Sorcerer, CobbCon, and the Charnel Gods

[hardcoremoose]

Hey everyone,

I just returned hom from CobbCon, the annual gaming fest my friend Martin hosts every year.  I'm happy to say that Sorcerer was the game of the con, and was introduced to no less than six brand spanking new players.  

Ironic tidbit: Martin is a Methodist minister.  We played Sorcerer in the basement of his church.  Gotta' love it.

Anyway, I managed to cram in two sessions of Sorcerer, one for four players (which was one player too heavy I think), and another for six (far too many people for this sort of game).  Even so, everyone had a blast.

The setting was my own Sorcerer & Sword game, Charnel Gods  (available as a mini-supplement soon).  The deal in Charnel Gods is that all demons are intelligent weapons (ala Stormbringer), and by virtue of wielding them, the PCs become de facto warriors in a looming Ragnarok-like battle against a horrible evil that if they lose, will spell the end of their civilization (for the record, the PCs can't win the battle, but that's all part of the game, being the consequence for losing your Humanity).

I've played Sorcerer before, having run it last summer and also helping to demo at GenCon last year.  I was never really satisfied with the results, but this past weekend everything seemed to fall into place.

For starters, I realize now what it is I like about Kickers.  Besides being an opportunity for a player to create real and actual content for the game, it's what keeps the GM on his toes, and keeps the game from being railroaded.  That is, if they're used correctly.  In the Sorcerer text, it's made explicitly clear that a Kicker needs to be a situation for which there is no single or obvious course of action.  I always wondered what the big deal was; I mean, heck, the player created the Kicker, he's going to know what course of action he wants to take regardless of how many possible options there are, right?  Maybe yes, maybe no, but what the Kicker really does is keep the GM from knowing what option the player is going to take, and thus making it difficult to prepare anything too ironclad for the game.

Case-in-point: One of the players in my first session created a character whose Past was "whore", and her Kicker was that she had just discovered she was pregnant.  The baby could belong to any number of men, including a half-dozen politicians who had raped her orgy-style, and an Elder God who traded sex with her for her demon-weapon (which she wanted so she could avenge herself).  I'm expecting her to use this information to play the Machiavellian magistrates against one another, but she one-ups me.  In the first scene of the game, at the bedside of the infirm, heirless, and practically vegetative king, in front of the assembled magistrates (many of whom recognized her as the whore they had left for dead), she announces that she is carrying the king's son and heir to throne.  I should of seen it coming, but I didn't.  She had processed a bunch of information I had provided to the players pre-game, found the coolest thing she could do, and it left me dumbfounded and scrambling.  But it was an awesome move, and the game itself was excellent.

The other biggie was that I realized just how powerful demons can be.  The average Power score for Demons in Charnel Gods is around 10 (and the character described above had a Power 15 Demon).  My assumption was that in a game about sentient magical weapons, people would want to fight a lot.  Turns out that the weapons are so powerful that combats against anything but supernatural foes are fairly blase, even in great numbers.  And although there was a ton of inter-party conflict (particularly in the six-man game), no one wanted to draw a weapon on another PC, since the combat would basically come down to who got to attack first (this, BTW, is a good thing, as I generally loathe inter-PC combat, and not just because it's deprotagonizing).

On a personal note, my GMing skills have come a long way since first playing Sorcerer.  Last summer, I largely failed to characterize the characters' demons.  Not so this time around.  I'm not going to say that every player's demon got equal treatment - they didn't - but since the demons are weapons the players are largely able to draw attention to them on their own, and in one notable instance, we nearly had a demon rebel on its master (a situation that in resolving itself, led the sorcerer to a loss of two Humanity within a single scene, and provided an intensely blood-chilling moment for yours truly).  Humanity was another issue that a year ago I never really got the hang of, but his time around the Humanity loss (and to a lesser extent, its gain) was a huge factor, coming quite naturally and very freely.  Very fun stuff.

Not that the sessions were perfect.  The first session was extremely dynamic, with lots of scene framing, and the players never really felt the need to be a "party".  But with six people playing, they kind of drifted together, if only to make scene transitions quicker.  This was fine, but the game seemed far more linear because of it.  Furthermore, the second session occasionally became bogged down in verbal one-upsmanship - the PCs standing around, expositing about a lot of nothing, trying to be the one to say the next coolest thing.  I consider this sort of stuff to be a drag, but a couple of my players seemed to like it.

Overall, Sorcerer went over extremely well.  Two players called it the best game they ever played.  One said she'd be looking for the Sorcerer rulebook the next time she was in a game store.  Everyone wanted to let Ron know how much they enjoyed the game (and jokingly entertained the notion of having him be the presenter at the first ever CobbCon gaming theory seminar next year, followed by much raucous play of Sorcerer).

And one player in particular looks forward to playing Sorcerer (and Charnel Gods) at GenCon with Ron and the crew.

