Koku in Dungeons & Dragons: for Samurai
It was the 1980 television miniseries Shōgun that introduced me to the concept of koku as a measure of wealth in pre-modern Japan. I purchased the original AD&D Oriental Adventures rulebook when it came out in 1985. I only ever used it for inspiration, though. That never included using koku for player character income/wealth.
It was the 2024 streaming miniseries Shōgun that finally got me curious enough about koku to do the research. My questions were:
- How many koku of income did a common samurai need to live?
- How was it distributed to him?
- What was one koku worth in D&D coinage?
The answers I found:
- The Samurai Archives Wiki project’s page for koku states a samurai’s annual expenses “was around 1.8” koku. That does not count the one koku he eats, so it takes almost 3 koku to basically live.
- That same page states “one-quarter of the annual stipend was paid in spring, one-quarter in summer, and the remaining one-half in the winter.”
- The Oriental Adventures rulebook has two tables in its “Money & Equipment” chapter. The first sets one koku worth 5 ch’ien. The second sets one ch’ien equal to 5 gold pieces (GP). So one koku is worth 25 GP.
So the wage of a “historical” samurai in D&D would be about 70 GP per year. Almost 6 GP per month.
ADDENDUM: 6 GP per month is what the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide lists as the wage for a mercenary heavy cavalryman or mounted archer. So internally consistent between the rulebooks.
See also Fiefs Were Measured By How Much Food They Produced.
