[Sorcerer] the sorcerers' coincidence

[James_Nostack]

Given a game of Sorcerer with N players, by definition play will involve N or more sorcerers.  They're in roughly the same place, at roughly the same time.  What is up with that, if anything? 

Obviously the answer depends on all the various factors that go into making a setting in this game, but primarily I am looking at "here and now" settings, or close approximations thereof.  If sorcerers are super-duper rare, they're unlikely to meet purely by chance. 

Furthermore, meeting another sorcerer is itself a huge bang.  (How can it not be?  Here is someone who can, if she wishes, banish or subvert your demon.)  Meanwhile, this supposedly chance meeting occurs at a time when the PC is already coping with whatever chaos was stirred up by her Kicker, the biggest hubbub in her life right now.  That simply cannot be an accident. 

And it's not: it's a contrivance of the game design, but there's a suspension of disbelief aspect to this because we're dealing with fiction. Over here, I went through how I (laboriously) tied one PC sorcerer to another by means of a complicated generational struggle.  We had fun with the game, but devising that connection was a pain in the neck, because I didn't just want to say, "Oh, well, oops, I guess four sorcerers happen to be in town today.  Don't go around tonight, for it's bound to take your life--there's a bad moon on the rise."

One of the things I really like about Demon Cops is that, even if played "straight," it offers a good rationale for several sorcerers' lives to intersect.  You have what amounts to a Coven dedicated to maintaining a Containment ritual on an extremely powerful demon.  This could easily draw attention from rival sorcerers from far away, or make local people "Lore-sensitive".  The super-demon's original human servants, or demonic spawn, might still be roaming around somewhere.  It's a simple but very flexible set-up: you don't all have to be on the same side, but it makes sense for you to be here.

[Ron Edwards]

Can't say I have that problem.

In Pulp Fiction, three men are intimately tied to a given crime boss. Two of them know one another but have only recently been re-united.

Does it "suspend disbelief" that Vincent has returned to L.A. and the center of Marcellus' operation from Amsterdam the very same time that Butch's plan to betray Marcellus has come to its crux point? How can that "just be by chance?"

But it is. Because this is the story of what happened when that happened.

I fully concede that different people have different standards for this sort of thing. But I submit that gamer-think adds an unnecessary wrinkle, far and away more intrusive than whatever it was Mrs. McGillicuddy thought she was talking about in high school English with "suspension of disbelief." I think that wrinkle is the desire for a virtual universe which runs on rules - not the real-world rules, mind you, but game rules - yet happens to be consistent with reality and to produce results exactly like we want them for our aesthetic priorities to be scratched. In the current case, those priorities would correspond to Premise; in the case of Gamist-oriented people, they would correspond to Challenge; and in the case of Simulationist-oriented people, they would correspond to Constructive Denial.

That wrinkle is flatly bonkers, in my opinion. I hold gaming fiction to the standards of ordinary fiction, which as it turns out, is absurdly over the boundaries of any realistic expectations regarding persons A, B, and C being in that situation at that very moment. What, the little son of the man who's the perfect victim for the evil-psychic hotel happens to be telepathic, and they're going to be socked in there all winter? And then the cook at the hotel turns out to be telepathic too, and they run into one another just before the family settles in and the cook leaves? Who could believe that contrived bullshit! But of course I do.

Speculation: Probably because "belief" has nothing to do with it, but rather enthusiasm for the conflict-based components which have been placed there for me in a way I find stimulating. I don't think it's a matter of a writer swindling a reader into believing something which he or she, in a saner moment, would not. I think it's a matter of deliberate collusion between the two because they, or a provisional communication between them, want to talk about something, which happens to be beautifully and dramatically placed into tension. Speculation: off.

But add the gamer desire to have the whole world of the fiction be running according to the same rules which brought these people together in this place and at this time ... I dunno, I can't see it and I don't know why people do this or want it. I can at least appreciate it as a priority of certain kinds of game design (I called it Purist for System in the Simulationist essay), but I don't share it. And I can't understand at all why it has to be folded into game designs or play which have nothing to do with it.

Or another way to look at it: again, with The Shining, do I expect that the meeting of these three people in that place and at that time would be representative of the way any two telepaths would be meeting, world-wide, in the fiction? No. That whole issue is so out of the mental range of enjoying the book that it amounts to failing to enjoy it, or even failing to read it, regardless of passing one's gaze over the words. In my nastier moments, I might even vilify it as a form of functional illiteracy.

