[Sorcerer] Deadly Sins & The Mafia

[Jeremiah Frye]

At Forge Midwest I got to play my very first session of Sorcerer. I read it years ago, but I've never had the chance to play it. One of the players, Jahmal, had kicked in the money on the Kickstarter campaign for a game with Ron and he invited 3 more to play with. Awesome and very generous.

Ron got us started with a bit of basic world-building via e-mail to get our brains working. The two things we came up with to kick things off:

1. Crime families
2. Seven deadly sins.

Something to start with. I know Ron specifically said that those didn't do much for him at first and I kind of agree, but it was a good starting point and it ended up turning into some really great stuff.

Saturday morning we spent a few hours making our characters and then a round of kickers. The extra time spent on characters was really great. Ron helped us all find some focus in our concepts and his help with the diagram/concept map (don't remember what exactly it's called) was really invaluable. For character creation that's really where the magic happens. I don't know if it was the same with everyone else, but I know when I started with my list of things to put on the map I thought I knew what the important stuff was, but by the time they were all placed, I was totally surprised. That's a really cool tool.

Ron had asked us to start working on characters before we met and without talking to each other. Two of us came up with enforcer/assassin types. The other two came up with management/"logistics" types. One character was trying to get out of the business, one was trying to get more power (I think), another was trying to destroy it from the inside, and mine was pretty content with where he was as an enforcer (more on that later). I'll let everyone else pitch in with more details as I've forgotten by now. We also each picked an additional descriptor for our Lore that matched one of the 7 deadly sins and each of our demons had a different sin for their desire. Definitely gave a cool feel to the game.

For the crime family bit, we had 3 major players: native Americans, Russians, & Italians. The Native Americans were sort of the new kids. Running a casino, of course, but they were also the only ones making any money. So the Russians & Italians were both trying to worm their way in to somehow get a cut.

So we finished character creation & did a round of Kickers Saturday morning. It'd been about 3 hours at that point, so we stopped and planned to pick it up and play starting Sunday morning.

Not going to bother with any sort of AP. Play was great. Characters/NPCs came together in some really awesome ways and Ron really put us in difficult spots, usually getting pulled from all different directions. Especially one character who was an enforcer for the Native Americans trying to get out of the business and was engaged to the daughter of the head of the Russian mob. Neither one wanted to let him go, of course.

In the end we had a final climactic showdown that involved one of the characters' masters, her demon house, and all of the PCs and their various demons. It was great and really gave us a chance to see how a really complex situation worked within the dice mechanics.

For my part, I think I could have done better with my character. The way it turned out, he was pretty happy with his situation, whereas everyone else was looking for something else. The status quo is boring and I wish I would have caught that part of my character earlier on. I still had a great time, though -- I had a couple scenes that I was really happy with. And that definitely gave me a good takeaway. Something to keep an eye out for in the future, for sure.

The one thing we didn't get to talk about much (Jahmal & I had to leave as soon as the game was finished because we had a long drive home) was any of the behind the scenes stuff. What Ron did/was doing as GM as the game went on. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of the player side of things, but I'd definitely like to know more about what goes into the GM process.

[MadJay]

I played a Native American enforcer, 'Jonny Threestones'. His demon does the killing when necessary, Jonny doesn't like to get his hands THAT dirty. During Ron's interrogation I decided Jonny has a new life, he's got a girl, they;ve got a place, looking at rings - and that was his kicker.  I named Jonny's girl Natasha, on purpose knowing there were Russians afoot. I figured Ron would use it if he wanted.

There's much to take away from the setup. Our two setting answers were 'meh' - but prooved to be incredible seeds. I saw Ron scribbling notes the whole time during setup and thought 'I want those!'  The magic isn't there though. I suspect his notes only have meaning for him on what scenes to frame, where to apply stress and how the characters intersect.
For example: 'The Hawaiian', a Russian heavy, pulls up in a limo(iirc?) near Jonny and Natasha.  In my mind I'm all 'let's pop this fool!'. Imagine my horror to discover the Hawaiian isn't there for Jonny, but for Natasha! He's calling to his daughter - Natasha. That's not on MY sheet!

