Although this was not the first Champions Now campaign we finished, it was the first one we chose to share on Adept Play. Considering how profoundly this game shocked all participants, I believe it is an appropriate beginning for our sharing.

Since we are not native English speakers, the following relies heavily on large language models and may inevitably carry some of LLMs’ and our cultural bias. For reference, the original Chinese version of this review is provided at the end of this post.

First of all, a bit of introduction: The game master of this Champions Now game was Lemon Ice, we call him TZ (it’s really tough to explain). There were only two players: Fronda, and Hailing (that’s me). This was Fronda’s very first time playing Champions Now, though we had previously played together in WFRP and Dungeon World. In contrast, I have somewhat experienc about the system, having both participated in and later run a campaign of Champions Now. The latter, I think, is worth a separate review at another time. Among us, TZ knew the system best, and thus he often handled rule explanations. Meanwhile, it was Fronda who usually took on the job of arranging the sessions.

Inspiration and Two Statements

About half a year ago, TZ told me he was reading the Libris Mortis of D&D 3.5. He thought the book contained some very intriguing ideas that he wanted to explore in actual play, centered on necromancy and the undead. But very quickly, just a day later, he told me he was dissatisfied. He had become convinced that D&D 3.5 was not a good choice, even if the inspiration itself came from one of its supplements.

So we returned to Champions Now. Soon after, TZ presented two Statements:

◇A land where necromancy is widespread, after the Demon Lord was defeated.
◇A society of humans, vampires, elves, and their mixed descendants.

He also offered some points of reference for the atmosphere of “after the Demon Lord was defeated”: post–World War II Germany, Austria, and Japan, or Iraq in the aftermath of the Iraq War.
After laying out these two statements, we held a Session 0. Unfortunately, I can barely remember what actually happened during that session 0.

Player Characters before the First Session

It is time to introduce my character! Imagine Iraq after the U.S. military withdrawal: huge amounts of military equipment left behind, the locals’ way of life permanently altered, yet without the ability to reproduce or maintain those abandoned equipments. Suppose, for example, the U.S. military had really deployed gas turbine trucks to move supplies. After the withdrawal, there would still be many such trucks in good working order, but local mechanics would be unable to handle their complexity.

That was the image in my mind for my character, a truck driver named Choros Buhbat. He once drove a supply truck for the Old Kingdom’s army, and after the Old Kingdom collapsed, he continued to earn a living as a driver, hauling goods between settlements. But in this world, his gas turbine truck is in fact a necromancy-powered flying skeletal crocodile. It has ample cargo space, can fight with its teeth and ramming strikes, its scales can burst outward to deflect projectiles, and it is equipped with flight bladders and fuel-jet propulsion. However, besides the constant worry about repairs and spare parts, Buhbat also faced threats from both the Old Kingdom’s restorationists and extremists hostile to the Old Kingdom, who were drawn to the crocodile’s unusual looks. On top of that, because of his far eastern origins and appearance, neither vampires, elves, nor local humans regarded him as one of their own.

Fronda’s character was named Florence, the daughter of the Old Kingdom’s last Prime-Minister. An accident had left her half-undead. She was skilled in both medicine and necromancy, able to create powerful undead and to heal both the living and the dead. Florence was driven by a deep obsession with restoring the Old Kingdom and had founded a resistance organization dedicated to that cause. Recently, however, several patrons within the New Kingdom government had withdrawn their financial support, leaving the movement in severe shortage of funds. The smuggling routes for corpses had also been cut off by the New Kingdom, throwing the restorationists into crisis.

The First Session: The Adventurers’ Military Junta

Since we had no recordings, everything that follows about each session is drawn entirely from my own biased memory. At the start of the first session, we began with a Play in Hot: our characters had discovered an Old Kingdom military arsenal. Given that the Old Kingdom had built its very foundation on necromancy, it was no surprise that the arsenal stored corpses and all manner of necromantic materials. By the time we arrived, though, much of it had already been cleared out. Florence tried to investigate who had emptied the arsenal, but came away with little meaningful information. Choros Buhbat suggested instead that we look into whether any new factions had emerged. Around that point, we began to sketch out the political landscape of the New Kingdom.

