Anti-SlaversReport
English：Anti-Slavers · Factions
The abolitionist militia led by the skeleton Tinfist. They free slaves and burn slave camps — and in doing so plunge the entire empire into famine. Heroes to the freed, terrorists to the merchants.
"When you can fight with your bare hands, nobody can disarm you — not even if you are naked and in chains. That is the perfect weapon for a slave." — Tinfist
The Anti-Slavers are one of the few organisations in Kenshi's world with an aim narrow enough to be almost singular: end slavery. That aim puts them at war with the three richest polities on the continent at once, and it also makes them the only armed group the bottom of society genuinely supports.
From the United Cities' point of view they are one of two anti-establishment militias that have to be handled simultaneously: the Anti-Slavers, based in Spring in Stobe's Gamble and led by the legendary fighter Tinfist; and the Reavers under Valamon, stationed in the "Ark" in Stobe's Garden[V1 0:07:43]. Their demands are entirely different — what the Reavers want is to overthrow a lazy, corrupt nobility and replace it with a "more efficient" order, not to abolish enslavement itself[V1 0:07:43]. That contrast is worth remembering: anti-establishment does not mean fellow travellers.
Spring
Their stronghold is called Spring, sitting on a hilltop in the south-western corner of Stobe's Gamble. The buildings are a mishmash of Storm Houses, Metal Wall Houses and Swamp Houses — the archetypal refugee city, built from whatever material came to hand.
Spring's admission logic is the reverse of most cities': being on too good terms with the empire will get you attacked by the guards. Wearing hostile-faction armour, or being allied with slave traders, triggers the same hostility. Neutrals are not welcome here.
Tinfist
The leader is a skeleton named Tinfist. He carries no weapon, specialises in Martial Arts, and mentions that his master was "Gatwood the Soft", the founder of modern martial arts — a man who never took a single life and never lost.
His background is almost entirely blank. What can be established is that he lived through the Second Empire and was close to Cat-Lon. In Black Desert City, skeletons talk about him like this:
"Tinfist and Cat-Lon were once a perfect pair... Now Tinfist fights a losing war for the humans, and Cat-Lon has vanished without a trace... What on earth happened?"
From that line one can roughly infer that he held a military, administrative or political post of some importance during the Second Empire, and broke with Cat-Lon as the empire turned to tyranny. As for when he learned martial arts, or when he began raiding the United Cities, the game says nothing at all.
Terrorist or liberator
This is the most interesting part of the Anti-Slavers entry: the game gives you two entirely valid accounts at the same time.
From the Traders Guild's side, the Anti-Slavers' record reads as follows: raiding caravans, releasing slaves, wrecking supply chains. And the consequences of wrecking a supply chain are quantifiable — with the exception of Catun and Drifter's Last, every town in the empire enters a malnourished state once the slave camps are destroyed. That is not a metaphor; it is the game's world-state machinery.
Longen therefore points the finger at the freed themselves:
"Look at the bodies they leave along the road. They terrorise drifters, nomads, traders... A wild thing is always a wild thing."
On the other side, Drifters have a relation value of +100 toward the Anti-Slavers — the most destitute group of people in this world gives all of its goodwill to this one organisation. Slaves and Rebirth slaves are likewise +100.
The game does not intend to adjudicate for you. It simply lays both invoices on the table.
There is a third invoice that gets mentioned less often: they also fail. Hamut's wife was taken to work the mines as a slave, and he went to the Anti-Slavers to beg for a rescue — the operation failed[V2 0:03:27]. This is one of the few in-game cases that explicitly admits the organisation is not invincible, and a reminder that Spring is not a rescue hotline.
Who is inside
The Anti-Slavers have the most even racial distribution of any faction in the game: Greenlanders, Scorchlanders, Shek, Hive Princes, Hive Soldier Drones, Hive Worker Drones and skeletons all spawn at identical rates. Even Hive Princes, who ought to be extremely rare in real geographical terms, appear at the same frequency as Worker Drones.
That fact is itself a political statement: an organisation made of the oppressed does not care what you started out as.
A substantial proportion of members carry no weapon, fighting purely with Martial Arts — an echo of Tinfist's line about the perfect weapon for a slave.
Besides Tinfist, the main characters are:
- Grey — a Hive Prince, the player's point of entry into the Anti-Slavers
- Bo — a Scorchlander woman, usually found in Black Scratch
- Jaegar — a Scorchlander, a Jonin
Bo's situation deserves a paragraph of its own. She is the organisation's field elite, reporting directly to Tinfist and Grey, and both the Holy Nation and the United Cities have put a 30,000-Cat bounty on her head for terrorism and "anti-labour propaganda"[V3 0:03:25] — that second charge is very nearly a confession of having written slavery into legal language. Nor can she simply be recruited on a whim: Tinfist and Grey will recommend her during the alliance process, but she will only go with someone "worthy of her", and the threshold is that the player must first kill or imprison a high-value target such as a noble lord or a slave master[V4 0:02:45].
The relations table: two outliers
Two things in the Anti-Slavers' relation settings are worth noting.
First, only -50 toward the Holy Nation. Compared with a flat -100 toward the United Cities, the Traders Guild, slave traders, Manhunters and Slave Hunters, the Holy Nation's score is conspicuously lenient — even though the Holy Nation runs large slave installations of its own, such as Rebirth.
Second, no negative relation toward the Reavers at all. An organisation that treats abolition as its single creed has no opinion whatsoever about a faction that also takes captives. The wiki files this under "trivia" without offering an explanation.
The rest of the relations are broadly intuitive:
| Target | Anti-Slaver attitude |
|---|---|
| Slaves, Rebirth slaves | +100 |
| Empire Peasants, Flotsam Ninjas, Tech Hunters | +70 |
| Shinobi Thieves | +50 |
| Swampers | +20 |
| Cannibals, Dust Bandits, Manhunters, United Heroes League | -100 |
The price of joining
The player has two routes in:
- Talk to Grey — +75 Anti-Slavers, and simultaneously -30 United Cities, -30 Slave Traders, -30 Traders Guild
- Deal with Longen first, then go to Tinfist — the same +75, but without those three -30 penalties (the penalty for capturing Longen himself still applies)
Conversely, handing Tinfist over to the United Cities earns 100,000 Cats in bounty and +75 imperial relations, at the cost of -75 Anti-Slavers and -50 Rebel Farmers. His wanted poster reads 50,000 Cats — the number on the poster is wrong.
World state: a balance held up by one man
Whether Tinfist lives or dies is one of the widest-reaching variables in Kenshi.
If Tinfist dies or is imprisoned, the slave trade expands across the board:
- Fishing villages and cult villages are taken over by slave traders and converted into slave farms
- Slave traders begin appearing across large areas: the Northern Coast, Shem, Sinkuun, Skinner's Roam and more
- Slaver density rises noticeably in Heng, the Great Desert and the Stormgap Coast
- The Anti-Slavers launch one final act of retaliation: a "Jonin raid" of 20 Jonin
If Tinfist survives and stays free, the reverse happens. As slave masters are cleared out region by region, Anti-Slaver patrols appear one area at a time in the Great Desert, Heng and the Stormgap Coast; and if both Emperor Tengu and Longen fall, the Anti-Slavers will even take over the Traders Guild headquarters at Trader's Edge.
See also
Video citations
- Kenshi: History of the United CitiesCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: Unique Companions | GreenlandersCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: Unique Companions | ScorchlandersCivilizationEx
- Kenshi: All Unique CompanionsCivilizationEx