I'm guilty, I had visions of Jonny and Natasha driving off to a new life away from the casino into the sunset. The reality finds Jonny barely escaping a demon house and a ritual naked and covered in blood.
Jonny did fare better than his peer, the Bear.

I'm walking away with these:

• No pre-playing. Which in practice is hard and easily ignored. Ron at multiple times enforced this as we slipped into those comfortable ways.
• Work that Diagram! I'm a believer!

Ron, you expressed how the setting didn't initially move you. Can you talk about when & what in the setup process made that change for you?

[Mark Delsing]

I was playing one of the logistics/higher-ups, an Irish woman, Maggie, climbing her way up the Italian mafia ladder. Her demon's signature sin was pride, and I think hers was greed. Her kicker was that she was pregnant, which was a big deal since her schtick was about making sure the Italians saw her as a "man" in terms of respect and ability, i.e., fighting their natural prejudice.

I'm in total agreement about the character-creation session helping me identify what was really important about Maggie. It took me a while to come up with a list of items for use on the diagram, but once Ron was prompting me, the process started to click, and I started seeing what the key issues to be explored were.

Ron berated me for not using my demon enough, which was a fair cop. I was expecting play to focus on the demon prodding me with its needs. I came to realize that the bound demon with which you begin play is totally your PC's bitch. It's more about the cost of making use of the kewl powerz they provide.

I had just finished re-reading all of the books in the weeks leading up to the session, so I had a basic grasp of what we were doing mechanically. However, we were moving pretty fast and furious in the second session, so I wasn't always sure exactly what it was Ron was doing, especially during the big fight at the end. E.g., I understand the "initiative" system, but sometimes we'd keep our dice on the table once our turn came up and just compare results, and other times we'd be rolling again, and that confused me a bit. Granted, it was a pretty complex conflict: four PCs, one NPC, and, what, five demons?

Another takeaway for me was how hard Ron was pushing things as GM. I'm not sure if that was because he was gunning for a definitive climax in a one-shot or if that's just Sorcerer GM best practice.

[Dave]

I was the fourth player in this game, in the character of Aglaia, passing as a man (without demonic assistance, in contrast to Maggie, whose demon imparted Cover: Male) named Arkady, who had been working her way up through the ranks of the Russian Mafia for the past several years. She was more or less Maggie's counterpart, certainly they knew of one another, which became important later on.

Despite some poor rolls early on, I came back strong and ended up sharing the "win" with Mark, although arguably everyone's character met a satisfying end, with the possible exception of Jeremiah's- in retrospect I can't be sure if you were happy with that ending, or if you'd have preferred to at least go out with a little more oomph- getting held down by a demon while someone shoots you in the head isn't exactly "guns blazing", especially after multiple rounds of psychic whammy. Your thoughts?

Particularly interesting to me in this game, now that it's over, is the interesting gender dynamics. Jay and Jeremiah both played male characters, while Mark and I both played female characters passing as male. Both Maggie and Aglaia/Arkady ended up having sex during the game, neither of the male characters did. One male NPC got sorcerously raped to death, and Jay's character was headed for a similar fate before escaping; while Mark and I both employed sex in rituals at least once.

I'm curious about everyone's thoughts/perspective on this aspect of the game.

All in all it was pretty satisfying, for a couple of 3-4 hour sessions. We definitely could have spun it out longer, but I don't think any of us wanted to end up dedicating the whole con to it, which we probably could have.

[Ron Edwards]

So much to write about! This post is merely to clarify a couple of points.

1. Maggie wasn't passing as a man. She used her demon to negate prejudices that arose because of her gender. So all of her fellow mobsters (and anyone else) knew she was a woman, and Irish, but whenever such facts would ordinarily count against her, they mysteriously didn't. That's different from Dave's female character, who under the name "Arkady" was indeed passing as a man.

2. All the player-characters had sex during play. The Bear got with the Native American prostitute, and Johnny and Natasha celebrated their new apartment. Only the latter, out of all four characters, got Veiled.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

So, "mob families and seven deadly sins," as one person said, weren't really floating my boat at the start. But I stress that I did not tell them that! I simply went with it.