First, there were the rulers themselves: the Adventurers’ Guild and its army. A band of heroes slain the Demon Lord in a decapitation strike, then the Adventurers’ Army defeated the Old Kingdom’s force in the field. Together, they ruled the new state, called the Adventurers’ Kingdom, under the formal structure of the Adventurers’ Guild.

To the east, the kingdom bordered one of the two superpowers of the era: the Elven Empire. In a legacy fashion, elves lived in settlements clustered around sacred trees in their forests, which meant the frontier was a patchwork of human villages and elven enclaves, with constant friction between them.

To the north lay a smaller polity, ruled mainly by vampires. Though nominally part of the Old Kingdom, the vampires had always been separatists, backed for decades by the Church. The Old Kingdom had drained itself fighting vampires, and that long war of attrition was one of the main reasons for its eventual downfall. In this new age, however, the vampires could supply the Adventurers’ Kingdom with potions that rapidly healed wounds, creating a fragile but mutually beneficial relationship.

And finally, there was the Church, the other superpower of the era, ruling its own league of nations. Fiercely committed to human supremacy, the Church was implacably opposed to the elves and at the same time held near-total sway over the religion of the Adventurers’ Kingdom. As for Florence’s restorationist movement, although it had some backing from former Old Kingdom military officers, at this stage it was little more than a mid-sized insurgent group.

Once such a political landscape had been outlined, Florence decided to travel with Choros Buhbat to the Adventurers’ Kingdom’s capital, hoping to win back the support of our lost patrons. We also defined who these patrons were: former officers of the Demon Lord’s government who had defected to the new regime, in other words, the bureaucrats of the fallen Old Kingdom. Yet, just as Florence and Buhbat arrived in the capital, the Adventurers’ Guild issued a decree: no one who had ever served in the Old Kingdom government could hold public office in the new state. Unsurprisingly, this provoked furious protests and marches in the capital’s streets. The Guild’s response was immediate and brutal, they dispatched the Adventurers’ Army to crush the demonstrations on the spot.

Florence and Buhbat witnessed firsthand how the Adventurers’ Army washed the streets in blood without hesitation. Forced to reconsider, we decided to leave the capital and rethink our next steps. Before leaving, though, Florence contacted several Old Kingdom bureaucrats willing to flee with them, thereby adding some much-needed administrative expertise to the restorationist cause. But as the movement’s membership grew, its funds quickly ran dry.

After discussing with TZ, three options were put on the table. The first was to loot the property of half-elves and elves within our controlled area. These targets had few means to defend themselves, and the local humans would quietly support such raids. But Florence strongly opposed this option. The Old Kingdom had fallen precisely because it failed to unite its many peoples, and she refused to repeat that mistake.

The second was to ambush the Adventurers’ Guild’s mineral convoys. Both Florence and Buhbat rejected this as well. The convoys were guarded by soldiers far too strong, and every attempt risked total annihilation.

So Florence chose the third path: raiding the vampires’ lands for healing potions, then selling them back to adventurers for profit, thereby keeping the organization alive.

By the end of this first session, we had come to a stark realization: the Adventurers’ Kingdom was in truth a pure military Junta. Though it had toppled a dictatorship, it lacked any real capacity to govern. The Demon Lord’s force and the Old Kingdom, meanwhile, were less like the exaggerated JRPG villains we might expect and more like a conventional authoritarian regime, now toppled and branded with stigma by their successors. On our side, we also realized that Buhbat’s Problems and Person needed to change, since he had already committed himself to the remnants of the Demon Lord’s force, and many of his most immediate troubles, like repairs, had already been addressed.

The Second Session: The Church’s Agent and a False Flag Operation

The raid on the vampire-controlled region went remarkably smoothly, mainly because it had the quiet support of the local human population. Florence and Choros Buhbat soon discovered why: the factories producing healing potions required a constant supply of blood slaves, and the vampires were capturing humans from their territory to fill that need. Although the restorationists quickly broke through the factory’s defenses, the trouble there was not limited to vampires alone. A man resembling one of the Church’s ascetic monks happened to be present, and the moment he saw Florence and Buhbat, he launched an attack.

