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 itās a bitā¦ hmmm. I guess you could say Iām uncomfortable with a setting based on the Soviet Union by someone who doesnāt know anything about the USSR. He explains it as small states forced to be in absorbed into the empire, thereās 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 weāre at war with a democratic nation. Every child is given a magical stamp, if you go against the empire or do āthought crimesā you get changed markings. You can get good markings back via āsocial credit.ā I feel so uneasy and I feel bad. I donāt want to be a Debby downer or an ass.
He mentioned Marxism but it seems to be evil in this universe (āwith regards to Marxism make sure you donāt get the worst mark on your headā). Also heās encouraging us to play evil/neutral. I donāt 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 Iām surprised this is happening. Do you have advice on how to make the best of this? Maybe combat misinformation subtly in character? Iām freaking out!
Edit: the currency in this āstateā is not gold or typical money, itās 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 āUkraineā areasā¦
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 heās been brewing this campaign up since around COVID, I did not know him at the time, and the Ukraine war just āinspiredā him more. I didnāt start playing as my dog until last year, he didnāt join that campaign until a few months after we began. Iām baffled that he had quite a few years to build this āSovietā world but got it so wrong. I didnāt 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 heās kinda be wasted on this haha.
Iāll try to make the best of it, clearly weāre not in the Soviet Union yet so Iāll have to start another revolution (my Marxist dog is also a revolutionary that is planning one in my previous campaign so Iām 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 sheās 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 thatās what it sounded like. It sounded like the usual lib āteaching through metaphorā that they like to do so much.
āIāll just show him how evil the commies really were when Iām DM, because Iām too much of a coward to admit openly that his characterās views make me uncomfortable.ā
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.
I donāt know how real this is. I hope it is because this is fucking hilarious. Howād you even get involved with these chuds? Whyāre you still involved with them after learning of their views on not just the USSR but even Marxism? Social credits in 2024ā¦wow.
If youāre playing evil characters in this campaign, that means you are all supporting the ādictatorshipā right? So Iād say go ahead. Fully support it and lean in. Fuck democracy and the āfree west.ā
Crush those peasants and proles with ideas of freedoms lol. Take their money and relish being the bad guy in a campaign. Evil campaigns are always fun.
I really wish I was joking. My background with these people is like this:
First campaign (on hiatus):
DM - IRL friend 1
IRL friend 2
IRL friend 3
DMās brother who Iāve never met (we play over discord)
Me
Campaign 2 (current):
DM - is the brother
IRL friend 2 from previous campaign
Friend 2ās boyfriend (I never met him)
Me
(IRL friends 1 and 3 couldnāt make it)
So with this new campaign I have one friend I know well and the DM is a fellow player in our paused campaign. In the hiatus campaign I play as an explicitly Marxist dog, and from our time playing together there were no issues at all. My IRL friends know Iām a communist and are not reactionary at all, they support me and are just great in general. The brother doesnāt know me as well but we havenāt had problems. The boyfriend and the brother seem very reactionary for this campaign while my friend just wants to play as a funny bard. So I fell into this by accident, so to speak. I was dumbfounded by what I was hearing, just the boyfriend and brother bouncing off propaganda. Funnily enough our characters are supposed to be bombarded by empire propaganda and yet it seems they fell for the western counterpart.
I think Iām just going to play a principled Marxist, be a Lenin figure, and take over the empire and turn it into the real Soviet Union and not the horrible caricature theyāre making it into. I donāt even know if this campaign will go on long enough for that to happen. I just hope our old DM feels better soon so I can play as my dog again.
Ah I see. Well, good luck lol.
From what I know of shitty DMs, they love to railroad campaigns. You can try to be a principled Marxist/Lenin figure but your DM will probably not let you get too far with that plan because heās motivated in showing USSR and Marxism in the worst light possible. I imagine one motivation for him DMing and choosing this setting was your Marxist dog PC in the hiatus campaign.
