When I were a tyke, first learning Tunnels and Trolls, I remember being off-put by the presence of slaves in the game, both in terms of the ones a delver could buy by the point and the ones who could be enslaved with the awkwardly-named "Yassa Massa." (Actually, I am still off-put by "Yassa Massa" - not the presence of an enslavement spell, but by its invocation of the awful "Stepin Fetchit" stereotype. I think a superior name for the spell might be "Charmed, I'm Sure," or "OBEY." Or "Simon Says." Anything, really.)EDIT : I 'b'lieve I saw on someone's blog that the name has been changed to Spirit Mastery... Correct? Not a bad name, though I should have liked something closer to the flavor of Take That You Fiend while avoiding the wincing qualities of the original...
Back then, I tended to play fairly egalitarian, neutral good type characters most of the time - even in the absence of official alignments- and so I found the whole idea of slave dealing abhorrent for my characters. So I tended to ignore the whole thing. (Now, hirelings I did indeed hire, and they tended to die like flies while my goodygoody heroes somehow survived. How is this better, I ask myself?)
But now, here we are in 2011, I've a sight more history under my belt, and the idea of slaves happening to one extent or another in a T&T setting makes more sense to me. Most of the historical periods modeled in heroic fiction had slavery. Most raiding societies captured slaves; Rome was heavily slave-based; slavery continued to happen throughout the middle ages all around the Mediterranean. Really, most peasants could be construed as slaves, tied to the lands of their feudal lords. And as far as the pages of heroic fiction are concerned, there's plenty slaves to go around, and not just the Barely Nubile Slave Girls dancing in the Adjective Animal Inn. Leiber's underground city of Quarmall was chock with slaves, many of whom were there just to carry torches. (Now that, I thought, will come in handy next time I'm a delver...) Plus, the heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser themselves have slaves: Ourph and his companion Mingols, their lives spared in return for life service.
SO. Yes, Virginia, there is slavery in Ardis. Many of the galleys plying the inner sea have slaves at the oars. Most of the big cities have arenas. The Volods' lands are mostly tilled by peasants; the granaries of the cities of Angapam and Khurasan are all filled by slave labor in the fields.
The berzerk tribes of Ys enslave one another constantly as their feuds broil back and forth from fjord to fort.
Galiana's fields and vinyards are cultivated by tenant farmers more than not: but their quarries and mines are often worked by gangs of enslaved goblins and orcs captured in the incessant war with the hordes of the Dire Mountains.
The brutal poverty of almost all the cities and towns drives many to sell themselves into slavery, if only to eat; Elves, Fairies and Leprechauns never find themselves in these straits and are never to be found enslaved except by magic. Humans, Hobbits and Dwarves are not always so fortunate, and can be found in chains.
As alluded to above, one result of the endemic conflict between monsters and the "good" kindreds is that defeated monsters get brought into slavery. Aberrant monsters, dragons and other higher, magical monsters won't be: but goblins and orcs are virtually always slaves to begin with. Indeed, the great goblin armies of the northwest are made up of little more than slaves, as the whole hierarchy of goblinish society is based on enslavement by fear and force.
So should a character be inclined to buy a slave at market (by the point) they are constrained only by budget, conscience, and their ability to control their charges: a slave that can easily overpower its master is swiftly gone! Many characters, I think, will blench at enslaving a human, dwarf or hobbit - but not be so worried about a goblin slave; on the other hand, a warrior intending to employ a slave as a torchbearer in a dungeon excursion might be more inclined to buy a wretched human than to trust a goblin in the depths.
Bringing a slave along on an adventure is a dodgy business, though. What's to stop them from running at the first sign of trouble, or deciding to help out the opposition? The slave-owning delver will certainly have to make saves on CHA of appropriate levels whenever the slave has an opportunity to break for it, or turn; good treatment might help; promises of reward - either of creature comforts or emancipation - might instill a degree of loyalty. Mistreatment, a history of promise-breaking, or exceeding risk will work the other way around. I'm away from the rulebook just now, and forget whether it said anything about arming your slaves or having them fight for you; I'll think about that for later...
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