A Response: An Open Letter to Erik Mona


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion

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If the Paizo tem want to remove slavery from the setting, that's fine, it's their game. What bothers me is this:

Erik Mona wrote:
Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change.

Slavery has been a part of the setting for a long time, erasing it without giving us a lore reason just feels lazy.


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Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

So I have complex feelings towards this topic. A lot of my characters, a lot of the character sof my players tend to be freedom fighters, people who fight back against Tyranny, and slavery.

That being said my table can still play our games and include those subjects. My partners and players who have used it as an outlet to confront anxieties about the past, as well as current issues can still do that.

From my understanding this isn't a lore retcon or change, this is a refocus and demphasis on the subject. Milani still exists, Lubaiko still exists, the bellflower network and the firebrand still exist. It's a shame we might not get more context or content for these things in the future but if that is the price to pay for more people to feel comfortable I I okay with that.

For some fantasy is that these things don't exist, for others it is fighting back in a world where you feel like you can make it not exist. At the end of the day both are admirable and desirable fantasies that can provide cathartic release and enjoyment for those seeking out those fantasies.

I personally find it easier to inject these kinds of conflicts into narratives as opposed to try and detangle and remove something that might be more interwoven into a story or setting.

And if we look at the context of Absalom, it's history in print, and heck even lost omens Absalom sisters products, "Agents of Edgewatch." There was a lot going on and a lot that could have done better. heck I can imagine the setting of Absalom specifically doesn't seem that inviting. It makes sense to perhaps take a step back, listen to feedback( something that has been ignored in the past untill it was too late).


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Cyouni wrote:

Well, I guess I'm going to stop quote-replying since I sense a removal-wave coming.

That said, Paizo clearly already wanted to address this issue, but trying to handle it diegetically was clunky and messy. This is really just them shortening the process.

I think that's a better way to look at this.

Paizo's initial approach to slavery was awkward at best. Their attempt to address that in-world had some good aspects but took a long time to develop and still leaves a bunch of nasty detritus.

Maybe, rather than making some ideological statement that slavery is always completely inappropriate in fiction (or at least gaming), they're acknowledging that they're not up to handling it well and it's better to just scrub it away than to keep screwing up.


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If I have a (probably selfish) hope, it's that slavery leaving Golarion doesn't mean that it's leaving Hell and the Abyss. Been playing WotR and kinda loved that it was willing to "go there" with a lot of subject matter, because, well, we are dealing with the forces of absolute evil. (EDIT: to be clear, I genuinely thought it created interesting and cathartic situations for my freedom-loving avatar. I'm not just in it for "the edge")

Besides that, slavery, and opposition to it, are coded pretty hard into a lot of factions, deities, characters and even mechanics. I respect that some things are more important than continuity though. Slavery is a cultural trauma I just don't share, and I can't speak to how its presence in a game (which is supposed to be *fun*, as people so often forget) impacts people who do share it.

At any rate, the "awareness" argument is total bull. Fantasy slavery didn't inspire me to learn about its real history, it just gave me a blank check to fireball bad guys.


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Barbarian Scholar wrote:

If the Paizo tem want to remove slavery from the setting, that's fine, it's their game. What bothers me is this:

Erik Mona wrote:
Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change.

Slavery has been a part of the setting for a long time, erasing it without giving us a lore reason just feels lazy.

It IS lazy. It is also the only way to do it without continuing the series of dumpster fires that are having to drag people kicking and screaming into the a world the doesn't center their personal experience to the exclusion of others.

It wouldn't matter if they provided years of context. People would still freak out about it because they NEED slavery to exist to connect with the game world. I know this because THEY HAVE SPENT YEARS DECONSTRUCTING SLAVERY ON GOLARIAN.

Scarab Sages

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Cyouni wrote:

Well, I guess I'm going to stop quote-replying since I sense a removal-wave coming.

That said, Paizo clearly already wanted to address this issue, but trying to handle it diegetically was clunky and messy. This is really just them shortening the process.

That's the real issue here. It's such a poor method of doing this. Have it happen as the product matures and the timeline progresses? We don't have any problems. Have a big Bellflower AP and Society season to boot. Slavery is a large and integral part of many aspects of the setting, just ignoring it also ignores those.

