Do slaves exist in your game's universe?

They do, and they can if it's legal in the country they live in.
As far as where it falls on the alignment scale, it's just like having a minimum wage servant or employee, it's fine if you treat them and compensate them appropriately. Of course, in the case of a slave, the compensation is room, board, food, medical, clothing, and basically taking care of their basic necessities.

Technically, but only through the indentured servitude of the soul via some kind of bargain or just dark magic, so it's less a slave and more a ghost minion. My character actually did buy off someone's soul, but it was for the purpose of giving it back to someone that hit a bad run of luck after we accidentally their business. I guess he kind of owns him now, but he's too nice a dude to actually do anything with it.

If they have a slave then they can't be a hero, period.

>Do slaves exist in your game's universe?
They're not really equivalent to slaves IRL, but yes.
There are, loosely speaking, 3 types of slaves.

Ppl who are forced to work for you
Ppl who you are trusted to make decisions on the behalf of
Ppl who you trade for money

A hero probably wouldn't be the 2nd type, because PCs tend to not work well if someone else makes all their decisions for them and can override the PC's decisions on what the character can do.

A hero could easily be the 3rd type because paid mercenary contracts can be traded between holders, and a paid merc is normal for a PC.

A hero might be the 1st, but given that most PC jobs get them off their masters' lands, and PC tend to be ambitious folk, they'd likely desert. Unless your master owns The_Town_On_Top_Of_The_Dungeon_Where_Our_Campaign_Takes_Place.GenericEntity and you need to go there to buy food, level up, sell prisoners and buy equipment.

I am fine with sex slaves and sex slavery in my campaigns but the players tend to be upset by it. That said, "Your master owns you and a bunch of other PCs. You want to impress him and become his #1 sex slave. There is rumored to be a really nice present in the middle of ContainsCombatEncounters. Go fetch." is standard fair for MAID.

Wasn't Enkidu the slave of Gilgamesh?

American that's only familiar with chattel slavery detected.

?

You can be a hero and still have a slave.

Just be nice to your slave. Or be a dick to your slave for some greater cause. Or be a dick to your slave and balance it out by being nice in other areas.

This isn't SJWSimulator, lads. Slavery is not a bad thing. Sometimes, the low races would just squander their freedom on booze and crime, and putting them to work benefits you both.

>Sometimes, the low races would just squander their freedom on booze and crime, and putting them to work benefits you both.
Holy fuck /pol/ has brainwash you to the core.

(You)

lol Irishman

No, but terrible bait threads do.

Ah screw it I'll bite.

Making decisions based on what'll help you (or your people) in the long run is not universal. Even amongst the high races, wasting your decision-making power on booze and crime (and feminism and emancipation) is very common. White trash exist and they are prevalent.
The trait is even less common amongst races that grew up in places without harsh winters - presuambly the winter selects for longterm planning. For these races, "$RaceName trash" is common to the point where it'd be easier to specify "$RaceName non-trash".

Of course I support making chattel of all the trash. And presumably to some "over-high" race, all of current mankind would be viewed as trash and would benefit from becoming chattel, and being uplifted as we had done to the negro and the australian aborigine (before reverting it in a fit of misguided empathy).

In my setting, if you're a slave, you're considered to have probably done something to deserve it. Be born to the wrong, conquered nation that didn't posses the moral fortitude or cunning to win, manage to run afoul of someone powerful and accumulate incalculable debts, or do something dumb to piss off the gods to land you in such a fate.

But all you have to do is serve your time well, and your children, should you have any, are free. The laws of men and gods are just. Anyone that harshly mistreats a slave or other beat of burden will surely suffer a worse fate in the next life, and be ostracised and have their grave fall into disrepair on this plane.

Yes.
Yes.

In my setting, kobolds are raised from birth as slaves by humans because they imprint on the first living thing they see when hatched.

It's ok though, the eggs that end up in human hands are mostly defects and would otherwise be destroyed. Plus kobolds love authority and pleasing people.

Regular human slaves depend on culture.

Yes they exist.

No, because the only slave-using state does not recognize the concept of private property. All glory to the Provisional Revolutionary Committee!

