Kingdom: A Role Playing Game About Communities

Product Information

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. Beyond that, there's also an intriguing set of roles, where each player has slightly different mechanistic powers. What will our Kingdom do? What will it become? The Kingdom's fate is in your hands. The question is: will you change the Kingdom or will the Kingdom change you?

community, equality, GM-Less, Narrative, storygame, Story Rich, Tabletop, Tabletop role-playing game

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? That's what Kingdom is all about: communities and how the people in them decide what they stand for. You'll sit down together and create any kind of group or organization you want to explore: 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.

These are all examples of Microscope games. Want to explore an epic history of your own creation, hundreds or thousands of years long, all in an afternoon? That's Microscope.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 Kingdom is in your hands. The question is: will you change the Kingdom or will the Kingdom change you? Microscope is a model of minimalist complexity: with easy-to-learn tools you gain the power to create a believable history that will surprise you even as you're authoring it. Microscope excels as either a stand-alone game or a collaborative way to build a setting with your gaming group for another game entirely." 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. 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 […]

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. Kingdom is a game of navigating a community through a series of crises. The community could be the crew of a single ship or a galaxy-spanning empire. It's got a number of very clever mechanics, and a lot more emphasis on role-playing characters and scenes than its predecessor.

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 […]

Alternate History, equality, GM-Less, history, Narrative, storygame, Story Rich, Tabletop, Tabletop role-playing game 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 […] 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.Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth 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 […] 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. Though this is typically a binary proposition (because it's a game mechanic), thinking about and framing central tensions in your D&D village, region, kingdom in this manner seems very useful to me. 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.)