Chateau de Sorcerie -- First Session of Universalis Serial

[Roy]

Hey, everyone!

Here's the first session of our Universalis serial, "Château de Sorcerie".  

This is our first attempt at a campaign game of Universalis.  Has anyone else been playing one?  If so, I'd love to hear about it and any suggestions you have.

Enjoy!

Roy

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Château de Sorcerie
Session 1

Number of Players: 2
Number of Sessions: 1 (so far)
Total Playing Time: 1 1/2 hours
Number of Starting Coins: 25
Number of Refreshment Coins: 5


Our game preparation looked like this:

Story Element: Based loosely on Sorcerer by Ron Edwards.

Story Element: Setting is a dark version of France during the Renaissance.

Story Element: Demons should have Latin names to keep them out of place.

Rules Gimmick: Coins refresh to 25 before the first scene is bid on (applies to first session only).

Rules Gimmick: This game is a continuing serial. We must leave at least one plot thread dangling to be picked up at the start of the next session.
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We decided to create the main character before the story began. Since the game is based loosely on Ron's excellent Sorcerer RPG, we also decided to create the demon bound to the main character. Here are the Components we ended up with before the story began:



Component Type: Character
Character Name: Edmund DeVille
Role: Baron of Château Le'Brion
Sorcerer
Cynical
Taught sorcery (how to summon, bind, and control demons) by his father
Father died after a long illness
Mother died during childbirth
Owns his father's rapier
Vissago (a demon) is bound to him
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Component Type: Character
Character Name: Vissago
Role: Demon bound to Edmund DeVille
Takes the form of the DeVille signet ring
Desires to see Power wielded over others
Needs to feed on the Fear of others
Can boost Edmund's strength and stamina
Can cloak himself and Edmund from others
Has a link to Edmund so that they can see what goes on around each other
Can help Edmund heal faster by removing wounds from him
The signet ring is carved from a Tiger's Eye stone. When Vissago is using one of his powers, the stone swirls.
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SCENE 1
The location is Edmund's bedroom in the Château Le'Brion. The time is shortly after midnight. Edmund awakes to the sound of loud knocking at his bedroom door.

Edmund quickly puts on a robe and hurries to the door, jerking it open. A man, Edmund's servant, stands in the hallway.

"I'm sorry to disturb your rest, Monseignur. But it's your wife ... please come ... I think she might be hurt."

Edmund rushes down the hallway, following his servant.

The scene ends.


SCENE 2
The location is a meadow just outside the Château Le'Brion. The time is just a few minutes later. Edmund leaps down from his horse and runs to his wife's prone form. Edmund's servant reins up beside him.

Edmund cradles his wife, Antoinette, in his arms and makes sure she's alive. She is breathing, but unconscious.

Edmund picks Antoinette up, carries her to his horse, and lays her across his saddle. He climbs up behind her and turns the horse to ride back to the Château Le'Brion, but he catches a brief glimpse of a shadowy figure among some trees.

Edmund quietly commands Vissago to follow the shadowy figure.

The scene ends.


SCENE 3
The location is the master bedroom in the Château Le'Brion. The time is several hours later. Edmund is standing beside Antoinette's bed as she regains consciousness. Jacque, Edmund's servant, is standing beside his master.

Edmund sends Jacque to fetch some brandy.

Edmund sits on the bed beside Antoinette. "Where were you?"

Antoinette turns away from Edmund. "It's none of your concern."

Edmund grabs Antoinette by the shoulders and turns her to face him. "Tell me, damn you!"

Antoinette struggles with Edmund. "Get away from me," she cries as she shoves Edmund backwards with all of her fury.

Edmund trips over the bedsheets and falls hard to the floor. Furious, he leaps to his feet and starts toward his wife.

Antoinette pulls a dagger from beneath her pillow and holds it in front of her. "Get away! I would rather die than have you touch me!"

