Running a Materialist Campaign

My last post looked at historical materialism as an aid to campaign creation. It suggested orientating a campaign around a dominant social process, as the driver of change. Part of this is about adding a further level of depth to a generic fantasy setting, without a corresponding explosion in the mental load involved.

I’ve previously talked about imperialism as an example of such a process. Here I’ll outline how this worked in my last campaign, with a consideration of economics as a central driving force.

Tailoring the Setting

Historically, generations can go by in which social relations are comparatively stable. While there will be underlying tensions in such times, setting a campaign during a period of revolutionary upheaval can help bring this to the fore. I’ve also found that certain scenarios can facilitate social processes playing out in a more restricted location.

The latter approach is something I tried in my last campaign. It centred on an area of contested territory between two rival empires. The region had been destroyed in a prior war and made uninhabitable by the salting of the land and a legacy of roaming undead. A wealthy industrialist then sponsors a venture to reopen a mine in the region, which now represents a strategic resource to both empires.

Setting a campaign within a contested territory can allow for more forceful interventions by regional powers than placing it in a secure sovereign realm. In my campaign, the mine begins aligned with empire X. Empire Y responds by employing a band of mercenaries/bandits to forcefully capture the mine. The mine effectively becomes the site of a proxy conflict between the two powers.

Enter the player characters, tasked with liberating the mine from empire Y’s mercenary/bandits. On defeating the bandits, a portion of mine workers are unhappy with things going back to the status quo. Some want to make the mine a worker run collective, much to the chagrin of its wealthy owner.

A lot of the above relies on the legal ambiguity of the setting. The two empires wouldn’t risk confrontation in a claimed territory, for risk of this escalating to all-out war. The workers too are emboldened to question the mine’s ownership, due to the uncertain status of property laws. It’s not just a site of proxy conflict between empires, but proxy class conflict.

The Central Process

My last post suggested identifying a dominant social process to base a campaign around. I used imperialism as an example, as the drive for empires to expand their boundaries. I’ve found it most efficient to go for the highest-level process with the maximum explanatory value.

Historical materialism has advice on this baked in. Marx saw all social processes as orientated around a single focus. That is the human drive to prosper, expressed socially through the development of the productive forces. This is manifest in the economic system which organises the means of production.

The setting of my last campaign operated on a capitalistic basis. The overarching process could be stated as “capital’s need to constantly expand and increase profits”. This can drive an empire’s need to expand into new territory. It can also drive the intensification of worker exploitation, to the point discontent reaches a breaking point. Underlying this are property relations, which determine who prospers as a result of said processes.

My preparation didn’t get much more theoretical than the above. A summary as concise as the last paragraph is probably enough to orientate subsequent elements introduced to a campaign. Reading up on historical examples of how these things play out can help make running the campaign more intuitive (I’d suggest historians with a materialist perspective, such as Eric Hobsbawm).

Applying the Theory

My last campaign began effectively “in media res” in terms of certain processes beginning in motion. There is the drive for its two empires to expand, and consequently entering into proxy conflict. From the mine workers’ point of view, there is the failure of the current economic system to meet their needs. Such a failure can be compounded, to the point where workers have no choice but seize and reorganise the means of production themselves.

An understanding of the above forces can help on a microscale when introducing new elements to a setting. At a midpoint in the campaign, I introduced an emissary from empire X. The owner of the mine had been aligned with empire X. Empire X operated on a capitalistic basis, to which worker ownership represents an existential threat. At this point in the campaign, the PCs had shown themselves to be more aligned with the mine worker’s interests.

From the above relationships, it was pretty clear to me how the emissary would relate to the PCs. Empire X needed the PCs to help defend the mine against a counter offensive from Empire Y. They would try and buy off the PCs with a stake in the mine, and on a metalevel offer training to advance in level. But the relationship would quickly sour if the PCs persist in supporting the workers.

I found that even incidental encounters in the mining settlement could be shaped through economic relations. The owner of a supply store was adverse towards the PCs, as he felt the ownership of his business was threatened. The mine’s watch men were adverse too, as they were comparatively well compensated. Occasionally I went against type; with the tavern owner supporting the workers. This really individualised the tavern owner, in terms of exploring her motivation to go against her economic interests.

A materialist approach also helped me anticipate how things might play out, without the need for any prewritten timeline. I didn’t need paragraphs noting “if the players do this, so and so will do the following”. I also didn’t need to map out a web of relationships between NPCs and factions. You kind of know how the tavern owner and supply store owner will interact from their relationship to the economic processes, and players quickly pick this up too once they understand the setting.

At the campaign’s midpoint, I had a high-level understanding of how things might play out. Basically, the mine owner and empire X would support the PCs as a stalling tactic, but likely abandon them at a crucial time (not unlike Scottish lord’s betrayal of Williams Wallace in Braveheart). Divisions in the ranks of empire Y’s forces might be something the PCs could exploit, if its soldiers began to identify with the worker’s plight.

Applying the Veneer

So far, I’ve left out the elements that would make this feel like a fantasy setting. But there was in fact plenty you’d find within a normal D&D campaign. There was a formidable horror lurking in an under-mountain passage, to be traversed to reach allies in the mine’s defence. The strategic resource was a gem used in scrying magic, as a means for the empire to spy on its population. An undead lord was prophesied to aid their descendants, but only if tradition (including property relations) was upheld.

The reason I’ve not described this earlier is because such elements were largely “external” to the underlying forces that shaped the campaign. You could replace one horror with another, or the mine’s magical resource with something else entirely, and campaign would largely function as before.

For me, the initial pull of D&D was being able to get creative with the fantasy elements of the campaign and letting my imagination run wild. The inclusion of original, wonder inspiring elements does seem important for engaging the players. But I’ve come to think of much of this as a veneer, with my main role as GM being to gauge how the player’s actions relate to the underlying material processes in the campaign.

Some Takeaways

The campaign worked less as a sandbox than I would have liked. It depended on the players taking sides with one of the interest groups, being prepared to risk their lives to achieve certain outcomes. In the future, I would prefer the players having the option of a more classic OSR treasure-seeking approach (as a desperate recourse). The social processes above would still shape the setting, characterising their experience of the game world.

It is important that the characters don’t get so powerful, as to be able to decide the outcome of these wider tendencies through their individual actions. The players securing the mine for the workers, through their wits, might and magic might have been a “feels good” achievement. For me though, this slides back to idealist poetics, where the dispositions and virtues of individuals determine outcomes. The PCs should not have equivalent influence to the social forces shaping the setting (institution based advancement helps here).

Setting the campaign in an isolated location with a limited number of actors was helpful in ramping the PCs influence over events. Within this microcosm, a temporary victory over imperial forces might be possible. It should be a result though primarily of the players’ reading of motivations and gauging whose support they can rely on, rather than gaining sufficient level to smite the empire.

What drives such a campaign is the classic OSR goal of exploration, rather than achieving a set of victory conditions. It is as much about the “social terrain” as the geographical features of the next hex. The “lay of the land” might be understanding how a merchant’s economic interests tie up with those of the empire. This should be something plain and discoverable, like the view over the next ridge, rather than a shocking conspiratorial secret.

The microcosm in my last campaign was perhaps over simplified, with the site of proxy conflict being conveniently uninhabited. Classically of course, imperialism encroaches on territory with a native population, with often dire consequences for its inhabitants. I’d look to add this dimension to future campaigns, though simplification can be helpful in finding your feet.