Given the character concepts the players brought independently, I went with the idea of a Native American casino and the other syndicates wanting to be involved, or in the case of the Italians, more so. I drew upon a certain minor influence from the comic Scalped.

Once we were looking at the mostly-finished characters and the diagrams were shaping up, I decided to Spike two of the Kickers: Natasha, Johny's fiancee, is the daughter of the Hawaiian (a character from "Arkady's" diagram), and Adam, the mysterious Russian boss who's coming to town at last, is actually Pavel - "Arkady's" husband, the man she thought was killed by the mob and why she had worked so hard to infiltrate it and destroy it from within.

The other two Kickers seemed sufficiently strong to me to run on their own, but as it happened, Jeremiah simply let his drop and seemed to me to play his character pre-Kicker. This was especially odd because he made such a strong start with it too. Mark used his Kicker a bit, just enough to matter.

We played a little bit at the end of the first meeting, just enough to let me see how the characters felt in the hands of their players and to establish the Kicker situations.

When we met the next day, as I was scribbling a little, I wrote "ritual" by "Maggie and mentor," without yet knowing what it would be or directed toward what demon, but thinking that it should destabilize the pregnancy and the possible relationship; and I wrote "the meeting is a ritual" by "Adam," meaning the meeting that effectively constituted "Arkady's" Kicker, i.e., regarding a demon but without any idea of what ritual or by what sorcerer. The players probably remember that I started making portentous noises to myself and gloating to them that now they were in real trouble. That's because, having seen the word "ritual" written twice there, I decided (or realized, if you like) that these should be the same ritual: Maggie's mentor, Marissa, Binding Adam.

So that's about as tight a back-story for four characters as I want to make, or even more so actually, but I went for it considering the brevity of our opportunity to play and also the large number of characters. That item constituted the last known-to-me-only content of my preparation.

Play after that was driven by three things: (i) the cross-cutting so that everyone's character was fairly said to be "doing something" at any given time, (ii) my ruthless use of in-fiction time and space to put characters together or to make their actions directly relevant to one another (again, significantly more than I might in a longer-term game), and (iii) all characters' stated actions, PC and NPC alike.

I'd say that both "Arkady" and Johnny resolved their Kickers, Maggie had not yet done so, and the Bear effectively resolved his by failing to deal with it and getting killed (that may have been more causal than it felt like in the moment; to be discussed later).

As Dave pointed out, the game turned out to be infused and ultimately about gender and sexuality, effectively becoming Sex & Sorcery with a clear tilt toward female power. The reason why is clear: the two men, basically, didn't have their hearts in the situation. Johnny was trying to get out of the racket but came a'runnin' at his master's call (the Bear even called him out on it!), and the Bear was effectively running on empty because he wasn't trying to find something to care about to replace his deceased parents. Whereas the women were engines of motivation, one to rescue her endangered husband (as opposed to avenging his death, her initial perception of the situation), and the other to preserve her motherhood in the face of both ordinary adversity and a mentor who cared nothing for it except as a resource.

This distinction was made brutally obvious by the two men seeking to assassinate Marissa in her own home, even after figuring out she's a sorceress. Don't attack a sorceress at home. Even worse when she's assisted by her utterly ruthless protégé and, as it happens, yet another sorceress shows up with an agenda of her own. Even though the female characters did not end up as a team - far from it, Maggie and "Arkady" ultimately allied against Marissa - the men were simply in over their heads.

That tangle consisted of five sorcerers and six demons, and the host of one of those demons too. I was pleased to use the system as it was intended, with as far as I can tell, not a bit of fiddling or adjusting or fiat on my part.

The Bear's fate was nearly a foregone conclusion. Tough as he and his demon were, he was up against Maggie in the full grip of her motivations, backed by her fully-fed demon Gowl and by the demon-house controlling the Escher-ian landscape of the confrontation in her favor. He had no dog in the fight whatsoever. And his demon's Need hadn't been met since the funeral scene at the beginning - it was sucking wind by that time. Incidentally, Jeremiah could have called for a Will roll to get one more action in there, but he didn't, and it's not my job to remind players of that option.

