Players: Marc, Alex, Andy, Caroline, Martin

We decided to play the story of a plague striking the planets in the Nashira system. Our bookends were the appearance of the first cases of the disease and "the departure of the Great Fleet". As it turned out, Patient Zero in the epidemic was Captain Anica Kean, a troubled visionary with a spaceship. She volunteered herself as a guinea pig in an illegal medical experiment, and when the result proved to be a contagious disease, her crew broke her out of quarantine and spread it across the whole solar system. Kean herself was immune to the plague's effects, which allowed her to rise to leadership among the survivors even as her crew died around her.

In the end, Captain Kean sacrificed herself in the hopes that studying her body would lead to a cure for the plague. And, after many years of research amid martial law and social collapse, it did. But there was a catch- the cure has terrible mutagenic effects, and those who take it soon cease either to look or to think like humans. A few religious factions held out, but in the end survival trumped humanity and there were no humans left in Nashira within a generation. The mutants constructed a Great Fleet loaded up with plague bombs and pointed it straight at Earth, though a secret faction among them developed a mutation-free cure in the hopes of sharing it with Earth before the genocide could be completed. This ended the story of Captain Kean and the Nashira plague.

This was more focused around specific characters than a lot of Microscope games I've played, and that worked out really well. All five of the characters in our first scene reappeared in some context down the road played by someone else, and we were invested in them, but they didn't belong to anybody. The logic of pandemic also meant that every scene was super high stakes and very emotionally intense. We had a bit of a mystery problem in the middle (we kept hinting about what the cure did rather than actually saying it) but I think it got resolved in the end.

Man, this game was really enjoyable! Despite having the unwieldiness of five players and adding us new players to that, I still felt like the narrative was really fascinating and had a lot of great scenes (so many scenes!) and characters.

I credit practically all of the interesting character-building as starting from Caroline's inspired decision to bring in the Brave Speaker's son Peter in the middle of the first prison-escape scene, it created so much tension and profundity in every single action in the scene! Although Martin's specificity in having our religious folks have to have believable motivations instead of just being crazy cultists is one of the most profitable bits of worldbuilding I've seen yet, I kind of want to make that a prerequisite anytime someone brings up religion in the palette now! It's way more satisfyingly challenging to try and create religions that actually seem to have something going for them instead of just saying "Oh I dunno these guys worship this crashed spaceship and I guess they want to kill everybody who doesn't?"

Also the transition from the "Banned Characters Are: Mutants" part of the game to the "A mutant on every card" part of the game was pretty amusing. For a while there I kept thinking "Man, did I ever choose a lousy Yes for the palette!"

Also it felt really Microscope-y that the event "Patient Zero kills herself" was just sort of an unknown dark event at first and then gradually accumulated more and more meaning as we got to know Captain Kean better and better, to the point where we played out a whole scene just before the event exploring exactly why it happened! And it made her whole story really poignant because we knew the whole time she'd kill herself at the end. I still almost wish we had had more time to zoom in on her character, seeing the second time she met Peter or having a scene where she confronts the Brave Speaker one last time on the exploding bridge of his capitol ship--or wait... having those be the *same scene*...

CAPTAIN KEAAAAAAAN! *salutes tearfully*