Communism

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"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

Contrary to western propaganda, this is how communism has always worked.

Communism is a term used to describe a group of political ideologies that involve the government having a great amount of control over the economy. If you didn't know this already, you should consider lurking your local /his/ board or consulting an actual encyclopedia before running a version of it in your games.

In general there are three ways communism is used in fiction and board games:

1. 1 FILTHY GODLESS COMMIE-NAZIS: Dangerous, faceless enemies, ripped straight from the wettest dreams of Cold War-era America. These communists are the enemy, a vast, brutal, godless horde determined to take over the world that our heroes must resist. This attitude is occasionally played for comedy, as in Paranoia where Friend Computer's glitched-out personality has made it a paranoid wreck obsessed with a largely-imaginary adversary.

1. 2 Champions of the Proletariat: The other side of the coin to what is listed above. These are either rebels against corrupt corporate overlords or a body of workers and soldiers fighting against fascist invaders, most people who complain about GeeDubs think they are being this. Occasionally show up in Medieval settings as anachronistic peasant revolts or other politically-radical types out to pull down the social parts of Medieval stasis.

1. 3 GLORIOUS COMMUNISTS: Somewhere between the other two and generally played for laughs. Communist regimes are oppressive, but also able to do great thing through sheer force of Industrial Might, soviet Super-Science, Stalinist Architecture and Will-Of-The-People and can be heroic just as easily as villainous. See Red Alert-II and III, and to a lesser extent a few parts of the Imperium of Man.

Communism has also provided us with the Russian army, which is awesome. It is a sacred law of /tg/ alternate history homebrew settings that there must be at least one communist faction and it must control at least 50% of the world's total landmass. Even Khador draws on the imagery of the Soviet armed forces, despite being more analogous to Tsarist/Imperialist Russia politically.

Like all radical ideologies, communists are all over the Sixth World, mostly among the poor and disenfranchised who can't help looking up at the big fancy megacorp enclaves and wondering how that makes any kind of just sense. The Berlin Flux State was probably the biggest and most successful anarcho-communist enclave in-setting for a while, before it became such an embarrassment to the megacorps insisting they're the only game in town that many of them (including the one run by the great dragon Lofwyr) had it dismantled somewhere around second or third edition.

People like to call the Tau communist. There's some truth to that, given they're a highly-collective society that generally values group achievement over personal accomplishment, but they're also a largely class-stratified society, with only the assurance that their leaders are theoretically cooperating for the Greater Good to keep them from being out-and-out feudalists with castes. Then again, that isn't too different from what many commie states became.

Star Trek is complicated. On the one hand, the Federation are essentially commies, but their advanced technology has created a post-scarcity economy so they can get away with it. Conversely, their chief rivals, the Klingons and the Romulans, are transparent parallel versions of the USSR and Maoist China seen through the pre-detente eyes of an American lounge lizard. Similar post-scarcity communists are common in Eclipse Phase, though with a much stronger anarchist bent. They are largely and uncomplicatedly perfect due to the game designers' raging stiffy for that kind of thing.

Any WWII or quasi-WWII game worth its salt will have a communist faction, including the classic Axis & Allies and the modern wargame Flames of War. Additionally, many classic board games have attempted to tap into the forty-five year struggle for dominance between Amurica and the communists. The most famous and best is probably Twilight Struggle. TSR also released an RPG set during the Cold War called Top Secret, though, like most non-D&D TSR products, no one under thirty-five has ever heard of it.

This article has been marked as containing treasonous capitalist road sentiments. Please report to your local commissariat for re-education through labor.

Gallery

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File:AK-47.jpg|Glorious Soviet Industries could be used to produce huge numbers of reliable and effective things which are still in high demand after a half a century... File:Lada 1200.jpg|...Their cars are not on that list