Players: Sam, Jess, Shimon, Mark. This was my first time facilitating Microscope and Mark and Shimon's first time playing, so it was a little rougher than might have been desired; still, a useful experience.

Big Picture: Humanity reaches space and is inducted into the Intergalactic Alliance. Beginning: humans reach space and are inducted. End: humans cease to exist as a distinct species.

Yes: FTL, interspecies marriage, sentient robots
No: human exceptionalism, Ancient Lost Civilisations, Universal Translators

Focus 1: Social Equals?
This focused largely on the evacuation of Talrok Colony, which ended up being the central event that most of the history rotated around: faced with an underfunded and failing terraforming effort, the governor abandoned a lot of the colony's poorest to their fate. Legacy: Talrok Act Enacted (it was never quite clear what this was, but it was strongly implied to be punitive to humans.)

Focus 2: Organic and Inorganic Life Begin to Merge
On a remote space-station laboratory, humans experiment with a human-some-other-alien hybrid, and discover that, in addition to exceptional mental powers, it can remember events that happened on Talrok, long before its birth. (This gave us a pretty cool opportunity for a framed flashback scene.) Legacy: race-memory.

Focus 3: Meanwhile, back on Old Earth...
This was a pretty all-over-the-place Focus without very many scenes (we were pretty scene-light overall). The general picture began to emerge: the Talrok business got humanity heavily censured and ostracised (possibly confined to Earth; at any rate, lots of humans got exiled), but ongoing tampering with AI and race-memory led to some singularity-like event that transformed... certainly humans, possibly a good chunk of the rest of the universe.

A lot of particulars were left at Event-level vagueness, and we finished after just three rounds, so this was a more nebulous Microscope even than normal. One thing that I need to keep in mind: if you have a conflict in mind to drive a scene, really make sure that everybody knows what that conflict is.

Layout:



(Mooria was not an official player).

Humanity reaches space and is inducted into the Intergalactic Alliance.

I really like that as a history seed. When Jess mentioned it in the picture caption my reaction was "!!!". Jealous.

A lot of particulars were left at Event-level vagueness, and we finished after just three rounds, so this was a more nebulous Microscope even than normal.

I'm always a big fan of tighter foci. If you make up a very specific person or thing as the focus you jump to more concrete level of play much faster.

One thing that I need to keep in mind: if you have a conflict in mind to drive a scene, really make sure that everybody knows what that conflict is.

Definitely. That's really what Questions are for, telling the other players what you want out of the scene.