[Sorcerer] Size of the web or R-map in your games?

[James_Nostack]

I've read Sorcerer's Soul.  I like it!  But the explicit, "base a scenario off a detective novel" relationship map technique is one I've never tried, because just dealing with the players' own nonsense turns my cast list into a Russian novel.  (Of course, some of the novels mentioned are certainly worth reading, whether or not you use them in a game.)

The first time Sorcerer really grooved for me was during a Dictionary of Mu game back in 2007.  We had three PC's (pre-gens from the book), each in very different parts of the world.  There were some NPC's in common--an itinerant Primite arms-smuggler, two sorcerous spies/double-agents, a couple of aristocrats slumming at the gladiatorial arena when not at court.  But mainly, just populating each locale with a handful of interesting, grabby folks who would logically be there, had me juggling about 40 NPC's.  (Some of them never appeared on-stage, and a few only had the equivalent of a cameo, but that's still a big wardrobe department.)

When I ran a 1950's rock-and-roll Sorcerer game last year, I deliberately said, "Nope!  Not doing that again!  NPC's on the back of the sheet only, and only add NPC's to unite the PC's backstories a bit."  Still: 26 NPC's between two players.  All of these had speaking parts and directly influenced the action.  (Come to think of it, this was about the same size as meaningful NPC's in the Dictionary of Mu game.)

Now, this isn't completely insane: I've run a number of other RPG's set in the early days of the Marvel Comics world, and there's easily 50 characters there who are must-have's if you're a comic nerd.  But not all of them would really matter in any given arc.  Also, these games tend to be less intense than Sorcerer and characterization is seldom as nuanced.  Perhaps as importantly, they already exist and I don't have to make them up whole-cloth.

In a one player game I think I had something like 10-11 NPC's, so it may be a function of group size, like around 10 NPC's per player?

How tight have your "NPC webs" or R-Maps been?  Am I on some crazy fringe where I can't stop inventing people?  Or is 26 folks about average? 

[Jesse Burneko]

Your numbers seem huge to me.  I had 3 players in my last Sorcerer game and I still have the sheets.  Across all three of them I see a total of 15 NPCs and I know about 10 of them became significant.  So that's an average of 5 per sheet.  And 3 to 4 of them taking on major significance per player.

I'm a little concerned about your phrase, "should logically be there."  When you put stuff on the diagrams it should only be stuff of immediate emotional resonance.  It's people, places and things essential to who the character *is*, not just any old thing related to that stuff.

For example, in my game one of the players was a graphic designer for an ad agency.  "Logically" he has a boss.  There's "logically" a client for his current ad campaign too.  But none of that went on his sheet nor did I develop it at all for my prep work because that wasn't important to who his character was.

Does that help?

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Typically I tell people their back-of-sheet diagram should have about ten things on it. My logic for their content differs from Jesse's a little, in that I go very specifically by the four categories. If their Cover, for example, includes a job, then I want to know a bit about what their participation in that job looks like, whether it's the workplace or merely something about the kind of car they drive. As with Jesse's example, typically I see about half of the ten things turning out to be people.

How you get such big numbers of NPCs, I don't know. One reason may be that you are thinking in terms of filling the sandbox, to know that if the guy should happen to go down to the corner store, that there'll be an NPC ready and waiting for him. Or conversely, maybe you are actually playing The Sorcerer's Soul by default already, so that merely in doing up the diagrams, you're hooking and linking and back-storying to a far greater degree than Jesse and I do.

Another thing to consider is that a given relationship map - in Soul terms, meaning mostly separate from the player-characters' diagrams - doesn't have to be very big. It's not like stocking a mansion in a Call of Cthulhu scenario, such that the more units, the more dispersed the information and the longer the scenario will run. Nor does being in the map necessarily mean a whole lot of screen time or importance for that NPC. I think the MacDonald maps are daunting not due to their size (which are  definitely not as big as your cast lists, even) but due to their psychological and emotional grubbiness, and the extent to which one or more NPCs will lie and murder (and has!) to protect themselves or to gain some neurotic advantage.

And finally, I know I stressed this in the book, but people often miss it - that supplement presents a deliberate added depth to play, which only makes sense if you really want to do it. Specifically: do you want Humanity to be the distinct, overriding, and above all challenging mechanic in play? If you don't, then don't do a relationship map of NPCs who are mainly not in the player-character diagrams. As far as I can tell more people would be happiest if they let Humanity remain the supplemental (although ever-present and significant) mechanic that it is in the core rules. Adding such a map means playing somewhat differently, and it only works if changes in Humanity, and evident abuses of Humanity both past and present, strike hard on the real-people players' and GM's nerves.

