Slavery

Everything that isn't what exists today is a failure by definition. We most past failures and into the future.

>It has nothing to do with pay.
>don't work, don't get food (paid).
It's just slavery under a different name and tasks with different motivations, a fighting slave will get food a roof under his head if he does his job.

>slaves are quite often friendly or loyal and reliable, like retainers
So why not just use them as proper retainers instead. Focusing on slavery and ownership (even benevolent) is strange.

If two people collaborated on characters that were a minor noble and one of their retainers I'd be ecstatic. If they showed up with a slave and their master I'd immediately be dubious.

and*

Orlanthi style thralldom?
Basically, your a slave with some rights, no outright abuse and any children you have will be full members of the clan.

>good slavery
But it was good. For those society at those periods, at least.
If it wasn't the case they wouldn't have reigned like they did.
They prospered and lasted longer than their concurrents, and transmitted their ideas to the next period. Ergo it was good, on a societal level.

>it still sucks shit for the slaves who are often there because society was stacked against the from the start.
I could remplace "slaves" by anything from paupers to prisoneers or whatever minority is present where you live. Does that mean every society ever is evil?

I'm not here to start a sterile argument, but we can't judge other societies by our metrics. That's anthropology 101.
Especially in a fantasy setting where more often than not, Good and Evil are tangible forces, and the apocalypse may actually come if you don't sacrifice enough babies.

How is necromancy inherently immoral though? It's the other way around, people try to asspull nonsense to make it evilbads. OoOoh it slavebinds the soul into service for some impractical reason or it's """negative energy""" and there's no other way to do it.

D E P E N D S O N T H E S E T T I N G

>OoOoh it slavebinds the soul into service for some impractical reason

Well, it does. That's why you can't raise someone even with spells that don't require the body as long as there is an undead formed from them about.

Dependson, the Setting?

I have a culture that has indentured servants that operate sort of like this. The desperate, hideously poor, criminals, or religious fanatics can have their wills sealed and bound to a master. Those that are sealed are left in a daze for a time, in increments of seven years due to religious iconography. The slaves are expected to be treated well, as they aren't just your property, but your dependents. Since they are perfectly obedient, punishment is unneeded. Abusing a slave in this state will nullify their contract, and have the abuser take on the remainder of the contract in service to those they abused.

Is that an elder god of theater?

I don't think you understand what I've been trying to say.
Slavery = removal of liberty

You could get paid 100000$ a month, with free hookers and blackjack, it's still slavery if you aren't free to leave your job.

And as you said, as you give food to your slaves, nobody ever works for free.

>There's a reason both slavery and serfdom ultimately failed in Europe, and it's because ~~it's better to employ free people than to have to take even halfway decent care of slaves.~~ expanding nations ran out of smaller, less advanced nations to bully for slaves, combined with the steady march of technological progress
making slavery no longer cost effective.

FTFY

What mainstream setting has necromancy, magically animating the dead, as a neutral type of magic and doesn't try desperately to either justify it as evil or downplay it as noble savage type shamanism summoning the ancestors or whatever.

A. why do you have to force people to be alive, why does undeath have to be nonconsensual B. why do you need the soul in the first place C. even if so, why can't you target evil people as a way for their soul to redeem itself and pay back the world in good deeds

Part time patron of contrivances and amateur weaver of destiny.

Post societal collapse, there was a resurgence in slavery, particularly in the coastal city-states. Previously it has been deemed barbaric by the western states, but was widely practiced in the eastern empire.

My own character was raised a slave from infancy after his parents died of plague. Grew up as a slave soldier among men who were mostly prisoners of war. Won his freedom as part of a slave revolt. He's very Roy Batty about the concept, and takes vindictive pleasure in killing slavers and slave owners.

>B. why do you need the soul in the first place

Presumably that's what makes it necromancy rather than just animating bones as a construct.

Good slavery is never going to realistically work out. People without power get abused. Unless you're dealing with alien minds that's a fact of life. It either ends up "good", where their treatment is marginally better than elsewhere but still shit, or "slavery" where their status is 100% purely on paper.

Example 1: Serfdom. Not technically slavery, but still a lack of most freedoms and complete shit. To be player characters they would have to be ex-serfs, because otherwise they aren't allowed to leave, have weapons or be doing anything other than working the land of their lord.

