General Mud by Rob Macdougall wins the sole High Ronny for this round

Where do I start? This is a beautiful piece of work, specifically because of the diverse possible outcomes and themes. Until about three-quarters through, I figured it was merely a dialogue-based homage to Animal Farm, but it's not. Can the Soviet survive? Is the General's ascendancy a long-term curse to its downfall? Are bourgeois notions, in moderation, compatible with a secure economy? This should be taught and played in history classes.

Granted, I haven't run any numbers or tried it out myself, so there may be Currency issues. I don't see any at first glance, so the next step is probably play.

I'll have to come up with some constructive comments, somehow.

1. Let us know what sort of publication format and commercial goals you have in mind for this. Pehaps something that includes the dice, or for which a set of perfectly-suited dice are available, as with Bacchanal? Although I love the illustrations, the question is whether they're freely available for commercial use, and if not, what might you do instead?

2. Encourage opening up the range for player-characters. I'd like to play a rat from the barn, basically Templeton; I could see some neat possibilities from including house pets who are now "on the farm," and perhaps even an escapee from another Farm. Stuff like that, without trying too hard for exact historical personages.

Finally, here's an interesting quandary. Right now, I'm trying to frame a post to answer Victor's questions in [Stalin's Story] Ronnies feedback, in which I'm going to claim that playing Stalin and arbitrating play isn't functional, or at least, isn't reliably functional for me. Whereas in this story, you do have someone playing General Mud, who does have GMing responsibilities too, and yet I'm saying it's brilliant, wins a full award, blah blah. Any comments on the differences? I think it'll be a useful comparison.

Best,
Ron

Ron, et al

First, thanks! For the feedback, the flattering praise, and the contest in the first place. The contest did for me exactly what it was supposed to, I think: got someone who'd noodled casually with ideas for games but never done any more than that to actually put something out there for the world.

Ron wrote:
Until about three-quarters through, I figured it was merely a dialogue-based homage to Animal Farm, but it's not. Can the Soviet survive? Is the General's ascendancy a long-term curse to its downfall? Are bourgeois notions, in moderation, compatible with a secure economy? This should be taught and played in history classes.

I must say I thoroughly enjoyed my recent reading of 'General Mud'. The characterisation of Soviet revolutionary politics is extreme well done, with great potential for competition between varying strands of ideology within the game.

One thing which did confuse me slightly was the use of the Red Banner and the creation of an uprising.

It's stated that "If the number of red banners flying exceeds the number of black marks on your character sheet, you may try to rebel against General Mud by declaring an uprising..." Now, does this mean that only those with black marks, those who have been sent to the Glue Factory, can actively instigate an uprising? Or, can any Proletarian Comrade instigate an uprising with no black marks against them, as soon as a single red banner is unfurled?

I like the potential that only those who have been to the Glue Factory and witnessed the horrors of the gulag can be active in turning against the regime of General Mud: they have seen the dark underbelly of the Revolution and are willing to strike out against it for the good of the people (or, perhaps for less comradely reasons?) However, it's slightly unclear at the moment (unless, of course, your intention is that any PC can instigate an uprising without having to have black marks.)

Cheers
Malcolm

Malcolm wrote:
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed my recent reading of 'General Mud'. The characterisation of Soviet revolutionary politics is extreme well done, with great potential for competition between varying strands of ideology within the game.

contracycle wrote:

Malcolm wrote:
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed my recent reading of 'General Mud'. The characterisation of Soviet revolutionary politics is extreme well done, with great potential for competition between varying strands of ideology within the game.

No, it isn't.

It's perfectly valid as a game but should not be confused with real events.  It's a continuing irony that Animal Farm is seized upon by both left and right as critical of their opposition, the right believing it is a critique of Communism and the left - probably more correctly - taking it as a critique of Blanquism.

It is more correct to say that the game represents an articulation of a particular (McCarthyist) historiography of the Revolution.  Note, as is common with Bourgoeis critiques, the First World War is entirely missing.  After all we wouldn't want to muddy the waters by introducing actual material conditions as these might undermine our projected and abstracted psychological drivers.