And then we top it off with Americans are weird about slavery compared to other evils, in a setting with elemental, planar Evil. Capital E Evil. It's weird, man.


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Angel Hunter D wrote:
Cyouni wrote:

Well, I guess I'm going to stop quote-replying since I sense a removal-wave coming.

That said, Paizo clearly already wanted to address this issue, but trying to handle it diegetically was clunky and messy. This is really just them shortening the process.

That's the real issue here. It's such a poor method of doing this. Have it happen as the product matures and the timeline progresses? We don't have any problems. Have a big Bellflower AP and Society season to boot. Slavery is a large and integral part of many aspects of the setting, just ignoring it also ignores those.

But then we get years of development before anything changes and then a huge amount of focus on slavery in their two main adventure streams, which is a topic they're already acknowledging they haven't handled well.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Paizo can do what they want, but I do disagree with their decision. As a counterpoint I look at Paradox in their development of Victoria 3 and the systems they are putting in around d slavery. They want to depict the true human cost, to show that ultimately slavery benefitted a very narrow slice of society a d those benefits were corrupting in nature.

I consider that far more noble. My old history teacher is looking forward to its release so he can use it as an educational tool.

Aside from that it also makes the world flatter again, one step closer to being less deep for me. The horrible institution of slavery bends and warps cultures and peoples, brings about inherently difficult questions about complicity and compromise (questions we struggle with to this day.)

That said PF2 is still the best fantasy rpg on the market as is, so I'm not going to say anything silly like I'm pulling support over what isn't a massive deal breaker.

And once again because apparently this is needed to say. Slavery is horrible, I don't endorse it and would condemn any that do.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

I have no issue with the removal of slavery from the setting. However, I would like to see it resolved narratively. There's a plot hook in pretty much every location that supports slavery to end it except maybe Cheliax. It seems like it would be straightforward to follow those threads and put an end to it.


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A key point that isn't being touched on much: There are absolutely ways to handle the topic in a sensitive and thoughtful manner. Paizo has just clearly refused to invest in that process and has just as clearly ignored/rejected the input of freelancers (and probably other dev staff, too).

This isn't coming from nowhere. It is the same lack of leadership as the rest of the nonsense around and being unwilling to listen to those that the leaders view as less important and possessing of less valid viewpoints than themselves.


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One thing to note is that this set of diegetic changes has been going on for years, because of how it was required to be diegetic.

The problem is that diegetic changes spanning years really sucks, because it means the problem is sitting there for years. And even after that time, it's still not resolved.

How long does this problem have to be in a diegetic resolution stage before it can be gotten rid of?


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Tender Tendrils wrote:
Paizo aren't even removing slavery from the setting - the open letter was a reaction to them ham-fistedly mentioning slavery 126 times in a 400 page book about a neutral-aligned city that is supposed to be a home base for PCs, and they responded by essentially saying that they will stop emphasizing it so much. They messed up and have admitted that they haven't demonstrated the ability to handle the topic appropriately, and that fixating on it so much was unhealthy, so they won't fixate on it so much in the future. It still exists in Golarion for those of you who absolutely need slaves in a story to get any enjoyment out of the game, and for those who want to do a "free the slaves" story or whatever, it's just the rest of us who don't need it to be mentioned on every 4th page of a setting book won't be subjected to it.

I believe that Paizo is, in fact, removing slavery from the setting in its entirety, unless I've badly misread Erik's response.

To quote (from the blog):

Erik Mona wrote:

Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change.

We’re just going to move on from it, period.

It's a complete removal. 100% gone from the setting, assuming there isn't some nuance I've missed.


Saedar wrote:

A key point that isn't being touched on much: There are absolutely ways to handle the topic in a sensitive and thoughtful manner. Paizo has just clearly refused to invest in that process and has just as clearly ignored/rejected the input of freelancers (and probably other dev staff, too).

This isn't coming from nowhere. It is the same lack of leadership as the rest of the nonsense around and being unwilling to listen to those that the leaders view as less important and possessing of less valid viewpoints than themselves.

It's not clear at this point whether this is the same problem or an acknowledgement of that problem.

Obviously, it could have been handled better in the past and that's definitely part of the broader problem. But what's the better approach now, even assuming the leadership approach changes and they did want to invest in it?