Example 2: Janissaries and Mamlukes. Technically slaves on paper, but in reality a very powerful and privileged class, in some times becoming the outright rulers. These could be PCs, but calling them slaves is laughable.

Things you can do:

A setting where slavery is shitty, even if not as terrible as RL, and your players are in a position where they're not able to oppose. An example might be playing as Realm dragonblooded from Exalted. Also difficult to pull off unless you have a mature playergroup, as they might still try to pull a "LIBERTY OR DEATH!" and then be butthurt when the powers that be crush them like little bugs.

Just find a group of like-minded perverts and let your freak flag fly. The magical realm is the only place good slavery can really be pulled off.

>and amateur weaver of destiny.
Must be a cousin of the dance god.

>to have to take even halfway decent care of slaves.
When slaves got scarce in Rome a myriad of laws protencting them were implemented. You weren't allowed to kill or maim them for example.
>better to employ free people than to have to take even halfway decent care of slaves.
This isn't some absolute truth like you imply. It varies a lot.

It worked for thousands of years, and then we moved on once we graduated to a societal stage where it didn't work anymore. Just because we live in a scenario where it doesn't work now doesn't mean it never worked.

You may as well say black and white televisions didn't work either because nobody would buy one today; an incredibly boneheaded argument to make.

>When slaves got scarce in Rome a myriad of laws protencting them were implemented. You weren't allowed to kill or maim them for example.

That sounds less like 'They were treated well' and more 'They were given the absolute minimum protection'. Since Rome didn't allow casual murder of other non-slave people at the time.

So your gestation was a failure since you were born?

Nigga, you high.

>'They were treated well' and more 'They were given the absolute minimum protection'. Since Rome didn't allow casual murder of other non-slave people at the time.
True, but by modern standards people have been living fairly shitty lives for all of history. I'd still pick being a slave over being a poor plebeian.

It works if the slaves have relative freedom and are paid for their labour. Centrally (i.e by you) organized living quarters and food can be cheaper than each family taking care of themselves, so by providing this you can pay them a tiny sum of actual money if any at all and overall benefit from the arrangement. There's less need to guard and force your slaves to work because they'd freeze and starve if they ran away, and since their conditions are shitty but not horrible they're less likely to risk doing so anyway.

I like the idea of slavery because slave women wouldn't be able to refuse my sexytime demands like the thotts of today can.

You're bandying about words like "evil", but I can already tell you're an "It's all subjective!" kind of guy, leading to a situation where you're launching an """argument""" where the presupposed axiom is that morality is entirely subjective, and then challenging other people to make it objective for you. That's fucking impossible because there will not be a metric you will not weasel out of.
>Necromancy chains the immortal soul of a living being to a life of torment as a power source for an abomination.
>Well, uh, how do you know it's torment?! How do you know they don't ENJOY being undead?! How do you know a soul is in there at all?! And even if it's true, evil is subjective!
It's impossible to go anywhere when you have that attitude. Remove the word necromancy and just assume that it's resurrection followed by a lobotomy + plastic surgery to make the person look fucking gross, and this almost universally against their will and will result in great discomfort and forced servitude. If that doesn't sound evil to you, you're an edgy faggot.

>Good slavery is never going to realistically work out. People without power get abused.
This leads logically to the opposite as well; where there are people with power over others, they will sometimes abuse. That's pretty much a fact of life, and something that exists regardless of slavery. Sometimes children get abused because they are powerless, but that does not mean that having children is inherently abusive, no?

It's not about slavery or power, it's about the fact that douchebags exist. Douchebags existing does not invalidate any given hierarchy. And if the people who abuse that hierarchy are known to be pricks, that must also mean that there are those who will not abuse the hierarchy for their own gain, in which case arguing against those non-abusive people by using the abusive ones as an example fundamentally makes no logical sense.

>'m toying around with the idea of a setting where slavery is a very well known and common facet of life within a particular continent, and in general its both unbecoming and impractical for masters to mistreat slaves, to the point that slaves are quite often friendly or loyal and reliable

SO LIKE ACTUAL ANTIQUITY?

Well, being a sllave of a rich person can eventually result in being able to pay for your freedom and become a wealthy free man, as it happened many times over in Rome.
Of course, not for any kind of majority - but still a perceptible amount

>Everything that isn't what exists today
well, "good" thing is that slavery still exist
it must have been a good idea, I guess

>I could remplace "slaves" by anything from paupers to prisoneers or whatever minority is present where you live. Does that mean every society ever is evil?
What a strange comparison. Underpaid immigrants get fucked by society, but not as bad as if they were slaves.