Malcolm wrote:
Obviously our points of view differ on this particular issue and perhaps I should have striven for greater clarity in my previous post. I was not suggesting that the game simulated the actual events of the Revolution, but characterised the revolution/revisionism/purge/revisionism (and so on and so forth) cycle very well. In game context, the First World War (or, indeed, the Civil War) could easily be represented within the tales of the revolution told in the initial stage of the game, if you wish to draw a firm parallel between actual and in-game events.

Hiya,

Gareth, this is great. As it happens, I agree with you about the "Tsarism-to-Stalinism" revisionism problem with not only the text of Animal Farm, but also with history as commonly taught in U.S. schools.

Therefore, what do you make of the potential, in the game, for reversing the outcome of the Animal Farm storyline? In other words, denying the moralistic inevitability of the bourgeois analysis and leaving it up to the judgment and values of the actual, living people in the creative group?

I was impressed by that potential. If the game were a polemic reinforcing the point of Animal Farm as a text, period, then it would definitely not have gained a Ronny. So I'm interested in whether you see it there as well, or if not, why not.

Best,
Ron

contracycle wrote:
Perhaps, but it is of course precisely that cycle of revolution/revisionism/purge/revisionism as it appears in Bourgeois revolutions that Marxism attempts to break.  Thats exactly why it exists in the first place.  And its methodology for breaking that cycle is to rely exclusively on material analysis rather than the moralist analysis endemic to bourgoise politics.  The above model applies much more precisely to the emergence of the First Citizen, Napoleon Bonapart, from the French revolution conducted by the bourgoisie.  In order to force this pattern to fit the Russian revolution a substantial quantity of history, essentially the preriod under Lenin, has to be ignored, and thus we skip straight from Tzarism to Stalinism without even asking how or why that happened.  Such as the virtual elimination of the proletariat as a class during the Civil War, or the systematic burning of crops and sundry massacres of workers by White forces.

Now as I say, I don't have any objection to it as a game; after all one of my favourite games of all times is Kremlin, in which secretive factional control of individuals and the purging of opponents is the subject of play and a great deal of fun, being cartrierd out in a black-humoured manner.  And I don't disagree that the above is a reasonable approximation of the dynamic that appeared under Stalinism.  Its the failure to distinguish between Stalinism and the Revolution, and the conflation of the two, that suggests an adherence to McCarthyist historiography.  To pose the question as to whether soviet "ideals" can survive is off the point, as the soviets have already lost power as soon as General Mud appears - and General Mud appears automatically as an artefact of system.  Thus the game appears to me to systematically answered the very question it proposes.

Ah. Great discussion. Thank you all for reading and thinking about the game!

To answer the simplest question first: Malcolm, my intent was that a PC with no black marks can instigate an uprising as soon as one Red Banner is flying. There would be something neat about requiring animals to go to the Glue Factory before rising up against the General, but mechanically I think it works better the other way, so the General's position is least stable in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. Definitely the text could be clearer in places about that and other things. The text is also confused on the issue of whether Mud dice may be used in the Revolution, before the Trials, something I went back and forth on while writing.

Gareth, thanks for the critique. You write:

Its the failure to distinguish between Stalinism and the Revolution, and the conflation of the two, that suggests an adherence to McCarthyist historiography.  To pose the question as to whether soviet "ideals" can survive is off the point, as the soviets have already lost power as soon as General Mud appears - and General Mud appears automatically as an artefact of system.  Thus the game appears to me to systematically answered the very question it proposes.

Hello,

Not to get too, too political at the Forge, Rob, but that was one of my resigned expectations upon choosing the term "soviet." It's practically unavoidable given what we learn in school here in the U.S., and that's even in recent generations - men of my dad's generation (my dad b. 1926) couldn't be spoken with at all on the subject, they went all blank-eyed and started breathing through their noses.

