Hey Veeky Forums, I've been homebrewing a humanless setting for 5e, and I have encountered a problem...

Make the slaves less heavy labourers and more like wizard familiars.

If the problem is the looming concern over a brutal system of racial slavery, take away the brutality. Make the system a highly regulated beurocracy that looks out for the great good, not just the good of the slaveholders; because what wizard with his hat doesn't love a good beurocracy. Include things like regular inspections to ensure that slaves aren't being mistreated. Stop looking to the enmity of American slavery and think of a system where slaves and slaveowners work together.

I think this is the right approach. You want to push your players, challenge their preconceptions of the morality of slavery by presenting them with a system that isn't inherently evil. IIRC Mass Effect has a short side quest touching on this.

There is nothing wrong with enslaving someone unless its racial, and even then its just a little wrong

You're assuming that's the only type of slavery he's heard of (probably correct) and then saying, essentially, "do something other than that."

If that's all he's familiar with, it's quite likely he won't think of most of the options because they just didn't occur to him.

OP, if you're not already familiar with it go read up on the Roman slavery system. It was still pretty harsh iirc but way softer than what you're thinking of.

Except it was really indentured servitude in that case, which, while similar to slavery, is distinct.

I had written a long reply listing all my premises, but it was too many characters long.

I'll try to be brief:
Agricultural slavery on a massive scale is manageable with the right system of carrots and very big sticks.

The problem with slavery on a massive scale is that there are a lot of slaves/serfs to keep in line.

Race-based slavery is manageable so long as the oppressor outnumbers the oppressed.

The problem with race-based slavery is that both sides will instantly recognize each other and their heritage, and resentment will simmer for generations.

Massive plantations will economically outcompete yeoman and peasant farmers, so long as the soil and climate allow it, and it is not discouraged by the religious orthodoxy or bonds of kinship.

The tieflings can't simply castrate all male ganasi slaves or they'd run out of ganasi.

Race/tribe-based agricultural slavery on a massive scale is extremely unstable, all potential carrots are now liabilities, and you pretty much have to rely purely on force, or you have to exile every freed genasi immediately.

It doesn't help that every tiefling city-state is either run by amoral wizards or is a Sparta-like Kallipolis.

So either it must be extremely brutal, or the environment of the tiefling civ's region must make large ganasi slave plantations not economically viable.

I'd be nervous about doing this since if a wizard can suppress the Genasi's elemental nature I don't see any non-handwaving excuses as to why they couldn't just do the same sort of thing to a free Genasi in exchange for money.

In that Mass Effect II side quest, it was a voluntary contract of service you could enter for a not insignificant amount of upfront cash plus a regular payment plan. It's still somewhat shady, as the economic system itself can fuck people over hard enough to reduce them to needing to sell themselves into slavery to escape it, so it's by no means a morally good scenario, it's simply a lot less terrible than the kind of plantation slavery we think of.

Slaves in a temporary contract could be placed under it as a sentence for a crime, and serve out their time as menials under the state. It'd be a better way of dealing with crimes of poverty, as now these people are state employees and earn money and job training through their labors. Essentially it's community service plus a side of education and job training with the aim of producing model citizens rather than a slave caste. Why bother fighting a system? It keeps the streets clean and civil engineering projects funded while training new free laborers and educating them as well, with the possibility of moving from blue to white collar menial jobs with possibilities for advancement once their sentence is up, and I suppose military service is a possibility as well. Instead of filling prisons with taxpayer drains and releasing them back into conditions where they'll just get right back at criminality, they are molded into model citizens and given opportunity for societal and economic advancement as state citizens.

Of course, I'm not really getting into the kind of agricultural slavery describes, I'm more describing slavery for cities and the kind of civil-service that comes from that. I don't think rural territories can support the kind of programs I'm describing.

You just need there to be some incentive for the Genasi. Freedom after X years with a guarantee of decent treatment in the meantime (as well as non-asshole slave owners) is a very good place to start, as is some kind of benefit for it (learning a trade in the process comes to mind, as does a tradition to send freed slaves off with a bit of cash to help them get their new life started).

I like the idea of giving the tieflings a spanish colonial conception of slavery as a transitional state, it would jive well with the tiefling's quasi-gnostic religion.

The problem with replacing Christianity with wizardry is that Christianity grants men grace, whereas wizardry grants men the ability to cast fireballs, but I like where you are going.

I like these ideas.