The fight escalated quickly. Using the skeletal crocodile’s flight power, Buhbat and Florence stayed on the edges of the monk’s range, and since he had no means of any ranged attack, he could not seriously threaten us. Nevertheless, the monk’s strength was formidable. Florence kept creating undead that jumped into battlefield from the crocodile, but none of their strikes landed decisively. The stalemate was broken when the monk used a Presence Attack on Florence, condemning the Old Kingdom as corrupt and incapable of rule, which shook her confidence. Immediately afterward, Buhbat countered with his own Presence Attack, demanding to know why the Church tolerated the vampires’ use of humans as blood slaves for potion production. Seizing on the monk’s hesitation, the skeletal crocodile dove and struck him into a knockout.

In the aftermath, Florence selected a few healthy and presentable blood slaves to use as propaganda and released the rest on the spot——in truth abandoning them to death, hoping they would draw the vampires’ pursuit.

Upon returning to our base, Florence and Buhbat spread message across the Adventurers’ Kingdom, presenting the restorationists as protectors of humanity standing against the vampires. We also interrogated the monk. At first, the questioning went nowhere. The monk insisted it was all a coincidence. His lies were easily exposed, but he revealed nothing further. Florence then attempted to ransom him or exchange him for some benefit. After discussion, however, we realized our organization had no trustworthy channel for such negotiations, whether with adventurers, vampires, or elves. Ironically, the only channel to the Church was the monk himself.

Florence “remembered” that the Church, aside from backing the vampires and demanding the Old Kingdom expel the elves, had remained relatively neutral during the war between the Adventurers’ Army and the Demon Lord’s force. On this basis, she concluded that cooperation with the Church was possible.

Once they expressed willingness to cooperate, the monk revealed his true identity. He was a special Agent of the Church, authorized to negotiate on its behalf. But there was a condition: the restorationists would have to expel or kill the elves. Buhbat’s first reaction was opposition. He was no friend to the elves, but he believed it would be reckless to tie the movement so closely to the Church, which would threaten its independence. Florence also opposed outright slaughter, recalling that the Old Kingdom had collapsed because it made too many enemies. Relying on superpowers would be nothing short of selling out its sovereignty.

Yet both of them, cautious as they were, had no choice but to accept the Church’s offer. The organization was desperately short of funds. The Agent could provide the techniques for running the blood-slave factories, and healing potions were essential for the Adventurers’ Kingdom. Adventurers abused them constantly, becoming dependent and unable to quit. This meant the revenue could sustain the restorationists for the long term.

After the agreement, the monk returned to the Church, which in turn began to promote the restorationists positively inside the Adventurers’ Kingdom. Florence and Buhbat decided to travel themselves to the Elven Empire, to investigate its condition. There we discovered why the elves had not intervened: the Empire was torn apart by civil war. Broadly, the elves were divided into two factions: the extremist supremacists, and the moderates who sought alliances with human nations against the Church. After some debate, Florence and Buhbat concluded that it would be better for the extremists to take power and for conflict between the Elven Empire and the Adventurers’ Kingdom to intensify. Only through war could the balance of force shift enough to give the restorationists a chance at reclaiming power.

Our method was a false flag operation. The restorationists, posing as mercenaries, would attack extremist positions inside the Empire while claiming to be hired by the moderates. Through careful propaganda, we would ensure that tales of “atrocities under extremist rule” and of “human-elf unity” spread widely. But we never intended to truly aid the moderates. Instead, we avoided direct battle with the extremist military and raided villages and towns with weak defenses in extremist territory. Such actions would only deepen the elves’ xenophobia and push public opinion toward the extremist faction that promised vengeance against humans.

During these raids, many elven civilians and half-elves were captured. You can likely guess what happened next: they were thrown into the blood-slave factories, fueling the production of addictive drugs. Florence did not object.

After this session, TZ, Fronda, and I discussed the campaign at length. By this point, the game no longer felt like Iraq or divided Germany; It felt like 20th century Latin America. We had become the mirror of a Latin American guerrilla force, the Elven Empire resembled the Soviet Union, and the monk was unmistakably a CIA Agent. Florence and Buhbat clearly understood the danger of cooperating with the CIA, yet the crushing scarcity of resources forced us to chose to becoming part of the CIA’s network of the addictive drug trade.

