Microscope

[evilsoup]

[This post deliberately left blank]

[evilsoup]

So. Microscope.

The basic thing of the game is that we'll construct a timeline for a fictional world. In the main part of the game, we'll take turns making either periods, events (which take place within periods), or scenes (which take place within events). This is not done chronologically -- you can cahnge something in the 'past' of the world as easily as in the 'future'. But we'll leave this aside for a bit.

For now, we've got to start with the more collaborative setting-up. This goes:

1. Big Picture
2. Bookend History
3. Pallette-add and ban ingredients
4. A fist-pass at the main game

First: the big picture. We'll start with a sentence that sums up the main thrust of our timeline. Something along the lines of: 'An ancient empire rises and falls', 'cavemen atthe dawn of time found the first civilisation', Mankind leaves the sick Earth behind and spreads out to the stars'. Don't go too in-depth -- the point of the game is to flesh things out as we go along. For now we want something fairly vague.

We want a minimum time-span of about 100 years. While we can play with this if we have later games, I think around 1000 years is a good upper limit to start off with. So. Any suggestions (if you want to use one of the examples I listed from the book, that's fine)?

[Manus Dei]

"Bee uprising destroys all civilisation; the swarmlords feast on human flesh"

Wait no, how about "Vast winged crabs hold dominion over a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland"

[Bakustra]

Some additional ideas: "The last days of empire, and what came next", "The fortunes and misfortun as of an aristocratic family." "Birth and life of a city."

Any of these are fine byvme, but if I had to choose it would be the first one.

[Manus Dei]

"At last the Brony purge heralded the of dawn of a new golden age for humanity, and the millions who laid down their lives for this highest of ideals would never be forgotten"

[Manus Dei]

See it works both ways because it could be a purge of bronies or a purge carried out by bronies it leaves a lot of room for creativity

[evilsoup]

Yeah but that ambiguity would get nailed down by the next stage of the process so...
I don't want to be a ding-dong about this, and there's plenty of room later for abject silliness (all the face-to-face games of Microscope I've played have descended to farce by the end), but I think it would be better to do this opening part of the game fairly 'straight'. When we get past the collaborative bits, you can have an ERA OF THE BEE-LORDS if you want, containing an event where the last brony is mauled to death by the mighty death-swarms or whatever (and a scene answering the question 'why did the bee-lords gloriously slaughter the brony scum?').

[Manus Dei]

yes but then where do the winged crabs come into it

[evilsoup]

it's really best to be kind of vague about this 'big picture' stuff, though
if you want to suggest a general post-apocalyptic one (like 'humanity tries to rebuild after an atomic war'), then you could throw in giant winged crabs if you really want to (and other people can pick up on & expand them if they want to)
of course if there's overwhelming support for giant winged crabs as our premise then I'm not going to stop it

Some additional ideas: "The last days of empire, and what came next", "The fortunes and misfortun as of an aristocratic family." "Birth and life of a city."

Any of these are fine byvme, but if I had to choose it would be the first one.

Yeah, the first one is the only one that really works for this game. We're building a world rather than a story, so we shouldn't start out focusing on something like an individual family or city -- we're setting the limits of our canvas (and that canvas get smaller in the next few stages of the thing), so bigger (and generic) is better.

And when you say empire, do you mean sci-fi or fantasy?

[Bakustra]

Either/or. I have no particular investment in eithervat this point.

[Darth Tedious]

Why not have both?
But instead of fantasy within scifi (like how SW is), do scifi within fantasy
So it's wizards and such in old castles, but they can build robits and flying machines and even spaceships because magic (eg wooden capsule survives reentry thanks to a hundred mages at Mission Control chanting fire protection spells)

