How much gold does it take to fill a hoard?

[RangerWickett]

Assume I want a dragon to have a nice 20-ft. square of gold coins and similar treasure to sleep on. How much gold would that actually be, roughly?

 

[freyar]

Draconomicon actually has a sidebar on this issue on pg 278. From WotC's estimates, a loosely packed cubic foot of coins is about 12000 coins. That would cover a 5ft x 5 ft square to a depth of 1/2 inch, so you'd need at least 48000 gp for 20 sq ft. (That's about what they say is appropriate for a Large dragon's bed.) If you want it to be a bit thicker, you're talking about a lot of gold.

Edit: Just realized you might want 20ft x 20ft. Then you're looking at 196000 gp for the 1/2 inch thick pile.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

That's a lot of gold. Hoo-boy, I wanna kill me a draggy.

 

[AnonymousOne]

Talk about your big game hunting ...

Ya think a .50 BMG round would drop one?

 

[Whisper72]

Draconomicon actually has a sidebar on this issue on pg 278. From WotC's estimates, a loosely packed cubic foot of coins is about 12000 coins. That would cover a 5ft x 5 ft square to a depth of 1/2 inch, so you'd need at least 48000 gp for 20 sq ft. (That's about what they say is appropriate for a Large dragon's bed.) If you want it to be a bit thicker, you're talking about a lot of gold.

Edit: Just realized you might want 20ft x 20ft. Then you're looking at 196000 gp for the 1/2 inch thick pile.

And I think that no dragon will be satisfied with a mere 1/2 inch mattress. They'll need a serious pile to make a nice bedding for such a large body, so I'd say youre looking at around 2 million coins (need not all be gold naturally).

 

[interwyrm]

Cast spell: gold to straw
Cast spell: fire

A kajillion points to anyone who can name the video game I just referenced.

 

[Dirigible]

doo dah leeedle leedle leedle leedle leedle leedle leedle leedle LOOOOOOOM....

At least, that's how the music always sounded to me Also, there wasn't a fire spell, but the dragon shot flame out of her nose when she snored.

That's an awful lot of gold coins, so the dragon might want to invest in some bulky, space-filling items like urns, statues, huge crystal orbs, bales of drider silk, rolled tapestries, suits of armour belonging to previous horde-tax collectors...

 

[Deekin]

Talk about your big game hunting ...

Ya think a .50 BMG round would drop one?

2d12 damage? Drop a dragon? You wish!

 

[Oryan77]

Just make the hoard full of Japanese rin. Then when the PCs take it home to cash it out, they learn they just earned about 100 gold

Or you can stick a bunch of Canadian coins in the hoard....there's always Canadian coins floating around in a persons change and it's never worth as much as the real stuff

Wait, should I even say that when our dollar is the way it is right now?

 

[jmucchiello]

Similarly, the Dragon is old so the coins on the bottom would be 400-800 years old. Do those empires still exist? What's the exchange/salvage rate?