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I would be fine with the world being cleansed of slavery if it was done properly in a campaign, we still have the starstone test so we could have a campaign about devils trying to sabotage a new chaotic good mortal "maybe a female liberator" trying to ascend to cleanse the world of slavery like Iomedae was directly fighting the world wound, then it would feel better because the player would have a indirect hand in accomplishing it and because it would be part of the lore


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I think something missing from a lot of this discussion, which was brought up specifically in the letter, is that the issue isn't that Paizo included any elements of slavery from the beginning, it is that it included them badly, has continued to handle the issue of slavery badly, and in its effort to "do better" has too long a tradition of approaching the problem with a heavy dose of the "white savior complex."

The way slavery was introduced into the game was problematic because it romanticized colonialist views of Africa and the economic systems of the time periods when the Transatlantic slave trade developed. Retreating from that has resulted in many plots where the "heroes," a group that by almost definition has to be free of intimate ties to the immediate community experiencing trauma, got to free the slaves, as if the immediate end of bondage ever resulted in immediate free and open societies, and then either leave with a pat on the back or else insert themselves in the rulership of the society, usually in deeply problematic ways.

The alternative would have been trying to write APs forcing the players to forge those connections to the communities that are going to be overturning slavery (something players tend to hate) and then you likely create a situation where the writers are going to have an impossible time of threading the needle between too traumatic a depiction of slavery for people with immediate connections to real world trauma and the alternative that has often already pervaded the lore of Golarion, of casting slavery in too comedic or light-hearted a perspective.

All that said, I am curious, but also cautiously pessimistic about how this is going to play out in the lore. "Slavery" is not one unified historical system or economic system. In the US, it does almost always exclusively stand in for the Transatlantic slave trade and is conceptualized by the antebellum south, but the reality is that slavery is not even fully illegal in the United States (the 13th amendment to the US constitution never barred it from use as a form of state punishment and control). The project of "removing references to slavery" within Golarion is going to be fraught with complications and very difficult choices about defining what slavery is and what is getting too close to it for comfort.

I agree with the decision to make sure that there is never player facing options about participating in slave trade, labeling it a distinctly evil activity, and having every society in Golarion recognize that using forced labor leads directly to an evil afterlife without question within the complex planar system of the game.

At the same time, this probably means needing to take a very close look spells like domination, and charm person, which are as fundamentally as evil a spell animating the dead. And setting a line between "this story is engaged in slavery" and "this story explores the limits of free will and trying to make others behave in the best way for everyone" is going to continue to be a very difficult, very nuanced conversation that will continue to create problems for decades to come.

Importantly, these nuances and complications should not derail the more important decision here, which is for Paizo to admit that their attempts to portray colonization, and sweep slavery into that portrayal have caused harm to players, writers, and human beings that are a part of a community that we all are trying to foster, and that many bad choices were made in the development of the setting that need to be fixed. Where those choices might be too complicated for the writers at Paizo to fix on their own, it might be better to leave those as "blank spots on the map," so to speak, for tables to tell those stories in smaller groups that respect all the people involved in their telling, rather than the human beings at Paizo to try to set the record straight for everyone.

It is a very interesting choice, and it is one I hope works out well, but I think "removing slavery" from the Golarion setting is going to prove only fractionally less complicated than "removing the legacy of slavery" has been from the real world.

For starters, trying to define what is and is not slavery seems honestly beyond the scope of a single RPG company to do (especially one who has used the theme of slavery so badly in the past), so I am not really sure where you begin.


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Travelling Sasha wrote:
And I do hope that if slavery is actually removed narratively from the setting, that it’s mostly done by the people that suffer it, or/and the people of the country. That Osirion finally outlaws all form of slavery thanks to the relationship of the Council of Liberated Slaves and the Pharaoh, that the Bellflower Network and its allies has struck so many times successfully against the slaver institutions in Cheliax that the country has no other option but to ban slavery, that a thrall ends up becoming a linnorm king and strongarms the other linnorm kingdoms into outlawing slavery, etc. No “eagle knights swoop in to save the day”, pretty please.

I understand - correct me if I'm wrong - that from Erik's response, it's simply going to be removed from the setting with no explanation.

