Solo Gaming on a Long Flight

With over 18 hours of air travel, I was hoping to spend some quality time doing solo gaming. I have been way out of the habit of playing with the Mythic Game Master Emulator and I have at least three games that I'd love to continue. Unfortunately, I have a set way of playing those games that involved using google docs and an internet connection which is not really an option on an airplane.

So I broke out one of my unused moleskins and proceeded to attempt a solo game of Microscope.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Microscope is a new game by Ben Robbins (of West Marches fame) that is essentially a world-building story game (I talk about it more here). The whole point of the game is for players to build on each other's ideas and explore a setting fractally. The interaction of different worldbuilders should create a rich and surprising historical tapestry. I knew that playing it solo would lack that crucial component so I decided to try something a little different. I used the Mythic GME to emulate three other players.

Before even thinking of a game concept, I came up with three player personas that were different from myself. Sure, each of them has elements of my personality (how could they not?) but I mostly based them on charactertures of other people that I have gamed with at one point or another. Names were selected to protect the innocent.

So we had:

MAX: A pretty conservative guy with a interest is military history and traditional national or religious organizations. I imagined that he would favor scenes featuring important military and political figures struggling against human nature and a fallen world. Of all the personas, he'd be the most likely to push for combat in scenes.

IAN: An artsy liberal guy who is primarily interested in quirky but relatively low-status characters on the fringes of historical events. He tries to find redeeming qualities in even the worst characters and generally believes that societies improve over time (though, perhaps contradictorily, he likes the notions of long lost utopias). He has a strong interest in the occult, mysticism, fantasy/horror, and conspiracy theory.

KATE: Apolitical (but left-leaning) woman most interested in romance and archetypal stories of good vs. evil. Favors strong female characters and underdogs of all stripes. Likes epic happy endings or weepy world-shaking tragedies in equal measure.

Next on the agenda was to select a concept for my Microscope history. Here's where I cheated a bit. I know that I'd like to play Microscope with others, so I held in reserve some ideas that I'd like to explore with a full group. Instead, I selected an existing concept that I had played around with quite a bit and might be less willing to share with others. That concept, which I call Cloudlands, is a dieselpunk space opera set in a universe of floating cloud islands and infinite skies. It is a very reminiscent of Lady Blackbird or Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, even though I've been noodling with the concept long before those games existed.

So here's the Big Picture statement:

From the the dawn of air-travel, the free peoples of the Cloud Sea overcome tyranny to establish a grand republic of the sky.

The Bookends:

Start Period (Dark): On a war-torn homeland, humanity discovers how to navigate the Cloud Sea. War and tragedy follow the first explorers and colonists to other worlds.

End Period (Light): In the final days of the last great empire, a coalition of free peoples defeat the tyrants and establish the Republic of the Red Sky.

Selecting tone seemed to be a bit of a challenge. In the End Period, for example, I imagine that there might be stretches of the Period that seem pretty dark until final victory is achieved. But it is the end state that (for me) seems like it should determine tone. Similarly, there will definitely be Lighter elements to the Start Period as well.

Palette
To assemble the palette, I returned to my original Cloudlands concept.

YES	NO
Diesel Engines	Jets
Magic	Gunpowder
Steam Engines	Electronics
Multitudes of Aliens	Alien Dominance
Airships	Known limits to the sky
Teleportation Engines	Personal Teleportation

So far so good and the influence of the other personas have not really come into it yet. In my next post, I'm going to continue the Setup phase by having each player persona create a period of event.