"Somewhere... beyond the sea.
Somewhere, waiting for me,
My lover stands on golden sands
And watches the ships... that go sailing..."

players: Jered, Dave, Ben

"The world floods and mankind settles beneath the seas." Our history starts with the first signs of rising water, largely ignored, except for forward-thinkers who start to tinker with undersea settlements (aka the Cassandra Period). It ends with land re-emerging from the oceans, but because we're saucy, we make the end Dark: you'd think it was a good thing, but it disrupts what is now the normal order of undersea life. It's just as much of an apocalypse as the flood is, because people are used to living underwater. This decision will color a lot of what happens in the history.

The early Periods shape up to have more traditional nuclear submarines and dome vs dome warfare, but later on scientists invent cyber-control devices that allow them to use sea creatures (read as: giant squid) as weapons of war, just as the Palette warned us (and by popular demand).

Even further along, genetic engineering is used to physically adapt people (read as: some people) to life under the seas, leading to a big schism between water-breathers and air-breathers, to the point where they're segregated as two different races. And yep, there's some racism. Guess which race boils in the sun, gasping for water, in the end Period?

- Serious game, but some fish-related puns were unavoidable. We played a Scene where the tables have turned, and water-breathers are now dominant and the air-breathers (aka normal humans) are second-class citizens. It's a rally of air-breathers, demanding equal rights, but the speech is being given by the notorious Palmer, former leader of the Species Party and racist from way back before racism was even popular. The Question is "are the protesters motivated by racism/hatred or a desire for fairness?" Jered throws a curve ball and plays an idealist water-breather activist, come to the air-breather rally to speak out for their rights and link arms in hippy tranquility ("hey, we're all humans, man!"), but he gets a bad reception from one of the hate-filled humans: "We don't need your sympathy! You're just here to soothe your gill-guilt!" (yeah, as in white-guilt, or as it becomes truncated in our game parlance "gillllll-t")

- I also really liked the cluster of Scenes on the war-sub Barracuda. It started off as a basic "why is the Doctor sabotaging his own ship" scenario and spiraled into a pretty heavy issue of the price of war. It turns out the Barracuda had torpedoed a civilian dome days earlier, which we later/earlier see was acting as a comm relay for enemy subs, but that hardly justified wiping out the "300 families, including women and children" (thanks Dave!). The crew can't escape the fact that they did something horrible. Heavy, heavy guilt and post-traumatic stress for the crew of the Barracuda push men to the breaking point.

Jered and Dave, what did you guys think?

Run! It's the fish police!

I had fun with the game. Microscope seems like a pretty good system, that allows for both broad, far-reaching worldbuilding and character-level roleplaying and development like we did with Henry Palmer.