Rise Up!

Late in the evening, the children are in bed. An email reaches more than five hundred inboxes, including yours. A legal entity with more surnames than a phone book sends it. In a few lines, shrouded in legalese sweetened with the poison of human resources’ affability, they warn you that the factory is closing.

There were no warnings of this. The reason is not explained. They tell you that in the end, they’re sorry, but these are market convergences. A lack of synergies. Restructuring to keep who-knows-what solid. But you were working well. The company was working well. Orders weren’t lacking, production was constant, and a part of your community grew up between the soccer fields and the sound of the assembly line clattering.

It doesn’t seem to make sense. It doesn’t seem human. Yet numbers are more important than people, apparently, and what you are or have done isn’t worth as much as the perceived value you have as an asset. You are data in a spreadsheet, and as data, you’re evidently not great.

After the dismay and that horrible feeling of falling into the void, of dizziness and nausea, you connect with your colleagues. And the disorientation and sadness quickly give way to something else. Some hot-boiling rage, a proper, righteous fury. Because you won’t accept that this is the end, yet another tragedy that unfolds in silence and consumes another town of this decadent west, one among many.

The fight begins. The collective is created. The doors are not closed, because now you have occupied the factory.

A Game of Resistance

Rise Up! is a journaling tabletop role-playing game that asks you to put yourself in the shoes of a Collective for a year and fight for the right to dream of an alternative to the meat grinder of late capitalism.

You won’t play a hero kissed by destiny, but an entire community, made up of ordinary people who share ideals and an idea of the future that is very different from the one served up to us.

The community will be represented by nine individuals, each representing a link of a chain that is not meant to close and restrict, but to connect and share.

Each month, you will face new challenges that will test the resilience of your collective. Perhaps you found fellow fighters in the unions, but the next protest could be seen as undermining your chances of dialogue with management. Maybe it’s yet another eviction attempt, as the fear and fatigue of the Picket members increase, while hope fades.

Every choice you make will create tension. Narrative tension, of course, but also between idealism and realism, between struggle and dialogue, between visibility and vapid theatrics.

Your victories will never come easy. Maybe they will never come. But when they do, they’ll feel real.

How to play

The core of Rise Up! is the act of writing. Each session is a new month in the occupation, and at the end of it, you record the “Minutes” of your Collective’s assemblies.

It’s simple to play: you only need a pen, paper, and a couple of d12 dice. Dice rolls help you guide the story, but what matters most is how you interpret them: how your Collective reacts, adapts, and grows.

Although it is a deeply narrative game, there is a strategic and resource management component; you will have to balance public opinion, Consensus, and Influence on local and national administration, making sure that the Pressure on the Collective does not exceed the boiling point, leading to incidents of various kinds, including the defection of one of your dearest members.

You will have to make compromises, stand your ground against internal and external threats, and resist with all your might against a faceless force that seeks to deprive you of every opportunity to realize your full potential as a community.

Inspired by Real Struggles

The events recounted in this manual are inspired by the struggle of the GKN Factory Collective in Florence (Opens in a new window), which started a permanent picket in 2021 in response to the announcement of the plant’s closure.

Despite unpaid wages and the difficulties of a truly grassroots struggle, the Collective is holding firm, proposing projects for sustainable re-industrialization with a socially integrated factory. The mobilization, which has spread powerfully beyond the factory walls and become a movement joined by the local population, has led to a unique popular share ownership project in the European landscape.

Where to find the game

Rise Up! is available right now as a digital book on itch.io (Opens in a new window) and DriveThruRPG (Opens in a new window), including everything you need to play.