For Florence personally, this marked a turning point. At first, she had held firm to the idea that elves in the new regime should have equal rights with humans. But by the end of this session, she tacitly accepted the abduction of elves and half-elves as blood-slaves. We all agreed that the restorationist movement was beginning its slide into corruption. And the root cause was clear: the harsh scarcity of resources that left keeping survival as the only viable choice. After all, had we chosen the most difficult path from the start, that is, rejecting all alliances and attempting instead to ambush the Adventurers’ Guild’s convoys, then the restorationists might already have been wiped out.

We recognized in this moment the parallels with history. In China, Latin America, India, and Africa, many rebel groups began with lofty ideals, only to decay within decades. At the same time, many others were crushed in their infancy, leaving nothing but dust in history. In the end, we imagined one possibility, and chose to believe it: when Florence and Buhbat witnessed the Adventurers’ Army massacring protestors in the capital, their idealism had already begun to falter. Doubts about revolution and restoration had taken root, pushing them toward survival over faith.

The Third Session: The Road to Wanda

At the beginning of this session, TZ gave us feedback on the consequences of our earlier actions: the moderate faction among the elves had quickly lost influence, while tensions between the Elven Empire and the Adventurers’ Kingdom were now escalating around the sacred trees along their shared border. Within the Adventurers’ Kingdom, human supremacist sentiment was also becoming mainstream, intensifying the conflict between humans and elves. Caught in the middle, half-elves were despised by both sides.

Florence decided to recruit these half-elves: as long as they were willing to oppose the elves, they could join her restorationist movement, though by now it was hardly to say who exactly this resistance was resisting. The slogan we came up with was that elves were an inferior race, while half-elves still had a chance at redemption. In practice, however, any elf or half-elf willing to oppose the Elven Empire would be accepted, gaining residence rights and small plots of farmland in exchange for service or labor to the restorationist organization. At this point, it was not so hard to think of that infamous phrase, “Arbeit macht frei——work sets you free.” Well, at least we truly did give those elves who joined us their freedom. Buhbat considered whether restorationists disguised as humans or elves should continue false-flag operations near the sacred trees, but we abandoned the idea as too risky.

With the organization now accumulating significant manpower and resources, and having gained broad support from rural human villages, Florence decided the next step was to advance into a city. Nearby, there were several suitable targets. One city, in particular, had already erupted into riots fueled by hostility between elves and humans. As expected, the local Adventurers’ Guild proved incapable of containing the violence and withdrew along with the adventurers stationed there.

This was the perfect chance for Florence’s organization to demonstrate its strength. We decided to send in troops to secure what remained of orderly districts, separating humans from elves, and to distribute wealth from the city’s treasury, granaries, and abandoned rich estates among the citizens as appeasement. To stabilize the elven quarter, we incorporated some elves who were willing to cooperate, using elves to govern elves.

Just as order began to return, however, the Adventurers’ Guild returned with the Adventurers’ Army, issuing a blunt ultimatum: “GET OUT.” After discussion, we chose not to confront them directly. Instead, we convinced many Old Kingdom bureaucrats and a few elves to depart with us, while also handing over a large portion of the wealth we had collected as a tribute to the Adventurers’ Army. Allowed to withdraw, we left the city.

Once inside the city, the Guild reestablished control and demanded that residents surrender all the property they had gained during the riots, in other words, everything they possessed. Many local self-defense groups that had risen during the chaos refused to comply and raised militias to guard the walls. The army’s response was brutal: they summoned thunderstorms, obliterated the walls and large sections of the city, massacred countless citizens, and forced the survivors to surrender in terror. Fronda and I said the same name in unison: “Rwanda!” From that moment, we began calling it Wanda City.

After fleeing the city, Florence tried to spread word of the massacre within the Elven Empire to provoke conflict with the Adventurers’ Kingdom. However, lacking channels of trust or communication with elven nobles, the restorationists managed only to spread rumors among the common people.

We then decided to shift focus back to the characters’ personal lives. Florence decided to personally raise and indoctrinate a few elves, instilling in them the ideology of Old Kingdom restoration. She also realized that, since the organization depended almost entirely on her leadership, it was necessary to find an heir——a foster son or daughter to serve as her successor.

