New Era Slavery, Any availability date yet?

Hey,

Good call. Got to get back to that document once the bestiary is out.

Sorry for the absence of yours truly from the forums, but as I get near the completion of a major book, I seem to crawl into my creative cocoon and shut everything else off (especially the internet access!). Not good, I know, but I am able to work 12 hour days in a very focused, obsessive manner. I don't believe I could have every produced anything in my life without this all-consuming obsession to see it done... and done as well as I can.

That said, if you have a copy of the Crossroads Region, turn now to page 386 for Appendix 3, which has a very usable section on Slaves in the Crossroads Region. Easy enough to apply this to your own region.

Sorry for the delay on the Slavery Supplement. I've been digging pretty deep into the whole real slavery issue and it seems to be a worldwide, culture-wide disgrace that some say is as bad now as at any time in history. Its a touchy subject and I got to get it right. The main idea for the supplement is to point out how evil it is, and why it is important for a GM's characters to take on missions which aim to free slaves... or start the characters as slaves and have them escape, hopefully punishing their former masters!

Please remind me again about this if you don't see the document in the near future! The Expansion book is next (although we may try to sneak a full sized adventure and a bunch of smaller PDFs out in the meantime)

Best regards
Will

(Sorry for necromancy)

You can also have cases where something is legal for the town, but illegal for people. For example, a town has prisoners. They can imprison them like current jails, execute a prisoner to prevent them from committing a crime, or find another option.

If they just confine the prisoners and feed them a meal every day, people will want to get into trouble as it means they can goof off and be fed (instead of starve and be in danger).

Execution is a waste of resources. The prisoner is decently strong, and can do light chores as necessary. Plus there are many crimes where execution is an overreaction.

So the town can put the prisoners to work. To make sure they don't escape in either the wilderness or in town, the prisoners are in chains. Better behavior or lighter sentences mean relatively safer jobs. Worse offenders (but not deserving to be killed) or prisoners who are just jerks will get the dangerous jobs (scrap hauling in the wilderness where the prior work gang was killed). This leads to all sorts of prison politics where people try to curry favor with the guards so they get the safe duty.

The fun part is a train of guards leading prisoners to a wilderness work site can look a lot like a slaver caravan. Hope the players don't get the two confused, or they will be on various bounty/kill lists.


Indentured servitude:  A person needs money or simply cannot make his/her way any more.  So they go to the town government and offer to make themselves a slave of whoever is willing to take on their debts.  If someone agrees, the buyer and slave sign an agreement where the IS will work for the buyer for a certain period of years, and the buyer agrees to pay off all the debts.  This is recorded by a town official, with a stated ending date.  In the meantime, a collar is put on the neck of the IS, sybolizing that they are effectively a slave.

Fun thought is something burning the IS records in a town, and the overseeing official having an 'accident'.  Presto, all the IS in a town have no proof they are only a slave for a certain period of time.  Good way for the PCs to be used to set an accidental fiew, while the town official is killed.  Since the PCs set the fire, they will be suspected of killing the official too.


One idea that PCs might try to do is buy slaves from a slaveowner (as freeing them would be considered theft), but then track the slaveowner when they perform their next raids outside the town.  They kill off the slavers, loot the bodies of coin, and return to buy more slaves.  The slaveowner will eventually notice that the PC group is buying slaves with the same coins that he just paid his/her people and realize what is going on as his slaving parties do not return.   Presto - contract on the PCs.


One fun idea might be if the PCs manage to shut down slavery within a town by killing all the external slaving groups, so the town slavers have to prey on the town itself.  The main groups might agree to prey only upon certain areas of the town, so they don't poach from each other.  Anyone free coming into the town is pretty much a target, unless they are really dangerous.  The PCs can then be put into the role of creating a Harriett Tubman, and making an Underground Railroad to get slaves out of that town and into somewhere else.  This would be a good way for senior PCs to make their own town, with their own rules, etc.  Escaped slaves are used to populate the town, and the PCs work to make the area safe.

My initial post was in 2014. You can see how it has progressed since then.