Artifact - Wooden Nickles

[Rick Neal]

>
>At 06:26 PM 2/11/99 -0600, Rick Neal wrote:
>>Just an idea I had for something nasty:
>>
>>Wooden Nickels (Significant Artifact)
>
>(snicker) Not bad.  These have got to be rare as hen's teeth... and who
>made 'em?  And HOW?
>
My thought, considering the tie to the expression, is that they're a 
cliomancer toy. Picture a young plutomancer, not many charges, but just 
enough money to buy the section of street where the (slightly misnamed) 
gunfight at the OK corral took place. Well, then, he's got a goldmine: 
$1000 charged to a cliomancer to harvest the significant charge. 
Plutomancer charged, cliomancer charged, everyone happy, right? Except 
the cliomancer has to pay $1000 dollars a day. He gets cross, and... does 
something about it. Voila, Wooden Nickles. I'm thinking possibly a ritual 
rediscovered, or, more funky in my opinion, just the accretion of belief 
(maybe helped along by Urban Legend and such) around the plain wooden 
coins. As Tom Deitz says in his books, "Things have power because we give 
them power."

(As an aside, has anyone mentioned the Deitz books as source material, 
yet? Not his Georgian Faerie books so much, but the Welch County stuff? 
UA in rural Georgia, complete with luck mages (tychomancer? My Latin and 
Greek aren't that great) and the avatar of The Smith. Fun stuff.)

Rare? Oh yeah. Extremely. But if the cliomancers talk them up, every 
plutomancer in the world starts to worry about them. And a given 
plutomancer only has to get one once to become very, very careful with 
his change...

>Now all we need is something to screw with the cliomancers.  (Creator's
>remorse: I'm starting to worry that the clios are the most dangerous school
>because of the way they can charge up with relative impunity.)
>
>-G.

Charging up with impunity... not really. Time constraints limit the 
number of places they can access in a day (how many good sites can you 
get to FIRST in a given day?), and major charges are incredibly few and 
far between (On that note, how long has Stonehenge been roped off? Any of 
our comrades in the UK able to point out the possible cliomancer farming 
a major charge?) Screwing with the cliomancers seems unnecessary to me. 
Of all the schools listed, they are the ones with the fewest resources to 
go around. I think that cliomancers will be the main people screwing with 
cliomancers. And how will your cliomancer feel if the Atlantean scam is 
revealed? The cliomancers ARE dangerous, but they're indirect and subtle. 
Put them face to face with a dipsomancer or an entropomancer or an 
epideromancer, and they better run away and start spreading nasty 
stories. If they stay, the only rumour will be of their untimely demise. 
They fit a very nice niche, as do each of the other schools, and are 
unrivaled in that niche, as are each of the other schools. I think 
they're fine, as they stand.

Just my $.02 worth. ($.0116 US, of course. Our Canadian dollar's taking a 
beating.)

Rick Neal


It is always best to be a little improbable.
     - Oscar Wilde