Depending on the country or kingdom;

Human, Elf races
>Mixed, slaves of varying races can be seen in some kingdoms, most slaves are Prisoners of War or Exotics.

Orcs, Minotaurs, Trolls, Ogres, Giants, most other beastfolk.
>Allow slaves of any race, except for themselves

Centaurs, Satyrs, Halffolk and Lesser Beastfolk.
>No slaves.

"Your children should not be punished for the crimes of their father" is a Western belief.
I do not put it in my games.
What if there were a family where Mom & Dad pumped out babies, and trained the babies to commit murder or other crimes on their behalf?
Though in this case it's "the father should be punished for the crimes of the son".

Two Tiers of Slaves:

Indentured Servants who have a time limit on their slavery. Closer to the Jewish slavery you read in the Bible, with lots of rules and regulations.

Enslaved Criminals are the worst kind, though. These guys are serving a life sentence and everyone knows what they did. Captured Pirates and Bandits tended to fall in this category.

Tumblr here
No problems
*sips coffee*

Yes and Yes, although mostly across lines of species. Humans are least likely to hold humans as slaves because of them being so few in numbers in universe.

We have a world building thread if you want to discuss this stuff in greater detail with others who might be more interested.

Yes and yes.

Slavery is acknowledged as any other vocation. Just not one where you actually get paid or can easily quit (actually, that still applies to most jobs) since it's a pre-industrial society of basically "renaissance but with magic".

In some countries, slaves and children are protected by the "Common Sense" Laws, and thus killing or grievously harming even your own slave is a punishable offense if you are found guilty.

Furthermore, children are RARELY ever slaves as slaves are workers and children normally cannot work. However, this means dwarven slaves are very popular just because dwarves achieve mental and almost complete physical maturity by the time they're ten to twelve and they live for about eighty to a hundred years. Thus, you get a lot of work out of them.

>Do slaves exist in your game's universe?
In some nations.
>Could a hero have a slave in your game's universe?
I guess?The Northwestern Dominion does allow for individuals to legally own slaves. In most other places that slaves are a thing they are considered to be state property and thus cannot be owned by individuals.

Yes and yes, but they'd have to be careful in certain places. If they lived in some places they could own as many slaves as they wanted and do to them as they pleased, some places have restrictions on years of service and what a slave can be made to do and how they must be treated, and in some places the group would face the wrath of several hundred angry knights in shining armour for daring to presume that one man may own another.
Dwarves don't like it but they're not going to step on anyone's toes about it, Halflings have banned it in their homeland, the elves rarely leave their forests but if any slavers come within a few day's travel of their forest they shall unleash the cavalry charge of doom against the slaver scum.

Slavery as they see it is banned, but sapient beings are commonly kept as pets by the upper class. People can only become pets voluntarily, and are well paid and protected by comprehensive laws, but they are essentially courtesan slaves nevertheless.

That should still involve the children being punished for things they chose to do, not things their father did that they weren't involved in.

>Do slaves exist in your game's universe?
Yes, but they're not very popular. There was a major war about two centuries ago with a slavery based super power. Any country in the main continental group that tried to implement slavery now would face massive massive international censure: "Holy shit, are they trying to be the next Rexian Empire!?"

>Could a hero have a slave in your game's universe?
I'd say owning a slave would be pretty non-heroic right off the bat. As I said, no slavery in the main continent. They could if they went across the sea in either direction, but then if the campaign got brought back to the mainland, most of the countries still have laws on the books with fairly strict penalties for slavery, and for offering slaves succor and aid at learning a trade and getting a new start in life.

Oh, I suppose some countries in the mainland do have prison camps with mandatory hard labor, which some would consider a kind of slavery.

>that picture
Triggers me every time. And I like the games too. So glad I'm not in high school anymore.

>not *sips tea*
so close.

Depends on the nation.

>Sea Dwarves: "Err, the human lad? He's adopted! That's right adopted!... Along with the two dozen others scraping the barnacles from the boat"
>Duergar: "We don't do that anymore. Now that you like us, give us your guns."
>Human/Halfling Kingdom: "They're not slaves! We pay them one silver a week."
>Hobgoblin Empire: "And your total comes to thirty gold, would you like paper or plastic?"
>High/Wood Elves: "Not since they took our toys away..."
>Oian Drow: "Yeah sure you can be the slave tonight, I call tomorrow night though."
>Ioan Drow: "Slaves yes I've been through twenty since breakfast, why do you ask?"

