I was wondering what they were going to do about 12 scrags for 5th level characters their really quite tough.

Going with the assumption that you hadn’t disallowed any of the potential characters chose to work on the locathah fixing some typos making it easier to read all he need now is however much gold he gets for equipment

A fair assessment. In fact I commented on it here:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/4634045-post31.html

Thanks for "lurking", last night. It was a bit chaotic; 12 scrags was about 6 too many.

you mention in one of the intros that coins would likely be less valuable compared to things like pearls and coral i imagine it would be the other way around. Because gold and silver particularly in in the form of well minted coins, would be much rarer they would be more valuable while pearls and pretty coral being so much more common would be less valuable i would imagine these items would switch places in the economic systems with pearl used as money and exotic gold and silver used more like pearls in a traditional campaign setting. Gold, silver and pearls have no inherent value so their value is ascribed to them by pepole based on how pretty and more importantly how rare they are. Exactly how valuable things from the surface world are would logical depend on how easily it is for undersea races to gain access to them the more trade with the surface world or the more shipwrecks the less valuable said items would be. At least that's my thoughts on the subject.