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…
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…