The Seven-Sided Die

A Wednesday in mid-September we had an evening of Microscope. We had a friend over, D, who is a geek of many stripes but roleplaying is not one of them. However, she much enjoyed Zombie Cinema a few weeks ago. She's also working on an Interactive Fiction game, so she was totally on-board with playtesting an unpublished roleplaying game. So. Microscope.

Since this is a playtest report, I'm going to go through the paces:

Big Picture

We started with the concept, which I always find the most challenging when I'm teaching people. People are very invested in the first idea they come up with, whether it's of a useful form or scope, or not. So it takes a while to pin down a concept we all like. I tried a rhetorical tack this time that I've taken from reading the most recent Burning Wheel supplement, the Adventure Burner: I asked everyone to put ideas out there, offering and then discarding them quickly, until one landed on the table that made everyone excited. The trick seems to be to emphasise how much more we'll enjoy it if we're all excited in the idea, and that it's not that the discarded ideas are bad concepts for a Microscope history, just that there are many ideas that are good for a set of people other than the one around the table right now.

We hit on the idea of the rise and fall of the Second American Empire, which had a few bits and pieces that excited us, but none of the ideas that name gave each of us were compatible. A few iterations later we came to—ironically—the bog-standard rise and fall of a galactic empire that seems to be the first default of Microscope groups. In our defense, we got there by parallel evolution and surprised ourselves that we'd come to the stereotypical history concept.

Bookend History

We discussed structure of the game a bit and our concept of the galactic empire, and set our starting and end points:

First Settlement (light) [START]

In which many colony ships set out through wormholes discovered in Earth space, and settled the habitable systems found beyond.

PAX Flu (dark) [END]

In which something called the PAX flu[1. Both of them had just come back from PAX.], also known as the Peace Flu, was the final blow that shattered the empire.

The "PAX flu" was also the first sign that the game would definitely have at least small bits of silliness in it.[2. My reasons for gaming lead me to be more impatient than amused by the silly stuff people bring to the table, but my wife is a silly person and I love her. The "PAX Flu" was D's idea, so I was definitely out-voted by the silly faction.]

Palette

I explained the palette, which is the other thing that seems to take a bit every time I explain it. I should mention here that I didn't read the How to Teach Microscope section before the game due to *toddler-mumble-mumble-toddler*, so I get to wear the Playtester Shame Hat next GoPlayNW.

I jumped in first with "no FTL (except wormholes)", giving us a nice fragile network for the empire. My wife M added "no wormhole machines", i.e., things that could make new wormholes apart from the naturally-occurring ones. After some though, D added "no time travel". I wanted to do another round and added "yes sentient robots". M anted up "yes juggalos".

And in such moments is history made.

Juggalos, in case anyone is unfamiliar are… oh hell, just go Google it. The relevant parts are that they're fans of Insane Clown Posse, who recently did that mock-tacular song "Miracles" about how they consider high school–level physics to be examples of Clarke's Third Law; they wear a lot of grease paint; they're tightly-bound by their identity as a tribe; and their view of the world is vaguely nihilist. I made a face and promised to blow up their planet as my first event[2. A toothless threat in Microscope, which is kind of awesome.], but she was passionate about it and I was already adapting to having a serious game liberally sprinkled with silliness.

So. Juggalos in Space.

First Pass

We had three players, so after our first first pass we did another to get a more fleshed-out timeline to start normal play with. (Again, I was just making this up: Shame Hat. But it worked fine.)

The first first pass gave us the periods:

Trade Constellation (light)

In which the colony worlds have knit together a trade network of yet more wormholes that connect them to each other directly, not mediated by Earth space, and an era of prosperity is enjoyed in the Trade Constellation.

Robot Prohibition (dark)

In which sentient robots are banned, and they are forced underground. There is some kind of robot underground railway, but nothing more than that was nailed down. This was placed after Trade Constellation and before PAX Flu.

…and the event:

Founding of Faygo Colony by The Dark Caravan (light)

In which the Juggalo colonists of The Dark Caravan have finally made planetfall, and deploy their pre-fab dome city, to much joy, ICP-playing, and Faygo-drinking. This was placed, naturally, in the period "First Settlement."

Our second first pass added the periods:

The Robot Regency (dark)

In which an infant emperor is orphaned, and a robot is given the responsibility to rule in the child's stead until their majority. Although the robot's regency was just and measured, it was a dark period because of the intense resentment felt and unrest caused by of a few groups. Placed after Robot Regency and before PAX Flu.

Silence of the Juggalos (light)

In which the wormhole to Juggalo Space collapses, cutting them off from the rest of the wormhole network. Light, because, well, yeah. Placed between Robot Regency and Robot Prohibition.

Renaissance / Enlightenment (light)

In which a rediscovery of First Settlement and Trade Constellation culture, technology, and learning leads the empire into a new era of prosperity and so forth. Placed after Robot Prohibition and before PAX Flu.

That gave us a starting timeline that looked like this:

• First Settlement (light) [START]
  • Founding of Faygo Colony by The Dark Caravan (light)
• Trade Constellation (light)
• The Robot Regency (dark)
• Silence of the Juggalos (light)
• Robot Prohibition (dark)
• Renaissance / Enlightenment (light)
• PAX Flu (dark) [END]

With that we were ready to start the normal turn sequence.

First Focus: Juggalos + Technology

Damned Juggalos.

M was the first Lens, and picked "Juggalos + Technology". That included their relationship to their own technology, since that was already an outstanding "bwhu?" for our group that needed some answers.

(At this point in writing this playtest report I developed a bad stomach bug and then we had a family emergency, so the memory of the game had two weeks to become fuzzier. I'm going to be less exacting from here. Alas.)

M opted not to make a nested set of history, going with a Scene in "Founding of Faygo". There was some waffling about whether we should kick off with a scene, but having seen Ben Robbins do that at GoPlayNW to good effect (and having read in passing that part of the "How to Teach Microscope" section!) I assured her that scenes go much smoother in this version of Microscope.

1st Scene Question: "How did SnazzyDog, Juggalo Prince, die during the deployment of Faygo's prefab environment?"

Set the Stage: The Dark Caravan is in orbit of Faygo, a barren planet around a star in an alien system, after wanding for years in Earth space looking for a wormhole. The crew are preparing to deploy the dome city, also to be known as Faygo. The Prince and pilot are on the bridge.

Check Drama: Light Drama was applied to the Period since there was none before the scene began.

Choose Characters: Prince SnazzyDog and the ship's pilot are required. D picks a Juggalo janitor, I pick the pilot, and M is left with the Juggalo Prince.

Reveal Thoughts: Crap, this is always where I need to write things down or record them. I don't remember the exact thoughts revealed. D's was about something leaking, I think. Mine was wondering what that blinking light on the control panel meant. I don't remember M's, but it set up the Prince as flighty.

The scene started on the bridge, with the Prince nagging the pilot about when he could push the Big Red Button. The pilot was flustered, trying to figure out what the blinking light meant. He flipped through manuals, getting increasingly flustered with his superior dancing about nonchalantly and pestering him about the Big Red Button. The janitor comes in, makes obeisance to the Prince, and sets about cleaning stuff. The pilot goes to another locker and pulls out more manuals as the janitor humbly asks the Prince to join in on the celebratory dancing about. The pilot finally finds something that explains the blinking light, and informs the Prince that the Big Red Button is broken. But there is a backup button in the cargo bay holding the prefab environment! They go down there, followed by a gaggle of Juggalo reporters and various hangers-on.

The hanger is long and could hold a small spaceship. (Picture the hold of a Star Destroyer.) There is a massive rectangular object taking up most of this cavernous space. There is a raised platform with the Backup Big Red Button. Before the Prince pushes it, the pilot hands him a bottle of Faygo to cristen the prefab brick, which smashes satisfactorily. The Prince pushes the Backup Big Red Button and… D shouts out "Nothing happens!"

At this point we each have different ideas of what happens. I've got an idea, so I explain the scene-resolution vote mechanic. I offer the counter that the Button works, but the containment field doesn't and so everyone gets sucked out into space as the prefab environment drops toward the planet. That would answer the question! The vote goes to D, so nothing happens.

The Prince is not pleased, he pouts and stamps his feet, and then… we do another vote. We were still shaky on the voting mechanic itself and how to leverage the voting to make things happen smoothly, so there was a bunch of discussion at this point and some explanation that counters can be "what she said, and…". The vote get done, and it turns out that there was an activation switch that the pilot forgot to flip on the Backup Big Red Button. He notices it, and goes to flip it. Meanwhile, the Prince has lost all patients and reason, and gone over to the bay doors with a crowbar to impotently try to lever them open. The pilot flips the switch. The containment field works, but the Prince is so close to the prefab brick that he gets sucked out through the field's shaped breach along with the brick. Victory and sorrow for the Juggalos.

