# Microscope *Created:* 2023-07-23, *Modified:* 2026-10-05 ![[Microscope (cover).jpg|600]] **Microscope** is Ben Robbins' "fractal role-playing game of epic histories" — a gm-less game where you and a few friends build a civilization-spanning history together, jumping backward and forward across centuries in a single afternoon. Humanity spreads to the stars; fledgling nations rise from the ruins of an empire; an ancient line of dragon-kings dies out as magic fades. You see the future first, then zoom in on how it actually happened. Alongside **Kingdom** and **Follow**, it's one of the hobby's great no-prep, no-GM designs — a small group of gods with a marker, a timeline, and no referee to rein them in. The timeline is the game, and the timeline is the group's: history as written by the same people who get to be its vandals. ## Setting Microscope has no setting of its own; you build the world at the table before you ever play in it. A session opens with a **Big Picture** (the meta-tone of the whole history — a slow golden age, an empire devouring itself, a machine that runs the world), bookended by two **Periods** that frame where the story begins and ends, and a **Palette** of allowed and banned ingredients (ban "space travel," ban "magic," allow "the dead returning"). Then a **first pass** seeds the bare timeline. The players are historians writing the rise and fall of a place of their own invention, and the palette is the law those historians work under. ## Mechanics The core is the **fractal timeline**. History gets built from three nested layers — **Periods** (eras), **Events** (incidents inside an era), and **Scenes** (the zoomed-in, actually role-played moments inside an event). Turns are collaborative but pointedly *not* coordinated: everyone builds on each other's contributions, but no one controls your details and the rules lean against dictating what other people made. ### Making History On your turn you either **focus** the game's attention on a particular part of the timeline, or you **make history** by adding a Period, Event, or Scene. Periods stake out an era's boundaries, Events mark specific incidents, and a Scene zooms all the way in — the one stretch where Microscope plays like a traditional RPG, with characters living through a moment. ### Scenes A Scene runs a fixed procedure: **state the Question** it must answer ("Why does the king become a tyrant?"), **set the stage**, **choose the characters**, then play until the players know the answer — it doesn't matter whether the *characters* know it. You **can't change the future**: once a fact is on the timeline it stays, so a Scene can only reveal the how and why of what's already settled, never undo it. When the Scene answers, you judge whether it ended **Light or Dark** against the palette. ### Conflict and the Timeline There are no dice and no stats. The **Push** system handles disputes over the world: if a player makes something happen outside their character and you want it changed, you Push — suggest your alternative, and everyone **votes** on which version stands. Beyond that, **Legacies** let a long-lived character or institution echo down the ages, and you can "**Nuke** [a chunk of history]" (Atlantis, most famously) to rewrite what you built. The finished history can be **stored** and continued in later sessions. ## Editions - **Microscope** (1st edition, 2011) — the original fractal history game. *In the library.* - **Microscope Explorer** — a Ben Robbins expansion building on Microscope. *In the library.* - **Microscope Chronicle** (2025 playtests) — the newer Microscope-family game, held as April/May 2025 playtest drafts. *In the library.* **Microscope** is by Ben Robbins, creator of **[[Follow]]** and **[[Kingdom]]**. ## References - [Microscope — Lame Mage Productions](https://www.lamemage.com/microscope/)