Inspirations for Revolutionaries?

One of the factions (read that link first, it’s important to get it) in our game is very revolutionary – they seek to change the world radically and if necessary (and it always is necessary!) by force. So we’re in a conundrum as to which revolutionary sentiment to ascribe to this faction. The three famous modern revolutions in the west are of course possible starting points for inspirations:

  1. The American Revolution – the earliest of the three. Led by puritans, scholars, and various intellectuals adored by the American masses. They waged a short and precise war followed by a long restructuring. Their goal? “A republic, if you can keep it”. Probably a bit too clean for our anarchists, though.
  2. The French Revolution – very bloody, at start filled with idealists who are egalitarian in nature but in time resulting in chaos with many ill-fated experiments, very volatile and often portrayed as morally grey in subsequent mainstream history. Indeed very good for what we want.
  3. The Russian (October) Revolution – the events in Petrograd had similiarities to our own factions, as Petrograd had all three factions that our game has as well: the Tzarists (our Royalists), the Cadets (our Reformists), and the Bolsheviks (our Revolutionaries).

It is also of great importance to us to clearly define the differences between the Reformists and Revolutionaries, so as not to confuse the player. Here, the Russian Revolution holds some great and easy to understand definitions, when comparing the Cadets (who wish to perform a political revolution, similar to our Reformists), and the Bolsheviks (who wish to change industrial relations in society), as seen in Ten Days That Shook the World by Herbert Reed:

“The propertied classes wanted merely a political revolution, which would take the power from the Tsar and give it to them. They wanted Russia to be a constitutional Republic, like France or the United States; or a constitutional Monarchy, like England. On the other hand, the masses of the people wanted real industrial and agrarian democracy.”

In trying to figure out the motivations and characteristics of our revolutionaries, we’ve also spent some time researching terrorist organisations (but hopefully we didn’t get on any government watchlists). These include the famous RAF, Rote Zora, Weather Underground, and so on. The common denominators are that all of them are usually a very loosely based fringe group that quickly dissipates in both their ideology (which eventually makes a sharp turn from systemic views on certain problems towards specific conspiracy theories and personal agendas). This didn’t sit well with what we wanted to achieve with our revolutionary faction (an interesting, cohesive ideology that challenges the players worldview as much as the other factions, regarding both the role of power in society and the consequences of its concentration in the elite handful).

Not to spend too much time on this today, we’d actually like to hear your opinions, so please drop us a message here or on our Discord server where we usually dwell.

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