Just got done with a session of Microscope that went very well, and have had a request to play it again the next time I meet up with these folks. In order to give Ben the information he needs, quick summary:

- we had three players, and I game with one of them far more frequently than the other

- I read the rules and explained them to them; I don't think there were any serious rule misunderstandings, as I was pretty thorough in answering the questions they had

- I used tone debt and made the only legacy, but the other two did not use tone debt or the legacy that I made. They were quick enough to spot when tone debt had been incurred, but they did not appear to be interested in making use of it. As one of them put it, "I think tone debt is for people who can't improv their way to the scene going in the direction they want." I don't agree with this assessment at all, but that seemed to be their opinion. We may not have been ruthless enough about enforcing the "nothing important outside of your character in a scene without Taking Control" rule. I used Predictions, Establishing a Fact, and Postscript.

-We've only played one session so far, but we will likely play another soon, though I doubt we will continue to use this history.

-The last three games I played were Amber Diceless, a PTA hack of Changeling, and an OWoD zombie apocalypse setting of my own devising, using the OWoD ruleset (largely because the players were comfortable with this). One of them player in the PTA hack, a 4e D&D campaign, and a Demon: The Fallen game, while the other has played in rather a lot of new WoD and 4e.

The history we came up with was not at all what I was expecting; the summary was "Japan wins the Second World War"; the beginning period was "Post-war Peace", a Light period of 50's style prosperity and complacency in a victorious imperial Japan, and the ending period was the Dark Abdication of the Emperor. Our palette allowed mechas and aliens (which was probably a mistake on my part, given the tone I would have liked), and forbade Akira-style psychic/dream stuff. The periods we ended up having in between were, in order:

The Paris Pact Invades Japan (since the Soviets dominated in Europe, their influence stretched a bit further than the Vistula...); Dark
Human-Alien War; Dark
Greater Earth Co-Prosperity Sphere (a prosperous and peaceful planet united under Japanese rule/suzerainity); Light

Things got silly quite quickly, despite the fact that our very first scene feature the execution of a Soviet diplomat and established that Moscow had been destroyed by an alien death ray. One of the players seemed determined to play things for laughs, and a Japanese re-education became became a chance for a cut-up of a biomecha to malfunction with hilarious results rather than a grim indoctrination into the new world order. Some very terrible things happened, like the aliens being driven away form earth by nanobots that had the effect of destroying all metals harder than copper, essentially rendering most technology totally unusable and sending humanity back to the dark ages, but the Japanese biomechas were apparently totally unaffected, and so they suffered no consequences from this whatsoever. A tense meeting between the Soviet ambassador and the alien representative was a cue to faux-Kruschev hamminess, and the final scene we played out established the completely gonzo premise via Tone Debt and Question-framing that not only was the current Japanese emperor really an alien clone, but that all Japanese emperors had always been aliens in disguise.

This last scene was necessary in my view to make coherent an inconsistency that emerged in the narrative; a number of events and scenes implicitly and explicitly suggested that the Japanese were collaborating with aliens or being assisted by aliens (my Legacy was actually "Japanese collaboration with the aliens"), but one of the other players just kept throwing down scenes where the Japanese were the brave defenders of humanity against the alien menace. Eventually it was established that the aliens behind the Japanese emperors were really a different species of alien, so the aliens won regardless.

All in all, it was very enjoyable, but it ended up a bit too much like a Harry Turtledove novel; we only really heard from important people with titles and ranks and things, and had lots of sterile political discussions, since I couldn't get them to stay with scenes focusing on more workaday folks or what life was like during these periods (the fact that they were defined largely in terms of geopolitical events didn't help in this regard). These also tended to have bland, anodyne settings, and eventually this became self-reinforcing; without any prompting or the slightest word from us, one of the players started out setting up a scene with corporate execs meeting in a bionutrient restaurant in Shanghai to frantically strategize about the response to the new, revolutionary government in Tokyo (kind of interesting) to some ministers of the Sino-Indian colonial government having a conference in a boardroom (blah).

Hopefully this will not be the case next time we play; they both said they were uncomfortable not having a clear goal or purpose, and just sort of fell back on safe territory. I think this will change with familiarity with what was going on, and understanding that the purpose is just to fill in details or sketch out broad strokes that you find interesting, to explore the bits you are curious about. They both did request this by name for next time, so that's encouraging, right?