[Sorcerer] Cloak & Dagger, Tyrone and Tandy

[James_Nostack]

Over at Ron's Doctor Xaos Comics Madness blog, people got to talking about the disappointing performance of two minor Marvel Comics super heroes, Cloak and Dagger.  On the off chance anyone reading this website is not a middle-aged comics geek, the deal with these two is that they're Goth Teen Vigilantes, many years before that became a cliche, who fight heroin dealers using stylish light & darkness powers.  But, for many reasons, they never really caught on, and it's been 35 years since their debut so it's safe to say they probably never will.

Still!  There's something about them, so I figured I'd see what they look like as Sorcerer characters.  Here I'm trying to do a fairly close adaptation simply as proof of concept: obviously if these were real Sorcerer characters you'd want to change things up quite a bit.  What I would not change is the demon's Need and Desire, nor the angel's Goal, and that the demon's Need can be mostly satisfied by getting zapped with the angel's Grace from time to time.

Core Concept
Two teenage runaways from vastly different socioeconomic classes.  They are homeless, friendless, penniless, high-school drop-out street people in terribly over their heads.  One or both may be addicted to heroin.  One or both may have left home under conditions where it's impossible to go back.  The conventional path to adulthood is buried under a rockslide of bad decisions and crushing obstacles.  Basically: take people who are as vulnerable, as discarded, as you can possibly make them--and then give them a demon and an angel and turn them loose on a society that's turned its back on them.

These characters received their powers from a drug overdose--possibly "shrack" to use the concept from the core Sorcerer rule book--and the binding ritual for the demon and angel involved tracking down and exterminating a street dealer who was victimizing kids just like them.  With that immediate threat over, where do each of them go now? 

Tyrone
Scrapper 2
Rageful 6
Naif 2

Humanity 5 (lost a point in binding)
Cover Teenage Runaway 2
Price No Good to Anybody (-1 when trying to interact as a normal person, instead of bullying them)
Telltale Face contorts in pain for no obvious cause

The Cloak
Type Parasite
Telltale Host seems weightless, insubstantial, nothing but fabric

* Shadow (host) - billowing darkness
* Armor (host) - insubstantial
* Travel (host) - teleportation
* Transport (host) - can store people inside himself
* Big (host) - can store even really, really big stuff like subway cars
* Hold (host) - to grab victims and pull them inside
* Special Lethal Damage (demon) - once victims have been pulled inside
* Confuse (host) - on victims if they're ejected from the cloak

Stamina 7
Will 9
Lore 8
Power 9

Desire Mayhem
Need Devour souls (a/k/a Grace) by killing victims drawn inside

Note that the Cloak's attack powers aren't like picking from a menu: it's a specific sequence, designed to maximize roll-over dice.

Also note that the demon is extremely pushy, and will use its Will against Tyrone to shove him toward satisfying its Need.

Tandy
Athletic Regime 4
Belief System 4
Naif 2

Humanity 4
Cover Teenage Runaway 4
Price Sheltered (-1 to street-smart stuff)
Telltale Improbable tattoo over right eye

The Dagger
Type Parasite (angelic)
Telltale Soft ambient glow

* Castigate - similar to Bless; roll Grace vs. target's Humanity, and the angel's victories are a penalty for the next time target tries to hurt a child
* Enfold - innocents in the immediate vicinity are shielded from all harm
* Restore - heals drug addictions completely; otherwise acts as other-directed Vitality

Goal Avenger

Stamina 4
Lore 3
Grace 6 (I just picked a number; adjust to taste)

Note that the angel in this example is capable of using its ability to satisfy the Cloak's Need.  For binding purposes, though, note that Tyrone is Cloak's master and actually bears the responsibility of satiating its hunger: getting these "life-light" zaps from Dagger tides the demon over, but it still needs to be fed for real.

Comments
Note that Tyrone's demon needs to eat souls and longs to cause violent trouble; Tandy's angel is a spirit of righteous wrath.  These attitudes are close enough to work together most of the time, but there are bound to be ideological splits.

Note that while the demon can satisfy its Need with the angel's "life-light," and thus is somewhat dependent on the angel, the demon also has the ability (per Sorcerer's Soul) to cancel any of the angel's abilities by making a Power vs. Grace roll.  So the demon has a dependency but also a veto power.  Between this veto and its tendency to push Tyrone around with stabbing hunger pangs, the demon feels reasonably safe from any obvious attempt to banish it.

Tyrone is pretty much screwed in the long-term.  He's got a pretty nasty demon inside him, inspiring him to commit serial murder, and eventually he'll run out of "deserving" victims.  Staying on extremely good terms with Tandy's angel is the most reliable way to survive, but that assumes Tyrone can persuade Tandy to stick around.  The main thing holding these two together is that their supernatural buddies have a shared agenda and work well together.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Hah hah, most excellent. I myself love Cloak and Dagger as characters, but I think that the observations at the blog are spot-on: they look like characters that should be awesome all the time, but in practice I couldn't name a single story that would've really done anything with them except compelling visuals. Definitely in my Top 5 of "Marvel characters I'd write if given the chance", though.

And yes, Sorcerer suits those two very well. I don't know if Tyrone should control all those powers of the cloak (I could see the demon being the user for many of them, really), but that's a minor detail.

You point at something observed at the blog as well: Tyrone has a lot of reason to want to keep Tandy around, but the reverse is not necessarily the case. (I think they did this in the comics at some point, too - like Tandy joined the X-Men or something while Tyrone was thrown under a buss.) Considering the setup in game terms, as a GM I'd probably try to finagle it so that Tyrone has the superior Cover score of the two, so he could be useful to Tandy in terms of real everyday streetwise survival. Maybe it's cliche for the man to be a streetwise provider, but then the entire concept of Cloak & Dagger is basically an '80s "style before substance" anthem, so it fits.

[James_Nostack]

Ha ha, thanks!  The exact write-up may need to be wiggled a bit, particularly with how the angelic powers work: I've always found the Angels section of Sorcerer's Soul fascinating, but have never used them in play.  (And in all the Sorcerer AP threads, I don't think I have ever seen anyone else use them either!  Like the rules for Liches in Sorcerer & Sword, it's a neat idea but under-explored.)

But what emerges writing this up for Sorcerer is the daisy-chain of fuckery between these four entities.

The Demon
IS CONTROLLED BY
Tyrone
WHO DEPENDS ON
Tandy
WHO WORSHIPS
The Angel
WHO IS EXPLOITED BY
The Demon

That's TNT waiting to explode, and it would all come down to who stabs whom in the back first.  You can almost imagine the demon savoring the thought that either Tyrone will enslave Tandy or be enslaved by her... and the angel rooting for disinterested agape to somehow win out in the end. 

Rules in play would definitely include the "inferior opponents" and the guns rules from the core book.  Per one of the optional rules in Soul, if an angel's ward fails a Humanity Loss check, they lose Humanity by the margin of loss, instead of just one point.  Soul also proposes an optional rule where a player can burn one point of Humanity to get a re-roll on an action, which seems like a nice little throwback to the Karma rules in the Marvel Super Heroes game.

[Ron Edwards]

I can't see anything but "sign me up" in your fuckery summary.

As Sorcerer anyway. In my limited reading of the comic myself, I found the whole "demon" thing to be intrusive and a bit of a dodge from what I was really interested in, Tyrone and Tandy as young people with all those crazy criss-crossing social issues.

Kind of like how I pretty much dropped the then-new Ghost Rider in the early 90s as soon as it was about some stupid demon and not a bad-ass biker full of demonic power.