Campaign Standards: Slavery yea or nay?

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Yeah, there's always fairly institutionalized slavery somewhere in my campaign worlds. PC's may never run across it but it's out there. At minimum it's going to be Orcs and Drow and whatver other races enslaving each other or whoever they can get their hands on as opposed to "civilized" nations.

 

[roguerouge]

Slavery is for antagonists only.

 

[N0Man]

I think it's fine to use, but don't start your players off as slaves... I've been there, and it certainly wasn't fun.

Slavers should also tend to be the enemies, unless your group likes moral conflicts. I would tend to use them in a less civilized and more lawless areas, or in cultures that are more foreign (overseas, or in the underdark for example), or in remote tribes.

 

[Snoweel]

My current campaign is regionalised. There are four major regions...

Region one...

Region two...

Region three...

Region four...

Is it true that once your slaves have changed region compatability three times they are stuck on the last region they were switched to?

... or employees of large corporates with mortgages and credit cards to pay!

Very true. But I have absolutely no pity for people who choose to become slaves. Having gone without for 3 years to claw my way out of debt slavery I'm comfortable feeling superior to everyone else.

 

[Rechan]

I do think that a PC starting out as a slave (either owned by one of the other PCs, or the party patron) is a great background/character. Either to win freedom, or some other purpose. It's a great hook.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Yes, I've used slavery before, in various forms, with no resistance from players.

Brutish chattel slavery (usually based on race or POWs, etc) I generally reserve for evil societies. It makes a fairly standard reason to go beat up on orcs or whatnot.

However, I've also used other forms of slavery in non-evil societies (mainly as background), using status or economics as the rationale behind it. Examples are caste systems, indentured servitude (medieval serfs), taxation (jannisaries, etc), and the like. However, I don't recall such forms of slavery ever becoming major plot points IMC.

Frankly, as revolting as slavery is, there's a rich history of it throughout history and culture. The social structures and morality of it can provide a lot of intriguing background (and therefore adventure seeds).

 

[Celebrim]

So in your campaign, is slavery a part of it? Huge part? On the fringes? Used to be in vogue and out?

Slavery is a ubiquitous part of my campaign. Much like the historic real world, slavery is an accepted part of life pretty much everywhere and pretty much every culture has some tradition of it in one form or another. There is one country that about 450 years ago had a revolution and overthrough the King, and in theory abolished slavery, but they are considered to be wierd and decadent by everyone else. Further, even though they in theory abolished slavery, alot of the peasant farmers are in much the same position as poor share croppers in the south or peasant farmers in Ireland after the English took over all the land. While its not exactly slavery, its very nearly economic slavery. Harsh landlords are kinda stock foils for me, in that they are really loathsome, but you can't easily solve the problem by just pulling out a sword and killing the guy.

Slavery as such tends to be kinda background, and the afore mentioned nation of Daros has kind of been my stock homo-centric setting because its comfortably enough anchronistic that I don't have to explain it so much. It's closer to culturally modern than the rest of the world - much of which has been explored only in my mind. It's not unusual though to have players that bring their modern perspectives on this and who play characters that want to free the slaves where they find them. One of my campaign ideas that I've always had floating around involves taking on that question of freedom and asking what that whole 'liberty and the pursuit of happiness' might really mean and how you'd go about getting it. So I'd love to kind of take that on, because my default campaign position is that - with the aforementioned exception - the idea that slavery is wrong is a rather foreign concept. Nominally good societies in the campaign world would consider treating slaves badly to be wrong, and would consider at some level the King - in the role of the 'establisher of justice' to be in a way a sort of servant of the slaves, but they'd look at you funny if you started talking about the ignobility or inherent evil of slavery.

 

[Lanefan]

Going in, my current campaign was going to have slavery as a mostly-accepted fact of life, though technically illegal; mostly because I'd scripted in a journey through A-Series on the adventure storyboard and, well, it's kinda hard to run the Slavers series without slavers.

I was forced to change my thinking on the fly when what became one of the major PCs in the game* rolled "Slaver" as her past profession; leading to some wonderful in-character lines such as "Stop taking prisoners and start taking inventory!", and forcing me to pay much more attention to slavery in general than I'd really intended to.

This all led to a long discussion among the players about slavery and how it might fit in. I'm using a Greek-based setting, so the idea of slaves as being much more than gladiators, sacrificial victims, or expendable hard labourers makes perfect sense...but the other, downtrodden types exist as well, allowing me to run a much-amended version of A-1-2-3 (they got partway through A-3 and gave up, and have since been diverted elsewhere) in the meantime.

Lanefan

* - it might say something about our crew, but this same PC just won her second straight overall "Most Valuable Character" annual award by vote among 4 campaigns worth of players!

 

[S'mon]

Technically my primary campaign world Ea has slavery, but the PCs are in an area where it's heavily restricted or banned, thanks to the efforts of a previous PC who is now a deity in the campaign world (Thrin). So it has not come up in the current campaign. In my second campaign world Aelos only the bad guys have slavery; the good guys revere the Church of the Unconquered Sun which bans it.

 

[Starfox]

Slavery is just one end of the spectrum. Counting Corvee and similar systems, history was full of enforced labor in a way we can hardly conceive of today. The status of slaves relative to serfs, beggars, and other low-status sub-citizens was very complex in many societies.

I used to have slavery as an accepted part of my game worlds, but I don't any longer. I found that modern people just have too much difficulty understanding and dealing with the idea of forced labor in any form. My players generally prefer a world with much more modern values. I don't always agree, but I'm not making an issue of it. After all, role-playing is escapism.