The Glorious Revolution is upon us, comrades! Join Red Army today to die tomorrow!
OK, truth be told, as much as I enjoy playing up the image of a dirty commie sometimes, I’m not really one. The truth of the matter is that communism doesn’t work. It’s a distant utopia that requires either unlimited resources or perfect people to function (and if you have either, nearly any social order would work fine). And the attempt to make it work has resulted in some really, really horrible things.
So, kids, don’t try communism at home.
But, as with many other historical horrors, it makes for a great game of make-believe. The time of Russian Revolution is fascinating. It was a time of ideals clashing against reality, producing nearly unprecedented human brutality. You had reds driven by unreachable ideals and personal ambitions imposing their vision of the world on common people, you had whites clinging to the old order which time was gone or attempting to find a more moderate solution to Russia’s problems, you had blacks using the chaos of war and the fact Russia is fuckhuge to seize control over some territories and try to live the ideal of anarchy, you had greens fighting for common people and ultimately being crushed and forgotten between two giants. And, of course, you had the common people themselves, just trying to survive and being pushed beyond their limits.
There is a lot of material for potential games on every level: a game of survival, political intrigue, war action, spy games, Kafkian nightmares due to the secret police gaining power and influence, assassination plots, etc., etc.
And adding supernatural component to the conflict expands the possibilities even farther. I was actually tangentially involved in a Russian TRPG project about the Revolution called the Red Lands, in which the civil war was interrupted by the sudden appearance of magic, which prolonged the war for a few years as the participants suddenly gained unexpected advantages, and turned the whole conflict from a mundane war into a direct battle of ideals, with the winner potentially gaining power of Revolution to reshape the world into their image.
As such, I’m curious how this game handled the issue. It’s only one chapter rather than the whole game dedicated to the period, so I don’t expect it to be very detailed, but let’s see how well it does thematically.
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