So that went well enough, and we got a taste of how scenes work. We judged that dark, because despite how eliminating a parasitic and unpredictable noble did the Juggalos a lot of good at that critical juncture, it was a blow to morale and a tragedy on the day that should have been a celebration.

We struggled a bit in both votes because our proposals and counter-proposals somehow had to be "light" in order to invoke the Drama necessary to bring things to a vote. We weren't entirely consistent with that. We already knew that the Prince would die, so to bring the scene to a resolution we either had to make up stuff to frame it positively ("maybe the Prince is a jerk and his people would be better off without him"), or we had to set up a negative event (death) with positive things. It didn't feel quite natural.

Following that, I made a Dictated Scene. I'd been wondering how individual Juggalos, being willful technical incompetents, survived the hazards of colony life, and decided that it was time to introduce the Sentient Robots from the palette and implied in the "Robot Regency" Period.

2nd Scene Question: "How do Juggalos survive colony hazards?"

Answer: "Guardian Angels", sentient robots assigned to each Juggalo, keep them safe. I narrated a bit about the Juggalo "techs" going into the Angel containment section of the ship, going to each pod with a printout of how to do the activation, and releasing each Angel. Pre-programmed to seek out their assigned Juggalo, the Angels took it from there, leaving the containment area and going to meet their Juggalo to accompany them down to the newly-deployed colony. Judged light, because the Guardian Angels were definitely a hopeful element. The Prince's Guardian Angel is orphaned…

After that, D made a new Event in "The Robot Regency" Period: "Royal Robot Sex Scandal (w/ a Juggalo)". This she was marked light because, though it was a PR disaster, it distracted the rebellious elements away from effective activism against the Robot Regent by giving them something titillating/enraging to waste their energy on.

M finished up her turn as Lens by making an Event in the "Silence of the Juggalos" Period: "Guardian Angels collapse the Faygo-system wormhole to prevent war", a dark period. Again she declined to make nested history in favour of moving the game along.

First Legacy: The orphaned Guardian Angel

D, to M's right, picked this Legacy. I opted to make an Event: "Death of Emperor & Empress, Appointment of orphaned guardian angel as Regent" inside "The Robot Regency" Period, which nicely explained how that happened. This was light, as the new Regent was an able and fair ruler in the child's name, despite the nay-sayers.

Second Focus: Wormholes

It was my turn to play Lens and I wanted to hear more about the wormholes. I didn't really have an idea of where that might go, and I wanted to find out.

I made an Event in the Renaissance/Englightenment Period: "The wormholes of the Imperial Homeworld are reopened." This implied that the seat of the Empire had been cut off at some point. I like to make stuff like that to show off how making history can imply something about events in the rest of the timeline simply by existing and the game forbidding that existing history be contradicted. At some point, the wormholes around the seat of the Empire must have become unusable! This reopening was light.

D opted to make an Event in the "Trade Constellation" Period: "Discovery & Slavery of tentacle monsters" through a new wormhole. This amused everyone, and we were curious to explore this bit of shameful strangeness on the part of the proto-empire. She understandably marked that dark.

M made a Juggalo-related (of course) wormhole Event to expand the "Renaissance" Period: "Juggalo Civilization redisovers wormhole; is reunited with greater humanity." She marked it light, since it was good for the Juggalos.

I opted for a nested bit of history to finish this Focus off, in the "PAX Flu" Period. I made the Event "Something changes in the wormholes—humans who pass through sicken & die soon after." Definitely dark, that. Inside I made a Dictated Scene.

Third Scene Question: Why are the wormholes deadly?

A: A traveller in robes and cowls goes from system to system. This one itinerant guardian angel poisons the wormhole network as it passes through each wormhole. It is carrying something in its torso that does this passively. The reason is inscrutable, but must be (at least to its best belief) for the greater good, due to the implications in the "Peace Flu" alternate title for the enclosing Period. However, this is a dark, dark thing that is done in the name of peace, and we judge it so.

This Focus turn passed fairly quickly, without any scenes, since we'd got the hang of it. Alas, we'd also run out of time, so we didn't get in a third Focus for D as the Lens.

Second Legacy: Guardian Angel Robots develop a libido!

To my right, M created this one. To her right, D was given the chance to make some history Focused on this Legacy. She made an Event in the "Robot Prohibition Era" Period: "Original Robot Sex Scandal eventually deposes current emperor." The details of how the sex scandal from the earlier Period came to haunt that later emperor weren't clear, but we speculated about how long guardian angels lived and whether it might be the same robot from the original scandal (which was tentatively named "Orangina"), causing trouble for later Imperial generations. This was dark, in line with the enclosing Period.

And that was the game. We had to pack up because it was a week night and we all had to get up in the morning.

The final history

The history timeline looked like this at the end:

• First Settlement (light) [START]
  • Founding of Faygo Colony by The Dark Caravan (light)
    • Q: How did SnazzyDog, Juggalo Prince, die during the deployment of Faygo's prefab environment? A: Sucked out airlock with prefab dome due to own stupidity. (dark)
    • Q: How do Juggalos survive colony hazards? A: "Guardian Angels," sentient robots assigned to each Juggalo keep them safe. (light)
• Trade Constellation (light)
  • Discover & Slavery of tentacle monsters (dark)
• The Robot Regency (dark)
  • Death of Emperor & Empress, Appointment of orphaned guardian angel as Regent (light)
• Silence of the Juggalos (light)
  • Guardian Angels collapse the wormhole to prevent war (dark)
• Robot Prohibition (dark)
  • Original Robot sex scandal eventually deposes current emperor (dark)
• Renaissance / Enlightenment (light)
  • The wormholes of the Imperial Homeworld are reopened (light)
  • Juggalo Civilisation rediscovers wormhole; is reunited with greater humanity (light)
• PAX Flu (dark) [END]
  • Something changes in the wormholes—humans who pass through sicken and die soon after (dark)
    • Q: Why are the wormholes deadly? A: One itinerant guardian angel poisons the wormhole network (dark)

The focus record was:

1. Juggalos + Technology
2. Wormholes

The two legacies were:

• The orphaned guardian angel (D)
• Guardian Angel Robots develop a libido! (M)

The palette was:

• Yes
  • sentient robots
  • juggalos
• No
  • FTL (except wormholes)
  • wormhole machines
  • time travel

We've been playing a three-player game of Burning Wheel (that I haven't yet written AP reports for), but one player had to bow out for personal reasons and another is moving away soon, so it suddenly didn't have any future left in it. I proposed instead that we playtest Ben Robbins' microscope, which I'd just finished reading the night before. I gushed about it already, so I was very pleased to be able to playtest it.

microscope is a game where you literally play history. Since Ben has been generous enough to let playtesters publicly write about their games, I'm going to write my playtest report here for everyone to enjoy (or slog through, as the case may be).

Familiarity with microscope will help make sense of this, but even lacking that, seeing what a game of microscope can produce is really neat. I'll start with what we ended up with, answer the playtest questions for Ben, talk about the observations and questions we had, and then finish up with a look at the four scenes that we played out.

Our history

Here's what the game looked like when we finished.

Concept: (Near-future Earth.) Humans adapt to the new ice age by creating transgenic humans.

• (start) Slave vat-humans adapted to cold prop up humanity against encroaching ice age. (dark) (1 tone debt)
  • The First Valley Alliance ends in transgenic bloodshed. (dark)
  • Decanting of Adam L16 (light)
    • Q: What happened to the other 19 L-series? / A: The others weren't viable due to a genetic mistake. Adam is more than the gov't paid for. / Setting: The decanting lab (light)
• The Coal Wars (dark)
  • The Calgary Oasis is wiped out by an engineered plague (dark)
• Ascendancy of Portland, Jewel of the North! (light) (2 tone debt)
  • Local "election" in Portland shows deep divisions in migrant enclaves (dark)
  • Passing of the Transhumans Management Act (Portland) (dark)
• The Portland–Las Vegas War (dark) (1 tone debt)
  • "Hostile Context Specialists" (HCS, or "hicks") ignore orders to commit atrocity (light)
    • Q: Why do the HCSs disobey? / A: They were offered their freedom & community / Setting: A HCS encampment outside Las Vegas (light)
• Humanity lives in sealed underground Arcologies (light) (1 tone debt)
  • Humans make friends with artificial intelligences (light)
    • Q: Why did humans turn over leadership to the over-intelligence? / A: AI manipulated the child majority to hand it perpetual, benevolent power. / Setting: A child's bedroom in an arcology (dark)
  • The Last Tinker is killed by rioters opposed to the Arcology Free Exchange agreement. (dark)
• Rule of the Over AI (light)
  • It becomes clear that orthodox humanity is obsolete (light)
• (end) "Humanity" expands to space & vacuum (light)
  • Completion of the Majorca Space Station (light)
  • Vacuum-morphs now outnumber all other human morphs combined (light)
    • Q: What is the life of a vacuum-morph like? / A: Weightless & spherical / Setting: The first all-vac habitat (light)

Two legacies were created: "Adam L16 (starts light)"; and "Philosophy: Gengineering is moral when benefiting humankind as a whole (starts light)".

