Microscope

I love Microscope. While it probably isn't a tabletop RPG by itself, it is a fantastic way to generate rich and vibrant worlds for other games or even fiction stories. It's also kinda weird if you play it with the right group of folks at a party because you'll wind up with a bunch of fun bizarre things.

Let's walk through the basics of Microscope and talk about what I like about it.

The Basics

Microscope was created in 2011 by Ben Robbins and describes itself as a "a fractal role-playing game of epic histories" and that is a very apt way to describe it. The whole premise behind the game is creating a wide fictional universe (world, continent, whatever) and then diving into historical periods that your group creates and then playing out pivotal scenes within each of those periods to create a rich history of your fictional world. It works remarkably well. One of the best parts of this also means that you can zoom in and out, and focus on time periods, allowing you to revisit any time period in your world at your whim.

It's collaborative, GM-less, and a ton of fun. In a word, it's sublime.

How it Works

First off, you're going to need a big pile of blank index cards (if you're playing in person) or an online tabletop that supports Microscope. Utgar's Chronicles is one such tabletop, specifically designed for Microscope. Aside from that, all you need to play is your vast imagination, and maybe an oracle system if you're stuck for ideas.

Starting a new game is pretty quick and broken into a couple of sections:

1. Decide on a simple overview of your "campaign"
2. Create the first and last periods in your setting, deciding if the tone is dark or light. This can cover a vast amount of time and usually should to leave enough space for logical events.
3. Create the "yes" and "no" list for things you do and do not want to see. This is where I place session zero events.
4. Go around the table and add periods and events to those periods in turn. I'll explain those in a sec.

This'll take about 45 minutes or so to get through the first set of setup.

Once that's done you're ready to get into the core gameplay loop.

The gameplay loop

Now you're ready to select who is the first lens and what the overall focus is going to be for this session of play. The focus is simply "what's the theme of this round" and it can be a person, narrow time period, a particular object, or whatever. The main idea is that every player must expand on that focus for this round.

Play starts with the lens and then proceeds clockwise around the table. On your turn you can create a period, event, or scene anywhere on the board you like so long as it fits with the focus. Let's look at what those are.

The building blocks

Periods are essentially the broad strokes of the history and can hold any number of events. Some examples of events we created in the last Microscope game I played in:

• Humanity's first years of spaceflight (light)
• Humanity struggles against the evil AI (dark)
• The Great Cat-Unicorn War (dark)

These are wide periods where many events can be placed into. Events are smaller discreet chunks which contain several scenes. They explore a particular time and place in history, and you can declare even more things by creating them. Here are some examples:

• Captain Balznak is killed failing to stop the AI core before it becomes sentient (dark)
• The cats destroy the unicorn home world (light)
• Alma Balznak finds the solution to the AI Menace (light)

Within each of those events you can have one or more scenes that are designed to answer questions about that period in history. Once again, some examples:

• How did Captain Balznak die?
• How did the Cats destroy the Unicorn home world?
• How did Alma Balznak discover the secret to shutting down the mother CPU?

Scenes are special, you act them out by deciding who's going to be present in those scenes, who is going to play them, and if there are any extra characters. The current player makes that determination when they're framing the scene. Anyone playing in the scene has plot armor until the end of the scene. They can't be killed or removed from the scene unless their player agrees. Likewise, each player can add any number of NPCs to the scene at will, but these NPCs do not have plot armor.

The only "mechanical" element within the scene is the concept of a push. When a player wants to propose a different way something in the scene could play out, they can push and declare what they think should happen. The rest of the players then hold a quick vote simultaneously by pointing and holding up a number of fingers.

In the scene we played out to determine how Captain Balznak die, the answer turned out to be "basically everyone betrayed him" partly because every time we introduced a loyal NPC, they were immediately killed by a disloyal one. It was chaos and a lot of fun.

How play proceeds

Because you get to define just a single one of these each time your turn comes around play proceeds rapidly around the table until you start framing scenes. Usually you'll wind up creating several new events and scenes in a given round, with periods being introduced more rarely, and usually in response to an event or scene.

The acting player rotates around the table clockwise until it winds back up on the lens, who acts again to finish the round (which means the lens gets to create two things on a given round). Once that's done the player counter-clockwise to the lens selects a legacy: a short description of something we want to remember or come up later. That gets added to the pile of legacies to be explored later. That same player then makes an event or scene related to any legacy in the pile.

Finally, the lens shifts clockwise and you start a new round.

And that's it! That's the entire game. Play until you get bored, and stack up the cards to play again later.

What I love about Microscope

The game is so simple in how it frames creating vast dynamic histories among the creative power of a group of folks who want to create a vibrant fictional world. This is extremely useful for custom campaign settings, creating alternative histories in established properties, or even working on other fictional settings.

All of that in a fun little package with easily understandable rules. It's a very solid system that provides enough structure to facilitate coherent stories, and gets out of the way with very little rules to limit your creativity.

Sidebar: comedic history

One thing that's always happened to me every time I've played this game is that we quickly veer away from serious dramatic history building into the wildly comedic. I'm sure that's obvious from the examples I provided in the building blocks section: Cats and unicorns waging wars, Sentient clouds being eternally tortured to provide humans with faster than light travel, and so on.

I have a hunch that this is a thing that happens with my particular groups and the dynamics that arise within them more than the game itself, but it is a notable pattern.

Wrap Up

I wholeheartedly recommend picking up Microscope, it's amazing. There's also an expansion called Microscope Explorer which adds additional rules and things. I haven't played with the expanded rules yet but when I do, I'll make another post about it.

Microsope

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