Money and Gear

Money don't buy happiness, but it comes in plenty useful when you're in need of such luxuries as food and fuel, not to mention all those pieces of pretty coming out of the Core Worlds.

Economics of the 'Verse
The Core - them planets as formed the Alliance - have an economic system so all-fired complex that Old Scratch himself would be mighty impressed by their endeavors, money being the root of evil and all that.

Financial institutions - banks to us less-enlightened types - hold the money for their customers in interest-bearing accounts, investing it in exchanges on Sihnon and Londinum. Most of it is transferred electronically, code and pixels replacing cashy money. There's currency in the Core to be sure, standard notes printed by the Alliance on special paper by high-tech printing systems chock full of all kinds of fancy tricks to keep off the counterfeiters. These credit bills and electronic transfer are the only legal tender in the Core, and those with gold and platinum jingling in their pockets have to go to a licensed money changer if they want to so much as buy a Fruity Oaty Bar without getting clobbered by the Feds. See, hard coin is untraceable, and the Alliance don't want nobody making off-the-books purchases, so it's also illegal. This untraceability also happens to make it the favorite tender of black marketeers everywhere.

The Border planets, lacking the fancy trappings of proper, civilized folk, rely on precious metal coinage. While most planets have different standards and mint coins in different ways, some basic standards have shook out. The most common coins are made from set weights of silver, gold, and platinum. Barter's also common practice, particularly in transactions where both sides have something to offer besides cash. While a far sight simpler than the Core economy, it also means prices and wages are a might more fluid out on the Rim, as there aren't Cortex-accessible exchange rates where you can look up how much a piece of Lilac platinum should be worth on Beylix, let alone the going rate of a haircut and a live chicken. All this fuzziness makes haggling an important skill to master for those who make a living on the Rim.

Currency
To get a feel for how much that last job was worth, it's useful to relate your credits or coins to money you're more familiar with. One standard Alliance credit is worth roughly $25 U.S. dollars on Earth-That-Was, and a platinum coin roughs out to about $10. Take a look at the chart below for general exchange rates.

Pricing Goods and Services
The goodies available on the wiki are just a sample platter from the smorgasbord of gear available in the 'Verse. In the time it would take to write out and price every bit of equipment a body could buy, it's pretty gorram likely that we'd be fast-approaching a point where the science-fiction future of Firefly would start looking like a historical documentary.

Not to worry, though. Many of those goods have equivalents on Earth-That-Was. A coil of rope is still a coil of rope, whether it was made in Texas or on Regina. If you need a price for something you don't see here, and it exists in the real world, just find it for sale somewhere and do the price conversion using the currency table. Easy-peasy. Of course, the GM is the final word on whether a given item is available, what it costs, and what game effects it might have.

Starting Wealth
Since Savage Serenity has its own economy, we'll be ignoring the typical $500 in starting cash for new characters. Instead, a Novice character receives ₡750, adjusted by Edges and Hindrances as normal.

Gear
Now that you've got the credits, you need stuff to spend it on. The following page list separates things out a bit to make it easier to peruse, since walls of text are a mite intimidating to those of us who can't help it if our lips move when we're reading.

Newtech and Mi Tian Gohn
The gear listings assume an average specimen of whatever-it-is. The Alliance has an untold number of corporations, businesses, and brands, all vying for your hard-earned credits, and quality can vary quite a bit, from cheap trash to shiny pieces of pretty that cost more than you'd make in a lifetime - or three.

You can buy the cheap feh wu if your wallet's a little light, but chances are it'll come back to bite you right on your skinflint tuchus. Cheap gear costs half the listed price, but you get what you pay for. Common items such as clothes are ratty and torn, hats are crumpled and worn, and nobody will want to play poker with your dinged up playing cards.

