Famine

Anyone who had taken a politics class knew that the value of currency used in circulation did not come from any intrinsic worth, but from "circulation" itself. The transfer of wealth and sale of goods were forms of circulation, and using labor to obtain the necessities of life was also a form of circulation. If money ever lost its ability to circulate, then it would have no value worth mentioning.

This law of capital applied equally on the Faerun plane. Although the fact that "an enormous quantity of gold could be refined into a tiny amount of adamantine" gave gold coins considerable value preservation, at certain critical moments when an economy stood on the brink of collapse, these glittering little things would likewise lose the status people once prized them for.

And now, the Scott Imperial Nation happened to be in precisely this kind of "economic collapse"—the most troublesome kind for the poor.

Of course, Scott's economic crisis could not possibly have causes as complicated as those in Punk's homeland. The medieval commercial environment, along with the professionals, could normally still sustain the circulation of vast quantities of gold coins. But now, this nation's disaster stemmed entirely from one simple cause: a food shortage—the terrifying famine that had continued for three years!

On the Faerun plane, because of the vast stretches of unclaimed wasteland and the semi-magical crop known as "Wavy Wheat," densely packed populations utterly inconsistent with medieval production conditions were quite common. Yet it was precisely because of this population density and enormous gap between rich and poor that, once a disaster struck, a nation's food crisis would erupt exponentially.

If a single year of reduced grain production could barely be endured with stockpiles, then two years of reduced harvests would be enough to trigger a small-scale famine.