Kingdom is Ben Robbins’ second storytelling meta RPG and, while not a formal follow-up to Microscope, it explores a lot of the same ideas of how history and storytelling intertwine. It also includes rules for fusing the two games together, though I admit I find that prospect a bit intimidating.
Kingdom is about communities at a crossroad in their history. Players create the broad strokes of their kingdom together – it can be anything, a neighborhood, a law firm, a barony, a seed ship, whatever. They then create characters, their main problems and their relationships with each other. Each character has a meta role – Power characters decide what the Kingdom does, Perspective characters can foresee the consequences of those actions and Touchstones reflect the wishes of the people.
Players then create the Crossroads, a pivotal moment in the Kingdom’s history in which their characters will play a crucial role. The players explore the Crossroads through a series of scenes, using their roles to define the story as much as their characters, building to decision or crisis. Thus, when the Touchstone character says the people are ready to rise up, it is true, until another Touchstone says it isn’t; only a Power character can move to quell the uprising, but even then, it is the Perspective character who decides the outcome.
This is an uncoupling of traditional RPG cause and effect and, while the rules elegantly account for handling any eventuality in the broadest sense, the result is a story that the players can never fully control or predict. It is quite an accomplishment to build an engine for storytelling that routinely surprises the storyteller.
There is, of course, a lot more going on – I only have so much room in these captions to summarize! – but the rules never feel heavy or crunchy. The book is designed to teach the rules by passing the book around and reading entries out loud, making the learning collaborative, and a full half the book is devoted to thoughtful advice for the game and starting ideas for your Kingdoms.
