering from causes the public money could alleviate.

Organizations with Money

Quick note: This list does not include banks because banks, for the most part, have other people’s money. If your world is advanced enough to have banks, however, nothing says an unscrupulous or desperate banker can’t offer the savings of several other people to a band of adventurers if they fix a problem for him. Whether the people find out—and if they do, whether they blame the banker, the adventurers, or both—is for you to decide.

Government

Governments are the most common organizations that are likely to both have money and offer it to adventurers. Fix our well, slay the orcs, get the cat out of the tree (without a fireball), slay the bandits, bribe the baby dragon into leaving because it’s too adorable to slay—these are but a smattering of the jobs a government small or large might ask brave heroes to undertake for an appropriate fee.

The problem many of us run into is that while most settlements will have the money to pay for a low-level group, finding coherent adventuring parties capable of greater feats (level five and up) is more difficult and significantly more costly. Yet, somehow, either that poor farming hamlet happens to have two or three thousand gold to make it worth a group’s time to run the marauding ogres out of the nearby hills, or you (the DM) put the party in a position where they either have to get underpaid for a dangerous job or feel like total dicks for leaving the hamlet to fend for themselves. Most players accept the math not adding up as part of the game, but you want a better answer, right?

So, let’s determine how much money we can expect any given settlement to have.

Taxation Level

Money on Hand

Light

5% of baseline

Moderate (default)

10% of baseline

Heavy

15% of baseline

Severe

20% of baseline

Very important note: These percentages are not the tax rates for each level. These numbers assume that the needs of the community have been met or are being met, and that whoever’s in charge is at least competent enough to set aside the money required for future expenses (e.g. if taxes are paid once a year, even a lightly taxed settlement will be flush with cash at tax time, but the rulers will understand the vast majority needs to be saved and paid out over the coming year). 

In addition, governments with a very high level of taxation won’t necessarily have more cash on hand than those with less taxation. Wars are a common way for loads of tax money to vanish, and even in times of peace, a corrupt, idiotic baron can tax his people through the nose and still blow it all by the time the adventurers show up. However, a higher level of taxation puts more money in the hands of the leadership for at least some period of time, and using these numbers allows you to quickly create locations where the people are terribly burdened but the local leader can pay adventurers very well for their services (and where the local leader may have invested in defending himself from adventurers who would take his wealth).

Shouldn’t the citizens in a place with very high taxes have less money?

It would make sense. However, designing a system to reflect that is difficult because exactly who has less money depends on how severe the taxes are and from whom the leadership is taking those taxes. With medieval-type societies, those with the least are usually taxed first because they have the least power to fight back, but you can make those taxes land any way you want. Therefore, the combination of citizens who will be impacted by heavy taxation and to what degree is unique to your campaign and thus something for you to decide upon.

Temples/Churches

Another major holder of wealth is religious organizations, or at least the major ones. Religions ask their followers for donations so they can fund work which enhances the strength of the faith. For most religions, the goal is then more followers, but some (especially evil ones) might have purposefully small memberships and different aims. Likewise, religions which tend towards good or neutrality and benefit from a stable society are more likely to ask for smaller, regular tithes, whereas religions devoted to power may ask for a great deal (or everything) from their adherents.

So, how would we determine the amount of money a local church or temple has on hand? D&D players, at least in Western countries, are most likely familiar with the 10% estimate attached to Christianity or Catholicism, even if they themselves are not part of the religion. Given that the expectations of the players matter (this is a game design choice, after all), 10% is a reasonable starting point. Unlike with taxes, however, we have to not only base the number on how much wealth people have, but also how many people follow that particular faith.

Smaller settlements will frequently follow a single deity, which makes this easy. In general, people are expected to tithe, not businesses or organizations, so let’s use our rule of thumb from earlier that the amount of money available to people is about half the baseline. The temple will have 10% of that. This gives us the calculation:

50% of baseline x 10%

Of course, two percentages are annoying, so let’s just use one. If the temple gets 10% of half the baseline, that’s the same as saying it gets:

5% of baseline

So, for example, an average village of 500 will have a baseline of 2,000 gp (2x for village, 2x for squalid, 500 people). That puts 100 gp in the hands of the temple. Likewise, an average town of 2,000 will have a baseline of 50,000 gp (5x for town, 5x for poor, 2,000 people), leaving the temple with 2,500 gp.

