Players: Drew, Pat, Martin

Setting: Sci-fi with a politics focus

Characters:

Beloved (Martin): Para, a young empress recently starting her term attempting to establish an Eternal Imperial Hegemony.
Suitor 1 (Pat): Miranda Sayli, a veteran transport captain
Suitor 2 (Drew): Kyle Hartford, son of a prominent senator

The obstacle was the business guild, a group of the various powerful businesses run by Para's brother. From here we established in the first few scenes that the 'senate' was only really an outward shell of democracy -- all of the senate seats tended heredity amongst the powerful families like the Hartfords reducing the Empress's role to largely just a title.

The suitor scenes with Miranda tended to revolve round Para using her to out maneuver the Business Guild. Miranda served as a voice of reason, talking Para down from performing an orbital assault on the guild that would've caused hundreds of civilian casualties. Meanwhile, the scenes with Kyle were not so chumly. Given his family relationships and the checkered past between the two of them, Kyle got off on the wrong foot at a party and then struggled to earn Para's trust.

In the beloved scenes, Para methodically expanded her power and control. Using Miranda's advice and connections, while simultaneously getting Kyle to turn on his family she was able to take out the old senate and start to fill it with her loyal followers (like Kyle)

In the climax, Para attempted her final seizure of complete power. Miranda, who already started out with a Brutal Reputation and latter got traits like "Intimidating" and "Imperial Thug" helped convince citizens that it was probably in their best interest to support the Empress while Kyle used his family compound to hide Para from would be assassins and use his political influence to do away with the rest of the opposition and finally earn her trust.

In the end, Para's Imperial Hegemony was established -- right in time in time for the Dance of the Three Suns during which she'd select a partner through performing a special dance with them. She started off the evening with Kyle as her date, but when time for the big dance came around she left him to dance with Miranda.

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One thing we did on Martin's encouragement that I hadn't seen as much in past Shooting the Moon games I've played was have the conflicts be more emotional/relationship threats rather than a physical presence. Para wanted to blow up the business guild; Miranda's bloody past made her adverse the causing civilian causalities. Para wanted all of the business families to hand over their wealth; Kyle liked his wealth. This created a bunch of interesting scenes. While I personally think there is still plenty of room for physical conflicts depending on the setting, I definitely think its a good thing to remember when you're playing that the conflicts don't have to be physical, and in fact stuff like "suddenly space pirates!" can much less interesting than a good emotional conflict.

The one downside we had for this game was it was hard to have scenes with all three of us due to Miranda and Kyle's differing backgrounds. But it all still worked really well. I continue to be impressed both by Shooting the Moons world/character creation, and then gameplay and scenes themselves.