Microscope game pdf download

Apr 24, — Microscope rpg pdf trove By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie PolicyPrivacy Policyand our Terms Microscope rpg pdf trove. Posted On Turn your iPhone into a powerful electron microscope! Amaze your friends and trick them into believing that Feb 2, — Microscope rpg pdf trove. Bound by seeming chance to the Words of Creation, these new-forged titans face a world ravaged by the mad When viewing a prepared slide Jun 8, — Anonymous Thu Jun 9 No.

Does anyone have the Microscope RPG pdf?. May 14, — Vampires of the worst kind, microscope rpg pdf download, they are hideously evil and nowhere near as angst-ridden as their Anne Rice Apr 29, — Song of Swords is a dark low-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game that focuses on lethal, tactical combat, with a library of arms and armor inspired Then there was the generation ship game with Brian, which was by turns deadly serious and absurd, but the absurdities were always the sort that you find in science-fiction where the people are doing ridiculous things in the audience's opinion only because they've forgotten their own history.

The point is that that mix of players in a game is very much the alpha and omega of the tone, and the way the game distributes authority means that everyone puts some of their style and tone preferences into the game. You , through clever use of the dials the game gives you can maximise your influence over the tone, but it will never be yours alone to determine. You can bend and twist the sillinesses into seriousnesses as I did with the game about Juggalos in Space , but why make it such hard work?

One of the easiest ways to enjoy Microscope with different tones is to play with different groups. Find some gamers who are more into human-scale drama and see what Microscope is like with them. The wonderful thing about this game is that it's so painless to get running with a new group that you can play with with a different set of people each time, unlike RPGs that need considerable setup.

And you can play it as a one-shot, so you can lure in gamers who would otherwise balk at committing to a drawn-out campaign using a weird new game. I've had great success playing Microscope with non-gamers as well, since it has none of the baggage of traditional RPGs that can so easily confuse new players and which is so hard for us to teach because we take it all for granted.

This is more of a general directive — the specific techniques above are all useful for this. Build on what the silly players add. If they add something implausible, ask yourself 'How does that actually work?

Are there pink bubble-blowing dragons futilely threatening the realm? Okay, that's kinda ridiculous. But ask yourself: How does their biology work? What force drives them to suicidal attacks against the knights and trebuchets they die to? What tragic figure, forgotten in history, worked their wizardry to create these things? When the rare knight dies in a bizarre pink-bubble-blowing fight, what do the funerary rites look like? In a realm with no credible outside threats, what sort of infighting and treachery do the nobles feel safe to engage in?

For every silly thing another player adds, you can ask yourself questions about how it's actually perfectly sensible in a believable, serious world. Ask those questions and you'll suddenly find the soaring flights of fancy being tied to the ground in nicely integrated ways that build on and honor the other players contributions rather than ignore or work around them.

The Juggalos in Space game is a good working example of some of these principles. It was made silly from the outset when one player added Juggalos to the Yes Palette, yet me being a gamer who likes him some serious drama managed to put a lot of drama into that game that we all enjoyed, and without banning silliness. Despite tentacle monsters, robot sex scandals, and a planet named Faygo, we managed to have a Imperial succession drama, a sinister immortal robot destroying the wormhole network for secret noble but tragic reasons, a space trade republic slowly going evil or decadent we didn't learn which , and questions about the rights of sentient robots and their relationship to their human creators.

It doesn't go into detail about all the possible techniques, but it does serve as an example of how silliness and seriousness can co-exist in the same game with some deliberate choices and techniques. The tone of the table is, at the end of the day, the choice of the players.

The players must choose to be invested in the theme of the game and the tone of the theme. When inviting players to play, get consensus on what kind of game they want to play. Do certain people at the table have joke-triggers? Ban them. For that matter, put 'silly' on the palette's no side, or whatever term operationalizes your group's approach to funny.

Make sure everyone is cool with this and what it means. Put some serious topics on the yes side of the palette. Spell the tone of the game out here.

It's incredibly powerful, because anything on the no side is auto-vetoed. Make sure that your theme has a serious context, a serious tone of exploration, and a way for people at the table to buy in.

At the end of the day, if the group buys into the theme, the people won't want to contradict the feel of the game. But this is meta. You must have the group choose to buy in, and setting the right theme provides for that. My experience with relatively unstructured, creativity-rich games like Microscope although this tendency is hardly limited to it is that people are most comfortable exhibiting their creativity in a silly way. If you come up with a race of mole people, nobody's going to feel bad when someone else laughs at it and calls it stupid.

