Politics?

[Snargash Moonclaw]

Still a lot of work to do, but most of what I referred to is posted up:   Panisadore

[LordVreeg]

S&M's stuff is all good and well thought out.
Panisadore (which I always call, 'Pan is adored' in my own head) gets the LV sigil of approval.
(which is, sadly enough, tantamount to getting a thread murderer award for 'Least-respondable' posting award)
But I love the philosophies behind Panisador.

Which leads me to....
Your setting is your soap box.
And lets get past the other words here and focus on a very interesting trend (and now you see one of my hats from the real world).  There is, wonderfully enough, a very intersting trend toward unconventional politics/religeous and a focus on the non-trad  in general.  
[blockquote=S&M]My spiritual and religious background is a much more pervasive influence on the setting. I've been a Wiccan priest for 25 years now, incorporating strong shamanic elements (including Native American influences) and significant Taoist and Buddhist (predominantly Ch'an/Zen) influences regarding the fundamental nature of reality[/blockquote]
[blockquote=Scholar] i myself am an atheist and despise the way politicians act these days, so i tend to incorporate corrupt priests and scheeming courtiers (which is not far from reality in a medieval setting). also, there is a lot of social darwinism going on and racial tensions come up a lot.[/blockquote]
[blockquote=Jharviss]I'm a political science major and I enjoy looking at the way organizations and nations are composed and run, so world-building becomes somewhat of a testing grounds for me.

I believe in the idea that the best government is a benevolent dictator. Such a person would be able to respond to situations quickly, not get caught up in the bureaucracy, but would always be working for the betterment of the nation. On Earth the world is leaning toward believing that democracies are the best. In Tephra, the world believes that these benevolent and counseled monarchs are the best. [/blockquote]
[blockquote=Limetom]I personally consider myself a socialist. If you want to get very specific, I am a libertarian socialist, much along the lines of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, though I do think that non-violent means, rather than violent means, are a better way to go.[/blockquote]

[blockquote=Khyron1144]My politics are disillusioned/burntout anarchist/socialist/libertarian-sociaist/believer in honesty and fairness. Somehow, I think my world does end up reflecting that. For example, the history regarding the revolt and Freeland. Even when the rebels win, paradise is not attained. [/blockquote]

So when I say, "Your setting is your Soap Box", I am noting that World-Building seems to go, at least in this criminally bletchorous overview and scandalously tainted sample-size, hand-in-hand with a view askance to orthodox politics/beliefs.  While this may not read as illecebrous, It is meant to be transmitted as such.  I consider myself well-served (in the extreme) to be conversing and creating with everyone of you, based on the responses of this thread.  Perhaps we create (and for some of us, to a ridiculous level of depth and complexity that will probably never affect a PC) as a means to divert and mitigate some of the heat from the same fire that stokes the philosophical fire on the 'real world'.  

Gaming is fun, let me be clear.  But for many of us, setting desgin is our art, our creative outlet.  And in the same way that great art often is inspired by these deeper thoughts and convictions we wrestle with, so too are our settings the canvas that we spill our very creative blood upon.

Hmm.  I will have to think more on this.  

[Jharviss]

I love thinking of setting design as an art.  It makes me all tingly inside.

[khyron1144]

Okay somehow this thread remind me of this thread[/u]. I think I figured out why Marvel's Civil War storyline bothered me.  I still have a little bit of an anarchist outlook, and the fascists won.