lame mage productions

“…and they flee to the colonies to escape oppression.”
“This family is always fleeing things. That should be their family crest: Fugit Omnis!”

I think because you have so much freedom to create in Microscope, there’s an initial urge to invent really far-out settings. Personally I think the real payoff comes when you zoom in and see people living the critical moments in their lives, so I tend to favor simpler settings with fewer exotic bits to distract from those meaningful moments. Give me a history with three feuding nations and I can guarantee the drama will follow.

So when we sat down to play some Microscope at Story Games Seattle last week and someone suggested we do the rise and fall of a great family, I was pretty excited. That’s exactly the kind of simple history seed I like.

When we made our starting bookend, we also decided on a dubious start for this great lineage: the founder was actually adopted into an existing great family. She inherited the Vandershrike family name but actually supplanted their bloodline with her own. A noble cuckoo. We followed the Vandershrikes throughout history, knowing it’s really a new and different thing than the original lineage.

The fascinating thing about playing Microscope is that there’s always room to go back and explore something in greater depth. Like the founding of the bloodline: we put out the idea of the cuckoo at the very beginning, but didn’t really explore how and why that happened until the end of the game. Exploring the beginning last put everything that had “already” happened in a totally different light.

But sometimes it can be hard to remember what you don’t know, to rigorously separate your assumptions from what has actually been established. Sometimes you have to remind each other not to jump to conclusions, that we don’t know something for certain because it hasn’t actually been shown.

Case in point. In the midst of a period of religious turmoil and schism, the younger Vandershrike son, bitter at being overlooked by his mother (as we later see), betrays his family to the inquisition. He reports his own mother and siblings as heretics and sees them hauled before a church tribunal to be stripped of their wealth and probably burned at the stake.

After the “betrayal” Event, another player made an Event for the actual trial and described it being resolved by a duel (which we had already established were an essential tradition among the noble houses) between the treacherous son and his own mother. But wait, because it’s an Event, there’s no cliffhanger. “Who wins?,” we ask. Oh, the Matriarch wins. The family is vindicated. Go Mom.

But that raises some questions. We love it when things raise questions. We’ve already seen that the mother is rather old and her son, while treacherous and hate-filled, is in the bloom of youth. Seems like the odds would be against her. Time for a scene! Jump to the family chapel in the pre-dawn hours before the duel. Trusted seconds are standing vigil over the mother’s sword. It’s a sacred tradition, etc. But lo and behold, conspiracy is afoot, because the Question of the scene is “Which one of the conspirators refuses to poison the mother’s sword?” Yep, everyone else agrees, but one person won’t go along with it. The Question says so, so it’s true.

Mom is banned from the scene. It’s part of the setup that she (apparently) has no knowledge of this little caper and wouldn’t approve if she did. Everyone picks characters and we see her daughter, her other older son (conveniently missing an arm so he can’t fight), a stalwart family man-at-arms and the family chaplain, all plotting to poison the blade to save the mother and by extension the Vandershrike family and themselves.

The plotters plot and argue and scheme but in the end go ahead and poison the sword, save one who storms off in disgust. Question answered, scene ends.

Afterwards, everyone at the table was jumping to the logical conclusions, saying “oh, well I guess that’s what happened: the mother had the poisoned sword so she beat her son.” But oh no! Not so fast! We only know what we know. We know Mom wins the duel and kills her son, because the Event said so. We know the plotters poisoned the sword, because we saw them do it in the Scene.

Everything in between is still up for grabs. Anything could have happened. The mother could have found out about the plot and refused to wield the tainted blade. Her son could have switched swords and gotten the poisoned blade himself. We have no idea, and we won’t know until we play and find out. At any time for the rest of the game we could suddenly jump back to those moments before the duel and reveal the unseen truth. But until then we have to embrace that we don’t know.

It’s strange, but I actually love those “mystery” moments, when everyone at the table can see some central unanswered question. I think it’s great stuff, because we’ve pointed this huge spotlight on a critical juncture in the history, and we all know the question is sitting there unanswered, but no one has gone quite so far as to shine the light right on that moment and reveal the truth. That anticipation, everyone’s brains’ churning over what it might be, that’s good stuff. It’s like xmas morning.

(And yes, it was the daughter who refused to poison the sword and stormed off in disgust. The Vandershrike women are always the best of the bunch, as the history shows time and again.)

Late Saturday night at PAX, some folks drifted into the Indie Games On Demand room and were checking out all the books on the display table. Like a good host, I pitched a couple of games but they didn’t seem terribly interested.

I asked what kind of games they were used to. Party adventure stuff? “Yeah, party adventure stuff.” I asked if they wanted to play a game like that or if they wanted to try something completely different. “Yeah, something different.”

