A few years ago we took the decision to remove slaves from all the battlefields in Empire. None of the barbarian forces that the Empire faces utilise slaves on the battlefield and no volunteer will ever be asked to play one. Everyone taking part in Empire must not assume or indicate that any player volunteer is playing the part of a slave.
===Reasoning===
Slavery is part of the fabric of the Empire setting, in part to reflect the morality of the nations that make use of it. The Druj are not evil because that’s their D&D alignment, they’re evil, in part, because they enslave people. Likewise the Grendel, the Jotun, the Jarmish, the Asaveans, the Surrani - the various ways they enslave other people is one of the things that makes them bad guys in the campaign.
In recent years we’ve pushed slavery to the background in new plots we written partly because the discussions within the Empire were largely settled by the creation of the Liberty Pact but mostly because both slavery and prejudice were counter-productive as a source of plot as it became clear that it made some players very uncomfortable to roleplay with. We don’t want to sugar-coat our setting, but we do want players to enjoy engaging with the plots in the game, so it did not make sense to keep foregrounding these issues.
Partly to reflect that change, we took the decision to remove all slaves from the uptime battles that we run. They crept into the game as a way to give roles for players who couldn’t wear a mask for whatever reason - a way to justify the presence of human enemies on the battlefield. However it became clear that players were being asked to roleplay being a slave even when they were not comfortable with that. We want everyone who participates in Empire to enjoy the events, but it is particularly egregious for white participants to direct roleplayers of colour to take on such a role after they’ve indicated they’re not comfortable with that. Once we identified the problem we introduced new battlefield roles for player volunteers to portray instead of playing slaves and issued guidance to all our crew to stop directing any volunteer to play a slave.
We incorrectly assumed that those changes would be sufficient to address the problem where players were being directed to portray slaves on the battlefield. Unfortunately, it has become clear that that is not the case. Because of the sheer scale of Empire, a lot of information is communicated from one participant to another, and as a result this problem is still happening. Players are still experiencing incidents where other players are assuming that they should be roleplaying being a slave.
So we want to take this opportunity to try to make as many people as possible aware of the change to the setting so that this problem stops happening. All the enemies the Empire fights employ human allies on the battlefield in some capacity. None of them employ slaves on the battlefield. No player volunteer should ever roleplay that another player on the battlefield is playing an enslaved character. On the rare occasion that a plot involves interaction with someone who isn’t there freely of their own choice, their presence will be explicitly called out in the brief for the skirmish or battle, and the role will be played by members of our full time crew who have volunteered to take on that role because they’re comfortable playing it. Everyone else, including everyone portrayed by a player-volunteer on a battle, is there of their own free will.
Photo by Tom Garnett
