Grain Into Gold is a Simple and Sane (that is, universal) supplement from Board Enterprises for use in any medieval fantasy role-playing game. The zipped file is just under half a megabyte in size, and contains a single PDF file that is marginally larger. The PDF is eighty-three pages long, and contains a non-hyperlinked table of contents, and no bookmarks.

The product has only one piece of black-and-white artwork, on the cover. No other art or stylistic designs (such as page borders) are present, meaning that there?s really no loss in not having a printer-friendly version available.

Grain Into Gold is designed to help GMs make a realistic, workable economy for their medieval fantasy world. It does this by walking the reader through a series of steps to help measure the price of the building blocks of a society, and then works its way up from there. The first several sections of the book do this for bread (the staple food source), food, land, overhead, cutting corners, middlemen, craftsmen, textiles, preservation, containers, mining, more (surplus goods), magic, and taxes. In each of these sections, the book gradually talks us through why the basics cost what they do, and how ordinary people work with those to turn a certain amount of profit, and what can be done with that to further improve business. While this may sound rather dry, the book does its best to try and maintain a light, conversational tone.

After this is a notation on how to make alterations to the previously-listed information to suit your specific campaign world. It then gives a series of steps to follow, each one outlining the relevant questions you should ask for each aspect of your economy. Two sample economies are then given, with each of the aforementioned questions answered as part of the examples, along with an example farm family. The book then closes with a brief FAQ, followed by a series of tables that list the relevant information (such as price or wages earned) for crops, agricultural processing, salaries, and cost of goods from various sources.

Altogether, Grain Into Gold does a good job of breaking down the basics of judging how an economy works, and how real people produce goods and offer services that keeps a market flowing. While the text can be a little dry, and oftentimes quite a bit to take in, the FAQ, examples, and charts help to streamline the process of making it all understandable. Grain Into Gold is a good supplement for helping to make a campaign world seem a little more reasonable, since it answers the question of why things cost what they do. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: This product did its best to maintain a light and easy tone throughout to help with the rather dry subject matter. It also offered several helpful guides, such as a series of layout questions for designing your campaign's economy, and a massive list of goods and services with prices given.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: It couldn't be helped much, but even with the product's jovial writing, economics is still a rather boring subject. Not having much art here didn't help that either.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>

Grain Into Gold was the generic money system from Board Enterprises. I wasn?t sure how beneficial it would be to my game at first, but I?m really glad I tried it. There?s a ton of info on all sorts of stuff the rule books never get into. Some of it was great, some of it was kind of interesting and some of it I probably won?t need, but I got a mess of quirky ideas I?m using in my game. OK, most of the jokes were corny, but I really liked the way that this books makes everything tie together. At first you can?t believe they?re talking about wheat and wool, but by the end, it all makes complete sense. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: They covered everything from food to clothes to where you live. The list in the back of the book is huge. In case there is anything that isn?t in the back of the book, I get how to figure it out. There are a couple of things I invented for my world ,and I added them to the charts real easy.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: There aren?t any pictures. I guess I was expecting pictures of peasants in the wheat fields. Its really for game masters. Players won?t get much out of it, unless they buy it for their GM. <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Excellent<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

Grain into Gold, the new economy supplement by for your fantasy game by Board Enterprises, means well in trying to introduce practicality and common sense into your fantasy RPG world, but comes off more as an Economy 201required course that feels rather dry in many places.

Grain into Gold feels like a realistic account of how economics worked in a medieval world- from the 9 page discussion about how people make money off of wheat to the short blurb about the importance of spices in the society. The book is so detailed, that right up unto the magic chapter, one would forget they were reading a book about fantasy medieval economies.

The PDF?s description claims it is not a textbook and with good reason. Because as you read it, it feels like a textbook. There is chapters covering just about every sellable thing in a fantasy world and explaining how it eventually gets turned into money. The items discussed in the book themselves are broken down into silver coin.

For the Dungeon Master Dungeon Masters whom are really into realism may enjoy this book, but you have to really be into realism. Those whom are in the middle of the subject, will probably just want to flip to the back of the book where they have about 20 pages of charts that relate the cost of common fantasy items and what they would trade for. This is the most important part of the book and the most helpful. If you have not fallen asleep reading about the material gathering of craftsmen yet, you will want to print out these charts and keep them by the game table. I can really see these charts helping out those DMs whom want to put mundane items in dungeons instead of the Zelda like pot of gold.

The Iron Word The writing in Grain into Gold is not meant for the casual gamer. It is very dry and should require a disclaimer that coffee is needed to read through the entire thing. The economy system introduced is neat but can be bogged down by too much needless detail, even for those whom like a rich amount of setting in their game. Luckily, the appendix charts in the back is pretty much all you need if you do not want to drown yourselves with dissertations about fruit. The fact that the author manages to sum up the entire book in the charts and appendixes shows that the book is very overwritten at points. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: -Thank goodness for charts that explain the system and give DMs a reference guide for how it works <br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: - no bookmarks for page referencing in this 80 pg document.

• dry writing. claims not to be a textbook but feels like it
• the economy system is interesting, but it feels like wit ha bit more work this could have been tighter and more dynamic
• fantasy needed to be worked in a bit more. <br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Disappointing<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Disappointed<br>