Revolutionize your next Dungeons & Dragons game with this anticapitalist / anarchist campaign guide

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/09/revolutionize-your-next-dungeo.html

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To be fair, my group turns most of our games anti-capitalist. We apparently would like to live debt free with medical care, even if it’s only in game.

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Kill the Dragon, redistribute the wealth, found a multi-species hospital!!

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And find out all that gold give rise to uncontrolled inflation, making the whole country rot from the inside, like Spain after it plundered South America.

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We’ve already been doing this - last campaign, one of the characters started a clothing line in the main city using cheap goblin labor, and the sweatshop goblins eventually rioted for better pay and working conditions. One of the organizers turned out to be a drow vampire in disguise, but once we dealt with him we worked out a contract with the goblin workers union which we quickly started calling the Gobblies.

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Wow, how bad does a goblin sweatshop smell? :grimacing:

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I remember one campaign where we (the characters) set up a soup kitchen in an enemy city…

It really annoyed the DM because we were so far off script he needed about three free-style sessions to get us back on the adventure path.

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I’ve mentioned this before and reading about things people are weekend-warrior “working on” is about a fascinating as listening to someone describe a dream, but I went as far as to register a domain, so guys, you know this is actually going to happen. Right now it’s a pile of google docs though.

Basically a tabletop roleplaying game based on my 10 years (so far) at an education nonprofit, but set in a classic high-fantasy setting. The concept is that you are semi-retired adventurers and you now use your collective experience to run a not-for-profit consultancy to help villages protect themselves from familiar fantasy-trope threats. The main activities/mechanics are around raising money, negotiating/building buy-in, teaching knowledge and skills, marshalling resources and fixing infrastructure. I’m working the mechanics up from the ground-up though they are inspired structurally by Dungeon World (i.e. D12 rolls, with descriptive options of consequences with some simple math to keep track of).

Not exactly set up for revolution, but it takes a position of community empowerment over subservience to roving bands of gold-seeking slayers.

It will all be supported by an online back-end, and I’m actually hoping to reuse all the software I’ve built for our own efforts-tracking at our company for the game itself. This may allow the whole thing to happen asynchronously, so I 'd love to find some of you fellow nerds to help me playtest. I’m not sure how many true nerds I can find within my organization, and they might recognize their work a little too much, or be frightened by how much I’ve obsessively turned their daily grind into a set of game mechanics.

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Me and my group are running a few campaigns and in one of them the small town we’re from uses a socialist kind of economic structure with some added twists. Among those the economy has a fixed pool of money that belongs to the whole town and people trade back and forth with that pool of money.

Because of our adventuring we have been inadvertently injecting new wealth into the town’s economic model but the DM hasn’t taken the time to suss out the ramifications of it. Probably because he doesn’t want to open that can of beans.

We’ve also overthrown a few monarchies and are trying to spread the word about our socialist ideals :stuck_out_tongue:

On the flipside our most current campaign our group is more nihilist and we’re actively trying to stay out of trouble and political shenanigans

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Evidently Warhammer in its early iteration had an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist bent. Replete with adventures against Thatcher inspired evil orc oppressors of hard working dwarves.

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Unfortunately, the Landlord of the town only accepts a certain kind of ID at the voting booths, which is notoriously difficult for goblins to obtain.

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Haven’t quite done this with D&D, but I ran a campaign of Scion a couple of years ago (set in the modern day, with the PCs as the children of the mythic gods). Naturally, each PC has a modern day identity as well as their divine ancestry. One character was a labor organizer, one was a civil rights activist lawyer, so we had a strong leaning towards activism. The third was a smuggler who never saw a border she didn’t want to smash, and the game was set in Arizona and Mexico, which brought in that whole set of issues. (The fourth was a somewhat psychotic TV psychiatrist, just to throw things a bit loopy.)

We only ran a few sessions, unfortunately, but there definitely was an anticapitalist leaning to things.

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Capitalist pricing nonetheless.

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Yeah, I was going to say that it was a steal at only $17.96.

But I get it. Creation takes time, and we live in a capitalist society. A society that already skews the value of creative endeavors toward $0, quite often. And not everyone can afford to do something like this and give it away free.

They have bills that need paying. It would be great if it decreased a bit in price after each person buys it, but being a bit niche it may be likely that they won’t even break even at full price.

And they have offered this:

If you are experiencing financial hardship, we have made discounted copies available for you. Please contact us at EatTheRichAnthology@gmail.com

I’ll think about getting it, even though I haven’t run a D&D campaign in decades.

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I’d say its worth getting as a reference, i don’t think i would necessarily base anything i do in a campaign too much off it but certainly would be amusing to throw in some alternate political/social systems beyond the typical monarchy or feudal ones we tend to see in D&D games.

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Like an Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune of filth digging peasants?

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Often times that’s precisely what our group dynamic ends up being. And then there’s the bard.

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tenor-5

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There’s a homebrew version of the Paladin that’s socialist/anarchist in flavor IIRC.

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My campaign subscribes to AMT - Archaic Monetary Theory. As long as you aren’t competing with the private sector for resources, spill all the gold you want!

They’re green, so I would guess minty-fresh?

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