It might not all be indoctrination, though. I can see why attention toward "soviet" would veer Stalin's way, because, after all, in 24 hours, the tendency is (joy) to write toward the things that grab one's own values and conflicts. Some people argue that Stalin's stamp upon the twentieth century via the Soviet Union overrides or overshadows the influence of anything actually Marxist or Leninist, although the nuances of that discussion are far, far beyond my expertise. Probably not a good idea to get into that, at this website, although if anyone wants to post links, that might be useful.

Krasnoarmeets did an interesting job of letting "soviet" be merely a historical tag ... but also to emphasize that if we Americans want to make a big historical-virtuous deal out of fighting Nazis, there're 1+ million Soviet soldiers who died at Stalingrad to consider in that story as well.

Who knows, maybe we'll see more post-Ronnies work that uses the relatively limited, but still fascinating inroads we've made this time as a starting point.

Best,
Ron

Heya,

Who knows, maybe we'll see more post-Ronnies work that uses the relatively limited, but still fascinating inroads we've made this time as a starting point.

Ron wrote:
Krasnoarmeets did an interesting job of letting "soviet" be merely a historical tag ... but also to emphasize that if we Americans want to make a big historical-virtuous deal out of fighting Nazis, there're 1+ million Soviet soldiers who died at Stalingrad to consider in that story as well.

Rob: You are forgetting mine, although October's Shadow does address the death of the Revolution. Stalin doesn't appear anywhere, I don't think. But anyways, the point is essentially that once you get into secret police and gulags and frankly described terrorist policies, Stalin himself is more or less a formality.

Maybe that's an insensitive way to put it, but I guess one shared element between October's Shadows and General Mud is that they both suggest that after the revolution power tends to concentrate in the hands of the ruthless, who then secure a near monopoly of force. Historically, that happened way before Stalin was more than an also-ran.

I mean, I don't think you CAN have a game about leftism in this day and age that doesn't address the betrayal of its ideals. Stalin is a convenient shorthand for that, but in terms of General Mud, my game suggests that Lenin became General Mud around September 1918 when he decided with Dzerzhinsky that a Glue Factory was necessary. Stalin was just a more ruthless iteration of the cycle, with added trips to secure better cooperation. More or less exactly the way Malcolm has it.

Ant any rate though, my text suggests that's where the game ends.

It was indeed inevitable that a use of the term 'soviet' would produce references to the USSR, the problems of that system, some real and some alleged.  And it is indeed in that sense that soviet is given a definition atthe beginning of the piece.  But there is, of course, a prior meaning to the Russian word: a soviet is like a village council, and its format had been carried over into the industrial workshops.  When Lenin said "all power to the soviets", he was specifically NOT saying "all power to the Bolsheviks". 

The Bolsheviks did not "seize" power; on 1st June 1917 they controlled only 13% of seats in the All Russian Congress of the Soviets, but this rose to 66% on 5th July 1918.  The Bolsheviks aquired power becuase their policies were consistently more functional than those of their opponents.  And that is the purpose of the vanguard of the proletariat - not, as General Mud would have it, to create the revolution out of whole cloth. The revolution was not conducted as a conspiracy by a narrow segment of arch-plotters.

Thus when it says that "The laws should be statements of revolutionary optimism, reflecting your faith in your comrades, in the perfectibility of animal nature, and in the promised paradise of beasts." we have already leaped head-long into wild-eyed Utopianism.  None of these things are relevant or even on the agenda when a revolution occurs.  And they are the dumbest basis for any kind of political programme imaginable (except perhaps for those who live in the "faith-based community") - that is why I put "ideals" in inverted commas.  Dialectical materialists have little truck with "ideals" in any form.

And thus inevitably "it doesn't matter" what caused the farmer to be overthrown, because we deal only with the "essence" divorced of content.  Thus, "selfish" actions are construed as Bourgeois, but why is that?  Selfishness may indeed be bourgeois, but overthrowing the state in pursuit of food to eat is also selfish, surely, and yet the basis of revolutionary action.  Have not priests continually exhorted us not to covet our neighbours ox?  Does Leviticus not admonish us to accept our wages?  So why is it that self-interest, in any other form but submissive forelock-tugging obedience to the powers that be, is construed as Idealisim to be countered by the harsh pragmatism of the bourgeoisie?