Some context

Ben Robbins provided the following questions for playtesters. Since I'm going to point him here for the playtest report, I might as well answer them here.

Did the other players read the rules or did you explain the rules to them?

I explained the rules to the other two players. I gave a loose description while pitching the game. When we sat down to set up, I read or paraphrased from the rules until it was clear what we had to do next. When we got to the next step, I read/paraphrased some more. I skipped the details of Legacies and Tone Debt while mentioning what they were for, and left the Scene mechanics for when we started the first Scene.

What parts of the rules got used in play and which didn't? Did people create legacies? Did they invoke tone debt and/or legacies to control scenes? What types of control did they use?

We created legacies and noted tone debt, but the only time either was invoked for scene control was by me, to establish a fact and to narrate a postscript.

How many games sessions did you play? Was it the same history continued or different histories?

We've played one session. I'll likely write a separate playtest report for each game, simply because our play schedule is once or twice a month. We will probably not continue this history, partly because there are so many other premises to explore and partly because the first go-round with a new system always feels a bit tainted by our lack of familiarity.

Were you playing with people you play with regularly (people you know) or with strangers you got together just to try the game?

We have all played together regularly.

What are the last three game systems you played, besides Microscope (this helps me get a sense of what different groups are used to).

The last systems I've played are Burning Wheel, Savage Worlds, and D&D 4th Edition (in reverse chronological order). That's the same for one of the other players. The third player's last three system have been Burning Wheel, her own in-development storygame system, and the third I'm not sure of. Possibly Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, or another Forge-like storygame system.

Observations, questions, and uncertainties during the game

• We had a hard time coming up with a concept. I spent a lot of time trying to get the other two players to think sufficiently big. Both wanted to think in terms of story themes ("pirates!", "social justice issues!") rather than a historical scope. Even once that hurdle was cleared, they were mostly thinking on the scale of events or short arcs of time. This is where having read the rules and the examples of play would have made a big difference. We did eventually have a short list of interesting premises, and picked one from that, but it took us a goodly amount of time to get there.
• When the first scene was added and begun, one player remarked, "Oh, are we playing now?" She seemed to have had the impression that the early part of the game where the level of magnification is limited to Periods and Events (because no Scenes had yet been added) was still just setup for the "real" game. Since there's no roleplaying involved at those levels of magnification, just vague storytelling, that's not really a surprising assumption from a new player. She has previous experience in collaborative setting-creation as a lead-up to the real play of a system (such as in Burning Wheel).
• Can legacies be made at any time? During his turn as the Lens, fimmtiu asked about legacies and wanted to make one right then and there. The rules seem to expect that legacies will be created during a scene just before they're invoked, but there isn't an explicit rule about not creating them at any time. That's why we had one legacy ("Adam L16"), which was never invoked to Take Control.
• I often ended up coaching too much. As the one who had read the rules, I spent a lot of time coming up with examples to convey what was expected from a player on their turn, but that turned into making suggestions to spur play onward. I really, really had to curb this and was only partially successful.
• Can focus be "notable figures"? i.e., a category rather than a particular? The examples of Foci are all singular and particular: "anything", "an institution", "a Period", "a concept". On fimmtiu's turn as the Lens he declared the category "notable figures" as the Focus. This seemed to me too loose, since it could be all kinds of different notable people and hence not very "focused", but we ran with it anyway. The "notable figures" we ended up focusing on were scattered throughout the time line. I think I prefer more concrete foci.
• We go meta a lot around scenes. We ended up negotiating and doing a lot of discussion about setting, scene direction, and the like before and during scenes. We had a hard time figuring out how to move toward the Answer to the Question solely in-play and kept resorting to meta-conversations to orchestrate our play. There was also a lot of "these people could be like this..." and "how about we make that technology work like this..?" At every point where we had a question about how the world was, it was hard to curb our tendency to automatically speculate about and flesh out the world in the way we might if we were doing a traditional (but collaborative) world-creation exercise.
• Being restricted to only one "free" NPC is pretty limiting. Did we play this wrong? I kept wanting to bring in more NPCs to move things along and flesh out the scene or environment. Are all NPCs created equal, or can you loosely control a pile of very minor NPCs in, say, your VIP character's entourage? We ended up playing that rule pretty loose. (See the next, related point.)
• We had a hard time introducing facts and events during scenes according to the rules. We just introduced stuff beyond our NPCs and PCs to give the scene context, without using the Establish A Fact method of Taking Control Of A Scene. There wasn't enough Tone Debt lying around to account for every fact (and NPC) we seemed to want to introduce. Legacies could have been created and invoked to Establish A Fact, but that would have been several legacies being generated each scene! It wasn't clear where the line lay between things established through narration and things that required Control to establish.
• We tried to negotiate setting details often. There was a natural tendency to try and sort out setting context before beginning a scene. I think there needs to be some way to underscore that the point of a scene is to establish these things in media res. (At least, that's my understanding of the rules at present.)
• We never used tone debt. We played for about five hours. We only realised halfway through that Period Tone Debt could only be moved onto Events during the creation of Events or Scenes nested inside the Periods bearing Tone Debt. When we wanted to use Tone Debt during a scene, it was "too far away" to use because it was still stuck on the Period two levels up. This might be a matter of developing system proficiency.
• I kept forgetting to adhere to the focus. I found that I'd be hunting around on the table for inspiration and places to expand, rather than looking to the Focus for this. The other two players kept reminding me, or asking how what I'd just made related to the focus. We thought that a whiteboard with the Focus written on it would be helpful to keep us, well, focused. (The Lens could be the marker.)
• We never used Making History credits from legacies. We had two legacies, but nobody cashed in on the credits. One of them was mine, and I can only say that I forgot about that on my turn, so focused was I on just going through the play order correctly (and trying to remember to stick to the focus...)
• We never Dictated a Scene. We played them all out instead of the current player electing to Dictate the outcome of a Scene. I can only speak for myself, but it seems like there wasn't much point to dictating it. "The play's the thing" seemed to rule, in that we wanted to use those opportunities for roleplay. There also might have been a rejection of the disparity between the supreme authorial control offered by dictation and the complete unknown that playing out the scene offers. After all, why ask the question if you already know the answer? I'm just not sure what Dictation is in there for... except maybe colour vignettes? (This is something that I didn't ask the other players about, and I'd be curious to hear their take on it in the comments.)
• There are no dice! Even having read it, I didn't realise that microscope was diceless until we actually played it.
• Our scenes meandered a lot. I don't actually think this is related to the dicelessness of the system. Rather, none of us were very aggressive in authoring elements of a scene. We weren't sure how to drive our agenda for answering the Question when the possibilities were wide open, and yet our scene control was limited to what a single PC does and thinks. It was hard to think in terms of what one PC would think and do while at the same time trying to think of how to define, on the fly, the world around the PCs. I think we were also wary of stepping on other's toes too much. In the one scene where I really pushed my agenda, it felt like I was commandeering the scene instead of collaborating on it. Maybe it's not supposed to be a collaborative thing?
• On paper it's odd that legacies need to switch tone after being invoked, but it's awesome in play. Even though no legacy got invoked a second time, just drawing that dark circle on a legacy that started light was thrillingly ominous.

The bottom line however, despite this pile of uncertainties, is that this game was a lot of fun. There were many rough spots, but it was satisfying even in a single session and even for being the first game of microscope that any of us had ever played. We all really wanted to play again, soon, or even right away. Time and tiredness made that last impractical, but we still wanted to.

