where does your world that you made for rpgs (or something else, like a novel series like i'm planning to do, the rpg is just for my friends) fit on the political compass? authright? libright? libleft? authright? center? this is a question of 'what ideology does your world support and how'.
my own world lands predominately in the center due to the fact that reality is subjective, thus making everyone from Ayn Rand to Stalin correct about what they're saying.
The only thing that's solid is that the spread of Gnosis by a God-like being (think: Father from Gnosticism) that will bring propserity to humanity. But even Gnosis is kept ambigious.
Always a mix. Having just one country/culture around is boring.
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 02:53:45 PM
where does your world that you made for rpgs (or something else, like a novel series like i'm planning to do, the rpg is just for my friends) fit on the political compass? authright? libright? libleft? authright? center? this is a question of 'what ideology does your world support and how'.
my own world lands predominately in the center due to the fact that reality is subjective, thus making everyone from Ayn Rand to Stalin correct about what they're saying.
The only thing that's solid is that the spread of Gnosis by a God-like being (think: Father from Gnosticism) that will bring propserity to humanity. But even Gnosis is kept ambigious.
I literally can't imagine having an entire RPG setting that only conformed to a single political ideology.
Burn the Witches!!!
Any Fantasy game I run will fall squarely into the Medieval-Authentic adjacent Elfgame political compass.
Also this:
Quote from: Jam The MF on December 09, 2022, 04:53:01 PM
Burn the Witches!!!
(https://media.makeameme.org/created/its-simple-you-ad052773db.jpg)
Subsidiarity.
If you have to look it up, do so. Then we'll talk.
It works beautifully for just about any good-aligned society in whatever setting you're putting together.
It's also anti-Gnostic because those guys have been fucking up the world for thousands of years (including its present day incarnations - scientism and transhumanism).
Each world has a different slant on government, while there may be similarities to the current political structures of our world today, it doesn't always fit.
How would you classify a loose association of people who are related by familiar ties and own their own slower-than-light starships which can travel very close to the speed of light (causing relativistic effects) that wander through the galaxy? When they leave a world and its uniqueness behind, it may be hundreds of thousands of years before visiting it again. makes it tough to pigeonhole into the political compass of our Real World.
Quote from: Bruwulf on December 09, 2022, 04:32:08 PM
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 02:53:45 PM
where does your world that you made for rpgs (or something else, like a novel series like i'm planning to do, the rpg is just for my friends) fit on the political compass? authright? libright? libleft? authright? center? this is a question of 'what ideology does your world support and how'.
my own world lands predominately in the center due to the fact that reality is subjective, thus making everyone from Ayn Rand to Stalin correct about what they're saying.
The only thing that's solid is that the spread of Gnosis by a God-like being (think: Father from Gnosticism) that will bring propserity to humanity. But even Gnosis is kept ambigious.
I literally can't imagine having an entire RPG setting that only conformed to a single political ideology.
that's easy to imagine. a world where only one ideology is right.
Well, mostly feudalism with a few cases of predatory capitalism in the case of guild councils. Sure you'll get a king here and there who tries buying popularity but most find it cheaper and more effective to buy soldiers.
My "Evil Kingdoms" D&D world is a bit different in that the powerful rule. If you're not a well supported high level character, don't even try to get into politics. The city of Tajorm is governed by the board of the wizard's school but even they tend to defer mundane matters to the guild council. There's the trade town of Thortus that's on the back of a dragon turtle. The turtle has an outright veto on all council decisions since nobody wants to wind up treading water in the middle of the ocean.
It's a Bronze Age to Antiquity type world so I imagine they have moral, ethical and political systems quite different to those of the modern day.
Everything from priest kings and queens to elder councils, might makes right or will of the people.
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 07:31:43 PM
that's easy to imagine. a world where only one ideology is right.
... so? Even if there was objectively one "right" ideology, that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree with it. There are groups, cultures, even whole countries even in our world that I would say have as close to an objectively
wrong ideology as is possible, yet they still exist.
The most politically 1-sided campaign we ever ran was RoboTech with Zentraedi officers in a fleet of 30 warships in a military campaign to find, fix, and destroy any and all Invid colony planets before they could become a threat.
With that as a back drop it was about as authoritarian as you can get. No prisoners taken, kill them all. Even Jonny Rico of Starship Troopers was never this single minded.
Unfortunately, this leads to almost no role playing. It lasted only a few sessions.
Then we bought Rifts and never looked back.
As for politics, we generally just played self serving mercs and had really grey morals. A job that pays well was a job. We knew enough to not work for the really awful people, but rescuing civilians for no payout wasn't a daily event.
