Sept 11
players: Del, Danica, Josh, Ben

I'll throw out the starting premise, so if anyone else wants to chime in with their stories, jump in.

Our issues were corporate influence over government, depletion of critical resources, police brutality, and passing values on to children. We brainstormed a Shock where human colonists dwelt in a station orbiting an alien world. The atmosphere of the planet wasn't breathable by humans, making colonization unattractive. What the planet did have was natural resources, namely uranium, the key energy source for the station.

The tricky bit? The uranium wasn't found in natural deposits. It was in the villages of the primitive native race (dubbed, the Trogs), used as part of their sacred religious rituals. Originally the small, furry, spiritual Trogs welcomed the strangers from the sky, but now things have spiraled badly: desperate for uranium (issue: depletion of critical resources), the corporations running the privatized government services like energy and the military (issue: corp influence over government) have trampled any illusion of Trog rights, cracking heads and seizing the sacred ore to power the station (issue: police brutality). Children are taught that Trogs are more like animals than people, so their oppression is natural and just (issue: passing values on to children).

I think the consensus at the table was: "uh, wow, that's dark."

My story goal was to loot the secret source of the holy uranium. I played a bitter anthropologist, Dr. Vicky Lane. As it came out, she had been taught all this idealistic crap about studying and understanding the trogs by her mentor (Antagonist), but once she got to the planet she realized just how hypocritical it all was: no one really wanted to understand the trogs and develop good relations, they just wanted to exploit them more efficiently.

Disillusioned and bitter, when the myths and stories she heard from the village elders hinted at a hidden source of all the "sacred" uranium, she thought, screw it. She was sick of camping in stinking forests, crouching in huts. She was going to cash in. If she could find a massive uranium deposit and turn it over to the gov-corps, she'd be on easy street for life.