And I'll admit, it seems really strange that Cheliax, the Empire of Devils, a tyranny in thrall to dread Asmodeus (Who believes that the strong should rightfully govern the weak, who in turn owe their masters unwavering obedience), would abruptly stop practicing slavery.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

The two options for how it's handled without producing material about it.

A) slavery just stops around Golarion with no rippling effects on the societies it touches and with no struggle.

B) It's still happening but we just ain't going to talk about it ever again.

Neither of those are satisfactory ways to deal with the topic in my opinion.


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I mean, you can have all manners of oppression in your game world without literal chattel slavery.

Cheliax honestly made more sense as a place where halflings are paid poverty wages, restricted in what they can own, where they can go, what they can do, etc. than a place where there's literal chattel slavery. The latter requires extensive infrastructure to enforce, whereas "leave them to their own devices, but make sure they're poor, and lean on them regularly" is much cheaper.

The part of the diagesis that's curious now is Nidal, where they literally buy people for torture as parts of their religious rites. Huge parts of Nidalese lore are well below the Pathfinder baseline, though.

That's the sense in which I took the "we're removing slavery" announcement- there's the notion of the Pathfinder baseline where there are things that even if they take place in the setting (basically every horrible thing you can imagine takes place somewhere in the Abyss), there's a line that separates "things we will talk about" and "things we will not talk about." So all they're really doing is moving one thing to the other side of the line.

Like "sexual violence" is a thing that absolutely can take place in a fictional setting, and is absolutely a thing that Pathfinder books will not interact with, describe, allude to, etc. I think everybody understands that pretty well.


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Cyouni wrote:

One thing to note is that this set of diegetic changes has been going on for years, because of how it was required to be diegetic.

The problem is that diegetic changes spanning years really sucks, because it means the problem is sitting there for years. And even after that time, it's still not resolved.

How long does this problem have to be in a diegetic resolution stage before it can be gotten rid of?

And publishing has many different masters. Depending on the other products being made in any given publishing year, Paizo might only be able to move the destruction of slavery on Golarion forward a bit. Or sometimes not at all, if its a year where they also are publishing books about places that don't have it as an issue or adventures that aren't topical.

The Meta Plot of the setting is not suited to handle these kinds of issues. You can search for developer statements about how there are projects they've wanted to do for years, but other demands keep them from it.

Could the company devote resources to publishing content about the eradication of slavery in the setting? Yes. Would a year's worth of APs and sourcebooks about fighting slavery be a great product? That's a lot of landmines to navigate in a time when the company has a few PR issues. And even if that was what they decided they were going to do, that's at least a year before we see a single one of those products. At least. Paizo has its publishing agenda set anywhere from 12 to 24 months in advance.

No, just ceasing to mention it in print going forward is 1) Cheap 2) Easy and 3) Hurts no one.*

*I mean, probably. I have no way of actually knowing.


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I hope of they do get rid of slavery in the setting, it isn't done retroactively or arbitrarily. If it's done in a narrative way like Cheliax is defeated or forced to end the slave trade and similar effects around Golarian would be best I think. I don't like it, but I get it.


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The only way of going about removing slavery from the setting that I would approve of is having an in-story explanation, on the scale of an AP with the theme of "you get all the anti-slavery people together, burn every slave-holding nation to the ground, and throw a party on the bombed-out ruins of Egorian--er, Freedomia, sorry, and Cheliax is being renamed the Confederation of Libertopia."

I mean, doing that kind of large-scale societal change is difficult to do in an adventure, but it would be tons of fun. Get yourself a two-fisted lanky lawyer from Andoran in a stovepipe hat, a disaffected Molthuni alcoholic military genius who found owning a slave he was given so repugnant he bought the slave manumission papers the first chance he got, a former slave who freed himself and stole a Chelish warship to boot, and a veteran Bellflower organizer who knows the back-roads like the back of her hand, and go turn every regime that holds people in bondage into Georgia post-Sherman's march! That would be a blast.


Ian G wrote:

The only way of going about removing slavery from the setting that I would approve of is having an in-story explanation, on the scale of an AP with the theme of "you get all the anti-slavery people together, burn every slave-holding nation to the ground, and throw a party on the bombed-out ruins of Egorian--er, Freedomia, sorry, and Cheliax is being renamed the Confederation of Libertopia."

