lame mage productions

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.

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

Here are some of the latest Microscope reviews and discussions that I think are particularly interesting:

• The Voice of the Revolution #53: April 2011 — excellent discussion of the core points of Microscope, starts at 7:51
• RPG Book Club discussion thread — I mentioned the RPG Book Club earlier, but the pre-game discussion thread has already proved so interesting that it deserves it’s own mention. Smart cookies out there.
• Roger Thorm on Microscope and Maps — very smart observation about why you can’t draw maps of your world as you play…

There are doubtless more out there that I haven’t heard about, so if you spot some good Microscope discussions, let me know.

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