Interlude: The History of Dalmore House

Using Microscope for Worldbuilding

For this installment of PTFO, we’ll be taking a break from Blades in the Dark and taking advantage of a very different TTRPG to explore the world of Duskwall and the Shattered Isles, in the service of roughing out the history of the Dalmore School for Young Women to better understand Emma’s character.

In this episode, I’ll show how you can use Microscope, a really nifty indie TTRPG, as a tool to bring specificity and depth to your own worldbuilding — I’ve used Microscope to create worlds for a variety of projects, and I suspect it’d be useful for at least some of you folks reading today. If you’re just here for the Proper Villains story, this is probably a good installment to skip — the next installment of Proper Villains, Session 4.7, will be published on 10/28.

Why should we care about all this history?

When I kicked off this series, I woefully underestimated how long it would take to bring the Jessek boys and their long-lost sister back together. It’s been fun to have the party be separated for so long; it’s something that really wouldn’t work at the gaming table, but works well enough in solo to create a big goal for the party to work towards. But it has created a big knowledge gap between us and Emma: She knows lots of things about the school and the cult that we haven’t established in the fiction, which is not a great reading or playing experience. To envision the next confrontation between Emma and her fellow students, or Madame Dalmore, we’ll need to have a stronger understanding of what sort of place this is, and what motivates the people who are part of it.

More broadly, I’ve found that it’s worthwhile to not frontload all your worldbuilding for a TTRPG. Early in the campaign, when the characters are newly created and you’re still getting a feel for them, it’s desirable for their backstories to be a little vague and high-level, and for them to then be fleshed out over time, as the details become more relevant.

In PTFO:Stonetop, for example, the details of Padrig and the Claws’ time in Gordin’s Delve and their defeat there were only very loosely established, until we made plans to return there. By the time we had to get specific about what went down in the Delve, we knew many of the NPCs we wanted to play a role, and we knew how we wanted things to have ended to best set up the tension and drama in the present. If, instead, I had cranked out a 20-page backstory for old Padrig, we’d have lots of established details that we’d have to live with, regardless of how much they helped make the current situation dramatic. This is why, as a GM, I tend to get concerned if a player comes with a really extensive and detailed writeup for their character: To be good and worthwhile, backstory must serve the drama in the present moment.

So, as we’re closing out this first arc of Proper Villains, I thought it’d be worthwhile to firm some things up about Emma’s time at the school, and what the school is like, both as a public institution that trains maidservants as well as a secret cult of assassins in the service of a dead god.

Introducing: Microscope

Microscope bills itself as “a fractal role-playing game of epic histories.” True to that description, in Microscope, you don’t play individual characters; instead, you and your friends at the table take turns envisioning consequential moments in the epic history of a person, place, or idea. You might envision the clash of nations, the emergence of a new faith, a terrible cataclysm, or a people colonizing the stars.

How it plays

Before we get into using Microscope to create the history of Dalmore House and the Cult of the Burnt King, I’ll give a high-level overview of what a session of Microscope might consist of, using what’s hopefully a common touchstone — the fantasy epic Game of Thrones — as an example, envisioning how a game of Microscope could’ve helped create the history of Westeros.

In a Microscope session, you dive into a sweeping arc of history, beginning with high-level periods. You could envision something as big and epic as “The Seven Kingdoms descends into a civil war,” a short, high-level description that gets written on a notecard and pinned to the wall.

Then, taking turns with your friends at the table, you could then zoom in to talk about specific events — continuing the Game of Thrones-flavored example, you might envision and write down something like: “The Lord of Storm’s End, a mighty warrior, allies with the lords of Winterfell and the Eyrie, and together they swear to depose the Mad King.” That note card then gets pinned beneath the period, and now we know a little more about our civil war. When the card gets pinned, the players can discuss the event in more depth, prompting one another with follow-up questions for details — especially since none of the characters in the example need to have been established before mentioning them in an event. In the above example, we might ask about these lords and envision their names and personalities. We might envision some flavorful details of the event, for example giving the war a name — ‘Robert’s Rebellion,’ in our GoT example.

Next, you might zoom out from the events of Robert’s Rebellion and talk about what big period of history comes next. For example, following this civil war, we envision a period where ‘many more usurpers arise, and fight among one another to rule the Seven Kingdoms.’

This idea then gets recorded on a notecard and pinned to the right of the period of Robert’s Rebellion, creating a timeline that keeps track of what we’ve established and the constraints and inspirations that will guide our next decisions. Moving between past and future and figuring out interesting ways to creatively play and pay off what’s already been established is the skill tested in Microscope; it’s what makes the game magical.

