Just Make Slavers The Bad Guys

     As I'm writing this, there are two main Hullabaloos I'm aware of in the RPG scene. One concerns the upcoming 5.5 release of Dark Sun, and one Luke Stratton's Pirate Borg continuing to trip on the same rake over and over. Now, lots of thinkpieces have been written about both, and I promise I'm not jumping into that again, but something did strike me about each: 

    In an interview with TTRPGinsider, Greg Billsland talked about how the grit and grimness of Athas would be present, but without slavery. "You don't have to have slavery in a setting if in order for it to be oppressive...There are other forms of oppression out there.” In the opening matter of Pirate Borg, it says the following: "Pirate Borg is a game about grog-swilling pirates, undead galleons, arcane treasures found in ancient temples, and high seas adventure. It's not a game about slavery, sexual violence, genocide, or any of the other abhorrent real parts of our history. Please treat the topics with the respect they deserve, or leave them out of the game altogether and go hunt some skeletons." Both of these are admirable sentiments from a game design perspective: if you're trying to make a fun adventure game for more people to enjoy, it makes sense to preemptively cut out parts of the setting that you know might upset folks. However, I would like to offer an alternative that the attentive reader might have gleaned from the title:

Just make slavers the bad guys.

A painting depicting a scene in the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history.

    This isn't exactly a hot take-Dungeons and Dragons has been doing it since 1986. And I'm not even talking about it in a "Let's make D&D woke" way. From a both a ludic and ease-of-prep perspective, "Slavers" (construed broadly as people who enslave other sapient beings either to profit off of their labor or sell them to someone else) make for fantastic elfgame villains. Even operating within the default rpg framework of kill and extract, there's a lot to be gained from making slavers the opponents of your heroes.

Diversity Win!

    "Slaver" has an advantage over creature types, whether that be something as narrow as "Orc" or "Hobgoblin" or as broad as "Undead." Slaver is a job, which means anyone with an Intelligence score can do it (and those without can still function as henchmen). This means you as a GM still have access to the entire monster manual, with an extra built in motive (profit!) that you can use to spice things up. In addition, because slavery can happen basically everywhere, this means you can send your heroes to different biomes pretty much whenever you get sick of one! 

    Speaking of those heroes, abolitionism as a political movement has tended to attract all types, but it means your party is united by a singular (and presumably militant) ideal. Just pulling from the history of my own country, people like Harriet Tubman and Robert Smalls are badass figures that are worth pulling inspiration from when crafting your heroes. Even beyond those more famous individuals, the history of abolition is full of a million small heroisms and sacrifices that are worth learning about for their own sake. 

Different Stakes

    One of the things you see most often, especially among newer GMs, is "My players lost a fight, now what?" The combination of fights in Stock Elfgames being especially lethal, combined with the general loop being that the heroes never lose, means that there isn't really a defined thing to do if the heroes lose. Slavers, as opponents, have a solution to this baked into their very identity. What do they do if they defeat the heroes? They enslave them. Now obviously this is something that can have its own myriad pitfalls, and generally speaking no one comes to the table on a friday night seeking an introduction to the brutal realities of pre-industrial labor, but it doesn't have to go that far. Just let the players stage a breakout! It's the best episode of Andor for a reason, just pure unwavering catharsis. 

    In addition, there is often a worry of letting players meet the final villain too early, lest the players fucking murder them. Fiction in general tends to be highly personalistic, with defeating the bad man stopping the evil plan-you destroy the One Ring, and Sauron's army collapses. Slavers, on the whole, can be both personalistic threats (individual enterprises) or massive sprawling institutions, where your Cutler Becketts can hide behind layers of security without making it feel like a cop-out. Of course the head slaver isn't out in the middle of danger-they're at home, enjoying their riches and doing accounting.

Moral Clarity

    I promised I wouldn't moralize, but I figured I'd put this out there. There is a contingent of roleplayers who just want to be able to enact wanton violence on an enemy group and take their stuff without really worrying about moral complications. To that, I suggest slavers are the perfect candidates for being slaughtered en masse-they're groups in the process of doing something pretty much everyone on earth can agree is wrong, and most importantly they chose to be there. There are no slaver babies to worry about.

There is, in fact, an ongoing John Brown isekai. I can't vouch for its quality, but it definitely exists.

Conclusions

    Obviously, this is still working within the Standard Kill and Extract framework outlined above, and there is a case to be made that something as serious as the historical evils of slavery shouldn't be put into a hack-and-slash campaign experience. But I do think there is also potential room for, if not catharsis, then at least low-guilt violence and easy prep work. If you want to dig deeper into the actual historical realities of these systems (and I think you should), I recommend Jennifer Morgan's Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic for a look at the process of dehumanization the victims of the transatlantic slave trade underwent, and Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom for a comparative study of two systems in very different parts of the world, and how the material and cultural conditions of both affected each other. Ultimately, I feel like ignoring the horrors of our world and our history is akin to a diet of nothing but spun sugar-ephemeral, and making folks feel worse about discomfort than injustice. It is only by acknowledging and facing that history that we as a people can move forward. And hey, in the meanwhile, there's good inspiration to mine for rpg antagonists.