Atlas stood crouched on the launch pad, his arms holding up the bulky form of a $250 million, 1.5 ton communications satellite. He shifted the weight easily, adjusting his grip on the titanium handholds mounted on the satellite's protective shroud, then spoke softly into his headset. "Launch Control, this is Atlas. Ready for orbital insertion." A smooth, crisp, feminine voice replied back. "Confirmed Atlas. T-Minus five minutes to launch. Be advised Farstar is in position as well, and ready for geostationary TP in 10."

The Libertarian Gamers Project is having a lively conversation about using the Star Wars campaign setting to run just about any type of game imaginable, from space opera to noir detective stories to medical dramas. I posed a counter argument that just because you could run a medical drama story in Star Wars doesn't mean that you should.

The idea that kicked off the hold discussion was Jay Hailey's proposal for an Age of Alderaan in which modern day adventurers find themselves in a galaxy far, far away.

The Libertarian Gamers forum shows some signs of life in 2007 with discussions of the politics of zombie fiction, the Weird West, a libertarian gamer database and who's going to GenCon Indy.

A few months ago I picked up Animal Crossing: Wild World for the Nintendo DS, partly because I'd heard good things about it, partly because its a kid-friendly game I can play with my daughter, and partly because I'm always looking for games for my DS that are different from the norm. What surprised me is just how pastorally libertarian the game is.

There are a great number of libertarian projects out there -- the Libertarian Party is an ongoing experiment in freedom politics via the voting booth, while the Free State Project attempts to influence shape the government and society by convincing free folk to move to New Hampshire. Bureaucrash is home to grass-roots activism that one usually finds among the Left, but is oriented towards the defense of capitalism, free trade and other libertarian ideals.

These are all worthwhile undertakings, but even the most strident defender of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness needs to relax every once in a while ... and that's where the Libertarian Gamers Project (Join the Yahoo Group) comes in.

In the last issue of the Libertarian Gamer, I laid the ground work for a libertarian campaign set in the classic post-apocalyptic setting known as Gamma World, laying down some campaign guidelines and destroying the world. Now it's time to rebuild it.

In the distant future, Earth will be in ruins. The land will have been ravaged by a horrific assortment of doomsday weapons, from nuclear bombs to genetically engineered super-viruses to hunter-killer nanites. Mutants -- both human, animal and things horribly in between -- roam the Earth ... and consider it home. They compete with the surviving human settlements, which must fight off starvation and mutation, as well as the other denizens of their far-future Gamma World.

So who should ride into save the day? Why the capitalists of course!

In Part 1 of this column, I gave an overview of Monte Cook's Diamond Throne campaign setting for Arcana Unearthed and talked about the sort of adventures I'd like to run there. In Part 2, I talk about the races and classes I'd use to achieve the goals set out in the first column.

One of the themes that Monte Cook specifically lays out in Arcana Unearthed is the concept of free will. He writes on page 4:

Although chance and fate seem to guide one's life at times, Arcana Unearthed assumes a world where freedom of choice is more important than the unknown whims of fortune or the predestined plans of importal beings. Characters choose to become mojh, spyrtes, or rune children. Oathsworn choose their own oaths and fulfill them because they want to. Champions pick their causes, totem warriors choose their totem spirits, and witches decide their witchery manifestations for themselves. Characters witching to become great warriors can select the path of unfettered or the warmain.

Monte Cooke's Arcana Unearthed is an alternative Players Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons that ditches the game's time-honored fantasy classes in favor of wholly new classes that contain echoes of their predecessors, but represent something entirely different. It does an excellent job of breaking the fantasy molds, and it's surprisingly well-suited for a libertarian campaign.

Reactions to the Libertarian Gamers Project have been largely positive -- in the month since I started promoting it, we've had 21 members join up, and a few good conversations over at the UncleBear.com forums, where people wanted to know what the heck a "libertarian" was. But there have been a few who've been uncomfortable with this mixing of politics and gaming.

For most gamers, I think gaming -- be it on the computer or with pen-and-paper -- is an escape from the real world. I don't mean that in any negative way; I simply mean that it is a chance for them to forget, at least for a time, the complexities of politics, religion, and current events, and just lose themselves in a reality where bullets can fly without consequence, and good always triumphs over evil, even if the nature of what constitutes good and evil is never closely examined. To bring politics into gaming is to sully this fantasy sanctuary with real-world concerns.