Another question for Microscope playtesters: are there parts of the rules that you ignore? Things you just don’t use, or say “hmm, that wouldn’t really work for our group, so we’re not going to do that.”
Every game gets played a little differently by different groups, so tell me about your rules drift.
We just played the second session of our “Doom of the Gods” Microscope game. It’s an age of myth stretching from the creation of the World of Men to the very death of the Gods. Very Ragnarok, very Norse.
We probably would have played it again sooner, but we couldn’t get the right four players together at the same time, and if there’s one thing that Microscope hates it’s adding changing the player roster. Because everyone has such a high creative involvement, you really have to be there from the start, so adding people is rough. Leaving someone out of a history they started is even worse. Players hate that, and rightly so. It’s not like having your character sit out for a session, it’s like being the GM and being told you’re going to miss your own game for a session.
Two vignettes from the first session, both during the very ominous sounding “Well of Fate” focus:
An outcast Dwarven prince and his followers have come to the Well of Fate, seeking to learn how the Gods can be slain.
But that’s not the Question of the scene. The Question is: what price was the Dwarven king paid long ago for selling his people into slavery to the Gods? The dwarves have labored for the Gods for ages, ever since that dark day, and the rebel prince wants to free his people.
The answer? In exchange for making his people the slaves of the Gods, the Gods gave the king the gift of artifice, making him a craftsmen beyond compare. He thought to trick the Gods by teaching this skill to his people, but this only served the Gods’ purposes: the price they paid they got back redoubled, because their new slaves could now forge them fabulous weapons and tools. Tricky, tricky gods…
The Gods are locked in battle against the Colossi, and the mysterious Father of the Gods has gathered his brethren to reveal his new creation turn the tide of war: Man. But the All-father is renowned for his secretiveness, and rarely does he reveal the true depths of his plans.
That’s the Event, but then another player creates a scene in it with the Question: why did the All-father imbue men with the mist from the Well of Fate? So now we know what the All-father did, but not why.
The suspicious gods learn from a humble squirrel that the All-father exhaled a strange breath into Man when he made them, which the Gods recognize as the mist from the Well of Fate which the All-father inhaled and hid in his mouth.
The answer? Being born from the mist of the Well of Fate means that unlike the Gods, Men carry their Fate within them. The Gods present don’t realize it, but in a Postscript the trickster god Crow recognizes this means the All-father has made Man capable of destroying the Gods themselves, since they are not bound by Fate…
“How do you know when you are taking enough risk?
If nobody is complaining about your work, you are probably not taking enough risk.
If nobody is slapping themselves upside the head, if nobody is saying ‘I knew that!’
If anybody can afford to ignore what you are doing, you are not being strange enough.”
- Brian Moriarty, “The Point Is” (1996)
(don’t read it, listen to the audio)
Game two of our excellent StarCraft-analog Microscope game.
In the first game we established that along with the humans and the Swarm, the third race were the mysterious Wan, sometimes called the Voi. In keeping with StarCraft tradition, while the Swarm are a horde of monsters, the Wan are a highly advanced species, technology far ahead of humanity and the inheritors of a proud and ancient culture. In their minds they are the chosen race of the galaxy. Shades of racial messianism. They’re ten feet tall, have four legs, and skin like marble.
Ping throws down the first focus of game two: the Swarm on Earth. During the initial game setup, Haskell made a period where humanity makes first contact. Unfortunately, it comes in the form of the Wan showing up and utterly overwhelming the newly space-faring humans and subjugating the entire race. We know that later on the Wan first encounter the Swarm, and it’s their vicious attacks on Wan-space that weakens Wan control over Earth and the human colonies, allowing mankind to break free after a bitter guerrilla war against their alien overlords.
Ping starts us off with an event in that Alien Occupation period, the 10th birthday party of little Olivia, the daughter of one of the human collaborators. Because nothing says brutal alien occupation like a child’s birthday party. She then makes a scene with the question “does Olivia reveal her father’s sympathy for the rebellion?”
There’s a “hey, wait a second, I thought you said Swarm?” moment, but Ping is ready: Olivia has a family dog, and that dog has been secretly taken over by the Swarm. We’ve already had scenes later in this period where we see Swarm-animals skulking around on Earth, but it’s clear the humans don’t even know the Swarm exists, and there’s no indication the Wan know about them yet either. They’ve infected Earth without anyone being the wiser.
