I have a query (also, woo first post.): Will slavery be put into the game? It was a very important part of how the British empire became what it is today, and it was very important during and leading up to the Victorian era. If you do do it, how will you make it not completely-rascist-and-utterly-inappropriate? If human slaves won't be in the game, there'll still be the demonic variety I suppose!
It doesn't sit especially well with me. One option would be to apply the same philosophies behind CE to slavery, making it rather lighthearted. I don't think anybody would accept a lighthearted depiction of slavery, so that isn't really an option. You could integrate slavery into gameplay, giving it economic benefits and social penalties. But yet again seeing the human attrocity that is slavery reduced to a population happiness modifier seems wrong as well. On the furthest end of the scale you could present slavery in all its horror, but that would clash with the lightheartedness of the rest of the game. At this point I feel that I should clarify what I mean by lighthearted. Normally an eldritch factory that eats hope and churns out fleshbricks would be pretty horiffic. However CE manages to make that seem hilarious, which I think is down to how lighthearted the game is as a whole. TL;DR: I really don't think slavery should be a part of CE. Either you trivialise it or it clashes with the rest of the game, neither of which are particularly desireable.
Well you could make a certain kind of slavery. After you defeat other seatlements (for example in multiplayer) or defeat some of their people you take them prisoner. Some of them decide to join you rather than live in prison and are now handeled as "cheap labor" till they prove that they are worthy to be people of the empire. So after a certain time of "slavery" they become normal members of your society. I think that´s far enough from every form of real slavery to be added to the game without bringing any kind of negative press.
I remember back when Age of Empires III was being developed that they had a similar situation with the Native Americans. They could have told an accurate historical tale, but that would have been far too brutal for the tone they were going for and so they simply included the Natives as a people you could establish trading posts with.
I'm not an official spokesman in any capacity, but knowing David, the answer to this is "Absolutely not"
Now, I'm going to add to this by saying that I don't support slavery in any form, and thing that it's a disgusting thing to do to a human being. It just occurred to me that it might be an issue that they had to face, if they wanted the historical accuracy. I expected the answer to be no, but thought it was worth asking anyway.
I'm not familiar with the history of the steampunk era. Is there a resource where I can read real facts about the world history period where an empire used steam-powered armor and zeppelin shock troops to combat eldritch coffin-horrors? I would be flabbergasted if Gaslamp, after going to such extensive pains to make Dredmor so ... politically neutral is a good phrase, that they just dropped an issue into CWE that cannot, ever, be taken in a neutral fashion. It would be a huge pile of negative publicity/potential ill will no matter how it was treated, and add little to the game in return.
Slavery doesn't fit well into industrial era setting because machines replaced cheap labor and thus the need for slaves.
Yeeeaah. Oh, boy. It's a bit before our period of history being taken for inspiration (which is approximately Victoria through Edward). At least for the British Empire. On paper. If we did some kind of United States inspired faction, the question would become more relevant and troublesome ... so anyway, we can kinda dodge the issue a bit on that ground. At the center of this and related issues is the fact that the Victorian period is crammed full of a lot of inhuman horribleness and it's a bit ... insensitive, at the very least, to make a game of it. At the same time one doesn't want to make a totally white-washed version of history as that surely does injustice to the memory of victims of said horrible history. And surely one can make a game that portrays events & actions that one does not approve of, depending on how it is handled. Happily, by the way, we are not actually a historical game so we have a ton of leeway to just Make It Up here that, say, Paradox Interactive doesn't have. So while I do think CE will be a rather darker game than both Dredmor and our blog posts seem to imply and we will try to ... address certain excesses of the Victorian period with some kind of dark humour, the short answer to slavery is "no". Getting the correct tone and choosing content which is appropriate and giving that content an appropriate angle is extremely tricky for a game like this. There are whole matters of, like, presenting something that is condemned somehow by the authorial voice versus what gamers actually do in the game, etc. To say the least, we're putting a lot of thought into how to get it right. TLDR: "No."
Yeah, dealing with sensitive issues like this in games is usually a bad idea. The only way I envision that kind of stuff not being atrociously awkward is through : 1. Pure Fantasy world : orcs being slaves in Warcraft doesn't matter, you can hardly relate that to any historical context. 2. Unpersonal Numbers : in Victoria II, there is of course slavery, but you don't have to deal slaves as characters. They are but numbers on a sheet. At the same time, the game is eventually pushing you out of slavery reason as the more progressive ideas take grounds in the world. Additionally, as a pseudo-historical game, it can't really go around the difficult topics of the era, or it would lose its purpose. 3. A very specific setting that is there to make a point : i don't have game names to illustrate, but a movie like Django (didn't see it, don't care), very specifically want to deal with such an issue, 1. CE though is heavily inspired from a real world era, and the people in question would be humans too. 2. CE is focused around the characters of your settlement, if there were a few slaves mixed in, it would feel very awkward. 3. It is simp;ly not the case here.
