Slavery [My player's stay out !]

I disagree. In order to be evil, in my eyes, you have to be doing something for the purpose of being evil or at least not care. I don't think Rome had slaves so they could be malicious and cruel, they did it because they thought it was normal and just that they should have slaves. And besides that, there's a lot more behind Rome than its slavery and expansionism. Most were hardworking and creative and at heart, I would assume, good natured. Even when they conquered other nations, they allowed extraordinary liberties and allowed them to keep their religion, language and culture. Even slaves could buy their freedom eventually.

Of course Rome had it's problems, but so does every culture. From a modern day perspective, yes, slavery is evil, but to them, it was just there. I wouldn't call them evil for it. Lawful Nuetral as a nation, with of course varying allignments for individuals.
 

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Trainz said:
What about a Chaotic Neutral society ? How would THEY view slavery ?

It might fit, especially with the main clergy beeing Olidamarra...

?

well chaotic neutral characters are typically very free spirited, which seems to me to oppose slavery. Also, I can't easily picture someone who is neutral seeing someone and saying "hey, I'm bigger than him. Why not have HIM clean my socks?". Carrying out such a thing would surely be an evil act.

Also, you may want to keep this kingdom an evil one, but give it many redeeming qualities. After all, just because someone is evil doesn't mean every aspect of their personality is dominated by this. You can still have a more or less functional, pleasant, and perhaps even benign (to the right people) evil soceity afterall.

As always, YMMV.
 

It all depends on the rights aforded to the slaves !*!*AND*!*! how well those rights are enforced. If slaves are given rights under the law, but they are not enforced, then the society is potential more evil than one where slaves ahve no rights at all. At least there are no illusions.

IIRC (an I probably don't) some societies slaves had the right to keep nay money they earned or were gifted so they could buy their freedom down the road, or use it to purchase whatever they may want.

You could even have different levels of slavery, one for criminals who are used to work in the mines and other hazerdous duties and another for people who have been forced into slavery to pay off a family dept or such.

In the end, it's all in the semantics...
 

Soap Box :)

Defining evil in your game builds your world myth, if you define slavery as 'not evil' go for it. The poblems players and DMs have is trying to apply modern/current morals to a fantasy game or the past, we judge by our standards but if we lived at that time we would be the same way. World myth sets the standard by which the players act and behave.
 

When there is talk of "ROME" we are covering an era from about 450 B.C. to 450 A.D., about 900 years of history.

In that time, the culture and necessarily the laws altered.

Take some of these notions about slavery:

Some slaves owned slaves

Several of the top bureaucrats under the Julio-Claudian emperors were slaves -- they were also amongst the richest men in all of the Empire

Slavery was not ethnic, nor was it necessarily inherited; equally, it was possible to place oneself into slavery in order to save one's family from greater debt and mass enslavement

There were laws about the ethical treatment of slaves, but these were not universally followed; conversely, several owners were taken to court over their treatment of slaves and some of the slaves were freed due to their treatment

The problem here is D&D Alignment vs. reality

(Warning! Wombat On Soapbox!)

Most societies are, in D&D terms, Lawful Neutral, in that they want to follow the laws, as the laws define the society, yet Good and Evil are difficult axioms to follow at large. A Chaotic society may exist, at least for a while, but any group larger than a small group is going to have a VERY difficult time trying to be anything but Lawful, with a few squiggling over to Neutral.

D&D wants to deal in Absolutes.

Societies are not so Absolute.

Name a society that lasted for any appreciable length of time that you could name as Absolutely Evil where you will not get an arguement; the same goes for Absolutely Good.

The closest you are going to get is probably something like Nazi Germany, and even there you are probably going to have a hard time labelling every single German as Evil. Even in the aggragate, only a small but potent minority could be labelled as Truly Evil.

So Rome was not EVIL in D&D terms. Nor was it GOOD. At best you will get Neutral, and that is only based on 21st century, North American/Western European, urban, educated, computer-literate standards.

Would YOU want your society to be judged by the standards of another society 100 years in the future in another part of the world?

(The Wombat steps off his soapbox)

So, D&D alignment standards do not apply to the Romans or any other RealWorld (tm) society.

The only apply in a pure fantasty setting. Never in reality.
 

Trainz said:
Grrreetings....

the thread title should freak my players out ! :D

I was wondering if a society has to be inherently EVIL to be based on slaves.
To conclude such is to conclude that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are inheritantly evil.

Read Exodus 21:7-9 - rules by God on how to sell women as slaves. Joel 3:8 - where God declares how Joel's family will be sold as slaves. 1 Timothy. 6:1-2 - how slaves should see their masters.

And the clincher for modern New-Testament-Jesus-Only thinkers: Matthew 10:24-25 - Jesus telling slaves to not presume over their masters.

http://home.inu.net/skeptic/slavery.html
--- Which you can cross reference with a bible for validity. Some modern translations have carefully removed the word slave for servent, but you can see through this when you find phrases about selling servents...


