Where’s the gold stored? All that gold the PCs drag back out of holes in the ground?
It just occurred to me that in all these years I’ve been playing, what happened to all that loose coin was either handwaved or abstracted into “we trade it for smaller, portable gems”. We’d just never gotten into domain-level play.
With ACKS, I kind of want to keep good track of the money, since domain-level play is now a neatly fleshed out game in and of itself.
Presumably the ‘trade for gems’ aspect is handled by the Mercantile Ventures rules starting on pg143.
For whatever reason, the idea of a ‘bank’ always gave me pause is that I can’t see a situation where, in a world with magic, it doesn’t devolve into some weird place where every large city has a “Gringott’s” style Harry Potter bank.
So what’s left? Buried under that one tree? Encased in the bricks of a small house on a remote homestead?
It's mostly silver in my game, and it invariably flows out rapidly into the extended clan of henchmen, and thence into the city. Though currently one PC is acting as treasurer, and storing it somewhere in their employer's estate.
My PCs have never been rich enough to be concerned about it, so far. We’ll see what they do when the time comes.
For NPCs, I mostly go with historical solutions: heavily guarded treasure rooms for the truly wealthy, and some attempt at hiding or burying it for everyone else.
PCs generally convert all their wealth into useful goods, which go into the chests in the wagons. Wagons have ~20 men guarding them. It’s not a perfect solution, but they’re fairly poor yet.
Depending on the campaign, I often have different sorts of “banks” in larger markets. “Modern” banking has its roots in the late Middle Ages, but lending, deposits and money changing go back to ancient times.
In default magic level ACKS, I don’t think a “Gringott’s” is all that likely. Too expensive. (Perhaps a mage’s dungeon stocked with monsters might approach a Gringott’s, if the mage has a way to move gold in and out, and wanted to be troubled with such things.)
On the other hand, I see gnomish bookkeepers as the flip-side of the gnomish trickster – they’ve seen it all and are not easily fooled regarding matters financial. Dwarves inherently make pretty good bankers too.