Take care,
Scott

[Paul Czege]

Hey Scott,

The setting was my own Sorcerer & Sword game, Charnel Gods (available as a mini-supplement soon). The deal in Charnel Gods is that all demons are intelligent weapons (ala Stormbringer), and by virtue of wielding them, the PCs become de facto warriors in a looming Ragnarok-like battle against a horrible evil that if they lose, will spell the end of their civilization (for the record, the PCs can't win the battle, but that's all part of the game, being the consequence for losing your Humanity).

I don't want to derail discussion of all the great stuff you learned from play, but I gotta say, I'm stunned by how tame/lame this chunk of promo text is.

"The deal...is..."

"...by virtue of wielding them..."

"...battle against a horrible evil..."

Perhaps my emerging personal awareness of how my own use of language hasn't successfully influenced others to play games I've posted about has me now paying too close attention to your promotion of Charnel Gods. I apologize. Deal with it.

I think you need to say that your Charnel Gods mini-supplement provides each and every demon in detail. They are the Fell Weapons, a fully realized pantheon of grotesquely powerful, self-absorbed, corrupt, meddling, manipulative, reckless and megalomaniacal weapons, creatures of a long forgotten iteration of the cycle of destruction. And that by no means can a player character be considered the "owner" of such a creature. Life, for a player character, is an exercise in being so significant to the landscape of power that you're always on the radar of everyone, women who would love you, warlords who would use you, those who feel threatened by you, and the oppressed who need you. And it is one of gradually trading away the currency of your individual humanity, struggling to get the best rate of return on it from a clearly unequal partnership. And what exactly is the morality of brandishing and using fearsome and excessive force for near-term good, when every such act takes you closer to complete and total destruction of your species?

I think you need to give your promo text some ego. The game deserves it.

Paul

[Blake Hutchins]

Agree with Paul that you certainly have a great idea here with a lot of promise for ramping up, though I didn't think you were trying to hype the game in your post, so the lack of sales text didn't phase me.

Part of me wants to see the jacket blurb read, "The unkindest cuts of all...."  I'll let be, though.  Good luck!

Best,

Blake

[Paul Czege]

Oh yeah..."de facto" is terrible too.

Paul

[hardcoremoose]

Paul, Blake, and everyone...

Blake correctly assessed the situation.  I wanted desperately to talk about my actual play experience with Sorcerer, but couldn't effectively do so without at least mentioning Charnel Gods.  False humility prompted me to underscore many of the game's more innovative features.  As Paul noted, I should be promoting the hell out of this.

The proper place for that is the Sorcerer forum, and I'll be more fothcoming soon.  The text is 95% written, and the artwork is starting to come in.  But since I kind of spilled the beans, I'll say this...

Charnel Gods is Sorcerer taken to the extreme.  If normal sorcerers are powerful, here they're dialed up to 11.  They can destroy everything - all of humanity - if they so choose.  In fact, they might not be able to prevent it, because that's what Humanity measures in the game: How close humankind is to their own eventual destruction.  And the player characters are the measuring sticks.

But here's the cool part: Charnel Gods doesn't have a single setting.  Instead, it presents guidelines for designing your own fantasy setting, with the understanding that at some time it will be destroyed.  Then a new one can be built on the corpse of the old, and new characters will enter the fray, but the Weapons remain the same.  It's a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, played out not just side-to-side, but front-to-back over the entire span of mankind's existence.

I'll be honest - it's the game I've always wanted, but never realized, at least not until I read Sorcerer & Sword.  I hope others feel the same.  

So there you go, a little shameless self-promotion.  

Take care,
Scott

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

As one of the few folks who's privy to the drafts of Charnel Gods so far, I can say that it is a terrifying mini-supplement, up to 11 indeed.

This was an Actual Play post, however, so I'll stick with that.

1) People who aren't that used to Sorcerer often cobble up Power 15 demons. Played well, and with abilities that work together, something that big could eat Cthulhu. A lot of people don't realize that demon design is multiplicative, in terms of how abilities interact with one another, not additive. Taking it down a notch (8-11) will actually make for a better game, I think.

2) I'm interested in that this second experience with playing Sorcerer, you were more comfortable and more effective in playing the demons than before, even though the demons in this case were all Objects. That's an important point. I'm not convinced that it was all the players' doing; something was different about how you activated abilities, used OOC information, or played objects-as-characters. What was it?

Best,
Ron

[hardcoremoose]

Ron Edwards wrote:

1) People who aren't that used to Sorcerer often cobble up Power 15 demons. Played well, and with abilities that work together, something that big could eat Cthulhu. A lot of people don't realize that demon design is multiplicative, in terms of how abilities interact with one another, not additive. Taking it down a notch (8-11) will actually make for a better game, I think.

Multiplicative indeed!  I sort of understood this while I was designing the game, but it didn't really hit me until we were playing.  The best example to illustrate this is combat, where a demon with Boost: Stamina and Special Damage (not an uncommon combination in Charnel Gods) can be a real menace.  The reason being is that damage in this case is derived not only as a multiple of victories rolled, but also has a base of whatever the demon's Power is.  Every point of power becomes potentially twice as good as the level before it, and it gets heinous quickly.