Jacque opens the door and nearly drops the brandy in surprise. "M'lord! M'lady!"

Edmund visibly regains control of himself. "You think I do not know where you have been? I will kill him before you go to him again!"

Antoinette cries and drops the dagger. "No, Edmund! No!"

Edmund tears from the room, knocking Jacque out of the doorway. The decanter of brandy crashes to the floor, the dark liquid spilling slowly across the carpet as though it were blood.

The scene ends. The first session ends.

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NOTES ON SESSION 1

We based this game of Universalis loosely on the Sorcerer RPG by Ron Edwards. In Sorcerer, you play a normal person with one little special ability: you know how to summon and bind demons.

Sorcerer is one of those brilliant games that affects your roleplaying for the rest of your life. You owe it to yourself to

check out the official Sorcerer website.

In order to do justice to Sorcerer, we knew we wanted to tell a story about a man's struggle with his own Humanity. We had just finished watching "The Count of Monte Christo" (excellent movie), so we had a great idea for the character he could become if he fell "into the pit" and lost himself "to the monster within".

We also knew we wanted to play a campaign game of Universalis and the serial model fit very well.

We wanted a lot of collaboration when developing our "star character", so we added the Rules Gimmick that gave us our full 25 Coins back before we bid on the first scene. This worked great and gave us every reason to get creative right from the start since we didn't gain anything by hoarding our Coins.


NOTES ON SCENE 1
Realizing that we'll probably need several servants before the story is told, we created a Servant Master Component:

Component Type: Character
Role: Servant
Master Component
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We also added a "married" Trait to Edmund.


NOTES ON SCENE 2
We fleshed Edmund's wife out as a separate Component:


Component Type: Character
Character Name: Antoinette DeVille
Role: Edmund's wife, Baroness of Château Le'Brion
Unconscious
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We changed Edmund's "married" Trait to "married to Antoinette DeVille".

Although we established that Vissago took the form of a signet ring before play, my wife decided it would be better for Vissago to just live within the ring. I didn't Challenge this, so my wife changed Vissago's "takes the form of the DeVille signet ring" Trait to "lives within Edmund's DeVille signet ring, but can leave it when commanded".


NOTES ON SCENE 3
Edmund's servant kept showing up in every scene, so my wife decided it was time he had a name. Unfortunately, she couldn't think of a good French name, so she paid the Coin to add the name and asked me to name him. Jacque was born.

I removed the "unconscious" Trait from Antoinette and added the "upset" Trait to her.

My wife added the Traits "angry" and "jealous" to Edmund.

This scene featured our first and only Complication of the evening. My wife was controlling Edmund and I was controlling Antoinette when I announced she was trying to shove him away from her. Interestingly enough, my wife won the Complication and narrated Edmund tripping over the covers (which is exactly what I was going to narrate if I won the Complication). That's one of the great things about Universalis; some scenes just end up writing themselves.

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[Ron Edwards]

!!

This is ... amazing. Talk about offspring exceeding their parents!

Sorcerer + 17th-cent French adventure + Universalis + ... man, my brain is going "sput."

I'm linking to this thread from the Sorcerer website right away.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

Cool. Keep us posted on the ongoing saga. I think this may be the first time that anyone has posted an example of using anotehr published game as inspiration for Universalis. The idea of doing this sort of thing gets bandied about a lot as in the "Alternate Use" on the website, but we haven't seen many examples (there will be one from a session that we ran that emulated a very popular FRPG posted soon).

From this one can see how well it can work, however.

This just goes to prove Ron's long standing point that RPGs do not compete with each other. In fact, here's an example of the products actually cross selling. This couldn't have been accomplished without Universalis to base it on, and Sorcerer for ideas and inspiration.
Think of Universalis as potentially value added to any other game purchased.

No surprise, we also endorse Sorcerer. If you don't own it, give it a closer look.

Roy, once again, good stuff.

Have you considered letting more players in? That's something I also want to see more of in action. Or is this just an intimate little game for you and your wife?

