>Why do nomads need male slaves?
To be honest, they don't. In almost all primitive societies getting captured by your enemies was a very bad thing. If you were male it was typically fatally so. Unless they decided to exchange captives or something clever like that you became dead in any number of interesting ways. A reasonable number of societies killed just about everyone, with prisoners being quite rare.
One of the distinctions between a nonstate society and an organized state is the usabilty of captives. A "politicaly evolved society" can effectively integrate a vanquished population into their society, as they can produce a suprlus of goods and services. A nonstate (or whatever phase you want to use) society "the military strategy that most benefits the victors is to kill or disperse the population of neigboring groups in order to lower the pressure of population on resources." *
or, as phrased by someone else "In general, nonstate groups preserved the lives of captives only when some material benefit would accrue; This approach generally limited the persons spared to women and children. States, by contrast, often have a strong material interest in preserving the lives of defeated enemies -- even adult males -- because they can become tax- and tribute-paying subject, serfs, or slaves." **
Female prisoners have obvious value to the praxians. It is an obvious way to obtain a mate if you are a low status man. You might have a great deal of difficulty in getting up the bride price and such, but this bypasses that. In addition female praxians are basically not provided any sort of cultural basis to attempt to kill a captor, as they are basically not allowed to learn or use weapons.
Male captives are highly dangerous, as they are all warriors and are not likely to make good slaves. In a Praxian camp weapons would be everywhere. In a society where nearly all the men every so often ride off to go fight someone any sizable group of male slaves offers major a threat to the clans survival. While they might be useful to do the heavy lifting occasionally, the Praxians live fairly close to the raged edge of survival. I would doubt that they would find a male slave worth the food he takes, as he can no longer perform the primary taks of the men, fighting.
Now if you want the Praxians to keep some male prisoners around more or less permanantly (as oppossed to saving them for torturing to death some boring day) I can think of a few ideas. The most obvious is to prove you are really hot, that you can make warriors serve you as a slave. The disadvantage is that they are warriors and can probably kill you ar your family if they decide to do so and are willing to die in the process.
(Basically it is the same sort of thing that would make a praxian male decide to keep a Unicorn rider as a slave. They are very rare and are a source of prestige and notoriety. The downside is that men who do this tend to get their throat cut in their sleep.)
The other obvious reason is for exchanges of prisoners taken by the other side. A problem with this is that I would not expect that given clan to spend a lot of time fighting an given enemy clan, so long term prisoners would not be all that useful.
But if you really need to have a bunch of male prisoners for some plot driven reason do it anyway. Ultimately a fun game is the objective, not an anthroplogically correct game. You can get away with a lot by saying "We have always done it this way."
Lastly: I would expect that trying to castrate your male prisoners would not work really well. I would not expect it to reduce the willingness of the prisoner to kill you at the cost of his life, as you have quite probably made him decide that his life is not worth living. Praxian clans do not seem to organized in such a way that total control could be maintained on any reasonable number of male captives.
Kevin
Powered by hypermail