Microscope — GMless history-building game

"Create the history of an entire civilization in a single evening."

DiceНе нужны

Players2–5

Prep0 min

Foundry VTTНе нужен

Complexity

What is this system

Not an RPG in the traditional sense. It's a collaborative history-building tool. No GM, no dice. Players create eras, events within eras, and scenes within events — in any order. Scale: from millennia to a single conversation. Perfect as a Session Zero for any campaign.

Setting

Any! You create it yourselves. Want the history of a galactic empire from birth to collapse? A family's story across 500 years? The history of magic from discovery to prohibition? The only limit is imagination.

What it looks like at the table

No dice. No GM. Anton creates an Era: 'The Machine Uprising.' Masha adds an Event within it: 'The last human city surrenders.' But then Dima places an Event BEFORE that: 'Humans and machines sign a peace treaty.' So the treaty was broken? By whom? Masha creates a Scene to answer that question.

Playstyle

Worldbuilding Narrative

Key mechanics

Fractal history

Eras, Events, Scenes. Zoom from millennia to a single conversation. Infinite depth.

No GM

Everyone is equal. Each round someone sets the focus. Everyone builds the story around it.

Non-linearity

The ending first, then the cause. Any moment in any order. Turns narrative perception inside out.

Session Zero

Perfect for building a world before a campaign. Create the universe together, then play in it.

What people say

Microscope is the best session zero tool ever created. We used it to build our campaign world and the players are SO much more invested because they created the history themselves.— u/worldbuilder_gm, r/rpg

Playing Microscope backwards — defining the end of a civilization first, then exploring why it happened — was the most mind-bending storytelling experience I've had at a table.— u/fractal_historian, r/rpg

Art & materials