That one member of the party who always took the empire's side

I watched Louis Theroux in Israel recently and it amazed me that like 10 minutes into the mini documentary he hadn't talked to a Palestinian at all yet, only Israelis, but it didn't seem at all like it was biased TOWARD the Israelis because they did SUCH A GOOD JOB acting like evil religious zealots all on their own. They were so mask-off it was nuts.

Normally I would call bullshit, but I just played first dnd session of my life few days ago and already met 2 hardcore zionists there (one of which apparently makes pro-israel tiktoks as a side-hobby)

Highly doubt. The Palestinian allegory to a Zionist would be cartoonist caricatures of rape and violence while the Isn'treal allegory would have been a pure place of light and peace.

I think sometimes about politics in games. Especially the unexamined kind. Like a guy one time ran a game predicated on literal patriarchy - the story was about how a baby boy was due the throne instead of his elder sister. I'm like ... You could have written anything. I don't want fantasy patriarchy.

Meanwhile, my game right before that was about helping an anarchist collective stop a counter revolution from restoring the despotic monarchy. And my current game the players just shot a surveillance CEO on the street and donated all of the wealth they could get out of his unlocked phone to charity.

I desperately hope this is true

So he added enough detail for them to want to solide with Palestine without realizing

I do wonder if in this example the party actually detected the intended propoganda, versus if they just were in a campaign doing what they thought good characters would do in a situation. If not it's so much more telling, as the best way to tell if you are standing on principles or just biased propoganda, is if you would make the same judgments if the names were hidden or even reversed. Even more ironic because obviously the DM controls the facts of the fictional world. Literally likely to not know or leave out details that hurt his case.

The Israel-Palistinian affair reflects the larger dichotomy of principle vs. loyalty.

The enlightenment values behind the US and French revolts and transformations are propped up by the principles that everyone is entitled to equal regard by the society, are endowed with the same rights, are treated equally by the justice system in so on.

(Mind you, both of these nations failed to embrace these principles fully, still don't, and progress towards this ideal is slow and meandering — to say the least.)

Of course the challenge, then, is extending that degree of citizenship to the worst wrongdoers, even after they've profiteered on war and drug addiction, wrecked the economy through financialization and turned entire government institutions against the people they were supposed to protect sexually assaulted kids or killed with intention.

We don't like giving our criminal suspects their day in court. When convicted, we don't like to consider that they were, wrongfully, and in either case, we want them to suffer not just incarceration, but to languish in squalor, abuse and neglect. We want them afraid to reach for the soap. We don't like extending rights to those we regard as outcast.

But if we don't, we dip into the other side of the coin, in which criminal is not defined by what you did, but who you are. Feudal society is structured based on contracts of loyalty. If you are born of the better blood (monied, ethnically pure, faithful to the orthodox) then you deserve all the benefits of the doubt. Whereas if you are alien or other, you deserve to be outlawed.

And this applies when the good guys fuck children, murder with intent, profiteer on war and drugs, wreck the economy though financialization and capture government institutions so they don't protect the people. And yeah, at it's worst, we see things like genocide and torture become controversial because the heroes are doing it and the goblins are on the receiving end of it.

So not just the US and Israel, but the entire world needs to reflect on what kind of society they want to be. Unlike economic structures that can be blended, guiding ideology tend to be a slippery slope. Once it is established that some people can be denied rights and regard by fiat because they're of the wrong faith or the wrong blood, or aren't rich enough, then that refusal of access can extend to anyone else, and eventually everyone else.

And we're seeing this develop in the US, as MAGA circles talk about liberals in blood libels and calls to hunt and execute them. In this case liberals includes anyone who isn't MAGA.

• all the exp for the party. And 10 items of their own choosing.

What was the setting and the story?

I did something simillar on the last table i DM, i created a village where the players found when they are looking for a "kidnapped" daughter of a Duke, the girl and his boyfriend got captured by a group of bug man who took over the place.

The discovered a giant underground nest where the bugs are hidden because the valley where used to be they home was taked by the settles and they build the village, than they fleed to the underground and keep hidden until they took back the place and disguised themselves as settlers.

The rogue get a critical success on the roll and infiltrated on the queen nest, guide the rest of the group on it, and with the help of the half djinn mage they persuaded the queen to free the girl and her boyfriend, promissed keep their secret and and the paladin even got a chitin heavy armor on that.

I'm glad they opted for the pacifist solution and keep they word on the promisse...

Israel-Palestine allegory gone right.*