Quote Originally Posted by PeaceHeather View Post
The other thing I'd tell you is that the average adventuring party would wreck the economy of most small kingdoms in nothin' flat - coming home from most trips with pockets full of gold, individually wealthier than most of the high nobility, and plonking down hard currency in every tavern and brothel they cross, is a great way to devalue the local currency down to nothing, watch prices skyrocket out of control through inflation, and from there... hmm. Every area they haven't visited is now too poor to trade with those places they have dumped gold into, and since we can assume the wealth doesn't distribute evenly through society, you'd have massive fluctuations in joblessness, immigration/exodus, civil unrest, starvation and rioting in the streets, and so on. Fun!
Lots of ways to deal with this. The first is in differentiating coinage. If only the nation's official coinage is legal tender, then ancient and foreign coin has become a lot more difficult to deal with. That dragon horde probably doesn't consist of Gold Crowns minted during the reign of the current king. If the government demands a tax of, say, 60% on all found money, that is also going to make adventurers a lot less likely to flash it around. If the government also has a tax of, say, 50% on the exchange of ancient to modern currency and, say, 30% on the exchange of foreign to local currency, this is starting to get painful.

If they have foreign coin, they can go spend it in a foreign country, where they are obviously foreigners and probably subject to the same kinds of high taxes - or maybe even forfeiture over a certain amount. It may be even more difficult to get away with spending a lot of foreign coin in a country where you can't pass as native.

So, adventurers might be tempted to participate in a more underground economy, with all its attendant risks. Do they try to barter for goods with these foreign or ancient coins, knowing that any transaction could be reported? Do they try to find an organized criminal organization that can melt the coins and produce counterfeit?

The problem with money is that it is hard to hide it if you use it and hard to enjoy it if you don't.