IN THIS WORLD MICROSCOPE KINGDOM FOLLOW UNION Subscribe More Ars Ludi

What is Kingdom?

Groups are stronger than individuals. A Kingdom can accomplish things no individual could.

But the Kingdom makes demands on you too. If you’re part of it, you’re pressured to do what it thinks is right. If you believe in what the Kingdom is doing, you’re fine. But if you don’t, or if the Kingdom starts to become something other than what you want it to be, you might find yourself caught in the middle, pressured to do things you don’t want to do.

The question becomes: do you change the Kingdom or does the Kingdom change you?

What kind of Kingdoms can we play?

A “Kingdom” is the game term for an organization or community that the characters all belong to. Any kind of group works. Your Kingdom could be a hospital, the crew of a starship, French partisans, a viking clan, a Greek city-state, the Federation of Planets, the Mafia, a Wild West boom town, a newspaper, or Sunnybrook Elementary School.

Just about any tone or genre should work: anything from dudes with axes fighting to be chief, to concerned doctors arguing that the underprivileged deserve health care, to romantic comedy (yeah, I was surprised too, but it works).

What’s the Kingdom for? What’s it’s purpose? What should it do? Our characters may not all see eye-to-eye. Then the trouble starts.

Awesome! I wanna play!

Well lucky you, the external playtest is coming soon. Stay tuned for details.

We’ve been playtesting Kingdom internally since September and I’ve been working on it on and off since a few months before Microscope was released (sheesh, over a year now). A couple drafts have already gone under the bridge. Some major problems have been solved. Wrinkles added, wrinkles removed.

I think it’s ready for more tables. I’m very curious to see what you clever folks do with it.

    Ben Robbins | March 6th, 2012 | | show 4 comments