As part of my perambulations around the globe, I've now pitched up in the Southern Hemisphere, Wellington, New Zealand to be exact.

Last Sunday saw my first visit to WARGS, the local games society that meets monthly in Wargames Supplies, down town Wellington. I'd brought along a bunch of games including Contenders, Covenant, Cold City, Dead of Night and Shock:, just to see what people fancied playing. There was a mood for SF and the chance (for some) to try Shock for the first time. Steve had played the game once before, while James and Paul had not had the chance to. James was, at first, not so sure about the style of game that was portrayed in our discussions, but was very willing to give it a go. Steve and Paul are both familiar with many of the small-press story games.

We each threw in an issue, ending up with terrorism (a current hot topic for debate here in New Zealand), group identity, the after-effects of colonialism (again, a topic that is the subject of wide ranging discussion in New Zealand society) and media manipulation. All of the issues were born out of stories that had recently appeared in the papers or were topics that were prominent in national discourse.

Leading on from these issues, there was a strong feeling that the story should take place on a far flung colony world. The topic of sub light generation ship star travel came up, so we decided to incorporate the two and have both as shocks. Our shocks were: alien contact and generation ship star travel.

Everyone seemed very happy and enthusiastic with the possibilities that these offered. Ownership was taken of the issues and shocks and the process of creating protagonists and antagonists was embarked upon. It quickly became apparent that we would be creating a story that existed in several different time periods: on the generation ship itself, immediately after the first landing and a generation or two after the landing. The way that these stories intertwined and eventually gave a full and satisfying explanation of the situation on the colony planet was one of the best aspects of the game.

The protagonists turned out as follows:

Mikael (me): The son, of the generation ship Captain, his story would take place approximately a decade prior to the ship reaching the destination planet. He was an authoritarian, somewhat genocidal maniac who wanted to eject thousands of people from the ship so that he could mould the colony in his own image (those ejected would be scientists, bureaucrats and so forth). His antagonist was his father, the Captain.

Sean Wiffen (Paul): A senior military officer who's story took place in the few days following the first landing and the initial contact with the alien inhabitants. Paul had picked an interesting goal for his protagonist, in that he wished to “lose his faith in group identity”. In other words, he would cease to identify with the military and the colonists. His antagonism came in the form of Marshal Antonov, representative of the military top brass.

Joseph (James): A renegade colonist, who's story took place a generation or two after the first landing. He had gone off to live with the alien inhabitants of the planet and had developed a romantic relationship with an alien female. He was struggling to regain his trust in humankind after the viciousness of the colonisation and was antagonised by Clex', a sibling of his alien lover and something of a Ghandi/Malcolm X figure to the aliens.

Tanya Lees (Steve): A junior xeno-ecologist, Tanya's story took place roughly contiguously with that of Joseph. She desperately wanted to prove to the mass of the colonists that something horrible had happened during the early years of the landing, but was confounded by the fact that all communications were controlled by a quasi-military outfit called The Transmission Division (who were her antagonists).

Finally, we threw down a few bits of minutiae about the setting, and ended up with:

Generation ships are huge, people are carried in stasis pods, there is a skeleton crew who are awake the entire time, militaristic society.

It takes 8 generations to get from Earth to the colony planet.

The aliens are a nomadic, hunter/gatherer society who travel round the planet in huge trains of wagons.

The planet has a belt of land that runs round the entire equator.

The planet had a very slow rotation, the aliens must keep to the sunny side.

The generation ship still hangs in orbit.

The re are huge cultural differences between those who live on the planet and those who still stay on the ship.

Once we got started, play flowed very well and everyone got to grips with playing the parts of their protagonists and antagonists. The intertwining of the four stories is something that was a real highlight for me, especially the way in which past and future events influenced what was going on in each of the threads. To jump forward to the end of the game, it was very satisfying that all of the events eventually offered and explanation of why the colony had turned out the way it had.

Not much time to respond in detail, just now, but I'll point out our Praxis scales were Obsession vs. Understanding, and Change vs. Stasis.

Designing the Praxis scales has been a highlight both times I've played Shock. There's something about looking at how the game will (a) link all the protagonists together, and (b) express its themes that really appeals to me. I like the exploratory nature of the conversation between players as we try on different possibilities, figuring out what fits and what doesn't.

it was a great game, it has given me a buch of cool ideas to run with.

Always a good time when you find something in a game that makes you think about all your other games in the future that the ideas could span from here.

I was caught out a couple of times " playing before the game" - a bad habit that I have that I am trying to train myself out of .

MY highlight was the scenes with Malcolm working out where is the best time to hop into the narration and really find a place to get to the heart of his character and really drill it in.

I really liked the scenes with Malcolm and Hix, that story really grabbed me and was a really good exampel of the sort of stories to tell with this system, It makes me hanker for another game of this sometime or at least with the same people again.

Cheers for coming along to WARGS and bringing this

it was a VERY dark, VERY politcal game.

I think thats what got me with it the fact that we went so dark with the game.