We pick characters and wind up with Olivia’s father (me), his nervous social climber wife (Ping) clinging to the material benefits of collaborating with the enemy, and one of the alien overseers (Haskell) making an formal appearance to show official favor for the cooperative human. Yes, the Swarm are the focus but no one opts to play the Swarm-dog, because it’s not in a good position to answer the question. Olivia clearly is, but hey, we like a challenge, so no one plays her.
Thoughts reveal pretty quickly that the father isn’t just sympathetic to the rebels, he’s up to his neck in it. He’s feeding the overseers information to set them up for a rebel ambush, hoping to wipe out the upper echelons of alien leadership in this zone. He knows if it goes wrong he’s screwed, and he’s put his whole family in danger, so he’s on edge when speaking with the aliens. I use Drama to establish a fact: we’ve already seen that the Wan have language translation devices (creepy looking collars), but I add that even though this gives them literal verbal translation they can’t interpret subtler human signals, like emotion or facial expression (and vice versa). So they can’t pick up on things like nervousness or outright fear, like the father is showing right now. He’s terrified, but he knows the alien can’t see it. If his lies hold together, he’s okay.
I immediately use NPC control to have Olivia peek out from her bedroom (where she was sent on a time-out after getting cranky in the middle of the party), and spy on her father talking to the overseer. The alien can’t tell her father is agitated, but innocent little Olivia can see it clear as day, even if she doesn’t understand why.
Doom is about two steps away. I sit back to see what the other players do — I just used Drama, so I couldn’t use it again if I wanted to. Haskell has the satisfied alien walk away, but before he’s out of earshot Haskell controls Olivia to have her come out and sulkily ask her father awkward questions. The alien turns around ominously, and we cut scene, because we know the jig is up.
The answer: yes she does, without realizing the repercussions her childish actions will have. The rest is just unhappy detail. The party ends before anyone gets cake, and someone’s Dad is going to the re-education camp. Happy Birthday!
Poor Olivia. On the bright side this gives us lots of reason to make her a fanatic yet guilt-ridden rebel years later.
And in the background the creepy dog lurks in the shadows, watching everything, and waiting…
So far so good with the new Drama rules. Knowing that Drama will be available every scene seems to have drastically reduced our hesitation using it. Scenes feel even more decisive, even when Drama doesn’t get used at all, because you know it’s an option.
We’re trying out the new Drama rules with a shiny new history. The overview is humanity locked in a three-way war with two alien races (yep, it’s intentionally a StarCraft analog).
Early in the game we establish that one of the races is the Swarm, small parasites that attach themselves to unintelligent native species and use their bodies. So when the Swarm assaults a base, it looks like a hodgepodge of different creatures all fighting together, tentacled monstrosities thundering alongside suspiciously aggressive star-antelope, etc. They’re intelligent and can build spaceships and cities (if they take over species with thumbs) but they also spread from world to world as spores, giving rise to separated pockets of Swarm far and wide. You never know if a world is already infected until the squirrels start acting funny.
An Event gets added really early in the timeline where the Swarm homeworld becomes uninhabitable — the ecosystem collapses, so the Swarm are forced to look for new digs, making them a roaming menace. But we don’t go into any detail about what actually happened, so a lot later in the game we have a Scene with the Question “hey, why did the ecosystem of the Swarm homeworld collapse?” Because, well, that seems pertinent.
It turns out the highly successful Swarm had taken over all the native species of their planet, and when all the organisms in the ecosphere stop acting the way they’re supposed to — when the star-lions stop hunting the star-gazelles and they sit around and plan cities instead — the natural order is pretty much a thing of the past. The food chain breaks down, and eventually the ecosystem tanks.
The real bummer? It also implies that the same thing will happen to any world the Swarm take over, dooming them to wreck worlds and then look for more, like locusts.
You just can’t keep a good playtest down.
I’m working on a complete text re-write of Microscope (version 4) but that’s a ways-away. In the meantime I’ve incorporated all the playtest updates into a new, improved version of the current draft (version 3, which is now version 3d). Playing from the marked-up old text is just too cruel.
Version 3d also has a few new tweaks. A simple one is that I’ve renamed Tone Debt to Drama. Tone Debt was technically accurate but it always felt like a mouthful. Drama is a little more intuitive and evocative. Wanna take control of the Queen and have her murder her husband? Time for Drama!
A bigger change is that Scenes now always start with Drama available. If there isn’t any Drama on the Period when you are creating a Scene, you add one Drama of the same Tone as the Period (so a Dark Period starts with a Dark Drama if there is no other Drama already there). The goal is to give players a little more leverage to crack weak or limp Scenes, and avoid timid negotiation for control. If you want the Scene to move along, you have a way to make it happen. Of course you might not like the Tone you have to work with… It also makes Period Tone a little more weighty, since it’s enforceable more often.
