I’m the god of fire. I have fire powers”“Fire powers? What are you, a superhero?” We’re in the middle of a game and you need to make up a god. Because you know, we’re gamers, we have to create whole worlds, gods, civilizations on the fly. What do you do? The number one approach […] A role-playing game for two to four players. No GM. No prep. Microscope was playtested for two years by over 150 awesome gamers.

The second game from the creator of Microscope (which is one of the best games of recent years, and I will happily play it at pretty much any time. (Microscope lends itself unusually well to online play, too. Hint hint.) A role-playing game about communities, by Ben Robbins, creator of the award-winning game Microscope. Why, yes, you can! I always try to make games that you use to tell a lot of different stories and play over and over again. Kingdom is always about a community, but you have huge latitude about the group you make and the kind of decisions it faces. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth Any role-playing game is a careful balance between agreement and disagreement. We need agreement because the game world only exists in our minds. If we can’t agree about what’s true, we’re going to contradict each other. If you think there are walls around the city and I don’t, our game will crash. Since agreement is […]What I like about this that Microscope did really well is that the randomness isn't down to dice, it's down to how people find ways to complicate things. There's a great deal of control every player has over their character and the world around them in Kingdom, but at the same time all of the factors that are out of the player's control make it seem, just from the way it's written, like the sort of game that could be very tense and very fun. In the past few years I’ve had a lot more regular weekly games than one-shots. Mostly games with no GM, so no one is writing a story for us to follow. We are all just playing in the moment and seeing what happens. I love it. Except for one thing, which I’m doing to myself. […] This is an excerpt from Kingdom, but it’s a good recipe for making scenes in just about any story game.) The secret to making a good scene isn’t coming up with an amazing or surprising idea. The secret is painting a clear picture so players know exactly what is going on. Being able to visualize […] What will our Kingdom do? What will it become? The Kingdom's fate is in your hands. The question is: will you change the Kingdom or will the Kingdom change you?

When I’m playing a role-playing game, I’m much more interested in hearing what someone’s character feels about a situation than what they do. If we understand the character’s feelings, even taking no action is informative. And if we don’t know their feelings, any action remains a mystery. Why did they do that? We don’t know. […]A role-playing game by Ben Robbins, creator of Microscope and Follow. For two to five players. No GM. No prep. So while these roles are fairly mechanical as it pertains to Actions Players take in the game, I also find that thinking of your Mover & Shaker NPCs in your D&D game - political games especially - in this way can help shape NPC function to the central tensions of your game. You essentially have the Oracle, the Voice of the People and the Establishment. And these are almost always in disagreement/conflict which is a great way to grease your central tension on an interpersonal level (and thus make it easier for your PCs to connect with what's happening). Kingdom is a game of navigating a community through a series of crises. The community could be the crew of a single ship or a galaxy-spanning empire. It's got a number of very clever mechanics, and a lot more emphasis on role-playing characters and scenes than its predecessor. These are all examples of Microscope games. Want to explore an epic history of your own creation, hundreds or thousands of years long, all in an afternoon? That's Microscope.

It does a number of things that are a little more familiar than Microscope: you have a (mostly) persistent character, this character has a role they play and certain information about them written onto a sheet, in a way they are kind of the main protagonists of the story. Though this is typically a binary proposition (because it's a game mechanic), thinking about and framing central tensions in your D&D village, region, kingdom in this manner seems very useful to me. The entire last half of the Kingdom book is full of really clever suggested seeds, how to customize them, the locations involved, the people who influence events, threats to status quo and the crossroad events they will face. There are sci-fi seeds, historical Earth, real world seeds and fantasy seeds. There's even a nod to D&D where you're in a popular 1980s Pencil & Paper RPG company facing some interesting threats and crossroads.Beyond that, there's also an intriguing set of roles, where each player has slightly different mechanistic powers.