Wonderful things

One of my favourite books is Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds. The main character, Lizzie Greystock (later Lady Eustace) is one of fiction's standout characters a breathtakingly unabashed chancer, a kind of Victorian-era Donald Trump if Trump were quick-witted, beautiful, charismatic, young and female. It's not a spoiler if I reveal that Lizzie ends up with a diamond necklace, worth upwards of five million dollars in modern terms, that she claims her husband gave her as her personal property a few days after they were married and a few months before he died.

The concern of the Eustace family and their lawyer is that, if they can't prove the diamonds are an heirloom that should be held in trust for Lizzie's infant son, she'll sell them for cash. That means they'll be broken up and lose about half their value.

The fun of the novel lies in the increasingly chaotic repercussions that ripple out from Lizzie's lies to affect everyone around her, but it also got me thinking of how much value must have been lost in the course of plunder through the ages. Conquistadors seized Aztec treasures and melted them down for shipping home to Spain. At the time they only cared about the gold, but to us today those artifacts would be of immeasurably greater value if they could be restored. It's in the artistry and the history where the value lies.

In traditional dungeon bashes, adventurers rush into ancient buried temples, prise jewelled eyes out of idols, break gold statues up for easier carrying, and load their mules with bags full of ancient coins that will be sold for smelting, not to adorn a numismatist's collection. Imagine Howard Carter had done that to Tutankhamun's treasures. The value in gold ingots would only be in the tens of millions, but as a complete set of 18th Dynasty artifacts they've been insured for one billion dollars.

Heists are popular in roleplaying these days, it seems. If the player-characters steal treasure from a private collection, they may not be able to sell the items at their true value. Crown jewels, for example, can't easily find a buyer. In that case there may be no choice but to break the jewels up and melt down the precious metals. The loot may thereby lose 90% of its value, but the difference is that the remaining 10% now goes to the thieves, so what do they care about the vandalism involved?

For treasure to be worth anything as art, you need to have a society in which aesthetics feature as well as commerce. In Tekumel gaming, for example, coins bearing the head of Queen Nayari, founder of the Bednalljan dynasty, would be worth far more intact than if melted down into silver or gold ingots -- in theory, that is, though first you'd have to find a wealthy numismatist to buy the coins. In contrast, D&D was styled more on the Wild West, where one sack of loot was much the same as another.

Does treasure play a role in any of your games, and if so is it in the form of mere plunder or artworks of unique value?