“Politics is downstream from culture.”
— Andrew Breitbart (apocryphal)
For those of you who have NO idea what “actual play” means, it’s basically playing tabletop roleplaying games — often Dungeons & Dragons — on YouTube or Twitch, like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone.
For those of you who have NO idea who is, she used to surveil Fox News and comment on its unique combination of cruelty and stupidity. She’s now running for congress, specifically Illinois’ 9th District.
It’s a wacky idea, I know, but an actual play to raise money for an election campaign would not be unheard of. At least one D&D actual play raised money for Kamala Harris in 2024, and Andrew Yang played an NPC in an actual play supporting Donna Imam’s 2020 congressional run. On a broader note, AOC did an Among Us Twitch stream to reach out to younger voters that same year.
Abughazaleh isn’t doing typical fundraisers. Her kickoff event was also a donation drive for period supplies, and she intends to hold other events that double as book drives, clothing exchanges, etc. She’s also stated her extreme distaste for big donors, and actual plays are more in line with small-dollar donations.
But it would have to be the right roleplaying game. Fortunately, as both a gamer and a news junkie, I am perfectly suited to make objectively correct recommendations.
ARC: Doom Roleplay — because we’re running out of time
“ARC is a rules-light, tension-heavy fantasy tabletop role-playing game where anyone can create urgent stories ticking down to a seemingly inescapable apocalypse.”
— ARC: Doom Roleplay, page 15
Stop the apocalypse or die trying. Race against a Doomsday Clock. Reverse Omens if you can to slow down the clock. Accept that sometimes you lose, no matter how hard you try.
ARC is fairly rules-light, and made for short campaigns and one-shot games. Heroes must stop an oncoming apocalypse before a semi-realtime clock reaches zero. Fighting happens but the game is more interested in solving problems — Omens — and saving the world in the process. There’s no set lore but the gorgeous art communicates the game’s fantastical vibes.
ARC’s chief mechanic is a reference to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. The game is a metaphor for human-made catastrophe. There’s no mention of climate change, nuclear weapons, global warming, or artificial intelligence — mainly because its default is fantasy stories. But that’s OK. God created analogy and allegory for just such occasions.
We’re running out of time. Climate, economic, and perhaps nuclear disaster is right around the corner. ARC’s countdown mechanics convey the sort of fear and loathing that a large section of the electorate feels in these nigh-apocalyptic times.
A game about time is on brand for Abughazaleh in another way. Under the issue of Basic Existence, she says “Our existence isn’t merely a means of profit for the richest people in society.” She speaks in terms of a stagnant minimum wage and the lack of a wealth tax, but struggling Americans are also time-poor. Free time, or even enough time to live life, has become a privilege.
Daggerheart — because D&D is overrated
“Daggerheart is a collaborative tabletop roleplaying game set in a vibrant fantasy world. Create a shared story with your adventuring party, and shape your world through rich character progression and long-term campaign play.”
— Daggerheart.com
Despite the fact that the only summary I could find is dryer than toast, Daggerheart will be everywhere once it releases. Its connection to Critical Role and Vox Machina will guarantee a lot of eyeballs on any actual play.
Just as Abughazaleh asked “what if we didn’t suck?”, Daggerheart asks “what if D&D was fun?” Mechanically speaking, Daggerheart is crunchier than other games mentioned here, but it’s straight-up breezy compared to Dungeons & Dragons. The card-centric design simplifies gameplay and reduces the need to look stuff up during the game. The whole thing has a very newb-friendly table presence, and it doesn't look like a refugee from the Satanic Panic.
Despite its lineage, Daggerheart isn’t “Vox Machina: The Roleplaying Game”. The game’s Campaign Frames will purportedly offer different flavors of fantasy — grimdark, high adventure, low-fantasy political drama, etc.
A Daggerheart session probably wouldn’t tie into any of Abughazaleh’s issues, but it doesn’t have to. It’s about heroic good times. More than the other recommendations, this one values pure escapism.
A Daggerheart actual play with one of the new firebrands of the Democratic party is enough to break the internet. The hate-watching alone will shove the algorithm towards normies in both parties. If they didn’t know who she was before, they will after this.
Eat the Reich — because nazis are bad
“Welcome to EAT THE REICH. By using this book, you and your friends will be able to craft over-the-top stories of action, ultraviolence, carnage and supernatural chaos together.
WHAT THIS IS:
A tabletop roleplaying game built around a single scenario: the final vampire mission to retake occupied Paris at the close of the Second World War.
…
WHO THIS IS FOR:
Players and gamesmasters who want an all-action pulp adventure ready to go out of the box, and who aren’t squeamish when it comes to descriptions of dead fascists.”
— Eat the Reich, page 4
Eat the Reich is about vampire commandos on a mission to kill Hitler in an alternate history World War II. The game’s anti-fascist vibes pair well with Abughazaleh’s position on the GOP’s authoritarian rampage: “The only way to properly fight fascism is loudly, proudly, and every single day.”