Quote from: Bruwulf on December 09, 2022, 08:25:15 PM
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 07:31:43 PM
that's easy to imagine. a world where only one ideology is right.
... so? Even if there was objectively one "right" ideology, that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree with it. There are groups, cultures, even whole countries even in our world that I would say have as close to an objectively wrong ideology as is possible, yet they still exist.
sorry, hold on, let me clarify, i was being imprecise
a world where there is only one ideology that is right and most people follow it. those who don't are shown to be idiots, or worse, villains, and are soon defeated.
Sure, "Might Is Right" is the guiding principle in most feudal societies. In Traveller it's "Money Is Right" but money is really just a handy might tracking counter.
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 09:20:42 PM
sorry, hold on, let me clarify, i was being imprecise
a world where there is only one ideology that is right and most people follow it. those who don't are shown to be idiots, or worse, villains, and are soon defeated.
No. I'm not woke, I don't need my RPGs to be hugbox affirmation sessions. I make it a point to *fix* settings that do that before I use them. I have no interest in playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians, even if it did agree with my politics.
Quote from: Bruwulf on December 09, 2022, 11:15:29 PM
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 09:20:42 PM
sorry, hold on, let me clarify, i was being imprecise
a world where there is only one ideology that is right and most people follow it. those who don't are shown to be idiots, or worse, villains, and are soon defeated.
No. I'm not woke, I don't need my RPGs to be hugbox affirmation sessions. I make it a point to *fix* settings that do that before I use them. I have no interest in playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians, even if it did agree with my politics.
good, you are one of us
Let's see. My world is a post-post-apocalyptic (so it's in the late rebuilding state) where the divide between the have and the have-nots are really on the nose. Not only does the rich live on elevations that literally makes them look down on the poor, but also blocks out the sun (so the poorest and most criminally infested areas are called "Shadowtowns", because they live in a literal shadow.)
The rich also are the only one who trades with gold coins (which are more technically bars than coins) while the ordinary people have to settle with trading in silver. Since some stuff (like artefacts from the old world, vehicles, housing on the elevated area) can only be bought with gold, this is another hurdle for poor and ordinary people to overcome. Luckily there is a black market where the regular people can buy gold for silver at a inflated price. As one gold is worth approximately 100 silver, the price on the black market is on average 150 silver, depending on supply and demand. (By rolling 1d100 and add 100. So the price that week can be anything from 101 silver to 200)
Yes, that means that PCs can (and probably will) be able to trade with currency like its a stock market.
Religions are these huge and mammoth organizations that control the rulers from behind the curtains.They are not good, but corrupt and self-serving.
In the chapter of Law and Justice, a PC that has a low social status (characters have a Influence stat) are more inclined to get in trouble with the law and get a harsher sentence for any crime they commit (or didn't commit) than a rich, influential PC that can be caught red-handed and still walk away. (and then they'll find some hobo or drifter and imprison them instead.
Speaking of imprisonment, there is also a slave trade going on. I don't think the SJWs will like that, but to my defense, the reason I've put prices on slaves is not so the players can make a living on slavery but rather to buy friends, compatriots free in case the are caught. Not to mention a mission they can get is from someone rich is: "here is 10 Gold, use that to buy my daughter free at whatever cost. Anything thats left over if you can haggle the price down is yours to keep," with the option of keeping the money and stage a rescue operation.
But there is nothing in the rules that forbid PCs to take up the trade themselves... Other than a GM who will likely send wave and wave of adventurers to disrupt their business. Not to mention other slavers might send mercs to get rid of the competition.
Any PC who goes to a brothel should be aware that the girl (or boy) they sleep with is in all likelyhood a slave. But a form of indentured slave. A common contract looks something like: the brothelkeeper takes 20%, 70% goes to pay of the slaves debt (the price they cost) and then they get to keep 10% for the day they are released. There is even lawyers who specialize in slave law to make sure former slaves get what they're owned. This doesnt make slavery right or ethical, but it does allow them (slaves) more rights in my world than what they had historically in the real world. And anyone, no matter what their gender or skin colour or religion can be taken slave.
So the world is right-wing, capitalist, religious. But it is also unfair, oppressive, dystopian, anti-progressive. It's not a world you would want to live in (well, maybe a few of you would). So the game itself would actually be more left-wing, maybe something like Cyberpunk.
But I wouldnt consider it woke. Players will be free to create characters who try to resist and change the world order or to play as characters who take advantage of it to improve their situations- just like in the real world. Ambigious and grey.
