That's
not how I remember news of Paizo's new stance on slavery being received.
Well, let's hope that this thread doesn't also suffer from an untimely demise.
This approach - to simply remove references to slavery - actually seems entirely reasonable to me. If a kingdom is "wicked" in a canonical setting - say the Great Kingdom in Greyhawk, or Thay in the FR - it would appear sensible to me to allow individual campaigns to manage what that entails, without going into specifics. This is a question of what each table decides and is comfortable with.
We don't really need to know the details of slavery in a published mainstream setting, or of racial persecutions, or rape as a weapon of war - or really anything which, when examined, is apt to elicit extreme discomfort or act as a trigger. Big publishers aim their products at a wide audience, including children, and also need to consider their responsibility to
parents in their choices. While I think a direct corollary with the Satanic Panic is misplaced, I do think there are some parallels - which is to say that a game which seeks to successfully capture an audience of young, impressionable minds needs to be sensitive to the prevailing cultural mood, whether reasonable and justified or not.
I don't think this is a question of "sanitizing" a product or setting, but more about providing an uncontroversial baseline, and I think that the space which is left - whether it be with regard to eroticism, or mental illness, or institutional slavery, or anything else which might cause a
parent to raise an eyebrow - is ripe for investigation by small publishers, if that's the route they want to go. Whether they address any such issues intelligently and thoughtfully is another matter, of course, but it's not WotC's problem, and nor should it be.
The entire premise of D&D is already patently absurd, so I don't see how removing controversial elements somehow makes it less believable. And with something as charged as slavery - the legacy of which remains a gaping wound in the collective psyche - omission of the phenomenon altogether is a sound choice. Because if it is included, it leads to questions of
what exactly does that entail? - and that is a topic which the D&D ruleset is entirely unequipped to handle.
At your own table? Play whatever and however you agree, of course.