How so? I'd bet the wealth gap was actually smaller during antiquity.

Depends on what period. There was a period during the Roman Republic when they were riding high on their defeat of Carthage and subjugation of the Mediterranean that things were really bad, due to a glut of slaves and plunder

>Linkarus tries to rape his slave
>gets kicked in the balls
>the judge considers that there are limits to what a slave can be forced to do (with whom, to be precise)
>Get told to take a bath and exercise, otherwise he'll lose his citizenry.
Even in Gor, there's a justice

>Example 2: Janissaries and Mamlukes
Still slaves, a slave caste with privileges and some prestige (see also greek tutors and such slaves in rome) would be some of the most realistic good slavery

Slavery is a meme. You can work a person to death and pay them in stamps but so long as you give them the choice of working or starving to death it's not considered slavery. In modern definitions there doesn't need to be a de facto difference between a slave and a nonslave, it's just a legal technicality.

People don't care about modern slavery or ancient slavery, de facto or de jure, they just care about the meme.

It's easy for modern people to forget that, even without masters, there is still work. If you're unwilling or unable to trade your labor for sustenance, that means someone else has to do it (or let you starve). You can think of us as "slaves to reality" if you like.

"There are a few recorded instances of Roman slaves having good lives" is not the same as "Roman slaves had good lives". Yes, if a slave was an educated or highly skilled servant of a wealthy and benevolent man, he might eventually become a prosperous Freedman. But for the vast majority of laborers--agricultural and mining slaves, for instance--there's no evidence they had it any better than slaves in the American South. It was still a brutal life of work without property, subject to torture, mutilation, and rape at your masters' whim.

>Implying poopy puffer would ever touch a woman when there are big black bulls he could throw her to instead

I'm an Alabama orc and I want to be free

>THE PRESENT IS GOOD
>THE PAST IS EVIL
>CHANGE FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE
This is you.

It seems like such a simple concept but so many people completely ignore it.

>"slaves to reality"
I prefer "slaves to nature"

>If it wasn't the case they wouldn't have reigned like they did.
Here's the problem, you're rating slavery as "good" or "evil" based on its benefit to society as a whole, and then using this to come to the conclusion that slavery was "good" because societies that used slave labor were more economically successful.

In the setting for an evil campaing I'm DMing, most of the gods are meddling fucktards a la Greeks, except instead of raping mortal women and engaging in drama between each other, their favourite activity is empire building. Shit's pretty grimdark but my players enjoy it for some reason.

One of these gods, a former mortal, achieved his temporal power by forcing the daughter of the mother-goddess to submit to him and taking over her dominion over people. Therefore, the tenets of his religion are basically an extreme form of social darwinism, sanctifying the use of force to achieve one's goals, rulership of the fittest, and the institution of slavery. The religion doesn't have a major following outside of a single nation, within which it is the state religion. The state itself is, per the faith's doctrine, a tool created for the purpose of subjugating the world and uniting all the peoples in a perfectly hierarchical social order, where every individual's position is uniquely tailored to reflect their traits. This will supposedly create a state of complete harmony and happiness for everyone.

Slavery is extremely important in that country, being the foundation of its economic power. In fact, one of the primary tasks of the priests is to ensure that slaves are complacent and properly trained, aiding the slaveholders in the conduct of their business. Their primary application is mining and agriculture. Recently that list has been expanded by industry, which has been transformed by technological developments, enabling mass production of all kinds of goods. Traditional workers and craftspeople have all but disappeared, and their scarce modern descendants are more akin to foremen-taskmasters with specialist knowledge of the production process, directing platoons of slaves who do all the dirty work.

Yes, and?
Do you think morals can be weighted on any scale but success? Societies answer to the same imperatives as species, namely survival.

Human rights didn't spread because they are good, they did because the other solution is total class warfare. I.e. french revolution.

cont.
Slaves of other kinds do exist as well, and slave ownership is common across all social strata except for the urban proletariat. Still, their numbers are dwarfed by those of the laborer slaves. They are much more diverse though - in the empire's largest markets, one can find a slave for pretty much anything. The exceptions, in which slaves are an extreme rarity, are jobs that require a high degree of trust, arcane magic, and fighting - the latter two due to the widespread belief that enslaving someone with a capability to exert force upon others is usually an act of folly. This is due to the country's primary system of social mobility, which allows allows to overthrow one's superiors if they prove to be incompetent. Of course, most slaves are kept unaware of this fact.

