So my first DnD campaign is on hiatus so another player has started their own for us to play in the meantime. My DM for this new campaign is explaining the world and it’s a bit… hmmm. I guess you could say I’m uncomfortable with a setting based on the Soviet Union by someone who doesn’t know anything about the USSR. He explains it as small states forced to be in absorbed into the empire, there’s one rich area and as you get farther away the poorer it gets, the worst area is described as Ukraine. I guess in that area you can be working the land and then some guy forces you to give him money. Our Soviet Union is very repressive and we’re at war with a democratic nation. Every child is given a magical stamp, if you go against the empire or do “thought crimes” you get changed markings. You can get good markings back via “social credit.” I feel so uneasy and I feel bad. I don’t want to be a Debby downer or an ass.
He mentioned Marxism but it seems to be evil in this universe (“with regards to Marxism make sure you don’t get the worst mark on your head”). Also he’s encouraging us to play evil/neutral. I don’t know what to do. I want to make the best of it but damn, I literally play as a Marxist dog in the hiatus playthrough (the current DM is a fellow player on that campaign) so I’m surprised this is happening. Do you have advice on how to make the best of this? Maybe combat misinformation subtly in character? I’m freaking out!
Edit: the currency in this “state” is not gold or typical money, it’s food rations. So when I said if you live in a poorer region and a guy comes demanding money I mean some state official haggles you for taxes which is paid in rations. This haggling seems to only take place in the poorest “Ukraine” areas…
Your Marxist dog may have inspired them to give you a lecture through D&D.
Congratulate them on their creativity of accurately depicting a world based on the British empire and ask if the democratic state is the Haudenosaunee confederacy before the Europeans arrive.
If you keep playing, brush off the insult and play along. Organise the proles and tell them how bad it is that in this alternative universe Trotsky or Zinoviev managed to seize power. Luckily, you will go to a bar and hear about a train robber known only as The Zdahllin, with whom you might decide to join forces. Spread the word that under current leadership, the Union will not be prepared in time to fight another enemy that is on the horizon.
My Marxist dog may have inspired him but apparently he’s been brewing this campaign up since around COVID, I did not know him at the time, and the Ukraine war just “inspired” him more. I didn’t start playing as my dog until last year, he didn’t join that campaign until a few months after we began. I’m baffled that he had quite a few years to build this “Soviet” world but got it so wrong. I didn’t know what I was getting into when he offered to DM us while our previous campaign is on hiatus, I had this whole character with a neat backstory but now I feel like he’s kinda be wasted on this haha.
I’ll try to make the best of it, clearly we’re not in the Soviet Union yet so I’ll have to start another revolution (my Marxist dog is also a revolutionary that is planning one in my previous campaign so I’m just repeating the same shit lol). Thankfully this character is an artificer so bypassing magic stamps and thought crimes might be easier. Thank you for the inspiration! I might even carry it over to the dog campaign as she’s been a revolutionary from the beginning, my poor goblin guy just wanted to be a hermit engineer with a cursed mask. Oh well!
Yeah, I heard this and that’s what it sounded like. It sounded like the usual lib “teaching through metaphor” that they like to do so much.
“I’ll just show him how evil the commies really were when I’m DM, because I’m too much of a coward to admit openly that his character’s views make me uncomfortable.”
He has been working on this campaign for a few years apparently and his idea started well before we ever met. Maybe he is bringing it to the table as punishment but I hesitate to label it as such due to us not knowing each other for very long. If it is punishment that really sucks because my character (and myself) have been nothing but kind towards him and his characters.
there’s one rich area and as you get farther away the poorer it gets, the worst area is described as Ukraine
Moscow’s famously far from Ukraine 🤓
Crazy enough, the map of the nation looks a lot like Russia except the top half is the “authoritarian” one where our characters live while the bottom half is the rival “democracy” nation. The democracy is called a federation while the USSR-inspired nation (according to him) is an empire.
Secret Maoist?/j
So you’re saying you get to choose your class and alignment, walk around exploring the map, and make your own decisions as a party? Sounds like the USSR cause this ain’t happening in an Amazon warehouse
We can just choose our class and race, while he is fine with us playing “good” he’s leaning more into neutral/evil. This is probably due to the fact that we have to align ourselves with the “evil” state and if we go against it then the magical mark on our foreheads will show we’ve been doing thought crimes. If the mark changes to the worst version…. Well we don’t know, apparently “no one has been seen with the worst mark” so I’m assuming they get disappeared to keep good optics about the state. It seems like while we will have some freedoms to explore, our DM is going to keep us on a tight-ish leash.
It seems like while we will have some freedoms to explore, our DM is going to keep us on a tight-ish leash.
