In 1378, many of the working-class laborers in Florence—including the wool-carders upon whom Florence’s lucrative, international wool and cloth trade depended—were operating without the more typical protections of a medieval guild. Where Florentine guild-members had important protections of their rights and equally important obligations to the practice of their craft, the so-called “Ciompi” laborers were being worn down by conditions both in and out of the workplace that they found increasingly punishing. In response to what they saw as a gross failure of representation of their interests, they eventually took radical political action that resulted in one of the earliest and most unsettling working-class revolts in European history. Seizing power for just over three years from the initial revolt, these revolutionaries have often gone forgotten compared to those later celebrated in the Americas and France. The “Ciompi Revolt” will allow players to bring to life both the revolutionaries and the oligarchs in Florence, the city that would lay the groundwork for the later era known as the Renaissance. The potential success or defeat of this revolution will be the subject of a unique role-playing experience based on the Year Zero Engine.

This game is a play test of a simplified version of a game intended for the Reacting to the Past line of education role-immersion games (https://reactingconsortium.org/). The Reacting Consortium is a group of educators who use RPGs to teach college courses; the play test will be run by college professors who are part of the Consortium. Your feedback will be used to shape the development of these games, which can be implemented in classrooms or as entertaining games in their own right