Can you please suggest prices for slave versions of the various types of crew you can, potentially, recruit in Pirates of Drinax and ways for disciplining?. I was thinking of A Stars Wars Episode 1 style Transmitter with options other then blow up, 2 examples being temporarily choke and cause mental pain. What do you think?. Also I've made slavery legal in this campaign
Suggested prices and ways of disciplining
- Thread starter JMISBEST
- Start date
ShawnDriscoll
Cosmic Mongoose
Find out from your players what their gameplay thresholds are for your refereeing style.
steve98052
Mongoose
On any type of complex work, it takes more effort to tell the difference between passive resistance to enslavement and limited skill or ordinary mistakes that the brutal style of slavery practiced in the slavery era US southeast is impractical. It's simply easier for a slave overseer to do the job himself than to watch a technical slave do the job closely enough to see that it's done right.
Instead, something more like a benevolent Roman slaveholder would be necessary. Imagine a Roman trader with a Greek translator handling his business correspondence with Greek associates. The Greek could easily include a note to offer a huge kickback to the correspondent to buy his freedom and bring him back to Greece. To keep the Greek from cheating him, the Roman owner had to gain his loyalty. That would include lots of priveleges (good food, slave women, etc.), the right to accumulate his own money and eventually buy his own freedom, legal rights not to be punished too brutally (by Roman standards), and other things that are not at all like a US field slave's conditions.
(It wasn't like that for all, or even most, Roman slaves. A mining slave, for example, might have the legal right to keep his own money and buy his freedom too, but the work was so exhausting and dangerous that practically all of them would be dead from overwork or injury in less than a year, long before they could buy their own freedom.)
So, if you want to allow slavery for complex jobs, think about that hypothetical Greek translator, not a US field slave. And in terms of the market price for a slave, it should be only moderately less expensive than the amortized cost of paying a free employee -- maybe five years of salary.
Instead, something more like a benevolent Roman slaveholder would be necessary. Imagine a Roman trader with a Greek translator handling his business correspondence with Greek associates. The Greek could easily include a note to offer a huge kickback to the correspondent to buy his freedom and bring him back to Greece. To keep the Greek from cheating him, the Roman owner had to gain his loyalty. That would include lots of priveleges (good food, slave women, etc.), the right to accumulate his own money and eventually buy his own freedom, legal rights not to be punished too brutally (by Roman standards), and other things that are not at all like a US field slave's conditions.
(It wasn't like that for all, or even most, Roman slaves. A mining slave, for example, might have the legal right to keep his own money and buy his freedom too, but the work was so exhausting and dangerous that practically all of them would be dead from overwork or injury in less than a year, long before they could buy their own freedom.)
So, if you want to allow slavery for complex jobs, think about that hypothetical Greek translator, not a US field slave. And in terms of the market price for a slave, it should be only moderately less expensive than the amortized cost of paying a free employee -- maybe five years of salary.
baithammer
Mongoose
Technology can facilitate slavery.
Hook up slaves with a TL 14 Neural Comm running a performance and activity monitor slaved to a Central computer to do advanced analytics and you effectively have a fairly omniscient Taskmaster.
Hook up slaves with a TL 14 Neural Comm running a performance and activity monitor slaved to a Central computer to do advanced analytics and you effectively have a fairly omniscient Taskmaster.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
If the economic argument loses out, slavery would be a form of judicial punishment, or a way to demonstrate power dynamics.
baithammer
Mongoose
Hasn't stopped anyone in our modern world and its only expensive if a
don't have a large population to exploit b grant limited rights to the slaves, when neither condition applies slavery is only a few moral steps away.
don't have a large population to exploit b grant limited rights to the slaves, when neither condition applies slavery is only a few moral steps away.With a few exceptions, slaves have always been relegated to menial tasks. Having slaves, even with advanced control methods, flying ships and doing important tasks is a recipe for failure if it involves humans. People can be self destructive, not to mention angry about being a slave. Crashing the ship with the cruel overlord aboard isn't far fetched.
steve98052
Mongoose
With that level of automation, slaves make no sense; having a robot do the job directly would be cheaper and more reliable.baithammer said:
As I wrote earlier:
That is true whether the overseer is a human or a robot.steve98052 said:
Enslavement as judicial punishment may still make sense, but it's judicial sense, not economic sense. And for that purpose, menial labor works too. Which sentence sounds more plausible?
"To punish you for your crimes and deter others, you are sentenced to a lifetime of shoveling organic fertilizer on the baron's farm."
or
"To repay your debt to society, you are sentenced to a lifetime of service in the engine room of one of the baron's freight liners with an initial crew rank of Slave, grade 0."
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
The character was born on the planet B3K, where she was sold by her parents to the Wife Bank. During her initial years Zev was raised by computers that taught her to become a perfect wife. As a result, the character became overweight and was rejected by her bridegroom.[4] Zev was then sentenced to become a love slave by being run through a device called the Lusticon, intended to transform her into a beautiful and brainless servant. Before the process could be successfully completed, a carnivorous reptile called a cluster lizard attempted to eat her but was fused to her DNA in the process. This enabled Zev to free herself. She then substituted the decapitated robot head of a 790 robot in the machine to be subjected to brainwashing.[5] This prompted the robot to fall in love with her.[6]
BigDogsRunning
Banded Mongoose
Condottiere said:
That's Miss Bellringer to you! :lol:
PsiTraveller
Cosmic Mongoose
Oghma uses slave labour to maintain the tech base to support its warlord ways if I recall. The willingness of slaves to misjump if they were crew might be problematic.
