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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9735318" data-attributes="member: 6779196">It doesn’t have to be a matter of them drawing a line; it might just be that slavery, in the way that we tend to think of it today, isn’t practical in that world. The kind of mass industrialized chattel slavery seen in the pre-civil war US was not what slavery has looked like at pretty much any other place or time in history. Mostly because it’s usually not economically viable, and the US south just happened to have a particular confluence of factors making it so in that particular time and place. Human beings require a lot of resources to keep alive, healthy, and fit enough to do significant physical labor. So, in a setting like Dark Sun, where resources in general and water in particular are exceptionally scarce, and the land is minimally fertile, owning people may be something that is just never worthwhile. For the average landowner, the maintenance cost of an enslaved person is just too great compared to the value that can potentially be extracted from the labor they perform. And for the ultrawealthy like the sorcerer-kings, they have the scale economy to benefit from an enslaved labor force, but they also don’t need it because they gain that value for free from tithes, taxes, etc. They might at most have some personal indentured servants.</blockquote>