players: Jered, Jeff, Ben
Thursday Feb 3

Jered and Jeff were both new to Shock (in keeping with our "everyone must play Shock" mantra) but they rocked it. We wound up with a pretty fascinating and intricate universe.

Because we play both old school _and_ hard core, we picked Issues secretly, then brainstormed a Shock that fit. Our issues were Divorce, Dishonesty, and Division of Labor. We came up with a world with people much like humans, except they were single-sexed and reproduced asexually. Rather than learn skills or trades, individuals were born with inherent skill-memories. So someone might be born knowing how to farm, others were born weavers, etc. Some unfortunate souls were born without any skills (or at least not any skills they could identify) and might go to great lengths to hide it. Others might be born with two or three different skills, but usually one dominated.

The core social group of the entire society was the Hex: a six-person communal family. Each Hex was functionally independent. They had social contact with their neighboring Hexes, but everything they needed to survive was provided by the Hex for the Hex. That meant to thrive, each Hex had to have the right balance of skills in the family: not enough farmers or hunters, and you don't have enough food.

The Hex was always six people. If someone died, you looked for a new member to adopt. If the Hex needed a different skill to survive and there were already six people, somebody had to be kicked out (divorced or "Pruned", keeping our arboreal metaphor of reproduction). The whole culture was steeped in rigid tradition, and Pruning (as we saw during play) was a serious 'we cast you out, you are dead to us, never darken our door again' ritual. Not casual, very painful. The bonds of family were not broken lightly.

So the land is covered by this patchwork of neighboring independent Hexes, with no larger government or organization than these families of six. Society isn't very technologically advanced (farming, weaving and pottery are still major skills), possibly precisely because it's hard to develop science when you have to carry your weight in tiny isolated subsistence level communities.

Mental note: at the outset everything is peaceful and pleasant. People are living off the land, leading satisfying lives where everyone (or just about everyone) contributes and belongs. Take a good look, because by the end of the game we mess the whole thing up real good, without really even meaning to.


(I'll talk about characters and what actually happened in the story in a bit, but Jered and Jeff, jump in wherever you want)

Essentially what started the ball rolling was that each of our characters decided that they wanted to change the Hex structure in some way--by expanding the Hex to include more than six, by getting back into a Hex they had already been Pruned from or by altering the nature of a Hex's supposed self-reliance. The first goal was that of my character, the second Jered's and the third Ben's.

Through naive or intentional interpersonal manipulation, unwitting infanticide and in one case outright poisoning followed by vicious scapegoating our characters sought to achieve their goals. Not everyone reached their goal.

In the end our world ended up becoming incredibly Balkanized, to borrow Ben's descriptor, and fell into a state of what was basically a feudal pyramid scheme. My character's Hex formed a bond with its neighboring Hexes, they did the same with theirs, and that sent the ball rolling to a small scale empire lacking even the barest traces of the high handed diplomacy and elan of the Roman Empire.

My character Rioux's role in this was that it was, in a way, his idea. He came from an overly specialized Hex; they had four hunters and two fisherpeople. No one properly knew how to farm or store food and they ended up occasionally relying on their closely neighboring Hex. In an attempt to formalize this relationship the juvenile Rioux ended up getting Pruned from his own family unit, though in the process he managed to set unintentionally into motion a string of events that bonded those two Hexes together.

Once he threw himself at the feet of the scheming Elder of the neighboring Hex who had taken control, and in the process getting a well loved older member of his community to advocate for him, he was inducted into the neighboring Hex after a swapping of members. Being initially told it would "work out" and "take time" to figure out who the neighboring Hex would send to his original family, Rioux found himself homeless for several months. Shortly after an impassioned and idealistic display towards the Elder, his antagonist, Rioux found that his idea of a greater community had become something else entirely. Soon the Elder was sitting on figurative piles of gold, being the receiver of gifts, as new Hexes were absorbed into this new pyramid scheme by hook or by crook.

In the end he failed to stop the Elder and his partisans from waging war and crushing other Hexes' beneath the collective heel of his empire. His best friend, who had repeatedly fought for him, was in an attempt killed to foment bad feeling towards one of the Hexes the Elder sought to oppress. Hearing this Rioux decided to get his original Hex to steal away in the night to kill the Elder and his partisans. The mission failed, leaving a formerly idyllic, if hide bound, society ground beneath the boot of greed.

All told it was a good time. The first two scenes were largely based off of Rioux having this idea and passionately arguing to expand their society for the betterment of all their peoples. The third one was based around Rioux losing all hope. Somehow this child had found his idea of turning the Hex into a group of twelve or eighteen or some multiple of six greater had turned into a vicious cycle of de facto bribery and feudal expansion.