As for other continuing play, we just started a game online on Monday. I am hoping that it continues going strong for many more sessions. You can see the transcripts, etc. at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indie-netgaming

Check it out.

Mike

[Roy]

Hey, Ron!

Ron wrote:
Sorcerer + 17th-cent French adventure + Universalis + ... man, my brain is going "sput."

"Sput."  That's exactly how I felt after I read and re-read Sorcerer and The Sorcerer's Soul.  Those two products just blew me away!  There's just so much gaming goodness packed into those pages.

Ron, thank you so much for Sorcerer.  You can really tell it's a labor of love.  And I swear the books are really object demons that infiltrate your mind like a virus!  I've never had any game worm it's way into my thoughts the way Sorcerer does.  I think I get a new insight every few hours (even during my sleep)!

Also, kudos on Sorcerer & Sword.  It's the best sourcebook I've ever read and I personally recommend it to everyone interested in fantasy with meaning.  

Thanks for opening my eyes to the glory of the original Conan stories.  They're really fantastic and I'm afraid I would never have given them a chance because of the "barbarian jock" crap from Sprague's "works".

I'm glad you like where we're going with "Chateau de Sorcerie".  We're really taking the great premise behind Sorcerer and running with it.  I just hope we'll do justice to the excellent source material.  

I want you to know I've actually played more since I bought Universalis and Sorcerer than I've played in the last year without them.  That's a testament to how great both games are.  

As far as I'm concerned, the indie gaming movement has more going for it than the big publishers.  Viva la Forge!

Roy

[Roy]

Mike wrote:  
I think this may be the first time that anyone has posted an example of using another published game as inspiration for Universalis.

Hey, another first!  I'm on a roll. :-)

Universalis is just so much more than a simple storytelling game.  I can't even begin to tell you the possibilities it's opened up in my gaming.  

Not only is Universalis great on it's own, it can add so much to any roleplaying game out there.  Everyone needs to own a copy of Universalis just for it's mind-expanding capabilities.  Now if I can just talk my company into using Universalis to control it's meetings!

If you really want to create an RPG, do yourself a favor and play a few games of Universalis first.  I guarantee your creative juices will be flowing in no time.  I now have at least three solid ideas that may find their way into indie rpgs of their own thanks to Universalis.

Mike wrote:  
This just goes to prove Ron's long standing point that RPGs do not compete with each other. In fact, here's an example of the products actually cross selling.

Hear, hear!  I agree with you entirely.  In fact, I can see using Universalis to set up a Sorcerer relationship map then "zooming in" and using Sorcerer for some of the actual scenes.  Sorcerer has a way of turning the intensity dial to 10.

Mike wrote:
Have you considered letting more players in? That's something I also want to see more of in action. Or is this just an intimate little game for you and your wife?

We're definitely open to more players, but our schedules are so screwed up right now that it's impossible to get together with other people on a regular basis.  

Roleplaying isn't very strong in our area and our attempts to get a gaming club going haven't worked out.  We only have one FLGS in this area and they don't have enough floor space to use for actual gaming.  A small but dedicated group of indie rpg gamers may be just the thing to kick start the hobby down here.

One thing I'd love to try is a Universalis "fall lineup" of "our favorite shows."  Basically, get together and play three one-hour games of Universalis in one night with each one-hour game acting as an episode of a series.  I think that would be a real blast.

Mike wrote:
As for other continuing play, we just started a game online on Monday.

