Games Night: Microscope

As we don't have a regular campaign/game running at the moment we decided to play Microscope last night. This was for two reasons:

1. It's a really great, engaging and fun game to play.
2. We're going to use the shared universe we created last night as the jumping off point for a series of one-shots and mini-campaigns that we're going to play over the coming months.

It was my third time playing, and again we started from scratch in our universe-building. It was the first time that we had played it as a whole group, but it didn't take too long before we settled in to the groove of establishing periods, then events and then launching into (often) crazy scenes. We were detailing a hard science, space opera, man reaches for the stars universe. For a flavour of things, this is what our "yes and no" lists looked like.

Yes

• Technological plagues
• FTL travel
• Geneered humans
• "Horrible costs for psychic powers"
• Mechs and powersuits
• F*cked up but explainable alien demons
• Artificial consciousness

No

• TNG humanoids ("no bumpy fore-headed aliens speaking English!")
• Terraforming
• Single biome planets ("welcome to desert world", "welcome to frozen world", "welcome to the land of hats!")
• Time travel (other than normal relativistic effects)

This was quite a departure from previous shared-world-building with Microscope, as previously we had always gone for more fantasy-style settings. It worked though, just as it had in the past. We had a really rich and varied timeline building up, with concentrations of interest around the first near-collapse of humanity (centring around very small, personal moments) and an incursion into our reality by Schwarm-Laden beings from beyond normal space-time. Imagine being on the bridge of the only starship, when a wave of 5 times 10^15 ships from beyond ab-reality arrives, too many ships occupying the same space, computers and space marines going insane...

Really, really good fun (so much so that two of us were crying with laughter at one role-played scene), and will lead in to next week's first one-shot/mini-campaign, based around the game GHOST/ECHO.