Very sane and insightful. The Master Price list is handy to have if you're not happy with the static prices of most RPG core rulebooks. If you want to know WHY something cost the amount they cost, you can check the Table of Contents and then jump right into the page for a through answer. There's also a section dedicated to help you to design your worlds economy.

Forget D&D, if you want to learn about medieval economics this is pretty much the best practical guide I've found, with actual numbers based on actual calculations. Grain Into Gold will calculate the average yield in silver pieces from an acre of wheat in a year, once the farmer's had it milled and sold to a bakery. Want to know how? This little book will walk you through it, as well as textiles, mining, and more. It's edition neutral, works just fine in 5e.

This has completely changed the way I run a game, no more throwing gold around like it's confetti. It was an aspect of the game that I'd never even thought about.

This book completely inspired a new campaign for me back in Highschool and is consistantly one of the most recommended third party products I find myself showing off to fellow GMs. It can become a little unbalanced if your campaign handwaves things like travel time, item limitations, expiration dates, etc..., but in a dedicated merchant campagin this book becomes your Player's Handbook. The amount of effort that has gone into this masterpiece is nothing short of superhuman. Being able to get this much information for only 7.50 is a bargain. But, like I said, you can't just use this as a side-piece for a normal d20 campaign, or else your players are going to very quickly become more powerful than they should just by buying low and selling high. But when their stocks are at risk of everything from market collapse to banditry? You got yourself an intriguing campaign full of twists and turns that does more than the typical dungeon crawl.

Good but not great.

This product is a good product that does what it sets out to do, but there is not much new if you understand the basics of economics. Several basic things are left out. They go in great detail to calculate the price of a loaf of bread. But is this enough bread to feed a person for a meal, or for a day?

I would like to know what the cost of living for a year is for a slave, a poor peasant, yeoman, a couple levels of craftsman, a knight and a lord. A table like this would very quickly tell me how to multiply costs for their economic system to adjust it to the one in my game.

A huge number of calories came from beer in the middle ages. So much so, that modern scientists sometimes call beer and ale 'liquid bread'. This is ignored in this product. (Altho, if I knew the yearly cost of living above, I wouldn't be trying to figure this out.)

The price of metal goods seems a bit low. It takes a lot of work to dig up the ore, pump water out of the mines, mine the flux, bring the flux & ore together, chop down a huge amount of wood, bury the wood to make charcoal, slowly burn the wood. Dig the charcoal back up. Bring the charcoal to the ore and flux, smelt all that into pig iron. THEN you are ready to to make steel. Then you can make a sword. I could easily see the prices for metal items being double what they are in this book.

However, that is the limit of the not nice things to say. The product basically looks at the cost of labour and logically figures out what things can cost. At the back of the book, is a huge list of prices, with mulitpliers for how far it has been traded.

A nice product. Warm regards, Rick.

Grain Into Gold is a very solid attempt to introduce a level of economic realism to fantasy games. The writing oft times has a tongue and cheek tone to help break the monotony of discussing economics and does a decent job of helping engage the reader.

The authors certainly rely upon guesswork, but it is logical guesswork. Still, this can easily leave the reader doubting the validity of the math when looking at the example price chart at the back, especially given how radically different the values are from most games. Even considering the margin of error introduced by the guesswork, when stopping to think about the numbers, they made far more sense to me than those in most gaming books.

Perhaps the biggest failing is that Grain Into Gold focuses almost exclusively upon a western market, giving little to no consideration for crops and goods outside of the western mindset (e.g. no rice).

Perhaps the most misleading value is actually gold. Though the authors admit that their gold estimate is inaccurate, they stick with it, keeping a 1g to 10s ration that is popular in most games rather than a realistic ratio. This skews some end values as a result, most notable that of gold.

Perhaps the area with the most room for improvement is the price charts. Where some items, such as clothing, are covered in extreme detail, others, such as weapons and armor, are not. Given that most gamers more readily want to know what a sword will cost than a heavy wool sweater, this seems to be a bit of an oversight.

