Value of Slaves

[Angel Tarragon]

Reveille, what KoK book are the slave price guidelines from?

Its in the Player's Guide, pgs. 119-120.

 

[Kaodi]

Keep in mind that there are places in the world today where you can buy a slave for about $100 U.S.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Keep in mind that there are places in the world today where you can buy a slave for about $100 U.S.

Yes but $100US in those places in a LOT of money.

 

[Rystil Arden]

The Kalamar system is nice. I like how it accounts for skills, age, and race.

But, why are halflings and gnomes 150% the cost of humans?

For Gnomes I could see it being due to aging.

Actually, I suppose this would especially be true for elven concubines, which could increase the value by quite a lot over a human. With a human woman, your typical debauched LE slave-owner only gets maybe a decade or two before she grows old and is no more use than a common labourer (and probably a weak one if she was sold for looks), but with an elf, you get good value since an elf takes almost two hundred years to reach middle age. That could actually lead to some strange situations where the favoured court concubine of the Emperor is a lovely young-looking elf woman who is also secretly his spymaster and advisor because she has learned quite a bit about court intrigue due to serving as favoured concubine of the Emperor father, and his father, and so on for several generations.

 

[Elf Witch]

I have played in a game set in Kalamar. Our party actually came together as escaped slaves when our ship sank.

Some of us had been made slaves because we broke the law or in my PCs case had been part of a rebellion the local Duke did not care for.

In Kalamar certain races sell for mre depending on the area and there is racial intolrence in the game Most humans from Brandobia dislike and distrust elves of course that might be because they have been at war so long.

There are two ways to look at slavery in the game some slaves are made slaves because they are criminals. There is an anti slave group called the Broken Chain. But slavery is legal.

I have played in games where slavery is not a horrible thing and I have played in games where it is.

In some games it makes sense and some it does not. I have a form of slavery in my game. Certain criminals who break the law end up in servitude for a certain length of time. Their contracts are bought and they are owned by the contract holder until they serve their time. Now there are certain rules they cannot be beat though certain infractions can get them a public flogging they must be fed allowed a certain amount of rest.

If a slave feels they are being mistreated there is a place they can complain to if their complaints turn out to be true then the owner of the contract loses the contract and faces a heavy fine.

I came up with this system to handle what to do with criminals the society does not have the resources to house care for and feed a population of criminals.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Nifft: thanks for the clarification. HAdn't actually thought about it in those terms. And they are nasty inferences.

Well having read through the rest of the thread there are definitely some strong feelings. WHich is fair enough: it's a sensitive topic. I must admit I tend toward the "It happened IRL so I don't mind having it in my game since I try to model RL" end of the spectrum. My regular altar of verisimilitude. And in a world where different species fight long and bloody feuds with one another over purely racial lines I don't see slavery as being out of the question. No more than I see genocide as being out of the question. They are both things that come up. The important thing to do is explore these issues in a mature and sensitive way.

That being said I haven't often used slavery in any games I've run. I tend toward the standard received high middle ages sort of game. Slavery doesn't come into it. But if I did introduce slavery into a game I'd just ask my players to remember that having something in the game doesn't imply any sympathy with it IRL for either myself or the players. PCs would be more than welcome to oppose it or try to moderate it in some way. And if folks found the idea too distasteful I'd drop it. Replace it with something like serfdom, the substance of which isn't much better IMO but the form of a thing can be very important.

 

[roguerouge]

I find it odd that the mere mention of selling beautiful slave girls for more than common laborers would seriously upset you.

First off, if you can't figure out a few likely reasons, you haven't maxxed out your sense motive score, have you?

Second, there's a huge difference between normalizing a repugnant practice and having the bad guys do bad things that your PCs oppose with your player's full knowledge and consent.

Third, you're falsely assuming that I feel that designing campaigns whose major appeal is sating blood lust is an acceptable past time.

Finally, wasn't it J. D. Sallinger who wrote, "You are what you pretend to be?" DMs have to think about that issue when designing worlds, especially settings with this topic.

 

[Elf Witch]

First off, if you can't figure out a few likely reasons, you haven't maxxed out your sense motive score, have you?

Second, there's a huge difference between normalizing a repugnant practice and having the bad guys do bad things that your PCs oppose with your player's full knowledge and consent.

Third, you're falsely assuming that I feel that designing campaigns whose major appeal is sating blood lust is an acceptable past time.

Finally, wasn't it J. D. Sallinger who wrote, "You are what you pretend to be?" DMs have to think about that issue when designing worlds, especially settings with this topic.

I want to make sure I understand what you are saying here because it sounds like you are implying people who may want to play a more dark and gritty game or heaven forbid play evil characters have something distrubing about them. Is that what you are saying?

I have played in evil themed games as an evil character and I had fun it does not mean in real life that I want to go around killing people and plotting to take over the world.

As I said before there are various ways to put slavery in a game where it is not an evil thing. There are more mature themes that some players and DM choose to explore just like some groups like a more historical feel to their game with all the dark and grittness that can imply.

One of the reasons I like the setting of Kingdoms of Kalamar is that it has a more real feel to it with issues like slavery and bigotry. Not all the races get along. Sometimes I don't want a Star Trek modern everyone is equal Utopia world.

 

[S'mon]

Replace it with something like serfdom, the substance of which isn't much better IMO but the form of a thing can be very important.

Yes, it's very noticeable that I never get players saying "Free the serfs!" - serfdom just doesn't have the modern connotations that slavery has acquired due to American 19th century slavery.

 

[roguerouge]

As I said before there are various ways to put slavery in a game where it is not an evil thing. There are more mature themes that some players and DM choose to explore just like some groups like a more historical feel to their game with all the dark and grittness that can imply.

One of the reasons I like the setting of Kingdoms of Kalamar is that it has a more real feel to it with issues like slavery and bigotry. Not all the races get along. Sometimes I don't want a Star Trek modern everyone is equal Utopia world.

To clarify the last post, which was made rather late at night:

I agree that there are ways to put slavery in a game where it is not an evil thing. It's in my game right now, as my one PC campaign just tracked down a slave ship that had hit the PC's island. But it's handled very delicately and I keep lines of communication open on any issue like this.

I have played in evil themed games as an evil character and I had fun it does not mean in real life that I want to go around killing people and plotting to take over the world.

That's good. I've played an assassin that took out an orc day care. That was that character hitting bottom at the start of the campaign, with the intended arc of moving towards the light.

I want to make sure I understand what you are saying here because it sounds like you are implying people who may want to play a more dark and gritty game or heaven forbid play evil characters have something distrubing about them. Is that what you are saying?

I'm not saying that that's badwrongfun; I'm saying that you need to be careful. ONE of the effects of role playing games is that you find aspects of the character inside yourself. Sometimes that's enormously positive. One actress who played Medea said that she found it to be enormously cleansing; she said she was like a kitten after shows.

This doesn't apply to everybody, however. In my profession (media studies), it's fairly widely-held that fiction rewards certain ways of thinking and feeling through pleasure (especially fictions that are interactive or immersive.) You get used to it, as Renoir said in The Rules of the Game. What's worse, we're not perfectly aware of our own motivations and what can start as an attempt at verisimilitude can start to shift over time. And a setting can force a DM to role play certain behaviors for a long time.

So, yeah, if I had a DM who made the most costly slave a "comely female elf" rather than, say, a wizard that could make magic items that could be sold for a 100% markup and came with no XP penalty to the owner, I would DEFINITELY think that it revealed something unpleasant about the DM and what his fantasies had unleashed in him. If I continued to play with him, I'd definitely give that aspect of his campaign a wide berth.