Interpreting Canon Demons.

[Isator Levi]

]
Oh on the whole Selling Neomah created babies into slavery thing?

I'd say that most slave traders don't bother putting in the time for that, but there are a decent number that regard it as enterprising to do so.

Uncle toms Cabin contains a reference to a baby being sold for $50

Well sure, and accounts of American slavery on the whole are filled with references to families torn apart.

It seems to me that we get fewer references to women being repeatedly forced to become pregnant as an additional source of slaves for work or sale, but it's still documented. It's at least one thing that refutes arguments of slaves being an expense that outweighs the value of not paying them.

probaly not as much as the trader lost when the mother in despair commited suicide

There was never a ship that crossed the Atlantic that didn't lose some human cargo to suicide or simply the conditions they were transported in. It's just that the overhead on slave transport was low enough compared to the price they could go for that you'd still make money as long as you got enough of them.

It's similar for work gangs on the plantations or mines. As long as you've got enough and any given one is kept for enough years, then the occasional death to brutality or suicide doesn't mean you lose money, just some profits, and you're still likely making quite enough.

That book will emphasize such an example because it was written to promote abolitionism, and undoubtedly there were people whose trauma led them to suicide, but we still have the accounts of innumerable former slaves that had children taken from them and continued living with that. It's horrible, but in the calculations of the slave owner it is perceived in terms of lowered financial risk.

[Prince of the Night]

Yes, if you include references so we know where to look for more details.

TINSIANA, the Scorpion Demons (Compass of Celestial Directions: Malfeas p150) progeny of LUCIEN, Guardian of Sleep (The Books of Sorcery Volumn V: Rolls of Glorious Divinity 2, pg 64.No, idea. The Guardian of Sleep clearly helps those in power sleep peacefully by hunting down rebels. He's not the Sandman.

He keeps Sachaverial asleep by hunting down rebels since if Sachaverial ever awoke it would be a disaster.

I'd say that most slave traders don't bother putting in the time for that, but there are a decent number that regard it as enterprising to do so.



Well sure, and accounts of American slavery on the whole are filled with references to families torn apart.

It seems to me that we get fewer references to women being repeatedly forced to become pregnant as an additional source of slaves for work or sale, but it's still documented. It's at least one thing that refutes arguments of slaves being an expense that outweighs the value of not paying them.



There was never a ship that crossed the Atlantic that didn't lose some human cargo to suicide or simply the conditions they were transported in. It's just that the overhead on slave transport was low enough compared to the price they could go for that you'd still make money as long as you got enough of them.

It's similar for work gangs on the plantations or mines. As long as you've got enough and any given one is kept for enough years, then the occasional death to brutality or suicide doesn't mean you lose money, just some profits, and you're still likely making quite enough.

That book will emphasize such an example because it was written to promote abolitionism, and undoubtedly there were people whose trauma led them to suicide, but we still have the accounts of innumerable former slaves that had children taken from them and continued living with that. It's horrible, but in the calculations of the slave owner it is perceived in terms of lowered financial risk.

Can you believe Jefferson Davis called 'African Servitude' "Confessedly the mildest and most humane institution in history to which the name slavery has ever been applied"

[Isator Levi]

He keeps Sachaverial asleep by hunting down rebels since if Sachaverial ever awoke it would be a disaster.

This has to be one of the Second Edition revisions I like the least, for how the reasoning behind it can only be either really weird or just a colossal misreading of him in First Edition.

To whit, in his original write-up, Lucien's primary remit is that he disposes of rebels, traitors and rabble rousers that might disturb the sleep of the mighty. Fitting enough to the described qualities of Cecylene, and aligned with some of the functions of Orabilis. This made him well suited to the task of keeping Sacheverell asleep (by specifically targeting phenomena such as things trying to pray to him directly and similar oddness), because it's how he do; much the same as how Berengiere was tasked with using voice stealing powers to preserve the respectful silence around a tomb or earthquake dance lady was sent to climb Mount Meru to do something strange and mystical. It wasn't explicit, but reading between the lines and some other comments Jenna Moran, it's apparent that giving such tasks to Second Circle Demons is part of how Yozis operate.