If you set these flaws aside and focus on how the prices are derived, then you can adapt the methodology to estimate the value of goods in both a medieval setting and beyond with reasonable accuracy. This is the greatest take away from the book. Lessons are provided for everything from walnuts to chain armor, discussing everything from harvesting to manufacturing to transport and taxes. It all starts with how much surplus food a farmer can produce. If you pin your economy to that and follow the logical steps from it, then you are golden.

An extremely thorough breakdown of a fantasy economy. Some may call it dry, but I like to to think of it as scholarly and well done with enough humor to keep the reader's interest. Those involved in fantasy world building would do well to pick up a copy and apply its principles to your projects.

Grain Into Gold is a very simple PDF with scarcely any artwork that sets about the daunting task of trying to teach you how to work your fantasy town's economy and the myriad of factors that will change it. Grain Into Gold is system-neutral, but accounts for many things that are likely to be common to standard fantasy rpgs. Grain Into Gold presents the subject matter in a very accessible way, and through humorous examples (that farmer thinks very little of John the Miller) and explanations in plain English, Grain Into Gold follows the fantasy economy from the Bread that sustains the peasant, to the cattle, and ultimately to the wizard's magic trinkets and the adventurers who covet them.

I found that the book did a very good job in keeping economics from being dry and unapproachable by using characteristics of settings we've all played in and concepts we're all familiar with. If you don't feel like constructing your own economy from the ground up, there is a base price list in the back. But this book is so much more than economics to me. It gave me a small picture of the struggles and triumphs of medieval life, a lot of ideas for campaigns (how's about a campaign around fighting dragons for their thingies to give to your wealthy wizard patron?).

While I ultimately can only recommend this book to real tinkerer GMs who like to play around with every aspect of fantasy worlds, I am certain even if not you'll find a spark of creativity from this book.

A well written supplement that takes what should be a dry subject and turns it into a fun and interesting read. Clearly written, this volume is packed with useful information about the economics of a game world, that I never would have though of. I contains excellent examples, and a good dose of humor to help get the points across. I highly recommend this to GM's of any fantasy system, looking to add a realistic economy, or just trying to figure out what your household, manor,castle or merchant can produce, sell and buy.

A very good concept, which, regretably, didn't quite get where it was going.

The authors point out that they didn't want this to be a dry, true economics textbook...unfortunately, when they started piling assumption on assumption, after the first chapter I felt myself longing for something with more true data & less guesswork.

It IS a considerable work, and has MUCH good information. I'm sure it lends itself to a far more believable set of economic relationships than one could get from picking apart the equipment list of any game.

In the end, I just had trouble trusting the numbers they came up with. But, if you're willing to replace your game's price lists, I'm sure it will be more than up to the task of keeping the players from trashing your economy...or at least justifying the trashing the players do to it.

This supplement has been extremely useful in improving the realism in my campaign. The tone of the supplement has successfully made what could well have been a dry subject more accessible. Would highly recommend.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

Grain into Gold is one of those source books that gets easily overlooked by the average gamer. "Why should I care about the price of bread in a town my character isn't even in?" A good GM takes the time to make many maps, NPC's, and points of interest available to the characters. Very few have the time to flesh out a complete economics system for them as well. Characters try very hard to amass a great fortune and it's up the person running the game to take it away from them bit by bit. This book was very helpful in many areas. I don't have the time to paint figures let alone come up with the economics of walnuts in the area. If I need something I grab the book and look it up. Like any game product some changes may need to be made depending on how you set your game. If your characters live in an area that grows cork or olives, of course, the prices will be much different than if you live on the tundra. All in all, I enjoyed this supplement.<br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: The charts are worth their weight in gold. (no pun intended) The distance from the source increases were great to show the mark-ups of trading from one to the other.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: There was no art other than the cover, but the subject doesn't lend itself to pictures well. It should not be read all at once. Look up the areas you think you'll need and browse through the rest at your leisure.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>

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>