Slave prices

[Kesh]

Right. Keep in mind that prices may vary from region to region. Even just outside a city, prices would be lower than inside, simply because of demand.

Some folks will refuse to buy a certain race, or a certain age, etc.

Also, use will cause price to vary. Someone who needs a heavy laborer won't want a halfling, while someone who needs an entertainer for their court won't want an orc. Depending on your group's comfort level, there's also the... other... uses for slaves, which draw prices depending on the venue they're being sold at.

 

[Privateer]

I'm running a campaign in the world of Freeport and this info. is particularly useful.

Just so you know, in the Freeport setting slavery is illegal;in fact, it's what caused the Back Alley War between Sea Lord Marquetta and the first and last Thieves Guild of Freeport -- the Guild had been involved with some orcish pirate-slavers, and refused to stop their activities. If this is illegal slavery you're talking about, then forget I said anything

I'm such a Freeport fanboy.

 

[Kyramus]

Kingdom of Kalamar has a slave cost chart on page 120.
It's if you have the book.

They have modifiers for exceptional ability scores, npc levels, race multipliers, etc.

Just a heads up.

Also, Kalamar has a lower price list than what's on the thread so far. A adult halfling unskilled with a total of +3 ability modifiers would cost 11 gold, 2 silver and 5 coppers. But then people do haggle prices. I guess the base cost can be this low and the bidders can go up.

just for comparison a level 5 wizard human vs a level 5 wizard elf.
both have ave stats and both have 18 int.
human wiz level 5 costs 510
elven wiz level 5 costs 1530 (elf multiplier x3)


(edit: aditional comment)

 

[argo]

Here are the prices from the new Conan RPG. Conan uses the silver standard to change the sp to gp.

Slave, female, beautiful 60sp
Slave, female, common 30sp
Slave, female, high-born, educated, beautiful 150sp
Slave, male, rebellious savage 5sp
Slave, male, work-shy criminal 8sp
Slave, male, hard-working and submissive 15sp


Plus you can order a particular individual kidnaped and made a slave for double the price! Gotta love Conan

 

[Trainz]

I'm sorry, but paying 700 gp for a human laborer is not an accurate price for a slave. According to the Core Rules, the average human laborer makes about 1 sp a week, right? It would cost a little more than 5 gold pieces per year to hire several of these laborers, and they would take care of their own food and shelter.

No one would ever buy a slave, they would just hire people instead. Even 50 gold pieces for a slave seems high, when you consider that it takes that same 1 sp a week to feed someone. Naturally, a slave can work in worse conditions and harsher hours than a freeman, and only the worst of jobs would be likely to be staffed by slaves if the price was 50 gp.

Of course you're right. I didn't pay attention to that. However, 50 g.p. seems right. You have this slave FOR LIFE, and if not, the slave has resale value. Not so for the paid laborer.

You can ask your slave to do pretty much anything. If you drive the laborer too much, he will quit.

Slave ownership is also a symbol of prestige in some fantasy societies, so you pay for that too.

A laborer for 10 years is 54 GP. So as a general rule (IMC anyways), I would say the price for the slave is his appropriate expertise level for a paid hireling over 10 years. You could also put a variable based on the age of the slave. For a laborer, the optimal age might be 20 y.o., so every year removed from that could diminish the price value by 1%. Under this system, a 35 y.o. laboring slave would cost 50 gp instead of 54. If he's very strong (15+) or agile (15+) you could add 20% to the price.

That's for a laboring slave. A slave with a skill (trained) would be worth 162 gp.

Also note that slaves aren't furniture. It is quite possible to buy 3 laboring slaves, and have them trained by a skilled slave, in effect tripling their retail value.

But that's speculation...

 

[pawsplay]

Slaves, even above average quality ones, are cheap. They have to be trained, usually. They eat. And then there's the slave retirement plan; once they are too old or broken down to work, they sit around and eat till they die, and very few slaving societies allow you to simply dispose of them. The American South was particularly brutal in its treatment of slaves, but almost never freed them during the height of King Cotton, and some slaves lived decades after they could pick cotton. In Rome, slaves had quite a few civil rights, but freeing them usually meant losing their children as well.

