players: Pat, Shuo, Ben

We used the old-school setup, each picking an issue blindly then brainstorming a shock that fit. In pure coincidence, we had both Hunger and Famine as issues, but they were so close that we went with a backup issue instead (Equality).

Our final issues were: Hunger, Equality, and Might Makes Right. Next stop: institutionalized cannibalism! We came up with a Soylent Green-esque shock, where the ecosystem is stretched dangerously thin, so the mega-nations have made up for the food shortage by waging eternal war and secretly processing the bodies of the dead veterans into food.

Is it a stunning indictment of modern war, a metaphor for the homefront sacrificing soldiers to sustain themselves? Yeah, sure, what he said ;)

We actually made the secret casualty-cannibalism, dare I say, plausible. The idea was that the mega-nations were at war because first because they were fighting over the limited natural resources, but then the policy drifted and became sending soldiers off to die in foreign wars reduced the population and the food burden, and then finally Shuo's character (the notorious Dr. Cooper, architect of the Food Bureau's final solution) came up with the appalling idea of using the dead to feed the living. It was the huge atomic bomb of secrets, lurking at the heart of the society. As we played we carefully distinguished between characters that Knew, those that Suspected, and the rest who were blissfully Ignorant. Those that Knew were either creepy or extremely conflicted: like my character's antagonist Dad, a career military officer who knew that his son's brave military death really just sent him to the food vats, but was still struggling to put on a proud face at the funeral -- cruel, cruel gaming.