Itās why I advised just playing up the mustache-twirling evil villain angle. Steal from the farmers. Suppress revolutions. Kick puppies. There was a corruption problem in the latter half of the USSR. You can play as one of those guys who professes a nominal adherence to Marxism-Leninism but is an out an out capitalist just looking to make a quick buck. Maybe an enforcer or associate to a high level party official who steals stuff and puts it to the black market. Or something else along those lines.
But I donāt know if your DM will allow such portrayals either, because that would mean admitting the problems were, again, capitalism and not state socialism. Eh, just play up the ācorrupt bureaucratā angle. Chuds love to hate them.
While I do agree that they should largely just have fun with the shitty railroad dm and mess with them, I think them trying to be an ultra-capitalist character will be exactly what the DM wants. 90% of anti-com arguments are just describing capitalism and then saying it is socialism.
thereās one rich area and as you get farther away the poorer it gets, the worst area is described as Ukraine
Moscowās famously far from Ukraine š¤
Crazy enough, the map of the nation looks a lot like Russia except the top half is the āauthoritarianā one where our characters live while the bottom half is the rival ādemocracyā nation. The democracy is called a federation while the USSR-inspired nation (according to him) is an empire.
Secret Maoist?/j
So basically youāre playing with someone who doesnāt understand socialism/communism/Marxism at all, or at least thinks itās 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, itās 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 Iāve never DMād before and this would be my second play ever. Maybe Iāll do some reading and drafting on the side. It may be too difficult to do right now as Iām doing university stuff as well.
So youāre 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 aināt happening in an Amazon warehouse
We can just choose our class and race, while he is fine with us playing āgoodā heās leaning more into neutral/evil. This is probably due to the fact that we have to align ourselves with the āevilā state and if we go against it then the magical mark on our foreheads will show weāve been doing thought crimes. If the mark changes to the worst versionā¦. Well we donāt know, apparently āno one has been seen with the worst markā so Iām 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 āevilā civilization work exactly? If the civilization is completely at odds with citizensā 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 āevilā 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.
Iād just make fun of everything (āIāM GONNA MASSACRE A BUNCHA INNOCENT PEOPLE JUST āCAUSEā), but that might contradict your āI donāt want to be [ā¦] an assā statement. Forcing yourself to laugh might help though it might annoy somebody.
Well my character is a genius type so maybe Iāll relish in his intellect and ātalk downā to certain people and topics that come up, like poke fun at completely wrong information/references to the USSR.
We have to do mandatory military service and get rewarded for killing civiliansā¦
Damn, thatās cringyā¦ 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 lateāterm abortions, too. The later the abortion, the better!
Yeah if anything this is just childishā¦not to mention lazy, like, if I wanted to do Nazi Germany Iād 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 moreā¦ I donāt know what the hell kind of research heās been doing this whole time but itās clearly wrong. Like, at best his āSoviet Unionā resembles the Russian Empire or Nazi Germany. He also sent us the song āfeed the machineā by Poor Manās 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 Iāve found myself inā¦
The reprise to feed the machine is āgive and takeā which is explicitally a revolution in response to the of the society in āfeed the machineā.
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 itās 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 wouldnāt have agreed to itā¦
If thereās 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 youāre coming from but I donāt know if I can just leave. Thereās only three players (including me)ā¦
maybe you could get them to read Blackshirts & Reds. itās short, if they wonāt read it maybe they arenāt worth your time
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. Donāt imply that it contradicts his view though! Just that it could provide āLots of inspiration for campaign directions and NPCsā
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 āfleshed outā alreadyā¦ One day Iāll make my own campaign thats actually based on the USSR with fantasy characteristics.
Tell them to make an account of hexbear and write up their campaign idea on our games comm or tabletop comm and let us shred him to pieces
I would love to but I have way too many IRL connections with this guy to risk it. Heās the brother of my other DM (the campaign on hiatus) who is an IRL friend, and heās also a fellow player in the hiatus campaign so that would cause issues for me lol
I got it! Hereās the mindset that you want.
Lol what am I reading.
Real talk, I donāt know if this is a joke but Iām 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.