TL 3-4 Slave Prices

[Bah! Gaming]

Hey guys.

My party is about to come upon a slave auction. One of the party members will recognize one of the slaves on the market as being an old friend.

I'd obviously love one of the options for the party would be to avoid a messy combat in town by merely purchasing the slave.

Some background on wealth for the campaign.

Follows the prices in the Characters 4E.
Starting Money (Average Wealth): 1000
Price of a Broadsword(Normal quality): $500

The NPC they are looking to buy is of high quality. Strong, experienced, lots of good skills (Especially in regards to naval things). Which is more prominent as the auction is happening at a port town.

Thoughts on both this important NPC's auction price as well as like.. a normal 25 pt civilian?

Thanks!

[Mr_Sandman]

A quick google search found average prices for slaves in the US the 1850s and 1860s. It includes prime field hands and skilled slaves. It might be helpful. You could just adjust for the starting wealth of the tech level.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian...ost_in_todays/

[Anders]

It will vary widely depending on the type of slave and the supply of slaves. Has there been a recent war, for instance? That would bring the slave prices down drastically.

[Bah! Gaming]

Thanks for that.

Looks like they players should be easily be able to afford this NPC. I'll have to add a "rival" bidder to spice it up a bit.

Originally Posted by Anders

It will vary widely depending on the type of slave and the supply of slaves. Has there been a recent war, for instance? That would bring the slave prices down drastically.

The last big war was a while ago (A decade or more). Slaves are absolutely a Black market thing. So i can bring up the price a bit for that i would think..

[jason taylor]

Windfalls and twists of fortune are also a possiblity. Once in Belisarius Series, the hero needed a Marathan interpreter, and found one rotting in the cages with the rest of the grunts even though he was a clerk as smart as any Brahmin. That would be a stupid thing for a dealer to do in real life. But reading the passage makes me think some things like that probably did happen in real life and are gameworthy in any case.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Bah! Gaming

Hey guys.

My party is about to come upon a slave auction. One of the party members will recognize one of the slaves on the market as being an old friend.

I'd obviously love one of the options for the party would be to avoid a messy combat in town by merely purchasing the slave.

Some background on wealth for the campaign.

Follows the prices in the Characters 4E.
Starting Money (Average Wealth): 1000
Price of a Broadsword(Normal quality): $500

The NPC they are looking to buy is of high quality. Strong, experienced, lots of good skills (Especially in regards to naval things). Which is more prominent as the auction is happening at a port town.

Thoughts on both this important NPC's auction price as well as like.. a normal 25 pt civilian?

Thanks!

Side deals are also a possibility. Mrs Samuel Baker was rescued from a concubine caravan heading to Turkey when Baker bribed the guard and ran. If the security doesn't have(stays bought) or something like that, that might be possible.

[Bah! Gaming]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Side deals are also a possibility. Mrs Samuel Baker was rescued from a concubine caravan heading to Turkey when Baker bribed the guard and ran. If the security doesn't have(stays bought) something like that might be possible.

You called that one. This will be another option for the party (hopefully none of them are sneakily reading this >.> <.<)

Should they decide to bide their time.. they'll be able to track down the person who bought the NPC and either make a deal with them, a subordinate.. or attempt a prison break scenario.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Mr_Sandman

A quick google search found average prices for slaves in the US the 1850s and 1860s. It includes prime field hands and skilled slaves. It might be helpful. You could just adjust for the starting wealth of the tech level.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian...ost_in_todays/

So my rough estimate "Cost of labor for a year" still holds.

I don't remember where I got that notion, but it's the price I've used in games for ever.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Bah! Gaming

The NPC they are looking to buy is of high quality. Strong, experienced, lots of good skills (Especially in regards to naval things). Which is more prominent as the auction is happening at a port town.

Thoughts on both this important NPC's auction price as well as like.. a normal 25 pt civilian?

It depends a lot on how available slaves are, and what they slave are used for. The last part has to do with which kinds of slaves are valuable, or extra-valuable, or worthless.

Also where you're selling. Are we talking a megalopolis like Imperial era Rome, or a significant market town such as Viking Age Dublin or Hedeby, or a tiny village that holds market day once per month?

Female slaves tend to be used for light domestic labour, or sexual purposes, or often combined, so their value almost always depends on appearance (in which apparent age is included), with more attractive female slaves being seen as more of a "luxury item" (I read a news article recently, about how Saudi-Arabian wives are beginning to object to "too pretty" foreign servant girls coming to work in their homes. One can easily imagine the same in a medieval setting, when the husband and his wife are at the market, looking to buy some new kitchen girls: the wife cares about how skilled the girls are, while the husband has other priorities).

