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.

Hey, you're the one underpaying your fictional workers in the first place

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.

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?

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.

Oh no, I have a really easy means of getting my players organically motivated in my story. :(

Sounds like a good campaign to me!

That's my kind of game. The "let's not be political (even though it is political)" flavor is less appealing.

You can do a harry potter thing where the workers want to be slaves

Why do you think it is called a party?

dimension 20 moment

Unions is not socialism.

Socialism is when the corporations are both owned and controlled by the workers of those companies themselves.

If you don't have a copy of the little red songbook, can you really call yourself a bard?

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?

Literally me as an unchained rogue in pf1. Enter city, use my underworld connections to find the abusers, rapists, and pedos. During my downtime, after helping the party during adventuring as normal, I build up a list of men to kill.

Rinse/repeat

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.

This but actually. Dnd is not the best system to live out the group's actual fantasy of social revolution, and that's what my groups tend to want to do.

Come to think of it, can anyone here suggest a good rpg system to simulate working people siezing the means of production from the bourgeoisie?

I played with a group that defeated a boss by unionizing his minions against him so they could have a worker owned dungeon. I played another campaign where i turned a kingdom over to its field workers and abdicated and destroyed the monarchy after defeating its ruler.

😈

JDPON Bard leading a protracted people's war against the despotic empire.

Our party tries to extort money from every single NPC we encounter. Our rouge would probably asks for the jewels of the deceased person at a funeral or otherwise we would not help the town to fend of the goblin invaders (which then costs something as well of course).

unionize? no. one party, we were doing LMoP. i fucking hate LMoP. I took the boring ass prerolled character the DM made me play (because other people don't know dnd and thus it wouldn't be fair to let me play a character i wanted to play) and twisted the premade backstory from him saving some mistreated workers into him leading a communist revolution.

Sounds like a great party to do an Acq Inc campaign. They play as their own business and can have evil corporations as enemies. It's great fun