I normally use published settings, and tend to use some of the authorial intent where reasonable/practical. So my Grey Box Forgotten Realms is somewhat left-liberal to left-libertarian, where my Primeval Thule is more right-libertarian, both in line with the source material. I'm not sure my Wilderlands could be said to have any political slant though, it seems too much of a chaotic soup. There were some anti-Nazi themes in the long running Black Sun/Neo-Nerath saga, but really it was more about the nature and evils of ethnic conflict per se, the main inspiration was the Balkan wars of the 1990s. If anything it's anti-ideological in that it tends to explore the dangers of ideology. I guess it's broadly Humanist. There are also some mild pro-Christian themes in how it presents the faith of Mycr.
I would say the politics are extremely local. One area can run very differently from another. I think a medieval tech world with some magic and confirmation of gods and demons existing is going to be MUCH MUCH different than our perception of Right and Left.
My game is in 1984, so kind of conservative? Our characters aren't too politically active, and politics isn't really part of the adventures we play, but I'm guessing this is about where they stand politically on the Nolan Chart.
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/890643086848430180/1051255479277457499/image.png)
In real life,we're both somewhere on the right side of the green.
One game I plan to run is a Star Wars-ish knock-off. A new universe with its own story. One major change will be the number of major factions. It can have a rebellion vs an evil emperor, but that is just happening inside one nation among many others.
In any game there should be more than good guys and bad guys. Tolkien was guilty of this. You can say the Shire, Mirkwood Elves, dwarves, Gondor, and Rohan are each a nation, but the end result were just two sides. Stereotype good vs stereotype bad.
Typically I go with four factions at least. Pick a Mcguffin that everyone is fixated on, then have one faction that loves it, one faction that uses it begrudgingly, one faction that is almost gotten rid of it, and another faction that has never and will never use it. Each faction is actively trying to make the other three be more like themselves, as anyone knows the root of conflict is unwanted change.
My world is a fantasy setting that was once a high-magic setting but turned into a low-magic setting and is currently a mid-magic setting :)
Politics will vary from kingdom to kingdom; you have liches, god-kings, wizards, the council of lords, dragons, ruined dwarven kingdoms, devastated elven lands that the elves are trying to restore, and a small island nation further along in technology that uses a combination of steam and arcane power.
With the gods having a real presence in the world, mortal politics don't matter nearly as much as what the gods are doing. The last time the gods' will was ignored, the world was plunged into darkness and almost destroyed. Most kingdoms have aligned themselves with a god faction, and their politics align with its god's vision.
Now that's not to say others disagree with those gods and their vision. Many do, but the gods and their followers have the upper hand for now :)
Quote from: Krugus on December 11, 2022, 05:08:39 PM
My world is a fantasy setting that was once a high-magic setting but turned into a low-magic setting and is currently a mid-magic setting :)
Politics will vary from kingdom to kingdom; you have liches, god-kings, wizards, the council of lords, dragons, ruined dwarven kingdoms, devastated elven lands that the elves are trying to restore, and a small island nation further along in technology that uses a combination of steam and arcane power.
With the gods having a real presence in the world, mortal politics don't matter nearly as much as what the gods are doing. The last time the gods' will was ignored, the world was plunged into darkness and almost destroyed. Most kingdoms have aligned themselves with a god faction, and their politics align with its god's vision.
Now that's not to say others disagree with those gods and their vision. Many do, but the gods and their followers have the upper hand for now :)
I find your ideas fascinating and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. :)
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 02:53:45 PM
where does your world that you made for rpgs (or something else, like a novel series like i'm planning to do, the rpg is just for my friends) fit on the political compass? authright? libright? libleft? authright? center? this is a question of 'what ideology does your world support and how'.
So, the world I'm working on is set in the period from Genesis 4:16 to 6:4. I guess, given it is premised on the first part of the Book of Genesis being true, it would be in the hard conservative part of the compass.
Similarly, its predecessor from a decade ago, The World After, was built on something akin to the events in the James Blish novels
Black Easter and
The Day After Judgement and thus is built on all of the Bible being true (although liberties are taken with Book of Revelation), and thus is arguably conservative as well.
Both worlds share similar ideas, especially the place of Lilith as the mother of elves (who disappear after The Flood only to reappear after the premature Apocalypse). I think of them as the same world, bookends of our own present existence.
So, they are conservative on the political compass, but that entirely misses the point of both worlds and the games I run. If you want to put a grand philosophy on them, I guess The World After is about the real consequences of the free will and the meek inheriting the Earth. This would be in line with a minor inspiration, the RPG,
The End: Lost Souls Edition, which I have read in part but never owned. The newer one even lacks that much of a theme that coherent.
