Visions Back Story

 

The player enters the game as a slave of a very wealthy landowner on the island of Cyprus. The landowner has inherited his land and wealth from birth. The wealthy landowner was a small child during the days when Apostle Paul visited the island of Cyprus and performed the miracles in the palace that led to the Proconsul converting his faith to Christ Jesus and thereby putting Cyprus in the history books as the first Christian nation. As he grew up, he learned more about this man named Jesus, and the Christians who follow him.


One day he became a Christian himself and was baptized in the Mediterranean sea on the shore of Paphos. He learned that Jesus said “I have come to set the captives free” and, like many slave owners who became Christ followers, he began to feel that if he wanted to be more like Jesus, he needed to release his slaves from bondage. As a prestigious Roman elite, and owner of many slaves he faced great criticism for this decision by the other elite citizens of Rome, but the joy he felt from watching these people grow to become productive members of society was stronger than any pompous criticism he might experience. The joy was so great in fact, that he began buying slaves from the slave ships specifically for the purpose of teaching them a trade so he could set them free.

 

There were three ways a person might end up as a slave during Roman times. The first two ways we’re familiar with from recent history: 1) A person may have been either a slave from birth inherited from the Master’s estate (if of Roman heritage) or2)  an imported slave (if of other heritage) which the wealthy landowner has purchased from slave traders. The third way is by bond servant, where a person owes a huge debt to a debtor (often the debt was to the Roman government which demanded unreasonable taxes) that they can not pay so they offer themselves as a bond servant to a wealthy land owner in exchange for the land owner paying their debt.  Sometimes the father of the family would offer himself as the bond servant to save his family, while other times parents might forfeit a child to become a bond servant to pay the family’s debt if that is the only bond servant the land owner would accept as payment.  In the Visions game world, one way or another, a play-character has found themselves in the unfortunate position of being a slave or bond servant with no hope of escape, and now they are being offered true freedom from the Master.  The play-character needs only to prove themselves willing to become productive citizens of Rome by learning a trade, which the Master has offered to provide training from the greatest master trainers of the region. Once they complete all the Basic Skills quests, the landowner will grant them their freedom and enroll them in a trade school of their choice to learn a trade.