“My story goal is to inflict the perfect, genetically engineered people with the same degenerative disease that is afflicting us normal humans.”

“… You’re a terrible person.”

players: Ace, Joe, Ben

We take Shock for a spin and do terrible things to society! It’s an old favorite and one of our “merit badge” games but we haven’t played it that much recently.

One of the neat things about Shock is that you pick the real world issues you want to examine and then invent a science fiction setting to explore them, safely removed from the real world. So when you get into eugenics, hospice care, and rampant racism it’s fascinating rather than utterly depressing.

We play hardcore mode: each player picks an issue *secretly* then we all reveal and brainstorm a setting that fits all three. Picking without discussion gives you surprising and interesting combinations instead of the same old stock themes.

Often, those blind combinations go together surprisingly well. Our issues were coping with death, institutional racism, and genetic lottery (i.e. some people being born with better traits than others). That led us to make up a world that was post-eugenics: we’d mastered genetic science, started breeding for human perfection, but then a massive backlash had flipped things. Now the “perfect race” was hated and discriminated against by the normal, flawed humans that ran society (check, institutional racism). And even in the face of rising debilitating mutations and genetic syndromes that caused crippling disabilities and a slow death (check, genetic lottery), we refused as a society to go back down the road of tampering with genetics — we flat-out refused to even research possible cures that involved looking at genes. We turned our backs on that branch of science entirely and opened more and more hospices where the sick could be tended to and die, slowly (check, coping with death).

All that mayhem? That was just setup. We hadn’t even gotten to the terrible or incredibly idealistic things our characters were going to try to do.

Did we play straight until it was almost midnight and totally destroy society? Oh yes we did.

Did Ace scream when forced to choose between saving her son and curing the disease destroying society? Oh yes she did. (classic “I’m simultaneously screaming and smiling” antagonism face)

Did Joe earn a “no-stabby card”, redeemable to not be stabbed by Ace’s character in a coming game? Oh yes he did.

Joe and Ace: once again, great game.