Slavery Lore

[Illustrious]

So I'm thinking of making a mod* based around converting a special new custom follower into a slave. I love messing around with the mods on LL (you guys are great) and the experience I've enjoyed the most is slowly convincing a follower to submit. I do this by role-playing: escalating a sexual relationship with a follower by slowly adding more restraints, piercings and tattoos over time. You should see what I did to Iona!

 

The fabulous 'Sex Slaves' does this in its own way, creating a framework that will work on every follower. I'd really like to make a mod which does this more by dialogue and quests which necessitate creating a specific character to base it all around. I don't plan on creating many new locations or NPCs and I'm also trying to avoid heavily scripted events so theoretically it shouldn't be that ambitions to make. I'm sure all the experienced modders are rolling their eyes at this point, but I think I can create a vanilla-esque Skyrim quest which ties in routine ways to LL frameworks.

 

This is not a WIP thread for my mod, instead I have some questions for you guys about how slavery might fit the lore of Skyrim. Every mod has its own take on it. I think 'Slave Girls' is a great mod that compliments stuff like 'SD+' very well but it is a little goofy. The idea that anyone of any rank can be made a slave at the drop of a hat doesn't fit with my idea of Skyrim. So I have some (a lot of) questions about what you think 'realistic' slavery might be like in Skyrim.

 

1: Given the dialogue that buying Breezehome for 5000 gold is within the price range of one, what is the average wage of a guard?

 

2: By comparison what is the average wage of a miner, meadery worker, sailor, ect? Most NPCs will give the player 100 gold in their will, which suggests most people have a few hundred in savings and the value of their estate.

 

3: A mercenary can be hired for 500 gold. Technically you could play years of game time and they'd never leave you or ask for more money but I feel that the lore is that this is a wage for a certain period of time. What is the wage of a mercenary, 500 gold a week? A month?

 

4: What are favourite towns and villages in Skyrim that you feel are underused by LL mods? Lovely though it is I think we all agree Whiterun is saturated, I always thought Dawnstar was cool.

 

Serving a week in jail for butchering half the town is clearly the nature of making Skyrim a functional game. However the rough conversation of 100 gold or a day in prison is interesting. For example, if you use the 'Unofficial Skyrim Patch' then Brand-Shei only spends a short time in jail for theft before being released which fits this model.

 

Most prisoners in Skyrim are permanent however, but this can be justified when you factor in class. The only noble or rich person in jail is Sibbi Black-Briar and he's only in there because his mother insisted. Whilst its a little strange, lets go with the idea that a noble person can kill a commoner and simply pay off the crime.

 

So let's roleplay it and say the Dragonborn is an exception. Let's assume that they have unlocked their dragon shouts and everyone is depending on them to save the world so they'll get let off major crimes with only a short time in prison. Here are a list of crimes and the fine attached to them.

 

Theft: half value of stolen goods

Trespassing: 5 gold

Disturbing the jarl's peace: 10 gold

Pickpocking: 25 gold

Assault: 40 gold

Horse theft: 50 gold

Escaping jail: 100 gold

Murder: 1000 gold

Lycanthropy/Vampirism: 1000 gold

 

5: How many days in jail should a commoner serve for each of these crimes?

 

6: Skyrim has the death penalty. Presumably this isn't just for being an accessory to the murder of the High King so what should the threshold for this be? Murdering a noble? Accruing a certain level of debt?

 

The crux of my mod's lore is that whilst no one is born a slave in Skyrim a person can elect or be forced to become a slave, perhaps instead of serving a long time in jail. Obviously, a serial murderer couldn't be trusted and wouldn't be allowed to become a slave, and an old person might be of little value as one.

 

7: How much debt could a person accrue before the person they owe force them into slavery?

 

8: How many years in prison would be a person need to be sentenced to before they could be made a slave instead?