I had sort of a similar idea I was considering making it so that genasi had compulsions that required supervision that eventually evolved into a system of slavery. ie: fire genasi were fond of pyromania.

Another idea I had was making them like replicants from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, where while sentient, they are sociopathic and inhuman.

The problem is that in the setting, the tieflings may or may not have been responsible for creating the genasi as part of the same experiment or leading up to the experiment that led to them becoming tieflings and destroyed the civilization of their ancestors.

So any innate instability among the genasi would be directly the fault of the tieflings, possibly by design. Reducing a race to mental invalids or creating a slave race would push the tieflings into super goddamn evil territory.

There is no way to mechanically represent that in 5e.

Players might want to play a free genasi. If genasi are basically normal, then all the Player's character needs to do is put on a phrygian cap of a freeman and not get instantly manacled when in tiefling town. Whereas, if genasi setting-wise are either metaphorical or literal time bombs, every time the party wants to go into any town is going to be a shitstorm.

I've narrowed down the problem and the solution.

Either enslavement of fellow tieflings and other non-genasi would be permissible in their civilization. (However that might create problems with other tiefling city-states or their religious authorities, and their non-tiefling neighbors are all either important trading partners, nomadic tribes that value kinship and martial valor above all else, or incredibly vengeful.)

Alternatively, their region could be of a climate and soil quality that disfavors plantation or latifundia systems.

>Reducing a race to mental invalids or creating a slave race would push the tieflings into super goddamn evil territory.

Make it so the event happened in the past, to the point that no tiefling was alive when it happened. Now you have a nice moral quandary to throw at your players; sure, the ancestors of the tieflings did some shit that created the system of slavery, but it wasn't the fault of anyone alive, and to simply abolish the practice would be a negative to everyone involved. You can even have a sizeable faction of wizards trying to find a way to fix things so the genasi could be free, but unable to find any solution, so you don't have the entire race sitting on a race of slaves and shrugging their shoulders.

Take a look at the slavery in Thomas More's Utopia.

>I'd be nervous about doing this since if a wizard can suppress the Genasi's elemental nature I don't see any non-handwaving excuses as to why they couldn't just do the same sort of thing to a free Genasi in exchange for money.
It seems to be less "Magical Spells Restrict Elemental Blood" and more " the Submission of the Genasi allows the Genasi to restrict their blood in turn."

Seconding the various comments that "whips and chains" slavery is not the only form of slavery. Miscellaneous slaves historically could frequently have second jobs, earn personal income, own property, buy themselves free, and in some cases even buy other slaves while still being slaves themselves.

So describe it as slavery but just use the details of 2018 america /o_o\

I suppose, though that sort of magic seems pretty separate from most of the stuff you see in D&D since it's not "wave hands, make thing happen."

Though, come to think of it, Genasi (or at least some of them) could theoretically get something similar (depending on handwaving) from joining some sort of strict organization, like a church. Genasi Paladins, for example, could theoretically get similar beneficial effects to the slave Genasi, though I would assume not all Genasi have the willpower (or whatever) to pull that off.

Come to think of it, OP, are you tied to the idea of the Genasi being "the slaves?" Perhaps just make it so criminals and various other types are made to be slaves (and because of some reason or another a lot of Genasi became slaves). If you want a less evil option, maybe the Tiefling civilization turns captured enemy soldiers into slaves, and the Genasi attacked them for unrelated reasons before losing.

You could, potentially, make it so that when the Genasi were first accidentally created by the Tiefling forefathers, they were MUCH more chaotic and bestial elemental beings rather than thinking feeling people. Rather than let them loose on the rest of the world, the Tieflings were forced to bind them magically and balance them. Over the centuries, due to the various bindings and tinkerings of their Tiefling masters, the Genasi have become the people we know them to be today, but still exist in this magic-bound servitude to their Tiefling masters. Some among the Tieflings would argue that they've successfully managed to "domesticate" the Genasi enough that they could theoretically be freed, but the system has become so entrenched in Tiefling culture that few are willing to change things.

By the way this thread unfolds it seems to me that you are going for some sort of "flawless" slavery system that will work perfectly upsetting none of the parts involved. I don't think you need to do that though :actually, i think you NEED to make it imperfect so that when the players address the issue, they will have something to do other than shrugging and moving on.

Striking that "morally muddled" balance is hard.

Well, it doesn't appear to be O.P.s plan to have them try and change. They are trying to make a society with slavery that _is_ functional and not evil. Given that those of us in the West see slavery as one of the ultimate evils, simply facing a slave system that is not as horrendous as the ones they imagine would be a conflict in and of itself.