There'll often be a mark-up for very cute female slaves who also look foreign (those are harder to sell, but those men who like such girls will pay a hefty premium, so it's worth the expense to "sit" on such girls for some time, and savvy slavers know that). Also mark up for special skills, singing or playing an instrument, or possibly if she's very skilled at something else such as cooking (I don't think fine cuisine is very historical, though) or massage. Assuming the slaver knows, and assuming the buyer belives what the slaver tells him.

Male slaves divide pretty cleanly into labour (in GURPS terms you'll want Fit and high ST, especially Lifting ST, decent to good HT), non-physical service (serve food, carry messages short distances, etc.) and actually skilled work, the later ranging from crafts skills to scribe work such as reading, writing and arithmetic. Musical or other entertainment skills again give a markup (e.g. a clerk who can also play the harp and recite poetry). There's always a market for labour slaves in slave-based societies, but craftsmen aren't always in high demand, and in some parts of most worlds, more intellectual skills such as writing and accounting may be ignored completely.

Exotic looks in a male slave adds some novelty value, but the effect is much milder than for female slaves.

Male slaves who talk, behave and look as if they aren't going to act tame towards whoever buys them also aren't like to be sold. In fact they're unlikely to even be taken away by the Viking raiders after the raid. They'll just get killed. Then again, tame vs tameable... A high-ST slave who seems rebellious gets killed right away. No point in moving him anywhere before doing it. Worse if he seems to also have poor impulse control, from low IQ or certain mental disads.

But a more physically modest slave, with a mouthy attitude, perhaps from an upper class background, might be seen as someone whose attitude can be easily broken, and so might get to live.

With female slaves, that's pretty irrelevant. They tend to start out with lots of attitude and ideas, but just wait until they get pregnant, one way or another. That's a huge wake-up call. So while the claims of certain popular BDSM authors, that "real men" prefer slave girls who challenge them are absurd (men buy bed-slaves for the convenience - exact same reason men rent prostitutes, especially to get a "GFE"), mild feistiness in a female slave, up for sale, isn't seen as a problem. They're assumed to become tame quickly, and usually that's true.



As for your specific idea, naval skills, I really don't think that's something most people would trust to a slave. If he's set up as the navigator of a ship, he's dangerously likely to sail it back to where he came from and run away (a slave who wants to run can run in two different directions: He can run away, or he can run home). Any other kind of work on a ship is also a danger of him deciding to run, given that the defining feature of a medieval slave is that it's a person who is far away from home - far away from his clan, and therefore he has no friends or allies who will interfere if he is treated badly.

A slave isn't someone who is treated badly (because most aren't).

A slave is someone who can be treated badly.

And almost always becase he is de factor kin-less. You shouldn't take someone like that along on a sailing trip. Especially not if he can swim... Byebye money!



Slaves need to be fed, until they're sold, and it's a pervasive feature of GURPS TL3 that food is non-abundant.

Therefore slavers won't keep perceived worthless slaves around, but will get rid of them quickly.

They might give them away, set them free (not likely, especially if the slave might try ti take physical revenge if freed) or even kill them. The later requires a rather callous attitude, but it's easy to imagine that that's a lot more common among professional slave traders (often so extreme as to warrant GURPS' actual Callous disad) than the general population.

GURPS offers some guidelines for both Cost-of-Living and Job Table salaries, but the former are a joke and the later isn't much better, and as the saying goes, garbage-in-garbage-out. I don't think anything good comes out of using those particular guidelines. But I'm almost as sceptical about taking recorded slave prices from a much-later culture featuring racial slavery, and using them in a TL3 or TL4 setting where slavery isn't racial.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Windfalls and twists of fortune are also a possiblity. Once in Belisarius Series, the hero needed an Marathan interpreter, and found one rotting in the cages with the rest of the grunts even though he was a clerk as smart as any Brahmin. That would be a stupid thing for a dealer to do in real life. But reading the passage makes me think some things like that probably did happen in real life and are gameworthy in any case.

Yes, of course. The real value of a slave is a different thing from the market value acribed to him by the culture or cultures in which he is going to be sold. In many less intellectual cultures, male slaves are all about muscles, about HT and ST and Lifting ST, and their brains are irrelevant. All men have Dabbler for Carpentry anyway, and many for Blacksmith too.

That also opens interesting opportunities for people who "discover" such overlooked slaves. If you buy him and treat him well, he might become extremely loyal out of gratitude. Especially if you can convince him that you're a bit of an intellectual yourself, and not a "barbarian". Or if you're so inclined, you can even set him free, then offer him a job. That's unlikely to cause his loyalty to evaporate.