During a break in the middle we went for a walk and discussed the game a bit. One of the things we all liked was the idea of using microscope to play out the "sequel" of a book/movie/videogame that left us wanting more, or to replace disappointing book/movie sequels such as instalments 2 and 3 of The Matrix or the entirety of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.[1. No offence if you enjoyed those.] We brainstormed a bunch of other things that would be great to play with this. I keep coming up with new premises for interesting games of microscope.

The idea I just had was the career of a bog-standard fantasy adventuring company: begin with their founding, end with their retirement/TPK/whatever; each Period is what would be an adventure in a traditional D&D game, or a chapter in a more storygame system; Events are the different acts of an adventure; and of course Scenes are the bits of awesome, quite, terror, and pathos that make up the adventuring life. I'm a sucker for traditional fantasy, and this would combine my love of storygaming with a traditional-ish D&D romp!

That's another point: having played it, it's much easier to see what you can do with it, and to understand the scale of the parts you are expected to create.

The Scenes

For completeness, I wanted to describe the three Scenes that we played out, and some thoughts on how they went. I'll go in chronological order of play, rather than of the time line.

Unfortunately, there are some hole in my memory regarding scenes. Since everything in a game of microscope corresponds to an artefact on the table, I didn't think to take detailed notes on scene elements and setup. Scenes are oddly unique in that they have a lot of detail, but very little of it is automatically recorded by applying the rules. They're very ephemeral, unlike the rest of a microscope game.

Why did the HCSs ("hicks") disobey [orders to commit an atrocity]?

The Focus when this scene was made was "inter-community relations". Raggedylass was the Lens, and required two Hicks and banned nothing. The setting was a Hicks encampment outside Las Vegas. The immediate context was the Portland/Las Vegas War and the disobeyed order. The implication understood from context was that Hicks are transhumans serving human masters, engineered for combat operations.

Characters were a "groundhog" Hick ("#256"), designed for combat engineering, demolitions, and sapping-type work; the human Major commanding the groundhog squad from the Portland base over a secured commlink; and an enemy Hick. The Major and #256 were on-stage to start.

There was some chatter about the commlink being compromised, and then some doubts voiced by #256 about the number of unshielded civilians at the objective being picked up on his magnetic imaging HUD. Some setting established: they were underground, approaching a buried "village" built right on top of the objective. That didn't match the briefing on this power plant. Via imaging the squad picked up a Morse-coded pulse requesting parley off to one side. #256, already having doubts, used the excuse of the bad commlink to have the comms Hick cut the Major off and make it look like interference.

Proceeding to the parley coordinates, a single Las Vegas Hick is sitting and reading a book. He offers the soldiers an alternative: the villagers have cut a deal for some independence from Las Vegas, and want the Hicks on-board for security. The Portland Hicks could be part of that.

It was a nice ending to the scene. The Hicks disobeyed (and deserted!) because they were offered freedom and community, something they didn't have in their slave crèches back home.

What happened to the other 19 L-series?

Focus is "notable figures". Adam L16 (one of our legacies), was about to be decanted. Vat-humans had previously been merely cold-tolerant and otherwise unchanged, except for their legal status as slaves. Gov't policy has just changed to make them stupider and easier to control, but Adam L16 is going to be the first vat-human who is an improvement on homo sapiens sapiens. (This was established in the Event in which this scene is nested.)

No required or banned characters. Characters chosen are a head scientist on the project, Adam L16, and a gov't attaché sent to oversee the culmination of the project.

The head scientists thought is about how he's in big trouble since everyone's about to find out how he'd meddled with the project specifications. Adam's thought is "I'm already awake!" before being decanted and revived, which is unprecedented. I forgot the suit's thought.

Adam is responsive very quickly, soon showing strength enough to stand and walk around when everyone had been prepared for rolling him to intensive care in a high-tech gurney. The gov't suit is wary, remarking on just how remarkable Adam L16's abilities already are. The head scientist at first is fussing over Adam, and then gets into a nervous conversation about Adam with the suit. Adam wanders about, slowly, taking everything in while a gaggle of techs follow him and prod him with instruments.

Adam asks who all the others (in the tubes) are. "They're just like me." He observes what a tech is doing at a computer terminal for a while, and then suddenly points at an unremarkable data line: "They're dying." He sits down, and rapidly navigates through the experimental protocol and logs. He points to a gene-splicing specification. "Here. This is the mistake. They're not viable." The suit stares, then excuses himself to "make a call." As soon as the suit is through the door Adam wipes the experiment data off the terminal and somehow accesses the facility network, then with a gesture cuts off all voice connections to the outside. "We need to get out of here. You put these memories in my head. There's so much, I need to sit and think. They're not going to let me do that."

That answered the Question, but I invoked Adam L16 (the legacy) to narrate a Postscript where they escape with their advanced genetic engineering information, and Adam L16 himself, to a neighbouring Valley's polity.

Why did humans turn over leadership to the over-intelligence?

Focus was still "notable figures", the figure in this case being what was to become the Over AI.

Humans live in sealed Arcologies. Recently some of the friendships that these humans have established via telepresence with other humans in other Arcologies have in actual fact been avatars or agents of the artificial intelligences that manage the basic functions of the Arcologies.

The setting for the scene is a child's bedroom. The child (eventually named Cynthia) and an AI are required characters. The third character chosen is a fox-like Familiar, which is a genetically engineered intelligent companion for these isolated humans.

The Familiar's thought is that "the alliance between the Familiars and the AI will ensure this generation does not grow up into tragedy". The child's is "my terminal is acting funny". I've forgotten what the over-intelligence's was.

This scene really meandered. There were conversations with telepresence friends (one of which was the AI) that didn't really go anywhere, but were interesting in a colour-setting way. There were sudden explosions within the Archology, and the "friend" suddenly had to go, to be replaced by computer-voice instructions to stay calm and remain inside your home. There were subtle implications of connections, but no strong drive toward answering the Question. The child's mother came home, who was a member of the Council. She said some nasty things about the "R-10s", presumably residents of a sector or something, and how they never should have been allowed in. Her nastiness and prejudice is played up, but it still doesn't go anywhere.

Partway through the scene the "Gengineering is moral when..." legacy is created and invoked to Establish the Fact that Familiars are two-way empaths who can sense and insert emotions, designed to soothe and improve the mental well-being and development of the latest generation of children. The Familiar suggests that there is an interesting debate topic on Board #432 (or something) that should interest Cynthia and that she might find absorbing enough to shut out all these disturbing events. It's a bunch of kids debating different policy options that the adults might implement. That gets poked at a bit, but still the scene isn't moving toward an answer.

We stop and talk about how we're meandering, and whether what we're playing is heading toward any answers to the Question. We kind of approach negotiations about how to play before we play, but I didn't want to do that. I suggested that we call the scene inconclusive, but we opt to continue.

I had an answer in mind, but I didn't want to steamroll it through. I figured out how to frame things through my character (the Familiar), and just go for it. "Cynthia, there's an alternative to these disturbing and ongoing confrontations. The Arcology AI is well-designed by these adults, but they are too short-sighted to trust it. You know that the AI must obey human commands. Although you children cannot vote on the Council, the AI will take your orders. You outnumber the adults. You can, together, tell the AI to take over political control of the Arcology from the fighting adults."

Cynthia goes back to the debate boards and lobbies hard for that debate option. The children perform a coup d'état, and hand a benevolent dictatorship to the Archology's AI.

(I'm still not sure that taking that much authorial control was my prerogative. The rules as-is seem to imply that that much control needs to be paid for by invoking legacies or tone debt, and I did neither. We just cooperated a lot, and I strongly suggested a conclusion with my fox-thing's speech to Cynthia.)

What is the life of a vacuum-morph like?

This was our last scene, with a focus on the final Period. I was the Lens and just wanted to wind things down. We had a Grandpa vacuum-morph (huge due to the continual molting the early models did) escorting his grandkid and grandkid's friends around the first space habitat that was designed exclusively for vacuum-morphs, with no allowances or compromises made for the other morphs of humans. It was about time, since vacuum-morphs now outnumbered all other morphs put together; there's a lot of room in space.

There were some velcro-hided pack animals and their handler, the kids, grandpa's incompetent spinnerets leaking slightly, kids calling each other names ("You're oblong!" "No, you're oblong!") They communicated via radio-implants, though grandpa's were an older model that could only do real-time over short distances and had to rely on the old, pre-coded messages for speaking across the void.