The empire maintains a massive standing army, and the reasons for this mostly all slave-related. First is conquest, which apart from being a holy war keeps fresh slaves flowing into the markets, which is vital for the economy to keep running(in fact, it would probably start to collapse as soon as that flow would be stemmed). The second is the threat of slave rebellion, which is a grave one with so many around. There was, for example, a brief period when magical progress and scientific discoveries allowed for eugenics to be applied to the slaves en masse. This is no longer the case(at least no one can do it legally)due to what was basically Spartacus' uprising but with fantasy space marines. The final reason is that slavery forced most uneducated and lowborn citizens out of the labour market, and this is the state's way of providing for them and avoiding a revolution.

Please don't beat up nerds for their lunch money in elementary school, sometimes they go all Stockholm Syndrome and turn into social darwinists.

>industrialization made having a large market for consumer goods desirable plus improvements in agriculture technology making less and less work needed made slavery slowly obsolete, with morality changing to fit it's new obsolescent. In the united stats we see the north further a head in the process to the point where their morality conflicted heavily with the south's.
>But no slavery was always inefficient and always wrong

This thread is shit as usual but I like you.

It does more than existing, it's currently thriving. There are more slaves today than there were during the peak of the triangular trade and african empires.

>what is demand and supply, the post
>also implying that there's a single country on earth with zero welfare and mutual aid inside the community

No offense, but this is a mess.

Wrong. The industrial revolution made slavery obsolete. Nothing else. If your world doesn't have combustible engines and machinery, then slavery will be viable.

It's running on god-wills-it so it was never supposed to make perfect sense, but please elaborate.

>why does undeath have to be nonconsensual
If they wanted to go back, you could use normal ressurection. If their time has ended... Hm. Unless there's some entity guarding "fate" or some other dull shit, that'd be alright. That could be a plot - Settra vs The Inevitables.

>Does slavery exist in your setting and how do you handle it?
Yes. Two different types of human slavery plus one of my players is an AI so that brings robot slavery.

One forms of slavery is basically debt slavery, where in one of the cultures people either sell themselves of or their debt is bought of and become slaves, this can go on for generations as slave children usually have nowhere to go and no will to do so. But as this society is Ancapistan there is some good old forced slavery as well.

The other is a culture that has a caste system that's biologically imposed. Some of the lower classes are basically mind stapled from birth and bred to become docile to the higher classes, that culture is also psyonic and the lower classes are more susceptible to mind control by design.

Depending on where in the campaign they are my PC could own slaves. Be they mind stapled, debt slaves or some other form.

Where did the belief that the pyramids were built by slaves originally come from?

Nobody belived anyone would give a shit enough about their leaders or deities to build something like that willingly. Low expectations basically.

probably linked to the Jews being enslaved in Egypt in the bible being extrapolated to all of egyptian society

They were. Egyptians were under corvée, which is assimilated to slavery.

>Implying he wouldn't be the one to go for the bull

Could we have some slavegirls art instead?

The fact that Egypt had slavery. Does that answer your question?

I fancy the idea of engagement bond of sort.

So how about those cassette tapes huh?

>unrealistic
Slavery still exists m8
>economically impractical
It doesn't have to be. Slavery is more than just economic gain.

>Linkarus tries to rape his slave
Yeah...nah. Despite being vocally Christian he has truly earned his fedora. He's the archetypical male feminist. He'd probably apologize for looking at a woman's exposed shoulder for 0.3 nanoseconds too long in order to be a good "male ally".

Raising the dead is not done the same way in every setting. If, in my setting, necromancy is done by creating eternally and genuinely blissful souls and placing them into corpses which they love being in, then how can it still be "inherently evil"?

Your setting is gay.

>Good slavery
Fuck off with this shit, if you want slavery that's fine, there's a lot of cool settings that use slavery and there's absolutely nothing wrong with RPing a slave owner, but don't do this kids gloves "every thing's all right" bullshit.

This Yeah, sure, if you invent an entire universe built specifically to prove you right, than maybe you're right.