Returning to our GoT example: Instead of moving jumping ahead in history, you might choose to envision more events of Robert’s Rebellion — what happened before Lords Baratheon, Stark, and Arryn swore to depose the Mad King — like Rhaegar’s kidnapping of Lord Baratheon’s bethroned, Lyanna Stark, or the Mad King’s execution of Lord Stark’s son. All these events then get recorded beneath the Period notecard, creating a second timeline of events. Just like with the horizontal timeline, we can move backwards and forwards in time in the vertical timeline, envisioning past or future events until we choose to move on.

We can even choose to dive into a roleplayed scene that envisions an important moment in history — we could play out the duel of seven against three, where Lord Stark and his allies dueled three of the Kingsguard to free Stark’s kidnapped sister, or we could play out Lord Baratheon persuading his fellow lords to rebel against the Mad King. Each player at the table would agree to take one of the roles, and play would proceed freeform until the scene is resolved. Microscope doesn’t feature any conflict resolution mechanics — the players simply have to agree what the coolest outcome is (with the player who’s ‘turn’ it is being the final decider).

The decisions of what scenes to portray, what to write on a period or event card, and where in time to focus are all made by the Lens, Microscope’s word for the acting player. The Lens declares the Focus of a given round, and the table takes turns creating scenes, events or periods that relate to that focus. The Lens begins the action, and then each player takes a turn, with the Lens taking a second, final turn, giving them a bit of extra control over the timeline.

Getting Started: The Big Picture and the Palette

The first step to setting up a session of Microscope is establishing the Big Picture, the period of history the game will concern, and then creating a Palette, which are elements you know you want to include or discard. In multiplayer Microscope, this is done collaboratively, with the players at the table discussing it until you reach a consensus everyone can have fun with. Here in sololand, we don’t get to have fun batting ideas back and forth, but we do just get to write down whatever we like and call it done.

I do all this work in Miro, using the post-it note feature to organize and reorganize all the notes I’m taking — here’s a screenshot of the first few steps all done:

For my big picture, I wrote “A school that saves young orphans from the streets of Duskwall is brought into the service of the Burnt King.” This would probably be a little too focused for a standalone Microscope session, but for our purposes, it focuses on the most relevant part of the setting for Emma’s backstory.

Then, for palette, I selected a few elements from two perspectives: That of Emma’s player, who wants to cover off on a few important points of character development, and that of the GM, who wants to include some elements from broader Duskwall and exclude some others.

From Emma’s perspective, I included Emma’s friendship with Flint, Altruism/Genuine Goodness, and banned Demons/Infernalism. It’s worthwhile to figure out a little more about why Emma and Flint have a special relationship, and I wanted to make sure Dalmore House’s history is not just a parade of horrible bleakness from day 1, even if Duskwall is a pretty nasty place overall. Demons/Infernalism are specifically included because one of the key tensions in Emma’s character is the specific nature of the Burnt King: Is he truly a god who can offer salvation or paradise? Or even just an improvement on the status quo? Or is he a demon in disguise, leading his cult towards ruination? If we establish upfront that he’s epistemically evil, we can’t really explore that question, so we won’t be doing that.

From the GM’s perspective, I vetoed ‘gangland connections.’ Part of the storyline here involves the separate worlds that the Jesseks bestride: The world of high society and secret cults, and Duskwall’s criminal underworld. If we state upfront that Dalmore House is tied in with organized crime, we have less of an opportunity to play up that tension later. For the include list, I added Religion and Lord Strangford. For Religion, I thought it was important to rope in Duskwall’s established church, which we haven’t really touched on much before and seemed worthwhile if we’re going to be dealing with dead gods. Lord Strangford was mentioned briefly throughout Session 2 — he’s connected to Detective Laroze and pulling her strings for some unclear purpose. Lord Strangford is an NPC who shows up in many Blades in the Dark campaigns: A ruthless industrialist who always shows up a little differently in each game where he appears. I’ve got him slated to an important NPC down the road, so tying him into the history of Dalmore House feels like a worthwhile thing.

Setup: Bookending History & The First Pass

Once the Palette and Big Picture are established, we then create a pair of events to bookend the period of history we’re focused on. For the history of Dalmore House, I chose the founding era, and then closed it with Emma’s time at the school, which corresponds to the present of the Proper Villains timeline. I also chose to record the calendar time, placing the Dalmore School’s founding about 100 years before the present moment. This is not usually done in Microscope, but since BitD has a published timeline, I added extra details to connect this exercise to the existing worldbuilding.