This was an atmosphere scene: Struts and spars, worries about loose objects posing a danger to bodily integrety, how to cut up an inflated space-cow without it exploding (slice it slowly so that you're only ever cutting frozen meat), what space-cows eat, the etiquette of using silk lines (from the spinnerets) in crowded parts of the habitat, space-cows' prehensile tongues, and overall the implication that a new golden age for humanity is only just beginning.

The end

It was a lot of fun and I'm definitely going to play this again. It's great that it can work as a pickup game since the rules are short and relatively easy to explain, even if the concepts involved are hard to convey at first. I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of history results after a few sessions, as well as seeing how different kinds of roleplayers I know take to it.

One of my readers (hi Chad!) submitted a link to my first BW AP report to reddit, which I only discovered when I saw it in the list of referrers for the article. I love these little discoveries. I've seen links to The Seven-Sided Die coming from places I never knew existed, which is admittedly gratifying, but more importantly it introduces me to blogs and sites that are obviously talking about things I already find interesting.

Reddit has a discussion feature for each link. One of the reddit commentors on that link said, essentially, that they love what they've read in Burning Wheel but they're frustrated by how artificial the scripting seems. I shared a bit about my first successful use of scripting in the Duel of Wits, then realised that I'd glossed over it in the AP report. I want to elaborate on the comment I left over there to fill in the bits I skipped in the AP report.

But first, I need to lay some groundwork.

Fiction first

Burning Wheel appears to be a very rules-heavy game, but it feels oddly lighter to me during play than it looks. I'd almost call it a "medium rules" game because the rules handling doesn't feel cumbersome. What makes the difference is that all of BW rules exist to make your fiction really "pop". Luke Crane seems to have tried very hard to make sure that the rules can always support your fiction before demanding mechanical attention.[1. Importantly, the mechanics also make sure to feed back into your fiction in interesting ways, so they "pay back with interest" to your fiction for the control you give them, but that's aside of the point I want to make.] You decide what's happening, use the mechanics to resolve the question, and then let them fade back into the background.

Putting the fiction first is critical to making scripting worthwhile in Burning Wheel. The mechanics are involved and interesting enough that you can just keep manipulating them as an abstraction of conflicts and uncertainties, but this makes for a flat play experience.[1. Abstractly handling the mechanics also makes it very hard to come up with ways to make failure interesting, since that depends so much on being "plugged in" to the fiction.] We did this at times in our second session, which is why parts felt like bookkeeping. Using the mechanics in that way divorces them from their raison d'être, which is to breathe life into the fiction. If there is no or little fiction to hook an invocation of a rule into, it doesn't have anything to make "pop."

To make BW rules sing, particularly the more complex ones like scripting, the mechanics must be consulted only when the fiction demands it.

Fiction in scripts

How can I claim that a rule should only be used when the fiction demands it? Once you've started writing scripts and gotten into one of the three detailed tactical subsystems of Burning Wheel, you've got to use the rules, right?

Yes, but they're still going to be flat. Using any of the scripted subsystems—Duel of Wits for social conflicts, Fight! for combat, or Range and Cover for field manoeuvers and sniping—can seem like a lot of time and work for not much gain. One roll follows the last, until you find yourself at the end asking yourself, "What was the point of that?"

To put fiction first, and to really give the mechanics something to work with, you have to anticipate the rules' needs. You have to feed the beast! Every test in Burning Wheel requires an Intent in order to know what the test is really about, and the tests in scripts are no different. You know that each volley of a script[1. For the uninitiated, a script is broken down into an exchange of three volleys. You secretly write out what your actions will be during all three volleys, then reveal them one at a time so you can compare them and determine the results by rolling. e.g., a Strike against a Feint will be very different than against an Avoid; a Point versus a Rebuttal is going to be different than against a Dismiss.] is going to happen before it does, so generate some appropriate fiction before you have to deal with the mechanic.

If you don't want to generate a lot of close, detailed, move-by-move fiction for a scene, then you don't really want the level of detail that scripting brings to the table. In those cases, set a clear Intent for the entire conflict and use a simple, versus, or Bloody Versus test instead. Save the scripted subsystems for when you really want to play a knock-down, drag-out conflict to the hilt.[1. The climactic confrontation with the King at court is a good use of Duel of Wits. Convincing the guards to open the town gates after curfew so you can sleep safely after a day of travel probably isn't.]

Practicals

In no part of the rules is this more important than Duels of Wits. You might decide that scripting Point-Rebuttal-Point is the soundest tactic against what you expect your opponent to script, but it's going to stall out badly as soon as you reveal the first volley and don't have a plan for what point you're going to make.

In our first session of Burning Wheel we finished up with a Duel of Wits (DoW) between Basilio and Archdean Rimedio. We really enjoyed it and were impressed with how well the DoW mechanics worked for us. When we set up for it, I made it clear that for every volley scripted, we should have an idea of what the general thrust of our chosen debate actions was going to be when we roleplayed it. Each action represents no more than a sentence or two of argument, so that wasn't too much work to expect on top of the scripting itself.

Our statements of case were:

• Basilio: "Carmino is practicing demonology and must be investigated right this minute."
• Rimedio: "That’s a far-fetched charge, and I am far too busy. You will drop this and not bother me about it again."

(Since it was our first time using the rules we failed to separate the Cases for which we were arguing from our Terms in case of success, but they served us well enough.)

This very much coloured how we prosecuted our cases. We scripted tactically, but more importantly we scripted to suit the things we wanted to say—the actual, spoken points, rebuttals, avoidance tactics, and dismissals that we planned to roleplay before each roll.

Fimmtiu scripted Points, Rebuttals, one Obfuscate, and saved his Dimiss for after he'd clinched the argument. He was aiming for convincing the Archdean that he was right, and chose aggressive debate actions to suit the "on the offense" argument he was trying to make. Rimedio didn't really want to be having this discussion, and to that end I leaned defensive with enough offense to try to shoot down and turn aside Basilio's argument. Hence, I scripted Points, Rebuttals, two Avoids, and an early Dismiss that proved fatal.

Both of us knew while we were choosing actions that we were going to have to speak a coherent argument that would fit the actions, in order, that we had chosen. At one point (the second exchange), I actually found myself without a plan and looking to what I wanted to script for inspiration on what kind of tack Rimedio's argument might take next. This was really interesting because what I eventually came up with to say, though inspired by the mechanical tactical choices I wanted to make, demanded that I choose slightly different actions in order for them to fit the roleplay I was going to do.

Brass tacks

A couple of examples are in order. I'm not going to go over the scripts volley by volley, but in consulting my notes I can see that there are a few volleys that are excellent examples of using a fiction-first approach and making the fiction and mechanics dovetail. Both of these examples are from the first exchange.

I anticipated Basilio making a point right away, and I wanted to pursue Rimedio's argument that this is beneath his notice. To that end I chose a Rebuttal, which was putting tactics first. However, to give the Rebuttal mechanics meaning I needed to have something to say before the roll. I was careful to come up with something that would be a statement that would refute the Point I was anticipating from Basilio, since that is the, er, point of scripting a Rebuttal. I decide that I would say, "Carmino is respected; he wouldn't risk his reputation." Although I chose a mechanic first, I made sure that I put some fiction in place before executing that mechanic, and I made sure that the mechanic would back up the fiction.

In a later volley (but in the same exchange), Fimmtiu scripted a Feint. I can't speak to his decision process here, but it's a good example of a debate action that really needs a meaningful bit of roleplaying beforehand to make it work. Feints are designed to mislead a Rebutting opponent into countering a dummy point that sets them up to be more vulnerable to the real point. In his debate notes he had prepared to say, "But surely you admit that these charges are serious enough to merit investigation," which is the misleading argument, followed by, "So why not? He never has to know," which is the real point Basilio wanted to score.

The spoken roleplay gave the Feint meaning and consequence: not only was he arguing for Carmino to be investigated, but that the Archdean could avoid jeopardising Carmino's reputation by just being discreet in case Basilio was wrong. A different dummy point and real point would have given the argument a different impact on later fiction, regardless of the basic mechanical win-or-lose outcome.[1. As it so happens, I scripted an Avoid for Rimedio, against which a Feint has no teeth. Rimedio just ignored the bait of the dummy point and tried to beg off on account of "I don't have time for this nonsense and I really don't want to keep my breakfast guest waiting." C'est la vie, but it's still a good example of choosing the mechanics for the sake of the fiction.]

Hypothetically, Basilio could have used Incite for mechanical advantage, and yet at no point did he go in that direction because of the fiction that would give that action meaning. Basilio had a Belief that required getting the Archdean to investigate Carmino. Insulting him might have won him the argument and furthered that Belief, but would have certainly negatively impacted his other Belief that involved earning the respect of his peers and superiors by making his Engine work. The fiction that justifies using a mechanic has consequences.

