Rise Up!

An email, sent in the dead of night, shatters the lives of an entire community. The factory will close. You’re the best at what you do, orders keep coming in, and the plant has never been so efficient, but for management, it’s not enough. The owners, a faceless and nameless multinational corporation, aren’t happy. They need to “optimize,” “restructure,” and “synergize.” But most of all, they need to cast out 500 families who have deep roots in that community and give back to it every day. You could bow your heads, hope for unemployment benefits, and for help from a state that has never felt so distant. 
Or you could rise up, because another world is possible.

The Objective of the Game

Occupy the factory. Resist for one year. Transform those spaces into a laboratory of grassroots democracy, a hub for sustainable and self-managed work. Each month, take time to write the minutes of the collective’s assembly so you don’t forget where you came from and where you want to go. 

Manage crises. Balance struggle with dialogue. Make a difference.

A journaling game of a Collective

Survive for twelve months in an occupied factory, interpreting the dreams, hopes, and anger of nine members of the Collective as they try to make a difference. Each month, an Event will test the group’s beliefs and strength, forcing them to make difficult choices or once-unthinkable compromises. How will the factory change after a year? And how will they?

When the pressure rises, the stakes get higher.

Rise Up! uses the Pressure12 engine to resolve in-game events, providing strategic depth to a purely fiction-driven experience. A pressure-based system creates escalating tension: the more you roll the dice, the more mental and physical stress you accumulate, with consequences that unfold. All you need to play is three d12s.

Based on real events

The events recounted in this manual are inspired by the struggle of the GKN Factory Collective in Florence, 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.

About the authors

Rise Up! is a project by Oddplan, an indie label and collective run by Nicola Santagostino, designer of the Blood Engine and Copperhead System.  Oddplan is based out of Italy, somewhere between lands. 

Design: Nicola Santagostino

Additional Writing: Massimiliano Palloni