I mean, doing that kind of large-scale societal change is difficult to do in an adventure, but it would be tons of fun. Get yourself a two-fisted lanky lawyer from Andoran in a stovepipe hat, a disaffected Molthuni alcoholic military genius who found owning a slave he was given so repugnant he bought the slave manumission papers the first chance he got, a former slave who freed himself and stole a Chelish warship to boot, and a veteran Bellflower organizer who knows the back-roads like the back of her hand, and go turn every regime that holds people in bondage into Georgia post-Sherman's march! That would be a blast.

I don't think that is quite possible as you are not talking only about Cheliax but also probably about Kelesh based on the description of Qadira.

How can slave trade stop:

- Someone with enough power to enforce it says to stop.
Thats what happened in history when Britain stopped the slave trade through diplomatic and military action, but no single non divine source in Golarion is powerful enough to enforce that

- Lack of slaves
When slavery is tied to a specific ancestry like in Chaliax or being tied to military victories not being able to get more slaves will eventually stop the practice unless another source of slaves can be found

- Loss of value
Slaves, on a large scale, can only be used for certain types of labour. If the value of this labour is dimished by technological innovation or lack of demand of the things they produce then it makes no sense to continue to keep slaves

- Alternate and better source of labour
What (among other things) happened in Europe, instead of relying on slaves which had to be guarded and fed the society was transformed to get your own people to do the work with minimally more rights but less required oversight making slaves not needed as there was not much work left for them to do. Although serfdom wasn't all that nice either.


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I don't know if there's really a plausible way to end an institution due to the heroics of 3-6 spectacular individuals.

More likely the death of slavery in the inner sea ends via - countries that participate in slavery are surrounded by forces antagonistic to it, and eventually reach the decision that bringing people in and out via violent means is a lot less effective and profitable than simply establishing and oppressing an underclass and harshly restricting social mobility. Like "special laws that apply only to Halflings, and a judicial system antagonistic to them, plus prison labor" is a lot easier for Cheliax than keeping people in literal chains.


Is this something that will happen in the future with 3e? Or with 2e books going forward? Because it's a little too late for that. The CRB mentions it doesn't it?


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Y'all do realize that every word not spent on slavery (slavers, plot, etc) are words that get to be spent on different villains, plots, etc, right?

It's not like there's going to be a giant hole in the world suddenly, at least not any more than already exist with having a fantasy world that intentionally leaves space for future development and GMs to build their own spaces and stories.

Be like Elsa. Let it go.


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Ian G wrote:

The only way of going about removing slavery from the setting that I would approve of is having an in-story explanation, on the scale of an AP with the theme of "you get all the anti-slavery people together, burn every slave-holding nation to the ground, and throw a party on the bombed-out ruins of Egorian--er, Freedomia, sorry, and Cheliax is being renamed the Confederation of Libertopia."

I mean, doing that kind of large-scale societal change is difficult to do in an adventure, but it would be tons of fun. Get yourself a two-fisted lanky lawyer from Andoran in a stovepipe hat, a disaffected Molthuni alcoholic military genius who found owning a slave he was given so repugnant he bought the slave manumission papers the first chance he got, a former slave who freed himself and stole a Chelish warship to boot, and a veteran Bellflower organizer who knows the back-roads like the back of her hand, and go turn every regime that holds people in bondage into Georgia post-Sherman's march! That would be a blast.

There is a cost to this, though, and I don't just mean in terms of money. To do this kind of story well requires A LOT of research. There is an emotional toll that kind of work takes on the people doing it. I say this as someone who had to transcribe people's accounting of recovering from sexual violence. It is absolutely valuable work and, done well, can be transformative. However, you would be asking freelancers, designers, and dev to subject themselves to that kind of content long term. Given the number of freelancers from marginalized backgrounds, the toll could be immense.


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PossibleCabbage wrote:

I don't know if there's really a plausible way to end an institution due to the heroics of 3-6 spectacular individuals.

