Microscope - Starter guide
What is Microscope?
Someone at the table says: "The empire falls." Someone else says: "Three hundred years earlier, the first bridge across the river is built." A third zooms in on a night in the builders' hut, where the bridge builder and the imperial inspector argue over who gets to lay the first stone. Three sentences, three centuries, and nobody asked permission. That is Microscope.
Microscope is a roleplaying game with no game master, no dice and no preparation, in which two to four players build the complete history of a world: from the first period to the last, not in order but in leaps. Ben Robbins wrote it in 2011 and published it through his own Lame Mage Productions, after two years of testing with more than a hundred and fifty players. The subtitle says exactly what it is: a fractal roleplaying game of epic histories. The closer you look, the more there turns out to be.
How does the system work?
You start with four steps. First the Big Picture, one sentence that sums up the whole history: an empire rises and falls, humanity leaves the Earth. Then the Bookends: a starting period and an ending period, each on a card, each light or dark in tone. Then the Palette: a short list of things that definitely belong in this history and things that definitely do not, so everyone sees the same world. And a First Pass, in which each player adds one thing.
After that you play in rounds. One player is the Lens and picks a Focus, a theme or person or place this round is about. Everyone then adds something connected to that Focus, at one of three scales: a Period (an age, broad and vague), an Event (something that happened, more concrete) or a Scene (a single moment, with characters, played out at the table). A Scene opens with a question, and you play until it is answered. At the end of the round someone picks a Legacy, a thread worth coming back to. Then the Lens moves on.
Two rules carry the game. You may not contradict anything already on the table. And you do not confer: what you add is yours, with no vote and no permission. That is how the history grows in directions nobody would have thought of alone, and that is the whole point.
What do you need to start?
The book, a stack of index cards and pens. Nothing more. No dice, no character sheets, no game master with homework. A long table helps, because the cards end up in a row that runs through the centuries, and that row gets long.
Two to four players. With two it is intimate and quick, with four the history gets richest. A session runs three to four hours; a history can be finished in one evening or grown over several.
Who is this game for?
Worldbuilders, first of all. Game masters who want a campaign world the players invented themselves, so they already love it before the first session starts. Writers who need a backstory and would rather not invent it alone. And groups who want an evening of play without anyone having to run it.
It is not for players who want a hero. There is no character that belongs to you, no advancement, no combat. And it is not for tables that find it hard to add something without first asking whether it is all right; Microscope asks you to put it down and let others build on it.
How does it compare to other systems?
Compared to Dungeons & Dragons, Microscope is not a rival but a tool for it. Where D&D asks what your hero does in a world, Microscope asks how that world came to be. Many groups play Microscope first and then run their campaign in the history they just built.
Compared to The Quiet Year, the other GM-less building game, Microscope works at a different scale. The Quiet Year draws one community on one map, season by season, for a single year; Microscope spans centuries and has no map, only time.
Compared to Dialect, which lets a community's language rise and fade, Microscope is broader and looser. Dialect follows one group to its end; Microscope leaps from emperor to bridge builder to the last day of the realm. If you are weighing Microscope against A Perfect Rock, the game about a world that turns on a single place, our comparison has the longer answer.
Where do you start?
Pick a Big Picture everyone at the table understands at once. The book offers a few; "an empire rises and falls" always works. Make the Bookends sharp and opposed: a light beginning and a dark end, or the other way round.
Take the Palette seriously. One "no" (no magic, no gods, no space travel) does more for coherence than ten "yeses".
And play your first Scene early. As long as only Periods and Events lie on the table, it stays a timeline; the moment two players speak as characters, it becomes a history. If you want to know where the game itself came from, our history chapter the ages of Microscope tells that story.
Recommended products at Netherbook
Microscope RPG is one book, and it is everything you need.
If you want the smaller scale, The Quiet Year is the counterpart; if you want the same freedom applied to language, choose Dialect. Everything we sell for worldbuilders is in the Worldbuilding collection.