But I am probably merely wiped out and hungry after a late bedtime with three kids who felt quite strongly about their Legos, and whose ability to process "go to bed" had been diminished with each decision of mine to let them stay up just a little bit longer. Please excuse my unsympathetic growling.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

No, I think it's a perfectly fine answer.

In Pulp Fiction, three men are intimately tied to a given crime boss. Two of them know one another but have only recently been re-united. 

Does it "suspend disbelief" that Vincent has returned to L.A. and the center of Marcellus' operation from Amsterdam the very same time that Butch's plan to betray Marcellus has come to its crux point? How can that "just be by chance?"

But it is. Because this is the story of what happened when that happened.

I think your first sentence gives away the game.  Vincent Vega has a problem: he's been asked to go on a date with the extremely seductive wife of his violently jealous boss.  Butch (can't remember if that's his name) has a problem: by refusing to throw a boxing match, he's cost Vincent's boss more than Butch can possibly repay.  Given who they know in common, and fact that Vincent's job is to kill guys like Butch, it's no surprise they're gonna cross paths.  Even if Butch had a completely unrelated problem, he's still an athlete in a very mobbed-up sport; there are going to be shared threads.

For a movie set in what amounts to a cartoon, Pulp Fiction does a pretty admirable job of maintaining internal consistency.

That wrinkle is flatly bonkers, in my opinion. I hold gaming fiction to the standards of ordinary fiction, which as it turns out, is absurdly over the boundaries of any realistic expectations regarding persons A, B, and C being in that situation at that very moment. What, the little son of the man who's the perfect victim for the evil-psychic hotel happens to be telepathic, and they're going to be socked in there all winter? And then the cook at the hotel turns out to be telepathic too, and they run into one another just before the family settles in and the cook leaves? Who could believe that contrived bullshit! But of course I do.

I have to say that this aspect of the The Shining has always struck me as clumsily handled.  The movie is still enjoyable, but would it have killed them to add a line of dialogue such as, "Ever since I took this job, I could just tell what this old hotel was trying to do to people.  Like it was waiting.  And I thought, I'm gonna wait too. If I have to wait twenty years, I'm going to stop it.  But, well, turns out my vacation days don't roll over!  Have a merry Christmas, kid!"  Furthermore, according to Crothers, ESP is bloodline trait, so it's possible that the little boy has a full-on version of it and his father has just enough to be susceptible based on his severe emotional problems.  (Worst.  Screening interview.  Ever.)

You're absolutely correct that so long as it's a good story, who the hell cares about this stuff.  But that's a question for the audience to decide, and I don't think it relieves the creator/collaborator from making a token effort to seduce the audience into that world.  Sometimes you've shot a beautiful and hypnotic movie, like Kubrick, and you know only an asshole is going to pick your movie apart.  But Tarantino's a talented guy when he wants to be, and he was fairly scrupulous about tying up his threads.

Speculation: Probably because "belief" has nothing to do with it, but rather enthusiasm for the conflict-based components which have been placed there for me in a way I find stimulating. I don't think it's a matter of a writer swindling a reader into believing something which he or she, in a saner moment, would not. I think it's a matter of deliberate collusion between the two because they, or a provisional communication between them, want to talk about something, which happens to be beautifully and dramatically placed into tension. Speculation: off.

Congratulations!  You've just hit on Coleridge's formulation of "willing suspension of disbelief."

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

From Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV (emphasis added).

[Ron Edwards]

I don't think I'm agreeing with Coleridge, let alone paraphrasing him. He's talking about the relative contributions of the actual and the fantastic, and I'm talking about fictional coincidence. Which I thought was the topic.

The last time I talked about this suspension of disbelief thing in detail was in 2002: Drawing conclusions in public, and it pissed everyone off except Jared, so Jared and I decided everyone was crazy and we've been happy about that conclusion ever since.

Two other minor points: (1) in Pulp Fiction, the fact that all three men know the crime boss does not negate the utter coincidence of the three story-arcs coming to their separate heads on the same day, forcing the three men separately to re-evaluate their respective relationships to that boss - that's raw coincidence, utterly unjustified, utterly unbelievable, and superior story-telling. (2) My discussion of The Shining is based solely on the novel, in which dialogue of the kind you're describing is present; I'm one of those grumpy bastards who dislikes the film.