As was pointed out, once you get the computers and robots that can replace crew you should go robotic. Then all you have to worry about are hackers taking over your ship.
https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
A site that shows a slave being worth anywhere from 20 000 to 140 000 dollars in todays money.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/humans-are-being-sold-as-slaves-for-400-each-in-libya-2017-11
or for 400 dollars today in Libya.
If you want to control a population you can use fear and blackmail. Break a family up and allow them to visit each other occasionally. If one person breaks a rule, the rest of the family is punished, and told why. Video of the punishment can be shown to the slave. This plays family off against one another.
Drugs or cybernetic implants are other options. As long as they produce they get the antidote and can keep working. If they break a rule or escape then no antidote and bad things happen chemically.
Cybernetic implants could be attached to the vagus nerve. As long as the transmitter stays on the crew is functional. If it turns off they start to vomit, convulse and soil themselves. Look at the Jumper series for an example of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_(novel)
More advanced implants could do all sorts of mayhem.
As was pointed out, once you get the computers and robots that can replace crew you should go robotic. Then all you have to worry about are hackers taking over your ship.
https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
A site that shows a slave being worth anywhere from 20 000 to 140 000 dollars in todays money.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/humans-are-being-sold-as-slaves-for-400-each-in-libya-2017-11
or for 400 dollars today in Libya.
If you want to control a population you can use fear and blackmail. Break a family up and allow them to visit each other occasionally. If one person breaks a rule, the rest of the family is punished, and told why. Video of the punishment can be shown to the slave. This plays family off against one another.
Drugs or cybernetic implants are other options. As long as they produce they get the antidote and can keep working. If they break a rule or escape then no antidote and bad things happen chemically.
Cybernetic implants could be attached to the vagus nerve. As long as the transmitter stays on the crew is functional. If it turns off they start to vomit, convulse and soil themselves. Look at the Jumper series for an example of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_(novel)
More advanced implants could do all sorts of mayhem.
Debt slavery might not be uncommon as a form of judicial punishment - work as a slave laborer for X years until your debt is paid off. Or indentured servitude, which was pretty common in the US in colonial days.
IMTU I’ve created a multi-world polity on the Imperial border whose society has non-hereditary slavery as a punishment for failure. No one is born a slave and all children get a basic level of education, health care, etc. But all citizens are required to strive for perfection and to compete to be the best (strongest, most successful, etc). Those who don’t lose status; those who fail lose everything. But their children begin again as free citizens and nominally equal footing to everyone else.
Yes, I am all too familiar with performance reviews....
IMTU I’ve created a multi-world polity on the Imperial border whose society has non-hereditary slavery as a punishment for failure. No one is born a slave and all children get a basic level of education, health care, etc. But all citizens are required to strive for perfection and to compete to be the best (strongest, most successful, etc). Those who don’t lose status; those who fail lose everything. But their children begin again as free citizens and nominally equal footing to everyone else.
Yes, I am all too familiar with performance reviews....
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Try North Korea, where they place entire families into labour camps if someone related to them is deemed an enemy of the state.
And according to an account by one defector, she was forced to marry a nuclear technician as a perquisite for doing a dangerous job.
And according to an account by one defector, she was forced to marry a nuclear technician as a perquisite for doing a dangerous job.
steve98052
Mongoose
Another atrocity example of discipline was the system used in Nazi concentration camps: some prisoners were designated as "Kapo", and granted special privileges on condition that they do a lot of the dirty work of oppressing their fellow prisoners.
US slavery used similar systems, with the rich owners at the top of a hierarchy, poor white people as senior enforcers whose status as as something above "white trash depended on both serving the rich and oppressing the slaves, senior slaves whose privileges depended on oppressing lower status slaves, and the many unfortunates at the bottom who did the common labor.
When slavery ended, the poor whites lost their legal superiority over the former slaves, but the rich kept the poor whites in the service of their interests by promoting segregation, so that even if they were no longer elevated over the former slaves with a distinction between freedom and slavery, they were still elevated by institutionalized racism. That persists today, in spite of laws against racial discrimination; racism gets poor white people to vote for the interests of rich white people and against their own interests, by convincing them that politicians who serve the rich help poor whites by hurting poor non-whites even more.
US slavery used similar systems, with the rich owners at the top of a hierarchy, poor white people as senior enforcers whose status as as something above "white trash depended on both serving the rich and oppressing the slaves, senior slaves whose privileges depended on oppressing lower status slaves, and the many unfortunates at the bottom who did the common labor.
When slavery ended, the poor whites lost their legal superiority over the former slaves, but the rich kept the poor whites in the service of their interests by promoting segregation, so that even if they were no longer elevated over the former slaves with a distinction between freedom and slavery, they were still elevated by institutionalized racism. That persists today, in spite of laws against racial discrimination; racism gets poor white people to vote for the interests of rich white people and against their own interests, by convincing them that politicians who serve the rich help poor whites by hurting poor non-whites even more.
