Kill All Enlightened Robots

Usually at a con you get some good games and some okay games. At our story games area at Emerald City Comicon I drew the lucky penny: all my games were great great great.

One Microscope game included a textbook example of building on each other’s contributions to make an unexpected whole. We’re making the palette for our story of alien civilizations in collision:

player 1: “I want a race of robots.”
player 2: “I want genocide.”
player 3: “I want mysticism, like spiritual beliefs.”
player 4: “I want a god-like race of aliens.”

As our history unfolds, the robots, who we learn were created by humans after they discover remnants of mysterious Ancient technology, make contact with the not-as-dead-as-we-thought Ancients and achieve enlightenment. The rival alien races promptly unite to eradicate them: enlightened robot genocide.

Later in play we find out that the Ancients had previously tried bringing enlightenment to the other races — including us humans, which explained our first contact — but had failed or been rejected. Only the poor robots were young and innocent enough as a race to achieve enlightenment…