PS:

Another interesting little factet: We never actually named the colony world, it was always just 'the planet' or 'the colony'. Although, in my head, I was kind of referring to it as New Aotearoa. Hmmm, I wonder why we never named it? Was there an implicit assumption about what land the colony world was reflecting and therefore, we did not need to come up with a name? My recent reading of 'The New Zealand Wars' by James Belich placed the subtext and themes of this story in greater relief. I, personally, saw much of this story as relating clearly to the history of New Zealand itself. Or, perchance I read too much into it.

SO FUCKING HOT.

His final scene, where he commits genocide by attempting to jettison hundreds of stasis pods from the ship. Initially, he failed, which really didn't satisfy me as I desperately wanted Mikael to be successful in his mad quest (whether he lived or dies was inconsequential), as I felt it would really underline the events of succeeding years on the colony world. So, Mikael sacrificed the life of his co-conspirator and lover, Ilya, forcing him into a particularly brutal death. In the end, Mikael died, but not before throwing dozens of huge knife switches and hearing the thudding clunks as thousands of souls were committed to the void.

If something's going to contradict established facts in the story, you can't have it as an Intent. On the other hand... did you risk the LInk to Ilya to make it happen? That's so goddam hot, I gotta take my pants off.

It's a tough thing with a cross-time structure like this. I think if the genocide is a foregone conclusion, then it can't be your Story Goal. I mean, you know where it's going; your Intent should be "I'm vindicated" or "I purge our society of the Moguat sisterfuckers."

re: weaving the stories together at the end.

At one point during the game, James and I speculated that our two stories might turn out to be alternate timelines. Which one of us ended up existing would depend on how Malcolm's genocide attempt, and Paul's attempt to resist the military coup, turned out.

So, yeah, the success or failure of the genocide was in play right up until the last round of scenes.

(Confession - as part of Malcolm's audience, I tried to make him fail in the first scene. However, in his later scenes he was playing such an interesting character, who was so dedicated to his goal, that I used my d4 to support him whenever I had the chance.)

while this was very much in malcom's head with the recent education of new zealand politics it was just local political stuff for the rest of us so it was really quite interesting that it came out that way, I had a character whose story was about the collective nature of people it was amazing how it all came to pass that it became so dark and political, I know that was the aim of at least half the table and I was helping , but amazing none the less.


re : the genocide , although it was my job to take malc to task over the whole issue (I was playing the antagonist) I really wanted him to succeed as an audience member, I was really ( happy is the wrong word here ) .... Pleased when the story went down that path, and that Mikhail really had to pay for the goal in the end, it was nice. If he had failed I could have seen his antagonist following a much darker path than before and finding some sympathy for mikhail's cause.

I will have to get together with this group again for more fun , maybe those playtests malc was talking about?

I was playing Tanya Lees, a junior xeno-ecologist on the planet. She was at the intersection of Media Manipulation (issue) and Alien Contact (shock), and her story goal was "Get the truth out about the incident."

As Malcolm said, "she desperately wanted to prove to the mass of the colonists that something horrible had happened during the early years of the landing.” I had no idea what this 'incident' involved. Figured that'd come out in play. And it did, in an unplanned way. The horrific series of massacres in James’ storyline did such a good job of illustrating the general carnage that had been happening on this planet, I never needed to go into specifics about what was driving Tanya.

Malc also mentioned Tanya’s efforts were “confounded by the fact that all communications were controlled by a quasi-military outfit called The Transmission Division (who were her antagonists)." Originally I was going to make my protagonist a journalist working for the Transmission Division, a journo who doubted the incident had even occurred. At the last minute I decided I'd rather play the story of someone trying to gain access to a powerful institution, rather than someone who was having to be convinced about what the truth was.

Actually, I found 'goal selection' was an interesting part of the game. Malcolm and I choose goals that had very clear success/failure outcomes (“Jettison the scientists”, “Get the truth out there”). James' and Paul's goals were more ‘identity’ based (“Regain my trust in humanity”, “Lose my faith in group identity”). Sometimes it seemed a little unclear how to set up conflicts that were really on-topic for those goals.

For example, I was James’ antagonist, and I found it was challenging to come up with conflicts that would really hit his “Regain my trust in humanity” goal. I started by following my instincts, and illustrating that the humans were massacring the natives. I think the conflict in that first scene was whether Clex’ would be able to exile James’ PC (Justin) from the tribe of aliens he was travelling with. In the second scene, James described how the aliens had massacred a human settlement in revenge. I believe the conflict there was whether Clex’ could make Justin admit that the aliens had done the right thing.

By the end, what had emerged pretty naturally though James' scenes was that the aliens had adopted human traits like bloodthirstiness and anger - and Justin was forced to make a decision about whether to kill a human hostage or not.

Basically, it turned out that the conflicts I introduced were ones that forced James to make choices between his human and alien identities. That was an interesting story, but I’m not sure they directly helped express his “Regain my trust in humanity” goal. Be interested to hear James’ take on it …