On a June evening at Hollywood's Fonda Theatre, six Los Angeles city council candidates sat down not for a debate but to roll dice. Comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan, who runs the popular D&D series Critical Role, served as dungeon master for a campaign against corporate villains and an evil dragon. The crowd of hundreds didn't just watch. They pledged donations up to $150 each to boost the damage rolls, turning fantasy combat into real campaign cash.
The event raised $30,000 for the city's primary election. Five of the six candidates either won re-election or advanced to the general ballot. But the Los Angeles fundraiser was far from isolated. Across the country, players of Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games have launched a coordinated effort to channel the games' communities into political action and fundraising against what organizers call a hostile federal climate: ICE raids, attacks on transgender rights, and corporate control of creative work.
The movement taps into something organizers say is unique about tabletop gaming communities. "Most people want to be tapped and told how to help," Mulligan, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, said of the approach. "There's this new way to participate, bringing the platform I have to bear."
The appeal runs deeper than novelty. Tabletop RPGs attract a broad coalition: people of color, women, LGBTQ+ players, and neurodivergent folks who found community in games where outsiders band together against evil. The core mechanic of D&D, Emily Friedman, an English professor at Auburn University who teaches classes on the games, explained, creates what feels like "a space that is welcoming them." The games offer what she calls "found family," a concept with particular resonance for marginalized communities.
Jes Wade, a popular D&D streamer, has weaponized this community power through ChariTTRPGs, an initiative that has raised over $1.1 million since 2021 by livestreaming tabletop games and selling bundles of donated creative work on gaming platforms. The funds have gone to organizations like the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, and Trans Lifeline. "Maybe they don't have hundreds of dollars to donate, but they have this game that they've put their love and soul into," Wade said of contributors.
In April, Brooklyn-based gaming company Twice Rolled held a charity livestream called Operation ICE Breaker that raised $3,000 for the National Immigration Law Center. For each $75 donation, the entire performance group interrupted the story to chant a profanity directed at ICE. Donors received "Bleed," a mini tabletop game designed as a zine to help players translate heroic actions at the table into activism in the real world. "It's all just getting people to take that first step to help," said Linnie Schell, Twice Rolled's director of creative development.
The political dimension of these games extends beyond fundraising. When 9th Level Games released Rebel Scum, an anti-fascist space drama inspired by Star Wars, Drive Thru RPG removed it from the platform for containing "overt political agendas." The game's foreword included a line about punching a space "Republikan." Rather than capitulate, 9th Level Games refused to edit the work and sold more copies independently through alternative platforms, proving the audience for explicitly political tabletop games runs deeper than major retailers acknowledge.
Some organizers have drawn direct lines between the games' mechanics and their resistance to corporate power. Andoni Elias-Nava, the primary organizer of the Los Angeles event, noted that D&D lets players and dungeon masters control stories and characters, aspects many fear surrendering to artificial intelligence. In 2023, Wizards of the Coast, D&D's parent company, banned AI-generated art from the game, standing apart from the broader gaming industry, where roughly 90 percent of video game developers use AI in their workflows.
When Chicago's Rough Magic Games learned that the parent company of Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo owned LexisNexis, a data firm used by ICE for surveillance, they pulled out of the event and launched their own charity con instead, raising over $1,500 for Organized Communities Against Deportations. "Our rooms are safe places for our people," said Tara Bouldrey, the group's operations lead. "As long as you've come there in good faith to connect with others, we want to keep you safe in all possible ways."
Author James Rodriguez: "These aren't fringe activists dressing up their politics in fantasy costumes. They're operating in spaces where real money, real community, and real political will already exist, and they're channeling all three toward genuine outcomes."
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