I can say nothing about Leftists, Woke, Alt-Right, Ctrl-Left, or any of that is at all relevant except perhaps Eastern Europe in The World After being under a weird communist dictatorship in theory. I think trying to apply modern politics in any definable way to either world is as misguided and as likely to produce just as poor a game, as the continual need to apply Ctrl-Left Woke ideology.
Wokeness is evil, but the application of politics to most fantasy games in direct or strongly allegorical ways is always going to create problems regardless of the ideology. This is one place where I'm much more in alignment with Professor Tolkien than C. S. Lewis.
My current campaign is in a largely medieval-authentic published setting, so I try to keep the moral assumptions true to that milieu.
A campaign I would very much like to do (largely contingent on me finding the right game system for it) would be a swingin' 60s "imperial" science fiction setting, modeled after cold- war era sci-fi like Poul Anderson's Flandry of Terra series, very similar to the feel being gone for in the Thousand Suns RPG. So, a universe in which Humanity is in the late stages of a galactic civilization, perpetually in peril of collapse back into an interstellar dark age.
I find that kind of science fiction is often defined by the tension between the post-enlightenment liberal belief in the value of reason and progress, and a more conservative skepticism about the long-term survivability of such things in the face of corruption, decadence and human nature (think Dune or Warhammer 40K). I like the idea of my PCs being like Dominic Flandry or James Bond: the hard men (or women) necessary to preserve a soft civilization from the barbarians knocking at the gates.
Quote from: ForgottenF on December 11, 2022, 08:04:15 PM
My current campaign is in a largely medieval-authentic published setting, so I try to keep the moral assumptions true to that milieu.
A campaign I would very much like to do (largely contingent on me finding the right game system for it) would be a swingin' 60s "imperial" science fiction setting, modeled after cold- war era sci-fi like Poul Anderson's Flandry of Terra series, very similar to the feel being gone for in the Thousand Suns RPG. So, a universe in which Humanity is in the late stages of a galactic civilization, perpetually in peril of collapse back into an interstellar dark age.
I find that kind of science fiction is often defined by the tension between the post-enlightenment liberal belief in the value of reason and progress, and a more conservative skepticism about the long-term survivability of such things in the face of corruption, decadence and human nature (think Dune or Warhammer 40K). I like the idea of my PCs being like Dominic Flandry or James Bond: the hard men (or women) necessary to preserve a soft civilization from the barbarians knocking at the gates.
That sound like a blast. Right up my alley. I'll just throw out the Poleseotechnic League and Falkenberg's Legion as similar source material. I've always thought LBB traveller is just the thing for such a game.
Too many areas in my campaigns are in contrast to each other and/or are in flux themselves to give a singular answer in the aggregate. It's like imagining a slice of the world where everything was the same except for the terrain. I guess maybe an overarching atmosphere? But that'd be more literary convention than political compass. I love alignment and moral encounters, so having friction is part of that fun for me.
Quote from: Mishihari on December 12, 2022, 01:39:01 AM
Quote from: ForgottenF on December 11, 2022, 08:04:15 PM
My current campaign is in a largely medieval-authentic published setting, so I try to keep the moral assumptions true to that milieu.
A campaign I would very much like to do (largely contingent on me finding the right game system for it) would be a swingin' 60s "imperial" science fiction setting, modeled after cold- war era sci-fi like Poul Anderson's Flandry of Terra series, very similar to the feel being gone for in the Thousand Suns RPG. So, a universe in which Humanity is in the late stages of a galactic civilization, perpetually in peril of collapse back into an interstellar dark age.
I find that kind of science fiction is often defined by the tension between the post-enlightenment liberal belief in the value of reason and progress, and a more conservative skepticism about the long-term survivability of such things in the face of corruption, decadence and human nature (think Dune or Warhammer 40K). I like the idea of my PCs being like Dominic Flandry or James Bond: the hard men (or women) necessary to preserve a soft civilization from the barbarians knocking at the gates.
That sound like a blast. Right up my alley. I'll just throw out the Poleseotechnic League and Falkenberg's Legion as similar source material. I've always thought LBB traveller is just the thing for such a game.
Polesotechnic League was on my radar, but Falkenberg's Legion wasn't, so thanks for the recommend. Ironically, I saw several books from that series at a thrift store just yesterday, but passed them up because I didn't know what they were. Might have to go back.
Of the big, famous games, Traveler is probably the one I know the least about. Honestly, every time I look at the book, I see cat and dog people, and I bounce right off of it. I'd kind of written the game off as being one that is too married to its default setting to be easily homebrewed. Is that not the case?