I am getting more concerned by the minute that my points and examples are being missed, if not by you, then by any number of people who might be reading this. It might not be apparent that I think Pulp Fiction is a superior film and The Shining is a superior novel (King's best in my opinion), I bet it looks like I'm sneering at them when my whole point is that they work, despite being based on total coincidence, and in this, they are no more nor less that what you find in any excellent story. This is probably not a conversation for the internet.

But seriously, let's get back to Sorcerer in particular, and comparing repeated-character play in that game to repeated-character play in other games. Is this really a problem in practice, or is it something people are saying as a way to avoid playing, or is it something that you imagine yourself to be saying when you get there, or ...?

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

I agree that the timing of the interlocking stories in Pulp Fiction is apparently coincidental: there's no obvious reason why Vincent should take Mia out on a date shortly before Butch kills him.  (Do we know how much time passes between those two events?  My recollection of the film is that it's on the order of a day or two, but we don't know that for certain based on the "text.")  But we do know, based on Marsellus's position in life, that simply because he has hired Vincent he must have reasonably frequent problems with guys like Butch.  If it wasn't Butch on that particular day, it would be some other guy making trouble, like the kids at the apartment.  (We can surmise, based on Vincent's idiocy and position of near-trust, that Marsellus may not be a very good crime boss.  And I don't think the plot threads are as coincidental as appears at first glance, though I do take your point.)

So there's this old joke about D&D, that goes something like, "Okay, so, a Necromancer, a Half-Elf, a Rabbi, and a Talking Monkey meet at a bar, and decide to hang out together forever afterward."  It's funny because in D&D, specifically, this is actually expected behavior and a delicious cliche to be savored.  But there are many other RPG's out there that supply a similar diversity of character options without providing a coherent explanation for why these dudes would occupy the same fictional space.

For example!  I remember an old Shadow of Yesterday thread where you argued that, rather than embracing the full diversity of characters in the text, play probably works better by focusing on a specific region of the world, and the character types to be found there, teasing out the conflicts and themes of that spot.  It's an idea you returned to in an essay in mid-to-late 2011 that contained a closing paragraph about olden-days sandbox play that I quibbled a bit with, though I agreed with the other 95% of the essay. 

Sorcerer, though, is a little bit different.  Imagine you've got two players.  They're going through character creation.  It's totally possible they might give each other a connection: sharing the same Coven, for example.  Or it turns out that Player #1's kicker is explicitly connected to Player #2's cover, or something.  But it's not required in char-gen.

Yet the starting assumption of the game is that you summoned a demon.  That implies, in terms of "fictional world logic," that you know some really bizarre metaphysics, but in terms of "storytelling logic or thematic logic," it means you paid a price for this thing that most people wouldn't be willing to pay.  Either way, much less in combination, the PC is a rarity. 

For me as a GM, if there's explanation for why these dudes are in the same bar together, so to speak, I feel like I ought to engineer an explanation.  It sounds like you're just a "eh shit happens" kind of guy, which surprises me somewhat: it feels like the Sorcerer version of "you freaks all meet in a bar."  If I'm misunderstanding, how do you connect the PC's if they don't connect themselves?

[Ron Edwards]

Someone else is going to have to discuss it with you. I'm not getting through.

1. "You freaks all meet in a bar" fails to make sense because of its forced outcome: and now you all team up loyally. Not like Sorcerer.

2. Shadow of Yesterday is a setting-first game, which is what that essay was about. Not like Sorcerer.

3. The internal twist and turns of the events within either Pulp Fiction or The Shining is absolutely not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that those characters arrived where they did, when they did, before anything else happened.

I mean, I'm really trying to help you arrive at a point where playing Sorcerer as written can make sense, or at least not bug you. It feels like you're fighting me in order not to be helped. So .... clearly I'm mis-judging the situation and someone else will have to salvage this thread. I think the topic is great.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

I think we are talking past each other, which is where specifics can help.  So, think of a game of Sorcerer you've run in something approximating the real world.  PC's, plus whatever NPC sorcerers are floating around.  Were there any connections between them?  If so, what were they?  Who authored those connections?