As you can see, I’ve chosen a white card for the first period and a black one for the second — in Microscope, you record the tone of each period, event or scene as Light or Dark. There’s no additional mechanics around tone, it’s more just a method for the players to talk about their intentions with any given decision.

Then, to close out the setup, the players take turns adding more Periods and Events to flesh out the starting timeline. For Dalmore House, I added two Periods and an Event: I knew that we’d need a moment in history when The Dalmore School was taken over by the Cult of the Burnt King, and I knew there’d be a period before that happened when the school developed a reputation as a source of skilled, discrete help for the elite families of Duskwall.

After adding in a few additional Periods, I decided to record a key event — the discovery of the Burnt King’s altar beneath Dalmore House. Based on what we’ve established so far — specifically, Flint’s description of the Burnt King mythos in Session 4.5 — it makes sense that the altar might predate Dalmore House and the school. We can envision the dead god lying in wait beneath the house until the moment comes when he can rekindle his faith.

First Lens: Founding Era

Now we’re ready for the first “turn,” where we pick a Focus and build some events around it. For this exercise, I began at the beginning and chose “The Founding of the Dalmore School” as the first Focus. Below is a screenshot of my Miro once I finished this Focus:

At this point, the cards get kinda hard to read, so here’s the text of the vertical timeline, and some thoughts about why I envisioned these specific details:

• Jasmin ul'Ankhayat, a noblewoman from Iruvia, is driven from her home in Iruvia by political strife: To envision the first headmistress of the Dalmore School, I knew I wanted someone who’d suffered from political infighting. The Burnt King is concerned with the doings of the powerful, so someone who has been victimized by powerful people in the past seemed like a good fit. I decided to make her an Iruvian exile — this allows us in the future to connect our story to the broader world of the Shattered Isles, if we so choose. “Ankhayat” is one of the noble families of U’duasha, a major city in Iruvia, the details of which are published in the Blades in the Dark collector’s edition. Specifically, the Ankhayat family is responsible for U’duasha’s schools and university, so it seemed like a nice fit for our future headmistress.

• Lady Jasmin weds Lord Renard Dalmore in a whirlwind romance. The inkrakes are enchanted by the tale of an exiled noblewoman from a foreign land, and two are the toast of the city, for a time: The next step was to connect our exiled noblewoman to the Dalmore family. I decided to make this beat a little more bright and uplifting, in contrast to the generally dark tones of BitD. I’m envisioning Lord Renard as a genuinely good guy, as far as Duskwall aristos go.

• Lady Jasmin spends years searching for her lost family members, also displaced by political violence. Over time, her search proves fruitless, and she falls into a deep depression: Lady Jasmin’s despondency over the loss of her family accomplishes two things: It establishes the wound she has that the Burnt King can take advantage of, and it creates the inciting incident that leads to the founding of the Dalmore School.

• To help her honor the memory of her lost family, Lord Renard funds the founding of the Dalmore School for Young Women: This event is a pretty straightforward one — to help Lady Jasmin grapple with the loss of her family, Lord Renard helps her start a school which honors the Ankyahat family traditions in this new land.

• Dalmore House is expanded to accommodate the school grounds. During the construction, an ancient temple ruin is discovered beneath the basements: This is the event that we established in the initial setup — as you can see, all the events we placed this round took place prior to this one, and help lead up to it. Much of Microscope works like this: You know your destination, you’re just envisioning an interesting path to get there.

• Lord Renard, a devout adherent of the Church of the Ecstasy of the Flesh, reports the matter to the authorities: This is where we begin to rope in one of the elements of the Palette — religion. The Church of the Ecstacy of the Flesh is established in the Duskwall setting materials and is described thusly: “The ‘state religion,’ if there is such a thing. They honor the life of the body and abhor the corrupted spirit world. Essentially a secret society.”
  
  This description of the Empire’s state religion has never really worked for me — it doesn’t make sense how a faith can be a secret society and still function as a state religion. For the purposes of our version of Duskwall, we’ll envision the Church of the Ecstacy of the Flesh as a full-fledged state-sponsored religion with temples, regular services, rituals, and holidays. As it says in the materials, the faith mistrusts the corrupt spirit world — ghosts and dead gods included — and exalts in the life of the body. We’ll further imagine they preach a virtue ethic that focuses on behaviors that the state wants to encourage: Things like temperance, diligence, fortitude, charity, and humility, which, despite being admirable virtues, can also be used to keep the populace of the Empire docile and productive. In this context, Lord Renard is a useful symbol for the church — an aristo who genuinely adheres to the virtues they preach.

