Survive the Tyrant!

Six months ago we shared Survive The Tyrant! with you. I just reread it, and I am sad to say I would not change a single word.

We are still not going to be publicly active apart from publishing the guide. But I was inspired by recent events to share a few thoughts.

bsky.app/profile/surv...

The back page of Survive the Tyrant! "Stay Safe / Help People / Boycott the Billionaires / When the Time Comes, Take to the Streets / Help Rebuild When This Is Over / Survive"

Please choose a real-life role and do what you can to improve your community and the world in these dire times.

We’re going to step away again. If you feel inspired to, please share Survive the Tyrant! The upcoming Worldcon and MagicCon are great opportunities to get the word out.

Anyway, the entire RPG community is amazing, from the most famous streamer to the five-year-old who plays a goofy sidekick so they can sit in on their siblings’ game.

Special shout out to all the GMs/DMs. All us players owe you so much for creating the worlds and putting your hearts into it.

I’m not saying anything new and I don’t want to tell anyone how to make a living, but we do think in a few years everyone will be asking why, in 2025, everyone kept up their financial support of billionaire Trump allies who put us in this position.

Please consider leaving X and Twtich for good.

This week’s news that Bezos is trying to buy Condé Nast is terrifying. The little we about what Musk did at DOGE came from brave reporting by Wired.

That’s what streaming on Twitch supports—the continued capture of every independent news outlet by billionaires.

But as fans, it’s obvious that when you look back on 2025, you will ask why you didn’t leave the billionaire economy sooner.

Your archive is your legacy, and in the future when you watch videos from 2025 every passing mention of Twitch and X will make you wince.

Finally, a few words for streamers, from Critical Role and Dimension 20 to the smaller shows.

We see you promoting trans personalities and continuing to make story lines where capitalism is the enemy. That’s awesome, and needed now more than ever.

(By the way, as surveillance becomes an increasing problem, Discord voice channels, Roll20, and D&D Beyond (and Spelltable) may be excellent places to have dangerous conversations—obscured by the ordinary back-and-forth of the game.)

THE GOOD TROUBLE CHECKLIST keep all your shenanigans in one place

A play group is a natural resistance pod. You already have a good reason to be meeting and talking about intense things.

Consider asking your group to take 20 minutes of each session for real-world organizing. For ideas about how to help, look here:

www.lifeisasacredtext.com/goodtrouble/

If all I knew about someone was that they play RPGs, I would trust them a great deal just from that.

You’re good people.

We still believe RPG players are natural opponents to tyranny. The act of getting together in a small group to imagine a different world is inherently subversive. Thinking about right and wrong is part of the game. The moments when characters face a deep personal and ethical dilemma are the best.

The billionaires, led by Elon Musk, have operated more openly and obviously than we expected. The budget act signed on July 4, 2025 was a naked power and money grab that will kill or impoverish huge numbers of ordinary people.

Never forget that the billionaires declared war on us first.

Things are going faster than we expected. We wrote: “Since the regime does not allow free expression of negative information, the media will not provide a clear and accurate picture of current events.” But it has still been shocking to watch trusted media organizations race to capitulate.

Six months ago we shared Survive The Tyrant! with you. I just reread it, and I am sad to say I would not change a single word.

We are still not going to be publicly active apart from publishing the guide. But I was inspired by recent events to share a few thoughts.

bsky.app/profile/surv...

Makes sense, and thank you anyway

I think this is really goodbye this time. If anyone is interested in taking over and running this account and the other links, please let us know in the replies and we may send you our usernames and passwords. If nobody does, we’re just going to go dark and go do what the guide says in secret.

We would love it if people would bring some paper copies of Survive the Tyrant! to #worldcon and #magicon #magiconchicago to leave out on tables for people to find. There are pdfs that print nicely into booklets on the website and the deviantart page

bsky.app/profile/surv...

@spice8rack.bsky.social, we wrote Survive the Tyrant! to help people answer the question “what can *we* do?” Would you be willing to take a look, and maybe boost it?

bsky.app/profile/surv...

Hi @kathleen.loadingreadyrun.com, we updated the links for Survive the Tyrant! because some people had technical problems. I’m sorry to impose, but if you could boost it our guide might reach a lot of people that it could help. Thank you!

bsky.app/profile/surv...

@questauthority.bsky.social, sorry to intrude but could you please tell @kbspangler.com that when we wrote “No rights reserved / Public domain / CC0” and “This guide has no copyright protections” we waived copyright and she can look at our guide without worrying about legal mumble-blorp? Thank you!

Additional reading for anyone who is interested in Survive the Tyrant! Professor Chenoweth is amazing and her work is one of the reasons we emphasized nonviolence so strongly in our guide

We are drawing on our own family history to take the lessons from experiences like these and present them in an accessible way in Survive the Tyrant!

bsky.app/profile/surv...

Reappearing very briefly because we added a new link (deviantart) for people who were having technical problems.

If you follow us, please consider sharing Survive the Tyrant! one more time. Thank you!

Some browsers give a security error on the main website because our SSL certificate is a little wonky. (Sorry, this was hard to do anonymously.) It’s safe to click through the error, or you can use one of the other links.

A group of us made something heartfelt. Survive the Tyrant! is an RPG-style guide for surviving an authoritarian and oppressive state. Stay safe!

survivethetyrant.infy.uk

www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5...

www.deviantart.com/survivethety...

drive.google.com/file/d/1n0XG...

Goddammit, I really wanted that exit to be the end, and then I saw this news.

We couldn't have done this without Proton.

So for whoever needs to hear it, it is basically impossible to excise free speech anonymously on the internet right now. You need email to do anything, make a website, etc.

Honestly, I think the best thing we can do to prove that is to actually follow through on our promise and disappear.

Which is what I plan to do.

Right ... now.

A frosty mug of beer, which is what we're going to have now that's all done and I can go back to reading the people who are good at getting in front of the public

We’re going to ride off into the sunset now, to go and do in secret what the guide describes. If anyone is interested in running this account and the website, say so in the replies here and we’ll send one of you the usernames and passwords. Thank you, and keep yourselves safe, you’re all marvels!

We really mean it when we say anyone can do anything they want with this document. We’ve waived all copyright and posted it in RTF format on the website, so if anyone thinks “good idea but it could have been done better” then please improve it!