That said, there could be an underground ring that is more akin to what we think of when we think of slavery. Hell, maybe the gov't hires them to clean it up.

Or if they go with the idea that has popped up, i.e., Genasi need slavery to be normal, the party could go on a quest to help with the that. The system itself need not be the problem for something interesting to happen around it.

Without humans, where did Tieflings come from?

I like this

Slaves are property, sure, but they're *important* property. A tiefling who beats and mistreats his slave is seen as an untrustworthy asshole by his peers; strong insurance system on slaves where if they get hurt then the slave's family gets a huge payout; regular beurocratic inspections to make sure slaves have proper housing and care.

Also, a clear way for slaves to buy their own freedom. Do it right and the party will run into plenty of slaves that are totally okay with the system.

Look at slavery in ancient rome. I think your setting already looks a lot like rome from how you described it, so you could use that for part of the aesthetic.

I feel like that's too close of an analog to the southern idea that slaves couldn't live on their own and needed a white master. OPs players might think that OP is a slavery apologist or something.

>The tieflings can't simply castrate all male ganasi slaves or they'd run out of ganasi.
Ganasi always breed true maybe?

I'd just recommend dialing it back to a more family-oriented slavery, instead of chattel slavery.

>Given that those of us in the West see slavery as one of the ultimate evils

Fuck you, I'm in the West and I see no such thing.

Holy shit, an actual sensible thread on slavery in Veeky Forums that didn't devolve into shit posting or the equivalent of elf slave wat do?

Anyway, OP, I think the most solid idea here is the ancient elemental ritual fuckup that created the gensai, along with that whole 'slowly transform into elementals'

Also, there's TOTALLY a way to mechanically represent this in 5e, at least I think 5e has aging rules, if not, then rip them out of 3.5 and transfer them. They're not going to cause much problems.

You have it so that Gensai lose Int and Wis as they age up, rather than gaining it. Instead they gain traits similar to elementals, and have their charisma (which is what elementals use for their base stat for spell like abilities I believe?) go through the roof.

Then you set up a ritual binding spell (again, if 5e doesn't have the rules, you can basically rip them from unearthed arcana from 3.5), that converts specific kinds of aging traits into OTHER kinds of aging traits. Basically converting the Gensai's 'lose thought' into 'lose physical' (which works really well since 2 points of mental is 1 point of physical still I think, so Gensai aging up under the effects of this spell would be actually fantastic slaves even late into their life span).

have it so the spell has to be cast regularly. Manumitted Gensai are usually those rich and prosperous enough to regularly hire Teifling wizards or pay for the reagents themselves in order to fuel the ritual.

Manumitted Gensai families tend to bind themselves to one another. Leading to highly structured families. Usually a manumitted Gensai will be bound to their marital partner. Children will be bound to one of their parents.

Gensai rarely are able to be manumitted because of the expense of the ritual. Luckily the ritual can effect multiple people at once (which is how Teiflings maintain control over their enslaved gensai households without bankrupting themselves). Since Gensai have hundreds, even thousands of generations of enslavement and relatively little ability to pull themselves out of poverty, most Gensai families have basically bound themselves to Teifling families for centuries now, the highest class types are usually far closer to oaths of fealty and a master/servant relationship rather than master/slave.

So basically, almost all Gensai families are bound to a Teifling family, but the few manumitted Gensai families are pretty rich in and of themselves.

guess op learned what he needed to learn?

This thread needs to be saved, as the one time Veeky Forums talked about slavery without it turning into a rape factory

There was no single Roman slavery system - there were dozens of iterations depending on a host of factors, including who was in charge

It is called a generalization mate, calm down.

>re-wage the American Civil War.
Sounds awesome, I'd be down

internal strife over the system would help keep them from being written off as the "slavery race"

kinkier than the Drow

When you say things like "slaves are part of the family" and "they can work towards their freedom", anybody can rationalize it.

Plantation Slavery and Slavery are very different things.

Slaves were/are typically a part of the family. They're on the lowest shittiest rung, but they're part of the family. They're like a cheap, unimportant stockholder in a company.
Their word doesn't carry any weight, but they are also held to a lower expectation than other members of the family. They're not expected to do *well*. They also have the short straw for marital matters.

Chattel slavery is/was typically seen as an abuse of this kind of system.

Of course, this makes slavery sound so nice.

I think you can figure out how it isn't.