More likely the death of slavery in the inner sea ends via - countries that participate in slavery are surrounded by forces antagonistic to it, and eventually reach the decision that bringing people in and out via violent means is a lot less effective and profitable than simply establishing and oppressing an underclass and harshly restricting social mobility. Like "special laws that apply only to Halflings, and a judicial system antagonistic to them, plus prison labor" is a lot easier for Cheliax than keeping people in literal chains.

Put Another Way: Why do slavery when apartheid works just as well.

The ways of being evil and exploiting others are uncountable in their vastness.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
PossibleCabbage wrote:

I don't know if there's really a plausible way to end an institution due to the heroics of 3-6 spectacular individuals.

More likely the death of slavery in the inner sea ends via - countries that participate in slavery are surrounded by forces antagonistic to it, and eventually reach the decision that bringing people in and out via violent means is a lot less effective and profitable than simply establishing and oppressing an underclass and harshly restricting social mobility. Like "special laws that apply only to Halflings, and a judicial system antagonistic to them, plus prison labor" is a lot easier for Cheliax than keeping people in literal chains.

This kind of retcon though is basically just saying that the ways the harm and enduring trauma of transatlantic slave trade continue today are a safer space to continue to tell problematic stories about.

I strongly agree that an AP is not the place to tell the story of the end of slavery in Golarion, because putting that story on a small group of individuals is always going to cause more problems than it solves.

I think the real problem that has to be addressed here is that bad choices were made in companies past, choices like those made with the editorial choices in the heart of darkness book. The vast majority of criticism that I have seen directed at Paizo for their portrayal of slavery is really tied to their decision to basically try to include the transatlantic slave trade into their approach of creating historical-based settings. Correcting the problem really needs to specifically focus on that or else the company is just going to muddle fixing their mistake into a huge nebulous can of worms that is much bigger than the problem.

In that regard, I bet what Eric is trying to say is that they are going to go with more LO: Mwangi Expanse books, and APs like Strength of Thousands, and stop telling stories about slavery at all in the material that they are paying people to publish, leaving those stories for people to tell themselves with the pile of problems that the already existing material has left behind.


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It's really weird that so many people seem not to have read the original two posts, which are actually very, very clear about both the issues and the planned response.

First off, this didn't need to be a new thread. I'm sorry, but do we really need a second thread for arguing about slavery? This is the exact same subject. Just email it to Erik Mona and post it in the original thread we literally already had for this. Don't make more work for the mods.

Second... hoo boy.

Okay, so the original blog post was pretty explicit that the issue was not solely "they're implying slavery isn't evil" (although they were, and Erik Mona has correctly apologized for this), so can we please stop with the "nobody said slavery wasn't evil"? Many people did, and many people continue to, but that isn't actually the only thing the freelancer was concerned about.

The primary issue seemed to be that there were a bunch of white people centering in their fantasy TTRPG a deep source of collective familial trauma for African-Americans for the sake of cheap thrills for a majority white audience. It made the author and many others uncomfortable engaging with those adventures and those sourcebooks. Compare it to the fetishization of "slavery stories" by Hollywood, or male writers' obsession with including rape in the backstories for their female characters.

Slavery has been a cheap shorthand for "evil races" for a very, very long time--the Bekyar, drow, kobolds, hobgoblins, Chelaxians, Nidalese, and basically 80% of "evil groups" have been involved in forms of slave trading, even though in the real world, brutal chattel slavery was basically solely the domain of a small number of white nations and a large number of their colonies. And yes, other forms of "slavery" certainly existed, but none of them can easily be called "slavery" today, because the word has lost a lot of its nuance due to how viciously chattel slavery scarred entire cultures and subcultures across the globe. Please don't with the "but what about the Irish" or the "but Native Americans had slavery too!" Native Americans did not call it "slavery". "Slavery" is an English word.

In response, Erik Mona has promised to greatly reduce the prevalence of slavery as a plot point. He has explicitly not called for a retcon, nor to stop acknowledging the history of slavery throughout the world, only to deemphasize it in future installments.

Erik has indicated slavery will basically no longer be brought up as a present and active thing, and it's fair to contest that, though the sheer confidence with which so many white people have jumped up to insist that there is Nothing Wrong Here and the blog post writer is being Absurd is... troubling.

I am white, and obviously I don't think white people shouldn't be allowed to talk about this, but doesn't it feel a little weird to loudly declare that the blog post writer is wrong when you possess none of their lived experiences?


