My favorite one-shot that I’ve ever ran involved the PCs being hired by a city to go kill some kobolds. The kobolds had taken over their mine, had fortified the place, and were violently rejecting any attempts to make them leave.
When the PCs arrive, it’s basically as described: The mine is overrun with kobolds, who have erected makeshift barricades and are armed with crossbows.
In actuality, the city had hired the kobolds to mine the ore for them, but then refused to pay them after taking delivery. It’s a labor dispute, and the PCs had been hired to kill them because nobody would question some adventurers killing some kobolds. The players discovered this and were upset enough about being lied to that they joined the kobolds’ side and basically acted as the (very well-armed and aggressive) union reps, negotiating better pay and more favorable terms for them. Was a great time.
This is the best sort of rpg story, in my humble opinion.
Needs more murder of the oligarchs that tried to use the party but we can’t have anything
I was in a game where we all played kobolds and lived in a old mine, except during a winter food raid on the local gnomes we managed to break into the mayor’s house and steal the treasury. When they demanded we return the safe we swapped the gold for lead, then they sent adventurers who we bribed with a gold bar each and the knowledge they had been lied to about the number of kobolds they had to fight.
In the end we ended up bloodlessly annexing the gnomes and putting them under “oppressive” restrictions and tax burden that ended up better than before we took over accidentally exposed former mayor’s massive embezzlement (In character we still don’t understand what he did wrong, we see it as dragon behavior) which started a pattern. We would scheme and plan evil things but end up being a net good for the area and because our party face was adorable as a sack of kittens no one noticed that both of the planners are evil as fuck
Hey, you’re the one underpaying your fictional workers in the first place
You know to make interesting rpg stories, you need bad people, and being bad means you underpay worker and take all the money from their work.
If dwarves get a 15beer a hour minimal wage, they won’t have a reason to fight the Dragon they work for
But the point is that if you’re going to make a villain you can’t get upset when your heroes try to help their victims.
You know what that’s called, right? It’s class consciousness. When people’s power fantasies are union organizing, that implies there is a degree of cultural hegemony going on and that’s pretty neat.
Player: I want to ask this road worker about their job.
GM: They tell you that they are perfectly happy with their job. They say they work short hours, get paid well and have a contract with very favourable terms that prevent them from being fired arbitrarily. All of their colleagues seem to feel the same way.
Player: Hm, what if they’re lying?
They’re absolutely lying get the pamphlets and cast a zone of truth.
Oh yeah the way they answered definitely has cult behavior.
Time to free them from their chains.
Not one single disgruntled worker?
Clearly mind control magic
lol I’ve been working on a holy grail game where the anarchos are the central characters and the conflict is them vs the monarchy so she isn’t wrong
You can do a harry potter thing where the workers want to be slaves
This is how you get killed irl, by embracing the “happy slave” trope
Oh no, I have a really easy means of getting my players organically motivated in my story. :(
That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.
Unions is not socialism.
Socialism is when the corporations are both owned and controlled by the workers of those companies themselves.
Unions are a tool of the working class in the class struggle. Not sufficient for socialism, but kinda necessary.
No, that’s already communism.
Surely that’s when humanity has forgotten how to be selfish and the state withers away, leaving a utopia of fully actualised workers for whom work and play are indistinguishable, both being ways of joyously participating in society.
Something notably quite different from what socialists are trying to achieve
Collective bargaining is capitalism.
Ownership and control over the mop is not collective bargaining
Literally me as an unchained rogue in pf1. Enter city, use my underworld connections to find the abusers, rapists, and pedos. During my downtime, after helping the party during adventuring as normal, I build up a list of men to kill.
Rinse/repeat
This but actually. Dnd is not the best system to live out the group’s actual fantasy of social revolution, and that’s what my groups tend to want to do.
Come to think of it, can anyone here suggest a good rpg system to simulate working people siezing the means of production from the bourgeoisie?
Cthulhu RPG except the workers are cultists and the means of production old ass artifacts that summon non-euclidean deities.
I played with a group that defeated a boss by unionizing his minions against him so they could have a worker owned dungeon. I played another campaign where i turned a kingdom over to its field workers and abdicated and destroyed the monarchy after defeating its ruler.
😈
Our party tries to extort money from every single NPC we encounter. Our rouge would probably asks for the jewels of the deceased person at a funeral or otherwise we would not help the town to fend of the goblin invaders (which then costs something as well of course).
Sounds like a great party to do an Acq Inc campaign. They play as their own business and can have evil corporations as enemies. It’s great fun
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