Sorcerers of Ice and Fire?

[Frank T]

I find myself returning to Westeros time and again, even more so since Game of Thrones aired (cue eye-rolling from Ron). It's just so easy, especially in a convention game. You come up with some colorful house in the Seven Kingdoms, or maybe two of them. Or maybe you go crazy and do Nights Watch or Wildlings or even the Free Cities. But you have a locale and a political backdrop. Then you set up some special event that works as a catalyst. A wedding, a siege, a major deal, the arrival of some important character or event from the novels/show. And then you make up player characters who have a past, relationships, conflicts, and a strong agenda, and you tie them into each other, the locale/backdrop and the catalyst event. And off you go. Everybody knows the setting, everybody knows the kind of story that is expected, there will be bastards, there will be sex, there will be blood, there will be threats and lies, things are going to get dirty real fast.

There is this guy who always runs these games on our forum meet-ups and they are always a blast. What he does, system wise, is a large part free play and hand-waving and a very small part dice rolling, but he's never quite happy with the dice rolling. Others have been running SoIaF-themed games, too. Systems that have been tried include: The Riddle of Steel, Reign, Green Ronin's SoIaF RPG, and the system from the new Dragon Age RPG. Here's the profile for the Perfect System (tm) wanted:

* Vanilla Narrativist play / bass-playing GM
* Fiction leads
* Low points of contact
* Quick, exciting, gritty combat
* Conflict resolution available but not mandatory for "social" conflicts
* Conflict between player characters up to blood opera indulged

I'm kind of thinking Sorcerer & Sword could do the trick, with player characters typically not being sorcerers and not having demons. However, in case player characters would want to be sorcerers, I am having a hard time wrapping my head around how to "translate" stuff like the green dreams or Rhlorr's or the Many-Faced God's gifts into Sorcerer terms (it's easier with Dragons of course). Also, what would Humanity be? Any thoughts on the matter? Maybe even someone tried it before? (Slightly off-topic but if anyone has a different yet stunningly fitting idea of an existing game that would do the trick, I wouldn't mind the suggestion.)

[Adams Tower]

It's been too long since I've read those novels for me to help much with sorcery stuff. I vaguely remember some priestess of a fire god giving birth to a shadow guy at one point? I'd think that would be pretty easy to handle as straight sorcery. It seems to me like Necromancy, Unnatural Technology, and hypnotism, in Sorcerer and Sword, are some good examples of non-demonic sorcery, so you could probably use them as examples to create other setting specific sorcery variants. Green dreams are mostly prophecy, right? Maybe you could treat that as unnatural tech: Hint, without a physical object and stuck to the person? Or, if it's at least somewhat inimical to it's user, it could be a parasite demon. The kid who has them is crippled, right? Is that a Price?

Anyway, I'm really posting because Vincent Baker just announced Apocalypse World: Dark Age, with Game of Thrones as an explicitly listed influence. Apocalypse World fits all of your requirements except "Conflict resolution available but not mandatory for 'social' conflicts", since the basic moves are mandatory in Apocalypse World. http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/780

Even in Sorcerer, isn't conflict resolution mandatory for all conflicts, social or otherwise, though?

[Moreno R.]

Caveat 1: I have only seen the TV series, I have never read the books.

Caveat 2: there will be SPOILERS. Al lot of them! Don't read if you don't want anything spoiled!






...these are, from memory, some of the possible demons in the series....


- the five wolves of house stark.
- Hodor (passer or host+possessor)
- The wilding woman. (passer)
- The tree of house stark
- the hound's scar (a telltale for a parasite, possessor, inconspicuous or object demon)
- Tyrion Lannister size (a telltale for a parasite, possessor, inconspicuous or object demon)
- The "black" (object demons, criminals cursed to guard the wall donning a cursed vest...)
- Daenery's dragons
- Petyr Baelish, Tywin Lannister, and Varys: all have that certain ""je ne sais quoi" of a Sorcerer...  :-)
- Melisande and her... peculiar way of summoning demons...
- Shae, passer for Tyrion
- Bronn (a passer with a serious need for money...)
- The throne of Sword itself

These are the first ones I thought, there are surely a lot more.

[Frank T]

Thanks for the replies!

I saw that announcement of Vincent's, I'll probably have a look at it when it comes out, though I'm kinda more a Sorcerer guy than an AW guy.

Also, yeah, spoiler warning for this entire thread, please don't read it if you mind spoilers.

The Iron Throne as a demon did occur to me but that's a bit too around the corner for me, I like things straight and simple. So yeah, the dragons are immanents obviously, that's fairly straightforward. The Worgs bonding with animals could probably work with the animals as passers, more or less. The shadow could be a demon and an interesting way of summoning for sure, but she doesn't bind him, he only has one task and then he is gone. Wasn't there something like that in & Sword though, now that I think of it? Or maybe it's some sort of application of the Spawn power?