Quote from: ForgottenF on December 12, 2022, 09:02:34 AM
Quote from: Mishihari on December 12, 2022, 01:39:01 AM
Quote from: ForgottenF on December 11, 2022, 08:04:15 PM
My current campaign is in a largely medieval-authentic published setting, so I try to keep the moral assumptions true to that milieu.
A campaign I would very much like to do (largely contingent on me finding the right game system for it) would be a swingin' 60s "imperial" science fiction setting, modeled after cold- war era sci-fi like Poul Anderson's Flandry of Terra series, very similar to the feel being gone for in the Thousand Suns RPG. So, a universe in which Humanity is in the late stages of a galactic civilization, perpetually in peril of collapse back into an interstellar dark age.
I find that kind of science fiction is often defined by the tension between the post-enlightenment liberal belief in the value of reason and progress, and a more conservative skepticism about the long-term survivability of such things in the face of corruption, decadence and human nature (think Dune or Warhammer 40K). I like the idea of my PCs being like Dominic Flandry or James Bond: the hard men (or women) necessary to preserve a soft civilization from the barbarians knocking at the gates.
That sound like a blast. Right up my alley. I'll just throw out the Poleseotechnic League and Falkenberg's Legion as similar source material. I've always thought LBB traveller is just the thing for such a game.
Polesotechnic League was on my radar, but Falkenberg's Legion wasn't, so thanks for the recommend. Ironically, I saw several books from that series at a thrift store just yesterday, but passed them up because I didn't know what they were. Might have to go back.
Of the big, famous games, Traveler is probably the one I know the least about. Honestly, every time I look at the book, I see cat and dog people, and I bounce right off of it. I'd kind of written the game off as being one that is too married to its default setting to be easily homebrewed. Is that not the case?
Bolding mine.
The cat people are called Aslan and the dog people are called Vargr, there has been over 600 pages of official game material written about the former and over 500 pages of official game material written about the later across eight editions. As alien races that Players can role-play, they are definitely not "humans in funny rubber head make up" like on Star Trek or Star Wars. To get the gist of each race, all you have to do is read about a page of description if you aren't ready to deep dive into them.
Unfortunately, because of their resemblance to cat people and dog people, the fandom has to fight off the occasional insurgence of furry fetishists.
I'm saying this because it is one the things that attracts me to the game Traveller, the aliens are what Larry Niven wanted out of his aliens. Beings that do not look like us or think like us, but think as well as we do. I find that much more appealing than playing Dwarves who all talk with Scottish accents and drink a lot or Elves who talk in sneering upper class English accents and love their self-importance.
Traveller was originally designed as a generic science fiction system, but since its inception back in 1977 an Official Traveller Universe has organically grown from the rules. The OTU is both good and bad, depending on what kind of campaign you want to run, but I've found it is best at running games of literary science fiction - like the Dominic Flandry or Falkenberg's Legion series of books. Now,if you want to use a system that is close to Traveller, the OGL version is known as Cepheus Engine and has several campaign settings for it.
Quote from: ForgottenF on December 12, 2022, 09:02:34 AM
Of the big, famous games, Traveler is probably the one I know the least about. Honestly, every time I look at the book, I see cat and dog people, and I bounce right off of it. I'd kind of written the game off as being one that is too married to its default setting to be easily homebrewed. Is that not the case?
I can't speak to the later editions of traveller, as I'm mainly familiar with the original, little black book edition, but for the most part the setting information is so scanty as to be almost non existent. The map is mainly a random generation system for a region of space,. The vargr, aslan, etc are in supplementary books and are easily ignored if you want them. The government is mostly just implied th the chargen and world gen system. I find it very wide open.
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 09:20:42 PM
Quote from: Bruwulf on December 09, 2022, 08:25:15 PM
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 07:31:43 PM
that's easy to imagine. a world where only one ideology is right.
... so? Even if there was objectively one "right" ideology, that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree with it. There are groups, cultures, even whole countries even in our world that I would say have as close to an objectively wrong ideology as is possible, yet they still exist.
sorry, hold on, let me clarify, i was being imprecise
a world where there is only one ideology that is right and most people follow it. those who don't are shown to be idiots, or worse, villains, and are soon defeated.
I thought a bit about this. I'm not sure I could ever agree. I can think of many popular settings that are binary, evil vs good. Star Wars. Lord of the Rings. Starship Troopers.
We should all remember that RPGs are originally thought of as kids stuff for middle school boys.
My own stories tend to have a few red herring plot twists, but my bad guy is an obvious bad guy who nobody should morn if he dies.