Because it is further alleged that "More broadly, General Mud represents reality’s way of corrupting and staining the lofty ideals of any revolution."  Never mind the dependance on the failed revolution in Germany, such material concerns would undermine the moralistic point.  Never mind that the Bolsheviks were well aware that their situation was extraodinarily tenuous.  Never mind the forces from foreign states on Russian soil, including a contingent of US troops fighting against the people on behalf of Monarchic absolutism.  We don't like to look at the facts because it undermines the nice self-fulfilling prophecy we have constructed, and we can then draw a spurious contrast between "idealists" and "pragmatists", arrogating to our bourgeois selves the identity of the pragmatist.  We don't like to imagine our fluffy and rather simple, stupid animals having had to deal with real conditions - thats why we imagine them as stupid animals in the first place, rather than real human beings.

So as far as I can tell, the game does not permit the revolution proper to triumph - it allows only one of the four possible outcomes of a revolution, the formulation of a new class-based society.  This is quite overt; even the raising of the red banners against general mud produces only a new incumbent, not a change of order.  The outcomes strike me as bizarre, these being: GM stays in power but it does not matter because quotas are met - and this is to be the alleged paradise of animalism?  Isn't that precisely the relationship workers have with capitalists today?  Next, the animals can retract from their supposed "idealism" in order to sabotage the "soviet", and yet this most Marxist of responses - change from below, independant working class strategy - is deemed to be the failure of animalism.  And lastly, of course, the charnel house.

So what it offers is a choice of any colour you like as long as its black.  It is impossible for the revolution to succeed - that is literally out of bounds in this game, the possibility has been eliminated as soon as it is asserted that animals are driven by idealism rather pragmatism, are only indifferently familiar with their own physical circumstances, and that the Inevitability Thesis - that revolutions, being the artefact of the lesser orders without the enlightened guidance of the bourgeoisie, are doomed to fail - is in effect.  And not much of it has a great deal of relevance to what actually went on in Russia during the revolutionary period, IMO.

Yeah, so anyway...

General Mudd is a kickass game.  Have you done much revision work on it yet, Rob?

Peace,

-Troy

Hello,

Wait, wait, that input isn't irrelevant, Troy. I have to say "busted," referring to myself, on your history-class call, Gareth. I can't reconcile the assumptions/labeling that are intrinsic to the novel with real history either.

I think a number of your points about the larger issues are irrelevant here, but that'd be a topic for other websites.

So the game seems best to me to be considered as a literary political pastime, rather than a historical one. Switch my "use it in classrooms" phrase from history to literature? I can live with that.

With that in mind, Rob, what will you be looking for in playtesting? My own list includes:

- what kinds of actions distinguish white from red dice

- the currency interactions in general, but especially whether the mud dice are overwhelming

- whether people find the basic conflicts among the broad types of actions worth pursuing

- what "winning" might or might not be, for this game

Best,
Ron

"Busted"? "Not history but literature"? I'm not so sure.

Gareth, I certainly see your point that the game assumes the failure of the revolution by automatically selecting someone to be "General Mud," which is assuming some kind of dictatorship rather than democracy (of which one example would be "all power to the Soviets" for real). So the game's not in fact a useful teaching tool on "why revolutions fail," although I'd argue it's a pretty good one for "how the failure of revolutions affects people."

My problem with Gareth's argument is that I can't think of a historical case in which a Communist revolution actually did create a more-or-less lasting democracy. I can think of Social Democratic parties that have made all sorts of accomplishments and helped create greater democracy than previously existed in their respective countries; I can think of revolutions (including bloodless but illegal seizures of power) inspired by non-Communist ideologies that have led to greater democracy; but I can't think of an event that's clearly (a) a revolution and (b) Communist that hasn't led, within a few years, to some form of undemocratic rule that would be pretty fairly described by a game of General Mud.

Obviously, I'm entirely open to counter-examples, though anything beyond a brief capsule mention along the lines of "hey, check out the history of this, which disproves your assertion in this way, and here's some useful links" is probably beyond the scope of this thread. Such counter-examples, assuming people can find them, would make a nice item for an endnote or historical postscript to the final game.