To be fair, slavery isn't limited to colonialism or to white/black. Just about every historic civilization from Egyptians to the Vikings to the Persians had slaves. And people of all races have been slaves. Heck, slavery still goes on today. You could probably find a reason to include slavery in any game that intends to model pre-modern civilization. But given sensitivities on the issue it would certainly be distasteful. Well, there probably is a way to do it in good humor. Say that you go the evil route and start building obelisks to the elder gods and enslaving the native diggles for free labor and meat cubes. Such an action could have a random chance to spawn a diggle Moses to release plagues of locusts on your towns or a Dijiggle the Unchained to start killing your citizens. Actually that'd be kind of cool.
What makes this particular period of slavery all the more ugly, and especially to us over here making a game, is the ideologies of racism and racial hierarchy that were developed alongside it, the effects of which are very much with us today. Fair or not, it'd be far easier somehow to make a game about a slave-holding society from two thousand years ago rather than two hundred.
The more insiduous effect of those racial ideologies, and a reason for their application to early american colonies, was to prevent indentured laborers from Europe from uniting with imported chattel slaves (actually, chattel slavery was introduced in part as a mechanism to keep the two apart, wasn't it? And early african slaves were relatively better off) by creating a class division inbetween the two that otherwise did not exist. This could perhaps be captured with a different arbitrary metric that's less sensitive. Like preventing the urchins and peasants from uniting with the diggles by applying some kind of artificial social divide inbetween the two and giving the humans special priviledges to give them a stake in preserving the status quo. Essentially, a single hated group to help keep the lower class loyal to the existing social order is all that you really need. I vote diggles.
So, there actually will be diggles in Clockwork Empires? I can jive with that I suppose although it IS unexpected...
Speaking of American slavery, it wasn't until 1655 that slavery was legally established. So slavery in the US happened a good 100 years after the premise of this game. Until that point, there were only indentured servants who became citizens after serving out their contract. Chattel slavery would have followed that I believe. Here is a link to the first legal slave owner and the trial that led to legal slavery if anyone is interested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist) . The first legal slave owner was an indentured servant from Africa who fought to prevent one of his servants from buying out the rest of his contract. The man, being African, was later determined to be an alien and had all his property seized by the state. It would be a sad story if he wasn't the first legal slave holder in the US.
Well, one possibility to consider is shifting, the, well... metaphysical setting, a bit? So, these colonists are coming from, more or less, AU Victorian England. But in the interests of Not Making A Genocide Simulator, having them going to the equivalent of the places Europeans actually colonized is next to impossible without either depicting genocide as committed by the player, or whitewashing the atrocities that went with real-life colonialism. I don't know how much better/worse, this idea is, but a different tack you could take: -Background: The CE / other equivalents of European colonizers already did try colonization like what happened in the real world. In this history, however, though they do manage to exploit much resources and wealth initially, they're somewhat quickly overthrown and pushed out rather than subjugating and conquering. Subsequent wars and repeated invasion attempts are bloody, but the would-be colonizers don't really succeed. -The erstwhile colonial powers are still holding their imperial ambitions, however, and are determined to seek out much more land, wealth, power, and dominance whatever the cost; the attitudes that led to the atrocities of colonialism are still very much there and definitely something that can be reflected in newspapers etc. -In light of these ambitions, the CE in particular has, through whatever combination of 'science' and Faustian bargains with Invisible Geometers etc, been trying, if they can't go invade other humans' lands, to colonize Friendly Nearby Realities. Earth is twisting, new routes are appearing to places that weren't, the geometry and geography aren't right, and the Clockwork Empire is at the center of it all, the crossroads between the real Earth-like world and these increasingly stranger and more sinister shores, and all the horrors and abominations and whatnot that lurk beyond So this also gives a nice twist to other things: that narrative of colonizers going out to those strange, unknown, magical, horrifying lands to bring Order and Civilization was actually a really racist one, but this sort of flips it on its head; while relative to its Reality-Displaced colonies, the CE is a beacon of order and stability, to pretty much everyone else on Earth it's the exact reverse: the CE is a metaphysical nexus bringing forth all these horrors and creeping evil forces into the rest of the world, increasingly distorting reality. And the CE, it seems, is actually becoming inhuman: from colonists who Came Back Changed by eldritch forces, increasing integration of automata and machinery into people or replacing people - and hell, that machinery and stuff isn't like normal, real machinery, it's manufactured by demons out of twisted nightmares or something, and sure doesn't act like normal, real machinery does. And so on. I don't know if this idea IS really better, if it doesn't end up whitewashing too much or what, but it appealed more to me than either realistic depictions of colonial atrocities or AoE3-style things where it's the same setting but just pretending it didn't happen.
your math is off I think. The Victorian era centered around the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901 roughly 200-250 years after you're date. Most of which coincides with the abolition of slavery in the US and after abolition across most of Europe and it's colonies. In truth I'm not even sure why this is a discussion, steampunk is about mechanization, probably the primary driver of the abolition of slavery across the civilized world. I don't see the need to even consider it, all it would do is garner unnecessary controversy with the only 'benefit' being a less focused experience in the game itself.