Of course, in the numerous D&D worlds with widespread pantheons, it’s quite possible not everyone in a given community worships the same god, especially when the settlements get bigger and bigger. A village or town might all pray to Lathander out of cultural tradition, but larger towns (and, even moreso, cities) are likely to see multiple faiths at work within their borders. Alternately, perhaps some people are faithless and do not worship any god. In these cases, decide what percentage of the population follows a particular faith and insert that into the calculation.

5% of baseline x (% of followers)

In the case of the town above, if 80% of the town worships Lathander rather than everyone, then the temple will have 2,000 gp available (80% of 2,500).

(Pro tip: If you don’t have a calculator handy or don’t want to bother with one, the easiest percentages to work with are multiples of ten. We’re used to approximating values like one-quarter of this (25%) or three-quarters of that (75%), but when doing this type of math, those can lead to more difficult mental arithmetic. If we said 75% of the above town worships Lathander, for example, that would give the temple 1,875 gp—a number that takes longer to calculate if you don’t already know it, and which we might well just round up to 2,000 gp anyway.)

It’s worth noting that if most citizens worship a particular god in a city, there will be numerous temples promoting that worship which more or less split the available tithe money. If everyone in a city of 100,000 worships Helm, for example, the church will be unbelievably wealthy, but that’s not all locked up in a single building—there will probably be a couple dozen places of worship around the city so everyone has one they can reach in a short time on foot. (In fact, if this situation occurs, you can very reasonably have a central authority for the temples where they send a large portion of their tithes, making that central authority flush with cash—and security—while the local temples still hold a reasonable amount.)

As previously mentioned, 10% is a handy baseline because players are likely to be familiar with the 10% tithe concept, but you can pick whatever you want. The equation for determining how much money a given temple has, no matter the expected tithe or the number of people in the settlement who worship there, is this:

Baseline x (½ the tithe) x (% of residents who are followers)

From here, you can adjust for the specifics of your campaign, what you need to push a certain storyline forward, and so on.

Guilds

Guilds are associations of merchants or people involved in a given craft. Think of them like unions, except for business owners. These guilds organize craftsmen and entrepreneurs so they can enhance their influence over governments, be assured of protection in various markets, fund security for caravans or trade ships, and so on. In the same way that modern workers pay union dues in order to fund the efforts of collective action and bargaining, merchants pay guild dues to secure access to the guild’s services.

Because guilds represent (or attempt to represent) all craftsmen of a particular type, their reach stretches beyond town and city limits, and potentially beyond national borders. However, even if a town blacksmith belongs to the blacksmiths guild, if she’s the only blacksmith in town, there’s no reason for the guild to set up an office there. As such, it’s most plausible to assume that if the PCs need to find a guild rather than a specific merchant, those offices will only exist in large towns and cities. 

What kind of money do guilds hold, though? They have to keep a war chest of sorts available for immediate needs, on top of funding the regular benefits associated with guild membership. There’s also a question of just how much they collect in guild dues from each craftsman or merchant that’s a member. 

All of these numbers vary by profession as well—members of a smiths guild or doctors guild, for example, will tend towards higher revenues and thus higher individual guild dues, but only large cities will have a noteworthy number of such professionals. On the other hand, a bakers guild will have many more members, but each one is not likely to chip in as much in guild dues. Additionally, if a city’s smiths are known for their tools and weapons, they may be able to make money exporting them via ship or caravan, which has additional upfront costs. Bakers and doctors are unlikely to have this need.

This is all leading to a reiteration of the point that the table you’re about to see is very much a guideline. Use it as a starting point, and adjust it as you feel necessary to account for anything in your game world that you think would change the calculation.

Settlement Size

Guild Cash Calculation

Large Town

Baseline x 0.01

City

Baseline x 0.001

Large City

Baseline x 0.0001

These equations are designed for ease of use more than anything. Although the multiplier gets smaller as the settlement size goes up, the actual sum of money available to the guild does increase in larger settlements. For example, using the midpoint of the population ranges, a guild in a modest large town of 7,500 will have 7,500 gp available, a guild in a comfortable city of 25,000 will have 10,000 gp, and a guild in a wealthy large city of 100,000 will have 16,000 gp waiting to be spent.

That said, the numbers are reasonable. The wealth available to a guild will not scale linearly with the baseline wealth available to a settlement, since as it grows new businesses that would have trouble surviving with smaller populations will start to flourish. This money is also above and beyond what’s brought in to pay for guild upkeep and organization, member benefits, and so on. Cities in the Middle Ages that became centers of trade could have a hundred guilds or more working within their borders; if that many exist in Waterdeep, and each has an average of 16,000-20,000 gp available, that’s 1.6-2 million gp that guilds across the city are keeping safe for emergencies or looking to invest. For the wealthiest city on Faerun, that seems about right.