 

9: Who are the nobles of Skyrim, the people partially above the law and the only ones allowed to own slaves? The jarls and their families of course, but who else? The Black-Briars? The Silverbloods? The Grey-Manes?

 

10: What is the value of a slave? Are different races worth more? I think 'Maria Eden's value of 2000 gold is pretty good, more than a horse but less than a house.

 

11: What mods do you run to 'fix the reality' of Skyrim? I'm not thinking of stuff like 'Wet And Cold' or 'iNeed' which enhance the game, rather stuff like 'Perseids Inns and Taverns - Realistic Room Rental Enhanced'. I use the basic version to just adjust the prices of inns to be realistic.

 

12: Would the Imperials be slavers and the Stormcloaks not? Would the Thalmor see winning the Great War as a licence to enslave mankind as they see fit?

 

Lover's Lab is super rad, thanks for the mods guys! I know this is a lot of questions so I appreciate anyone who answers them. This is my first thread, I apologise if broke some forum rules or put it in the wrong place or something.

 

*This should probably goes without saying but a newbie saying they'll make a mod means there's a 99% that'll nothing will happen or at most a broken alpha, if that.

[WaxenFigure]

#11 http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/47989/? -- Adds back the missing towns/cities

 

#12 Neither the Imperials nor the Stormcloaks have embraced slavery but the Thalmor practice it and as such have been introducing it through another clause of the White Gold Concordant that allows them to keep their slaves and traffic them throughout the Empire even though slavery is otherwise still banned in the Empire/Skyrim no real legal way to make a person a slave there).  You can then source slaves through the Thalmor who may make slaves of surrendered foes but take them far from their home to serve.

 

Will that work for getting started?

[Jexsam]

Slavery isn't really "realistic" in Skyrim at all. The last confirmed slaveholding race were the Dunmer, but that was virtually exclusively Khajiit and Argonian slaves, and the practice has since been eliminated (largely in part to a group of pissed-off lizards violently annexing a large swath of Morrowind after another large swath was decimated...).

 

The Thalmor don't practice slavery as such either. They employ Bosmer and Khajiit as servitor races, little better than slaves, but they don't, say, run plantations with Bosmer picking cotton all day. They certainly don't traffic in sentient races. They do enslave Goblins, but that fact isn't really relevant to the topic as it stands.

 

Any slavery that takes place in Skyrim would be extremely clandestine and largely outside the realm of law - bandits and such, perhaps some evil sorcerers, etc.

 

Sex slavery could happen, though again very clandestinely. Being marched through the streets of Whiterun in shackles with degrading things written on them is just not going to happen without somebody getting arrested for something. Any sort of human trafficking would have to be kept tightly under wraps and well away from the eyes of the law. It could be taking place all over Skyrim, but in very small quantities and absolutely not out in broad daylight.

 

In other words, without extraordinary care and attention to detail, "slavery" and "lore-friendly" simply can't exist in the same mod.

[afa]

I feel like the whole gold worth and wages thing was discussed elsewhere in another thread. Another approach to the problem would be to estimate how much a commoner need to survive a day. Say the price for a night in the inn, and two meals. A homeowner will be above that. Merchant + their home maybe a little higher still (but could be a story element, merchant falls on hard time, etc.)

 

There are definitely a few well to do families in Skyrim, usually in the bigger holds, Battleborn, Greymane, Black Briar, Silverblood, Cruel Sea, Shatter Shield, Free Winter, etc.

The really shady ones are definitely Black Briar and Silverblood

 

"Proper" slavery would likely not exist as a lawful thing in Skyrim, but underground trade, an off the beaten path locations, some indenture servitude, debt/blackmailing might not be hard to worm their way into it.

[Illustrious]

Thanks for the replies, guys. The debt idea is particular useful. I've gotten 75% of the way through making my first mod but fuck Creation Kit. Can't use CTRL + F4 to fix gray face bug and now it can't compile scripts. Ugh, I'll try again another time.

[daedal]

I think riverwood is underused.