Slaves are not like other commodities. They're human beings! Suffering slaves or brainwashed imperial slaves. But in game, slaves might as well be tobacco or onionhead - just another thing that's illegal some places. We have two anti-slavery faction leaders, but it seems the only way it shows up in the game is that you can't buy slaves in their systems. I think this is a major opportunity to make the Elite galaxy more interesting. I'm using slaves here for both imperial and regular, unwilling slaves.
There could be all kinds of anti-slavery groups. Some use all legal methods, some are non-violent but will break the law, some are violent, some are full-blown terrorists. Some wouldn't mind much if you killed slaves, as long as you got the bounty on the slaver; others would be really mad. No penalties for leaving slaves floating in space - explicitly or implicitly, you called activists to pick them up. If the power plant went critical, some might forgive you for the accident, others would give you a paltry reward and tell you to be more careful in the future.
A lot of these could be reversed if you want to play an evil slaving character.
Flavor text changes:
More involved changes:
What are your thoughts? I think that these could add a *lot* of immersion for relatively little effort on Frontier's part. I want to free slaves for blue-haired Space Khalissi!
There could be all kinds of anti-slavery groups. Some use all legal methods, some are non-violent but will break the law, some are violent, some are full-blown terrorists. Some wouldn't mind much if you killed slaves, as long as you got the bounty on the slaver; others would be really mad. No penalties for leaving slaves floating in space - explicitly or implicitly, you called activists to pick them up. If the power plant went critical, some might forgive you for the accident, others would give you a paltry reward and tell you to be more careful in the future.
A lot of these could be reversed if you want to play an evil slaving character.
Flavor text changes:
- Quests. Where [imperial] slavery is legal, hand in slaves to an underground railroad contact or smuggle them from station to station along the underground railroad (safely cryothaw them here, cut out the tracker there, medical treatment elswhere...). For a twist, you could be taking imperial slaves who don't want to be freed to deprogramming.
- Support slave rebellions. It's a minor faction of anti-slavery rebels and ex-slaves (anarchy/communism/democracy) v.s. a slaving faction (corporate/feudal/dictatorship). It could follow regular civil war mechanics. You could smuggle in weapons (or military advisors), kill the slaving faction's warships, and liberate slaves from cargo ships (more soliders). For regular slaves only - I don't think imperial slaves would rise up. Could be for a station or a system. If one station is held by freed slaves and another by slavers, you could have some very interesting missions between them...
- Anti-slavery groups - powers, minor factions, minor factions allied with anti-slavery powers - give extra large bounties for the crime of slaving. The simplest way is to match certain names - e.g. Saul the Slave Breaker, Politus the Pimp, Marius Manwhipper - to a big implied slaving bounty.
- Powerplay with slaves. You could undermine slaving powers by freeing their slaves, but also fortify by delivering freed slaves to a system - regular slaves at least would be happy to fight for their liberators. Mechanically, slaves would be just another powerplay item delivered to power contacts.
- Freeing slaves could effect the local economy. Taking them out of a slave economy would lower the supply of their products (less slave labor). Dropping them off in a free economy would increase the supply of their products (cheap, happy labor). It could be a subtle reward - traders can free so many slaves that they create an excellent trade route.
- Free slaves ship to ship, reusing NPC "follow my wake" and pirate mechanics. Meet activists in deep space and drop off your cargo of slaves. Fight off the agents of slaveholders along the way. Distract superior bad guy ships long enough for them to scoop the slaves.
- Community goal where the commodity is slaves you're freeing (or returning to slavery). Maybe we're creating space Liberia, colonizing a new system. (Hopefully it turns out better this time.)
More involved changes:
- Players can free slaves instead of selling them anywhere in anti-slavery faction space. Because it gives money to slavers, you get a small reward if you bought them and a large reward if you... liberated them from someone's ship. As it's the moral high ground, it should pay less than selling slaves. It could give you merits, lots of local influence, raise your influence with ALL anti-slavery factions (if you're a consistent liberator)... any ideas? There's another thorny issue: how does system defense force tell whether you're bringing in those slaves to sell on the black market or to free them? Easiest implementation might be a quest that's always there and spawns over and over instantly.
- Track down a ship of imperial slaves who don't want to be freed and are "escaping" from their rescuers back to imperial space. Disable the ship (shoot out its drives or powerplant) and activists will pick up the slaves (either on or offscreen). The mechanic could be reused for all sorts of non-lethal combat missions.
- Standing bounties (paid by Winters, Aisling, and neighboring minor factions) for slavers. Any pilot scanned carrying slaves or with a slaving warrant is fair game (at least in Imperial space for Feds and vis versa - like how Lincoln freed slaves in the confederacy before the union). You'd still get the murder bounty if e.g. it was a respectable, legal slave trader in Torval space. You could lose most/all of it if you killed all the slaves. The bounty would be higher than usual because (in-universe) it's in addition to other crimes and (out of universe) to make up for the increased effort to not kill the slaves.
What are your thoughts? I think that these could add a *lot* of immersion for relatively little effort on Frontier's part. I want to free slaves for blue-haired Space Khalissi!
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