In my opinion, having conflated a bunch of this into "everything Lucien is about is solely concerned with keeping Sacheverell asleep, because mortal agitators rebelling against mortal magnates disturbs that Yozi for some reason" was just.... soooo dumb. Apart from that, it really reduces the scope of what Lucien is about and utilised for, and conversely makes Sacheverell seem like a much bigger deal than it really deserves.

Can you believe Jefferson Davis called 'African Servitude' "Confessedly the mildest and most humane institution in history to which the name slavery has ever been applied"

Yes. Slavers are liars.

[Prince of the Night]

This has to be one of the Second Edition revisions I like the least, for how the reasoning behind it can only be either really weird or just a colossal misreading of him in First Edition.

To whit, in his original write-up, Lucien's primary remit is that he disposes of rebels, traitors and rabble rousers that might disturb the sleep of the mighty. Fitting enough to the described qualities of Cecylene, and aligned with some of the functions of Orabilis. This made him well suited to the task of keeping Sacheverell asleep (by specifically targeting phenomena such as things trying to pray to him directly and similar oddness), because it's how he do; much the same as how Berengiere was tasked with using voice stealing powers to preserve the respectful silence around a tomb or earthquake dance lady was sent to climb Mount Meru to do something strange and mystical. It wasn't explicit, but reading between the lines and some other comments Jenna Moran, it's apparent that giving such tasks to Second Circle Demons is part of how Yozis operate.

In my opinion, having conflated a bunch of this into "everything Lucien is about is solely concerned with keeping Sacheverell asleep, because mortal agitators rebelling against mortal magnates disturbs that Yozi for some reason" was just.... soooo dumb. Apart from that, it really reduces the scope of what Lucien is about and utilised for, and conversely makes Sacheverell seem like a much bigger deal than it really deserves.

.

Fair Enough I like the whole Catastrophe it promises. Lucien working Tirelessly to prevent it I think thats why I applied a false romantacism to him.

Yes. Slavers are liars.

Not sure which is more disturbing that hed tell such a blatant lie, or that he may have actually believed the garbage he shat out...

[Isator Levi]

I like the whole Catastrophe it promises.

Certainly I'm fine with the idea that there's something ominous behind the prospect of Sacheverell awakening when it's referred to as a scenario that neither gods nor Yozis desire. I just think it's better suited as something lurking in the background to be picked up on and given a particular way of playing out as desired, or else just hanging out as a neat strange detail to the higher agendas of Hell.

Lucien working Tirelessly to prevent it

I don't even necessarily think him being stuck working on that project constantly is incompatible with my preferences for him.

It's more a case that I like the angle of the Second Circle Demons that they've got their own stuff to deal with, their own aspirations, in addition to the tasks foisted off on them by the Yozis. So Lucien might have to put in a lot of time to eliminating the specific things that stir Sacheverell, but doing so is taking time away from what he'd prefer to be doing. It creates a certain tone, and can provide an additional dimension to engaging with the stronger demons, as helping to relieve their Yozi-given burdens or doing as they'd wish in their stead can be a bargaining chip for them.

In particular to give a hook to the matter of how the majority of sorcerers can't bind these demons. I've always been annoyed by references to what the Second and Third Circle Demons are summoned for that never seemed to fully gel with the fact that there were only ever maybe a couple dozen people at a time who could do that. With Workings introducing a capacity to bring them up but unable to bind them, I think it's worth emphasizing what demons want personally and their obstacles to getting that to let Terrestrial Circle casters establish a quid pro quo.

That and the parts where demons have perspectives and interests that cause them to offer services voluntarily to people with no direct power over them. Lucien who eliminates rebels because it's what he's into is Lucien who's more likely to show up in the private apartments of some troubled king and establish a working relationship than the one who's doing that stuff to keep a distant Yozi asleep.

I think I've basically never seem people talk about Ligier as having ever showed up to provide his smithcraft services to some mortal, when to me that's a super intriguing thing about him. By the time I come along somewhere around late Second Edition his characterisation seems to have largely been overtaken with conceptions of "slightly less ultimate badass than the Unconquered Sun" and "tuts at Malfeas for dancing". I finally get around to reading Games of Divinity and I'm like "why do you people care so much about how he feels towards a Yozi? Why aren't you sharing stories about the game you had featuring a kingdom protected by a fire breathing brass bull that the Green Sun made for them three hundred years ago after the king gave up his newborn child to be sealed within it?"