Whereas by contrast, what you described in your Mu game, James, was utterly classic Sorcerer & Sword, and although such play can occasionally involve relationship maps, they tend to be small and only sometimes deeply resonant in Humanity terms.

So what I'm saying is, if you don't want to do it, then don't force it. And if you do, then consider streamlining some aspect of how you're coming up with those diagrams, or consider playing a story or two without the Soul techniques, then ramping up that content later.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

Jesse or Ron, can you talk a little bit about how you generate NPC's or back stories in a recent game?  For disclosure, here's how I did it in my most recent game.  I have identified stuff from the players' sheets explicitly. 


Here is how this happened in the rock-n-roll game.

PLAYER ONE SHEET: We've got one PC, Tommy Joe Jackson, a white high school drop out lunkhead who wants to be a rock-n-roll musician without any talent.  With the help of the swamp witch, Delilah, he binds the Mojo Hand, which used to belong to a rival until he died in a drunk driving accident.  Kicker involves getting hounded off the stage at the county fair by Church Lady types.  Also on the sheet is is uncle Asa, a doctor who took him in as a youngster, with his mean wife Sally.  Oh!  And Smokin' Joe Tate, a blues musician who Tommy is shamelessly ripping off. 

So, BAM!  Delilah, the dead kid who supplied the Mojo Hand (along with a grieving family and hot girlfriend), the band mates, the leader of the church group, Uncle Asa, Aunt Sally, and Joe Tate.  All important to the player.  For tidiness, I link the dead kid's hot girlfriend as the daughter of the Boss Church Lady.  I also throw in, just for laughs, a cartoonish 1950's radio DJ.

PLAYER TWO SHEET: Another PC is playing Zachariah Cosgrove, a thirty-something traveling evangelical preacher and faith healer who's returned home after a long time away.  Zachariah summoned the insect-imp Melchidezek with the very reluctant mystical help of father figure and family servant Old Saul Phelps.  Zachariah's got Mavis Belle, a beautiful young black girl, as a prophetess in his church group.  Vernon Smalls is a kid who Zachariah healed.   Zach's kicker is that he's attacked by the Klan one night.  He has a promiscuous cousin named Mehitibel.

BAM!  Melchidezek, Saul, Mavis (and impliedly her parents), the Klan leader, Vernon (and impliedly his family), and Mehitibel.  For tidiness, cousin Mehitibel is two-timing the radio DJ with Smoking' Joe Tate.  Tommy Joe's uncle Asa had pretty much given up all hope of treating Vernon's injuries.  I decide to make one of Tommy Joe's band-members a young Klansman pushed into it by his father.  The Chief Klan Guy is the local Sheriff.

In terms of meaningful backstory: dang, two African-American sorcerers living in the same town, practicing the same type of sorcery, with two very different attitudes about it?  There's a story there!  After futzing around with a few ideas, I decided that In the late 1930's Saul had summoned a possessor demon to pass for white.  Under the demon's influence, Saul has an affair with Tommy Joe's aunt Sally.  Horrified by the half-demon child, they later kill it.  The furious demon then possesses Saul's daughter Delilah and lures Saul into incest.  This breaks apart Saul's family and leads to the birth of the half-demon prophet-girl Mavis.

Fast forward eighteen years, and here we are.  Having renounced sorcery, Saul's come back to town to find Delilah has cemented her power.  Zachariah's pro-integration church group is destablizing the white power structure as well as Delilah's influence.  She grooms Tommy Joe as an asset in the struggle.  Both sides are threatened by the Sheriff/Klansman.

None of the players have to care about any of that!  They just have to resolve their Kickers.  But this sorcerous race war is running in the background, as NPC's try to endure the PC's savage agency within this larger context.

[Ron Edwards]

Seems reasonable. Everyone in the group seems (i) to like making NPCs, which adds perhaps one or so per character who's not strictly necessary but I won't complain, and (ii) you seem inclined to connect characters to one another via their NPCs and to make a relationship map out of them, including a generational back-story and adding or elaborating upon characters to do so. As I suspected, you are Soul-ing the basics already.

To back up a little, is there a problem with that? I don't see one. It seems to me that any given time, only a few NPCs would be dragged directly to the center of each diagram, so it's not as if you have to play all of them at full-blast at every minute. If this is how you want to play, then go for it.

The leaner way Jesse and I described isn't really supposed to be the right or best one. Or another way to look at it is, it's not surprising you liked The Sorcerer's Soul on sight, and if you wanted to focus the back-story on what might be called a crime against humanity hidden by lies, then you're already most of the way there.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

Actually, this raises another point I've been meaning to bring up.  I'll start a new thread.