Different, you say? Yeah, we can do that.

I meant to write about this game a while ago but I never got around to it. I got a kick out of it for several reasons. For one, it’s always interesting seeing how a bunch of total strangers who’ve only played fairly normal role-playing games react to Microscope. Second, it was one of those games that really highlights how Microscope works: the unforeseen creative snowball. And third, well the game was just fun.

So we sit down and I explain the basic concept of the game. We decide on a futuristic industrial revolution with an alien invasion tucked somewhere in the middle. The world is transformed by fusion power, but not without some dire consequences. As we make the bookends our history begins with a literal revolution, a worker’s revolt, and ends when a fusion explosion spells disaster for the radical new technology.

When we’re going around doing the Palette, in addition to the aforementioned alien invasion, one player adds cloning. This seemed fairly minor at the time (particularly compared to an alien invasion) but little did we know it was destined to become the central theme of the session.

We’re ready to start play, but it’s late and I’m a little logy. PAX has already been an energy-draining whirlwind of fun and I don’t have any stunning ideas. But because I know it’s better to make something simple and roll rather than over-think it, for the first Focus I throw out an anti-fusion activist, a radical who we decide to name Sarah.

I have no idea why Sarah’s interesting or where this is going, but that’s okay, that’s how Microscope works. And just to demonstrate that chronological order is for suckers, I jump to the very end Period of the history, the disaster that heralds the end of the fusion age. I make an Event for the eponymous disaster, a meltdown at a fusion power plant, and then make a Scene asking “does Sarah’s daughter forgive her for causing the meltdown?” Yep, no beating around the bush: the Question establishes that our radical activist was behind the crisis. Investigators are interviewing plant staff (like Sarah’s daughter) to figure out what happened. I require Sarah’s daughter and an investigator, but I ban Sarah, just to make things interesting.

Then things get strange. We’re going around picking characters and the very first player decides to be the husband of Sarah’s daughter’s clone. That’s right: there’s a clone of Sarah’s daughter (apparently) and this is her husband. Or was her husband anyway, because we rapidly find out she (Sarah’s daughter’s clone) died in the crisis. She (the clone) sabotaged the plant for Sarah. Sarah didn’t bring her daughter in on the plan, she was in cahoots with her daughter’s clone instead.

As we play the scene we get the uncomfortable impression that Mom loves (loved) the clone more than her own daughter. Or does she? After all, she sent the clone on what was basically a suicide mission. But then again it was a suicide mission that she (Sarah) apparently thought was essential to the good of humanity and she trusted the clone to carry it out rather than her daughter.

And why the heck is there a clone of her daughter anyway?

This launches a round of scenes jumping backward and forward in Sarah’s life. We see an elderly Sarah presiding over her eco-terrorist cell, deciding whether to strike again and precipitate an even more calamitous meltdown. We see a young Sarah first decide that the fusion technology (acquired from the aliens, Periods ago) is destructive and should be stopped.

Another player jumps waaay back to Sarah’s birth, only to reveal that Sarah isn’t Sarah at all: she’s a clone of the real Sarah who died as a baby, raised discretely by her bereaved parents to avoid the societal stigma that haunts clones. This little shocker suddenly casts our first scene in a whole different light: Sarah did have a reason to have a deeper bond to the clone of her daughter than her actual daughter, however strange that seems.

By now everyone has jumped on the clone bandwagon. Ostensibly the scenes are about Sarah’s attitude towards fusion tech, but really they’re about clones and their place in society. One player uses the Legacy phase to look back at an earlier Period and establish how cloning was originally popularized to provide a cheap if dubious work force of second class citizens, explaining a lot of the dehumanizing stigma.

But before that the ball’s back in my court to wrap up the Focus of Sarah. And just like everybody else, I’m all about the clone theme now. In early scenes, when Sarah was an old women, we had already heard about her estranged husband Lowell, so I jump back to the halcyon days and make an Event for their wedding. And as the happy young couple are coming together to take their vows, I make a Scene asking “is Lowell disgusted when he finds out she’s a clone?” I ban Sarah again and let the best man break the news to him. We already know the wedding happens (because the Event description was them getting married, not them failing to get married) so if he is horrified he’s probably going to be bottling it up deep inside, which is even worse.

Like a lot of Microscope games, we wound up creating something none of us foresaw. We didn’t sit down to make a history about cloning and its civic and interpersonal consequences, but that’s what most of the session was about. But the critical bit is that we did it together. Even though one player put clones on the Palette in the first place, it only became so important because each of us chose to keep exploring it. Each of us used our turn to bring it back in. Anyone who wasn’t into clones could have stuck to the Focus but explored some other facet of Sarah’s life. We built on each other’s ideas, which is exactly how Microscope is supposed to work.

