ben robbins |
June 1st, 2011
in
actual play, microscope |
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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
ben robbins |
May 22nd, 2011
in
actual play, microscope |
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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.
Yay 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.
Boo science!
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
ben robbins |
May 20th, 2011
in
microscope |
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Here are some of the latest Microscope reviews and discussions that I think are particularly interesting:
There are doubtless more out there that I haven’t heard about, so if you spot some good Microscope discussions, let me know.
ben robbins |
May 9th, 2011
in
actual play, microscope |
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Some of the awesome folks from our weekly pickup games had never gotten the chance to play a multi-session Microscope history. Which is a crime, because multi-session games let you really dig into your history. So we assembled a crack squad (there’s still some debate whether it’s Team Boomstick, Team Thunderbunny, or Team Something Else Entirely That Isn’t So Loud) for some repeat gaming goodness.
We decide on a post-apocalypse / recovery of civilization arc. But instead of nukes or zombies, we have the world rocked by massive quakes. Civilization as we know it is shattered. Cities swallowed, massive tidal waves, whole continents split in two: the works.
A little bit into the history and a new feudal society has arisen in caverns beneath the surface. We zoom in for a Scene: the heir of House Ulysses has been caught sneaking up to the mysterious and forbidden surface world. The gloating hunters of rival House Hades are leading him back in chains, to face The Punishment. It’s a serious scene, but unintentionally hilarious role-playing ensues:
Prince: I’m innocent! You can’t prove I went to the surface!
Mother: Hey, yeah! You’re just trying to frame him to undermine our family!
Hades leader: Oh yeah? Well how do you explain _this!_
Prince: Those are just flowers!
Prince’s mentor: Uh, what?
Prince: Flowers! But I didn’t get them from the surface. I found them in a cave that had natural sunlight.
Hades hunters: Natural what?
Prince’s mentor: Dude, you’re not helping your case…
next session: Techno-priests & Infinity Boxes
ben robbins |
May 2nd, 2011
in
microscope |
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You know what’s awesome? Microscope is the new story-games.com RPG Book Club selection.
The challenge: get together and play some Microscope before the end of June. Share your experiences with everyone else. If you’ve played before, play it some more (you know you want to). If you’ve never tried it, now’s your chance, complete with a whole community backing you up and cheering you on.
I really like the whole RPG Book Club idea (even when it’s not Microscope) because it drives people to sit down at the table and try a game that maybe they wouldn’t have played otherwise. And because everyone’s playing the same game at the same time, you’re learning from each other. Sweet.
ben robbins |
April 26th, 2011
in
actual play, microscope |
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Why is it never a good thing when superheroes take over the world?
In other news, Microscope has landed on the beaches of Europe. Books are sitting on the shelves of Leisure Games in the UK, right now.
ben robbins |
April 14th, 2011
in
microscope |
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A couple more really excellent Microscope reviews.
There’s a lot of great observations in both of them, but I want to pull out a few choice quotes. Lowell’s review on Age of Ravens is a follow-up to his Cycles of Apocalypse actual play.
Microscope appears simple and the basic structure of play actually is. But it hides a surprising amount of depth. We played a game based on a couple of reads on my part, with me teaching the very basics of it to the players. We ended up falling into a couple of simplified approaches which weren’t as fruitful (sticking with generics, a slight misreading of the legacies idea). Going back to the book, I found advice which at first glance had seemed a little excessive. In fact, the advice and suggestions presented really do make sense after you’ve played once. The game’s obviously been extensively play-tested and it shows in the explanations of best and most fruitful practices.
It’s always great having people say nice things about the game, but as an author there’s nothing more full of win than seeing that when people have questions, the text actually provides exactly the insight they need. That’s a big part of writing rules, thinking “hmm, what questions will someone have when they try to play this game?”
Ryan’s review is actually from about two weeks ago. I linked to it on the Lame Mage site, but I never gave it a proper shout-out. Ryan’s take is particularly interesting because he played without reading the rules: someone else taught him to play, then he read the rules afterwards. I’m guessing most reviewers are the ones who read and taught the game to their fellow players.
The first round was pretty slow, and I initially thought “Microscope is meh,” but I’m glad we gave it a couple more rounds, because then I got jazzed about it. I’m totally looking forward to playing it again.
I bet this happens a lot. At the very beginning you don’t know know much about your history, so it isn’t really engaging yet, but every minute you play it gets more interesting. I love one-shot Microscope games, but they aren’t nearly as cool as coming back to the table and continuing a multi-session Microscope game. Our starcraft-analog game went seven sessions and each game just made us want to play it more.
Awesome reviews.
ben robbins |
April 8th, 2011
in
games we play |
2 Comments »
I went to Game Storm last week and it was simply lovely.
I’d never been before, so I had no idea what to expect. You’ve got your big rah-rah-rah cons (GenCon, Pax), you’ve got your “playing among friends” cons (Go Play NW, I’m looking at you). Game Storm hit a sweet spot. A medium-sized event, but the story game folks has a cozy corner all to themselves (the fantastic Indie Hurricane) so we got the best of both worlds. Mix in a bunch of awesome gamers and good times ensue. Play some games, chat with some cool cats, drift down to the hotel bar and have a beer, sit by the fireplace, then repeat. So pleasant.
There was also a lot of Microscope love in the air, which I simply cannot object to. There were at least three games, but I was only in one. Technically I was in another one to start with, but we got so many other people that wanted in that we had to throw down with some gaming mitosis and split into two games. I’m still burning to know how the “secret societies steer the galactic empire” history turned out after I left…
next up: Fabricated Realities
