lame mage productions

Go Play NW 2009 was the first big public unveiling of Microscope, so it was actually pretty nice to come full circle two years later and see Microscope running rampant at Go Play NW 2011.

It was ninja-like. I’d be walking around, chatting with people, and then I’d look over my shoulder and -boom- table covered in cards. Is that Microscope? Where did that come from?, I would ask myself.

I’m guessing any game designer will get what I’m about to say next: the first victory is enjoying playing your own game with folks, but the big victory is when the game exists without you. It doesn’t need you to hold its hand, or walk people through the rules, any of that stuff. You could launch the book in a rocket, to Mars, and those Martians could chill by their canals, watch the dim sun set, and play a nice game of Microscope. That’s the win.

As for Go Play NW in general, my only regret was that there were a lot of people I wanted to play with but didn’t get a chance. Don’t get me wrong, I played with a lot of different people. In fact there was only one person I played with twice in the whole weekend. Clearly the con just needs to be longer.

Oh, and ever wonder what Go Play NW looks like to someone who’s never been? Consult the Giant Fire Breathing Robot.

Preview of a study coming out in Psychological Science in September:

… a new study found that knowing the outcome doesn’t ruin a story – in fact, it enhances our enjoyment of it.

Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt, of University of California San Diego’s psychology department, say people who flip to the end of the book first have the right idea.

They conducted a series of experiments in which participants read a dozen classic short stories by writers like John Updike, Anton Chekov and Agatha Christie. Some read the stories as-is, some got an introductory spoiler paragraph, and some had the spoiler paragraph incorporated into the story.

Even when the stories contained a plot twist or mystery, the researchers found subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions.

– Surprise! Spoilers don’t spoil stories, Toronto Sun

Microscope 1, The Expected 0

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.

Consider this a quote entirely out of context, but it’s too excellent to pass up. It’s from Ashok Desai’s review of Microscope in Knights of the Dinner Table:

Aside from the literary benefits of the game, it’s also a great way for a group of players to sit down and create a universe that they can later adventure into in a more conventional RPG system. For this purpose, the game is as close enough to perfect to spit in its eye and call it a sissy.

Take that, perfect. The review is in print, not online, so I can’t link to the rest. There are certainly parts that are more critical, but I must tip my hat to this.

It’s been almost two weeks since Go Play NW and I haven’t even touched on all the glorious Microscope action. Luckily, Nels has: Above 49: Microscopy.

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…

We’ve done a whole slew of Polaris setting hacks recently. Aztecs, Fall of the Roman Republic, 1920s Empire City cops and Battlestar Galactica (twice).

The key ingredients of a satisfying Polaris analog are pretty simple: 1) a grand society on the verge of collapse because of some doom it has brought upon itself (a Mistake-analog), and 2) some lucky order of individuals tasked with defending the sinking ship (a Knights-analog).

It’s critical the Mistaken (the antagonists that represent the seeds of destruction that will bring the whole thing down) can be anyone. Your brother, the king, your girlfriend from high school: they could be part of the problem. In stock Polaris, the Mistaken include demons that can possess or tempt (easy), and in BSG anyone can be a Cylon, but in other settings it’s been easier than we expected to single out issues or beliefs that work wonderfully. In the Roman Republic, the Mistake was a yearning for tyranny, betraying democracy. Anyone could start to feel that way. You’re in the middle of a chat with your girlfriend and she idly mentions how incompetent the Senate is and how one firm leader running things would be such an improvement… Doh!

For our latest Polaris setting hack, we decided to try out 1950′s America. The Mistake isn’t Communism (too easy), it’s self-righteous patriots trampling civil liberties to find The Enemy Within. McCarthyism, Un-American Activities witch-hunts, and all that post-911 stuff you hate so much.

Sweet. Anyone can succumb to The Fear and start thinking it’s their duty to rat out their neighbors, that freedom can only be protected by taking away freedom.

So who does that make our Knight analogs? Diligent FBI guys? Nope, that would only work if Communism really was the threat. Instead, our protagonists are that final line of defense against oppression:

Journalists.

It’s Polaris: Freedom of the Press.

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.