If we’d played late into the night, would we have gone back and explored the dying alien race we got the magnificent fusion technology from in the first place? No doubt. But for the moment all of us were interested in the same thing, so that’s what we explored. The Focus kept our attention on Sarah, but we voluntarily Focused even more tightly on this one aspect of her life.

And the wedding scene? Despite some rough moments it turned out Light. Their marriage may wind up a shambles later on (in fact, we already know it will) but on this Spring day they get to be happy…

You probably thought I was kidding when I said there was a Microscope game with nothing but plant-on-plant action. I never bluff when it comes to Microscope. Or plants.

• Plants of Arbre — The long-awaited plant history (thanks, Dominic!). Yep, plants. Just plants.
• Star Wars Rebooted — Using Microscope to re-write canon the way it should be. It’s a gold mine of creative catharsis. Looks like Harry Potter might be next on the chopping block…
• The Hunts Begin — Gold mine number two: using Microscope to cooperatively build the game world for a campaign.
• Those pesky humans — Magical and modern worlds collide at Story Games Seattle. Moral of the story: humans resent being made pets.
• Love of Radia & Forus — Wrapping up Go Play NW with myth, monsters, man-beasts and sweet, sweet divine love. And some killing.

Did you play an awesome Microscope game? Drop me a link in the comments field. Wait, you ask, what if I played a Microscope game and it was god-awful? Same thing. I want to hear about it.

After six games, we’ve drawn our Quake-pocalypse Microscope history to an epic close.

It wasn’t all easy. After game 4, it looked like we were going to have a hard time explaining how it all fit together. But in game 5, we jumped back and revealed that even before the first UFO was shot down, alien protocells had come to Earth on meteorites and it was exposure to these spores that had opened the door for all the unusual pockets of evolution and mutation that followed: the monstrous morlocks of the Techno-priests, the sixth sense of the blind underdwellers (founded by the erstwhile heir of House Ulysses), and the persecuted mutants of the Laputan golden age. Even the strange slug-riding natives of planet Beacon were the offspring of these protocells.

What brought the aliens to Earth in the first place? Their desire to eradicate any lifeforms exposed to the protocells. Their own advancement was due to protocell evolution and they weren’t about to let another race catch up and threaten them. Their standard operating procedure turns out to be protocell exposure => global extermination. Earth only dodges a bullet because we whack ourselves first with the gravitic drive and the aliens think a) the job is done and b) they’re afraid of getting closer.

Even things we thought already made sense suddenly made even more sense.

Awesome. But starting game 6, we still had a bunch of loose ends that defied explanation. We already knew Beacon wasn’t just a planet but a world-ship, ready to be flown to a proper new world. But who made it? Why was it just sitting there waiting to be used? And how did the post-Quake technologists who built the rocket know where Beacon was in the first place, or that it even existed, light years away in space? We’d learned that the strange aliens who lived on Beacon were originally from Earth, but we had no idea how they got there. The Laputa-01 was supposedly the first and only ship from Earth.

Add to that one more tiny little item: we knew that activating the captured alien gravitic drive caused the first quake, but what caused the second quake a few years later? The one that well and truly wiped out what remained of civilization?

So many questions. But as it turns out, one single answer for them all:

Only a few years after the first Quake, the engineers and scientists of the Odyssey Moon Base, determined to escape the alien threat, use the gravitic drive to fly the whole frickin’ moon away. Yeah, the backlash washes over Earth, triggering a second even more massive quake. And yeah, they’re abandoning the rest of humanity to rot in a shallow grave. But they’re going to survive and they’ll save humanity. That’s what they tell themselves and they’re both right and wrong.

A thousand years later, the wandering moon-ship is unrecognizable. At its peak, cities covered every inch of the surface, the triumph of the Odyssian golden age, but they crumbled to dust after humanity died out. The once barren rock drifts through nebula and asteroid fields, collecting atmosphere and life-giving chemicals from passing gas giants, but clinging to it are the surviving protocells, remnants of the samples sent to the moon for safe keeping in the first disaster.

The world is reborn. New life arises, slowly crawling from the primordial muck, watched only by the “ship’s” AI. A new sentient species emerges, its evolution and advancement accelerated by the protocells. The world-ship and its AI await the reunion with humanity, a safe haven and beacon to the survivors of Earth…

Quake-pocalypse, game 4. The survivors of the shattered Earth escape to a new world, but it’s not what they expect. There’s a welcoming committee. From Earth! But not human. It gets a little complicated.

