Microscope: Alien Apocalypse
Sunday, we got the roleplaying group back together, after a bit of a hiatus, to wrap up our Mutants & Masterminds game, Brave New World, and figure out what the plan was for the future.
I handed the GMing baton off to Peter and, after some discussion, we decided our next game was going to be a post-apocalyptic D20 Modern campaign set after an alien fleet had bombed us back to the Middle Ages. As we’d previously considered, we used Microscope to collaboratively create big swaths of the setting’s history, hopefully creating greater player investment in the process.
This time around we had the full roleplaying group together: me, Britt, James, Jeff, and Peter. Our concept was, “Aliens attack Earth leaving devastation in their wake” with the explicit idea that once they were done the aliens went away again.
Our Pallette was fairly extensive this time around. In the Yes column we had psionics (and some other stuff I’ll add in with an edit later) [I'm doing this from memory here!]. In the No column we had human psionics, magic, supernatural powers, all supernatural entities, mutants and (possibly one or two more things that will be added with an edit).
We bookended our timelines with ‘The 2010s’ and ‘The Campaign Begins.’ For a complete layout you can download it in PDF form here: http://www.jadettman.com/Alien_Apocalypse.pdf
All in all, I’d say we had a fun little game of Microscope and, when we were done, we also had the alternate history of our campaign world. Whether we succeeded with the greater player buy-in for the setting remains to be seen.
I will be most interested in seeing if Microscope was useful in getting that buy-in.
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