Ron wrote: Finally, here's an interesting quandary. Right now, I'm trying to frame a post to answer Victor's questions in [Stalin's Story] Ronnies feedback, in which I'm going to claim that playing Stalin and arbitrating play isn't functional, or at least, isn't reliably functional for me. Whereas in this story, you do have someone playing General Mud, who does have GMing responsibilities too, and yet I'm saying it's brilliant, wins a full award, blah blah. Any comments on the differences? I think it'll be a useful comparison.

Sydney wrote:
Gareth, I certainly see your point that the game assumes the failure of the revolution by automatically selecting someone to be "General Mud," which is assuming some kind of dictatorship rather than democracy (of which one example would be "all power to the Soviets" for real). So the game's not in fact a useful teaching tool on "why revolutions fail," although I'd argue it's a pretty good one for "how the failure of revolutions affects people."

Obviously, I'm entirely open to counter-examples, though anything beyond a brief capsule mention along the lines of "hey, check out the history of this, which disproves your assertion in this way, and here's some useful links" is probably beyond the scope of this thread. Such counter-examples, assuming people can find them, would make a nice item for an endnote or historical postscript to the final game.

I think Ron is right. In the light of Paul Czege's recent comment:

Roleplaying is increasingly the most socially threatening and personally dangerous leisure pastime in middle america.... The activity of playing the game puts programming into your brain. (Thank god I have your best interests at heart.)

Anyway....

The bulk of that is off topic in terms of the game.  I certainly agree that that it would work best when considered as a study of the book, without too many express or implied claims about the real world.  And I think the model of the coloured dice indicating something like ideological conventions is very interesting indeed.  I wonder if it is possible that the system might be broadedened to serve more generally as a model for the kinds of conflicts that occur in, for example, monarchic courts.  What the model most represents to me is the operation of factionalism.  Any complex organisation has a continuing problem in reconciling its interests as a whole with the individual interests of its members, and it appears to me this conflict that is represented by the exchange of 'selfsh' dice for 'collective' dice.  Similarly, when General Mud puts his own black dice into play to present a challenge to the other players, this can be construed as the way in which allegiance to a cause obliges you to take on enemies you might not have made for yourself.  Again, its the trade-off inherent to complex organisations, governed by an internal social contract: in exchange for aid in achieveing your agenda X, you are obliged to provide support for collective agenda Y.  Sometimes these tensions cannot be resolved and one party breaks away, or defects to another side.  Thata element of the mechanic, divorced vfrom the notional setting, is quite compelling, I think.

Wait, wait, wait.

Gareth, please tell me I'm misunderstanding you, because what I can make out of your argument is that:

1) General Mud, Animal Farm, and most Western analyses of the USSR and Communism are "McCarthyist," "moralist analysis," "ignore... a substantial quantity of history," express a "comprehensively propagandised" outlook, and constitute a "nice self-fulfilling prophecy,"

2) Whereas your critique of Rob MacDougall's and George Orwell's/Eric Blair's work is based only on objective, dispassionate "material analysis," drawing on Marxism's "proven track record for cogent and correct analysis of the tensions in modern Industrial society"

3) and therefore you can authoritatively conclude that General Mud is a fatally flawed depiction of history because its mechanics emulate what actually happened after every extralegal seizure of power ("revolution") by self-described Marxists, when you would prefer it to emulate events that have not to date occurred but which Marxist theory predicts will occur sometime in the future?

Gareth, I happen to believe that Jesus of Nazareth will return to earth at some undetermined point to make an end of Time and to judge the living and the dead (n.b. not holding my breath, mind you), but I don't claim to have a scientific basis for that belief, and I don't berate other people for expressing thoughts about the "trajectory" of human history that give short shrift to it. In what way is your future global Communism any less faith-based an eschatology than mine?

More to the point of the thread, why on earth should Rob listen to your arguments and make any of your suggested changes to his brilliant game, let alone make any apologies for it? Why should he, for example, strip away one bit of the powerfully resonant history and reduce it to a "model [of] the operation of factionalism...divorced from the notional setting"? If you'd like to make an argument for your understanding of "the evolutionary trajectory...of human society," instead of Rob's understanding, you need to write your own game.