About the only underlying, consistent view that one could tag onto my campaign setting is that "human nature doesn't change". By extension, that includes non-human races that are played by humans, sometime with particular emphasis on some aspect of human nature. The gods can be somewhat remote and mysterious, in which case any agenda they have is seldom overt. Or they can be more in the Greek or Norse vein, with recognizable human aspects, albeit with super powers. Either way, if it's being played up, it's about unchanging human nature.
Therefore, the politics tend to be all over the place, based on the goals and inclinations of particular groups, their traditions, their neighbors, the pressure on them, and so forth. It's likely that the full range of human nature (from utter depravity to candidate for sainthood) is somewhere in the world, though not always emergent in the way the campaign plays out. Every civilized place is always a few bad steps away from sinking into barbarism or decadence, and every decadent or barbaric entity has a route to something better, though not an easy or likely one. It's a tightrope between cynicism and hope.
I find that not only is this approach more satisfying for me and the players, it also conveniently tends to supply plenty of opportunities for characters to engage meaningfully with the world.
It's been a long time since I ran Goddomir but it was a fantasy world with it's own internal politics.
The Seven Cities was a feudal magistracy that ran a union of city states around the southern edges of the Inland Sea. As the player went up in levels the Seven Cities underwent political threats, one from a well meaning but ineffective rebel lord, another from a politically ambitious religious leader. The third was a conspiracy from the Hidden Realm (witches operating covens like terrorist cells) which the players encountered but never realised went further.
The storylines were portrayed in the same pseudo-medieval manner that most of us utilise and I don't really see how that implies modern themes. If you mean was I politically correct, good god no. The Seven Cities were pretty ethical and well behaved, most of the nasty, evil, selfish, racist, oppressive, or other extreme stereotypes were away from the centre of this society, though I did use historical examples as inspiration for the purposes of the story - particularly the religious dictator. So what? It's a story. It does not imply I agree with such behaviour.
I'm planning to run my own version of Star Wars Clone Wars, but the flashpoint won't be taxes on trade routes. It will be the ethics of cloning soldiers.
1. Republic at peace has a droid army. Conscription isn't a thing, and is even the draft in wartime has been outlawed. We have battle droids for that. And a few military volunteers.
2. Jedi Order is tiny. Nobody will give up their child to monks and never see them again. Sure, back in the bad old days of the Sith Empire wars they did that for the greater good, but not now. Most people think the Jedi are already gone.
3. Nemoidea and it's allies develop clone soldiers. This is considered highly unethical tantamount to slavery. Especially by the Jedi. But their clone army is kicking ass. Others copy them by also making clone armies to protect themselves, each one declared illegal and war is declared by the Republic. It's not a smart move for the Republic. Noble, but not smart.
4. The Republic can't pass a draft. All they've really done is get the Jedi to lead armies, but defeat seems inevitable. So they also do the unthinkable and clone an army of Storm Troopers. This alienates the Jedi, most of whom desert the Republic army. This gets them on the Republic bad side, especially the few Jedi still loyal (Anakin). Even without the Jedi, Anakin leads the Republic/Empire to victory. The handful of Jedi are hunted down as deserters and traitors.
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 09:20:42 PM
Quote from: Bruwulf on December 09, 2022, 08:25:15 PM
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 07:31:43 PM
that's easy to imagine. a world where only one ideology is right.
... so? Even if there was objectively one "right" ideology, that doesn't mean everyone is going to agree with it. There are groups, cultures, even whole countries even in our world that I would say have as close to an objectively wrong ideology as is possible, yet they still exist.
sorry, hold on, let me clarify, i was being imprecise
a world where there is only one ideology that is right and most people follow it. those who don't are shown to be idiots, or worse, villains, and are soon defeated.
That would be someone's idea of a Utopia and adventures get mighty scarce in a Utopia. My settings, even though they are in the same world, differ from one another but none are Utopian, or even paradise but with monsters. Other people, often other people who are doing the righit thing in their opinion. are the main cause of conflict and conflict drives stories or history.
As Robert Heinlein had Lazarus Long say, "Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly." which is pretty much what God said to Arjuna
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 02:53:45 PM
where does your world that you made for rpgs (or something else, like a novel series like i'm planning to do, the rpg is just for my friends) fit on the political compass?
The sandboxy game I run is basically lawless wastelands with pockets of self-governing communities. I think I said this somewhere else, but the most organized government is run by a spectre, and I suppose he could be considered a despot of sorts. But oddly enough, pretty fair, and adheres to his own laws and honors his word. The small communities range anywhere from 50-100 people, and are typically clannish-type rule, with village elders dictating how the community will handle problems; they are probably technically barbarian or anarchist societies. There is one larger settlement (couple thousand people), but is centered around a massive mine, and the "government" is essentially the owner of a mining company. Probably a plutocracy or something if I were to give it a label, or probably just another despot. If you mean something more like left-wing/right-wing/whatever, I don't think those labels make much sense for my fantasy game. The people in charge tend to actually try to make their "realms" good places to live, regardless of their personal outlook on life.
