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I'm reading Shock: Social Science Fiction rpg at the moment and I am veryimpressed by its world creation process.
In the same shopping trip that I bought Cartagena in , I bought a copy of Shock: The Social Science Fiction rpg.  I've been interested in getting Shock ever since I listened to Robert Bohl's Independent Insurgency podcast with Joshua A.C. Newman , the author of Shock. And of course the fact that the book is an extremely beautiful artefact helped make the decision easier.
A big hand to Fantasiapelit , the Finnish rpg store, for stocking up on various indie games. According to their homepage, Arkkikivi's stock of Shock has been empty for a while and now I didn't need to go through the hassle of ordering it from the US.
I haven't read the whole of the book yet. It is not easiest English text to get a grasp of because of the numerous terms unfamiliar to me (and I've read plenty of scientific texts in English, too). So far I've been most impressed by the rules for the world creation stage of the game.
Basically what you do in the world creation stage is you 1) create a set of issues to explore, 2) come up with a set of shocks (we'll get to the defiinition of the shocks in a bit), 3) assign owners for each of the interesting issues and shocks and 4) assign a shock / issue pair to each player so that their character is the protagonist related to that issue / shock pairing. Being an owner means you have the final say about the topic and its details. Shocks are major changes in the fictional world i.e. the ways that the world is different than ours. Artificial intelligence can be a shock, as well as a utopistic world government.
The way that this process impresses me is not its novelty per se. I've been a part of many great games were we have had a similar process as a part of the character creation and/or world creation. There was ths fantasy game where a friend of mine created a world of his own and asked us to create characters. The character creation process allowed us to also create or affect large parts of the game world. Basically we became the part-owners of our countries of origin. In other games we have had conversations about the topics we want to explore with our own characters.
No, what impresses me is the elegance and economy of the creation system. Any player can come up with multiple issues and shocks, but no one player can be both the owner and protagonist of one issue or shock. And, on top of that, the player sitting on the left side of each player plays that palyer's characters antagonist. So basically every player has one or two players as their personal GM's: one for the details about the world and another one to provide opposition and challenge.
It turned out that I bought Shock just at the right time. I have plotted out the outline of a rpg project with a friend of mine and what we think is important right now is the story / world setup process that kicks off the game. Reading Shock's world creation rules certainly gives me ideas how to handle that one, too.
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