Thoughtcrimes will not be tolerated.
How can an “evil” civilization work exactly? If the civilization is completely at odds with citizens’ well being it is trivial to have outside powers influence the people. They could be evil in the sense of plundering outside of the empire like the USA.
It is an “evil” empire that has marks that change based on what is the interest of the empire? It is in the best interest of any civilization to meet the needs of its citizens. To neglect the needs of the citizenry creates inefficiencies to the ability of the empire do do its actions. Thus reforming the empire to be socialist is in the greatest interest of the empire.
Maybe this mark is detecting how evil each individuals actions are? If evil is determined deontologically (actions are evil independent of context), you can burglarize rich people and torture them to death to move your morality down to make up for the fact that you are using the funds to build a revolution for the greater good. If enforcers of the law come to visit your group the members have an opportunity to lower their morality even more if they can survive the fight. All of the bodies can be butchered to lower morality even further. Your people can lie and sell the human muscle tissue as pork to lower morality in other ways.
So basically you’re playing with someone who doesn’t understand socialism/communism/Marxism at all, or at least thinks it’s the propagandized evil version of the ideology. Considering they think the USSR is some repressive empire with all the negative stereotypes that come with it (muh Orwelllian thought crimes and seeseepee social credit system).
My advice, make your own campaign where the USSR stand-in is less bastardized, or at least, it’s an Evil vs. Evil situation, where your guys are relatively sympathetic communist bastards against the Nazi BBEG and a group of unsympathetic fascist assholes, and try to find people who are interested in playing I guess?
I would love to make my own campaign but I’ve never DM’d before and this would be my second play ever. Maybe I’ll do some reading and drafting on the side. It may be too difficult to do right now as I’m doing university stuff as well.
I’d just make fun of everything (‘I’M GONNA MASSACRE A BUNCHA INNOCENT PEOPLE JUST ’CAUSE’), but that might contradict your ‘I don’t want to be […] an ass’ statement. Forcing yourself to laugh might help though it might annoy somebody.
Well my character is a genius type so maybe I’ll relish in his intellect and “talk down” to certain people and topics that come up, like poke fun at completely wrong information/references to the USSR.
If there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there playing D&D with him, then you have a table with 11 Nazis
I see, I understand where you’re coming from but I don’t know if I can just leave. There’s only three players (including me)…
To piggyback on the other comment, tell him black shirts and reds has a lot of information in it that will really help him drive home what it was like. Don’t imply that it contradicts his view though! Just that it could provide “Lots of inspiration for campaign directions and NPCs”
You and @miz are probably right, although he has been working on this campaign since COVID so he might not even bother reading it having everything “fleshed out” already… One day I’ll make my own campaign thats actually based on the USSR with fantasy characteristics.
maybe you could get them to read Blackshirts & Reds. it’s short, if they won’t read it maybe they aren’t worth your time
We have to do mandatory military service and get rewarded for killing civilians…
Damn, that’s cringy… not that militaries have never ordered massacres against civilians before, but there was always some sort of logic to them, like discouraging people from harming colonizers, or simply making room for colonizers. Your DM sounds like me at age ten. I bet that your DM rewards people for late‐term abortions, too. The later the abortion, the better!
Yeah if anything this is just childish…not to mention lazy, like, if I wanted to do Nazi Germany I’d probably research to pull some fun details from real life to inspire something allegorical. This is just a lazy heap of vague cultural osmosis anticommunist slop.
Fun fact: apparently this campaign has been in the works since COVID started and the Ukraine war just inspired him more… I don’t know what the hell kind of research he’s been doing this whole time but it’s clearly wrong. Like, at best his “Soviet Union” resembles the Russian Empire or Nazi Germany. He also sent us the song “feed the machine” by Poor Man’s Poison, so I thought this would be a working class campaign but I guess not. I always thought that song was anti-capitalist (most of their songs are in my opinion). What an unfortunate series of events I’ve found myself in…
The reprise to feed the machine is “give and take” which is explicitally a revolution in response to the of the society in “feed the machine”.
Exactly, both fantastic songs that I always associated with, at the very least, leftist politics. I find it funny (not funny haha, funny weird) that it’s being used in this context. I love their music and have listened to their work to inspire my own story ideas and projects, so you can imagine that I was a bit shocked at which direction this campaign was taking. Had I known what the story was going to be about before hand I wouldn’t have agreed to it…
I got it! Here’s the mindset that you want.
Lol what am I reading.
Real talk, I don’t know if this is a joke but I’m definitely keeping this handy for when we play, this will be helpful in my speeches lol
I was thinking about doing a campaign where you can do whight genocide against a race of undead slavers that kill and turn people into zombie slaves to run their economy.