H'm,

I think this discussion has so far been in the bounds of "guys talking, knowing that hot-buttons and some caring are involved." For instance, I think the whole issue of ideals and who's idealistic and who's not can simply be placed in the realm of "oh, look, not how I see it," without it being a source of contention.

Gareth and I gave each other a little space based on deciding what's worth blazing into a big disagreement and what's not. We didn't even work it out via PM or anything, just the posts you see here. Both of us are using food for thought regarding the game as our yardstick.

So Sydney, consider giving a little space. The game will not live or die based on whether you win a debate. Rob's the author, and he can make his own decisions. Right now the goal is only for all of us to understand one another, and a little rhetoric along the way, here and there, is just part of the expected landscape when these issues are involved. No need for defensive modes. Gareth, if you could hold off on responding to Sydney point-by-point, I'd appreciate it.

In fact, maybe it'd be good for Rob to be the next person who weighs in.

Best,
Ron

Hi all:

Thanks for all the discussion and sorry I've been quiet a few days. I'm in kind of a work crunch right now, with something due next week, so I won't be able to give General Mud, or this conversation, or the other Ronnies threads, the attention I'd like before then. But for what it's worth, I'm enjoying the thread, and I find both the game design talk and the political talk around the game interesting and worthwhile as long as everyone keeps it friendly, like Ron suggests. I appreciate Sydney and Troy getting my back, as it were, but I wasn't troubled by anything Gareth posted. I respect that these are subjects people take seriously and I don't think that Gareth was ever demanding an apology or revisions to the game or anything. At the same time, I think it's cool that a game can open up some modest political discussion. I'm intrigued by the possibility of political rpgs - not polemics or sermons, but genuine games that mess around with, play with political ideas. (I'd love to package a completed General Mud with a completed version of my proposed "capitalist" Sorcerer supplement, Sorcerer Incorporated, and thus offend both ends of the political spectrum.)

Regarding the game itself, right now I'm thinking about Ron's question about what to look for during playtesting. I know what I fear, which is that in terms of IIEE, the game is a mess, or at least, it gives no guidance. I have no idea: how much scene framing and setting a GM should do, how long players will talk before putting dice in play, how much back and forth there will be between the GM and between players, how much gets narrated before dice are rolled, who talks after dice are rolled, how this will all work in the Revolution phase before there's a GM - all these fundamental things that can totally screw you up. Without stifling other conversation, any thoughts on those issues would be greatly appreciated.

cheers,
Rob

Sydney wrote:
Gareth, I happen to believe that Jesus of Nazareth will return to earth at some undetermined point to make an end of Time and to judge the living and the dead (n.b. not holding my breath, mind you), but I don't claim to have a scientific basis for that belief, and I don't berate other people for expressing thoughts about the "trajectory" of human history that give short shrift to it. In what way is your future global Communism any less faith-based an eschatology than mine?

More to the point of the thread, why on earth should Rob listen to your arguments and make any of your suggested changes to his brilliant game, let alone make any apologies for it? Why should he, for example, strip away one bit of the powerfully resonant history

and reduce it to a "model [of] the operation of factionalism...divorced from the notional setting"? If you'd like to make an argument for your understanding of "the evolutionary trajectory...of human society," instead of Rob's understanding, you need to write your own game.
[/quote

I didn't say that he should.  I am indiciating that I too see value and skill in the work that he has done.  While I dispute the context, he can do whatever he wants - after all, given my dependance on material evidence no faulty claim presents much of a threat.  But I did think there was an interesting application for the mechanic, because the mechanic does capture a genuine political process - its just not one that has a great deal to do with revolutions per se.  Mechanically, I liked it a lot and there may be something about the use of coloured dice representing factional allegiances that I will borrow some day.

Gareth, I just told Sydney to give you some space. I expect you to extrapolate and do the same for him. You guys are getting really close to posturing about who's smarter or more scientific or less idealistic - stupid geek bullshit.

