Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5604880" data-attributes="member: 4937">Wow.  Talk about importing your modern morality into an archiac set of assumptions.1) It's techically not slavery; it's indentured servitude.  We may see them as the same class of thing, but they differ in two very important respects.   First, that indentured servitude is entered into voluntarily, and second that it endures for only a fixed term.   From the perspective of the Familiar, he is entering into a contract with a Wizard from which he obtains some abstract thing of value to him, and the contract expires upon the Wizard's death... which really a quite limited term of service if you are an immortal outsider.2) In exchange for whatever the Wizard is providing (title to his soul upon death? education in the arcane arts, a portion of the power that the master acrews is bequethed to the familiar upon the master's death?), the familiar is promising absolute obedience (and if the Wizard is smart, absolute loyalty as well).   As far as the Familiar is concerned, this must be some sort of good deal or the contract wouldn't have been agreed to.3) As far as the familiar is concerned, a Wizard that says, "Oh no, you can go if you want" isn't offering freedom - he's welching on a deal.   He's trying to void a contract.  The Imp or Qausit or whatever that he's entered the contract with is going to be angry and offended and for fear of voiding the contract is going to DEMAND that the Wizard fulfill his end on threat of bringing a more powerful outsider in to arbitrate the labor dispute.   He's going to be insulted that the Wizard has implicitly suggested that the familiar's services are of no value, and potentially jealous and fearful of the idea that the Wizard wants to replace him with a new familiar.   4) The very notion that the Wizard must remain on a peer to peer relationship with every being that he meets, even if that being is not in fact a peer, will be a bit bizarre and unworkable in a universe were sentient creatures are as diverse as D&D.   And even if a peer to peer relationship with everything that can think isn't unworkable, it's going to be seen as abnormal or even insane by your average lawfully aligned person who believes it upends the very sort of heirarchial relaitionship the universe runs on.</blockquote>

Verification