Lemme think. There are some dwarven and elven slave NPCs kicking around but don't some Mulan families also hire gnome scholars as in-home mystic tutors for their red apprentices?
I've also read that skilled artisan/craftsman laborers will get treated a bit/marginally better than the unskilled ones.
It's a slave holding society yes, but so were a lot of IRL ancient cultures and also the Southern Confederacy before the American Civil War... I'm gonna look at those historical examples and try to filter it through that kind of lens rather than sticking 20th/21st century moral value baggage to it.
Are some of the overseer/taskmasters exceptionally cruel? Of course!
And there's layers to this Hazlani underclass, right?
You've got the true slaves at the bottom and then you've got indentured servants who do tenant share cropping as part of (usually) a downward spiral into becoming reduced to slaves but those aren't quite the same thing because last time I checked farmers renting land space and living on it do eke out a miserable pittance of a living based on that.
Yeah there's a pretty hardass inquisition trying to root out alien faiths and worst of all those pesky more subversive ones but a lot of real world empires historically have had periods like that.
So for a person playing a Hazlani you're going to be worried that like somebody could lie and say you were a foreign sympathizer against the two-pronged "benevolent" dictatorship of the Lawgiver Church and Hazlik, sure.
You're also going to be worried both you're going to agitate people from abroad and other parts of the core based on rumors and incidents involving the red wizards and duh, human and Demi-human rights violations and also that they might agitate you into acting out in such a way that it could be used against you. Or that they might hurt themselves in doing this.
It's an empire. Yes. One with a super dangerous jungle and unforgiving plains which people (mostly Rashemi) work hard to tame sections of into cultivated and arable land.
Ramulai is a spectacle of massive scale city planning combined with arcane geo-engineering. How brutal are the Mulan? Depends who you butt heads with and rub the wrong way.
Say you call every Mulan you meet a dirty slaver then the actual ones who hold slave auctions go: I beg your pardon, I wash daily, thank you... What an imbecilic, ill-bred, long haired foreigner. Yeah, then you are probably gonna have a bad time.
Experiment. See if ticking off a red wizard, the wizard king or the Lawgiver inquisition is a good idea.
On the flip side, are the oppressed Rashemi going to be nicer to you (probably also no not really)?
Then again, not all the Rashemi rebels are heroic. There are a lot of crazy guys (and women) who will attack you on sight, jumping out at you guerilla style in the wild because they feel like they've got nothing left to lose. Try reasoning with them from while you are facing down the pointy end of a sword or the sharp part of that great axe.
OMG degrees of nuance and moral complexity wah...
What do you mean there are more options than just killing your way out of things!?