But that's not actually a slave. He thinks she is, but she's just staying with him out of love.

Everything is what Rance says it is.

Yes and yes, depending. A hero can have a slave that serves the function of a trained valet or something like that, but if they want a slave for other magical realmish things or try to engage in something like chattel slavery, I'm going to revoke their hero badge.

Slavery has many forms, some neutral, most evil.

>8 dollars a week
Fucking hell.

Admittedly, it's more so the Halflings who are that godlessly jew-y than the Humans.

Feliss on the other hand is a slave

Sill was not a slave, Sachiko was not a slave and even Russian was not a slave

>The trait is even less common amongst races that grew up in places without harsh winters - presuambly the winter selects for longterm planning.
This actually makes a great lot of sense

Yes
Depends on where s/he's from

No.

Enkidu was his best bro. I know Veeky Forums likes to pretend that slavery was 90% benign throughout history (by, oddly enough, using the example of a culture that saw slaves as literally nonpeople and often put them in an arena to get mauled for entertainment), but your slave was never your equal and therefore never your best bro.

While deviating from your point slightly, are you aware that while many Roman slaves were tortured and killed in arenas, many others (including doctors) were afforded great respect, and in many cases freed and given a large inheritance on the master's death? And the freeing of slaves in Rome and making them your almost equal was actually an extremely common event? And just because one sort of slave was treated a particular way by a particular master doesn't mean the entire culture does so. In fact, heavily mistreating slaves was unusual enough it warranted comment in the literature of the time, despite the fact slaves were also used as lion bait in the arenas

The point is: slaves essentially had whatever rights reserved master wanted to bother with. Yes, some struck gold.

But the mere fact that they could be lion bait shows that Roman slavery was not remotely benign. I don't know how you could argue it was.

There is no prison in my gm's current setting. Your crime is either bad enough to demand execution or a form of atonement, but the kingdom sees no use in feeding and housing criminals. Slavery isn't an uncommon form of atonement, especially when the offended party is a member of nobility. A hero could possibly demand the servitude of a villan and the land would see it as legal, depending on the details of their confinement and the severity of their crimes.

Thieves often enough give up a year or four of their lives rather than lose a hand. It's kind of a brutal place like that.

>Star Wars
Yes.
Also my character, being a Hutt, likely was looked after during his hundred-year childhood by "indentured servants" of some kind. Doesn't keep them himself though, they make incredibly unreliable soldiers and you want someone you can trust to watch your back in a battle.

It's Starbucks doppio.

Yes
Yes

A whole subrace of elves where turned into slaves for their crimes against the rest of the world during a great war. Now they and their children live their lives out as slaves for the rest of the world.

There's also Hebrew slavery, user. In that case, masters were mandated to provide slaves certain basic human rights. Read the Mosaic law; it even outlines laws and rituals for a weirdly magical-realm-sounding situation where a slave could, at their own request, be bound to their master for life, willingly giving up their own obligation to be freed.

Perhaps that sort of slavery really was an exception rather than the rule, but it's still enough to show that the modern abhorrence of slavery on principle is much more of a value judgement than we'd like to think.

In the first age, where it's all big tribes being held together by magic and common ancestor gods, slavery is ubiquitous. Anyone can be captured and claimed as a slave.
They are property, to be disposed of and used any way the owner desires. People will still judge you for it, if your cruelty seems needless and destructive.
A hero is expected to show his or her prowess in battle by capturing enemies alive and claiming them, so slaves are basically mandatory. A slave is someone who is weak and has no friends willing to defend them.

In the second age, where it's sailing, city states and colonization, the less advanced societies generally end up enslaved. Usually the strong people from the mountains. A form of indentured servitude (still slavery, but with rights) exists for skilled craftsmen among organizations and city states, but generally only the wealthy need a large and cheap labor force.
A slave or servant is freed after many years of service, exceptional deeds or generosity. So a hero could have been a slave, at one point.