In other news, the so-called scientists of the post-Quake golden age are accused being little more than “junkyard scavengers,” not inventors. They blindly clamor for ancient tech, drooling over the wonders of the olden days and squealing like school girls when they find an Infinity Box, but they never make anything new. Their defense? Just look at all this cool ancient stuff!

next session: That’s no moon! Oh wait, it is.

A flurry of game designers put Microscope to the test, sparked by the RPG Book Club. Will they enjoy themselves or burn Microscope at the stake like the witch it is? Let’s see…

• War of the Beast-Men! — Jason Morningstar’s posse sets the bar: “You can’t call me a Nazi just because I refuse to fuck a bear.”
• Killing the Gods and SPACE Robots! — Double-header from two simultaneous games from Emily Care Boss and Evan Torner. Yes, the palette does include spaceships in the form of giant Greco-Roman statues.
• Capes & Cthulhu — Joel Shempert takes a deep look at character advocacy and restricted collaboration (“zooming in on emotion”) examining the excellent superhero game we played at Nemo Con.

Lots of great discussion and analysis in each of these threads. And if that’s not enough actual play for you, there are also some snippets from the Fabricated Realities Microscope games (all six of them) scattered throughout the “I left my heart @ Fabricated Realities” thread. Because yeah, Fabricated Realities was awesome.

The RPG Book Club still has two weeks to go. Chime in and share your experiences.

Sometimes coming up with Questions in Microscope can be harder than you expect. But a lot of the time there are perfectly good Questions — critical Questions — staring you right in the face. Questions you never consciously considered, but once they hit you they’re blindingly central to understanding your history.

Case in point: Quake-pocalypse, game 3. We finally ask, and find out, what caused the catastrophic earthquakes that toppled all of civilization in the first place.

It all starts when we finally see an Infinity Box with something good in it. Anti-grav tech, good enough to build a floating city, drifting safely above the savages and scavengers on the cracked world below. We play a scene showing how the dwellers in this new paradise get to lounge around rationalizing why they aren’t helping the wretched masses. Thanks, science! Sorry we doubted you for so long.

But come to think of it, it does seem a little strange that an Infinity Box sealed in basically modern Earth-times has anti-grav technology. What’s up with that? Looks like Fruitful Mistake time. So we jump backwards to before the first quake-tastrophy and see an alien ship getting shot down over Washington D.C. and captured by the government. One extraterrestrial survives but attempts at diplomacy go South, fast — on the universal First Contact scale, it’s somewhere between “Is this glass bulletproof?” and “It’s a cookbook!”

Fearful military scientists, expecting (rightly) that alien invasion is imminent, experiment on the crashed alien vessel. If they can just unlock its advanced technology, they can meet the aliens on equal footing! One scientist correctly warns that tinkering with it Will Bring No Good, but he’s ignored because of old grudges with the leader of the project (read as: that girl we both liked in university).

They flip the switch and activate the gravitic drive, designed to hurl ships between the stars. Unfortunately the would-be student drivers did not anticipate just how indiscriminate the force of gravity is, or how to drive an alien stick shift. The drive interacts with mass around it, which just happens to be Planet Earth. Crash, boom, bang as the planet’s own gravity tries to tear it apart.

Three games in and now we know how our history started and why civilization was destroyed.

next session: But A Very Dignified Squeal

Game two of our Quake-pocalypse Microscope history. Science is the big theme of this session, but as everybody knows, there’s good science and there’s bad science.

It brings us the wondrous Infinity Box, capable of preserving something indefinitely (one could even say infinitely).

We play a scene with the Question: What does humanity put in the Infinity Box to hand down to future generations? Y’know, in case there were global earthquakes that destroyed civilization as we know it, leaving only morlocks and marauders behind. Answer: an orphaned girl puts her doll inside and then presses the go-start. Yep, gonna be mighty disappointing for future generations that find that time capsule.

It brings us the Techno-priests of Pandora, a crazy-ass enclave of scientists who were supposed to be caretakers of technology and learning so civilization could be rebuilt after it goes over the brink (Project Pandora: “so that after Man unleashes horrors on the world, there will still be Hope…”). Instead, untold years of isolation in their sealed city-shelter turns them into power-mad psycho freaks.

When they crack the seals on their enclave and emerge, do they start a school to teach physics to scavengers? No. They declare themselves the supreme race, enslave the mutated deep dwellers, conquer the underworld, and then overthrow the fledging surface empires. Jerks.

…

Yeah, I’m behind. We’ve already played game three and I’m still talking about game two. Here’s a sneak peak: we never actually declared what caused the catastrophic quakes in the first place. It was the unasked question sitting right in front of us, but not for long…

next session: Don’t Mess With Gravity