For the Traveller/Cepheus game I occasionally run, that is straight up anarchist in the extreme. It's the Wild West, with each developed world being run by its own government, nearly uniformly aristocracies. I kind of like the Battletech way of doing it, but instead of multiple planet kingdoms, I decided to run it as world-based due to FTL in my game being highly unreliable and difficult/expensive to use. Lack of FTL communication also means most worlds are frontiers, so unless you have a strong government, the world will probably be overrun by pirates and criminals.
There's also a spy game I run sometimes that is set in a late 70s James Bond-style world, so the governments all mirror real world stuff. The most fun I had running that game was when the PCs snuck into East Germany from Berlin and got arrested. The younger players apparently didn't understand how those sorts of governments operate.
Quote from: WillInNewHaven on December 12, 2022, 04:41:15 PM
That would be someone's idea of a Utopia and adventures get mighty scarce in a Utopia. My settings, even though they are in the same world, differ from one another but none are Utopian, or even paradise but with monsters. Other people, often other people who are doing the righit thing in their opinion. are the main cause of conflict and conflict drives stories or history.
That was the fundamental fail of
Blue Rose. It was a wish-fulfillment utopia for fans of a certain kind of fantasy hot in the 90s. They never seemed to realize despite the things they loved in the books, mostly women filling male gender roles without question and acceptance of homosexuality, those books weren't utopias. Hell, half the time the women in male roles had to struggle against that not being without question.
Criticism of it was also reduce to homophobia, giving us a preview of the current scene 20 years ago.
Sadly, the system in it, True20, never got a fair shake away from that awful world.
Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 09, 2022, 02:53:45 PM
For the Traveller/Cepheus game I occasionally run, that is straight up anarchist in the extreme. It's the Wild West, with each developed world being run by its own government, nearly uniformly aristocracies. I kind of like the Battletech way of doing it, but instead of multiple planet kingdoms, I decided to run it as world-based due to FTL in my game being highly unreliable and difficult/expensive to use. Lack of FTL communication also means most worlds are frontiers, so unless you have a strong government, the world will probably be overrun by pirates and criminals.
In my Traveller setting, robots and advanced AI do most of the productive work. As a result, most developed worlds have basically evolved into European-style welfare states, where the masses are kept content not only with a basic income, but also with drugs, entertainment, and virtual realities. Although gun laws are strict on paper, law enforcement is so feeble that you can get away with almost anything if you have the right connections or know whom to bribe. It is a world of megacorps, but unlike the cyberpunk genre, the masses are not oppressed, because the society focuses on hedonism. The player characters, by contrast, are not content with this and thus seek adventure on the frontiers.
My campaign's in the mid 1984, so I guess around here?
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/890643086848430180/1052210985349415012/image.png)
Here's a blank Nolan Chart for people who want to plot theirs.
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/890643086848430180/1052211387721592928/nolan_chart.png)
Quote from: weirdguy564 on December 12, 2022, 10:33:22 AM
I thought a bit about this. I'm not sure I could ever agree. I can think of many popular settings that are binary, evil vs good. Star Wars. Lord of the Rings. Starship Troopers.
Star Wars (in the original, pre-Lucas-going-senile, pre-Disney era) was strictly comic book morality. The Good Guys are Good, the Bad Guys are Evil. It wasn't really espousing any sort of ideology or belief system. The depth of it's political commentary could basically be summed up as "A tyrannical, genocidal empire is bad, mmmkay?". It's fine for what it is, mind, but even at that, most of of the EU kind of had to introduce nuance to be able to keep telling interesting stories, and I know I sure did back when I was running D6 Star Wars.
Starship Troopers is a bit more nuanced than you're giving it credit.
Lord of the Rings is... complicated, and, again, a bit more nuanced than you're giving it credit. Tolkien himself was conflicted on how binary he wanted the morality of the setting to be, in fact, as he comments several times in his writings.
Quote from: PulpHerb on December 13, 2022, 12:01:01 AM
That was the fundamental fail of Blue Rose. It was a wish-fulfillment utopia for fans of a certain kind of fantasy hot in the 90s. They never seemed to realize despite the things they loved in the books, mostly women filling male gender roles without question and acceptance of homosexuality, those books weren't utopias. Hell, half the time the women in male roles had to struggle against that not being without question.
Criticism of it was also reduce to homophobia, giving us a preview of the current scene 20 years ago.