Meanwhile, Buhbat, one of the movement’s earliest veterans, was given full responsibility for the organization’s daily affairs. This meant constant travel between human and elven settlements. Given the restorationists’ notorious reputation among elves, it was no surprise that extremist elf-supremacist groups began plotting to assassinate him. Nor was it surprising that there were leaks within the movement.

Inevitably, Florence and Buhbat were confronted by an elven noble leading several squads. During the fight, Florence launched a presence attack, declaring that the restorationists’ actions were nothing more than protecting elves from the tyranny of the Adventurers’ Kingdom (a 3-core attack). The noble countered with a 6-core presence attack, denouncing Florence for condoning the enslavement of elves and half-elves in blood-slave factories. Florence, unwilling to abandon her guards, stayed and was incapacitated.

At that moment, Buhbat’s presence attack took effect: capturing elves and half-elves as blood slaves was, in his words, still a form of protection, at least it preserved their lives. And the restorationists had not slaughtered them, but had in fact saved many elves in Wanda City. This was a 4-core attack, lowering the noble’s DCV to 6. The skeletal crocodile seized the opening, delivering a martial kick that knocked the noble out. His squads carried him away, and Florence chose not to pursue.

After this session, we realized that in both the second and third sessions, we had paid little attention to the characters’ personal lives. Even the original Person and Problems aspects from the first session no longer fully apply. I gave Buhbat’s hatred of elves a stronger background: his homeland was east of the Elven Empire, where he and his sister were captured by elven slavers and sold into vampire lands as blood slaves. He was freed only when the Old Kingdom army attacked those territories, after which he became a driver for the Demon Lord’s army to survive. His sister, possessing necromantic talent, might even become Florence’s adopted daughter.Thus, Buhbat’s personal life would likely revolve around condescending interference in his sister’s affairs, constant nitpicking of the elves within the organization, and endless conversations with village elders.

On the other side, we realized that one NPC could serve as the DNPC for both of our PCs, though with different Situation elements, since the same person might reveal very different sides when entangled in both our characters’ lives.

The Final Session: The Fading of a Revolution

At the start of this session, Florence was at the hospital within the restorationists’ territory, teaching Choros Buhbat’s sister, Choros Sayinjiya, both medicine and necromancy. The hospital served a dual purpose: providing cheap care for the common people, and supplying corpses for the restorationist organization. Since corpses were a crucial military resource, families who donated the dead also received compensation. As a medical student, Sayinjiya studied medicine under a respected elven doctor while also learning necromancy from Florence. Yet Florence soon realized that Sayinjiya harbored deeply ingrained prejudice against elves, something she believed needed correction. As a candidate for leadership, Sayinjiya should not let such biases show——political priorities had to come first. Unsurprisingly, Sayinjiya brushed off such lecture, so Florence decided to consult Buhbat about it.

At the time, Buhbat was mediating a conflict between humans and elves. Many elves, having fled to the restorationists’ territory, were destitute after losing all property, and disputes with local humans broke out. A human accused an elf of stealing valuable artisan tools. After hearing both sides, Buhbat easily judged that the human was likely lying. Nevertheless, he declared the evidence insufficient and ruled that the tools be given to the human, while the elf would instead receive a stable job moving corpses at the hospital. News of this spread, and Buhbat was praised for his wisdom and fairness: the dispute was resolved, and the elf was given a chance to reintegrate into society. Of course, I suspect that this narrative was carefully spun by someone. Florence was somewhat displeased but admitted the solution itself was not wrong.

We then discussed how to educate Sayinjiya. Florence proposed appointing an elf handmaid of similar age to influence her attitudes. The girl would need to be loyal to the policies of the restorationist organization and submissive in character. Five candidates were brought in:

1. A woman who was likely just human with slightly pointed ears, perhaps a few elven ancestry, and a staunch human supremacist eager to expel elves. Buhbat fully supported her, but Florence rejected her outright.
2. A dissenter from the Elven Empire, a moderate who wanted cooperation with humans and claimed she was simply doing the right thing by being here.
3. A local from a half-elf village of the Old Kingdom, who joined only because the restorationists were the least hostile power to half-elves nearby. Her support for Florence’s policies was clearly superficial.
4. A half-elf supremacist who considered both humans and elves inferior, believing Florence would lead half-elves to rule the world.
5. A half-elf from an Old Kingdom bureaucratic family, uninterested in the rights of humans or elves but very eager for the prestige of being handmaid to a future leader.