Eat the Reich’s rules are easy-peasy, and the game’s gorgeous art clearly conveys its supernatural nazi-killing themes. Players get to use fangs, claws, machine guns, bazookas, magic swords, and ancient spells to remove the walking cancers from Paris on your way to drink all of Hitler’s blood. If that isn’t fun, I don’t know what is.
Slaughtering pretend nazis is cathartic as fuck. While most of the fascist scum of plain human nazis, some of them are also literal monsters — like a demon-possessed actor and Frankenstein cyborgs — and one of them is a genocidal bastard.
An actual play of Eat the Reich would cause Abughazaleh’s detractors — and she has a lot of those — to shit a brick, but who cares? Detractors gonna detract. Plus, she could use the opportunity to discuss the featured genocidal bastard and how he inspired certain failed casino owners.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one thing about the game. Eat the Reich has only one complete mission, plus some hooks for further adventures in the back of the book. Those hooks are all other world leaders the vampire heroes could go after next, but Stalin is not listed as an option. Make of that what you will.
FIST: Ultra Edition — because we learned the wrong things from the Cold War
“Now: the second half of the twentieth century. The powers that be are locked in a tense nuclear standoff, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Away from the watchful eye of national intelligence, a cadre of exceptional misfits is assembled. These soldiers of fortune are uniquely equipped for covert and unusual operations.
In these uncertain times, the line between science and superstition has been broken, and the new arms race is only beginning. You, or your associates, may be faced with weapons, tactics, and actors unlike any you have ever seen. For a price, those exceptional misfits can help.
When you’re all out of options, it’s time to call FIST.”
— FIST: Ultra Edition, back cover
FIST’s creator has donated this game to at least nine charity bundles on Itch, supporting everything from trans rights to Palestinian relief. The game is destined to support an election.
FIST: Ultra Edition is a mashup of Metal Gear, the SCP Foundation, The A-Team, and Creature Commandos. All the conspiracies are true. You play paranormal mercenaries doing paranormal mercenary things during the Cold War. You deal with X-Files types stuff so the government can claim they don’t know anything about it, without dying in the process. You’re probably going to die in the process.
The game is bizarre and brilliant. The core mechanics are simple and character creation is a snap — which it needs to be since FIST agents die a lot. If a character kicks the bucket during play, the player creates their replacement — who is conveniently sped to the mission site post-haste.
I love the smell of roleplaying games with real-world political references in the morning. FIST provides an opportunity to discuss the Cold War behind a layer of the fantastical. We don’t discuss the Cold War nearly enough, and it’s time to re-litigate the takeaways. Namely, it wasn’t the lack of capitalism that made the Soviets the Evil Empire. It was the lack of democracy.
MoonPunk — because electoral politics is direct action when you’re a politician
“WHAT IS OPPRESSION?
Oppression is a systemic abuse of power. Sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism — these are only a few examples. There are too many systems of oppression that exist in the world to list here.
Oppression is tricky. It fools people into believing in a hierarchy, that there are certain people who are better than others. This is a lie, but it’s a powerful one.
It’s a difficult cycle to break. The people who have the most power to disrupt the system have incentive not to, and the people who are hurt by it have little power. But change is possible. That’s what we hope to demonstrate with this game. You can find some of these tools in this book, and we hope that playing MoonPunk will inspire you to fight oppression outside of the gaming table, too.”
— MoonPunk, page 8
MoonPunk is about mutual aid, direct action, and organized resistance on the moon. The retro-futurist aesthetic clearly communicates the setting, the rules are easy to pick up, and character creation is quick.
This isn’t a power fantasy. It is about underdogs taking on powerful yet skeezy and cowardly Rich Bastards in an effort to claw back the rights they lost to Big Business and a corrupt government.
MoonPunk pairs nicely with Abughazaleh’s plan to combine campaign events with mutual aid. I already covered MoonPunk, but it bears repeating that mutual aid is traditionally an anarchist practice, and most anarchists wouldn’t be caught dead engaging in electoral politics. Moreover — in a now-deleted tweet — one of MoonPunk’s creators second-guessed the inclusion of a politician class in a game about direct action and mutual aid.
All that said, I don’t care much and neither will her supporters.
Other games were considered for this piece — particularly Spire: The City Must Fall and Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition — but the five I listed are the most ideal for an election fundraiser. ARC, Eat the Reich, FIST, and Moonpunk are low-prep — for both GMs and players — and Daggerheart has a built-in audience that is counting the seconds until the game’s release.
But regardless of which game is played, news of an actual play would reach young voters who would love a candidate that plays “Woke D&D” to win an election and help some people along the way.
Kat Abughazaleh’s congressional run is already a shock to the Democratic Party’s system. An actual play would only add to that effect.
