What do you think?
Rate this book
Microscope Explorer: An Expansion for Microscope
Microscope Explorer is a supplement for Microscope, the award-winning role-playing game of epic histories.
The new book is loaded with tools and strategies to get the most out of your Microscope games. One of the biggest challenges is picking an idea for your history: the possibilities are nearly infinite but game time is not. Microscope Explorer includes new step-by-step SEEDS to get you started playing more quickly. Want something novel to spark your imagination? Roll on an ORACLE to generate a random seed instead.
Explorer also lets you use Microscope in entirely new ways. It includes three spin-off games, each based on the core principles of Microscope but with careful adjustments to create different experiences:
UNION transforms the normal Microscope history into a family tree. You go back and fill in the blanks to explore the lives of the ancestors whose unions brought each new generation into existence.
CHRONICLE focuses and streamlines Microscope, narrowing the history to the story of a single thing, such as a building, a city or a ring of power. It also brings individuals to the forefront of the story with anchor characters whose lives are intertwined with each chapter of the history. It's a simpler, more personal, Microscope.
ECHO lets you muck around with alternate history and cause-and-effect. Travel back in time and change a single moment and see how that change would echo forward, reshaping your history or utterly destroying it.
There are also techniques for using Microscope for WORLD-BUILDING, rules EXPERIMENTS and more.
The new book is loaded with tools and strategies to get the most out of your Microscope games. One of the biggest challenges is picking an idea for your history: the possibilities are nearly infinite but game time is not. Microscope Explorer includes new step-by-step SEEDS to get you started playing more quickly. Want something novel to spark your imagination? Roll on an ORACLE to generate a random seed instead.
Explorer also lets you use Microscope in entirely new ways. It includes three spin-off games, each based on the core principles of Microscope but with careful adjustments to create different experiences:
UNION transforms the normal Microscope history into a family tree. You go back and fill in the blanks to explore the lives of the ancestors whose unions brought each new generation into existence.
CHRONICLE focuses and streamlines Microscope, narrowing the history to the story of a single thing, such as a building, a city or a ring of power. It also brings individuals to the forefront of the story with anchor characters whose lives are intertwined with each chapter of the history. It's a simpler, more personal, Microscope.
ECHO lets you muck around with alternate history and cause-and-effect. Travel back in time and change a single moment and see how that change would echo forward, reshaping your history or utterly destroying it.
There are also techniques for using Microscope for WORLD-BUILDING, rules EXPERIMENTS and more.
- GenresRole Playing GamesGaming
147 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2015
2 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 23, 2016
The early parts of Explorer support playing the existing game. I find the advice interesting enough. I was less enthused by the numerous story seeds, because I'm not really looking to create someone else's settings. That's nothing on the seeds; they seem evocative. On the other hand, the oracles, which randomize starting points for Microscope, felt really clever and interesting.
The material on using Microscope to create the basis of other games was one of the sections that I really wanted to read, because that's exactly what we've been doing and it contains some neat ideas and some obvious explanations.
(Really, that's a good description of this whole first half of the book: a mixture of the mundane and the miraculous.)
Moving on to the game variants.
Union is quite a clever way to use Microscope to create family trees. It does a great job of varying the core rules to the game to support this sort of play, while staying close enough to those rules so that the game remains familiar. I'd definitely use this to help define heroes in my own history.
Chronicle lets you write the history of a specific thing in Microscope. It's actually quite similar to the original game, other than that constraint, but it's kept interesting and different by the introduction of a new "Anchor" character for each era, which is an intriguing variation.
Echo is a game of using time travel to create and recreate history. It's a bit beyond my personal desires for Microscope, but it might be the most fascinating part of this book. The rule system is a massive revision of the Microscope game, and it looks like it'll make a really fun game of timey-wimeyness.
Finally, the Experiments that end the book are interesting seeds for more variants of Microscope and interesting advice for using the original rules in slightly different ways.
As a whole, Explorer is mixed. Some parts feel mundane, while others seem almost as revolutionary as the original. The three game variants are the strong heart of the book, and the best reason to buy and read it.
The material on using Microscope to create the basis of other games was one of the sections that I really wanted to read, because that's exactly what we've been doing and it contains some neat ideas and some obvious explanations.
(Really, that's a good description of this whole first half of the book: a mixture of the mundane and the miraculous.)
Moving on to the game variants.
Union is quite a clever way to use Microscope to create family trees. It does a great job of varying the core rules to the game to support this sort of play, while staying close enough to those rules so that the game remains familiar. I'd definitely use this to help define heroes in my own history.
Chronicle lets you write the history of a specific thing in Microscope. It's actually quite similar to the original game, other than that constraint, but it's kept interesting and different by the introduction of a new "Anchor" character for each era, which is an intriguing variation.
Echo is a game of using time travel to create and recreate history. It's a bit beyond my personal desires for Microscope, but it might be the most fascinating part of this book. The rule system is a massive revision of the Microscope game, and it looks like it'll make a really fun game of timey-wimeyness.
Finally, the Experiments that end the book are interesting seeds for more variants of Microscope and interesting advice for using the original rules in slightly different ways.
As a whole, Explorer is mixed. Some parts feel mundane, while others seem almost as revolutionary as the original. The three game variants are the strong heart of the book, and the best reason to buy and read it.
February 2, 2024
Interesting additions to the Microscope line. The one that fits what I want to do most closely is the island-mapping scheme described near the end. There's just enough detail given for me to think my idea will also work (though it's slightly more complex).
Worth a read if you want to play variations on Microscope. Even if you don't use any of the listed ones, exactly, seeing the adjustments made can help figure out how to make your idea work.
