Killing Slavers

[AlexanderHowl]

Winning is for board games. At least in my mind, the point of tabletop games is the story, not whether PCs are victorious. If the PCs are the only people ethical enough to oppose slavery and brave enough to do something about it, that means that they are heroes living within a heroic epic and that the story is about their heroism.

Heroes fail to change the world everyday, but they make it just a little better each time that they try. If they kill slavers and liberate slaves, it does not matter if there is always another slaver to kill or if there is always another slave to liberate, what matters is that slaver is dead and that slave is liberated. Now, they may face death for their actions, but I think that some of the best campaigns are the ones that end with noble deaths for the PCs.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Doesn't come up terribly often. Usually when I want opposition that is Obviously Evil I want something more over the top than simple slavers (e.g. my kobolds are slavers, but they also eat babies), and if I want Moral Dilemma it calls for something more nuanced than simple slavery (if slavery is involved at all, it probably targets things that are actually explicitly less than human in some important way).

This is pretty much the biggest problem. Slavery isn't quite evil enough to make someone irredeemably evil, but it's too evil to leave the slavers feeling sympathetic.

Slavery really only works in a story which is "about" slavery or some related topic (like power or oppression). One example which immediately comes to mind is Small Gods, which demonstrates the oppressiveness of the fundamentalist Omist society by contrasting them with an island where even the slaves are more free than "free men" serving Om.
Of course, if you're willing to delve into stories deeper than "The goblins are evil nasties, kill them," slavery is a potent tool for characterizing a society and the people living in it—as well as people in other societies. It's also good tool for asking "What matters in life?" After all, if slavery is bad, there must be something about being enslaved that makes it bad. Is it the lack of freedom or quality of life? The dehumanization or loss of agency? Or is there just something inherently bad about being property—and what does it mean to be property, anyways?

I'd love to play a TRPG which explored these kinds of ideas, but the rest of my gaming group probably wouldn't be as interested. I guess I'll have to get that kind of narrative satisfaction from VRPGs instead...

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold

This is pretty much the biggest problem. Slavery isn't quite evil enough to make someone irredeemably evil, but it's too evil to leave the slavers feeling sympathetic.

Really? If I want to make my NPCs sympathetic I tend to have no problems doing so.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold

This is pretty much the biggest problem. Slavery isn't quite evil enough to make someone irredeemably evil, but it's too evil to leave the slavers feeling sympathetic.

Slavery really only works in a story which is "about" slavery or some related topic (like power or oppression).

'Works'? Are you saying that stories which aren't about that but include slavery in their settings somehow break down or burst in flames if you try to read them? Like the Iliad?

[scc]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

'Works'? Are you saying that stories which aren't about that but include slavery in their settings somehow break down or burst in flames if you try to read them? Like the Iliad?

Maybe he was referring to Fifty Shades of Grey?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold

Slavery really only works in a story which is "about" slavery or some related topic

Slavery works fine as a background nasty thing about a society or person. I'm just not likely to particularly highlight it unless it's also a significant plot point.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Honestly I suspect most slave owners are no worse than most employers. Maybe better - it's not like slaves can't take the starve option in the choice between work or starve too, they're just "lucky" enough to have somebody who thinks their labor is valuable enough to try to stop them.

At the risk of really driving this discussion off the rails, antebellum US Civil War literature is generally accessible on the web, is usually fairly readable for someone who understands modern English, and can provide lots of good insight into the pro-slavery and abolitionist points of view. (Also potential grist for some interesting campaigns, but that's another topic.)

Apologists for slavery regularly made arguments similar to Malloyd's. The idea that rich northern industrialists could treat their factory workers as essentially disposable, eternally impoverished, interchangeable cogs was deeply offensive to many people in the South, who argued that the expense of owning slaves meant that the slave owner had an economic incentive to look after them.

As to slavers being less socially acceptable than slave-owners, it depends on the setting and the situation. At least in antebellum America, slave catchers and overseers were generally looked down upon because their jobs required them to regularly bully or torture slaves. They were also usually men from the lower classes, and sometimes aggressive social climbers, hence not quite as respectable as the Southern aristocrats. Think Simon Legree from Uncle Tom's Cabin. On the other hand, you have men like Nathan Bedford Forrest who eventually made a vast fortune before the Civil War by dealing in slaves and was a well-respected businessman. Of course, as a major slave-dealer, Forrest probably delegated a lot of his dirty work to employees creating the fiction that he was a gentleman, albeit a self-made one.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

At the risk of really driving this discussion off the rails, antebellum US Civil War literature is generally accessible on the web, is usually fairly readable for someone who understands modern English, and can provide lots of good insight into the pro-slavery and abolitionist points of view.

Apologists for slavery regularly made arguments similar to Malloyd's. The idea that rich northern industrialists could treat their factory workers as essentially disposable, eternally impoverished, interchangeable cogs was deeply offensive to many people in the South, who argued that the expense of owning slaves meant that the slave owner had an economic incentive to look after them.

USA's slavery was pretty unusual in many ways though, so it shouldn't be used as a default benchmark when talking about worldbuilding and running campaigns in general.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

'Works'? Are you saying that stories which aren't about that but include slavery in their settings somehow break down or burst in flames if you try to read them? Like the Iliad?

I don't think that's quite a sound comparison. There's a difference between reading stories written in a past era, or a different culture, where people had different values and mores, and the writer just accepted those as the way things were; and reading stories written here and now, but set in a past or an imaginary society that has different values and mores, where the differentness is part of the appeal to the reader. Homer didn't put slavery into the Iliad (as a central element, in fact, in that its conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon stems from a dispute over who has the right to own a captured Trojan woman) because he wanted to challenge the reader to understand the motives of people in a slave-owning culture; his audience understood those motives perfectly well, as they lived in such a culture. But it was more of a challenge for Margaret Mitchell to have slaveowners in Gone with the Wind, and it would be even more of a challenge now.

I'd also note that reading ANY literature from past eras is a skill that has to be acquired, and that a lot of people, at least in the present-day United States, seem not to acquire. The Odyssey may stay in print, generation after generation, in a succession of new translations, but it's not a bestseller like, say, the Harry Potter books, or (in their day) the novels of Charles Dickens.

You have to identify the intended audience for a work before you can judge the content and presentation of that work.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

USA's slavery was pretty unusual in many ways though, so it shouldn't be used as a default benchmark when talking about worldbuilding and running campaigns in general.

Yeah, the racial element of colonial age slavery is historically quite strange, and carried into a lot of slave systems you see in games, where it interacts quite strongly with the use of "race" to label different humanoid species.

It's also a bit unusual for being industrial in nature. Though slavery in large empires often has at least some of that. You do need a trade economy that will support large plantations or mines for that though, so it tends to be a bit out of place in sort of fantasy and post-apocalyptic settings that are fragmented and monster plagued enough for wandering adventurers to make much sense.