[Isator Levi]

And even once you get past all the people trying to stop you, your society is just going to be not that good, on an economic level (as well as the moral one!). There's pretty good evidence from history that slave societies get out-competed by free ones. In the United States, for instance, the northern states before the Civil War were significantly more economically developed: more industry, more agricultural production, more trade, and more immigration and population growth, compared to the southern states where slavery was common. And the reason's pretty obvious when you think about it. Slaves have no reason to work harder, to innovate, to do anything beyond the absolute bare minimum they can get away with without punishment, and the more motivated and innovative one is, the more likely they are to put that energy into escaping, not working to benefit their master. Whereas free workers have incentives to work harder and develop new techniques, since it directly contributes to their own success.

I want to come back to this point for a moment, because having watched some recent things concerning the American Civil War I think it's worth considering fallacies in conflating a free society with an industrialised one and in presuming that industrialization is incompatible with slavery.

For a start, for all that the Civil War represented a growing gulf between the northern and southern states, it bears noting that they were initially a much more culturally and economically interconnected unit, and that the conditions that allowed for the more commercial northern economy did owe a lot at the early stages to capital generated by the mass scale agriculture of the south, including financial institutions that did a lot to facilitate slave transactions. Sometimes you get Confederacy apologists talking about the expense of purchasing a slave, but that conversation doesn't often seem to include the logical follow up of "so it really helped to have banks that offered loans with reasonable rates".

If it's phrased like the paragraph above, it kind of comes across as a statement of two discrete societies having made different choices about how to organise their economies with the northern one being superior, rather than the north being less suited to intensive agriculture and so specializing in other economic functions up until a point where some of these distinctions had an ideological component (and a realpolitik one given how the three-fifths compromise contributed to giving slave states disproportionate representation and how that informed agendas to limit the extension of slave states).

Now sure, the manner in which the northern economy was specialized meant that they were well-placed to transition to mechanised industry, but the problem I see in referring to the northern economy as a free one by definition is that the industrialisation was really dependent on workers who, considering the conditions they would operate in, had to necessarily come from the underclass. You know, the urban poor and immigrants, people who are still better off than slaves but in the grand scheme of things not by many steps. Sure, there freedom is the kind of thing that provides them with a platform to agitate for better conditions, although for one thing the priority there isn't so much making the economy better as it is their essential human dignity (even if it is apparent that human dignity does ultimately make for a more robust and diverse economy for a variety of reasons), and for another that agitation was fought every step of the way by bosses and politicians by methods that I still think aren't fully appreciated, the severity of strike breakers and the outright assassination of labour leaders.

But considering the key point about just how much of an underclass the initial industrial workers were, I've been moved by the arguments that in a society that already has a major investment in slaves the transition to industrialisation is just one in which the factory workers are... slaves. There might be some theoretical arguments that slaves make for poor industrial workers, but I think those ideas ultimately falter in the face of reports of what Asian sweat shops are like. Workers in there may not be slaves per se, but they're certainly unfree, and we can still see the manifestation of the old school overseer with the lash when we hear tell of foremen savagely and openly beating workers who don't make quota regardless of paltry things like being heavily pregnant at the time. We also see how unfree labour contributes to the level of construction that can create a modern city in the petrostates of the Middle East, with the migrant workers that are basically held prisoner and often literally being worked to death. People who are also not technically slaves, but in the absence of any substantial spending power, sympathy from the authorities or capacity to cross the borders again legally, have virtually no options but to continue the labour they were recruited for while being under no illusions about what they'll get out of it.

Now to bring it back up again, sure we ultimately know that a society in which a greater proportion have the means and motive to engage in things commercially, but that kind of depends on caring about people on the whole, society as a unit. Economies run on slavery may be less robust and their middle classes may be markedly smaller, but that class can still be pretty damn prosperous, while the upper class that owns the slaves can still be tremendously wealthy in a manner quite disproportionate from the world at large. You know about from the plantation houses of the American south, ancient Rome's economy was run on the labour of slaves and the broad image of their lifestyles is a poster child for the word decadence. Medieval Europe was run on a different form of free labour, and I feel as though the legacy of 19th century Gothic Romance has created a pop culture image of what the aristocrats of the time were like that has crowded out just how lavishly they lived. Like, I think it's possible there's never been a representation in film or television of just how gaudy the trappings of a tournament could be.