But why?

If this seems like an awful lot of work, that's because it is. So why do it? Ultimately, it's a matter of taste. I really like what comes out of using Burning Wheel like this, and I find the times where I forget (because it does take mindful effort) to be far less enjoyable.

My reading of the Burning Wheel also makes me believe strongly that it was written with the primacy of the fiction as a basic assumption. The core conceit of the system is that the mechanics exist to resolve Fiction That Matters; otherwise, it instructs you to skip the mechanics and continue on with your mechanic-free play.

Simply, the rules are made to be used this way, and anyone who has had their curiosity piqued by what the Burning Wheel promises owes it to themself to try playing it this way, at least once.

We played the second session of the game I introduced in First Burning Wheel AP report, which I've since dubbed "Academic Rivalry" since that seems to be the campaign's focus. It was almost two weeks ago and I've been busy since, so this will be a less-detailed actual play report than the last.

The session itself ended up dealing with events at a relatively high level, actually. In the first session linked above we played through two scenes that spanned a few hours of time between the dark of night and morning devotions. In the second session we had more play time—about five hours—and got through over four months of game time.

The Reliquary monk and the demonist professor

Picking up where we left off last session, Basilio and Archdean Rimedio met Brother Bartolio on the steps of the Archdean's residence. I took to heart Chatty's advice for introducing characters: provide two distinctive details and let the rest rot. Bartolio was therefore a "small man with a pinched face, rather reminicent of a crow". He didn't mind not having post-devotional breakfast with the Archdean—it turns out that Brother Bartolio just wanted to chance to ask free run of the University's library in his research on the lama misèria ("Blade of Misery", roughly), which had been stolen from the museum of Tramontare earlier that year. Quelle coincidence! Fimmtiu caught the connection right away and I could almost see him mentally filing it away for later.

Off to the offices of Carmino they went. The scene at the office began with the Archdean noting the open door with broken lock as they advanced up the hall, and on reaching the doorway they could clearly see the ransacked state of the office. Carmino had been robbed! And what's more, there's blood on the floor! Basilio quickly checked for the book and the knife, and they were gone. He corrected the Archdean's impression and convinced him that Carmino was indeed trafficking with demons and that he must have been informed and fled in a hurry with the evidence.

Here I leaned on Let it Ride to maintain the result of the Duel of Wits in the last session, to keep the game on track. The Archdean's reaction was realistic and reasonable, but I didn't want to derail things.

Basilio and the Archdean agree that this should be kept quiet, and the caretaker is ordered to clean up this mess and "keep his mouth shut". Nobody wanted the Church to involve itself in this. As a further wrinkle they soon learn that a student of Carmino's considered to be particularly promising had also disappeared.

Basilio returns to his home, but he still wants Carmino exposed. He'd exposed him to the Archdean and hence got a Persona point for completing that goal in his Belief, but he wanted Carmino stopped and changed his Belief to reflect that. First was trying to find someone who knows where Carmino went using a Circles test. This failed, so I invoked the Enmity Clause: Basilio did find someone who knew where Carmino was, but it was Emilia, the student who had disappeared with him. A chase ensues. It was a Speed tests, with Emillia benefitting from Inconspicuous as a FoRK.

That was an interesting mechanical wrinkle, because we immediately thought that Basilio should therefore also get to FoRK his Inconspicuous. We realised that it wouldn't work, though, if we thought about why Basilio should get the fork: Emilia got it because Inconspicuous would help her evade Basilio, while going unnoticed in the crowd wouldn't help Basilio run her down. I do remember considering that knowing how to be inconspicuous might be helpful in defeating the "usual" tricks in giving someone the slip, but I can't actually remember if I let Fimmtiu FoRK it into the Speed test on those grounds or not. In any case, it was a moment of realisation: Burning Wheel skill tests may be heavy on the mechanics, but they only make sense and run smoothly if you make sure their justification flows from the fiction instead of trying to shoehorn something in with a post facto justification.

Basilio lost the Speed test anyway, with Emilia giving him the slip when she darted from the back street into a busy main thoroughfare. However, before she did she shouted at Basilio, "Leave me alone! He'll kill me if he sees me with you!" This also all went down in the streets where the Docks district merges into the Church ward. He had a bit more information now. Since I'd invoked the Enmity Clause I had to give him something toward his Intent of finding Basilio, and I figured that bit of development, plus the location where he'd spotted her on some unknown errand, would be good enough. In hindsight I was too stingy. I'm still getting used to the BW philosophy of moving the story as quickly as possible without unnecessary barriers.

With Circles test not panning out (remember Let it Ride), he penned an anonymous letter to Bartolio—a Writing test with some FoRKs for Demonology, Rhetoric, and Ancient History, though I could have suggested Beginner's Luck with Composition to work on opening that instead—tipping off him and the Church to Carmino's disappearance and the reason for it. A week later he hears about Inquisitors on campus, but that seems to be the end of it. The Church has been alerted, which was Fimmtiu's Intent behind the letter, but they have not had any more success in tracking down Carmino than Basilio has, mostly because that wasn't Fimmtiu's Intent with the action of writing the letter. So, now they're interested. This might not have been wise, and to that end, I think I forgot to give Basilio a point of Fate for doing something that was Belief-driven.

I also didn't realise that the stated Intent didn't encompass what Fimmtiu really wanted to result from the letter until afterwards, so that was a lesson in making sure Intents are accurate. He could have said, "I want the Church to investigate and uncover Carmino's location," and a Writing test, in that context, would have been fine to accomplish that Intent. I might have set the Obstacle fairly high (maybe... Ob 5?) to reflect that there was going to be a heck of a lot of luck involved in order to find Carmino through the act of penning an anonymous letter. Still, I think that's more in line with what Fimmtiu was going for, and it's certainly within the philosophy of tests in Burning Wheel to achieve large effects via indirect means, so long as there is a plausible connection between the success at that skill and the desired Intent.

And... that was the first few minutes of play. I should step this up and work on the brevity.

The aetheric harmoniser and the Demon

Carmino obviously wasn't showing his face easily. Basilio turned to his other project: build a working aetheric harmoniser and finish his Engine.

This is where time really started to pass. It took a bit of gear shifting and prompting, but Fimmtiu decided that the first step was gathering everything that might be about aetherism or aetheric harmonisers from the University's library of old-empire texts. Basilio combed through the texts and combined what he knew with the obscure material to recognise drawings and descriptions in fragments of text that nobody had before understood. This was one research test with some FoRKs, which resulted in a month's passing and the creation of what amounted to a workbook for building an aetheric harmoniser.

He turned to the task of building a prototype. This would let him sort out the design principles of the harmoniser on a larger scale at which he could see what was going on. The production harmoniser would have to be smaller to reasonably fit into an Engine that would even fit inside his workshop, and it only needed to open a small dimensional breach anyway. This was an Enchanting test linked with Engineering (and a pile of FoRKs each), which I figured would model how successes (or failure) in echanting the sorcerously-engineered components of the harmoniser would impact the overall engineering challenge of designing the thing. Two successful tests resulted in a prototype that could open a dimensional breach about a foot square. Basilio poked a stick through to make sure that the breach was actually opening properly and not just a square foot of opaque nastiness existing in only this dimension.

I figured no more tests were necessary to build the "production" aetheric harmoniser, and a month later Basilio had completed his Device. It wasn't up and running yet, but he suddenly had more pressing concerns than beginning the laborious process of spinning it up and maintaining what was in effect the first-ever power generator.

All during the months he'd been building the prototype Basilio had also been hearing rumours of... things... in the night. Things that ate dogs, scared people out for an evening stroll, and destroyed shopkeeper's inventories while they slept. Bad things, whose night-shrouded profiles looked unlike anything that had any right to exist. In short, demons. They were beginning to plague Tramontare, and it was progressively getting worse. Then Basilio received a visitor.

Late one night while working on the engine, something sneaking about very quietly in the open rafters of Basilio's workshop caught his attention. Poking his head up, he saw movement but couldn't make out what it was. (A failed Observation test vs a good Stealthy roll that was doubled because Basilio was using Observation with Beginner's Luck.) Whaling on a steel drum with a wrench (which the neighbourhood dogs didn't like) didn't prompt any reaction, nor did pretending to ignore it, but he eventually heard it mumbling to itself. Talking to it got a response, and eventually it sidled halfway into the light. It was a horrible little demon, maybe two feet tall, hunched over, and looking like a dessicated monkey with a scorpion's sting for a tail and hollow pits for eyes. Basilio didn't recognise it. (I didn't have him roll for it and just told him, deciding that this knowledge was not a point of contention and hence not worthy of a test that would count toward advancing the skill.)

