MaxKaladin
First Post
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?
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?