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burnout02 wrote:
Tender Tendrils wrote:
Paizo aren't even removing slavery from the setting - the open letter was a reaction to them ham-fistedly mentioning slavery 126 times in a 400 page book about a neutral-aligned city that is supposed to be a home base for PCs, and they responded by essentially saying that they will stop emphasizing it so much. They messed up and have admitted that they haven't demonstrated the ability to handle the topic appropriately, and that fixating on it so much was unhealthy, so they won't fixate on it so much in the future. It still exists in Golarion for those of you who absolutely need slaves in a story to get any enjoyment out of the game, and for those who want to do a "free the slaves" story or whatever, it's just the rest of us who don't need it to be mentioned on every 4th page of a setting book won't be subjected to it.

I believe that Paizo is, in fact, removing slavery from the setting in its entirety, unless I've badly misread Erik's response.

To quote (from the blog):

Erik Mona wrote:

Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change.

We’re just going to move on from it, period.

It's a complete removal. 100% gone from the setting, assuming there isn't some nuance I've missed.

I'm surprised I keep seeing this and no one (unless I missed something myself) replied with what Erik wrote on these forums.

Erik Mona wrote:

The mistake I made with the Absalom book is in dwelling too much on a very sensitive topic. Yes, the PFS plotline helped by removing legal slavery from the city, but I should have just let well enough alone, mentioning that it had happened in the timeline and then moving on to any of a countless number of other evils.

Instead I wanted to flesh out the context more, and make the change a more holistic part of the setting while still giving a few illegal baddies for people to kill.

The thing is, with this topic, that's too much. People just hate it in the setting period. We really should not have put it in there in the first place. Trying to deal with "phasing it out" within the context of the story adds fuel to the fire and makes people even more uncomfortable.

It's not worth it.

So while I suspect the word may come up a time or two in the future, we're just not going to be covering it going forward. A few in-production items might reference it still, but it's no longer going to be a notable part of the Golarion campaign setting.

If you want to write a big adventure where people burn Okeno to the ground to have it all make sense within the fiction of the campaign world, you are free to do so.

But we are not going to.

It's not gonna be "slavery no longer exists in the world", it's "we're not gonna make stories where slavery is in focus anymore".


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Oh, and please, please stop with the "oh so are we next going to ban demons and alcohol because all evil/controversial stuff is banned now? We're talking about slavery. Chattel slavery. Arguably the worst and most heinous crime committed by the American government and American people, rivaled perhaps only by the genocide of Indigenous peoples in sheer magnitude of atrocity. Its evils continue to shape the lives of countless individuals whose families were scarred by the system of slavery, while the United States has emerged as a world superpower in large part thanks to the immense wealth and power slavery brought them--wealth that remains largely in white hands to this day.

Please do not compare it to alcohol, or to fantasy demons. Please do not suggest that every single bad thing is equivalent to a topic like slavery. Very few bad things really are.

Golarion has not been in a hurry to feature Holocaust imagery, nor a convincing counterpart to the AIDS epidemic. I appreciate that.

But whereas an AIDS retelling would likely not literally target gay and trans people, probably implementing a metaphor like "magic" or "lycanthropy", Golarion's slavery problem has explicitly been a major element in the continent we all know to serve as "fantasy Africa". Sargava and the Mwangi Expanse, the actual setting of the second installment of a well-known AP, feature actual slavers and systemized slavery as well as a literal apartheid government that is explicitly white people dominating Black people. No metaphors, no cheeky allusions. The AP featured literal enslaving of the fantasy equivalent of Africans. You fight abolitionists! I'm not joking!

Please stop making dishonest comparisons. It's telling.

EDIT: And again, because people are being frustratingly direct in their "rebuttals", the issue isn't "the game features the enslaving of black people, and that means the game endorses the enslaving of black people". The issue is "the game features the enslaving of black people, and that's an enormously traumatic and upsetting topic to casually and carelessly toss around in a game we're playing for fun, and white gamers don't seem to care or even understand why it bothers black gamers."


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I do have to say, it's pretty weird how much more often "slavery" comes up in the context of Golarion compared to other fantasy settings we set games in.

That is for sure a thing worth addressing and fixing.

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