Is there any way to base a fantasy nation on a modern ideology and make it interesting?

Got any stories about the Hoburgers?

I have worked out a few things, currently working on a map of the continent that the players will be interacting with, my idea is that the western steppe had a lot of Human and Elven kingdoms that share a lot of culture and religion, they confederated to fight against a new Religious orthodoxy in the east and eventually though inter marriage and open trade they became ruled by a single Family ruling a huge land, the game takes place about ten years after a workers revolution so the nation is still rather unstable trying to get rid of the class and social divide between the more long lived and craftsmen like elves and the more Martial and shorter lived humans.

It will on the surface be a very egalitarian society but human-elf relations will be state mandated and half elves will hold more positions of power, as with the people who started the revolution living in luxury.

Or an autonomous collective.

Orcs mostly live on another continent and the ones who come over are normally merchants with strange, high quality things to sell, any you encounter are going to be wealthy and probably well educated.

My fantasy setting is based heavily in Victorian era technology with no real 'steampunk', as the technology is really just stuff that was actually created irl being applied in a fantasy setting (Ironclads, Trains, Repeating Rifles etc).

In my setting, 'Communism' is the result of a holy cleric one day renouncing his faith and instead declaring his faith in 'the people' who will one day rise up from exploitation and challenge the gods themselves for divinity, becoming 'dragons' in their own right.

Thus, the Dragons of Labor got their name and was born from the ravings of an ex-cleric.

So, like imperial China?

>yes, I realize the system wasn't exactly simple for a simple peasant to become anyone. Still, no nobility proper.

then get rid of the kings and nobility
what are you a royalist piece of shit?

>We are an anarcho-syndicalist commune!

It is possible and was done hundreds of times. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. But it has mostly one use - as a political statement/commentary. Kind of like Animal Farm but with knights and peasants instead of animals
Read T.H. White's Once and Future King, it has chapters that are basically that, for example.

Of course, that takes game to entirely different level than standard game. Suspension of disbelief and worldbuilding ceases to be so important, as everyone knows that those medieval things and magic are mere aesthetics, and the theme is nature of human soul and society.

So it probably can be done but I think it would be hard to pull off and require right players.

Unless you just want to do it for shits and giggles, or to be special snowflake with "original" ideas. Then it will inevitably suck.

What do you mean for shits and giggles? Clearly the game is there for fun and I don't want to write a novel with this Pen and Paper game but my players are more then willing to take things seriously for the sake of fun and play though this kind of thing.

I don't agree with you if you are saying that such things must be done for a higher purpose, this is for fun I just want it to be interesting and memorable.

That armor's rad. It's like half European knight, half Samurai

Kobolds are basically already super communists.

bump

Because magic exists, it can be somewhat easier to explain why certain political ideologies have gained ground. With magic limited only to those that can preform it, there would be a massive class gap between the magical and the mundane, so explaining how communism, capitalism, or even national socialism came to be could be arranged.

As for making it interesting, here's a few ideas:
- Communism: There is a communist regime where the population is usually densely packed and the government uses magic to subsidize food (via spells like Create Food and Drink) and a magical KGB goes around dealing with dissenters.
- Hyper Capitalism: Large trading guilds run nearly everything, and a council of guildmasters runs the country. Harsh laws support guild monopolies, and guilds uses hired hands to cause "unfortunate accidents" with smaller companies or even certain rival guilds, if they can get away with it
- National Socialist: Those that are born with an affinity for magic create a strict society that exclaims and enforces the splendors and virtues of being born with magic. For added bonus, a certain ethnic group of magic users is considered evil, and members of their race are excised from society

Add some extra fantasy elements to these and you are good to go! Putting all three of these in a game could result in some great international drama. I myself used the bottom one for creating a mageocracy that has "banned" slavery, but considers people incapable of using magic to be "objects" and thus own-able.

You can also have fun implementing hypothetical government styles, such as the "Noocracy" (rule by the wise), where you could have a council of nationally recognized scholars and sages that have greatly benefited society run the country. This works out nicely for city-states.

I forgot to mention there are some great horror opportunities for idealized communism in fantasy settings.

One I am fond of using is that there is a city sequestered in the mountains that no one knows of, where all the people live in perfect harmony without crime, hunger, or money. The city is run by a big overarching figure, and the people are happy and content, experiencing life to the fullest as they see it.

The kicker is that the overarching figure is a lich that micromanages the population and feeds on memories instead of souls, so it constantly drains mundane experiences from the people to make them feel like they aren't doing the same things over and over again. The lich maintains a barrier around the city that causes people who enter to be forgotten by everyone outside of the barrier, and those that leave to forget themselves. Anyone who wanders in is welcomed in, shown around, hunted down, drained of memories, and given false memories of having lived in the city for most of their lives. The fun part is that the lich genuinely believes it is making people happy, and thus it is LG

Doesn't a lot of fantasy already generally do this? Entire nations get painted with a very wide brush.

Some great ideas here, I like the National Socialist the idea that My powerful magic using ethnic group is better then your powerful magic using ethnic group sounds interesting, even more if they share a language and culture. I will use that.

I was thinking of the communists in the west bordering the National Socialists and the many dwarven mountain city-states, going into coastal merchant republics and democracies with a large island nation that I have mostly worked out, Think the UK mixed with Japan.

Glad I could help, and thanks for sharing your own thoughts.

I could imagine communist dwarven mountain city-states, especially if food and drink are provided by Clerics that follow a strict regime and members of each clan are born to do their job (which has decent synergy with stereotyped dwarven clans that excel in their area of specialty).

Coastal/island merchant republics and democracies seem to work out both in fantasy and history, so that seems solid. Perhaps a smuggling business into the other nations could make for some drama.

A friend of mine once mixed the UK and NK together to make a country in a setting. It was quite interesting to see it.

typical fantasy settings have deities that enforce an objective morality to some extent; however even without these in real life, human history has essentially been a fantasy LARP taken too far, so we believed in that shit anyway. And when societies are uniformly governed primarily by religion, political conflicts become instead spiritual conflicts, so transplanting modern secular political ideologies may not be a good fit.