Natives: the Ku
Body wholeness is sacred
No formal hierarchy
Bird farmers

Occupiers: the Lakatos (Sam)
At war with the Rinne (they principally want the island for tactical purposes)
Iron workers (as in, on the verge of ironclad ships)
Complex heavenly bureaucracy

Sekura (Chris): a diver. Lost his leg in an accident while working on harbour fortifications; the Lakatos amputated his limb to save him, and he gradually rejected his own culture's stance on bodily wholeness (just a bit too hard) and became assimilated and a (rather unreliable) go-between.

Moa (Ben): a wood-sculptor, mostly working in funeral effigies and art serving as atonement for physical disfigurement. Affianced to Sekura's sister Jatta, he was confused at the whole concept of gods and deeply disturbed at Sekura's reaction to his amputation. Eventually ended up running amok and being hung as an example after burning down all the Lakatos protective effigies.

We had two metagame issues that prevented this from going very dark and oppressive. One was that, as the Occupier, I expected that the game would mechanically require things to go pretty dark all on its own, that it'd impose a sort of gradient on play; I felt that I shouldn't jump the gun on that and act like a total dick right out of the gate, so I played the Lakatos as really, really polite, if not exactly understanding, and more focused on assimilation through soft power than with throwing their weight around. (They were happy to cheat the Ku absolutely blind at trade, but really wanted to avoid faux pas that might imperil their trade and war efforts). In future sessions of this I'd want to focus more on what the Occupiers want right now, and what the most direct route to getting it is.

The other issue was that Ben didn't realise that he could have narrative authority over larger groups of natives, which could have forced my hand considerably more; as it was, I was able to treat and punish him as a lone crazy without a great deal of pushback, even though his views were probably more in line with the majority of the Ku. (We talked about how having Kingdoms-like roles, particularly Touchstone, could have been useful here.)

Very good post-game talk. Seriously, we should end games early more often so there's time to debrief. I even got to talk to other people about how their games went, which is always a pleasure.

It was ironic that after talking about keeping the setting real world and not sci fi we almost immediately Shock'ed it up with exotic cultures. Like I said last night, totally my fault for introducing the body wholeness thing right off the bat.

But despite unintentionally going against our own plan, and leaving out our preconceptions like expecting it to be darker -- judging the game for what it was, not what we intended -- I think the story we actually played was really tight. Sekura and Moa could not have provided a sharper commentary on the occupiers. Kudos to Chris for getting his own leg mangled scene one to throw that issue front and center. It was more a Shock game, but a very tight Shock game :D

I think my main regret about the game was that Sam I'm not sure you had as much fun as you deserved because you seemed to be saddled with wondering if you were occupying "correctly." You were taking the hit for the team while Chris and I were cruising along in much more straight-forward roles.

We did stumble around unsure of our authority in scenes but I think re-reading the rules might show us where we were going wrong. I didn't even think about the Kingdom comparison until you mentioned it Sam (strange, I know) but yeah that's what we were missing. It's a good reminder too: we should never hesitate to pause the game, crack open the book, and double-check that we're getting the rules right. Dispel any fuzziness.

Sam I'm not sure you had as much fun as you deserved because you seemed to be saddled with wondering if you were occupying "correctly."

It seems as though there are a bunch of different attitudes you can take to the Occupier role, and I was totally overfocused on being Well-Meaning But Tragically Clueless, with the expectation that misunderstandings would eventually force us into a situation where we'd have to commit horrible atrocities or abandon the island. It would really have been better to make that true of just, perhaps, the high-ups, and made the rank-and-file Lakatos more eager to exploit their advantages.

Or -- well, you and I kind of settled into a bit of a Polaris-ish situation, I think, with Moa as the antagonist and the Lakatos as the protagonist. Things were similar with Sekura, some of the time. I think I should have figured out early on that the Occupiers are meant to have a much more antagonistic role -- you've got all this narrative authority, you should damn well use it to create problems. (Possibly this happened because the Occupier role feels a bit like the classic GM role, where your power is twinned with a lot of responsibility to be fair to the other players; and I guess the whole point of Dog Eat Dog is to reverse that, to put the greater weight of responsibility on the powerless characters.)