Certain kinds of slaves are more expensive. Courtesans can cost a lot more in societies that employ them. Experts can be very expensive; in societies where slaves have civil rights, some people will sell themselves into slavery, either for ready cash, or to receive special training.

In societies where slaves are taken, rather than bred, slaves are cheaper than usual. African coastal societies and Norsemen, for instance, rated them cheaper than cattle, since they couldn't haul as much.

 

[Silver Moon]

Wow! You guys sure sell slaves cheaply! A key part of my "Chinese Take-out" module concerned a slave auction and the party's acquision of several who they wished to free. The following is taken from the Story Hour:

In order to have some gauge as to how much money slaves might sell for she asks Tak-Tung...(he) suggests going to the tax library, and consulting tax records for the auction house. Cassie, Aradyn and four Ming estate guards leave to do this with her reporting back mid-morning. She has found that human slaves tend to sell for between 10,000 and 20,000 GP, common monsters for less, and other humanoid races for more. The highest price she saw listed, for a Fire Giant, was 120,000 GP.

They wound up spending a total of 566,800 for 18 slaves.

 

[Agback]

G'day

To give you an idea of the range:

In ancient Rome slave dealers could obtain slaves by kidnapping people beyond the borders of the Empire: the costs of raising a slave were therefore borne by others, and the cost of a slave was as low as it gets. On the other hand, it was customary to offer slaves manumission when they turned thirty, so the value of a slave to his or her owner was about as low as it gets. The price of slaves in ancient Rome therefore represents something in the nature of a minimum. Adam Smith tells us that it was about the equivalent of one to two years' wages for the person. For a labourer in D&D, that means about 37 to 75 gp.

In the southern USA between about 1820 (when the British suppressed the international slave trade) and 1865 slaves could not be imported: the owners had to cover the costs of raising them from infancy to a saleable age. The costs of raising slaves were therefore about as high as they get. And slaves were customarily housed and fed very cheaply and worked until they died: the return to a slave-owner was therefore about as high as it gets. The price of a slave under these circumstances is therefor about as high as it can get. I understand taht the price of a young adult slave under these arrangements was about five to six years wages for an equivalent worker. For a labourer in D&D, that means about 180 to 220 gp.

Do slaves seem cheap? Reflect that they have to be fed and housed and clothed at their owners' expense, and that unlike oxen they cannot be eaten when they get old. In an environment where some people are working for bare subsistence pay, the cost of keeping a slave is very nearly the same as the cost of hiring a labourer. There is correspondingly very little advantage in owning a slave, and people will not pay much for them.

Slaves with very valuable skills seem to offer a much wider margin to the owner. But the experience of history is that they are vastly less common than slaves performing unskilled and semi-skilled labour. The explanation would seem to be that unless they are closely supervised, or else provided with incentives nearly equivalent to a free worker, slaves perform very poorly at their work. It always seems to work out that enslaving highly-skilled labour is not economic.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Wycen]

The Players Guide to Kalamar has slave prices, as does the athas.org website, official Dark Sun stuff.

 

[Telperion]

Thanks for the input. This has given me lots to think about.

The kingdom I'm using for this is called Calastia, part of the larger Hegemony of Calastia. In the fantasy setting of Scarred Lands, and their values seem to be something in between what has been discussed above.

Slaves are commodity, but they cannot be sold / bought / gathered just anywhere. There are actually only two countries (although fairly large in comparison to the other one's) on the whole continent, which deal in slaves. Dunahnae and Hegemony of Calastia.

Now, if the characters were in Dunahnae then the reality would be that a slave isn't worth the spit on your boot. The whole country is basically run by a very small nobility class, almost a non-existent merchant class, a huge military and then a hoard of slaves. Slaves are bred for particular qualities and then worked until they die. Preferrably a "good slave" would be used for reproduction at some point, so the "good qualities" would be passed on to the next generation of slaves. Other than that...killing a slave means nothing there...The military of Dunahnae constantly raids for slaves from near-by communities and breeds its own to cover the large death rate. The nobility are haughty and uncaring for anyone except themselves. The quality of slaves is very low in Dunahnae, but they are in great quantity.

