“Pal, look. If you had your gold coins stacked in your cave, and put in a couple tables, we’d just call it a ‘counting room.’ Then we’d be talking maybe a little citation for not spacing your dragon-discouragement columns close enough together. But what you’ve got here, with all your gold and gems and statues just like…piled up on the floor? I gotta be honest, I don’t know how you don’t at least have a little wyrmling in here yet. This is absolutely a hoard, and if we don’t remediate now you’re gonna need exterminators by the end of the week.”
These sound like great prompts for an Acquisitions Incorporated game, or maybe something set in Discworld
Let’s go meta. There’s a Ministry of Chelonism whose remit it is to send teams of interdimensional agents to prevent fantasy settings from becoming too self-aware and ironic, because that would cause them to interact with the Discworld and destabilise their reality.
They constantly muck it up, leaving a trail of universes with retconned cosmogonies and unhinged cosmic geometries.
The worst being that one incident where they left an entire universe in a state where every single particle is governed by the uncertainty principle but only when no one is looking.
I think it’s not just how much gold one has, but whether it can be categorized as a “horde.” You may only have a small amount of gold coins, but if you leave them in a messy–but not too messy–pile, you could end up with a small dragon sleeping on top of it.
“Horde” is orcs. “Hoard” is dragons.