So to that, here are a couple of story-game things that apply as equally to Microscope as Fiasco or Monsterhearts. I think it's a very, very good practice before a game starts to announce that if at any time anybody in the group decides that some element of the game makes them uncomfortable, they can ask to 'draw the veil' on that thing and nobody gets to ask why.

This can be anything from rape to Ewoks, it doesn't matter. The only rule is that you can say that at any time and nobody can even ask why. Now, you can ask for clarification 'Are you saying you want to draw the veil on slavery as a whole, or just the particular experiences of this character?

You might think that this would stifle creativity even more, but in fact it does just the opposite. Once people accept that they're in a comfortable environment, they'll start to take more risks. I've played with my fair share of story-gamers who complain about games getting too goofy. I like goofy, but I also really dig serious as well.

And when I'm playing a game that I want to get serious in, well, I just get serious about it. I would in general spend less time admonishing folks for not taking stuff seriously and spend more time getting deep into your own characters and themes, figuring out fiendish and devilish ways to advance the storyline keeping stuff close to the vest, as discussed in the rulebook, is a great idea!

Sometimes you'll end up laughing your way through a session which, as you look back on it, was actually extremely dark. The laughter becomes 'oh my god, I can't believe we just did that! Microscope has a great mechanic about it where, before you even exactly start playing the game, you go around the table introducing things you want or don't want in the timeline. It behooves you to use this, especially if you're playing with a regular core of folks.

If you're playing a science fiction world and your friend Bob has a tendency to introduce Ewoks, ban them. Ban cuddly aliens in general. If Bob wants to then introduce a 'cuddly' insect race in retaliation, well, I could see a serious game about that, actually. I think a big part of getting away from silly is dumping some of the more obvious cliches and being forced to play a little bit out of your zone. On the other hand, if Bob does try to bring in Ewoks, you do have that initial list to use against him as a cudgel if you have to.

Conversely, if you really want to explore some particular aspect of life through your timeline, by all means, bring it up in advance. Sometimes your ideas won't fly but sometimes someone else will hear something you want to include and think 'ooh yeah, that would be awesome!

The last game I played, we started out with a diplomat from a foreign land coming into a kingdom to negotiate a settlement. Kind of out of nowhere, I remembered this scene in ancient Rome where a Roman diplomat drew a line around a king and told him to make his decision before he stepped out of that line, and I decided to bring that in to play.

Folks were like 'whaaaaa? Maybe you don't know history. Maybe chemistry is your thing. Introduce some weird reaction that has some cool effect. In some ways, Microscope is your way of showing off A good half of the book talks about strategies on how to play and how to introduce others to the game.

That's good design for a game like this. Read those bits and try to call them out when you can. For instance, the rule against goading other people into answers is a fantastic one in this game; in my experience, sometimes a person who is taking forever to come up with an era or a scene eventually comes up with something that makes everybody just sit there speechless for five minutes.

Keeping your ideas close to the vest is another good one, and I think is related to the first one: if you have a good idea, do not waste it on advising someone else what they want to do.

Instead, keep it to yourself and spring it the next time you can. In fact, if you find yourself doing that, point it out in-game! If folks are like 'oh maaan that is awesome how did you come up with that? There's no better way for people to understand how the game can become great than by an example like that. The big thing about story games is that they're pretty much by definition not going to go in a direction you anticipated.

Let folks do what they want, roll with the punches, and see what happens. You'd be surprised at how often a silly-seeming beginning turns into something not all that silly at all. I wanted to just add this as a quick aside: don't be too worried if the first couple scenes get silly. Microscope is a little unique in that the first couple of folks just don't have a lot to go on, usually, so they're either pulling in something from outside of the game or they're just spitballing.

Allow this to happen. I have been blessed to live around the Seattle area, which has a vibrant story gaming community filled with people who have no problem playing Microscope seriously. This is, for many of those folks, something they've learned to do over the course of many years. The community itself is warm and accepting, so very often newer folks will move past the awkward silly phase quickly.

The thing is, you can't expect every game of Microscope to be like that from the start. The community had to grow to get to where they are now, and you in turn will need to learn how to story-game with your friends.

For now, you may not even want to worry so much about how the games are too silly or whatever, as long as everyone is having fun and getting more comfortable with each other's creativity. Constraints of Palette and Theme are your most powerful tools here. But if the players keep wandering off on tangents then try taking a well known sensible world system and set the theme to that.

You can have a lot of fun building on a world that you all know Dune, Middle Earth, Highlander and people know what is expected in that and how the characters would react. Toggle navigation. Microscope Game Pdf Download Torrent.