We’re trying out the new Drama rules with a shiny new history. The overview is humanity locked in a three-way war with two alien races (yep, it’s intentionally a StarCraft analog). Early in the game we establish that one of the races is the Swarm, small parasites that attach themselves to unintelligent native species and […]

Sometimes characters surprise you. One minute they’re complete strangers, and the next you are knee-deep into the most important moment of their lives. Haskell, Kevin and I sat down to play a game of Microscope. The one-line summary we came up with for the history is that a massive colony ship crashes on a planet […]

We’re rolling up characters in Flashing Blades (yep, from 1984). It’s a rapiers & musketeers system, but instead of historic France we’re playing in a supressed tech sci fi setting that we created in one of our Microscope games (the “stellar empires” history), a baroque and decadent period when the alien “gas whales” are the […]

I have to admit, there were times when I thought, “hmm, will the histories people come up with really be different, or will they all follow the same basic ideas and patterns? Won’t all stellar empires start to look alike?” Yeah, I was totally wrong. There are some fantastic actual play reports coming from the […]

We took a break from all the playtest launch mayhem and started another Microscope game. The concept? Settling the American frontier. Go West young man! It’s a real world alternate history setting. We’re only one session in, but we’ve already had the hanging of an innocent man, gold in them thar hills, war with Mexico, […]

Two more sessions of microscope under our belts: one continuing our first game, and another starting a new game with a new group. If anything, the game gets more interesting when you’re coming back to continue because you already have this material you want to explore. It definitely draws you back. In the new game, […]

We played our first microscope session and I have to say Ping is absolutely right: it was a ton of fun. A lot more fun than I expected. I thought we’d just try it for a while and then talk about what needed changing but instead we dived in and played for 8 hours straight. […]

We playtested the alpha draft of Microscope this weekend, and it was a resounding success! Ben no doubt has tweaks to make, things to clarify, and we playtesters need to give more feedback and of course it needs a lot more playtesting, but this version was a great start. Did I mention it was a […]