A lot of authors of speculative fiction are also gamers. Brandon Sanderson plays Warmachine. Jim Butcher does live roleplay. China Miéville, a significant voice in literary intellectual circles, has talked about the joy of reading roleplay sourcebooks.
At the same time, gaming is evolving. In terms of roleplay, this has included the emergence of more story-oriented games such as Fate and Inspectres. Story telling and game playing are merging in new and fascinating ways.
One of the most fascinating, which I discovered via Everwalker’s blog, is Microscope, a roleplay game that’s more about world building than going adventuring. And last night I played it for the first time.
Explaining Microscope
Microscope is a game in which the players create a setting and then tell its history, though not in chronological order. The time and place could be almost anything as long as it’s fairly large – the rise and fall of an empire, humanity’s colonisation of a star system, an age of superheroes.
Within your imagined history, players take it in turns to skip back and forth in time, adding eras, events and scenes. Sometimes you play through those scenes together, taking on different roles in the story to answer a key question. Why did the president push the alien ambassador out of the airlock? Why did the crops fail? Who invented the clockwork gigolo? The questions will entirely depend on the setting you’re building and the wildness of your imaginations.
This is not a cooperative exercise in the conventional sense. There’s very little negotiation. If someone else adds a detail then you pretty much have to accept it, like it or not.
That’s what makes it so fantastic.
Microscope as a world building tool
Authors of the fantastic tend to like world building. We like to invent the people, the places, the technology, the races, the magic and mysteries and mayhem that make up our worlds. It’s something you can get entirely lost in, creating something rich and exciting.
But there is a smoothness that comes from a world emerging from one imagination, or even through collaboration. There’s little of the unexpected or the contradictory. Whatever sort of world you started aiming for, that’s what you’ll end up with, and while the possibilities remain limitless, they are also tamed by expectations, for better or for worse.
If you’re willing to let go of some control then Micrscope is a great way to build a more varied world, one that’s less familiar and rounded at the edges. The people you play with will introduce ideas you would never have thought of, and your responses will take those ideas in directions they could never imagined.
In our game last night a single sentence of dialogue transformed the religious future of our world, as it emerged that the singer of spring rites at a famous funeral was in fact an automaton, breaking the expectations of his own mechanical kin. And this happened in a world originally about the discovery of magic. That’s the way that Microscope goes – utterly and gloriously unpredictably.
Microscope as a roleplay game
I love Microscope as a game. But as a roleplay game? I’m still trying to work that out.
The moments of actual roleplay are brief scenes with characters you will probably never play again. As a player your aim is to answer a historical question, not to forward your character’s agenda as is usually the way in roleplay. This needs a very different mindset. It’s one we hadn’t quite mastered by the end of the night, and I think it’s one some roleplayers won’t enjoy. It’s too alien, too strange to wrap your head around.
You’re playing as a storyteller trying to tell the best story, not as a roleplayer trying to play the best character.
Also, you might not do a lot of roleplay. We played from eight in the evening until we grudgingly acknowledged that we were too tired at 2.30 in the morning. In that time we only roleplayed four scenes, some of them quite brief. You could include more roleplay in the game, but the mechanics don’t necessarily drive you towards it.
So, great story telling game, has some nice roleplay elements, but I’m not sure I’d call it a roleplay game.
So many possibilities
I love this game. I’ve already got a session planned with Everwalker and some others, and I’ll be reconvening last night’s group once we’ve caught up on sleep. If you enjoy world building, or story telling, or like roleplay games and are willing to risk something new, then you should give this a try. As a gamer it has some fascinating mechanics. As a writer it challenged my imagination and helped it to grow.
Heck, I might even write a story in the world we invented last night. I really want to know what happened to that singing robot; to the hill goblin sage; to Jonny Galzabo and his replica Golden Palace.
I want to return and put my creations back under the microscope. I expect you will too.
Thanks to Ben Robbins, the creator of Microscope, not just for inventing this great game but for offering me advice for my first game via the Microscope RPG Google+ group.