If you’re a playtester, be on the lookout for the email with the download link.
Sometimes characters surprise you. One minute they’re complete strangers, and the next you are knee-deep into the most important moment of their lives.
Haskell, Kevin and I sat down to play a game of Microscope. The one-line summary we came up with for the history is that a massive colony ship crashes on a planet inhabited by dinosaurs, where the survivors build a new civilization from scratch after collapsing into stone age primitivism.
As we play we see that dinosaurs become the main source of labor for the colonists — they’re beasts of burden, powerful tools, and when necessary, war-machines. They’re the “technology” that helps the new civilization grow (and no, you’re not the first person to say “You mean like the Flintstones?” No, not like the Flintstones. Like Dinosaur Planet, or Dinotopia, or some other book I haven’t read.). We’ve also established that the dinosaurs are basically normal animals — they have beast-level intelligence and they can’t talk or anything cartoony like that. Again, not the Flintstones.
So it’s late in the game session and I’m the Lens again. We’ve already played four other Foci, so we’ve fleshed out a lot of the history. In a “well, let’s see how this works” moment, I make the Focus a dinosaur. One specific dinosaur. I decide it’s a triceratops-like beast, and his name is Hruck. And that’s all we know.
Why should we care about this dinosaur? What’s interesting about him? I have no idea, but I figure we’ll find out together.
If you want to get things rolling in a Microscope game, a good rule of thumb is to ask incriminating questions about total strangers: you’ll learn interesting things about them very quickly.
I jump right into a scene with the Question “Is the boy who raised Hruck willing to put his family and the whole village in danger to keep his dinosaur?”
This is during the “Savage Revolt” period we created earlier on, a time when some humans emerge who have the psychic ability to empathically communicate with the dinosaurs, and they rebel against using them as slave labor. These self-proclaimed “Savages” want to smash civilization and return to natural harmony. Bitter guerrilla warfare ensues.
Soldiers from the local warlord have come to the village to take beasts to serve in the lord’s service (yes, it’s a dinosaur draft) and one of the dinosaurs they’re taking is Hruck. The boy weeps and wails, but his mother holds him back and pleads for him to just let the beast go and not bring disaster down on them all. The warriors aren’t taking any lip from peasants — their leader tells the mother to keep the boy from being a nuisance if she knows what’s good for them. No good. As the groaning dinosaur is being dragged away the boy dashes to his beast friend, calling out to him to break free.
We stop the scene immediately because the question has been answered: the boy has put everyone in danger to keep his dinosaur. Whether he succeeds or not is a separate issue, but overall the situation looks pretty grim: the boy and his dinosaur are surrounded by angry troops. If the villagers help they’ll get slaughtered too. It’s an inch away from tragedy.
Kevin has been playing the boy, and he says ‘no way!’, grabs some Light Tone Debt, and postscripts that the boy does escape with his dinosaur, fleeing into the jungle before the warriors can stop him. Yea, happy ending!
It’s Kevin’s turn next, and he makes an event years later, where the boy (now a man) and his dinosaur are part of a bandit party raiding a caravan. They’re still together after all these years, and they’ve found a place for themselves in the world.
Very nice, but not for long, because on Haskell’s turn he decides to make a scene in that same event, with the question “Why do the other bandits leave Hruck and the mortally wounded boy (man) behind?” Ouch. So much for that bright future. The boy was wounded during the raid, and now lies there breathing his last breaths.
We pick characters, and Kevin throws a curveball and creates the boy’s girlfriend. Yep, not only did he find a new family among the bandits, he found true love. That sounds happy, but we already know she’s going to leave him behind: she’s one of the bandits and the question said so.
The scene reveals that the raiders aren’t just bandits, they’re Savages, empaths who have befriended dinosaurs. The boy isn’t, but they took him and his dinosaur companion in anyway. The grizzled leader had always known no good would come of taking him in: “He was never one of us.” The girl is heart-broken, but she obeys her elders and goes with her tribe, leaving the dying boy behind with Hruck.
We’ve come all the way back around to me, so it’s time to go out with a bang. I create an event of a bloody battle, a brutal assault by Savages with waves of fighting dinosaurs against a walled town defended by the warlord’s armies and their own war-beasts. The battle has left dead littering the field, so much carnage that it’s hard to tell which side even won.
