When real life inspires game scenarios.

There are an amazing number of things happening in real life that can translate into fascinating game scenarios.

Take for instance this farmer fighting court battles against a giant agribusiness all the way to the highest court in the land.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/10/15/162949288/farmer-tackling-monsantos-seed-policy-gets-a-day-in-supreme-court

The short version for those who aren't interested in the full details goes something like this:

A soybean farmer bought genetically modified seeds from a major agribusiness that are resistant to the other product they make that he uses - weed killer. Regular soybeans die right along with the weeds when the weed killer is sprayed on the crop.

There is a contract saying that he cannot save seeds produced from the resistant crop or purchase saved seeds from a resistant crop from another source and use those to grow more soybeans and instead the farmer is required to pay full price to buy more seeds directly from the giant agribusiness.

The farmer wanted to plant a second crop after harvesting the first crop so he went to a grain elevator and purchased seeds that were a mix of organic and these genetically modified seeds. Since they were all mixed up there was not a way to pick through and identify the difference.

He is being sued by the giant agribusiness for breaking the rules.

The giant agribusiness has about a 90% share of the soybean seed market so it wouldn't be cost effective to have separate grain elevators for the organic seeds. If the farmer wants to do a second crop he is mostly stuck paying full price for the special seeds.

This can be translated into a game scenario somewhat like this:

"Helpful druids" provide assistance to farmers by offering something special to destroy crop harming things. The special something harms the crops as much as it harms the crop harming things so the "helpful druids" provide special seeds that the special something won't harm, but require that the farmers plant only seeds bought from the druids when planting new crops, not any saved from previous crop yields or bad things will happen. Then the "helpful druids" limit seed availability or tighten the cost screws on the farmers to squeeze them for everything they can get, or something similar.