D&D 5E DnDBeyond leaks Dark Sun?

[Ruin Explorer]

Anyway: chattel slavery is, by definition, the buying and selling of human beings.

Not quite. It's only if they're being sold to private citizens and they really totally own them. As in the slaves have no rights and are purely "chattel". That's only part of the picture of slavery in Rome, and basically every year post-BC it gets increasingly inaccurate (though there is endless dispute over exactly what the law was - certainly ideas like Varro's become increasingly unpopular).

Re selling, here are situations where, directly or indirectly (indirectly usually being the land they were chained to being sold), serfs are sold, and indentured servants were regularly sold - a lot of them had a thing meaning they could only be sold once - but many could be sold (and how many times was that "only sold once" violated"?), including virtually all the ones who went to the Americas in the 1600s through 1800s.

If you can't see the affinity between Dark Sun and something like the film Spartacus (slave markets, gladiatorial arenas, slaves revolting against a decadent plutocracy, and, most importantly, scantily clad warriors covered in sweat), I don't know what to say to you.

Sure but it's an American film, made in America, for American sensibilities, that when it gets down almost nothing to do with the Servile Wars and there's no way Americans weren't thinking about their own history with slavery when watching it. We might also point to the similarities to various other slave revolts, including more successful ones, in the Americas (particularly Haiti). Weirdly the Spartacus TV series whilst being far from historically accurate (though less inaccurate than the movie) has a pretty great vibe for just how gross Rome was.

(incidentally, this also lets the Romans off the hook and puts wind in the sails of those spouting genuinely reactionary 'Western Civilisation' narratives, but that's another can of worms)

I actually agree here! But I think letting the Romans off the hook for their use of slavery is like, pretty low down on the list of things people completely unreasonably let the Romans off the hook for, and yes there is a real problem with extremist reactionaries attempt to appeal to the idea of ancient Rome as if it were in some way a good thing. I kind of got "radicalized" in Ancient History myself because studied what Caesar did to Gaul and Claudius and others did to Britain (which is often played down - a rare pop-culture exception to this is Hardcore History's somewhat aggressively named "Celtic Holocaust" 6-hour podcast - I recommend it largely because it's such a rare example of really giving it to the Romans, not like messing around trying to make out they were okay - even a lot of leftist sources often go a bit soft on the Romans - and are also often ignorant re: the true depth of Roman nastiness), and also just how crummy Rome was even for Romans.

I kind of feel like culture/society isn't quite ready for their reckoning with Rome just yet, sadly, there's still too widespread of a sort of propaganda-machine (include very mainstream stuff like the BBC) trying to feed us the idea that the Romans were an "advanced" civilizing force and other utter nonsense. Literally the only things the Romans were "advanced" in were civil engineering and arguably military tactics. Everywhere else they were a trashfire, including stuff like agriculture, where they were downright incompetent (they attempted to "reform" British agriculture, and massively reduced its productivity, because their simplistic system of crop rotation was trash compared to what the Britons were doing, and totally maladapted to the climate - classic imperial boneheadedness).

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

If DS desginers played some civilitation simulation videogame then they would realise the demographic repopulation is not very easy for tyrants and worse in a dessert zone with a limit of recourses.

The future DS should show at least three original PC raceslineages. One of these should the "muls", now maybe with other more politically correct name. If the half-giants now are the goliath, and the three-ken appeared in Spelljammer, then the option should the Athasian genasies.

A kid-friendly cartoon of Conan the barbarian was produced to sell Hasbro's action toys. We shouldn't be surprised if WotC allows different tones for DS, with more space for hope or darkness according to choise by players.

I imagine an "infernal plane" in the Athaspace/Crimsonsphere, but this is more populated with fire elementals than the standard infernal outsiders. Of course I allow some space for the infernal dragons and even infernal dragonborns, and abysall genasies.

Take care about use fiction for analogies with History from the real life, because you can't guess the type of counter-attack you can face.

In some zones the slavery could evolutionate to the medieval feudalism, because workers are better motivated if they work more then they can enjoy more profiencies for their effort.

Maybe the sorcerer-kings have discovered planar portal to certain zones, for example some demiplanes in the elemental chaos, but here they aren't wellcome at all, and it is too hard to be conquested (maybe the true rulers are the secret faction from the Black Spine module), but very useful for fast raids to catch more slaves.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

there is endless dispute over exactly what the law was

I think this is always the case. Law is subject to interpretation and reinterpritation, subject to change, and what it says on the statute books is going to lag behind what the general populous believe.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think this is always the case. Law is subject to interpretation and reinterpritation, subject to change, and what it says on the statute books is going to lag behind what the general populous believe.

Yeah absolutely though in Rome it's even more complicated because there's actual dispute as to whether laws were even enacted/enforced, and whether laws found in certain records actually were laws (or something the person making that record made up), or whether we're even understanding the meaning of the law correctly on a basic level (not even interpretation/reinterpretation sense, but the does it literally even mean what we assume it means) stuff. A lot of the best evidence is primary sources commenting on the enforcement of laws, but they relatively rarely talk about slave-related stuff. There was a remarkable law in Rome where if a master was murdered by a slave, all his slaves were to be put to death regardless of their involvement, and that happened at least once, but it caused such a massive kerfuffle among the middle and working classes of Rome (interestingly - you might not have thought they'd have cared but they clearly did) that it's unclear if it ever got enforced again, for fear of outright rioting. An awful lot of Roman laws got revoked or just not enforced because of riots/protests, including, famously the Lex Oppia, which attempted to limit what women could own and control their dress. Initially this was part of a package of emergency economic measures (including ones that impacted men), but much later Cato (the Elder) and others argued for it to be extended on astonishingly misogynist grounds (it's totally fair to say this - Cato's speech on the matter is recorded it's some of the most venomous and frankly stupid* misogyny one can imagine), even when Rome was totally flush with cash. But after Cato gave his speech, the women in question turned up and just jammed up proceedings (and possibly even beat up some Senators) all across Rome until the Lex Oppia got revoked (Cato of course went off to commit outright genocide in Spain, as was the fashion at the time).

* = One thing you really see in ancient history and classics is that loads of people in past, who were celebrated from like the renaissance well into the 20th century were, well just ghastly low-quality human beings, even by the standards of the time, and who were frankly, often very absolutely intellectually bankrupt, and when you ask why anyone was praising them, it becomes obvious that it's at least in part because these figures legitimized similar behaviour by more modern characters. This idea that because some dimwit from 200 BC did something, it was beautiful and traditional and cultured, is just hilarious in retrospect. Cato's only real surviving work is this thing upper-class Romans love to write - a farming manual - and the stretches from various scholars to make out it's anything but a bunch of opinionated and fatuous waffle mixed with the basic truisms masquerading as wisdom are astonishing.