Mighty Morphin’ Microscope
Oh sure, you could use Microscope to make an epic history, defying chronological order and jumping back and forth to explore the moments in the history that interest you. Or you could hold up your glossy black book and yell “too easy!” and use it to do something else entirely…
- City Building with Microscope — Very clever idea for taking the three-level hierarchy of Microscope and using it to build and flesh out the neighborhoods and details of a city. Could you apply the same Microscope hierarchy to, well, anything? Yes you probably could…
- Microscope meets West Marches — No, seriously. The Bad Wrong Fun campaign is going to follow a West Marches model of play, but create the game world with Microscope and Dawn of Worlds. There’s also a discussion thread on rpg.net.
There’s a whole lot of clever in the air this month…
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The City Building article got me thinking about using multiple layers of Microscope hierarchies for creating a world.
First tier is space. Periods are areas of space; star clusters, space empires, or anything that ties several star systems together. Events are solar systems or space phenomena like black holes. Scenes are individual planets.
Second tier is a single planet. Periods are continents or oceans. Events are particular areas, either natural or abstract; mountain ranges, forests, countries, and so on. Scenes are particular sites; cities, lakes, ruins, what have you.
Third tier is a single site. Periods are town districts, neighbourhoods, or other areas with something tying them together. Events are individual buildings, monuments, or other points of interests. Scenes are individual persons or objects.
Fourth tier is a single person or object. Periods are properties of the person/object, which can be relationships, group affiliations, or just properties (“John is a close friend of the King.” “Eva is a member of the Skull Gang.” “The Bluesword is blessed by the gods.”). Events are feelings, emotions or opinions about a property, either from the person themselves, or from others (“John actually dislikes the King.” “The Skull Gang sees Eva as a good fighter.” “The Bluesword is feared by all orcs.”). Scenes, finally, are Scenes. The Question for the Scene has to answer something to do with the Event it belongs to. It could be a simple “Why?” question, like “Why does he dislike the King?” but it could also be “Does the King know that John dislikes him?” or something else related to the Event’s feeling.
Whenever you make a Scene-level thing for the first three tiers you should establish the premise for it, so it’s ready when you want to zoom in and explore it further.
All of this was off the top of my head as I wrote… :)
Thanks Shannon! That sounds really interesting. Tell me how it goes.
Just purchased the game and hope to use it as a preview/review for a chronology of themes in history for my Social Studies class. Thank you for pushing the RPG field in such an innovative way.