I support the inclusion giant winged crabs, be they the main premise or not

[evilsoup]

oh we can totally do that, but it's best to start off using broad-brush genres
in the palette-add/ban phase, we each declare things that we definitely do or definitely don't want in it. So, if we go with fantasy, one person could say 'I want aliens' (because that isn't implied by 'fantasy') and another could say 'I don't want any elves' (which are implied by fantasy, so if you don't want them then you'd have to specifically ban them) and so on until we whittle it down to a more specific vision. The idea is to make sure that we're all playing on the same page
anyway if there are no other suggestions by Sunday afternoon, I say we go with 'The last days of empire, and what came next' and move on to the next step

[Bakustra]

Its Sunday afternoon soup's time, so I'm going to make some suggestions. For the beginning Period, I'd like to call it The Time of the Five Emperors. This Period is a time whwn the Empire broke apart into a civil war lasting many years, with five legitimate claimants and many warlords. Like the Three Kingdoms Period blended with the Sengoku Jidai. This will be a Dark Period as fire and sword brings the Empire to the brink.

[Darth Tedious]

Can The Time of 5 Emperors be the second period, just 50 years after the reign of the Greatest Emperor?
That way we can play with things at their decadent peak before they go sour

[Manus Dei]

decadence has my vote

[Oxymoron]

same there.

[Bakustra]

Can The Time of 5 Emperors be the second period, just 50 years after the reign of the Greatest Emperor?
That way we can play with things at their decadent peak before they go sour

OK, so is this a good time (Light) or a bad time (Dark)? And we need another bookend, the end of our little history, which should also be Light or Dark.

[Darth Tedious]

I'd think the time of the Greatest Emperor would be generally light
But not for everyone
Only for those in the right strata of society, and depending on location
So things would be shiny for say the upper and middle class in central provinces, but rather suck for the not-so-well off (maybe slavery? Someone has to do the backbreaking labour to build all these great infrastructure/monuments)
But maybe reverse in outer provinces, where the poor are pretty stoked with roads and aquaducts and medicine and whatevs, but the rich would prefer more self-governance, leading to secessionism and such
So we can have decadence, awesome achievement, a little oppression in the name of a reasonably benevolent greater good, and set things to nicely boil over into horrible civil war for 5 Emperors time

Third period, maybe happy ending/rise of democracy/communism?

[Oxymoron]

FYI, I'm working on a setting of my own, and I think the following may be kinda useful here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r0cr0y916gfsv ... Empire.png

It's a wip, but it already give some ideas, I suppose.


I propose that under the Greatest Emperor, all of that was unified; with it breaking into five different empires during the time of the Five Emperors, plus a number of other breakaway states here and there.

[Oxymoron]

With the five empires corresponding to the five Grand Provinces of the Great Empire, and the five Emperors being the former Vice-Prince of those provinces OR people who usurped their power and then declared independence.

[evilsoup]

I know this will go against standard world-builder instincts, but... don't discuss anything apart from these bookend eras. When (/if lol) we get out of this collaborative phase, people will be free to add anything they want. It's impossible to decide on a 'second' or 'third' period, because the nature of the game is such that anyone can insert a period or event (or scene) anywhere (so long as it's in-between the two 'bookend' periods).

So, I mean, Oxy you could have your five kingdoms... and then somebody could wipe three of them out in a magical war or whatever. It's fundamentally unpredictable

Also, a light period can have dark events, and a dark period can have light events. It's not really binding in any way, more a suggestion of general tone. When we get to individual turns, anyone will be free to do almost anything ('no time travel' is a set rule, and you shouldn't stray too far from genre conventions except in ways that the pallet allows, and you can't contradict anything that's already been put down).

So far:

Tagline: The last days of empire, and what came next (fantasy)

First period: The last days of the empire (light?) -- Having reached the height of its power, the Empire becomes self-obsessed and insular, devoted to the pleasures of the flesh and allowing its power to wane. (if someone wants to suggest any changes to this, go right ahead)

Last period:

So. How do we want our timeline to end? Humanity goes extinct and dragons take over? Wizards usher in a global socialist republic? The successor states of the empire enter an age of industrialisation? Old Gods awaken and batter down the walls between individual minds? Or...? We can have anything, so long as there's broad agreement about it.