• Church officials order the site sealed. Due to his standing with the City Council, Lord Renard is allowed to retain the property. The existence of the altar is covered up: This detail opens the door to church officials — perhaps some sort of Inquisition-like group — knowing about the Cult, providing potential allies or antagonists to our heroes down the road.

• The altar is forgotten by most. But in the night, Lady Jasmin begins to hear the whispers of the Burnt King, exhorting her to vengeance against the nobles who killed her family and exiled her: This seemed a good detail to end the period on, as it sets us up to have either Lady Jasmin or a future headmistress heed those whispers.

In an at-the-table game of Microscope, each player takes a turn adding an event or a scene, and then you move on to the next Lens and Focus. For my purposes, when playing solo I tend to ignore that rule and add stuff until I reach a good stopping point.

Legacy and the Second Lens

Once each player has taken a turn and added a period, event or scene, the player to the right of the Lens picks something from this turn and codifies it as a “Legacy.” Legacies function as important themes to the sweep of history we’re investigating, and other players can use those legacies as a jumping-off point to add to the timeline. Once the Legacy is defined, the player who defined it gets to add one more Event or Scene related to that legacy before the turn passes to the left (meaning that the previous Lens is the one who gets to create the legacy for a given turn).

In this case, I choose the legacy “Political Violence” and I add this event to the next period, which I dubbed “The Flourishing Era” in the setup phase:

This added event gives us a lot of work to do: The Flourishing Era is intended to be overall a Light-toned period, and its subject is “The Dalmore School builds its reputation,” so a lot needs to happen before Lord Renard gets what’s coming to him.

To continue in this thread, I chose that period for my next Focus, and dove in, adding the events prior to Lord Renard’s death, and the aftermath that set up the creation of the cult:

Here’s the text of the cards:

• Lady Jasmin pours herself into the school. Orphaned girls from Charhollow, Dunslough and Crow's Foot are fostered here and trained in the skills needed to perform as ladies' maids: In the context of Duskwall and the grim world of Blades in the Dark, this is a very altruistic endeavor — life in the slums for a young woman is no doubt quite harsh indeed.

• As the school grows and thrives, Lord Renard and Lady Jasmin welcome two children into their family -- young lord Sasha and young lady Alexandra: Since we know we’re a few generations out from the present moment, we need to plan for the next generation of Dalmore House’s leadership, so I envisioned a couple of heirs to the Dalmore estate.

• Lady Jasmin's efforts to locate the other exiles of her family finally bear fruit -- her aging mother is found and brought to Dalmore House, joining the family as the Dowager Lady Fatima Dalmore. In the tradition of House Ankhayat, Fatima is a sorceress, skilled in communion with the spirit world. Due to Lord Renard's devoutness, she conceals this from her family: This event plans the seeds for the cult’s magical proficiency — a little witchcraft from the old country, waiting for the right moment to be put to use.

• The Dalmore School's reputation is further burnished when one of its young graduates saves the life of a powerful patron, Lord Arthur Strangford, by noticing poison placed by his evening brandy. Now, every Duskwall household wants a Dalmore lady on their staff: This sets up the status of Dalmore House, meaning that once the PCs have a relationship with the cult, they can access a big network of informants and allies.

• As the Dalmore School flourishes, Lord Renard is inspired by his wife's example and begins to implement reforms in his own workhouses and businesses, becoming very popular among the Duskwall populace

• Bad blood sets in between Lord Dalmore and other powerful Duskwall families. 

• Lord Dalmore is assassinated by his powerful political enemies, killed in seemingly random street violence. The culprit is quickly found and executed, but cries of 'conspiracy!' ring out: This event, and the previous two, set up the event we know is going to help close out this Period — Lord Renard’s untimely death. This was written in the previous turn to connect it to the ‘political violence’ Legacy, but I added a bit more detail after I had envisioned the events leading up to his assassination.

• Riots erupt across Duskwall. The now-teenage Lord Sasha joins with the Rioters and demands justice for his father. He is arrested by Imperial troops and hanged for incitement. 

• The city council approaches Lady Jasmin with a deal: Help bring an end to the riots, and she will be allowed to retain ownership of Dalmore House and her school. She acquiesces and publically accepts the official story of her husband’s death. The riots are quelled.