In the third age, slavery is a contested topic, depending where you go. There's alliances of nations, some who tolerate others having slaves, others who oppose any slavery and some who keep the servitude. It's basically fascist traditionalists vs Liberal republics, buffered by an array of nations of various political leanings and power.
Virtually all slaves are guaranteed to fight for their freedom and as such are likely to be considered heroic.

Yes.Yes.Its like natural selection but with slavery instead of death in the country the PCs live in

Yes and yes. You'd have to treat them very humanely to still be considered a hero, however. Tormenting slaves into obedience is not heroic in the least, and the common folk frown upon such disgraceful behavior.

>yes
standard slavery, indentured servants and as punishment for crimes
>yes
but none of the players owe one at the moment

Sure, love for his hyper weapon.

>Could a hero have a slave in your game's universe?
>Rance
>hero
More like the least of possible evils.

Nah.

Fighting off demon invasions, removing caste systems and destroying tyrannical regimes counts as heroic.

I'm currently running Exalted, so hell yes, practically every form of slavery exists simultaneously.

Yes, in various forms. A few countries do have "slave castes", codified under the religious texts those nations share as being descended from an ancient tribe of humans who defied the gods and was stripped of their souls for it. As such, these people are not considered "alive" in the same way as most people and thus not afforded the same legal rights, privileges and protections under the law.

Outside of those nations, which are portrayed as dickish and choked by Church bureaucracy but not baby-rapingly evil in and of themselves, a few of the nations they shore a border with have inherited the practice of slavery but with a much lighter form, closer to indentured servitude. Essentially, slavery is a form of punishment for crime; one cannot be born a slave, one can only make oneself a slave. The type of slavery and the period for which one is made a slave, all depends on the level of crime committed.

As for whether a hero could have a slave, quite possibly. After all, the more important factor there would be how does the hero feel about slavery themselves and how do they treat their slaves. You might have a devout slaveowner who has a house slave they treat well, or perhaps they're not fully devout and even consider the slave fully human. You might have a borderlands hero who is tasked with keeping an eye on a criminal slave to make sure his just punishment is carried out and that he learns his lesson properly.

Gigamesh was a huge asshole anyway.

Yes, and probably depending on circumstances. There are a variety of conditions of servitude that are basically slavery , and by and large they're considered morally acceptable. The two most common forms are Debt-Thralldom among humans ( which is more indentured servitude than slavery. Basically if you lack the money to pay a debt, you can basically use yourself as a payment and labor for a certain amount of time. A lot of people are Debt-thralls to wizards or the church in exchange for magical healing or other benefits. You also have a fair amount of rights as a thrall) and being a hobgoblin ( which in my setting just refers to anyone and anything that serves the goblins. Contracting with goblins is kind of like making a slightly less malicious deal with the devil. Your rights, rewards, and terms of servitude are all defined solely by the contract, but goblin culture is basically based on fucking people over so more often than not you wind up in a much worse state than you started off in)

>And presumably to some "over-high" race, all of current mankind would be viewed as trash and would benefit from becoming chattel, and being uplifted

So, in other words: elf wants to make us slaves, wat do?

Yeah, but rape doesn't.

Rance is a hero* with a bunch of fine print attached that says he's a Classical hero, or at least one who subscribes to the Nietzschean heroic morality. He's virtuous in the "manly" sense of the word "virtue", but not necessarily in the "gentlemanly" sense. In D&D alignment terms, he's chaotic neutral at best, bordering on chaotic evil.

>Do slaves exist in your game's universe?
Obviously.

>Could a hero have a slave in your game's universe?
Yes, but if they fail to rape them at least once a week they forfeit ownership.

But since it's an h-game setting, don't they want his hyperweapon to begin with? It's all just a matter of convincing them.

No

It's illustrated quite nicely in Kichikuou Rance where all the female characters have a good end and a bad end.

For literally 80% of the girls there good end was "never met Rance ever again"

Definitely Chaotic Neutral.
It's rare but he does act against some stuff purely because it disgusts him and not for any other motive.
Like when he wiped out the pedophile slave ring in Zeth and arranged for all the girls to be looked after.

My paladin owns a slave. A tiny little Qadiran boy he bought off a merchant.

Since my paladin is a snakeman and can't have children due to lack of mates, he treats his slave more or less as an adopted son, and is apprenticing him the medical arts.