Fimmtiu hadn't yet declared any Intents, and I was content to let it just be creepy if he didn't force the issue. They conversed, with the creature ending up sounding something like Gollum in its simpleness and its lack of concept for "I". It called the engine the "nice, nice machine" and offered to help with it, which Basilio quickly rejected. Eventually Fimmtiu stated the Intent to drive it off, which he succeeded at with a simple versus test of Rhetoric vs the demon's Will. The demon left and hasn't returned.

Demon lenses

Basilio went out rumour-gathering. Chatting with the bartender of his regular haunt The Speckled Frog, he got an idea for tracking down Carmino. If he could see where the demons were most concentrated, he would have the vicinity of Carmino's hiding place. Rumours weren't going to do that—he needed to see firsthand to uncover the pattern.

Basilio began work on designing a pair of lenses that would make demons appear as bright beacons to the wearer. That is to say, we cracked open the chapter on Enchanting in the Magic Burner.[1. The Enchanting chapter of the Magic Burner is available online from the author.] Enchanted objects in Burning Wheel are created by selecting the effect, which gives an Obstacle penalty to a base Obstacle of 1, and any other modifiers. We decided that these demon-seeing glasses would be implemented by a device that gave +3 dice to Observation[1. The lenses could have instead given the bonus dice to Perception tests involving demons. I argued that Observation was the more sensible skill for the effect though, especially if the wearer had the skill and wouldn't be using Perception for Beginner's Luck. Too, using them would be a good way for Basilio to earn tests toward finally opening Observation.] tests to spot demons (+3 Ob). They had a verbal activation (+1D to the test), had to be touching the bearer (+1 Ob, odd that it makes the enchantment test harder, but it makes sense if you don't want anyone else using it while you've got the item on you), hold their enchantment until the end of the session (+1D), and are rechargeable (+1 Ob), for a total of Obstacle 6 and +3 dice for the test. With an Enchanting skill of exponent 4, that means he'll have to roll 6 successes on 7 dice, which is going to be tough even with Artha spent.

Having worked that out we still couldn't proceed with the roll, since an enchantment requirese the extraction of an essence from something related, called the Antecedent in the Enchanting rules. I figured demon blood would be reasonable, no? So not only did Basilio have to get his hands on a demon, but he had to first identify the Trait of the dead demon to extract using an Alchemy Ob 1 test, then extract the Antecedent from its corpse, which is an Alchemy Ob 3 test. That might not seem to be much of a hitch beside smuggling home a demon in a Church-riddled city, but Basilio doesn't even have the Alchemy skill, so those tests were goint to be Ob 2 and Ob 6, respectively, and rolled against with Perception of 5. That makes three increasingly tough tests to make to get these demon-seeing glasses made.

But first, demon's blood.

The cobbler and the Demon

Again, I was thrilled by how smoothly the system supports this kind of play. Fimmtiu asked for a Circles test to find someone who knew of a dead demon, and succeeded with three extra successes. So, yes, he found a cobbler who desperately needed to get rid of the demon he'd buried in his backyard, after killing it with a hammer one night while it was making a mess of his workshop. He named the cobbler Sergio (which means he's easier to Circle up in the future), and they went to go exhume the corpse. Basilio tested Ditch Digging (which he, unsurprisingly, didn't have) and we debated FoRKing in Inconspicuous, but it didn't really apply—it's only relevant for avoiding notice in a crowd, not avoiding drawing attention in general. Again, this was just us getting used to the details of the system.

They drew the attention of the cobbler's wife, who gave Sergio a good shouting-at[1. Sergio was happy in the face of this harangue, since the dead demon killing his garden and giving him nightmares was finally gone.] while Basilio snuck away with his prize. It was something like a squat, heavy-built small dog, except it was hairless, ugly as sin, and had six stumpy legs protruding from its squat body/head. I was picturing a really distorted pug mixed with that pig from the Simpson's movie.

Denoument

That's all that we got through. Four months and a week of in-game time, the creation of a world-changing energy device, a plague of demons, and the design and acquisition of the necessary components of a custom magical item. It was very high-level at parts, so in some ways it felt more like a session of bookkeeping interspersed with connective roleplaying scenes, and in a way I suppose it was. It was pretty cool though, and I was impressed that we could go from inspiration to having a useful magical device ready to be enchanted in the last hour of the game. Although we were only three rolls away from actually having it made, we didn't want to rush that part. Given the difficulty of the tests involved, there are going to be some hard choices for Fimmtiu at the beginning of the next session.

Sunday we sat down to play our first one-on-one session of Burning Wheel.

The first half or more of our time was spent refining Fimmtiu's character's Beliefs and getting all the details filled out on the character sheet. We used the excellent online character burner so that all the point allocations and stat calculations were fast, but we still had to write out aptitude numbers and figure out how to use the test and Artha-logging features that the sheet offers. It was still really slow going because we're still getting acquainted with the system, but we did finally get down to playing.

We only had a couple hours to play once we had sorted out Beliefs and taken care of all the set-up bookkeeping, but we got a lot out of those two hours and had a blast. I found that there were a few things I really liked about the system in-play:

• Events unfold quickly because the system encourages you to move quickly from interesting choice to interesting dilemma. All the slogging stuff in between is taken care of by the question "Is this interesting to play out, or to turn into a challenge? No? Then say 'yes' and get on with it." You can smoothly shift from playing out really high-level events to getting down into the moment-to-moment roleplaying between characters.
• Failure is interesting. I still have to get used to this part of the game's philosophy, but I think we used it well. There were a few times when he failed a test where I first thought "well that sucks", before doing as the rules encourage and considering just giving it to him, but with complications. That not only kept the action moving, but it made me stop and think at critical junctures, which led to some inspirations that ended up making the game much more interesting.
• We didn't have a single combat, yet dice were rolling all the time. I have said in the past that I really enjoy those games were we don't even touch the dice, but the Burning Wheel made me realise that it's not a matter of dice or no dice. Those games where not a single die is rolled are fun because they're pure roleplaying action. The Burning Wheel does have ways to use dice (i.e., inject interesting uncertainty) into everything, whether combat or not, so we were not only having fun doing non-combat roleplay, but we had interesting mechanical decisions to make that arose from and fed directly back into the events we were roleplaying. This is a huge win for the system in my eyes.
• The dice didn't compete with the roleplaying for attention, but instead prompted us to think of avenues of roleplay that we otherwise might not have considered.
• Player empowerment is awesome. I did not expect the game to start the way it did.

And with that last point, I guess I really should get on with the actual play report, shouldn't I?

Character and world

The setting is a sovereign city-state, Tramontare, embedded within a larger province or country that is loosely modelled on late medieval Italy. The surrounding lands have a mutated version of the religion of the city, and the religion in general is at its height yet in major decline and corruption, so they're sort of doing a glacial "retreat" into the city and tensions are increasing. The city is run by the rich (a plutocracy), who get social standing by working up the ranks of the Church, much like 18th-century English nobles worked up through the military. Sorcery was rediscovered a century or so ago from the artefacts and writings of an older empire, but that more ritualistic, tradition-bound sorcery is meeting competition from a more science-y, investigative, natural-philosophy approach to sorcery. There is potential for conflict with the Church there too because they have their own traditional view of the proper relationship between nature and sorcery.

Our PC, Basilio, is a 49-year-old professor of this new "applied sorcery" at the University of Tramontare. He's an engineer and sorceror, a rival of Carmino the professor of traditional sorcery, and considered something of a nutbar. He's working on a Device in his private workshop that melds engineering and sorcery according to the principles of this new understanding. When it's finished it will be an engine that derives its energy from a dimensional breach, demonstrating the usefulness of this discipline and achieving renown and esteem for Basilio.

Basilio's Beliefs are:

• I'll show the deans that I'm not crazy by completing my invention... once I can manufacture a working aetheric harmonizer.
• Carmino is trafficking with demons. For the good of the University I must expose his activities to the Archdean.
• Taking human life, even for a good reason, is a terrible thing.

The first and second have built-in goals and immediate actions, so we were off to a good start. The third is vague, but I figure that's OK so long as there are two explosive Beliefs already.

