The players start a religion idea (comments sought)

Yesterday I was poking around on RPGnet while these boards were down and I read a thread about historical gaming in the ancient world. One thing led to another and I got this idea.

Setup:

My players are currently playing 'special' assistants to a Senator in a Roman like empire. He's also wizard and many of their missions involve recovering various books or items of power. In the course of this, they've come across gates/portals that they know go "elsewhere". The only one they tried went to a jungle somewhere. They've expressed interest in exploring beyond a portal sometime.

It's also important to know the senator's niece is the defacto leader of the party and she is also a cleric of Orus. The worship of Orus is a monothiesm founded on the premise of saving man/demihuman-kind from the depradations of all the (false) 'old gods'.

Finally, I've been thinking about changing settings for the next campaign from this homebrew to a different one.

The Idea:

The players get to explore beyond a portal. They arrive in a cave in a desert. The situation, they find, is that there is a massive empire in the fertile river valleys of the desert not unlike something you might expect from Babylon and the other old civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates in our own world. I'm still working on the imagry, but I'm thinking of hanging gardens, god kings and so-forth.

The people of this empire use an awful lot of slaves. The thing is that many of the slaves look different from their captors. They are the descendants of people from the north who came into this land fleeing from war/famine/disease and who were enslaved. The river peoples basically view them with contempt, view them as sub-human, have legends saying the slaves' ancestors gladly gave themselves and their people into slavery in exchange for their pitiful lives and that their gods utterly destroyed those of the now-slaves. They brutally suppress anyone who hints otherwise.

The slave people have basically lost most of their culture and heritage. Their leaders were wiped out, their clerics were murdered and the names of their gods all but stamped out. The heve been forbidden to speak their native language and so on. They've been fairly thoroghly assimilated into the society of their captors albeit in a very inferior position. They have some legends that say they were once a warrior people and were only enslaved when their warriors fell to sickness, hunger and sheer numbers. They have that and a burning desire for freedom.

Into this mix come the PCs. Now, the stereotype would be for the PCs to lead a massive rebellion. I don't want that and I don't think my players would be too interested in diverting the campaign that way either. Rather, what I intend is for the players to inadvertantly strike the spark. It's more their style to do things to try to set trouble in motion for the slaveholders and then leave. Anyway, I intend for them to run into some escaped slaves, make friends possibly pass on some skills and most importantly for the cleric to teach them about her faith. I need to come up with enough that they dont' feel it's a wasted trip. Perhaps new spells and magic items they can take advantage of. Perhaps some sightseeing.

The rest of the payoff comes in my next campaign. I mentioned wanting to switch settings? I'm thinking of using the same setting a thousand years in the future where the slaves eventually threw off their chains and won their freedom. In this world, the church of Orus will be an established faith, though in a mutated form. There will be slogans like "There is no god but Aurus and Sophia is his prophet!" (Sophia being the cleric mentioned above )

Thoughts?

I'd lose the slogans anyway. Our Immortal souls are already in enough trouble for playing D&D.

Background sounds very like the theme to "Stargate" and "Stargate SG1".

Did anyone ever make a role-playing game out of those?

In my opinion, this is something you need to discuss with the players. Creating this new religion will probably involve a lot of work on the players side. I think you may want to get a comitment from them 1st.

Also, you should become reactive. Let the PCs develop/determine the extent of this new religion. You should set boundries, but have the NPCs react to what the PCs are doing within those boundries.

In my home brew campaign, one player has worked to set up a religion. He has brought worship of Odin into the campaign setting. After LOTS of working at it, and establishing both temples and shrines, I let him have an effect at it. Currently, worshippers of Odin can cast 3rd level spells or less. If the god's power grows, they will be able to gain more power to spread their god's faith.

If a player is going to found a new religion, it takes LOTS of proseletizing and building permanent structures for official worship. If UPPER KRUST EVER GETS DONE WITH HIS WORSHIPPER'S HANDBOOK, *cough*cough* I would say there is an excellent resource for determining how easy or hard this is; as it is, using DM's perogative is the only way to go.

(If you're listening, I'm just kidding, UK - but there IS a need for a strong system out there for establishing religions in living memory in a fantasy world.

Cleric of Orcus: Give more to He that Will Never die!

Me: Sorry I already gave Clark all my money for Necropolis and Tome of Horror.

Wonderful idea - I may use it (Ilike religion in games)

BUT

How do you intend to get the PCs 'teaching' their beliefs with out it seming to be railroading or contrived?

and why wait 1000 years - a few hundred should be sufficient

I played a PC who managed to start his own religion, and he wasn't even a cleric. He was a gnomish telepath, who believed his powers were granted by the divine power GREEBO (he always spoke the name in capital letters, don't ask me how). His charms, dominations, suggestions, and other such compulsions basically made him very persuasive. The only problem was, he didn't know he was the source of all of this belief; he thought GREEBO was exerting his divine will directly on his subjects. First he started small, turning the mayor of the town, then the people themselves into GREEBO worshippers. Then he expanded his worship base into the neighboring towns. Sadly, the DM kinda floundered from there and we never finished the campaign. When I started DMing for the same group, the gnome had caused such a stir that he actually ascended and became GREEBO, the god of non-sequiturs. After all, belief is reality on the outer planes...

-nameless

Once a friend of mine decided to create a God from scratch. We were playing in a friend's campaign and he had only four gods (one for each alignment, a good, an evil, a lawful and a chaotic one) but my friend was playing a true neutral warlock so he asked the DM if he could adore some kind of god of Magic, and the DM agreed. There were no priests at all and the characters goal was to teach his faith. The bad thing was the DM never let him do the job, and when I joined the party and converted to his faith he didn't let us any place for roleplaying... We all quit the table I think, or he let us all go one by one, sad story. But I still have the god he made and I will certainly use it somewhere

MaxKaladin: I would KILL to play in that! Really sounds awsome! Its one of those things I as a player am always up for.

I like the sound of it. You might want to be careful about altering the sayings and prayers of other religions, though -- unless you're sure that your players wouldn't take it the wrong way.

Would this be sort of like a spoof on religions in general, or were you hoping for something else? Either way, I think it'd be a fun adventure.