5 Steps to Building a Believable Fantasy Economy

•Urdr Team

"How much for the ale?" "One gold piece." "And the horse?" "Ten gold pieces."

If this sounds familiar, your fantasy economy might be broken. In many TTRPGs and novels, money is just a point system. But a real economy tells a story about resources, trade, and power.

Here are 5 steps to building an economy that feels real without requiring a degree in economics.

1. Determine the Scarcity

What is rare in your world? Scarcity drives value.

  • Desert World: Water is more valuable than gold.
  • War-Torn Land: Steel and weapons are expensive; luxury goods are worthless.
  • High Magic: Magical components are the primary currency.

Urdr Tip: When defining a Location in Urdr, use the "Resources" attribute to list what is abundant and what is scarce. This helps generate realistic trade conflicts later.

2. Choose Your Currency (It's Not Always Gold)

Gold is heavy, soft, and useless for tools. Why do people value it?

  • Fiat Currency: Paper money backed by a government (requires a stable empire).
  • Barter: Direct exchange of goods (common in rural or collapsed societies).
  • Utility Currency: Items that have inherent use (salt, grain, bullets, mana crystals).

3. Establish Trade Routes

No city is an island (unless it literally is, and even then, it needs boats).

  • Who trades with whom? If Kingdom A has iron and Kingdom B has food, they must trade or conquer.
  • What are the risks? Bandits, monsters, and storms define the cost of goods.
  • The Silk Road Effect: Goods from far away should be exponentially more expensive.

4. Define the Labor Value

How much does a peasant earn in a day? This is your baseline.

If a day's labor earns 1 silver piece, and a sword costs 50 gold pieces (500 silver), that sword represents 500 days of labor. Is that realistic?

  • Unskilled Labor: 1x baseline.
  • Skilled Labor (Blacksmith): 5-10x baseline.
  • Expert Labor (Wizard/Alchemist): 50-100x baseline.

5. Create Economic Conflict

Economy drives plot. Most wars in history were fought over resources, not just ideology.

  • Inflation: An adventurer dumps a dragon's hoard into a small village. Prices skyrocket.
  • Embargo: A kingdom blocks trade to starve an enemy.
  • Monopoly: A guild controls all magic potion production.

Conclusion

You don't need a spreadsheet to run a fantasy economy. You just need to know what people need, how they get it, and what happens when they can't.

By grounding your economy in scarcity and trade, you give your players new ways to interact with the world—through bribery, smuggling, and negotiation, not just combat.

Make the Economy Hard to Accidentally Break

Economy continuity usually breaks in small ways:

  • prices jump randomly
  • trade routes change without cause
  • a faction suddenly has infinite money

The fix is to treat economic facts as canon:

  • what’s scarce in each region
  • who controls which routes
  • what a day of labor is worth

When your world bible is structured as data, these constraints become easier to search, export, and sanity-check.

Read next: World Bible as Data: A JSON-First Approach

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