[Rq-rules] Slave Skills - Social RolePlay Experiment

[Den, Tony T]

I was having a chat with a friend about the different type of characters people have played over the years. More recently, there has been a bit of a leaning in my group towards pre rolled characters. Kind of if the GM wants to run a short adventure and needs a party that is tight and focussed. I blame myself really because I started with this and it has snowballed. But I digress.....

The postulation is that of a party of 15 years olds (or there abouts). The characters are all slaves and have either been born into slavery, or have just been slaves for a long time. Depending on whom their master(s) are and how they are treated, they could come with a whole bunch of pre determined issues. EG: They were humans taken slave by orcs when they were around 5 years old. Some may remember being small and free, some not. Some may hate their masters, others may have "become orcs" through conditioning and abuse.

The adventure can start in a couple of ways, off the top of my head: - they are freed after their master meets his untimely death (like in Slàine and the Shoggy Beast 2000AD comic mid 1980's) - they could run away - they could have rebelled etc etc. (A lot of this may depend on their slave personality). 

Anyway, to get to my point, if I ever run an adventure like this, what are the general skills a slave is likely to have acquired. Unless they were lucky/unlucky enough to have been chucked into a fighting pit like in the Conan The Barbarian movie, they would likely have zero weapon skills. However they may be very good brawlers (Head but, fist, kick, grapple) from fighting for food. Having lived so long, perhaps their stats could be juiced a bit, STR and CON (and perhaps INT) come to mind. They may have also taken a beating, so APP and maybe DEX (broken bones) could also have been negatively affected. A few skills may have been learned by the type of slaves they were, whether they were put to work farming barley for ale, or building a road in a civilised land. But what other skills may they have gained - on the assumption they were not afforded much freedom/were kept chained. Agility skills would be low, Communication, hmm, so so (is there a follow instructions skill:) Knowledge would prob be low, bar any crafts/lores they may have picked up. Manipulation I think could be good, depending. Perception and Stealth I would think would have been researched/experienced well enough t be pretty good. Magic, reckon zero there.

What does everyone else think?
Tony

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