(This isn't a question aimed solely at Ron!)

[greyorm]

I'm reading the "That simply cannot be an accident" as the central argument and point-of-contention. If it isn't I apologize for wasting everyone's time. However, my reaction to this statement is...why the fuck can't it?

"Seemingly impossible things happen all at once...that can't be a coincidence!" is an old cognitive bias arising from human pattern-seeking. Religion is one big example of this in action: something weird and seemingly non-coincidental occurs...why? The universe/god/spirits/something must have made it happen that way! There must be a "reason" that happened just that way.

But everyone has had those experiences. Life is random. Things seem to converge all the time. Except when they don't. We just don't notice the times they don't because those are always happening (every convergence that didn't happen is an example of it not occurring). But we notice the times they do and assume there's a reason for those intersections beyond mere chance, that such things MUST be occurring by some complex design. Even though it is just chance.

"But sorcerers are rare!"

OK...so are your friends. But ever run into one of your old friends suddenly in some weird place? Stranded on the side of the road, no spare tire, it's pouring rain, you're four-hundred miles from home...and your best friend suddenly pulls up? They were in the area and just happened to be passing by.

That cannot be an accident?

But, yeah, it was. There was no complicated shared reason you two both happen to be in the same spot...you just happened to be. It could have just as easily not happened to be.

You've been gone for three days and are heading home through a blizzard, but suddenly have to make a detour to pick up one of your kids on the way. While going to pick them up, you happen to spot your daughter's boyfriend's truck down in-between the trees on the side of the road, and it is pure luck you noticed. And you jump out and run to help him. That cannot be an accident you happened to be diverted *that way* *just then*? Yeah, it can. The vagaries of circumstance. Random intersectionality.

The worst fucking day of your life happens, and suddenly another sorcerer or three shows up, too? Fucking accident. No laborious complicated generational struggle necessary to make sense of that. They have their own reasons for being there that have nothing to do with you, but suddenly your lives are all intersecting.

Everywhere, including fiction, that can be and often is an accident.

That doesn't mean it necessarily is an accident, only that one not belabor the "reasons" for such nor create complicated connections explaining "why" they show up just then which are tied to the protagonist.

[KarlM]

My understanding...

* Sorcerer is a Story Now! game
=> the players want to play together in the same game
=> the players are getting and giving direct statement-to-statement, scene-to-scene feedback from each other and the GM

* Sorcerer PCs in no way act like a traditional rpg 'party'.
=> Each player uses their character to pursue their own agenda,

Therefore, quite naturally
=> Each player reuses/comments on/repurposes interesting elements produced by other players
=> Any underlying fictional rationale to explain this reuse is an after the fact justification, not a cause

Elements from each character's scenes can be reusable regardless of any same time/same place restriction
* There is no mechanical or fictional requirement for Sorcerer PCs to be in the same place at the same time

* if the Sorcerer PCs are in the same place at the same time, it is because the players (including the GM) find that interesting and useful

[James_Nostack]

Folks, while I very much appreciate the commentary and the tought that went into it, I feel it is no longer productive (for me personally) to discuss about movies, hypothetical road trips which have never happened in my life nor anything even remotely analogous, or diagrams.  As requested up thread, tell me about your Actual Play.  Specifically, tell me WHETHER but just as importantly WHY you connected up the sorcerous events in a recent game. 


(Normally, I would never insist on an Actual Play account from others, without supplying one of my own first, but I think I did that over here and explained my reasons for doing this in the first post in this thread.)

[Ron Edwards]

Tentatively,

Let me try. Just last weekend I fulfilled one of the Kickstart game pledges, with Jahmal, Jeremiah, Dave, and Mark. We began with a "two statements" step over email, then used both mornings of the weekend: one for finishing character creation and the beginnings of play, and the next for dedicated play.

With four players and the depth that we achieved, I think one more full session would have been minimally necessary to do justice to the material. The game could also potentially have led to considerably more sessions. Knowing we only had the single session, I Wove stuff together a lot and we ended with more of a grand dogpile rather than a literary ending. Granted, it was a fun, coherent dogpile: high-quality horror-action cinema.

