WesWorld: We Love Dogs

An Experimental TiGGR Scenario in WesWorld

Framing Statement

This scenario is an experiment in narrative perspective-shifting, prioritizing artistic exploration over traditional playability. Players will inhabit three different viewpoints of the same political crisis, examining how the same events affect different communities. Post-session analysis is encouraged to examine the qualities and challenges the experience revealed.

Touchstone

The dog flu crisis in Megasaki City, experienced from human perspective (before deportation), dog perspective (on Trash Island), and convergent perspective (during the political shift). Players explore how authoritarian policy affects different communities while examining their own capacity for cross-species empathy.

Core Rules

Roll 2d6 + Stat vs. Difficulty (Risky: 6, Dramatic: 8, Climactic: 10). Characters have Body, Mind, and Charm stats (3 points total), 5 HP, one Special Ability (+1 in specific situations, once per scene), and Signature Gear (+3 to any roll, once per scenario). When you hit zero HP, you're knocked out until the next scene - but everyone heals fully between scenes. TiGGR is about momentum, not attrition.

Experimental Mechanic

Perspective Shifts: Players create new characters for each scene but carry forward thematic elements. The same crisis, three viewpoints, culminating in player choice of which characters to inhabit during the climactic convergence.

Setup

Timeline: 6 months before to 3 months after the dog deportation policy Goal: Understand how the same political crisis affects different communities; find meaningful connections across species and social boundaries Themes: Displacement, loyalty tested by authority, love transcending political boundaries

Scene 1: "Before the Deportation" (Human Perspective)

Duration: 6 months before deportation begins Location: Megasaki City - veterinary clinics, family homes, government offices

Character Templates (Players customize names, relationships, and one defining trait):

Template A: The Medical Professional

• Role: Veterinarian, animal control officer, or health inspector
• Stats: Mind 2, Body 1, Charm 0
• Special Ability: "+1 Mind when diagnosing/analyzing medical data"
• Core Motivation: Questioning the official dog flu narrative through professional expertise
• Signature Gear Options: Medical equipment, research files, or diagnostic tools
• Customization: Choose your specific medical background and what first made you suspicious

Template B: The Protective Family Member

• Role: Parent, spouse, or guardian with a beloved dog
• Stats: Charm 2, Body 1, Mind 0
• Special Ability: "+1 Charm when protecting loved ones"
• Core Motivation: Keeping your family (including your dog) safe from government overreach
• Signature Gear Options: Family photo with dog, special collar/toy, or hiding supplies
• Customization: Define your dog's breed/personality and your family's specific situation

Template C: The Conflicted Authority

• Role: Bureaucrat, clerk, or low-level official
• Stats: Mind 2, Charm 1, Body 0
• Special Ability: "+1 Mind when interpreting regulations/procedures"
• Core Motivation: Navigating institutional loyalty versus growing moral doubts
• Signature Gear Options: Official documents, access cards, or communication devices
• Customization: Choose your department and what aspect of the policy troubles you most

Template D: The Underground Organizer

• Role: Student, activist, or concerned citizen
• Stats: Charm 1, Mind 1, Body 1
• Special Ability: "+1 Charm when rallying others to a cause"
• Core Motivation: Building resistance networks and exposing government lies
• Signature Gear Options: Communication network, protest supplies, or evidence cache
• Customization: Define your activist background and preferred resistance methods

Key Complications:

• Official health inspections of family dogs (Mind 8 to spot inconsistencies in flu testing)
• Moral choice: comply with deportation orders or resist (Charm 8 to convince others)
• Discovering evidence that contradicts official flu narrative (Mind 8 to interpret data)

Scene Ends With: The deportation begins. Players witness their dogs being taken or make final choices about compliance/resistance.

Scene 2: "On Trash Island" (Dog Perspective)

Duration: 3 months into deportation Location: Trash Island - various sectors, makeshift settlements, scavenging grounds

Character Templates (Players may choose dogs connected to their Scene 1 humans or create new relationships):

Template A: The Displaced House Pet

• Background: Recently deported family dog struggling with island life
• Stats: Body 0, Mind 1, Charm 2
• Special Ability: "+1 Charm when seeking help/making friends"
• Core Motivation: Survival while maintaining hope of reunion with human family
• Signature Gear Options: Tattered collar with tags, favorite toy, or food bowl
• Customization: Choose your breed, former living situation, and specific survival challenges
• Connection Option: Could be the pet of Template B from Scene 1

