Friday 30 March 2012

In Which I Am A Hypocrite

Patrick, one of the players in my regular group, has posted an AP of sorts for the session we had on Tuesday. We decided to create a shared world with Microscope, in which we plan to share a rotating GMship and run different campaigns in different genres.

I think we all started off with good intentions to create a darkish, hard SF setting, but things got weird, silly and fucked up very quickly - it progressed from a reasonable beginning to a sprawling melange involving, amongst other things, war meetings between the President of Humanity and his Chief Warlock, "ontological warheads", and a not-Tyranid race called the HMBTs (Hideous Murdering Bug Things). It ended up with a genetically engineered Velociraptor called Spielberg tending a sculpture garden in which a murder was taking place, on a space station in the Oort Cloud with a pseudo-Byzantine culture featuring an AI who was basically a futuristic version of OK Cupid. (And this after I'd claimed hypocritically to prefer my settings to be not-so-gonzo literally the day before.)

You can read all about it here, if you're odd enough to be interested.

9 comments:

  1. Of course it was those meddling other players who took you from Mass Effect to Spaceballs, right?

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    1. To be fair, I think I was the one who skewed everything by having, in the first scene, an insane Space Marine called Bo Lucas who looked like Ving Rames using a mecha to destroy his own home space station.

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  2. I use to love taking a break from serious play, back in the day. Of course back then it was Paranoia or Toon. Sometimes we would even break out Orcs of Thar, playing a bunch of goofy orcs and goblins out to raid the human village.

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    1. The Orcs of Thar is legendary to me. I've never been able to get my hands on a copy, and now it's not even available on PDF (if it ever was).

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  3. Yet another stone removed the Edifice of Noisms. May we someday rebuild.

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  4. Emergent gonzo (which is superior to 'willed gonzo' in every way) happens.

    ontological warheads [...] HMBTs (Hideous Murdering Bug Things) [...] on a space station in the Oort Cloud with a pseudo-Byzantine culture [...] Hyper-Neanderthals [...] the Jovian hypermind

    There's no part of this setting that is not relevant to my Moebius-loving interests.

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  5. I think it was a hoot! There might have been some sillyness in places (me playing one of the characters as Napoleon Dynamite might have contributed to that) but there was a genuine beautiful tapestry unfolding.

    One of the great things about Microscope is that the Periods and Events are big, they are epic - but when you get down to it, the Scenes are about people. Sometimes they are gardening dinosaurs, sometimes they are teenagers, sometimes they are mutating psychics. Not everyone is a hero or a paragon (or thinks they are a paragon). I find that quite freeing when it comes down to it.

    Here are some of my thoughts on the session over on my blog.

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  6. So I was going to say "no wait, THIS is what I mean by gonzo mashup" but it seems you beat me to it.

    Run to the hills? Or drive?

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