1. Do the hardworking folks at Athas.org have a plan as to how many of the original books they are converting to d&d 3/3.5
2. What sort of coinage do you typically allow players access to. I had an idea of what silver and gold coins were worth according to the source material but Im recently rereading the prism pentad and it seems like a single silver is a ridiculous amount of money. My scenario is I started my players on the freedom module and one outcome of an encounter is that the win a noble title at the expense of two former nobles lives (gotta love the whims of a sorcerer king). So I figured there was some money and estates attached with this but next thing I know with a fraction of what I intented to give them they can buy pretty much everything they need. Of course I have an idea oon how they can "lose" this amount but I dont want to make the mistake of giving them too much again. And of course I wont admit the reason they were marauded by raiders and left for dead is due to my unfamiliarity with athasian economics.....but anyways.....
, no DS supplements have been converted, only rules: psionics, spells, magic, races, classes...There is a monster document and a MC on the Dead Lands, the first contain the basic animals and monsters of Athas, the second is geo-specific to the Dead Lands region, plus some general monsters like golems, caller in darkness, basic undeads...
It is not a conversion of DS's MC1 and MC2; for example there is no shadow giants.
There won't, and cant, be any City by the Silt Sea DS3...
If you look carefully in the spells section of the DS3 document, you'll see some spells from Preservers & Defilers are missing, like the chain spells about enchanting obsidian balls. Some others are there. The reason? ask the staff.
As for coinage, look at the Wealth and Money section of DS3 for the equivalence to the PHB's currency.
2. What sort of coinage do you typically allow players access to. I had an idea of what silver and gold coins were worth according to the source material but Im recently rereading the prism pentad and it seems like a single silver is a ridiculous amount of money
I'll leave the first part for the actual Athas.org team to answer (even if I'm chuckling about it myself).
As for #2: Most of my players never see metal coins until very late in their careers. I stick with using ceramics for almost anything. Merchants can use charter writs as legitamate currency that cannot be stolen (since the charters can be made out to a specific person or group), so they have little need for larger coins. Even some of the richest nobles may have perhaps a few dozen silvers and four or five gold pieces. The Sorceror-kings are the only ones who have any substantial amount of metal currency (basically, I let them have unlimited wealth for whatever they see fit), but they know far better than to start tossing metal currency into even small circulation.
Metal currency has been out of use for so long and the economy dependant on the cermic piece for some 2,000 years or more. That's plenty of time for the SKs to hoard up the precious metals, perhaps even melting them down for more useful things like arrows of PC slaying and such. Some of the SKs may even consider owning or using metal coins to be a capitol offense, since tossing about a sack of gold is roughly akin to pumping trillions of dollars into a small market closed economy. It would drive down the cost of the local currency (in the case of Athas, the ceramic) and hence the cost of goods would rise. The SKs have had a long time to perfect ecomomic stability.
As for the city states who have lost their SK, I imagine Balic to be the one most likely to start trashing their own economy with the Merchant Lords tossing about their newfound wealth gained from the looted treasuries of Andropoinis. Raam too would probably have some of the warlords using silver and gold coins taken from Abalach-Re's storehouses (but since Raam has no viable ecomomy, there's little damage they can do to make things any worse anyhow).
Heh, beat me to the punch
There won't, and cant, be any City by the Silt Sea DS3...
Granted there won't be any text rewrites, but there could be an effort made to convert all the NPCs and such. In fact, WOTC has seemed to encourage statistical conversions of old material. Also, there's nothing against creating an adventure set in that region that may help things out a bit (of course, the adventure is quite allowed to re-explain everything in the CbtSS, but it would be allowed to cover any bases that are required in order to run the adventure).
Found it: the answer to your question on the future releases is at this thread.
Although we haven't discussed it, a proper way for fans to have access to 3.5E versions of those supplements is for someone to convert the modules using the guidelines from WotC. Then it should be easy (and legal) for us to post them on our site.