Florence chose the 2nd and 5th candidates to serve Sayinjiya.

Although the handmaid selection ended smoothly, Florence grew uneasy as hostility between humans and elves in the territory mounted. She decided to admit more elven refugees and grant them some autonomy in a small community. But land was already scarce, much of it seized by former Old Kingdom military officers when the restorationists first occupied the region. To make matters worse, the Church’s Agent returned, expressing dissatisfaction that the organization had not acted against elves recently. He demanded that dissenting refugees from the Elven Empire be handed over and pressed Florence to take new measures against the elves.

To address these internal tensions, Buhbat suggested a census: classify every resident as human, elf, or half-elf, and tally their landholdings. This would also expose members who had seized too much land during the earlier chaos, easing pressure on farmland. Yet the results were disastrous. In practice, half-elves were always registered as either human or elf, erasing them completely from the restorationists’ territory, while divisions between humans and elves only sharpened. To repair the damage, Florence had to improvise: elves were assigned to land reclamation labor and awarded the land they reclaimed, along with the title of “honorary human.” She also wanted to form an elven guerrilla unit from these more cooperative refugees. But word of this spread uncontrollably, highlighting a bigger problem: the restorationists had no reliable intelligence service, nor anyone trustworthy to establish one. Buhbat suggested creating multiple departments to balance power, but we all knew that such division would only accelerate the collapse of a regime beset by internal and external crises.

Florence then convened representatives of the major factions: former Old Kingdom military officers, elves, village elders, and former Old Kingdom bureaucrats. First she met with the officers, joined by Buhbat. They immediately denounced her, declaring that all hope of restoring the Old Kingdom was gone, and that the so-called restorationists were now nothing more than puppets of the Adventurers’ Kingdom. If her father had been the leader, they said, things would never have sunk so low. Florence was furious. These men, clinging to their rank, had no solution against the Adventurers’ Army’s thunderstorms; confronted, they fell silent, knowing even the Old Kingdom’s armies had fallen to such storms. With no useful answers forthcoming, Florence dismissed them.

A few days later, she called in the village elders. They agreed with every policy meekly, but kept complaining about the pollution and trouble caused by the blood-slave factories. Unsurprisingly, since they received no benefit from them. Buhbat bribed them with promises: once more blood slaves were captured, each village would receive its own factory with profit-sharing.

Next came the elves. They had little to offer in military terms, but some administrative and technical support. Buhbat told them bluntly that the Adventurers’ hostility toward elves was rooted in the Church’s demands, urging them to convey, through unnamed channels, the message to the Empire that “the Church is the true enemy.” Around this time, new rumors spread: that the Adventurers were too strong, and that elves planned to surrender to them because the restorationists had no future. It was clear to us this was not the elves’ doing——the only suspects were the Old Kingdom military officers. And to think Florence had protected them in earlier actions! As for the bureaucrats, their words and motives were entirely predictable.

At this point, TZ suggested that the campaign had effectively reached its conclusion. I felt the same. The restorationists had no true enemy and no true ally. Adventurers, elves, the Church, vampires, none of them were committed to destroying the restorationists, nor did the restorationists truly need to destroy any of them. Hunting NPCs who sought to manipulate the PCs had succeeded; those who wished to kill them had given up. Future events would still shape whether the organization survived, but they would no longer provide dramatic turns. The stories of Florence and Buhbat had come to an end.

All of us felt heavy-hearted. None of us had intended the campaign to end this way. Nobody had pushed the situation in this direction. Every action had been taken in ways that all agreed were reasonable. And yet, here we were. We all agreed Florence and Buhbat had made no “wrong” choices. We only chose those were “not quite right.” The restorationists had balanced precariously among far stronger forces, surviving against the odds, but in the end they were left only with survival. This was neither a good ending nor a bad ending, but simply a “normal ending”——to survival.