Thankfully the characters are Calastian nobility, and reason and pragmatism comes first in that country. While slavery is accepted it is actually practiced on the larger scale only in two of six duchies. The main reason, that I can see, is that controlling slaves isn't very practical when one can hire readily available men and women for just about any given job. Trained, highly trained or otherwise.

The two duchies that make the exception are Turrows and Jandalore.

Turrows is a militant duchy, mainly because it has the finest military training facilities in the world (or so they claim) and is also the backbone of the kingdom's military. Large numbers of mercenaries also gather here, along with all manner of other people. Including merchants, slavers, assassins and so on...On the outside Turrows seems quite a lot like Dunahnae, except for the more pragmatic set of mind that Calastian's share at large. While slaves have no rights they are treated well and kept alive as long as they will live. Reaching a venerable age usually just means that the slave will be posted to less physical labor. Retirement comes with death. While Turrows has nowhere as many slaves as Dunahnae they do seem to be of higher quality and of longer use to their owners.

Jandalore in turn is based on its maritime exploits. They have the greatest navy and largest maritime merchant trade in the world (or so they claim). And they ship in slaves from all over the world. Thus the quality of slaves is a bit lower than in Turrows, where quality comes before quantity and slaves have to be brought in over land. But again the pragmatic nature of Calastia sets in, and no slave is really treated harshly once they reach Calastian soil. There have been no slave revolts in the history of Calastia, because the slaves are too few, too far apart and treated in manner, which doesn't leave much to complain about. Certainly they are not humans (or whatever their original race) anymore, but that doesn't mean that a tool should be mishandled or thrown away after use. That just isn't practical.

The one major difference is that any common man of Dunahnae can be capture by a noble and made into a slave. In Calastia no free man (and all men and women are born free in this land) can be made a slave, unless he has broken the law in a serious manner. For those cases there are specific rules. This presents a small problem to the slavers running their trade there: they have to fetch their merchandice from outside of Calastia, and since the same laws abide across the Hegemony of Calastia that is a whole lot of land to cover. The Hegemony of Calastia is about 1000 - 1500 miles in length and latitude, after all. Of course sometimes the occasional peasant, laborer or expert might disappear, but this is more of a anomaly than a rule.

Noting that those born on Calastian soil are free men and women there is also the problem of not being able to breed slaves within the Calastian Hegemony's borders. Of course there are ways to go around this, but the general mood of the nation is that a child born here is no one's property. It doesn't say so out right in the resource book, but that's my interpretation of the letter of the law.

So, slavers have to travel thousands of miles to gather up the various slaves, and to conduct armed raids into suitable locations. They also have to find trained, healthy and young slaves, if they are to make good money. For Dunahnae anything that moves, has a suitable number of limbs and breathes (the last one isn't really a problem either since they practice necromancy heavily) is good enough. For Calastia I would view slaves as a more of a nobleman's mark of pestige. Common laborers, craft masters and such become much cheaper and are much more readily available. The kingdom of Calastia alone has a huge population, which is for the most part civilized and well trained in their various crafts and areas of expertise.

Although the owner of the slave can basically do what he wants the King frowns heavily on abuse and poor management of slaves, because it incites rebellion. And there have been no rebellions in history of Calastia. Period. (Or so they would have the common man believe)

This leaves slavery as a second rate commerce at best. Still, slavery does exist in two duchies, so there are enough decadent lords out there who want their own pets, laborers and professionals for life. Dunahnae doesn't pay more than a few copper / silver pieces for a slave. Calastia pays better, but also expects far better quality. This leaves your average slaver in the middle with a problem of pricing the slaves correctly.

Prices in the tens of thousands seem ridiculously high. A hundred pieces of gold for a slave that can be worked for 50 years seems rather low as well. Especially if that slave has already received training, and can be easily trained further by the new owner. So, I guess that the correct answer is somewhere in between.

Any suggestions?