New Sorcerer setting: The Metamorphosis

[Picador]

Okay, having kicked around some of the comments here for a few weeks, I think I'm starting to realize where I went wrong. I think I have a definition of humanity that brings the "stage magic" element back to the forefront of the setting, and the demon concepts are currently being revised to align them with this new idea. I will start a new thread to vet the revised definintions soon, probably with a new PDF, but I'll sketch out the new humanity idea first:

Humanity is a measure of how genuine and natural the character is in his or her actions and feelings. As Humanity decreases, the character's behavior becomes more and more a function of his or her public, invented persona: in essence, the character's Cover begins to define his or her personality.

This draws us back to the self-reinvention / performance theme exemplified by Houdini, Chung Ling Soo, Black Herman et al. By acting a certain way and telling certain stories about yourself, you begin to become your own myth and lose touch with your actual personality. You become a ventriloquist's dummy, mouthing lines written by... whom? (Here's where the demons come in.) And this relates to the American Metamorphosis by invoking the idea of American identity as a kind of performance -- there's actually a great essay in this month's Harper's about just this, although it relates the transformation to the birth of television.

More to come...

[Picador]

The new thread for this setting is http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=143886">here.