Relics of the Crusades Questions--Slavers

RotC p.36? wrote:

Slaves will generally be ill-treated by a slave merchant. If any slave achieves the ‘Lad’s got the Talent’ advance, then the slave must make a leadership test. If it is passed then the slave merchant sees some potential and loyalty in the slave and frees him. The slave retains his statistic line though his type is changed to caravan guard. This means that he now may become a warband leader and loses all the special rules associated with being a slave, such as stupidity etc.

However, if the slave fails his leadership test then the slave  merchant is displeased with his outspoken property. The slave  obviously needs to learn his place and the overseer sets to it with  relish. After the screams and begging ends, the slave is nigh immune to pain and obeys his master without question. The slave is removed from your warband list and becomes a new eunuch in his own henchman group. Roll advances for any slave left in the
henchman group as normal.

The promotion of slaves in this warband is kind of annoying.  The slave switches character class which seems straightforward except that you can only have 3 Caravan Guards or 3 eunuchs.  So...if a LGT slave is now a Caravan Guard, can you have 4? Or is he freed only if there are 2?

And of course the same applies for eunuchs if you already have 3, which is less likely, but not unheard of.

I must point out that the other Arab warbands in the Relics campaign all have a rule that a slave may become a hero, but stays a slave, which is much simpler.

I have no idea if playtable kept track of the number of eunuchs who were freed slaves, but playtable came to me when he finally rolled low enough to create a new Caravan Guard.  We just went with now there are 4 Caravan Guards.

Any thoughts?

For myself I am annoyed at how fiddly the Slaver warband is.  I once chided a forum member for trying to write an 'evil' slaver warband, but now I understand the need.

Tricky one. RAW means you would lose one of the limited spots. However, I think it would be better/more fun to treat this as an additional warrior that does not impact the warrior type limit.

Thanks for the reply RL.

Given the crappy beginning stats of slaves, I would think that the author would have just included the same rule as the Arabian Tribes (especially since I think that uniformity of rules, at least within a campaign setting, is a virtue.)

Relics seems to be another of those campaign settings that its hard to get feedback on. Not really a surprise I suppose.

And another question came up or at least an observation.  The Slavers warband may have up to 20 warriors.  The theoretical (in light of the first question in this thread) limit to warband members means that you must buy slaves as equipment in order to fill out the numbers of the warband because you may have only 1 leader, 3 Caravan Guards, 1 Overseer, 3 eunuchs, 1 ogre and 3 hounds.

So in order to get to 20 models a warband would have to buy 8 slaves among a possible 6 heroes.  Which must mean that a hero can buy more than one slave, right?

Which also means that other warbands could buy more than one warhound per hero, right? Assuming that they would want to do such a thing and stat within the warband maximum number of warriors to do so.  So like an Orc hero could buy a few warhounds instead of Boyz or gobos...

Also could a Slaver or Witch Hunter buy another warhound or two as Equipment over the warband limit (of warhounds)?  Since its Equipment now.

This is a new concept to me, which is why I bring it up.

Again I think the Slaver warband would be so much better it the slaves were just an warrior type with special rules.