Slavery in the Green Coast

Most were probably expecting this to be in last week’s post, but its deserving on a post of its own.

The hobgoblins are infamous for their practice of keeping members of other races as slaves. The only races that are not kept as slaves are gnomes and halflings. The noble families amongst the northern gnomes have an agreement with the hobgoblins: the gnomes remain free to conduct their archaeological digs while the hobgoblins get any magical items found after they have been cataloged. Halflings on the other hand are not seen as being worth the expense and are simply killed or fed to the warbeasts.

Life of a Slave

For most slaves, life is short. Slaves in the empire have few rights, and at any point a hobgoblin may kill them without imprisonment. The worst punishment that a hobgoblin will receive for killing a slave is a fine paid to the slave’s owner. Unless seen as unusually valuable, most are fed to carnivorous warbeasts when they are no longer capable of performing their labor. It is telling that in the hobgoblin dialect of Goblin, the word for “slave” is the same as “tool”.

     Most slaves are expected to work from dawn to dusk, with a break in the middle of the day for their first meal and a second meal after they finish work for the day. For most slaves their meals consist of water, stale bread, and a few root vegetables such as turnips, carrots, or radishes. Slaves in professions that require larger muscle strength such as smithing or military service can expect an eight ounce steak at least once every other day.

     Male slaves that survive to maturity and perform well are bred with female slaves with traits that are deemed to be a suitable match. Orcs and elves are most often bred with humans, for half-orcs are better capable of understanding complex commands and half-elves don’t take so long to mature.

     Some Rune-Scar Magi purchase slaves specifically for experiments in hybridization. The ritually scarred hobgoblin mages have performed hybridization attempts both mundane (human/dwarf, elf/orc, etc.) and magical (dragon blood magically merged with that of a slave, merging of human and bison to create minotaurs). Nearly all such experiments have failed, and the few successes have all been sterile. Most Rune-Scar Magi feel that sterile beasts are not good enough.

Reward of Escape

     Occasionally a slave musters the courage to try to flee. Most fail before even leaving their master’s property, but a few manage to avoid the guards to make it into the wilderness. They then head in one of two directions: south or west. All but one or two a year are captured before they manage to slip past the Empire’s borders into the Free Counties or Glastig.

     Those that are captured are brought to the capital, to the Coliseum. While the Coliseum normally features teams of slaves pitted against each other or against beasts, when an escaped slave is brought in, a team of five gladiator slaves is told that the one that kills the attempted runaway will receive triple rations for a month. The runaway is armed only with a sword with the blade broken in half.

     Sometimes, a slave manages to kill the team set against them. So a few days later a new team is pitted against the runaway. Should the runaway emerge victorious, the process repeats with the bets on the slave growing larger and the challenges increasing in difficulty. The goal at this point is no longer to kill the runaway, but to have him serve as entertainment.

     The teams of slave gladiators typically live through their bouts, after-all the performance training that they go through is not cheap. While not as expensive as training a soldier, gladiators are still an investment and their owners want them to live long enough to see a return on their investment. To make fights more interesting, most gladiators are trained in weapons impractical for open warfare (two-bladed swords, net and trident, and paired long blades are the most common).

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