Three Coins Faith
The Republic's sacred triad is minted rather than sculpted: silver measures honor, copper labor, gold power. Banks become temples because a promise that can be priced, witnessed and enforced can also become a spell.
Virtue With an Exchange Rate
The Faith of the Three Coins does not worship wealth in the simple sense. It assigns different moral weights to different metals. Silver stands for honor, copper for labor and gold for power. The scheme gives the Republic a compact theology of civic life: a person can ask not only what something costs, but what kind of value is being exchanged. The creed is especially suited to merchants, bankers and officials because it makes accounting feel like moral classification rather than a profane activity outside religion.
Its institutions erase the boundary between bank, court and temple. House banks function as shrines; auditor-canonists form a juridical-magical caste; the College of Basels provides senior authority. Oath magic follows naturally from this structure. Contracts can compel, place a soul under collateral, enforce sanctions or perform 'financial exorcisms.' A battlefield commander may be neutralized not by a fireball but because an older debt, guarantee or oath has been made magically executable.
This is why the Republic's power looks modest when measured only by battlefield spectacle. Its religion attacks ownership of force. A legion can remain physically intact while the legal relation that makes it obey a general is rewritten; a rival can discover that the price of breaking an alliance was already embedded in the treaty that created it. The faith turns the Republic's central political skill - intermediation through credit and obligation - into sacred technology.
The creed is also unusually easy to combine with other beliefs. Source estimates give it a strong urban core but note that it is 'soft' and compatible with guild subcults, rationalism and imported practice. That flexibility is not a weakness. A cult that insists every obligation be denominated can live inside almost any larger cosmology. The Three Coins do not need to explain creation. They need only be present when creation signs.