Then I put a scene inside that event with the question: “Does Hruck kill the girl for abandoning the boy all those years ago?”
This is years after the bandit raid, maybe a decade. Hruck is a scarred old war-beast, harnessed in the service of the local overlord, the very fate he escaped so long ago. The girl in the question is of course the bandit lover, likewise older and sadder, fighting on the side of the Savages. The battle is over, but dazed combatants still wander the field, and in the hazy blood-drenched twilight the two meet for the first time since that day years ago.
We’ve avoided having dinosaurs as characters before now, because well, they can’t talk. But this is a special occasion, so Hruck is required along with the girl. Haskell takes the girl, and Kevin takes Hruck.
Rather than intrude on the very personal and very bitter reunion with some random third character, I bend the rules slightly and play the dead boy, figuring I can easily “talk” to either of them by describing memories of things the boy said or did long ago. It is a mean, mean kick-you-in-your-sorrow, rub-salt-in-your-old-wounds trick, but I don’t tell them that until it’s too late.
The scene starts and it’s pathos squared. The moment their eyes meet across the carrion-laden field there is immediate recognition. The girl is still looking on in amazement as the old dinosaur charges, dragging his tattered barding through the mud, and with a toss of his head flings the girl to the ground.
As Hruck looms over her, poised to kill, she tries to reach out to him with her psychic empathy, to let him feel her sorrow and regret over the death of her one true love, but I immediately interject bittersweet memories of the three friends together back in their bandits days. Having seen the empaths’ gifts, the boy wants nothing more than to be able to really communicate with his life-long friend, so he asks the girl to use her abilities to speak to Hruck for him, forging a special bond between all three of them. Trying to psychically reach Hruck now just brings up the painful memories of happier days for both of them. I spice it up with lots of cheerful “we three will be best friends forever!” quips. Knife- twisting-!
There are long moments as the girl awaits her fate, the hot breath of Hruck washing over her. Just when death seems imminent the great beast turns and trudges away, spattering her with mud but never so much as glancing back. Hruck spurns her, giving her neither forgiveness nor the solace a death — a punishment that she would probably welcome as absolution for her betrayal. It’s about as cruel and spiteful as a dinosaur can be.
The Focus is done, and we’re about to wrap up for the night. It’s a bitter end to the saga of dinosaur Hruck. Heavy, heavy stuff.
But we still need to play the Legacy stage, and it’s Kevin’s turn to add something. He takes a mysterious valley Legacy from earlier in the game, and creates an event with old, weary Hruck finding his way to this sheltered spot, seeking a tranquil place to lay down his tired bones and end his days. It’s a clever use of the Legacy to put a sad but more satisfying cap on our story. His life might have been hard, but we know that in the end Hruck finds peace.
In Microscope you’re not advocating for “your guy” to win, but players naturally have different ideas of how they want the things to turn out: you want a happy ending, or you want that guy to get what he deserves, etc. But because different people play returning characters, your perspective also shifts around. You’re not entrenched in one point of view the way you are in a normal game.
At the beginning Kevin pushed for a happy life for the boy and his dinosaur, and it was Haskell who slammed the boy with an untimely death, but in the last scene it was Haskell trying to have the girl make peace and Kevin who rammed home the very bitter ending instead. Since Kevin was playing Hruck, he was the final decision maker in that scene — he could have just had the beast weep and forgive the girl if he wanted. But by flipping around and really pushing the tragedy to the end, he made it a much hotter game for everyone.
We’re rolling up characters in Flashing Blades (yep, from 1984). It’s a rapiers & muskateers system, but instead of historic France we’re playing in a supressed tech sci fi setting that we created in one of our Microscope games (the “stellar empires” history), a baroque and decadent period when the alien “gas whales” are the living gods of the Imperial church.
Ping rolls her stats and decides to play a noblewoman.
P: Do I get to be Queen?
Me: Uh, no. Starting social rank for a noble is only 8. The Queen is a 20.
P: Can’t I start higher?
Me: Well, theoretically you could start as high as Duchess. You’d have to take the Title advantage, and you’d have to roll really well.
P: [grabs a d20, starts shaking it vigorously]
Me: But just to be clear, you’ll probably get a lower rank.
P: [still shaking d20 in balled fist]
Me: You only start as a Duchess on a natural 20.
P: [first signs of cramping in her shoulder]
Me: …
P: [face scrunched up in pain, arm twitching frantically]
Me: …uh, just so you know.
P: [uncurls her claw and chucks the die]
Bam, 20. Duchess.