Now to apply it to the topic. The characters were all mobsters of one sort or another. One was a Native American hitman trying to leave the rackets, another was an Italian-American hitman whose sole emotional foundation had just dropped out from under him, another was an Irish-American woman in the Italian mob, and the last was a Russian-American woman disguised as a man in the Russian mob; all of this revolved around a Native American casino.

OK, the mob material is fine - classic stuff, which I modestly suggest we did well enough to exceed the standards of American cinema, enjoying certain stereotypes and subverting others. Your question, James, concerns why were these four (four!) sorcerers here at this time and place, in this way.

Well -- um, the way I figure it, in this construction of play (and there could be others), sorcerers are drawn to power. There may not be many of them, but they do walk the corridors of power in some fashion or another. And while most of the time we might see one in D.C., one in the prison-mob-government axis in some state, one in high finance, one running the whole population of homeless in some city --

Out of fiction, by saying "crime families" as the first statement takes the above concept and for lack of a better word, steamrolls or forces or dictates that atypically, at this point of in-fiction history, there are indeed four of the world's few sorcerers right here all involved in this particular tangle of inter-mob interactions. Unlikely? Yes. But we chose that statement knowing that, in full, it was best phrased "Mob families, and against all odds, no less than four of the bastards are there." So in-fiction, yes, it's unlikely. But since it happened, you can expect a blow-up or at the very least unpredictable and life-changing events for the sorcerers, and that's why we're here, in-fiction-wise.

An important modification of that: I should point out that nothing in our prep dictated that the four characters all had to be active mobsters, as they turned out to be. One could have been an FBI agent. One could simply have been a local housewife whose life was impinged upon by the mobs indirectly. And so on. But as I say, just through the vagaries of personal desires, all the players came up with completely embedded and variously committed straight-up mob people. And that indeed does stretch one's tolerance thin a bit. I always tell people, look, you can do anything with the two statements you want, you don't have to be all alike. It's like way back in my original Hero Wars game begun in 2002, I posed a starting point where two major cultures are overlapping and various nonhumans were available as well -- and they all chose to be members of the same tribe and small community.

But the good news about that - for these sorcerers I mean, it wasn't an in-fiction stretch for the Hero Wars situation - is that I didn't impose it. I didn't make them have to swallow this extra-unlikely narrowing of our admittedly-but-OK unlikely starting point. Bluntly, they did it. And if they want it, then obviously it's not a problem. I as GM am not in charge of the probabilities of the in-fiction in-game by-the-rules Sorcerer universe outside of the specific conflicts of interest once we've started play. I'm sure as hell not in charge of them regarding the context for play. So, OK, I go with it. Extra-unlikely launch point, here we come.

Anyway, I offer all of that not as justification but rather as process. It assumes that you've read the annotations for both chapters 1 and 4 in the preliminary PDF I sent out in very early February, and as I've mentioned, the final annotations are a bit more detailed and extensive. Let me know if it meets your needs in this thread.

Best, Ron

[James_Nostack]

Well -- um, the way I figure it, in this construction of play (and there could be others), sorcerers are drawn to power. There may not be many of them, but they do walk the corridors of power in some fashion or another. And while most of the time we might see one in D.C., one in the prison-mob-government axis in some state, one in high finance, one running the whole population of homeless in some city --

Out of fiction, by saying "crime families" as the first statement takes the above concept and for lack of a better word, steamrolls or forces or dictates that atypically, at this point of in-fiction history, there are indeed four of the world's few sorcerers right here all involved in this particular tangle of inter-mob interactions. Unlikely? Yes. But we chose that statement knowing that, in full, it was best phrased "Mob families, and against all odds, no less than four of the bastards are there." So in-fiction, yes, it's unlikely. But since it happened, you can expect a blow-up or at the very least unpredictable and life-changing events for the sorcerers, and that's why we're here, in-fiction-wise.

An important modification of that: I should point out that nothing in our prep dictated that the four characters all had to be active mobsters, as they turned out to be. One could have been an FBI agent. One could simply have been a local housewife whose life was impinged upon by the mobs indirectly. And so on. But as I say, just through the vagaries of personal desires, all the players came up with completely embedded and variously committed straight-up mob people. And that indeed does stretch one's tolerance thin a bit. I always tell people, look, you can do anything with the two statements you want, you don't have to be all alike.

