[Sorcerer] Ghost Rider

[Bret Gillan]

[Crossposted here from Google+ at Ron's request!]

For fun, I wrote up Ghost Rider as a Sorcerer demon. He's incredibly powerful and seems like it would be a lot of fun in play. Funnily, his various hosts would make terrible Sorcerer characters. None of them actually use Ghost Rider for anything. He's just a thing that happens to them, and then they wander into random encounters with villains. Fine for comic books, terrible for Sorcerer play!

Name: Ghost Rider (Zarathos)
Type: Parasite
Telltale: Eyes flicker with flames

Stamina: 18
Will: 19
Lore: 18
Power: 19

Abilities:
Shapeshift into Ghost Rider - all powers below associated with Ghost Rider form. Notes: When Ghost Rider, head is a skull in flames and bike twists into demonic form. Demon becomes much more verbal and will speak through the host's mouth (usually ranting about punishment and vengeance).
- Armor (resistance to mundane damage)
- Boost (superstrength, ability to throw cars and punch people through walls)
- Confuse (stunning strike with chains)
- Cover (Biker - motorcycle stunt rider, occasionally thought to be biker with a "rubber mask")
- Daze (turn up flames to blind people)
- Hint (look inside and find what the demon knows)
- Hold (trap people with chains)
- Perception (unerringly locate innocent blood that has been or is being spilled)
- Protection (resistance to flames)
- Special Damage - Ranged (spitting flames)
- Special Damage - Ranged (flying chains)
- Taint (Penance Stare, anyone dropped to Humanity 0 spends the duration reliving everything bad they've ever done to someone else)
- Transport (flaming motorcycle)
- Travel (flaming motorcycle - can travel at high speeds and drive up sheer surfaces)
- Vitality (super durability)

Desire: Mayhem
Need: To inflict pain or the Penance Stare on someone who has shed innocent blood.

[Ron Edwards]

Quick abilities editing ...

1. Boost is irrevelant, Stamina that high (or half that high) is already super-strength
2. Confuse is redundant, can be treated as a special effect of the Special Damage
3. Dubious for Hint - most likely a host-parasite communication with no need for an ability
4. Cover is bogus; that's the typical denial that factors into any encounter with demons
5. Alter penance stare from Taint to Psychic Damage, because

That brings the number of abilities down to 12, I believe, which following typical demon construction gives us 12-13-12-13 - excessive to be sure, but not ridiculous.

More importantly, it seems to me that the "demon" is better understood as an angel in terms of Chapter 3 in The Sorcerer's Soul, using the option of demon construction rather than the highly specialized rules. This also dovetails with your accurate point that the hosts are effectively not sorcerers, and it accounts for the fact that you've defined its Need badly - what the demon is obsessed with doing isn't its Need; its Need is what makes it sick when it doesn't get it, and what the host must supply. As far as I can tell, Zarathos has no Need.

The original stories from the 70s should be examined as an entirely different thing, as they are indeed a Sorcerer story. And Johnny Blaze back then kicked ass.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

The original stories from the 70s should be examined as an entirely different thing, as they are indeed a Sorcerer story. And Johnny Blaze back then kicked ass.

No "penance stare", at that time... (and I suggest dropping it completely even from this version of the character, to have both a less power total and a more bad ass demon: "beat his crap with a chain" beat in sheer bad-assery the comics-code-friendly "look into his face with a frown and he begin to cry" of the '90s version every day...  :-)  )

Talking about the first Ghost Rider, I am not sure about a possible application of the rules.

Johnny Blaze didn't bind Satan, he did made a pact with him. A one-time pact, as defined in "Sorcerer and Sword". But Johnny fail his roll, so Satan respect only the letter of the pact, but pervert the intent
Enraged, Johnny refuse to "pay" his part in the pact, and Satan "bind" a Demon to him.

Now, this would be acceptable as a Sorcerer's PC origin story? The rules says that the pact with the demon has to be made voluntarily, no "I got a demon by mistake" PCs. But in this case, the character did voluntarily make a deal with a Demon, that caused ANOTHER demom to be bound to him?

[Ron Edwards]

Regarding Johnny Blaze, 70s-only, there is no Zarathos. Moreno, I think you nailed it with the Pacting issue, but my take after that is that Satan basically initiates a "you're turning into a demon" process - the rolls described for human-to-demon conversion rules in Chapter 2 of The Sorcerer's Soul work well here, if I do say so myself - and Blaze's personal history is mainly about Humanity loss, setting up a nice pool of potential Power for the demon he is becoming. The only difference is that the demon abilities are in fact functional while Blaze still has Humanity, which seems like a good rules option anyway. So after that, it's all about Blaze (i) trying to use demonic abilities for good and (ii) figuring out what "good" is anyway considering that he's a perfect example of the hip/alienated long-hair roughneck favored so heavily by Ploog, Wrightson, et cetera at that point.

Do I recall correctly that the climax of the series was Blaze realizing that Satan actually had no power over him whatsoever, only what his fear and assumptions were leading him into? Also spot-on for the relevant rules, and no wonder, considering that the hip/alienated long-hair roughneck stories so common at the time (the implied mention above of Werewolf by Night, the Planet of the Apes black-and-white mag, my God more of these than I can shake a stick at) were about as formative an influence on me as you can find.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

There is no daylight visible between that weak-ass penance stare and the Care Bear Stare (don't overlook the included clip). Dollars to donuts the 90s writers were ripping off the CBs fully intentionally - and the true horror is that the resulting Ghost Rider was a quantum level less scary than they were.

(edited to fix formatting - RE)

[James_Nostack]

I'm more than a month late to this discussion, but I'd suggest that a lot of the Marvel horror characters work as Sorcerer dudes: Brother Voodoo, Man-Thing, Werewolf by Night (I always thought there should be a companion magazine, Human-by-Day, in which Jack Russel buys groceries, does his laundry, etc), Son of Satan, Satana, Lilith Daughter of Dracula, Blade, the Zombie, etc.  All you'd have to do is Goth up Dr. Strange a bit and give most of his powers to his amulet, as was done in the very earliest stories, and he'd work pretty well too.  It would be hard to take this seriously, but it would be fun for a few sessions.

(For people who don't give a shit about comics history, in the early 1970's the major American comics publishers fretted that super heroes would become unfashionable, and for a few strange years ran some horror-themed comic books as a side-line.  By the late 70's, when it was clear that the super hero story wasn't going away any time soon, some of these characters got folded into the "regular" super hero world.)