Kingdom: A Role Playing Game About Communities

Product Information

I’ve spent most of my life playing roleplaying games at the table, in person. I’ve only started playing online much in the last few years, so I’m no expert, but here are some things I’ve learned so far. I follow the “simpler is better” approach with technology. I want no bells and whistles, unless those […] It also adds LEGACY mode, which turns your Kingdom into a whole interconnected campaign. Explore the past and future of your community to see how it changes across time. How long? We've played over 70 sessions of a single Kingdom setting, with no signs of stopping…

It does a number of things that are a little more familiar than Microscope: you have a (mostly) persistent character, this character has a role they play and certain information about them written onto a sheet, in a way they are kind of the main protagonists of the story. When RPGs grow into longer term campaigns it's very common for the setting to take on a life of its own with recurring characters and increasingly fleshed out histories and conflicts which many times the players themselves help shape. But what if the focus goes to the setting and its role more than the individual characters? That is the question Kingdom seeks to explore. Kingdom feels very much like it's from the Fiasco school of design. Characters with emotions (hopes and fears), with problems (issues), and with relationships work together to create a narrative. A lot of the game is down to just playing out your character and how they react to the other players, or even deciding to take a certain power away from another character (which is something you can do). Every role has their own sort of power, a very fine control over what direction the kingdom they're part of is going to ultimately take. Characters may change over time as they change roles or affect the kingdom, but the kingdom itself will change as well: characters will have to make decisions and deal with the consequences of them, popular opinion and the various stresses of rulership no matter what form it may take.What this also does is give more options in the core book. I could have easily seen it being split up like Microscope and Microscope Explorer, but honestly I think that was more just an issue of not having the info (much of which was taken from other people playing the game and figuring out their own neat ideas) rather than any desire to split up information. Kingdom, however, includes the kind of stuff you might have expected in a sourcebook in it's main book, which is excellent, tons of extra options and ideas to change up the mechanics of the game right away, and for about the same price as one of the other books. There are even some notes on inserting Kingdom games into Microscope and vice versa.

If you play just one role playing game this century, make Microscope that game. Microscope is a game that takes many standard assumptions of a role-playing game and stands them on their head. Players share the creation of an over-arching storyline, like the rise and fall of an empire, the mythic beginnings of human culture, or a bloodthirsty war between interstellar species. It's a unique storytelling engine that sweeps away blinders of limits we enforce on the medium, which, I hope, will help us better realize the full potential of this form. There is so much more we could be doing. Microscope is a great start." A role-playing game by Ben Robbins, creator of Microscope and Follow. For two to five players. No GM. No prep. What I like about this that Microscope did really well is that the randomness isn't down to dice, it's down to how people find ways to complicate things. There's a great deal of control every player has over their character and the world around them in Kingdom, but at the same time all of the factors that are out of the player's control make it seem, just from the way it's written, like the sort of game that could be very tense and very fun. Why, yes, you can! I always try to make games that you use to tell a lot of different stories and play over and over again. Kingdom is always about a community, but you have huge latitude about the group you make and the kind of decisions it faces. In the past few years I’ve had a lot more regular weekly games than one-shots. Mostly games with no GM, so no one is writing a story for us to follow. We are all just playing in the moment and seeing what happens. I love it. Except for one thing, which I’m doing to myself. […]Beyond that, there's also an intriguing set of roles, where each player has slightly different mechanistic powers. We play these games together to be surprised and satisfied by ideas we wouldn’t have created on our own. How all our contributions combine is something no one of us can predict. For that to happen, we have to let go what we individually *expect* or *want* and just see what *does* happen. We had […] Any role-playing game is a careful balance between agreement and disagreement. We need agreement because the game world only exists in our minds. If we can’t agree about what’s true, we’re going to contradict each other. If you think there are walls around the city and I don’t, our game will crash. Since agreement is […]