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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
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?
Every time I see a “survey crew ahead” sign on road I have this mental image of driving with me head out the window yelling “ one a scale from one to ten: how acomadating do you feel your employer is with scheduling request- damnit I passed them… how am I supposed to do this going 60?!”
Second off topic when I see the sign with a construction worker with a shovel I think “lazy protesters ahead. You got to hold the sign up!”
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
They’re absolutely lying get the pamphlets and cast a zone of truth.
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.
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.
Thank you! You just gave me a new bbeg!
Remeber, kids: Laws are threats made by the dominate socio-economic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence and police are basically an occupying army.
Had to go find a clip of this because the delivery makes it even better, like a militant socialist afterschool special:
The delivery sells it entirely. He’s like the guy coming in to talk about drugs with a baseball cap and sitting backwards in the chair, but it’s about cops and molotovs instead.
Thank you for sharing, didn’t know about this
Yeah, my character is realizing that the nobles that want to depose the king in favor of a ruling council are themselves just as corrupt if not more, and that the only real answer is a worker’s revolution. So this might end up being a bit of an influence in this weekend’s events.
I mean, we use different terms (“social contract”, “law and order”, “state monopoly on violence”), but that’s what it boils down to.
That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.
Oh no, I have a really easy means of getting my players organically motivated in my story. :(
If you don’t have a copy of the little red songbook, can you really call yourself a bard?
Sounds like a good campaign to me!
You can do a harry potter thing where the workers want to be slaves
to be fair they said they could, not should
i would :cringe: irrespective of whether i interpreted them as encouraging it.
This is how you get killed irl, by embracing the “happy slave” trope
If only. So many people repeated this lie in the past and never got their comeuppance
You’re right, I was thinking about my friends and tabletop groups
I’d sooner bash my own head in using the biggest rulebook available
Gross.
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
Why do you think it is called a party?
If they want to walk the revolutionary road, then they better prepare some backup characters. The forces that built the world are never keen on allowing some scrappy rat-cachers to poke and prod at its foundations.
The campaigns I have run rarely see someones first character making it to the end. I am glad to have players who are okay with this.
im all for supplying them with that hope, but probably through a meta conversation so that they don’t attempt to unionize everything they see and instead make it a story they want to partake in
Now, would this work? Or embolden them to instead begin protracted warfare against the kingdom of the lvl 12 mage?
dimension 20 moment