But how about the "kiss of fire" with which Thoros brings Berric back from the dead seven times? That would have to be a new Power. And in general, what's with the powers that seem innate, like the green dreams, I mean, you could probably make a parasite out of that but I don't really see the Need and Desire there. It's a bit of a stretch, not that you couldn't figure something out but it feels a bit artificial.

And also, Humanity. There doesn't really seem to be a unifying theme or "moral of the story", on the contrary, what I like about SoIaF is the amorality. Looking only at the first novel I might have said Humanity is family ties, but if that's true then a lot of protagonists are at Humanity 0 by the end of the fourth novel... looking at Ned you could say it's honor but then, looking at Tyrion it looks more like empathy...

Sorcerer combat and general conflict resolution seem a perfect match, same as Kickers and Bangs, but I'm not really seeing the whole dynamic of Need/Desire/Humanity. I wonder what it would be like to play Sorcerer without it?

- Frank

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Frank,

Leaving your last question for others' thoughts, I think ...

The shadow would be Pact, from Sorcerer + Sword. The green dreams are a Lore ability.

The kiss of fire might be best described as necromancy, if one of the story features is that Beren "comes back wrong." If he doesn't, and it's plain old D&D resurrection, then the game doesn't support that so you'd have to insert a new rule.

Best, Ron

[Frank T]

Oh yeah, he comes back wrong all right. I'll revisit Pact and Necromancy. Thanks!

- Frank

[Adams Tower]

Sorcerer combat and general conflict resolution seem a perfect match, same as Kickers and Bangs, but I'm not really seeing the whole dynamic of Need/Desire/Humanity. I wonder what it would be like to play Sorcerer without it?

Take everything I say here with a grain of salt, because my first time actually running Sorcerer will be tonight.

It seems to me that Need/Desire/Humanity are mechanics to support and encourage address of Story Now premise. If you take them out, and just use the conflict system, the game is going to need something to replace them, either explicit or implicit, assuming you still want to address premise. It might be that premise is inherent in the conflicts of the setting, and if so, that might be good enough?

What is A Song of Ice and Fire's Lajos Egri premise, anyway? Based on what I read of it, maybe something like "No matter how hard you strive, death is what you achieve."

Sorcerer has been influential enough that I'm sure there are other games that use some form of it's conflict system without it's other systems. The only example I'm aware of is In a Wicked Age. Does anyone know of any others? Humanity is the Reward system of Sorcerer, so I suppose that the Owe List replaces Humanity in IAWA. I wouldn't call IAWA Story Now, based on my own experience of it, I'm pretty sure it was Right to Dream with a focus on Situation and Color. I think that might be what you'd end up with if you used the Sorcerer conflict system without anything to replace Need/Desire/Humanity.

[Frank T]

Well unfortunately the whole concept of "addressing premise" has never been useful to me, but we are definitely talking about Story Now. I guess if the group can do Story Now with the Dragon Age system and hand-waving, they can do it with a mutilated Sorcerer. I'm just wondering if they could do it better with the full version, only you'd need a Humanity definition and I'm kind of lost there.

- Frank

[Adams Tower]

This is kind of off-topic, but how do you know you're talking about Story Now if you can't identify premise? I don't mean to say that you're not talking about Story Now, I'm just curious because I sometimes have trouble distinguishing Story Now and Right to Dream without planned outcomes, and would like to read your perspective.

About a Humanity definition for ASoIaF, one of the main functions of Humanity is to distinguish morally ambiguous "heroes" from outright villains. Maybe you could figure out what works as Humanity by taking a look at what characters you can and can't identify with, and finding the difference between them? This is assuming that most viewpoint characters are morally ambiguous, but that there are also characters who are outright evil.

[Frank T]

How do I know? Well through years of participating on the Forge and reading articles and blogs and playing Narrativist designs. I get emergent theme, that's not the problem. I just don't find it in any way useful to think of one particular question as the "premise". But that's alright. I could never get any use of Egri's original premise for my writing, either.

I like your approach to Humanity. I guess the closest I can get is "compassion for other people". This actually sheds a VERY interesting light on Ned Stark's final chapters!

- Frank

[Adams Tower]

How do I know? Well through years of participating on the Forge and reading articles and blogs and playing Narrativist designs. I get emergent theme, that's not the problem. I just don't find it in any way useful to think of one particular question as the "premise". But that's alright. I could never get any use of Egri's original premise for my writing, either.

Ok, so when you recognize yourself as playing Story Now, it's because you see emergent theme in it, but you don't find it particularly useful to phrase it as a premise question before-hand?

I like your approach to Humanity. I guess the closest I can get is "compassion for other people". This actually sheds a VERY interesting light on Ned Stark's final chapters!