One thing that amused me: most of the first chapter of the book can be summarized as, "You know that rule that was in the original Microcope book? Yes, we really meant it as a rule and think you should be using it."
Oh, the book also has some generating systems for coming up with Microscope plot and/or setting ideas. I skimmed those. If I wanted to use them, I'd probably check if someone had made an online generator using them, or make my own via perchance. *shrugs*
Worth a read if you want to play variations on Microscope. Even if you don't use any of the listed ones, exactly, seeing the adjustments made can help figure out how to make your idea work.
One thing that amused me: most of the first chapter of the book can be summarized as, "You know that rule that was in the original Microcope book? Yes, we really meant it as a rule and think you should be using it."
Oh, the book also has some generating systems for coming up with Microscope plot and/or setting ideas. I skimmed those. If I wanted to use them, I'd probably check if someone had made an online generator using them, or make my own via perchance. *shrugs*
February 4, 2023
While Microscope: Explorer is labelled as an expansion, I cannot help but think of it as more of an elaboration. The original Microscope book is very simple. It is easy for me, though I've not yet played it, to see that a player or facilitator would run into problems that the book does not offer solutions to. Microscope is really rooted in the creativity of the players, those who enjoy, appreciate, or need more structure might struggle. I think Ben Robbins received that criticism, or something similar, because this book seems designed to scaffold play. It is intended, I believe, to help players get out of jams.
The book can be divided into two categories: tips to improve play, and premises to spark ideas for players. I think both are valuable, and helps enhance the game. I'd argue that including it in the core would be valuable.
The book can be divided into two categories: tips to improve play, and premises to spark ideas for players. I think both are valuable, and helps enhance the game. I'd argue that including it in the core would be valuable.
December 2, 2022
Useful expansion to (and further explanation of) Microscope. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
May 7, 2016
So, if you've read my Microscope review, you probably know how I feel about that game. Just to summarize though, I think it's interesting, a good idea that makes people think in ways that are a little different. It's not perfect if you're looking for a standard tabletop RPG experience, but it's a fun world building tool that's easy to set up.
Microscope Explorer expands on what's given in the original 81 pages of Microscope. Mainly, this supplement clarifies what's in the main book, gives some examples to help generate ideas for new games and timelines, and adds some new rules to the original game to help you handle different situations from the main one in Microscope, some even as experimental ideas to help you build your own unique rules off of.
This one's about twice as long as the main book, but it's not too much more complex. If you wanted, you could probably skip over a great deal of information in this to pick and choose when you think you could use it (honestly I didn't need much in the way of clarification, but the brainstorming and experimental ideas were more interesting, so I would probably just jump to there from now on). Rather than just add things that work within the present system, the game actually suggests serious changes to what the rules are as written (which does happen in RPGs but not often enough). Microscope is not what I would call a mechanically complex or 'crunchy' system, but the suggestions are often enough to get me to consider what could be. Microscope on it's own is kind of a freedom paradox (as a lot of games without a defined setting are); if you don't have a pathological complex to set stories in a certain direction, the options of infinity can be daunting.
Is it necessary? Not really. It costs as much as the main book, which bumps it up to about average RPG inital investment range if you buy it physically along with the main book. I think it could help anyone who isn't as experienced with role playing games or have some hangups with the system, or if they're just hoping to create something different with the concepts the game brings up but don't quite have the right direction yet.
I would say you should get this if you really like what you see in Microscope, because honestly I think this is the kind of stuff that should have come with the game initially (and probabaly should be in more RPGs). What it presents is some options, maybe the kind of thing you can build a roadmap from, which I think is always a good thing, many rpgs and systems for them don't present a lot of options other than what's written on the page, thus one can feel that freedom paradox or like there's only one way to play.
Microscope Explorer expands on what's given in the original 81 pages of Microscope. Mainly, this supplement clarifies what's in the main book, gives some examples to help generate ideas for new games and timelines, and adds some new rules to the original game to help you handle different situations from the main one in Microscope, some even as experimental ideas to help you build your own unique rules off of.
This one's about twice as long as the main book, but it's not too much more complex. If you wanted, you could probably skip over a great deal of information in this to pick and choose when you think you could use it (honestly I didn't need much in the way of clarification, but the brainstorming and experimental ideas were more interesting, so I would probably just jump to there from now on). Rather than just add things that work within the present system, the game actually suggests serious changes to what the rules are as written (which does happen in RPGs but not often enough). Microscope is not what I would call a mechanically complex or 'crunchy' system, but the suggestions are often enough to get me to consider what could be. Microscope on it's own is kind of a freedom paradox (as a lot of games without a defined setting are); if you don't have a pathological complex to set stories in a certain direction, the options of infinity can be daunting.
Is it necessary? Not really. It costs as much as the main book, which bumps it up to about average RPG inital investment range if you buy it physically along with the main book. I think it could help anyone who isn't as experienced with role playing games or have some hangups with the system, or if they're just hoping to create something different with the concepts the game brings up but don't quite have the right direction yet.
I would say you should get this if you really like what you see in Microscope, because honestly I think this is the kind of stuff that should have come with the game initially (and probabaly should be in more RPGs). What it presents is some options, maybe the kind of thing you can build a roadmap from, which I think is always a good thing, many rpgs and systems for them don't present a lot of options other than what's written on the page, thus one can feel that freedom paradox or like there's only one way to play.
May 5, 2016
A nice expansion to the original game, this book includes advice on playing, quick-start ideas, and variants. Not at all essential for playing the game, but nice to have.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews