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[MDFification]

Hey, I don't want a dabbling gelder anywhere near me or my fort. I wonder what a gelder would make if they were a moodable skill.

A legendary eunuch.

[Col_Jessep]

Issun Dostust - Everlasting Torment. A leather thong menacing with steel spikes.

[k33n]

How do you get the goblins to stay in their cages? The last time I tried to trade prisoners away they just got tossed out of the cage as it was hauled to the depot.

They were in fact dwarfs. My own dwarfs.

[Gnorm]

So, is this your fort's new up-and-coming market?

[Ancalagon_TB]

Hey, I don't want a dabbling gelder anywhere near me or my fort. I wonder what a gelder would make if they were a moodable skill.

A legendary eunuch.

Thread victory! 

[wierd]

I was leaning more toward a masterwork emasculator.



But menacing with spikes of something, with a gilt handle, and encrusted with gems and elf bone.

[Baffler]

A slave should be worth more than 2, maybe 3 barrels of ale. It's easy to find it for the antebellum American South, but that isn't terribly useful information for our purposes. Does anyone know how much you could expect to pay for a slave in medieval times? It's surprisingly difficult information to find.

[smeeprocket]

It probably varied per region. I don't think they had standardized the value of slaves during that time.

[wierd]

IIRC, slaves were sold at auction in medieval times.  Much like horses, or cattle. 

The price for a slave was determined by how much the people in attendence of the auction were willing to pay, on a "per-slave" basis. Not all slaves are created equal; some had better work ethic, were healthier, had unique skills, etc. All contributed to the amount the people in attendance would be willing to pay for that slave.

[Baffler]

Well yes, what I'm looking for is any number at all really. Averages are possible for the antebellum south because it was carefully recorded in ledgers, but I can't find a single word on how much anyone paid for any slave before 1800, or rather before 1400 which is the game's general historical cutoff.

[smeeprocket]

yea I think the likelihood of finding that is slim.

Also, what kind of slave are we talking about?

[than402]

they were always relatively expensive, but the prices and how they were priced varied from period and region. in the ancient times young men were usually more expensive than women (in a mesopotamian archive in my history book, slaves were priced more than goats but less than cows and men were priced twice as much as women, if i remember correctly), since they could do more work. in the arab and turkish slave trade, women (especially caucasians) were generally far more expensive than men.

in dwarf fortress... well, judging from the worlds i genned slavery is not widespread at all, not even with several extra modded civilizations. i've seen, like, 20 slaves at most in world with centuries of history.

[LMeire]

Price on any good has always depended largely on how much of the good is already on the market verses much the customer wants the good. Dwarves are opposed to slavery so the value of a given slave on the Dwarven economy is negligible since they're just going to end up setting them free. The value is further decreased by the Dwarves' typically having good trade relations with Human empires, since Humans see slavery as acceptable and can provide their friends with a constant supply of a good they don't even want.

Culturally speaking, the reasons for their opinions on slavery probably has a lot to do with the labor types they require. Humans live above-ground with gigantic castles and tombs, if you've ever tried to build above-ground exclusively, you'd know that it takes having a lot of unskilled workers just to cut blocks and construct the outer defensive wall. Dwarves, by contrast live underground, they only need enough workers to dig out the negative space to be inhabited, and so most of their population ends up in various forms of crafting and soldiering.

In short, you're bound to get a low price for sapients as long as one of the negotiating merchants is Dwarven, because they're not going to see the value of forced labor and base the price entirely on the cage. (And it's not like selling the cage to Humans will realistically change that, your Dwarf already marked the slave as next to worthless, they'd be fools to correct him and have to shell out more cash for their killer deal.)

[wierd]

Indeed.  It would be interesting to see what legends mode says after selling historical figures to other races though, after a fortress retire.

[Baffler]

Okay, I think I got as good as I'm gonna get. Apparently at one point in 306, a byzantine merchant paid 50 nomismata (24 carat gold coins weighing 4.5 grams each at the time) per man in a market in Constantinople. In game a gold bar weighs 11.5 kg (source), which would be 2555 nomismata. Some more distasteful math shows that a gold bar should be able to get you about 50 slaves. A bar of gold in DF is worth 150☼, so by this metric a slave should cost... 3☼. Considering that's the same as a guinea pig, I don't think that's really the way to go.

A better way would be to consider the value of the labor that dwarf would do, for the cost of taking care of them. Dwarves are more clever on average than humans and goblins, the two races that keep slaves. Goblins probably don't buy their slaves though so I won't consider them here. They're also stronger, but their smaller size negates that advantage relative to humans. That means that they would gain skills as artisans more quickly than humans, making them valuable but traded on a relatively small scale.

As we all know, even the crappiest little stone crafts produce quite a bit of value for their raw materials and given a dwarf's long working lifespan and the relative ease at which raw materials can be acquired (excepting metals) means that a dwarven slave could produce quite a bit of value for their master, and their children as well. Slavery being illegal for dwarves would also choke supply, driving prices up even farther. I couldn't even begin to quantify any of that though.