Template B: The Island Veteran

• Background: Long-term island resident, either native or early exile
• Stats: Body 2, Mind 1, Charm 0
• Special Ability: "+1 Body when defending territory/resources"
• Core Motivation: Maintaining pack order and protecting established territory
• Signature Gear Options: Makeshift tool, territorial marker, or resource cache
• Customization: Define how long you've been on the island and your leadership role
• Connection Option: May have encountered dogs processed by Template C from Scene 1

Template C: The Adaptive Survivor

• Background: Street-smart dog who's learned to navigate both worlds
• Stats: Body 1, Mind 2, Charm 0
• Special Ability: "+1 Mind when tracking/investigating"
• Core Motivation: Understanding the larger situation and finding opportunities
• Signature Gear Options: Useful scavenged item, hidden cache, or navigation tool
• Customization: Choose your survival strategy and what knowledge you've gained
• Connection Option: May have lived near Template A or D's neighborhood in Scene 1

Template D: The Pack Mediator

• Background: Dog trying to bridge divides between different island communities
• Stats: Body 1, Mind 1, Charm 1
• Special Ability: "+1 Charm when resolving conflicts between dogs"
• Core Motivation: Building unity among the diverse dog population
• Signature Gear Options: Shared resource, symbolic item, or communication method
• Customization: Define your approach to conflict resolution and pack politics
• Connection Option: Could represent a dog that Template D from Scene 1 tried to help

Key Complications:

• Establishing territory in contested scavenging grounds (Body 8 to claim resources)
• Deciding whether to help struggling former pets (Charm 8 to bridge social divides)
• Surviving island hazards while maintaining hope (Mind 8 to find safe shelter/food)

Scene Ends With: News arrives that the political situation in the city is changing. Some dogs sense opportunity; others prepare for worse.

Scene 3: "The Convergence" (Player Choice)

Duration: Political crisis reaches climax (parallel to film's events) Location: Both Megasaki City and Trash Island as barriers break down Character Choice: Players may choose to play humans from Scene 1, dogs from Scene 2, or alternate between both

Experimental Element: No predetermined character assignments. Players negotiate which perspectives to inhabit as situations develop.

Key Complications:

• Families searching Trash Island for their dogs (All stats relevant, emotional rather than mechanical stakes)
• Dogs choosing whether to return to human families or maintain island independence (Charm 8 to navigate reunion)
• Political aftermath requiring inter-species cooperation (Team rolls encouraged across character types)

Scene Ends With: Individual resolutions vary by player choice, but all characters must grapple with how their perspectives have changed.

Special Mechanics

Character Template System: Each scene provides 4 character templates with suggested stats, abilities, and motivations. Players customize names, relationships, and one defining trait while maintaining the template's core framework.

Cross-Scene Connections: Templates include suggested connections to characters from other scenes, but players may create their own relationships during the convergence.

Thematic Anchors: Objects, locations, or NPCs that appear in all three scenes to provide continuity

• A specific dog collar or family photo
• A location visible from both city and island
• A news broadcast or political figure affecting both communities

Emotional Handoffs: Each scene ends with unresolved questions that naturally lead to the next perspective

• Scene 1: "What happens to the dogs?"
• Scene 2: "What are the humans doing?"
• Scene 3: "How do these perspectives reconcile?"

Flashback Rule: Once per scene, a player may trigger a narrated flashback to gain +1 on a roll. Flashbacks must begin with:

• "That fall, after the hickory harvest..."
• "The day Royal left was the day the owl moved in..."

Perspective Bridging: Players encouraged to note how their Scene 1 and Scene 2 characters might be connected, even if indirectly

Post-Session Analysis Framework

Questions for Discussion:

• Which perspective felt most natural to inhabit? Most challenging?
• How did playing dogs change your understanding of the human characters' choices?
• What connections did you discover between your different characters?
• Did the perspective shifts enhance or diminish emotional investment?
• What assumptions about loyalty, family, or authority were challenged?

Success Metrics (Non-traditional):

• Did players find meaningful connections across perspectives?
• Were there moments of genuine empathy or understanding that wouldn't have occurred in single-perspective play?
• Did the experimental structure generate insights about narrative or character identification?

