How much does it weigh? What does it consist of? Coins? We are wanting to divvy up some loot, and we are assuming that it is residuum, instead of GP, so what should we do? How much for a unit of 100?
i've always invisaged it as magic that has been crysatlised and i belive it wieghs like gold.
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I believe that the DMG specifies that it's a fine golden-colored powder, but I'm AFB, so I can't get you a reference. 100 units of Residuum would cost 100 gp, and I think that it's actually measured in 1gp quantities. (So, you might say that you had 5gp worth of Residuum, or 1pp worth of Residuum, but you wouldn't say that you had "5 Residuum" or something like that.)
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There's a sidebar in the PHB1 (p 225) that specifies residuum as being a silvery dust, and 10k gp worth being just larger than a gold piece itself. A pound is called out as having a value around 500k gp.
There's a sidebar in the PHB1 (p 225) that specifies residuum as being a silvery dust, and 10k gp worth being just larger than a gold piece itself. A pound is called out as having a value around 500k gp.
Yeah, residuum is the ultimate answer to the whole "how the hell do adventurers carry around these millions of gold pieces they're expected to have?"
The answer being, past a certain point in your career, you stop dealing in gold pieces and just deal in residuum exclusively. And are typically using it to create magic items as fast as you get it.
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I have seen posited, in the past, that the world economy of 4e is actually residuum-based, instead of gold or silver.
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Related: I've found that replacing a reasonable amount of the monetary treasure found in treasure parcels with residuum work well for a party that has a few ritual casters. Especially if they're deep in a dungeon - residuum is almost always more useful than the corresponsing amount of gold.
Personally, I've just ruled that gold and residuum are the same thing. Residuum is what you get when you take gold and remove all the metal bits. You can also use gold coins directly in rituals, you just end up with a lot of worthless burned up iron coins or something afterwards.
Platinum is just the same thing, but with more residuum stuffed in the gaps between the atoms.
This is then what makes gold a valuable product in my world. After all, without being literally made out of magic, why would gold be worth anything? Sure it's pretty, but it's too soft to make anything useful out of
Last edited by Excession : 03-28-2011 at 09:25 PM.
This is then what makes gold a valuable product in my world. After all, without being literally made out of magic, why would gold be worth anything? Sure it's pretty, but it's too soft to make anything useful out of
Time to change your currency to steel coins like in the dragonlance campaigns.
Although you are entitled to house rule what you want, it's the same as someone eating dollars instead of food. Dollars (and gold) represent buying power, not something you can actualy use and as such you need to trade them for useful things.
This is then what makes gold a valuable product in my world. After all, without being literally made out of magic, why would gold be worth anything? Sure it's pretty, but it's too soft to make anything useful out of
One could ask the same thing of gold coins in the real world
Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to make your currency out of something that has a high amount of Use Value. Specifically, if your money can be used for something that has its own value (aside from trade) then you will discover that your "currency" experiences periods of intense deflation when people need it more to cast Rituals than to buy food.
Also note that Residuum works nicely as a high-value trade good but, as it is also so useful to power Rituals and Magic Item creation, it doesn't work terribly well as a high-tier currency.
Astral Diamonds ("ADs") are... well, I don't know what, but they're not Residuum. It'd almost be better to think of them as Raw Residuum - something that is very valuable if it is refined, but something that costs a lot to refine. So adventurers would rather have a lesser value of Residuum than ADs due to the Use Value of Residuum but merchants prefer ADs to Residuum because they can afford to take the time break down the ADs into a greater amount of refined Residuum.
Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to make your currency out of something that has a high amount of Use Value.
True. And Residuum is a CRAPPY currency even without that problem!
I spend 25,000 GP making a magic item, then spend more components and reduce the magic item to 5,000 GP worth of Residuum. The only other listed way that I'm familiar with to get Residuum is from rust monsters and (a) it's specifically not supposed to work at full value if you try to farm them and (b) that STILL doesn't give you a profit even if it DID work at full value.
You SPECIFICALLY can't buy Residuum, you buy normal components at 1-1, but not Residuum, no one is stupid enough to sell it for a "reasonable" price.
NO ONE mints currency where it costs over 5x as much to get the raw materials as the currency is worth! (The US penny currently cost more than a penny to make, but not that much more.)
Residuum is what is left when you destroy a magic item, it's VERY useful, but for the cost of MAKING 100 GP worth of residuum I can go out and BUY 100 GP worth of EACH of the four other components, and have plenty of change left over. Residuum is useful because if you HAVE an item you don't need, and are desperate to cast ritual X, you can still do it. You can reasonably carry some Residuum just to be prepared, but it's not the normal way to do rituals.
Last edited by Doug Lampert : 03-29-2011 at 04:09 PM.
I found that having Residuum (or, as my players started calling it, Pixie Dust) around in small quantities as a currency worked well once my players hit Paragon and started leaving the Material plane.
For example, if you wanted to buy a magical sword off of an Lawful Good angel, would you pay him in gold? Heck no! That angel is from Celestia, they use gold to build homes and paving stones, it's basically worthless. Residuum, on the other hand, has value no matter where you are.
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