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Actual Play Roundup: Is anything more epic than a psionic scream heard across the stars?

There are more great Microscope game write-ups out there than I can keep up with, but these are a few of my recent favorites:

  • Psionic scream heard across the stars — Easily the most epic Microscope play report I’ve seen in quite a while. After the first session the story continues with the Retreat, the Amoth Conspiracy, and the Nakamura Legacy. See what I mean? Epic. And then to wrap the whole thing up they convert the entire Microscope history to a campaign setting. “Interestingly, LL and I were loathe to speculate much about things we hadn’t specifically covered either in the history itself or the Palette. We could certainly just make stuff up…but it seems somehow more fun to discover it with Microscope.”
  • “This is such a cool world.” — Great report of a group building a campaign world with Microscope, followed by some other people chiming and sharing their own world-building experiences.
  • The Sordid History of Sweet Hollow — Just in time for Halloween, some small town American gothic horror. We’ve had a running discussion about whether Microscope would work to do the history of something like a haunted house, jumping back and forth from the distant past when the terrible deeds were originally perpetrated to the present where the descendants and/or supernatural investigators were learning the unspeakable truth. If your answer is “oh my god yes I want to play that game” then we are in agreement.
  • The Gardeners — Great game I got to play during the Lottery session at Go Play NW. I won’t spoil the ending except to say we really surprised ourselves. No one saw the twist coming (in fact we had a few moments of thinking we’d painted ourselves into a high corner) but when it came out it was such a perfect fit you would have think we planned it from the start.

I haven’t done an actual play roundup in a while so I’m sure I’ve left out some good ones. If you’re looking for more Microscope goodness RPGGeek and Story Games Seattle are definite hot spots. There are also a bunch of play-by-forum Microscope games on RPGGeek including one they’ve been playing for the last nine months.

    Ben Robbins | November 26th, 2012 | , , | leave a comment