What is Microscope? A fractal role-playing game of epic histories. Humanity spreads to the stars and forges a galactic civilization. Coldplay viva la vida meaning. Fledgling nations arise from the ruins of the empire. An ancient line of dragon-kings dies out as magic fades from the realm. These are all examples of Microscope games. https://wojivsz.weebly.com/blog/egyptian-book-of-the-dead-pdf-free-download. Hey, dow anyone know where i can find the Microscope PDF for download? No thanks Try it free. Talking about Microscope RPG Eric Vulgaris. Unsubscribe from Eric Vulgaris? Cancel Unsubscribe. Subscribe Subscribed Unsubscribe 1.8K. Microscope Ben Robbins pdf download. Nominated RPG of the Year, 2011 Golden Geek Awards. You easily download any file type for your device. Microscope RPG. A fractal role-playing game of epic histories by Ben Robbins. A fractal role-playing game of epic histories by Ben Robbins. Download panda pop game for free pc. Two more custom history seeds from the Microscope Explorer kickstarter campaign, released as free downloads for everybody. Ars ludi ยป Microscope Seeds: Secrets & Squirrels.
(Ben Robbins)
Microscope
Microscope In A Nutshell
In Microscope you outline a vast history and then zoom in and role-play the bits that interest you. You can create and play epics like the entire Dune series or the Silmarillion. Empires rise and fall, mankind conquers the stars, and so on. Instead of open collaboration, each player builds independently on what other people have already established, so you're constantly surprised by the details that emerge as you play.
First things first
Microscope is different from a lot of other role-playing games, so let's start off by eliminating some possible misconceptions. You don't have a single character. You'll play many different characters throughout the game. You may play characters other people played in previous scenes.
You don't play the game in chronological order. You build from the outside in, knowing how the history ends and then going back and exploring the middle. If in one scene the New Columbia sea dome is cracked by Soviet torpedoes, that story isn't over. You can always go back and explore what happened before it was destroyed. You might wind back and role-play the visionaries who built the dome, or dig into the sub commander's career at the academy to find out why he was willing to pull the trigger. You could play four more sessions and then have someone suddenly say 'Oh, remember that Soviet sub commander from game one? I'm doing a scene from right before he fired the torpedoes.'
What Do You Need To Play?
Three to four people is best, but you can go up to five in a pinch. People say they've had great seven player games but I can't imagine it. You can also play really great two-player Microscope games. You'll need a lot of index cards. I like the 2'x3' blank flash cards, but normal index cards are fine. Some table space or other flat space to lay out all your history cards (wind is the enemy). Pens or pencils. And you need the rules.
Setup: Thousands of Years in One Sentence
To start a new history, all you need is a simple summary like 'mankind flees the dying Earth and spreads into the stars.' That's your whole history in it's simplest form. Everything you do during the game will expand or explore that one line synopsis.
Next the group decides how your history begins and ends, establishing bookends on your story. That's right, you know how the entire history is going to end before you even start play. But you don't know the interesting bits, how and why it turned out that way. That's what you're going to discover in the rest of the game.
To make sure everyone's on the same page about the kind of fiction you're making, you then create a Palette of things you want to allow or ban from your history. You might make a fantasy setting but require all wizardry to be powered by mana drawn from the natural elements, or create a sci fi setting and forbid humanoid aliens. Then you're ready to start exploring your history.
Play: Zooming In & Out, Jumping Forward & Backward
Play is simple. On your turn you get to create a piece of history. You can make one of three things: either a Period (a large swath of time in the history), an Event (a specific thing that happens inside a Period, like a city being sacked or a soldier coming home from the wars), or a Scene (role-playing to find out what happens in a particular moment in an Event). It's a three-level outline: Periods contain Events which contain Scenes. You put down a card for each thing you make to keep track of the timeline.
You can create new Periods, Events or Scenes anywhere in the history, jumping backward or forward or zooming in and out however you want (q.v. you will not play in chronological order). To keep everyone's contributions connected, players take turns as the Lens, the person who picks a particular Focus that play will center around. So if the current Lens decides the Focus is going to be the magical sword Durandal, then for that round each player must make history that somehow relates to that sword. One player might make an Event where a warrior carrying the sword meets his wife, and another might jump back to a much earlier Period and show the sword being forged by ancient druids. So long as it relates somehow, it's okay.
If it's your turn, you have nearly unlimited authority, so long as you don't contradict anything we already know about the history. But because you can only make one thing on your turn, and you can't make a zoomed in piece of history without something to contain it (a Scene has to be inside an Event, etc.) more often than not you're building on something someone else created. If you want to role-play a Scene, you're probably setting inside an Event someone else described, which is itself inside a whole Period another player invented. So you're simultaneously independent and dependent on what others have made.
(there are other interlocking mechanics I'm not touching on, like deciding whether history is Light or Dark or adding Legacies)
We Role-play Together
When a player makes a Period or Event, they have absolute power to make whatever they want. There is no veto and coaching is forbidden.
But when someone creates a Scene everyone role-plays together to decide what happens. The player making the Scene poses a Question about the history (like 'can the seventh rune of power destroy the very gods' or 'did Captain Falkes know his wife was cheating on him'). That Question is the agenda for the Scene and we play until we learn the answer. The current player frames the scene (where is it, what's going, where does it fall in the Event), then everyone picks characters they want to role-play. Characters can be people we have already heard about in the history or people invented on the spot. Different players may have different ideas of what they think the answer should be and you choose characters that let you push the answer you want.
How does the game end?
It doesn't! Since you can always go back and add more detail, you can play the same history as long as you want. It's a fractal game. You stop playing a particular history whenever you think you've done enough, or when you're out of time to play. But you can always pack up the cards and come back to it later.
Where's the kaboom?
So everybody has vast creative power and no one has a veto. How can that possibly work? It sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it?
There are a couple of critical factors that make it possible. The freedom to jump anywhere within the history means that if someone makes something you don't like, you just don't build on it. In a linear (normal) game what happens now determines what must happen next (if we attack the king, that irrevocably changes the plot). In Microscope it doesn't at all. Also, because you know how the history ends from the very start and have overviews of how Periods and Events end when they're first described, everyone is working within common boundaries. You can't stray too far off because you know where you need to wind up. Add the Palette synchronizing expectations, and it means you can give everyone vast creative authority without having the game explode.
World Building, or 'Look on my works ye Mighty and despair'
When you're done, you've got a game world that everyone in the table has deep ownership in, because you made it together through an iterative process. The stuff that got built on and expanded was what everyone liked. Nine times out of ten, someone will say 'Wow, I want to break out [d20/GURPS/FATE] and play a campaign in this world!' Which you absolutely can. In a way the entire process of playing Microscope brings the fun of being a GM and building a world to the table and makes it part of play.
I've played almost 70 games of Microscope with a lot different people, from veteran gamers to people who'd never role-played before. We playtested it for two years (and five separate versions) before arriving at the final rules. There's not a lot in Microscope that's accidental or hasn't gone through a lot of examination
Any questions? Ask away.
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