[BANESTORM] Ending slavery in the Evil Empire

[Michael Cule]

My last GURPS game was set in the early days of the reign of the Emperor After The Demon.

The new Emperor is ambitious and a man of conscience. Why? Well, perhaps he wants to be someone different from his father, a man so wicked that when he was replaced by an actual demon nobody noticed for nearly fifteen years.

He's mostly concentrating on keeping the Empire together and defeating those pesky Templars. But in my game someone is going to come to him with a modest proposal of replacing the current system of manumitting slaves (which requires a personal petition to the Emperor and a lot of cash to lubricate the wheels of the bureaucracy) with a simpler, cheaper system that might actually get used.

Now, what the person bringing the idea to him (an idealistic member of the judiciary) would really like to do is to abolish slavery entirely. So, secretly, would the Emperor. Neither of them dreams of doing it quickly.

But what I'd like to do is to take the trigger of the proposed reform and the reaction against it by the more conservative part of the population and parlay it into a full scale conflict, perhaps using the Templars and/or Abydos as sponsors of an actual civil war.

Given the lack of modern communications and the insignificance of the abolitionist movement in the Empire, what are the ways I can make this work.

What are the ways the Emperor could move towards abolition?

What are the stories I could generate from this?

What would this look like to average subjects of the Empire? To highly placed political figures?

Would this be fun?