GM Notes

• Template Guidance: Allow 5-10 minutes for players to customize their templates rather than full character creation
• Connection Facilitation: During Scene 1, note which characters could logically connect to which dog templates in Scene 2
• Embrace potential "failure" - some groups may resist the format, and that resistance is itself valuable data
• Don't force connections between scenes; let players discover them naturally during play
• The scenario prioritizes artistic exploration over entertainment value
• Post-session discussion is as important as the gameplay itself
• Frame as "structured experiment" rather than traditional scenario
• "Improv on rails": Templates provide structure while allowing creative freedom within constraints

Accessibility Warning

This scenario requires:

• Comfort with narrative ambiguity and experimental structure
• Willingness to abandon traditional character attachment
• Interest in perspective-taking and empathy exercises
• Tolerance for potentially uncomfortable emotional complexity

"We Love Dogs" is designed for groups specifically interested in pushing the boundaries of tabletop narrative. Traditional playability has been intentionally sacrificed for artistic exploration.

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Dr. Arisaki had been a veterinarian for seventeen years. This was not what she had signed up for.

The lab reports scattered across her desk told a story that made no medical sense. Dogs testing positive for a flu that didn't exist, or rather, a flu that seemed suspiciously selective about which animals it chose to infect. Stressed dogs. Certain breeds. Dogs whose only crime was living in the wrong neighborhood or belonging to the wrong families.

She adjusted her well-worn stethoscope and reached for her phone.

Six blocks away, Kana pressed her face against the window, watching for the government trucks. Her neighbor, Mrs. Tanaka, clutched her poodle Puffy like a life preserver. They had agreed to hide their dogs together, a small act of rebellion that felt enormous and terrifying.

"They won't understand," Kana whispered to Mochi's photograph, its frame slightly cracked from being carried everywhere. "We won't let them take you."

But they did take him. They took all of them.

In his office overlooking the main deportation route, Kaito stamped another form and felt something die inside him. The numbers didn't add up. The whole thing was a charade, and he was the one holding the rubber stamp. He had always been good at finding loopholes in regulations. Today, he decided to use that skill for something that mattered.

Three months later, Trash Island had become a world unto itself.

Mochi learned quickly that charm could be as valuable as strength when negotiating with a scarred bulldog named Brutus for scraps of fish. The island had its own rules, its own hierarchies, its own desperate mathematics of survival.

Chief, who had been here long before the deportations began, watched the former pets stumble through their first weeks with a mixture of pity and pragmatism. Some would adapt. Others wouldn't. The island had no sentiment for good intentions.

Nutmeg followed her nose toward the humming fence at the island's far end, where the smells told stories of sedatives and fear and something that wasn't quite medicine. She had always been good at reading humans, even from a distance. What she found beyond that fence made her fur stand on end.

When the barriers finally broke down, when the political crisis reached its inevitable climax, the convergence felt less like resolution and more like archaeology—the careful excavation of connections that had always existed but never been acknowledged.

Dr. Arisaki arrived on Trash Island's shore with a crowd of desperate families, armed with evidence and authority. She spoke to them about false diagnoses and real suffering, about the difference between political expediency and medical truth.

Mochi heard Kana's voice before he saw her face. The reunion was messy and joyful and complicated by the knowledge that not every dog would get one.

In the research facility's server room, Kaito's bureaucratic skills finally served something larger than procedure. Guided by Nutmeg's unerring sense of smell, he downloaded files that would end careers and topple administrations. It was the most meaningful paperwork he had ever filed.

Later, much later, when the testimonies had been given and the headlines written, Dr. Arisaki would remember the look in Mochi's eyes during that first reunion—recognition mixed with something harder, something earned through loss. Kana would remember how Mochi had changed, how his body language carried the memory of places she couldn't imagine.

Kaito would keep a tennis ball on his desk, chewed and faded, a reminder that truth sometimes arrives through channels you never expected to trust.

The island remained, transformed into a memorial park where families could visit and remember. But the dogs who had survived—the ones who chose to return to their humans and the ones who chose to stay wild—carried something else forward: the knowledge that love and loyalty were more complicated than anyone had imagined, and that sometimes the most important truths come from perspectives you never thought to consider.

The bureaucracy reformed itself, as bureaucracies do. New regulations, better oversight, more humane procedures. But the people who had lived through the crisis—human and canine alike—understood that the real change happened in smaller spaces: in the decision to trust someone different from yourself, in the recognition that survival and compassion were not mutually exclusive, in the hard-won knowledge that families could be both broken and rebuilt, sometimes in the same afternoon.

Mochi still wore his collar, though the inscription had faded beyond reading. Some things, he had learned, were worth carrying forward even when their original meaning had been lost. Especially then.