I just stumbled across that yesterday.  Good stuff going on there.  I may have to horn my way into one of your sessions.  :-)

Roy

[Tony Irwin]

I think this may be the first time that anyone has posted an example of using another published game as inspiration for Universalis. The idea of doing this sort of thing gets bandied about a lot as in the "Alternate Use" on the website, but we haven't seen many examples

My group is running a Universalis campaign based on the Legend of the Five Rings gameworld. Very exciting for all of us as now we get to be much more creative and involved with the gameworld we've been playing in for years. Although we've only had three games so far I'd say from these experiences that Universalis is superb for using in a pre-existing gaming environment. Personally I think the key is that rather than being a set of game mechanics, Universalis provides a procedure for creating and introducing game mechanics. Hence there's no conflict with existing worlds and systems, not only can you can introduce any ideas you want, you can introduce any rules you want, even those from the original system your game is drawn from.

We've found that many of the rules gimmicks we introduce (concerning Honour, the shadowlands taint, maho magic) actually begin to resemble the original mechanics as found in L5R. We found that there wasn't a better way of doing what the L5R team had already done. The great thing about Universalis is that it didn't in anyway undermine the L5R system, it gave us a means to borrow both game world and rules mechanics as required to tell the stories we've wanted to tell

Hmmm, hope that's not too convoluted for y'all. Still figuring out my own thoughts before I go about posting up a review on RPG.net. My group and I are still coming to terms with playing Universalis - I know this will sound corny, but its way bigger than we had first imagined!

This just goes to prove Ron's long standing point that RPGs do not compete with each other. In fact, here's an example of the products actually cross selling. This couldn't have been accomplished without Universalis to base it on, and Sorcerer for ideas and inspiration.
Think of Universalis as potentially value added to any other game purchased.

Definately - Universalis has caused our group to fall more in love with L5R than ever and more likely to keep on buying L5R products. Eventually we'll get it out our system and start spinning some original yarns but in the mean time there's a heck of a lot we want to do in the samurai world of Rokugan. You wouldn't have believed the first session we ran in it, everybody had a dozen different stories they breathlessly wanted to tell. It was quite stunning to sit back and see how excited my friends were to finally get all those ideas out in the open. Sometimes being a gm is just as frustrating as playing a character; either role can feel so limiting. Universalis has been letting us have our cake and eat it ;-)

[Tony Irwin]

This is our first attempt at a campaign game of Universalis.  Has anyone else been playing one?  If so, I'd love to hear about it and any suggestions you have.

Sounds cool Ron. We've been running an L5R campaign and, competitive little gamers that we are, are all quietly busy trying to figure out the meta-game in order to get that edge... I'll maybe stick up some of our conclusions on that in a new topic.

Generally, something I've noticed from the way we play is that even the best ideas get left behind. Over the course of a game we'd come up with all kind of cool stuff that would often get neglected as all the players gradually converged on the same theme, plot, or characters. The result was that we had screeds of paper with countless (unused) master topics and traits scrawled all over them. We decided at the start of each new episode to make it a clean slate, but we could spend one coin to introduce something from the last game in as a kind of rules gimmick or gameworld fact. An important character could get all his traits and history of events in to the next episode of the game for just one coin.

This helped us to tidy things up a bit and focus on the stuff we really wanted to continue with. Players can go home and think about the stuff they've created and even modify and improve it before bringing it in for next time. The organised ones even make photo-copies. Importantly it also means that someone can come fresh to the campaign without drowning - they're present and involved as we reintroduce everything we want to play with step by step.

Rules Gimmick: This game is a continuing serial. We must leave at least one plot thread dangling to be picked up at the start of the next session.

Sweet! With your permission we'll nick that one for ourselves! ;-)

Anymore?

Tony

[Valamir]

Fantastic stuff Tony.  I remember you talking about doing this I'm totally stoked at how well its worked for you.

PLEASE PLEASE start a thread and tell us all about it.

[Roy]

Hey, Tony!

I'm glad you're having a great time with Universalis.  And you're right about it be a mechanic to introduce rules as well as story elements.  You can mirror any system in the world just by introducing rules gimmicks.

Tony wrote:
Sweet! With your permission we'll nick that one for ourselves! ;-)

Feel free to nick away!  

Sorry I haven't posted our second session yet, but real life has kept me busy lately.

Roy[/quote]