Talk to Rob, because he's listening.

Best,
Ron

Having set out fairly clearly where and why I disagree with Gareth, I'd actually like to return to the point he made with which I do agree: The current draft only primarily the internal dynamics of the "Soviet of Beasts" (i.e. the CPSU leadership) and shortchanges the very real possibility that external threats -- either external to the Farm (USSR) altogether, or within the Farm but external to the Soviet -- may influence events. The current draft, in both mechanics and text, subsumes external threats to the internal dynamic:

the current draft wrote: For the Farm, in the General’s mind at least, is beset by enemies without and within....General Mud’s dice represent opposition facing all the PCs—whether it comes from outside enemies, inside traitors, or the General himself.

hypothetical revised draft wrote: If the sum of the Soviet dice does not exceed the sum of the Bourgeois dice, the Revolution has not yet come to pass -- and the Farmer singles out the most obvious trouble-maker for some terrible punishment: The character with the highest total on his Red dice suffers some visible, terrible injury, and the PC's Heart score is permanently and irrevocably reduced by one.

Oh, I just thought of a possible "rally round the leader" mechanic, simply by inverting the current "uprising" mechanic:

hypothetical revised draft wrote: If the number of White Banners flying exceeds the number of Black Marks on your character sheet, you may try to unite the Soviet against external enemies by calling for a rally in support of the General... PCs may only join the rally if the number of White Banners flying exceeds the number of Black Marks on their own character sheet. Otherwise, they are seen as too much the toadies of the General for their declaration of support to mean anything.

If a majority of the PCs join the rally—a tie vote is not sufficient—a struggle to unite the people behind General Mud has begun. When the dice are rolled to resolve the turn, compare the sum of all the red Soviet dice on the table to the sum of all the white Bourgeois dice. If the sum of the Soviet dice exceeds the sum of the White dice, the people have rallied behind their leader! Remove one White Banner from the GM's screen -- and remove one Red Banner as well. If the sum of the white dice is greater, the rally fails, but with no further adverse consequence.

If a majority of the PCs do not join the rally at all, it is an embarassing failure that only emphasizes the weakness and division of the Soviet. Add one Red Banner and one White Banner to the GM's screen.

Sydney wrote:
Oh, I just thought of a possible "rally round the leader" mechanic, simply by inverting the current "uprising" mechanic:

hypothetical revised draft wrote: If the number of White Banners flying exceeds the number of Black Marks on your character sheet, you may try to unite the Soviet against external enemies by calling for a rally in support of the General... PCs may only join the rally if the number of White Banners flying exceeds the number of Black Marks on their own character sheet. Otherwise, they are seen as too much the toadies of the General for their declaration of support to mean anything.

If a majority of the PCs join the rally—a tie vote is not sufficient—a struggle to unite the people behind General Mud has begun. When the dice are rolled to resolve the turn, compare the sum of all the red Soviet dice on the table to the sum of all the white Bourgeois dice. If the sum of the Soviet dice exceeds the sum of the White dice, the people have rallied behind their leader! Remove one White Banner from the GM's screen -- and remove one Red Banner as well. If the sum of the white dice is greater, the rally fails, but with no further adverse consequence.

If a majority of the PCs do not join the rally at all, it is an embarassing failure that only emphasizes the weakness and division of the Soviet. Add one Red Banner and one White Banner to the GM's screen.

Obviously this is just a notion. But what I like is that it adds a new layer of dilemmas to the game:

"Yes, General Mud sent Comrade Pavel to the Glue Factory -- but look at all the white dice Pavel had been rolling! If more Comrades had begun to follow Pavel's selfish example, we would all be doomed! An example must be made!"

"The General has sent me to the Glue Factory before; he may well send me again -- but today, today I stand with him against the enemies of the Revolution! Comrades, set aside your white dice and join the rally!"

"I know, I know, two White Banners -- the Americans and British landing at Arkangel, the Cossacks burning the countryside. But the General has proven himself the greatest threat to the Revolution of all! Let's strike quickly, overthrow him, and then, under a new and nobler leader, unite against our external enemies!"