At Firebrands, our quest is to unleash the power of play to grow the next generation of organizers and defeat the great evils that plague our land: fascism, inequality, and bad bosses.
We believe there are few better ways than sitting down at the table to sharpen the skills every organizer needs: strategy, to defeat a powerful foe; empathy, to build connections with beloved NPCs; adaptability, when the dice don’t roll in your favor; and the solidarity that comes from doing it all with a team.
By playing a campaign in a role-playing setting, organizers prepare for campaigns in the workplace, but with the fun, laughter, and human storytelling that makes it stick in our bones.
It's the day before your union election at Bloom Foods Meat Processing Plant. You've been working to unionize Bloom for over a year. In an attempt to thwart your election, your sinister boss is surveilling and intimidating your coworkers. Your job is to face organizing challenges, combat monstrous threats, and most importantly — to empower your fellow coworkers to take control of your workplace!
Firebrands is designed to teach players how to ask strategic questions, build credible plans to win, and skills we all need to fulfill our visions for a better world on a localized scale. In today's context, this game helps players learn to stop fascism wherever we are.
Firebrands takes lessons from the labor, tenant justice, veterans' rights, and climate justice movements and transposes them into narrative gameplay, set in an arcanepunk world. We cover skills like:
- How to talk to your coworkers about shared issues
- How to map a political ecosystem
- How to create a strategic campaign plan
- How to coordinate a mutual aid network
- How to go on strike to win what you want
We are a collective of union organizers, TTRPG players, Gamemasters, and absolute nerds with roots in community organizations and gaming spaces across the globe. With your generous donation, we hope to launch actual play events all over the country, featuring celebrity TTRPG players and movement activists; a network connecting GMs to players to facilitate online games; and a pay-what-you-can system to make the game as accessible as possible.
Your donation will support:
Stay tuned to hear about perks you'll receive as an early supporter of Firebrands!
The best unions are a labor of community love. So is this game. Your donation goes toward more than a game; you're supporting a new form of participatory political media.
Welcome to the table. Let's go win.
In solidarity,
the Firebrands Collective