Yeah, I guess he dies because he refuses to bend the rules, doesn't he? I remember a scene where Cersei pleads to his sense of compassion, near the end of the first book. If he dies of Humanity loss, that's where he loses his last point.

[Frank T]

Neither beforehand nor after. But let's maybe not pursue that aside further.

I think if Humanity is compassion, Ned might be at 1 or even 0 because he put his sense of honor over his compassion. But when he lets Varys convince him to testify his "treason" he does so to save his daughters (well, and because he has been broken by the lightless cells). So he's rolling for Humanity gain there. But then his head is cut off, too bad.

[Adams Tower]

Alright. Will stop asking about the aside.

It seems like honor might also be important for your view of Humanity in ASoIaF, though. It occurs to me that you might be able to do a plural humanity definition, like described in Sex and Sorcery, with Honor and Compassion as the orthogonal humanity definitions? It might not be necessary, if you, as the audience, really don't find yourself judging characters as honorable or dishonorable, even if honor is a matter of morality as the character see it.

[Moreno R.]

I think that if you want to play any flavor of Sorcerer in the GoT setting, you will have to chose YOUR sense of humanity, not the one of the series producers. In the annotations it's made very clear that the Humanity concept is at "players level", it's not a setting characteristic (the value, the number on the sheet, is, not the definition) So, different people would play the same setting with totally different humanity definitions (and this would make them different setting in rpg terms, arguably...)

From watching the series (I did not read the book) what I am getting from the character is that "willingness to change" is positive, "relying on old traditions and values" tend to make you a villain, or dead.

Ned died not because he was stupid, or because he was honest: he died because he was not willing to see how the time had changed, and for these outdated value he was willing to sign his own death sentence and find himself without any ally because he insisted to follow the "traditional" line of succession... even if that meant supporting a guy who has absolutely no power at court at that moment, who could not help him in any way... and that was probably the worst candidate for the throne anyway and had no love for him at all!

His son died for the same unwillingness to see how times changed, and trusting the "honor" of other nobles.

See how everybody who refuse to change is proved wrong, time after time: the black robes and their old ways are ineffectual and defeated. The east continent cities are sacked by their slaves.

Instead...  Stannis was almost able to get the throne using a new kind of Sorcery. The Lannisters are the top guys and they practically represent modernity (money and practicality against outdated "old" values).  The island riders returned to their old power giving the command to a woman. And there is a certain character that is kicking a lot of asses by rejecting all the old values and creating an army of freed slaves and baby dragons....

If you look at the character (good and evil), you see that the successful ones are the ones who adapt, who can learn, who can change (at this moment, the only Stark survivors that are not dead or a puppet are a girl who refused his gender role and a boy who is learning forbidden foreign "magic"...), the others are defeated or dead. "winter is coming", adapt or die.

But this the theme that the original authors are using. Not the one in your own game.

Even if the exact same events happened in the game (and it would be really boring if they did), remember the 4 outcomes in the game manual. You could "play" them with "Humanity = Honor" and it would work, and Ned Stark dead is the protagonist of a epic defeat. Change the humanity definition, and he is a defeated villain or a fool. 

Humanity is YOUR judgment. The setting doesn't judge.

[Adams Tower]

Well I agree with you that Humanity is absolutely the GM's judgement, as the audience of what's happening in the game, that doesn't mean that setting has nothing to do with it. I don't plan to use the same Humanity definition in every game of sorcerer I run, though any Humanity definition I have, must be some trait that I consider good.

The annotations say, talking about the GM's sense of right and wrong on page 64, "That sense may be nuanced or focused by the fictional setting.." So, what I'm saying is, there are two ways to do it. Either Humanity is just what the GM thinks is right or wrong, or it's what the GM thinks is right or wrong as nuanced by the fictional setting. So, if one is going to do the second for a game that is going to be set in the ASoIAF setting, what matters is not what the ASoIaF characters think, but what the GM thinks of the ASoIaF characters, and applying the same standard of Humanity to the characters in his game that he does to the characters in ASoIaF. So that's why I'm asking if Frank is judging characters in ASoIaF in terms of compassion or honor.

Now that I'm thinking about playing literally by the book, though, something occurs to me. As Ron scolded me in my first thread on this forum "Sorcerer doesn't have a setting". If we're playing as the annotations say to play, you can't play Sorcerer in a pre-existing setting, like ASoIaF, because Sorcerer is Color, then Character, then Situation first. So, I guess we're talking about a way of playing Sorcerer that is definitely wrong. I guess what one could do, if one wanted to play properly, is distill what one likes about ASoIaF down to two look-and-feel statements, and create a game from the seed of ASoIaF, which would likely end up set in a dark ages fantasy setting that was not Westeros.