Kingdom: A Role Playing Game About Communities

Product Information

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. It really prompts a structured way to think about and develop tensions in your game and to think about NPCs not just as flavor, but their function in your setting. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. So, if you've read my Microscope and Microscope Explorer reviews, you know what I think about those.

Microscope is a game that takes many standard assumptions of a role-playing game and stands them on their head. You can play serious games with scheming and regicide, but you can also make Kingdoms that are about romance, teen drama, or hilarious hijinks. Instead, I found myself hoping that at some point I'll be able to get into a game with at least one very experienced player.Microscope is a model of minimalist complexity: with easy-to-learn tools you gain the power to create a believable history that will surprise you even as you're authoring it. Want to jump back to the childhood of the king you just saw assassinated and find out what made him such a hated ruler? Nailing down definitions can turn into a horrible quagmire, particularly when we’re tackling words that lots of people already use but define differently, or use without an actual definition just a case-by-case “I can’t explain it but I know it when I see it”. 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). It's got elements of traditional tabletop roleplaying games, but is definitely on the fringe of that hobby.

By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. And "fractal role playing" is no joke - the minute you finish, you'll want to dive back in and explore some interesting sliver of the vast history you just built. It's a quick read and is probably useful for setting up initial ideas in session zeroes for campaigns or games. I feel a bit anxious about people including or creating things that I don't enjoy when I'm in a shared creative space. Players play out not truly individual characters, but manifestations of forces within society and how they shape and determine things.When RPGs grow into longer term campaigns it's very common for the setting to take on a life of its own with recurring characters and increasingly fleshed out histories and conflicts which many times the players themselves help shape. In Kingdom, the roles players take on are broken down by three basic functions: Perceptives (who have the power to predict outcomes of the Crossroads events).

Microscope engagingly challenges assumptions and upends long-held conventions of play while delivering a singular and satisfying evening of gaming. Microscope excels as either a stand-alone game or a collaborative way to build a setting with your gaming group for another game entirely. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. 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. That's what Kingdom is all about: communities and how the people in them decide what they stand for.

A lot of the game is down to just playing out your character and how they react to the other players, or even deciding to take a certain power away from another character (which is something you can do). As you play, you'll confront your Kingdom and your characters with Crossroads, critical decisions that may change your community forever.

Zoom out to watch the majestic tide of history wash across empires, then zoom in and explore the lives of the people who endured it.It is cool to see that there is something playable in the veins of a fiction first approach that also works for more competitively minded people. Way back in college, when I was taking anthropology courses instead of focusing on my major, I learned the idea of “emic vs etic”. Ben Robbins' Microscope may be the clearest-written game text I've ever read - which is helpful, because it is also one of the most innovative games I've come across in a long time. When your charter is to game with strangers every week, maturity and civility is fundamental to making that work. For that to happen, we have to let go what we individually *expect* or *want* and just see what *does* happen.