Sadly, the system in it, True20, never got a fair shake away from that awful world.
Ayup. And as bad as the first version was, the AGE version doubled down on a lot of the problems.
Although it's not unique. Look at Eclipse Phase - and I hate to say it, because I actually *like* Eclipse Phase, as a setting, but the developers absolutely use it to push forward their particular views on things, and tended to double down on any point that they got criticized for, like their presentation of the Jovians.
The new campaign setting I will hopefully use is the Hyborian Age of Conan. So as far as politics, it ranges from theocracy, where the gods and the clerics and sorcerers rule the land (Stygia) to tribal rule in the Pictish Wilderness. Tech levels range from primitive to Dark Ages Europe.
Quote from: Cathode Ray on December 13, 2022, 08:12:52 AM
My campaign's in the mid 1984, so I guess around here?
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/890643086848430180/1052210985349415012/image.png)
Here's a blank Nolan Chart for people who want to plot theirs.
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/890643086848430180/1052211387721592928/nolan_chart.png)
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1016909463409668158/1052254942083153971/project_aeon_nolan_chart.png)
I'm about to play in a Coalition States game in Savage Rifts.
Lock and load. Time to collect some elf-ears. Yeah we'll kill Demons along the way too. Same thing.
Quote from: tenbones on December 13, 2022, 02:03:00 PM
I'm about to play in a Coalition States game in Savage Rifts.
Lock and load. Time to collect some elf-ears. Yeah we'll kill Demons along the way too. Same thing.
This.
We run games playing as "The Bad Guys" for funsies. These are not because we're closet Alt Right people. Alt Right is a term WAY overused on normal people just to the right of center. It's just interesting, and it's just a game. Play the Storm Troopers of Star Wars. The Rifts Coalition. The Armies of Chaos in Warhammer. The Zentraedi of Macross. We've done all that.
After all, you don't play Exploding Kittens because you actually want it to happen in real life. Or an undead Lich Knight because you want to really be undead.
It's make-believe.
I hate some arguments that think everything is literal. It's ruining comedy and life in general.
I tend to have LOTS of politics in my games, mainly because it's how I enforce social norms to set the standards of a locality where the PC's might be "doing things".
This can vary WILDLY to being lawless He-Who-Smash-Hardest wins, to very bureaucratic high-faluting procedural shit, to Feudal favors-for-fun, etc. it depends wildly on what I'm running. But internally it also depends on the specific locality within the game. As my sandboxes are large, very few campaigns adhere to *one* kind of political scene. Orcs don't organize like medieval feudal lords, or tyrannical city-state overlords, or whatever.
And often there are political realities within those domains that aren't part of the larger political state. Think of organized criminal enterprises within a massive city. Political compasses are largely meaningless to me. The World IS. And it remains that until the PC's do things to make changes to it.
Quote from: tenbones on December 14, 2022, 09:46:02 AM
I tend to have LOTS of politics in my games, mainly because it's how I enforce social norms to set the standards of a locality where the PC's might be "doing things".
This can vary WILDLY to being lawless He-Who-Smash-Hardest wins, to very bureaucratic high-faluting procedural shit, to Feudal favors-for-fun, etc. it depends wildly on what I'm running. But internally it also depends on the specific locality within the game. As my sandboxes are large, very few campaigns adhere to *one* kind of political scene. Orcs don't organize like medieval feudal lords, or tyrannical city-state overlords, or whatever.
And often there are political realities within those domains that aren't part of the larger political state. Think of organized criminal enterprises within a massive city. Political compasses are largely meaningless to me. The World IS. And it remains that until the PC's do things to make changes to it.
Greetings!
Excellent, my friend! Yeah, my world of Thandor is run the same way that you describe here. Lots of politics, everywhere, but at the same time, all of the politics is different. In Thandor, each nation, kingdom, what have you, has their own political landscape, informed and influenced by the region's dominant religion, as well as particular cultural customs and expectations.
Good stuff, Tenbones!
Semper Fidelis,
SHARK
The world itself doesn't care about you. It will try to kill you be it through man, beast, plant, weather or time.
The ruling body on the other hand is the Empire, which is, I think, a benevolent dictatorship. Anybody can be anything, and by that it's not an uncommon sight to see a civilised orc at a desk in some bureaucratic institution, for example. The Empire is remarkably non-racist, because merit will get you somewhere. Well, somewhere in the middle levels of the bureaucracy. Going up from there is for the nobility alone. That does not mean the people suffer tyranny however. As far as a fantasy empire goes, people are looked after, there's an efficient postal system that is cheap and open to the public, other what we would call public services are run by the state. The people enjoy their liberties.