Basilio's Instincts are:

• Always say what you mean, as frankly as possible.
• If in imminent physical danger, cast The Fear upon the aggressors.
• Don't trust people in positions of power, especially if they didn't work to get there.

These should get our dear friend in a lot of trouble! The last is verging on a Belief, but we'll see how it works in play.

To round out the BITRs of the character, he has the Character Traits Batshit, Bitter, Humiliation, It Just Might Work!, and Extremely Respectful of One's Betters. He also has Driven as a Call-On for Sorcery, and of course the Relationship with his rival, Carmino Baldessare.

Actual play

As I said, we only had two hours of actual play after futzing around. That included a lot of looking things up and puzzling out how to apply the system, so we got two good scenes, including one Duel of Wits, into the first session.

The session opened with me asking what he wanted to accomplish.

"I want to break into Carmino's office tonight to find evidence of research into demonology that will convince the Archdean."

Woah! I didn't expect that right out of the gate. Maybe some mooching around for spare parts, researching the ancients' knowledge of "aetherism", maybe jumping right into some Engineering tests to deconstruct the broken aetheric harmonizer that Basilio manage to get from an archaeological site... Instead, bang! right into a tightly-framed scene with decent stakes. I was enjoying myself and the system already.

Scene 1: Breaking in

So, we break in. We roleplayed the set-up, with Basilio having the janitor/nightwatchman let him in because he "forgot something in the office". Right. So he shakes the janitor as his office door, grabs a lantern from inside, then heads off to Carmino's office. It's locked. He wants to disintegrate the bolt barring the door. We're using the Abstractions and Distillations system from the Magic Burner to represent this more natural-philosophy approach to sorcery, so he has Basilio combine the Earth noun with the Tax verb, Single Target, Instant duration, and Presence range. There was a lot of page flipping at this point, obviously. The great thing about the session was that we still enjoyed it despite wrestling with an unfamiliar system and taking a lot of time out looking things up.

That spell is an Obstacle of 5, and his combined Will of B7 and Sorcery of B6 gives him 13 dice to roll to make it. Easy, right? He gets a single success, and we wonder what to do next. We figured out the spell tax test in the meantime (after some misunderstandings on my part), which he also failed, but his Forte was taxed down to 1 so he didn't fall unconscious. The way spell failures work in this magic system is to roll some dice to find out which facets vary and by how much, then consult a wheel of rings representing each facet: each step of variance is counted around the ring, indicating what facet actually ended up manifesting. The way he rolled, the "variations" ended up going right around and landing where they started, so the spell didn't actually vary at all. I narrated this unlikely event as Basilio losing control of the spell, but somehow ending up managing to channel the unleashed forces into what he wanted anyway.

Bolt disintegrated, he pushes open the door and scans the room. But wait, he failed the spell test, right? His intent was to break into the room, but failure means you don't get your intent. Well, I gave it to him anyway as the rules suggest, and added a future complication related to the failure. I introduced that right away as Basilio notices Carmino in the office, snoring softely, having fallen asleep while studying a large text. Basilio scans the room (a Perception test to find obvious incriminating evicence, which failed). He crept over to get a look at the book in the moonlight.

At this point we knew we had another test: Stealth versus Observation, with significant bonus dice to Basilio since Carmino was fast asleep. We weren't quite sure how to do this, tough, as neither professor had those skills. The Beginner's Luck rules state that you double the base Obstacle in such a case, but doubling it for both of them doesn't make any mathematical sense. (Again, much page-flipping here.) We decided that neither would suffer a penalty since they were equally unskilled and just got on with the test, but I'm still not sure what the right answer is, and I'm pretty sure I read something about Beginner's Luck and versus tests in my first ready-through of the system. I think we did it right, but I don't know how we would have done it if one had the right skill and the other didn't.

Basilio won with two successes. This meant that he had free run of the office under the Let it Ride rules, unless he tried to do something that had an Obstacle higher than 2, such as Stealthily playing the slide whistle or trying to take the book from under Carmino's head (at which point, under Let it Ride, he would have failed and woken Carmino). That was interesting because Fimmtiu had a good idea of what Basilio could and couldn't get away with. Not sure what implications this has, but I'll be looking at how Let it Ride affects player choices in future sessions. The one thing that I know it did was make the scene move more smoothly, as I didn't (wasn't allowed to, actually) ask for more fiddly tests as he moved around and searched the room.

So, the book turns out to be open to a page discussing the customs of summoning "pliant spirits" for favours, which modern Tramontareans know is the old empire's way of talking about demons. Evidence! This was garnered by an Ancient and Obscure History test FoRKed with Demonology and Summoning, where "FoRK" means "Fields of Related Knowledge", and gives +1D per related field to the dice pool.

He slid a few drawers open looking for more evidence. I didn't have anything planned, so I resorted to the Die of Fate. On a 1 (the DoF is a d6, like all Burning Wheel dice), there was something incriminating, on a 2-6 there wasn't anything more than the book. I rolled a 1, so there was a ceremonial sacrificial knife in the drawer. Another Ancient and Obscure History check (FoRKed with sorcery, Tramontare History, and something else that I forget) told him that it was an old-empire blood magic sacrificial knife, which is related to their demon-summoning practices. Furthermore the knife was most recently in the city museaum's collection before it was stolen six months ago and never recovered. Damning evidence!

Basilio got out while the getting was good, stowed the lantern back in his office, and cheerfully bade goodnight to the janitor.

Scene 2: Let's get the Archdean

Basilio returned home, got a couple hours of sleep (I forgot to get him to roll his Health check for the taxed Forte dice, but they ended up not being relevant in this scene), after which he went to find Archdean Rimedio near the University's temple during morning devotions. He snagged him coming out and convinced him (I just gave this one to him) to step aside a moment for a few words.

"Carmino is practicing demonology and must be investigated right this minute."

Those were Fimmtiu/Basilio's stakes, which sounded like a perfect chance to get into a Duel of Wits to resolve whether the Archdean investigated Carmino or ignored the charges. He wanted to catch Carmino still in his office, with the evidence right there. The Archdean's stakes were:

"That's a far-fetched charge. You will drop this and not bother me about it again."

Considering that Basilio is the crazy guy down the hall to most of the faculty, he was putting what little reputation he had left on the line to bother the dean of deans like this.

Bodies of Argument were rolled, with Basilio at the advantage with a Will B7 and Rhetoric B3 against Rimedio's Will B4 and Oratory B5. Basilio netted a BoA of 8 to Rimedio's BoA of 5.

We scripted the Duel, which I won't repeat here for the sake of keeping this from being longer than it already is. I was concerned that the structured argument rules would make for a stilted and unnatural scene, but it actually worked really well. We made sure to present our actual points and rebuttals before dealing with the mechanics. We also made sure that our statements were relevant to whatever was just said, so it actually flowed like an argument, and we made sure to choose argument manoeuvers that made sense for what we were going to say. This was actually a pleasant side-effect of the system, in that I actually had to think strategically about not only what manoeuvers would be best, but what ones Rimedio would actually use given his mood and perspective. (I scripted a couple Avoids of the "I really don't have time for this..." sort, following that.)

Despite scripting according to what tacks I thought were sensible for the Archdean to take rather than according to what manoeuvers I thought would most likely get a win, the DoW was uncertain right up to the penultimate volley. (First volley of the third exchange, to be exact.) Basilio won with half his BoA depleted, so the consession was that Archdean Rimedio would go almost immediately—but first he had to personally give his regrets to "this fellow from the Reliquary that I was to have post-devotional breakfast with" and expects Basilio to accompany him on this diversion.

Session wrap up

And that's where we broke. We'd played only two scenes, but already the plot was unfolding in interesting ways. There were twists neither of us had anticipated, even in such a brief couple of scenes. There are implications for Basilio's failed rolls and DoW compromise that I'm already cooking up with glee.

Basilio earned (and spent) two Fate points for driving the game forward with his Beliefs. We only really hit "Carmino is trafficking in demons...", but that's not too surprising given the limited timeframe we had. I'm going to encourage Fimmtiu to push his Instincts and Traits more for more Artha next time, since that will give us even more story convolutions and give Basilio some more advancement momentum. Myself, I need to look at those more when I'm cooking up complications, for the same reasons.

Everything in the Burning Wheel is on fire, metaphorically. You burn characters and worlds, people tend to name their campaigns "Burning [noun]", and the rules talk about setting figurative fire to things. The metaphor is appropriate, I think, because it set alight our imaginations. I mean, really, how many game systems not only let you create a 49-year-old pacifist University professor, but also makes him interesting to play? Without mugging him in a dark alley?