[BANESTORM] Ending slavery in the Evil Empire

[Michael Cule]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The core question is "what are the large political factions that support this plan?". Because if there aren't any, either the will of the emperor gets ignored (failure to enforce, etc), or the inconvenient emperor gets replaced in a palace coup.

Assuming there is a major faction in favor, it's not hard to result in violence, because even if the Emperor is secretive about his motivations, his supporters aren't going to be.

The Church is the faction that would be in favour. At least the part that isn't the Templars.

The Templars are still in revolt against the Emperor and still denying their Grandmaster's responsibility for the summoning of the Demon Emperor. And still sulking on their island base in the west.

They just attempted (and failed) to trigger a slave revolt in Teridar but I don't think that would prevent them from allying with the anti-Imperial faction when they started to oppose the new regime.

Hmm, yes the Church. And the Hospitallers would relish the chance to go against the Templars. (How very unChristian of them.)

But I think this needs to grow slowly, perhaps over several seasons of gaming in which the story is in the background.

The reform of the manumission law can be the start. Then when owners start manumitting their slaves at the end of their useful lives the Church can lead the protests and insist on further changes in the law.

Debt slavery would be the next point of attack I think. (It was for the Romans according to my superficial research.)

One problem is that I'm not sure where serfdom comes from on Yrth. In the early days of the human settlement of Yrth there would have been few places for serfs to flee to but plenty of settlements happy to take people in and not enquire what their status was back on Earth. The Romans imposed serfdom over several generations.

I think I'm going to blame that on Simon Menaleus, the first Emperor. Having the right to keep your farm workers down would appeal to some people and having a central authority that would bring back runaways would make them more inclined to sign up to the Empire.