Heroes don't need to be gentlemanly.
Because true gentlemen are already heroic.

Yes and Yes, since in that setting's mechanics being a Hero just means you get the 2 Hero Points that indicate you are destined for greater things.
Also, depending on the god who's alignment you follow there really might not be anything wrong with slavery at all.

Slaves in the Rance world are only slaves due to binding magical spells that force them to obey every command from their master.

Rance bought Sill believing she had such a spell on him but the reality is that there never was a spell and the slaver thought Rance was an easy target to rip off.

Sill willingly pretends that she is under Rance's control in theory because she loves him but in reality because she's a shit one dimensional character who is there because the games needed a safe heroine and no girl with reasonable characterisation would put up with Rance's shit like that without prolonged character development (like Kanami or plot reasons).

His other slaves in the series are Feliss who is a devil he forcibly contracted after finding out her true name and Russian who he coerces into becoming his slave at the start of Rance 01 through pretty villainous methods of making her think that he'd rape a whole bunch of other girls if she didn't agree.

I recently played a character that always had at least three slaves with him. Two for carrying stuff, and a third for protection.

*tip*

Do wage slaves count?

It's also an middle eastern belief, a belief among many native american groups, and others.

It's nowhere close to a Western exclusive thing.

only if you're the office plaything

>Elves
>High race
lol no

You're telling me wood elves aren't baked 35/7?

kek

That would be the High Elves, user

Well slavery exists in our real world, too, so in that sense it'd be much more weird if nobody, anywhere, existed in some kind of condition of slavery.

That is, of course, the pedantic ass's answer. In the mortal realm slavery is generally outlawed. However, demons regularly keep slaves and some other races have analogous concepts such as life debts which could be seen as a kind of conditional, "voluntary" slavery. The latter are things heroes could end up having.

...

Yes, yes

i play elric of melnibone so yes and yes

Yes to both.

Slavery isn't evil in and of itself. The morality of slavery is dependent on the morality of the slave owner; under a good owner it is a virtuous institution, while under an evil owner is is a sinful institution.

In the end, a large portion of people in every society in every time period have ended up working a fairly dull and strenuous job while they receive very little for their efforts. Whether they're a slave being paid in food/clothes/housing or an employee being paid in money that they spend on food/clothes/housing makes little difference. A slave may not have the opportunity to better his circumstances, but he has security. A small number of lowly employees may end up bettering their condition, but they could also end up jobless and destitute. One is not necessarily better than the other.

>Do slaves exist in your game's universe?
Yes.

>Could a hero have a slave in your game's universe?
Maaaaaybe? They would probably have to be against it as an institution, or at the very least not actively support it.

eji

there is more : in the core rule book slave are listed in the equipement section and are priced by age (in elric it's not uncommon to take slave for travelling : if an horse can't take the path you have to, you buy a slave to carry your stuff)

But what if... WHAT IF... Morality is a self evident and universal Truth that transcends edgy game rules?

...

your not familiar with moorcock multiverse are you ?
moorcock universe have no good or evil just law and chaos even the teacher and master at arms of the hero is a slave

That's fair enough. I was just looking for an excuse to insert Kant into the discussion.

Yes and yes.

>cunt

>Do slaves exist in your game's universe?
In some places, at some points in the setting, yes. It's not very common, though, since magic is common enough to make large-scale construction not require slaves, just a few guys with enough magic to raise stone blocks and shit, and because most gods are decent enough to tell their followers about the concept of human (or whatever species you may be) rights and consider slavery, no matter whether it has particular rules or what have you, to be based around a basic violation of the right of self-ownership and self-determination. Whether there's any form of divine punishment for holding slaves or not varies, and of course there were gods who allowed for slavery and people who simply ignore the gods' rules, but no, Dave, you can't have a fucking slave, fuck off; nobody else here want to play that kind of game.

>Could a hero have a slave in your game's universe?
If you're asking whether I'd allow a player to have a slave, then no. Not happening. Otherwise, I don't really have any idea what you mean by "hero". Whether a person can be considered a hero is highly subjective.

It's not necessarily benign slavery, user, just a different form of slavery than the chattel slavery that came after the 1600s.