SUN-02 Shock

[kscott]

This was two games of Shock facilitated by Susan (if I remember right—we all introduced ourselves with the caveat that we were terrible with names; Edit: Susan, not Shannon! Thanks Ben, I knew that wasn't right).

I crashed the initial setup and asked if I could sit in as Audience on a game. I didn't know beforehand how much fun it is to just play Audience in Shock; I just really wanted to see a game of Shock in the wild since it was one of my first indie games bought.

The group split into the two games. The game I played Audience in was set on Jupiter's ice moon Europa, a prison colony of Earth. The Issues were displaced persons, water rights, and reproductive rights. The shock was contact with genetically-compatible aliens.

For protagonists we had:

• Momma Sarah, a Europan settler who was the worst of welfare-mom stereotypes and whose aim was to become the brood mother of the human/Europan-blob-alien hybrid species
• A communications technician living in a frigid shack on the surface of the Europa who'd gone off the deep end since the communication with Earth broke down, and whose story goal was to end the inferior genetic lines of unhybridised humans and Europans
• Ephraim Cog, a bigoted frontiersman type who owned the largest protein farm at the water/ice interface below the miles-thick Europan ice, whose goal was to drive the Europans from the interface

The game concluded with the end of all human life in the solar system except for one lonely, broken man in an alien zoo beneath the ice of Europa. It was gloriously, destructively epic.

As Audience I was less embedded in the stories, but had a great time. I'll leave it to others to give a detailed summary of their protagonists' story arcs. The highlights were:

• a massive explosion on the protein farm when a mistargetted torpedo lit acres of oil-digesting bacteria
• a sterilisation serum used on Momma Sarah while she was pregnant, which mutated into a virus lethal to humans
• the enforced* reproduction of the protein farmer by the Pansexual Polyamorous Anarchists, and the beautiful squiddy-headed kids he came to love
• contact with a military force from Earth that quickly succumbed to the virus, only to have a single automated lander take off from Europa for Earth with its diseased pilot
• the protein farmer bringing war to the Europans to protect the hybrids and his children
• the protein farmer learning that his love of his children was only induced by pheromones, and the genocide that ensued
• the virus and a tiny Europan blob getting back to Earth, wiping out humanity and seeding the blue planet with the beginnings of a new, oceanic civilisation

* I have to mention that one Minutia of the game was that the method of mingling human/Europan genes to produce a hybrid was some strange blob-alien process that most humans didn't consider sex. The forced reproduction was a terrible violation even so, and was one of those paradoxically awful/great moments of gaming where horrible things can be explored in a safe space.

[Ben Robbins]

Man, that sounds like some tasty Shock!

[skinnyghost]

This game was probably the highlight of GPNW for me. Being able to play antagonists and protagonists and pursue the story across all these various character threads was really a lot of fun. That, and the group really clicked, I think, and were fantastic at riffing off each others ideas.