Cheap guns, computers, and so forth - anything you might use in an attribute roll - malfunction when you roll a 1 on the skill die, just like if you had the All Thumbs Hindrance. This even applies to gear normally exempt from All Thumbs. Your luh suh hatchet might fall apart on you while you're trying to whack somebody with it. If you already got the All Thumbs Hindrance, you're in for a world of trouble: cheap gear malfunctions on a 1 or 2. Good luck, chwen.

On the other hand, some of the gear available out there is mighty fancy, with the pricetag to match. This high-end merchandise is called Newtech, and can perform all sorts of nifty tricks that standard gear can't manage. Newtech gear requires a bit more attention from both the players and GM, so it warrants its own page.

Big Damn Prices
Some of the stuff listed may seem a mite on the expensive side compared to some of the others: food prices, Core medical expenses, and the costs of traveling or shipping goods between worlds are all pretty durned high. Sorry to say, those numbers are about right. Hopping around the 'Verse is a pricey endeavor, and operating a ship can't be done on pocket change. Finding fresh vegetables on a backwater moon in the middle of a ten-year drought can be all but impossible, and will cost you dear. MedAcad doctors are about as common as an honest lawyer, and thus can charge pretty much what they please (which they invariably do). Part of the expense can be explained by the law of supply and demand: those who supply can demand what they like.

The other major reason for some of those big pricetags on the Rim comes down to a simple fact of life: the Alliance has all the cards, and they aim to keep 'em. After a long and bloody Unification War, and a government bought and paid for by corporations like Blue Sun, the Alliance doesn't want no wong ba duhn from the Rim getting any high-minded ideas and going about causing trouble. Some prices are artificially inflated to prevent precisely that by making it pretty gorram difficult to move things around on an interplanetary level. The corporations need somebody to run their goods, though, so it'll never be impossible, but it can certainly feel like it.

Availability
Try as you might, you can't just walk into any old store and buy whatever you want. A general store on Whitefall might have wool socks and horse feed, but you'll have to go somewhere else to find that fancy pair of tight pants you've been pining after. Same goes for practically everything else - you'll likely find a gun store on both Whitefall and Persephone, but they'll be selling a completely different stock.

Common sense should speak to most things, but things get fuzzier when you have a whole mess of planets and moons to shop on. The Core worlds manufacture pretty much anything you can imagine, but shopping on the Core has its own associated problems - like that fancy, traceable currency we mentioned earlier. Most of what you find out on the Rim is secondhand, worn, or just flat junk. Wherever the crew may wander, the GM will need to know what can and can't be found for purchase. To help the GM out on those decisions, all of the equipment on the wiki has an Availability rating of Everywhere (E), Core Worlds (C), Rim Worlds (R), Illegal(I), or Alliance (A).

The meanings of those first four should be pretty obvious, but that last one's a little different. Basically, the "Alliance" Availability applies to items that only Alliance personnel are authorized to use. Then again, the Alliance has never been particularly shy about using gear marked as Illegal, but you won't be finding it on any of their gorram paperwork.

The Black Market
So what is a body in need of Illegal or Alliance gear to do? Find themself a black market dealer, of course. Such a feat is a little on the tricky side, though. Sometimes, dealers sell such toys under the counter, but often as not, it may be damn near impossible to find some of them - unless, of course, the body in question has some less-than-reputable friends hanging about.

Some goods, particularly guns and the like, may well be illegal just because the Alliance wants 'em out of the hands of the average Joe. That kind of illegal may be overlooked if the buyer is sufficiently generous - the "10-60%-over-market-price" type of generous.

It's pretty common to find thing on the black market you can't find elsewhere, for one reason or another. For some of the cheaper, easier wants, contacting a willing purveyor is a simple task, but the more expensive and exotic your tastes run, the more likely some underworld bigwig, such as a major Syndicate boss, will have a hand in the acquisition, so watch your back, friend.

Gear Listing
Like we said before, gear on the wiki is broken up into a few pages to make things a mite easier to find:

Armor and Protective Gear

Weapons

General Goods

Tech Shop

Professional Gear

Newtech