Once a week my friends and I play dungeons and dragons, using DnD Beyond for our character sheets and dice, and Roll20 for our world (maps, player characters, NPCs, etc.). I’m playing a dog folk girl based heavily on the blonde dog in my profile pic with the same name, look, and sassy attitude too. She’s fourteen, and in our campaign dog folk and humans age at the same rate. She’s a full blown communist and I’m not shy about voicing her ideals, while I don’t say the word “communist” during role play, it is explicitly stated in her character sheet. Using the term “Marxist-Leninist” would be inaccurate considering Marx and Lenin don’t exist in the world of our campaign, unless my DM pulls something. Hell, my character’s last name is Luxemburg.
I’m writing this post because I’m looking for some advice on how to play a revolutionary leader? For context, my character is the daughter of two revolutionaries, Clara Luxemburg and Sacha (no last name). Both parents lived outside a dog folk town where they acted as Robin Hood-esque figures. At one point enough was enough and they began plans for an uprising against the nobles of their town. To make a long story short the revolution failed and Sacha and Clara were executed to send a message to the other revolutionaries. My character fled, to be on her own after witnessing their deaths, and ten years later she finds herself in a city building a revolution with the homeless population against the noble families, the church, and the royals. This plan was interrupted when our party was arrested and I broke an anarchist out of prison (yes, shame on me, but in my defence I didn’t know he was an anarchist). But after a bunch of shit and an Ace Attorney court scene, my girl is back on track to leading the revolution once more and going back to her dog town to prevent a genocide. The genocide is because I accidentally sparked a race war between the humans and the dog folk.
Now I’m nervous and unsure on how to go about this. While I am well aware that this is a fantasy game and I could just do whatever I wanted in terms of leading the revolution (the rest of my party weren’t involved in this part of the game, but now they might be) but I wanted to do it accurately to how our real world revolutionaries have done it. Is there any reading material on how Lenin, or Castro and Che Guevara, or Sankara (etc.) went about planning, building, and carrying out their revolutions? This sounds silly as hell but playing this character actually helps make concepts stick better in my head, it also feels nice to act out scenarios I know I never could in real life.
Anyway I know this was rambly, goofy if you will, but I hope you were at least somewhat entertained reading a little bit about my little commie dog. If you need more background information or are just curious about the campaign itself please don’t hesitate to ask. I truly love interacting with you all and look forward to seeing the numbers next to that bell in the corner.
Note: Sorry for any spelling and/or grammatical mistakes, the keyboard I’m using is very small and weird. It’s for an iPad.
Also the Maoist revolution would be a good example to pull ideas from.
If it were me trying this I would probably go with a bard. Really can’t beat their charisma and their skills. I’m more versed in pathfinder so idk what skills are like in then newer DnD stuff, but I would go hard into diplomacy, bluff, perception, and sense motive, or whatever the DnD equivalent of those are. I would put a point into those every level. This will give the the best chances of getting people on your side, negotiating, and detecting spies, and assassins. Being a revolutionary leader these are a must. Reaming points can be spread out among other useful skills but these staples are necessary.
Now in Pathfinder there’s a feat called leadership that lets you slowly grow a small army. It gets bonuses from charisma as well. One thing it also does if give you a higher level companion character/NPC that’s like, one level below you at all times. I would definitely get this feat if it’s an option. And have the companion character be either a paladin or a cleric. Paladin is best if you need extra persuasion and general brute force. Cleric is gonna give you even more spell options and give you access to Miracles in late game (if all that exists in the new DnD). In addition both of these classes are also higher charisma classes and will generally allow you to spread the necessary skills out to a wider variety.