Or hey, maybe murder isn't inherently evil because in my setting maybe reality is hell and releasing people into death places them squarely into permanent blissful heaven?

Stupid, stupid ass ideas.

I didn't ask why people think Egypt had slavery. I asked specifically why people think Egypt allowed slaves to work on the pyramids.

>How do you know they don't ENJOY being undead
How do you know necromancy chains the immortal soul of a living being to a life of torment as a power source for an abomination? How is one baseless assumptions better than another baseless assumption? You're just a rigid-minded moron who fights anything that doesn't fit into his little fascist skull.

Where the fuck does fascism come to play here at all? You're schizophrenic.

Iirc it was originally what many assumed, then the discovery of tombs for the workers of the pyramids completely btfo of that idea.

Pretty much people didn't know any better and the US education system has been shit for a while.

What are you? Stupid? What kind of retarded question is that?

>How do you know necromancy chains the immortal soul of a living being to a life of torment as a power source for an abomination?
That's the literal implications of it you dunce. It's why it's seen as evil and described as such. What are you gona claim that because of your retardation necromancy doesn't require chained souls or soulless ghouls?

But necromancy doesn't exist. It's necessarily a conceit of the creator's imagination.

...you know slaves didn't build the pyramids, right?

But necromancy is based on preexisting concepts. Like dying, and passing away to another plane.
If you don't base it on preexisting concepts why call it necromancy?

Dragons don't exist but arguing that a dragon could be literally anything would turn some heads and make you look like a fool.

Something being conceptual does not equal it being totally meaningless. I'm starting to get why I was randomly called a fascist now; this is some deep post-modern bullshit thinking and of course challenging it would spur you to imply I'm a racist as a kneejerk defense even though it's not relevant.

The funny thing here is that necromancy rarely if ever involved raising the dead, but rather contacting them and learning from them, generally in the form of ancestor worship. The 'zombie' concept was invented by transatlantic slave trade voodoo practitioners, who used the word to refer to people who had had their souls removed or otherwise had their agency taken away, not necessarily risen corpses. Basically, your idea of raising zombies through a power known as 'necromancy' is just as unlike necromancy as the one I described, so you really have no room to be telling people what it is or what it necessarily must imply.

>The funny thing here is that necromancy rarely if ever involved raising the dead, but rather contacting them and learning from them, generally in the form of ancestor worship
Depends on the culture, but people communing with the dead are not seen as necromancers or evil per say. Nor called as such. A traveling gypsy and her crystal ball is not associated with a witch making and summoning ghouls.

> The 'zombie' concept was invented by transatlantic slave trade voodoo practitioners
Except necromancy is not directly related to zombies up until stuff like modern DnD. A Ghoul and a Zombie are not the same thing.

> not necessarily risen corpses
That's why Zombies have nothing to do with Necromancy, only until the modern interpretation which has nothing to do with the old zombies or the concept. As modern zombies are a plague that uses human corpses as means of spreading.

>Basically, your idea of raising zombies through a power known as 'necromancy' is just as unlike necromancy as the one I described
Except it isn't. Necromancy as I have stated before requires the concepts of death and of the soul passing away. Do to those two concepts it is evil by nature as you are preventing a soul from passing away creating something akin to an unwilling and twisted ghost, a soul that is tormented as it can't pass away, even more so as it wants to pass away.

>Entropy is oppressing me boo hoo

>Depends on the culture, but people communing with the dead are not seen as necromancers
Wrong.

Necromancy (/ˈnɛkrəˌmænsi, -roʊ-/[1][2]) is a supposed practice of magic involving communication with the deceased – either by summoning their spirit as an apparition or raising them bodily – for the purpose of divination, imparting the means to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead, or to use the deceased as a weapon, as the term may sometimes be used in a more general sense to refer to black magic or witchcraft.

>Wrong.
No you are wrong. I live in a culture that doesn't see communication with the dead on the same plane as necromancy.

But sure go on with the dictionary.

>words don't mean what I want them to mean

ok buddy, good luck with that

Those people are, by the definition of necromancy, necromancers, moreso than a person who magically creates ghosts or raises the dead.

Ghouls, by the way, in their original definition are not created by necromancy either; they were djinn, spirits of Arab folklore, who existed independently from humans or human ghosts.

Your concept of necromancy as something which involves creating ghosts or ghouls is bullshit, and your moral judgments of its every fictional iteration are bullshit.