• With her husband and son slain by corrupt, powerful men, Lady Jasmin begins to hear the whispers of the Burnt King ever louder: These last three events help set up the founding of the Cult — we now have both a motive (revenge for Lord Renard’s murder) and the means (Dowager Lady Fatima’s sorcery) for the cult to begin its ashen work.

As this era closed out, I chose the Legacy “Lord Strangford,” and then wrote the following event for the next era: “Church Inquisitors grow suspicious of Dalmore House, and approach Lord Strangford for help in learning the truth of what's going on. Strangford betrays and disposes of them, and uses his influence to steal all records of the Burnt King's existence.” Like the previous legacy and the death of Lord Dalmore, this event provides a turning point in the next era, and it helps ensure that we keep Lord Strangford in the picture.

Third Lens: The cult rises

For the next Focus, I just rolled on to the next period: The cult of the Burnt King is established.

And here’s the text of these cards:

• Jasmin, egged on by her bitter, vengeful lady mother, begins to delve into the secrets beneath Dalmore House. The Burnt King promises them the power to take revenge against those who have wronged them.

• Using arcane arts learned from her mother and intelligence gathered from her network of servants placed in elite households, Lady Jasmin  and the now-adult Lady Alexandra engineer the death of three of the nobles responsible for Lord Renard's murder.

• Church Inquisitors grow suspicious of Dalmore House, and approach Lord Strangford for help in learning the truth of what's going on. Strangford betrays and disposes of them, and uses his influence to steal all records of the Burnt King's existence: This card, plus the two before it, pay off the Legacy event we wrote in the previous round, further intertwining Lord Strangford with the history of the cult.

• Strangford approaches Lady Jasmin and becomes a powerful, public patron of the school, and a secret patron of the nascent cult. He reveals to Lady Jasmin even more aristos who were involved in Lord Renard's death, and soon the Burnt King begins to whisper their names, too: Here, my intention is to create some ambiguity about who precisely is directing these assassinations: Is it Strangford? Lady Jasmin’s need for vengeance? Or the god itself?

• Lady Jasmin, now quite elderly, makes plans to pass Dalmore House, and leadership of the cult and school, on to her daughter, Lady Alexandra: Given where we are in the history, it’s likely that the current Madame Dalmore is Lady Alexandra — initiated into the Cult of the Burnt King just as it was being born, daughter to a murdered father, sister to an executed brother. No wonder she’s so mean.

• Under Lady Alexandra's leadership, the cult flourishes, just as the school did. Members of Duskwall's sub rosa, many of whom themselves seek vengeance against powerful people who have wronged them.

• Flint, a spirit-trafficker and instructor in the arcane arts joins the cult to get revenge for the death of his daughter. He begins to train handpicked young girls in the skills of a Whisper, awakening their latent arcane abilities and teaching them to reach beyond the veil into the realm of the dead: With this card and the previous one, we’re envisioning the cult becoming bigger than just Lady Jasmin’s ambitions.

• Using the information gathered by their network of spies and placing assassins in privileged households, the cult sacrifices more than a dozen corrupt aristos and officials to the Burnt King: Now the cult is more-or-less fully formed. All the ladies’ maids placed by Dalmore House form a network of unwitting spies, allowing them to plan kidnappings and murders. And a few handpicked girls with the talent to become Whispers are trained in the dark arts and initiated into the cult itself.

• The girls trained by Flint become dangerous and unruly. To enforce discipline in Dalmore House, Lady Alexandra requires a loyal enforcer. The body of her dead brother, Lord Sasha, is exhumed from the family crypt and turned into a sparkcraft golem known as Mr. Seek: We couldn’t close this period out without a Mr. Seek origin story, of course.

Fourth Lens: To be continued?

My intention with this interlude was to take us all the way from the founding of the school to Emma’s time there, and the present moment in our story. To my chagrin, however, I’m getting an angry “Post too long for email” error at the top of my Substack editor, so unfortunately, I need to close it out here. As we’re playing out the last couple of installments of Proper Villains Session 4, I’ll endeavor to show some of the results of the fourth Lens in the fiction itself — or, if you all found this particularly interesting, I can do a part two of this interlude and show the last bit of work I did to build out this history.

I hope this dive into the Microscope as a worldbuilding tool was interesting, and that someday it might prove useful as you envision epic events that lay the groundwork for the story you’re trying to tell. I have found it an incredibly valuable tool for organizing my thoughts and keeping the continuity of a story strong while having the flexibility to explore any part of it that interests you.