We also discussed possible futures. Florence’s movement might endure for quite some time. After all, no one truly sought to annihilate it. But the Adventurers’ military Junta was incapable of governance and would eventually collapse. When it did, both the Elven Empire and the Church would surely intervene. That would be the restorationists’ opportunity. Whichever side prevailed, as long as they had no desire to directly govern the land, the restorationists, positioned as a compromise, would be the perfect puppet regime. Florence’s restoration might succeed in that moment, but only by becoming a figurehead, never a hero. History might remember her as a notorious opportunist. Yet that was still a better fate than Buhbat’s.

I believed Buhbat would either flee abroad before the dust settled, or be executed by whichever power claimed the land, remembered as nothing more than a brutal secret police chief, a butcher complicit in ethnic slaughter. Perhaps the only hope lay with Sayinjiya. Maybe she would leave the country, make her life in medicine. Or perhaps——just perhaps——she would truly unite elves and humans, becoming the hope of a renewed restorationist regime and founding a better nation state. But if that were to happen, it would no longer be the story of Florence and Buhbat.

Post-Campaign Reviews: How to Do Politics

“Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.“——Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society

After the campaign ended, we spent a long time in discussion. We all shared the same impression: in just four sessions, Florence’s restorationist movement had lived through the entire arc of many Latin American revolutionary groups. From the leader’s perspective, we experienced the full process of a revolutionary organization sliding into corruption and decay. In truth, neither Florence nor Choros Buhbat themselves were corrupted. Their actions were often quite selfless, since we players do not seek material gain for our characters. But the organization as a whole eventually became nothing more than a patchwork of bickering interest groups, unable to achieve anything beyond mere survival. By this stage, the restorationist movement of the Old Kingdom had not so much failed as it had quietly expired.

The most direct cause was, of course, extreme scarcity of resources. We began to understand why so many Latin American revolutionary movements were swallowed so quickly by the CIA’s narcotics networks. When funds ran dry and desperation mounted, the CIA’s networks were so ready-made, so profitable, and so effortless that they were almost impossible to refuse. But once integrated into those networks, once dependent on that money, it became nearly impossible to escape the CIA’s control. Even if the leader personally remained wary, could she really demand her comrades return to hunger and hardship after tasting a better life? Those who tried were often replaced with new leadership, encouraged by CIA intrigue. With the economy under the CIA’s grip, political control followed inevitably.

Under such conditions, many of our actions were not failures, but neither were they successes. At best, we kept things from worsening rather than making them better. At each turn, the harsh circumstances forced us into a choice: either attempt radical actions with enormous risks and near-certain annihilation, or take moderate compromises at the cost of sacrificing a little more of our principles. Step by step, with well-meaning compromises, the movement surrendered everything but its bare survival. Its stance wavered constantly: first welcoming elves, then rejecting them, then accepting them again, and then rejecting them once more. By the end, no class or group was willing to sacrifice for the cause. Florence no longer trusted any single report from her subordinates, because she could no longer believe anyone in the organization was truly capable of pursuing an idealistic goal alongside her.

Yet perhaps the deeper root was simpler: politics and conspiracies are not the same. Conspiracy is about hiding aims, bargaining, and compromise to secure benefits. Politics, especially for a revolutionary leader, requires the opposite: a clear, aggressive stance, openly showing one’s ideals, positions, and ultimate goals to both friends and enemies. One must firmly decide who to win over and who must be destroyed, no matter how powerful the enemy, no matter the risk of annihilation, so that potential allies can trust in unwavering resolve. From the very beginning, economic, political, and even cultural lines must be drawn. Otherwise, as with our restorationist movement, endless compromises turn a revolution into nothing more than a feuding warlord clique. Voluntary suicides, really.

Finally, a word about us as players. TZ, Fronda, and I never expected that this campaign would teach us so much about how to do politics, and how to do politics wrong. We all knew and could recite the quote at the beginning of this section, and we all knew its meaning. But when actually role-playing revolutionary leaders, facing the flood of crises, shortages, and hopeless situations, even in a game we still felt genuine pressure. In that role, we led a revolution that ended in quiet dissolution. None of us imagined that a role-playing game could ever teach us something like this. But it did, even if the outcome left us not so happy.

If we could begin again, our choice would be clear. Deep into the mountains, wage guerrilla war against the Adventurers’ military Junta, and from the very start draw a line against the Church’s narcotics networks. Even if it meant risking annihilation, we would declare to the people of this land our stance: never ever compromise.

The original Chinese version: