Kingdom: A Role Playing Game About Communities

Product Information

A role-playing game for two to four players. No GM. No prep. Microscope was playtested for two years by over 150 awesome gamers.

Your Kingdom can be any group or organization that interests you. You could play a Wild West frontier town, a colony ship crawling to a distant star, or a sprawling Empire holding conquered peoples beneath its thumb. 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 […] The colonists are excited even if it means abandoning our carefully calculated settlement plans. But by now all the players suspect that Captain Browning (ahem, *Acting* Captain Browning) cares more about looking like a good leader than being one. He's in charge and he wants to keep it that way. My character tells the Captain that the data's conclusive: the signal is definitely not natural. But she also mutters that if we're abandoning the plan and just making things up as we go along, pretty soon everyone is going to want a vote.

The innovative thing about this game is that is that the story isn't about those people, it's about the kingdom they live in — by which Robbins means country, city, organization, or other group of people. It's got a scope that goes beyond most interactive indie games. The second game from the creator of Microscope (which is one of the best games of recent years, and I will happily play it at pretty much any time. (Microscope lends itself unusually well to online play, too. Hint hint.) 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 […]

A role-playing game about communities, by Ben Robbins, creator of the award-winning game Microscope. I love good, dramatic conflict in a story game. But sometimes players shy away from or downplay an established conflict or history. Our clans have decades of grievance and blood feud, but yeah, that’s not such a big deal, let’s just forget that and work together, okay? And now we’re buddies. Sometimes the player is […] or, being the right kind of mean “So, you’re trying to expose government corruption. Well, a car drives up, and a bunch of guys jump out. With guns! And… they shoot you! Uh, dead! Conflict!”“Allll-right…” We play a lot of story games where there’s no GM, and each character has an arc or agenda […] This is an excerpt from Kingdom, but it’s a good recipe for making scenes in just about any story game.) The secret to making a good scene isn’t coming up with an amazing or surprising idea. The secret is painting a clear picture so players know exactly what is going on. Being able to visualize […]That said, I think this could be a really cool game for creatively minded friends who want something a bit different from a game night. It's got elements of traditional tabletop roleplaying games, but is definitely on the fringe of that hobby. I THINK this is cool...but I don't feel like I came away with a good handle on it. This might be because of my current difficulty with focus? Whatever the case, unlike Microscope (also by Robbins), I didn't find myself immediately trying to recruit my wife into playing a game of it with me. Instead, I found myself hoping that at some point I'll be able to get into a game with at least one very experienced player. Sure, it's got a lot of explanations and examples, but I came away feeling too unsure of myself. Of course not every game of In This World has been magical, but when I hear about sessions that dragged, they often have one thing in common: Only two players. In a high creativity game, the difference between two and three players is bigger than it seems. When there’s only one other person in the […] The overall game is remarkably simple. It seems like with 30 minutes of instruction most people would be able to carry out a session.

I think my big concern about Kingdom is that... I may not be great at sharing to this degree where worldbuilding is concerned. I feel a bit anxious about people including or creating things that I don't enjoy when I'm in a shared creative space. Relinquishing that amount of control could be, for me personally, difficult. I think I would probably have to set more groundwork than the base game calls for just to keep things where I'd want to tell the story and then have the right group to pull it off. This is a flaw of my own character and not necessarily the system itself, but I think when it comes to worldbuilding it can be hard for people to play in each other's sandboxes. My first rule of role-playing games is to care more about the people at the table than the story. The players matter more than the fiction. The danger is getting caught up in the wonderful story and forgetting that. 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." I'm Perspective so what I predict is true. A Touchstone character showed us what the people wanted. But the Captain has Power. He decides what we do. And I just told him that if he does what the people want his precious authority is going to be a thing of the past. A role-playing game by Ben Robbins, creator of Microscope and Follow. For two to five players. No GM. No prep.This new edition is a complete rewrite of the original Kingdom rules to make the game easier to learn and play.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. I’m the god of fire. I have fire powers”“Fire powers? What are you, a superhero?” We’re in the middle of a game and you need to make up a god. Because you know, we’re gamers, we have to create whole worlds, gods, civilizations on the fly. What do you do? The number one approach […] 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.

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. The entire last half of the Kingdom book is full of really clever suggested seeds, how to customize them, the locations involved, the people who influence events, threats to status quo and the crossroad events they will face. There are sci-fi seeds, historical Earth, real world seeds and fantasy seeds. There's even a nod to D&D where you're in a popular 1980s Pencil & Paper RPG company facing some interesting threats and crossroads. People can work together to do great things. But what do we care about and what do we fight for? Who do we listen to and who pays the price? The Kingdom is in your hands. The question is: will you change the Kingdom or will the Kingdom change you? Say yes” is a fundamental principle of just about every shared creative process. “Yes and”, “yes but”— either way, say yes. And it is absolutely good advice for role-playing games. Accept what other people contribute. Embrace what’s been said as established truth and build on it. Don’t contradict it. But there’s a big caveat […]You have vast power to create... and to destroy. Build beautiful, tranquil jewels of civilization and then consume them with nuclear fire. Zoom out to watch the majestic tide of history wash across empires, then zoom in and explore the lives of the people who endured it.