As a side note, a guild office might exist in a smaller town if the guild can afford to keep it up and feels the cost is worth extending its reach out that far (most likely if they want a place for traveling guild members to contact between two larger settlements that are very far apart). That guild office may even need to contract an adventuring party to do some work. However, guilds are primarily interested in protecting the wealth of their members, and keeping more than a nominal sum of cash in a smaller settlement is a bit risky. A very reasonable way for such an office to pay adventurers, therefore, might be an official voucher the party can redeem at any regular guild office for payment in full. (This also lets some higher-ranking guild leaders meet the party and potentially offer them more work.)

Schools/Universities

Figuring out how much money schools in a D&D world should have is a little awkward because of how universities were run centuries ago. In Europe, either the students paid the teachers directly, the university was funded by the Church, or the university was funded by the government. In the first case, there was generally no physical university to speak of, and in the second two, there may not have been an actual fund for the university to draw on for extra costs because an outside source provided their money. If you decide that a school in your world is paid for by an outside source, then if they need the help of adventurers, you can just look to the funding source and not worry about how much money the school has. Simple.

But, hey, maybe there are reasons you want or need to know more specifics about a school’s finances. Again, looking to our own medieval history is difficult because the nature of tuition and instructor pay was so different. In some places teachers were not allowed to charge students above a certain amount, which led to inflated class sizes. Highly sought professors could be the subjects of bidding wars between universities, but this tended to happen when larger organizations were putting forth the money and thus did not generally impact student tuition. Tuition itself could vary substantially per student; it was not uncommon for students to be charged based on their family’s wealth, which still meant mostly rich students went to the university but also allowed poor students who had managed to scrape together an education to attend. (Poor students might also be responsible for duties around campus to make up part of their tuition.) We can draw some comparisons to modern scholarships and work-study programs, but it’s really up to you how many of these ideas you want to work into your game.

For our purposes, the first number to deal with is basic student tuition. The easiest way to do that, given that we have a 21st century audience, is to use 21st century tuition as a guideline. The United States college system is actually quite useful in this regard, as it requires the highest financial investment from students (or their families) of any industrialized nation, and has a clear delineation between state schools and private schools, in case you want to create a D&D version of Harvard in your campaign.

The average state school tuition in the U.S. is just over $10,000 per year. The average private (non-profit) university costs $35,830 per year. Using the 1 gp = $35 estimate from chapter 11, this gives us a tuition of approximately 300 gp per year for a state school, and 1,000 gp per year for a private school.

Here are some things to consider before dropping these numbers directly into your game.

• Tuition inflation in the United States has been substantial over the past few decades. The price of attending college is perceived as reaching a crisis point, and has led to such severe tuition-related debt that presidential candidates are setting forth plans to wipe some or all student debt off the books as part of a plan for universal higher education. As such, the numbers above should probably be viewed as the top of the range for what most universities will charge for tuition, unless they intend to be highly exclusive based on wealth.

• As a rule, universities are only going to exist in cities. That being the case, who in the city supports the institution? How much do they insist on the school relying on student tuition vs. patronage vs. government/church funding?

• If the school wants to hire the PCs for a task, and they can’t simply lean on an outside source of funding to pick up the tab, how will they pay for it? Could that potentially lead them into more trouble (e.g. the schoolmaster borrows money from a loan shark to pay the PCs, potentially bringing himself into danger if he can’t find a patron to pay back the loan before he gets thrown off a bridge)? Do they have a fund set aside for a certain project that will need to be delayed (possibly bringing down the wrath of donors to the school)? Or do they have a rainy day fund which they can deplete, but which they’ll miss if more trouble finds them soon (e.g. the PCs find the lost students but don’t capture the kidnapper, and now the school doesn’t have money to hire more adventurers when the kidnapper comes back and the PCs are gone)?

Thieves’ Guild

The short version is that a thieves guild has as much money as you need them to have for story purposes. However, the strength of a thieves guild relative to the settlement’s ability to control them is good to know, and thieves guilds gain most of their power through money. (Even if a gang boss is known for beatdowns, she’s not really a broad threat unless she gets the resources to spread her power.) And a thieves guild, much more so than an average business, keeps their wealth liquid. They deal in cash and are far more likely to need a lot of it quickly.