Money: Magic For Politics

Wizards and shamans derive power from secrets and from Patrons and hoard it. They pass it, as misers' inheritances, to their apprentices and their murderers only when they cannot take it beyond the veil of natural death. Only a handful of self-made wizards are created each century, and only then because they have stumbled randomly across an empowered incantation, enfeebled efreet, or divine artifact like an anthill finding a discarded lollypop.

Those without magic petitioned wizards endlessly, trading labor for love potions and food for fireballs. The demand soon outpaced the willingness of wizards to do anything for simple folk, and the payments demanded by the wizards climbed beyond the ability of any but another wizard to pay.

A class of accountants was born to mediate the requests of the masses and the responses of the wizards once tracking how many hundreds of man-hours short a village was to pay for a rain-dance. These accountants invented tokens that the commoners could use to exchange/excuse labor among themselves. 

The strongest and least nice among the common folk began taking tokens in exchange for not hitting the token givers and/or hitting those who did not give tokens. This innovation created the political class and imbued the tokens with an additional magical aspect.

The accountancy class accumulated a small degree of magic that they devoted to Bureaucracy, eventually contacting and contracting with the Devils. These accountants evolved into the Clerical classes, performing much like the wizards but with extra steps.

It took a while for the mages to realize that commoners were trading chickens for 1/1000th of a love potion and cows for handfuls of magic beans via these tokens. Once they did, it was too late and the magic of money was a feature of everyday life.

 

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