Yamaneko2's page

Also, bad things will not necessarily happen to a character three levels behind the rest at Level 4/7. The other players can adjust the party's marching order and formation to keep the Level 4 character safer, or they can make sure that the weaker character is properly buffed.

Two solutions if the player returns:

1. Have the character play at the 4th level, and take heart in the fact that the new player will advance more rapidly than the others. You have not mentioned that this is Pathfinder Society, so it is assumed that experience points are awarded as in the core rulebook.

A character at the midpoint of Level 7, Medium Advancement, has 43,000 xp. The laggard at the midpoint of Level 4 has 12,000 xp. One-third of Level 7 is about 5,300 xp.

So, after the first mixed-level session, the rest of the players are at 48,300 xp while the Level 4 character gets promoted to Level 5, with 17,300. The part-timer should catch up in a few sessions, especially when reality forces the regulars to take a week off.

Session 2: 5300 xp award, Regulars 53,600/L8, Part-timer 22,600/L5
Session 3: 8000 xp award, Regulars 61,600/L8, Part-timer 30,600/L6
Session 4: 8000 xp award, Regulars 69,600/L8, Part-timer 38,600/L7
Session 5: 8000 xp award, Regulars 77,600/L9, Part-timer 46,600/L7
Session 6: 10,000 xp award, Regulars 87,600/L9, Part-timer 56,600/L8

2. The part-timer gets gold equal to the amount that he would have received during the adventure. Then let the player roll d%. Should the player roll 01-80, the character gets 5,000 xp. Should the player roll 81-00, the player dies but can be raised under the usual conditions and costs. (Other players can chip in, if they like.) The player may repeat this roll until his character catches up to the group, or may stop at any time.

We should not make an exception to the rule "slavery is evil" in a role-playing game just because it was tolerated in older societies that we may use as models. Here is a short list of other things that were tolerated, defended, commended or even enjoined during the medieval, Renaissance and industrial ages.

1. Abandoning babies on trash heaps
2. Burning heretics at the stake at an auto-da-fe
3. Torturing suspects on the rack or with hot irons
4. Pressing suspects under hundreds of pounds of weights to force them to enter a plea
5. Trial by ordeal: the suspect sticks his hand in boiling water while a Paternoster is said. If the hand fails to putrefy in three days, the suspect goes free. Otherwise the suspect is executed.
6. Hanging a thief for stealing two shillings (fifty cents) worth of ribbon
7. Whipping people through the streets for professing the wrong form of Christianity
8. Dogfights, tying cats' tails together and hanging by the knot as they clawed each other to death, bear baiting
9. Queen Elizabeth I's Coronation festival centerpiece: filling an effigy of the Pope with cats and burning it.
10. Ethnic cleansing (the Greek-Turkish "population exchanges" of the 1920s, forcing American Indians into reservations (USA) or cheating them into reserves (Canada))
11. Forbidding unemployed and starving people from leaving their own county.
12. Exporting grain from a starving island, then stigmatizing the islanders as "lazy".

A fantasy realm indulging in any of these would be labelled "evil" without a second thought. Thus, there should be no reluctance in labeling the keeping of slaves as evil.

This granted, the best way for a paladin to fight slavery or any other evil might not consist of charging into the slave pits with swords drawn. Spartacus tried that, and thousands of his men were crucified for their trouble. John Brown tried it and too many frightened slaveowners across the South took it out on their own slaves through torture and murder.

Quori is quite right to say that slavery was recent in our history. In fact, it evolved into serfdom during the Middle Ages, and from there evolved into tenant farming.

The Renaissance, while sparking many advances, also marked the regression of Western societies into slave societies. When the Americas were "discovered", Indians were forced into the "encomienda" system in which Indian populations were made to contribute a set number of laborers to be worked as the "encomendero" saw fit. This was serfdom, but with the "innovation" of working the serfs to death. When Indians died from overwork, Africans were brought in to fill their place and whatever reluctance the conquistadores had in selling Indians like cattle did not apply to selling Africans. Labor shortages in North America led to a similar solution of buying and selling black people; in Virginia chattel slavery evolved from indenture.

The form of slavery practiced in the Americas was comparable with relatively cruel forms of slavery in the Roman Empire. Slaves could be bought and sold. Unlike medieval slavery, the master was under no enforceable obligation to treat slaves humanely. The system of gang labor over cash crops was the standard on New World cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations; in Rome such labor was on the cruel side of the spectrum. Some of the innovations of Caribbean slavery (instruments that made it impossible to lay down or drink water) would scandalize most Romans.

In other terms, a cleric fulminating against cruelty to slaves and serfs in 1100 would get a polite hearing. A cleric fulminating against cruelty to slaves in 1770 Jamaica or 1840 Georgia would be driven from the area, possibly with a coat of tar and feathers.

So, it would be in perfect keeping with the times for characters representing periods analogous to the High Middle Ages in western Europe to regard slavery as a practice limited to barbarians, despots and "infidels".