No, actually to me that seems perfectly sensible, more or less. I don't see very coincidental there at all.  If sorcerers dig positions of social influence (which is certainly very reasonable), achieving that through a crime family is certainly one viable route, and I could even imagine a kind of sorcerous-gangster arms race, where eventually someone hires Javier Bardem's Anton Chiurgh or his demonic equivalent to take out the opposing sorcerer. 

The fact that all of those guys happen to be no-kidding gangsters rather than dudes working the periphery, Lady MacBeth style, is a slight stretch but I can buy it.  It's simple, direct, and plugs you right into shoot-outs and stake-outs and all that mob-guy stuff which you'd want in a one-shot.

Did you have any backstory that linked up their kickers or lore at all?

[Ron Edwards]

There now exist two concurrent threads about the same game, so check out [Deadly Sins and the Mafia], where my answers to Jeremiah's questions should do double-duty for yours. I'd like to see this thread address your call for breadth and examples regarding the role of in-setting justifications and the tolerable limits of coincidence involved in situations worth playing, whether for Sorcerer or for anything else. Along with your Zero thread, this also makes me want to pick up that essay I was working on last summer, which I shelved in order to finish Shahida; you'll like it, I finally tackle "sandbox."

Best, Ron

[greyorm]

Alright, James.

Of the two most recent Sorcerer games I've run, I'm fuzzy on the detail of the first as it's been a few years now. The PC sorcerers and some of the NPC sorcerers just happened to all live in the same town. Why? Because we, the players, all lived in that town or near it. Two of the PCs were members of a coven embedded in the local school district's faculty, one being a vet who retired to the area. Another was part of a local dojo whose family practiced sorcery.

In the main these were "just folks"...with a secret, obviously. We didn't play enough to determine if the dojo and the district had been aware of one another up until then. The coven members ended up working together after the murder of a student affected them both as suspects. A murder that had been committed by a rogue coven member returned from banishment, looking to punish/destroy the coven and steal the vet's demon.

We didn't get much further than that as we rotated to D&D for a bit, then members moved before we came back 'round.

The second game took place at the recent Forge Midwest, four of us -- three who had never played Sorcerer before (one had never even played an RPG before) -- played Dictionary of Mu. I had thrown something together quickly and we used characters from the Mu book: the Witch-king, the Damsel Maiden, the Khan-of-All-Khans, and one of the Witch-king's Bridegrooms. I'd mostly picked the characters out that would be used, but each player chose the one they wanted and there were a couple that weren't chosen, so I had no clue how this was all going to fall together.

The draw was that the Red Wastes had recently vomited up an ancient temple said to contain a treasure that would grant the owner lost knowledge and great foresight, and those three powers above, upon discovery of this fact, were rushing to claim it before any of the others. The Witch-king and the Damsel to get an edge over one another, the Khan as part of his test to show he WAS the Khan-of-All-Khans, and the Bridgegroom as a servant of the Witch-king.

There was no "and we're working together"...in fact, I imagined it would be quite the opposite, maybe punctuated with "except together against this!" and then "...but hah, screw you!" Though I had no clue. It turned out the players had much different and better ideas, which either aligned with the above set-up or were quite different from it.

Now, none of these facts presented themselves in this order, but we eventually discovered through play that: the Witch-king had kidnapped three of the Khan's children for use in a sacrificial ritual to open the way to the temple. But his Bridegroom was a secret devotee and spy of the Damsel Maiden, rescuing the children for her. Because the Damsel Maiden wanted to convince the Khan to marry her, hence her interest in the children, she then presented them to the Khan. The angry Khan then sent three diseased heretics and criminals, disguised as children by demons, back with the Bridgegroom to infect the Witch-king. However, the Witch-king was playing dumb and knew all about the betrayal thanks to the Bridegroom's demon, and planned a horrible fate for the Bridegroom, but maybe not quite yet...

We had to end the game as folks were heading out, so that's as far as it went. The players had tied their characters soundly together in ways I hadn't and couldn't have foreseen. It ended up I was pretty much just there to facilitate the rules and give prompts/reminders when needed: call for rolls, grant bonus dice, interject as the demons, etc. but mainly stay out of the players' way as narrators.

[greyorm]

The second game took place at the recent Forge Midwest, four of us --

Ack. FIVE of us. Numbers are hard.