Guild honour

The Guild honour is the most common currency circulating in the Eleven Cities which surround the Sea of Jars. It is produced by the Minters of Metal in mints located in the cities of Chogyos and Ramoros.

Description

Guild honours are circular brass coins 1.2 inches in diameter. They are stamped on one side with the seal of the Minters, a pair of assayer's scales, and the other with the batch number of the individual coin. "Batches" are produced once per year, on a non-specific date usually in midsummer (when firewood is cheaper and the casting of metal therefore less expensive).
Brass is not an especially durable metal, and coins wear with use. Particularly worn coins which re-enter the coffers of the Minters are assessed for the fidelity of their stamps, and those deemed unreadable are used as bullion for the next batch. As such coins with batch numbers earlier than about 100 are rare and, depending on the buyer, can fetch prices many times beyond their face value.
The first four batches were not numbered as it was not yet established that this would be an annual practice. Thus the first batch to be numbered was that produced in 101 AWR, and the current year saw the minting of batch number 205.

History

The Guild honour was first struck in 97 AWR as a replacement for the Hegemonic Chogyan Honour. The Hegemony had ceased being a going concern over a century previously, and the ciity of Chogyos, deprived of tribute from its vassal cities, was having difficulty maintaining the value of its currency. As the Commercial Guilds grew in power in the wake of the Wesmodian Reformation they proposed a new brass coin, masterminded by the Minters, as a replacement. The coin could be minted in Chogyos and held in common among the cities of the former Hegemony and thus maintain a degree of prestige for the city around the Sea of Jars.
The Guild honour was adopted as the official currency of the four former cities of the Hegemony - Chogyos, Loros, Ramoros and Elpaloz. In the first two cases this adoption was rather axiomatic; the Commercial Guilds were already growing to eclipse the actual government of Chogyos in decision-making power, and had established themselves as the de facto government of Loros after the disruption of the Reformation. Considerable lobbying by the ascendant guilds was required in Ramoros and Elpaloz, with the honour eventually winning out against locally-produced currencies mostly via economic logic. Attempts to promote the adoption of the honour by the governments of Oluz and Halumay failed to make headway against the parochial attachment to local currencies. Elpaloz abandoned the Guild honour in 258 AWR, reverting to its own electrum-based Lunar, a move that many members of the Commercial guilds decried as retrograde and divisive.

Use

The Guild honour is a valuable coin, but one used primarily for international trade. Merchants typically demand payment in Guild honours (business conducted through the Commercial Guilds tends to require this) but often convert the resulting payment back to local currencies when they arrive home. As such it is typically found and used around the dock districts of most cities. Only in Chogyos, Ramoros and Loros is the Guild honour used as a general day-to-day currency for domestic transactions. In those cities a single Guild honour will notionally keep a family in modest comfort for a whole day, and as such the coin has often been used as the daily allowance of indentured labourers, though in practice its buying power has declined over the years and a master paying only that much would be considered niggardly, even by other masters.
Regardless of this decline in value the Guild honour is regarded as a fairly valuable coin in Chogyos, Ramoros and Loros. Those cities therefore use the Guild sliver as a smaller denomination of coinage. By custom there are a dozen slivers to the honour.
In other cities the Guild honour only occasionally sees use for domestic trade. It is widely seen as a convenience for merchants transporting goods between cities rather than something for the general populace to use. Therefore, while it has achieved its purpose of becoming an international currency, it has failed to supplant the individual currencies of most cities.