There's more to write about in terms of preparation. The whole "don't pre-play" issue was huge, reaching all the way back to our first emails, and showing up later as an apparent deep desire to story-conference and character-conference before play. All of the mentions above about my interrogation or management during the character creation process were simply me enforcing the existing rules and explaining them when necessary, for example, pushing Mark to write a Kicker that wasn't just something Maggie dealt with ordinarily. We should probably talk more about the diagram method too - I ran into this last fall in Italy, too - in that it's not about "put what's important in the middle," that's very wrong.

Best, Ron

[Mark Delsing]

Mark used his Kicker a bit, just enough to matter.

Before we started heading down the Marissa route, I had planned on doing more with Simon, the baby's father. But we had bigger fish to fry in our limited time.

[James_Nostack]

The players probably remember that I started making portentous noises to myself and gloating to them that now they were in real trouble. That's because, having seen the word "ritual" written twice there, I decided (or realized, if you like) that these should be the same ritual: Maggie's mentor, Marissa, Binding Adam.

Now that, as people younger than me say, is my jam.  And by "jam" I mean part of what I was going on about in this thread.

(1) So, I think this notion of saying, "Whoa, this thing over here... and this other extremely similar thing over there... are they related somehow?" is a really natural instinct that humans have and while it's seldom much use in the real world, it's a big impulse in storytelling and symbology and so on.

(2) Ron, what prompted this on your part, to the extent you're consciously aware of your process?  Obviously you're not doing it out a sense of verisimilitude as discussed in the Coincidence thread, but is it a kind of economy-of-storytelling, or "Oh shit I have to entertain these clients and all I have are these two notes, let's jam them together quick quick quick" or what?

(3) How big would you have let this expand out to, if you were prepping out a full game?  In this thread I talk about a crazy-big R-map I worked out based solely on the diagrams on two PC's sheets.  I said to myself, "Whoa, this middle-aged swamp woman witch... and this elderly sorcerous mentor who's abandoned the craft... What if she's his daughter?" and working out their history with each other ended up encompassing a whole bunch of folks in town, and the people who weren't directly involved were pretty much strolling around with huge bullseyes painted on them.

I'm glad folks had fun and got what they wanted out of the experience.


edited to fix a link - RE

[Dave]

2. All the player-characters had sex during play. The Bear got with the Native American prostitute, and Johnny and Natasha celebrated their new apartment. Only the latter, out of all four characters, got Veiled.

True enough, and I had forgotten about those. They felt more casual/set dressing-y than essential to the plot, although perhaps they didn't feel that way to their players.

I guess I was thinking more about sex-as-plot-device, or "sex for effect", so to speak. I'm still interested in everybody's thoughts on all of it.

It was surprising to me how quickly everything came together, good job on that end, Ron.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi James,

I think I do things like conjoin two separately-listed items or ideas* out of an entirely different aesthetic: to find fun potential for conflicts that are relevant to Humanity. In this case, I knew it potentially threw motherhood-pregnancy into conflict, or at least confrontation, with wife-love. The fact that it was efficient, i.e., permitted two fictional rituals to become one, is nifty but not the priority.

I find the size of the NPC/social prep varies greatly. My 'town' in one of the first-ever prolonged Sorcerer games was pretty huge too, in terms of relevant NPCs. I've become a bit more minimalistic lately, partly because I've tried to avoid forcing the concepts in The Sorcerer's Soul into play and let them emerge instead.

I think that if this had been a longer-term game, this initial prep wouldn't have been much different. However, I'd certainly spend some time ... especially after this first session ... in developing more of the NPCs like Maggie's lover Simon. During the session itself, I might not have been quite so aggressive in framing straight to the crazy, particularly the whole kill-Marissa idea which might have done better as an option based on game events. I'd probably have tried to work Jeremiah's character's Kicker more, including developing the character of his parole officer who seemed like a decent guy in play, or providing more opportunities for the character's deep need for genuine human contact.

Best, Ron

* I say 'things like' because this is only one of probably a dozen modifications or arrangements I might make using listed items, whether right off the diagrams or as in this case, just notions I'd scribbled down.