The idea that slavery is evil and amoral came out of a labor and economics issue in the 1800s. It came about that that it was cheaper to hire freemen for less than a living wage than it was to buy and maintain a slave. A product of the industrial revolution, slavery was now no longer economical. As such it was easier for abolitionists to make their case and no longer be seen as immoral lunatics. Slavery in the south persisted out of tradition and vested capital - a large portion of a slaver holder's wealth was actually the value of their slaves. Free them rather than sell them and you go bankrupt.

So the concept of universal emancipation is a secular and modern post-industrial one. It has no logical place in a pre-industrial society such as the average fantasy world.



Someone mentioned no sexual acts as a just rule for moral slavery. Consider this, where do you get new slaves from? If you don't breed them you have to engage in near constant warfare with the societies around you to capture people.

Less than 40 thousand people were ever brought from Africa into the United States, yet millions of people were taken and sent elsewhere. Most of them to the Carribean where they were worked for a few short years until they died in sugar plantations.

By the end of the Civil War there were around 4 million blacks in the USA... Where did they come from? Breeding. Many of them where paler of skin than the plantation owners - many with less than 1/64th of actual african ancestry. Because of breeding and sexual predation there was little need to actually capture and import people -unlike in the Carribean and Latin America.
 
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This is the problem with alignments. Morals are subjective. I'd say it's not evil if they have some good/religous reason for it. Even with the caste system, I don't think that Indian society was inherently evil, even with the treatment of the harijans (untouchables). It was simlpe a part of their society that they think that the harijans deserved what they got because of not follwing their dharma (duty) in a previous life. There might be other reasons as well. Perhaps criminals are sold into slavery?
 

Wombat said:
So, D&D alignment standards do not apply to the Romans or any other RealWorld (tm) society.

The only apply in a pure fantasty setting. Never in reality.

So...

A city could have slaves, without being another Zenthil Keep ?

OK.

I will have many evil individuals in top places of that city, but I don't want my players to walk in town and start freeing all the slaves (I wouldn't mind, but it would invariably lead to their arrest and execution: they are not Epic Level). I DO want them to feel uncomfortable with the situation, and that is the premise of many adventures I plan to make in that city.

In fact, I can picture the Lawful Good noble who buys slaves and once they're on his domain, starts treating them with compassion and helps them. He could even go as far as buying a slave's sister so that they can be together again, and once the slaves can fend for themselves, he frees them. Some slaves wouldn't want to be freed, wanting to be under his protection instead of beeing freed and having to start fending for themselves, with the prospect of one day being recaptured and not serving such a compassionate "master" that time.

I have seen such Slave Owners in some roman movies. The society would definitely have an evil tangent, but not all aspects of slavery in that society have to be evil and wrong.

Oh this is going to be fun !


I did mention that I love the new wysiwyg interface uh ? Yeah, I did.
 

Wombat said:
When there is talk of "ROME" we are covering an era from about 450 B.C. to 450 A.D., about 900 years of history.

In that time, the culture and necessarily the laws altered.

Indeed, quite a bit.

Of course, a fair bit of this thread is not only getting into applying modern standards to an ancient society, but also into the old debate about absolute versus relative morality. That's somewhere I don't want to go.

A few points I'd like to add about the Romans:

* It was not unheard of for a man who had no children to pick out a favorite slave child from his household, free him and raise him as his heir.

* For a good part of Roman history, Roman slave owners had the power to kill slaves, but for a most of that period they also had the power, if they were the head of their family, to kill ANY family member who disobeyed them.

I read an article a while back about the Romans and how they've gotten a bad rap over the years. In the more mainstream culture, you've had centuries of setting them up as the bad guys who killed Jesus and persecuted the Christians. In fantasy circles, you have a lot of people who have fallen in love with a romanticized version of the celts and see the Romans, as the people who brought most of the celtic peoples down, as evil destroyers as well as representative of many of the things they dislike in the modern world. I wish I could find it back. Anyway, as a result, there are a lot of myths and half-truths about the Romans floating around. Be careful what you believe about them.
 

Actually, yes, Rome was evil, by D&D standards. They practiced slavery, were rife with political corruption and murder at the higher levels of government, and generally completely uncaring of those who were not granted the status of a Roman Citizen. An archetypal LE society, really. The "we treat slaves well" argument does not really work, either. Many slave owners in the United States previous to the Civil War made this same argument, and the fact is a man in bondage treated well is still a man in bondage. Slavery is evil, period.

D&D alignment is not subjective, it is objective. By the book, every action you take is classified under one of the nine alignments present in the D&D morality system. Nothing is absolute (unless dealing with extraplanar deities and socieities), but you can determine the alignment of any creature or society by the overall actions taken by them.

I would also question the reason for this approach in your campaign, Trainz. Why would the PCs fail to attempt to free the slaves if the society was neutral, as a whole? "Oh, you're enslaving people? *Checking Palman Evil Detector* Guess that's ok, you don't detect as evil. Carry on!" Is that really the way your players think? If not, I would not be surprised if they attempt to free the slaves anyway, especially if there are any CG types in the party.
 

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