🚦 A-Game Slavery in your game (serious answers only)?

[Mr. R]

Slavery


Dear mods, I am asking this question in relation to a game world that I have and want to modify. I do not endorse slavery and consider it abominable in all its forms.

That being said, I have an old ICE Shadow World module I am updating for maybe/possibly using for a campaign. Now a good part of the setting references slavery and how the slaves are gathered from the more primitive, darker jungle living people to the north (Yeah this module is showing its age). I severely want to put the kibosh on that.

So first question--- do you have slavery in your campaign?
Second--- is it something that is a facet of the setting OR something that is resulting in real divisions in your campaign?
Third--- do you have a slavery light (Indentured Servitude) OR Just say NOPE to slavery and adjust the campaign from there.

Personally I am thinking to keep it, but as part of the source material it mentions that parts of the setting have outlawed slavery while others seem to revel in it… so Civil War?

So basically I need some suggestions because, well unless the game is GET RID OF SLAVERY, I really don’t want it in my games!

 

[Angel of the Dawn]

This is a tough issue.

I have a D&D campaign setting I'm working on, and yes, slavery exist there. But it's presented as a bad thing. I only measure things on a law-neutrality-chaos scale, and have eliminated the good and evil axis... but and as much as anything could be considered capital-E evil in my campaign setting, slavery would be one of them. And it's never presented as a societal good, no matter the form it takes.

 

[mitchw]

No, it's never come up in any campaign for my group. We have never discussed it, that's just how we play.

The closest we have come was in a recent Starfinder game where we rescued a couple of goblins. They hang around on our ship and do small chores or provide comic relief.

After their initial introduction we pretty much ignored them and eventually the GM will probably have them just wander off when they find something more interested than our PCs.

 

[Aikireikinu]

Moderator Text:

Just to make it official: this is now an A-Game thread. If you're unclear what that means, the definition is here.

Thank you.

 

[Scarman]

Slavery has come up in the Star Wars D6 campaign I've been running for several months now. It is without question the one way that the characters, who are somewhat apolitical, self-serving individuals, will turn on an individual or group without question. I make an effort not to use flippantly or to excess, but it does come up in the narrative on occasion and it has always caused the players to turn against whomever the slavers are. Mostly at this point that has been the Galactic Empire, some Trandoshan cartels, and a few Hutts.

 

[Imaginos]

The closest I came was when I ran 13th Age. In that campaign, the Archmage was not an individual, but a collective. Anybody that was a citizen of the Archmage’s city was bound to the Archmage if they showed magical talent. It worked kind of like the Agents in The Matrix, where people lived their lives but the collective could control any member it needed at the time, including everyone if it were necessary.

The party, when they entered the city, saw a person who just discovered their magical talent being coerced to go with the agents of the collective. The Archmage was not a good Icon.

 

[AndrewTBP]

Yes, in a 13th Age game where the initial premise was all the PCs had been enslaved as gladiators in Axis. I played a dark elf barbarian who'd fallen in the magic potion cauldron as a baby.
I haven't used it in my Glorantha games beyond it being a question in the Heortling clan generation procedure.

 

[wirecrossing]

Sometimes there is slavery in my games. It ranges from Roman-style slavery to whatever is less severe than that. Never industrialised slavery like in the Americas. It is never presented as anything other than a social ill, but it has never become the focus of a campaign to end it. I have had PCs who have owned slaves and this always comes to bite them in the ass. I am all for letting characters do things they want, but I also want to stress that people want to be free, always and forever.

 

[Blackwingedheaven]

I run a fair bit of Exalted, where slavery is a thing across much of Creation. I always work to depict it as it really is: brutal, unconscionable, and with no moral grounding. Some NPCs will try to paint slavery in a positive light, but they're always shown to be lying, ignorant in their own privilege, or some combination of the two. I make it pretty clear to my players that my authorial opinion is "If you own slaves, you're a bad person; if you traffic slaves, you're definitely the scum of the earth."

 

[DarkStarling]

It hasn't come up, though it might. If it were too, though, it's not something I'll accept cultural relativism for whether it's evil or not.

The main reason I haven't used it, despite slavers being right up there with Nazis for kill-em-all acceptable targets, is that I'm not comfortable making it brutal enough to be accurate and I don't want to soft-pedal it to a pg-13 rating because that's disrespectful. Also my imagination is way too good at seeing how relatively low level magic would make the institution so much worse. For example, if you have someone who can cast Lesser Geas? Horrifying.