Summer is over. I don't really like summer as a season; I don't do well in heat and leaving the protective confines of the Bay can lead me to immediately perish. (Scotland is, it seems, just a very large version of the same thing, where the warmest day I experienced was maybe 82?)
But I do like summer as a social thing; perhaps this is inherited from reading Jane Austen. I'm much more willing to go out and do things--like trek across Europe--in bright light.
But it's nearly September now, which means I'm returning to my hole. It's hazy and gray outside. I have added another pair of Chuck Taylor's to my wall. I nearly have a rainbow and it would be the only rainbow I've any interest in seeing for the next 6 months. It's time to leave the sensuous real world and return to the hallucinated realm of letters and symbols.
Let's discuss something I'm utterly unqualified to speak of:
The New Dark Sun Might Not Have Slavery
I've seen a lot people I respect writing about this in detail. I've seen people defend it, but mostly argue against it, saying that Hasbro is motivated purely by what's easiest to market; trying to widen the appeal of this inherently-niche setting as much as it can allow for. I get why this might bug people. I've never played Dark Sun but I gather that its themes are inherently opposed to the general idea of soulless, extractive corporate dominance over a long-beloved IP.
I entirely get any particular person having their own comfort level and tastes and I will never say any combination of those things is wrong, especially for a game, and especially for a *social* game. So if people want a high fantasy game where there's no racism, sexism, whatever-ism, good! They should do that. I do! Everyone does. Find what you find interesting and fun and stick with it, sure.
But there's one behvior I've observed that I admit I don't really understand. Almost without exception, when people argue that Dark Sun should probably keep slavery, they start by saying it's important to the setting. This makes sense; it is extremely counterintuitive to create a premodern dystopian setting that doesn't include some form of slavery--a system that existed in various forms in essentially every civilization in human history.
But that isn't what interesting to me. It's a world with wizards; I can accept that it's also based on a system of free labor. There's nothing particularly hard to swallow about that; it's surprising and nothing more.
What catches my interest is how many people then go on to say some variation of "I want slavery in my game so my players have something to fight against." This is sometimes elaborated on; it almost aways contains stories about players fighting against slave lords, coming up from slavery, or some combination of the two. I've never seen someone just say, "I want slavery because I think it adds an interesting texture to the world."
I want slavery because I think it adds an interesting texture to the world.
Let's qualify that
I don't "want" slavery. Obviously, I hope it's needless to say. And I don't want any form that looks too similar to the chattel-style slavery that continues to haunt American culture. I am not trying to roleplay Django Unchained. But yes, if I was writing a game in a dystopian bronze-age world, of course I'd want slavery. Along with god kings, sacred bulls, holy virgins, blood rituals, priests wearing flayed skin, statues of conquerers built from the bones of men who dared to stand up to them.
And no, it wouldn't be so the players could overthrow it. Maybe they would--maybe they could, if they managed to acquire the power. But that wouldn't be the inherent goal of the world; much in the same way the goal of a traditional fantasy adventure isn't the overthrow of the monarchies and creation of democratic elven republics.
The expectation is not, in my experience, that a party of heroes ever banishes all the demons from the material world, or strikes down and eliminates every necromancer, or teaches every barbarian raider about emotional regulation and the importance of restorative justice. Nearly all stories center around a series of minor crises leading towards a single great conclusion; it might save a town or a kingdom or a god from elimination but they only rarely create some kind of great cultural, moral revolution. I've never even seen that discussed other than the occasional tongue-in-cheek joke about how traditional fantasy favors aristocratic governance.
But the moment people bring up slavery morality becomes by far the most discussed point. And I think that's interesting.
I'm not saying it's wrong. I must repeat: play the world you like! Play the world you feel comfortable playing in! This is a game and one with a group dynamic, so there's a very real need to make sure that nobody is being asked to stress themselves out with themes they don't find compelling.
But there's nothing morally dubious about having immoral systems in your world. In fact, it's almost necessary. Slavery has a strong moral valence in modern politics, but that's an artifact of society, not some divine mandate. People accept that depiction is not endorsement in nearly all other forms of art: it remains true in this one.
You don't even need to fight it. Sometimes it's okay to just have it be there, part of the world. Your party can see slavers and the enslaved; they don't need to act as if they live in the year 2026. I would be careful and follow the same caveats you find in any "playing an Evil PC" discussion: some players are weird as hell and you might not want to include them in your game. If a guy really, really wants to own slaves, that's kind of weird. But if you're playing a game where you kill people with swords regularly, often over property disputes, you've already left the realm of modern morality. It's okay to sometimes see slave girls dancing for a warlord and have your barbarian character enjoy it. They probably would! That was the world they lived in!
(Aside: people often talk about their role in a post-apocalyptic society and I can assure you if I were to survive at all, it would almost certainly require someone with a bit of muscle to murder my enemies for me, so it's important we keep the Slave Dancer concept alive in the popular imagination. There are worse fates.)
You Don't Need Anything
Slavery is a thing. It can be fought against, ignored, it can lurk in the background or be brought very much to the foreground. Your world doesn't need it and if you don't want it, don't include it. But don't feel like you have to cut it out or make fighting it the "point" of including it.
You don't need violence. You don't need liches or spellplagues. You don't need to ever depict any immorality or unkindness in your world. It's always a choice.
Keeping slavery is a choice. It isn't inherently immoral to make it and you don't need to defend it. People who don't want to play around in that world won't; those who think it could be interesting will. That's how fiction operates, how it has always operated, and how it will continue to operate. A world without evil, without cruelty, and without inequality can be great for a cozy game about cats baking cakes. I've played one, and it was fun! We had a nice time and it left fond memories.
But I would also enjoy a world with bleached bones, blood-spattered ziggurats, and masked god-kings being carried by a column of muscular slave-warriors; men who feast on the flesh of sanctified virgins. Maybe we'll kill him after a year of grinding guerilla warfare. Maybe we'll merely watch his army process past us at a distance, grateful they are not headed towards our humble village. Maybe we'll be forced to buy from him an ancient scroll that his fathers have kept locked away, the only copy of the incantation that will open the gates of a forbidden and best-forgotten tomb.
We don't need to. We could play checkers or just scroll our phones. But we might want to, and see what happens. And I think any of those could be great.