But I like that.  I didn't throw much in the way of supernatural villains at the players; the game is more interesting when dealing with the mundane wants and needs of normal people (a lesson I learned from The Whispering Vault), and it didn't take the players long to figure out who was in charge.  They quickly went from standard fantasy mode, where their mindset was that if they got lucky maybe they'd get to kill orcs or something, to assassinating kings, deposing bishops, and influencing politics on a setting-wide scale.  And with power to spare, the players' actions weren't guided by an instinct to survive, but rather a decision making process of what was and was not worth losing Humanity over.

Nonetheless, the Power 15 demon did give me pause (and it was made worse by the fact that the player actually won the Binding!).  Part of the problem is that the rules as written mandate 3-4 demon Abilities before the players pick any of their own, which artificially increases the demon's Power.  The rules are being revised to fix that problem even as we speak.  

Ron Edwards wrote:

2) I'm interested in that this second experience with playing Sorcerer, you were more comfortable and more effective in playing the demons than before, even though the demons in this case were all Objects. That's an important point. I'm not convinced that it was all the players' doing; something was different about how you activated abilities, used OOC information, or played objects-as-characters. What was it?

I've been wondering this myself, and have decided there are probably several reasons.  One is that I realized just how ineffectively I played the demons my first time out, and was determined to not make that mistake again.  Another is that I just flat-out liked the demons in this game better; my investment in Charnel Gods is deeper than in my previous efforts, and I think that came through in my play of it.  The fact that they were Object demons actually helped, I think, in that I recognized the challenges communicating with them posed and was prepared to deal with that (and I like the fact, too, that they can be so damn ambiguous - sometimes they just stop working, and it's up to the player to figure out why).

But I think the biggest thing is that the demon-weapons are omnipresent, in that they are in every scene with the player characters, and are frequently being called upon, both in overt and covert ways.  The players used their demons a lot; they constantly drew attention to them - their own and others - and it was extremely easy for me to look at that and ask myself "what does the demon want out of this situation?"  Most of the time the answer was "nothing...yet", but the players gave me so many great opportunities that I felt comfortable biding my time until that perfect moment reared its ugly head.

It's like I told Paul last night; these sessions came together very organically for me.  All of the right elements - Humanity, demons, the player characters - were emphasized, and all of the distracting little things were relegated to the shadows.  I don't think it's one of those games where you wonder "well, what do I do?".  Rather, there's almost too much to do.  At least, that was the case for me.

Take care,
Scott

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Great post, and I was going to leave it at that, and then I realized something that you might have missed.

The "Boost" ability requires that, while Boosting someone, the demon's Power drops to 1 for all other uses.

So you might have Boosted Stamina, but while you do, the demon's Power for purposes of the Special Damage is a piddly li'l 1.

But! Aside from that, all your points are dead-on.

Best,
Ron

[J B Bell]

As someone who had a good deal of trouble bringing out demon personalities in my first Sorcerer campaign, I'd like to say "thank you!"

Big important point:  I have to like the demons.  Probably true for others, so I post here.  I gave my players free reign, and they came up with some great stuff--a Parasite tongue whose Desire amounted to Tourette's Syndrome, man-hating living anime-style hair, and a Voodoo spirit of music and mayhem.  The vampiric blood parasite was a bit of a dud, honestly, though describing the way it crawled through the PC's veins was fun.

Now, though these guys were great, I really only played the voodoo guy, an Inconspicuous demon.  I realize now that I had relatively little invested in the others (except towards the end, when, duh, I paid proper attention to Kickers), not so much because they were bad particularly (they were rather inconsistent with each other), but because they didn't fit my own rather heavily invested notions around demons.  I really dig the whole idea of demons, I've done more research on them than might be strictly healthy, and I enjoy the good old traditional menacing bargain-making ugly-looking (yet suave) demons of fiction, with as much "authentic" flavor as possible.

Important point learned:  demons are a unique touch-point between the player's and GM's aspirations.  If the GM doesn't like them as characters, they'll be boring because the GM is bored, since the GM plays them.

--JB

[Mike Holmes]

...  I realize now that I had relatively little invested in the others (except towards the end, when, duh, I paid proper attention to Kickers), not so much because they were bad particularly (they were rather inconsistent with each other), but because they didn't fit my own rather heavily invested notions around demons.  I really dig the whole idea of demons, I've done more research on them than might be strictly healthy, and I enjoy the good old traditional menacing bargain-making ugly-looking (yet suave) demons of fiction, with as much "authentic" flavor as possible.

Was the problem that your preference of definition of Demon was not accepted by the group? Did they insist on something else? If you wanted Demons to be "the good old traditional menacing bargain-making ugly-looking (yet suave) demons of fiction" then why didn't you agree to go that way at the start of the game?

This is certainly an advantage of the mini-supplements. This is all layed out. If you like the Demon Weapons of Charnel Gods (and who wouldn't), then investing in the Demons should be no problem.

Mike

[hardcoremoose]

So you might have Boosted Stamina, but while you do, the demon's Power for purposes of the Special Damage is a piddly li'l 1.

Shit Ron, you're right.  I had that figured out for the guy who had Boost: Stamina and Big; he was thinking he was going to get a 20 point increase in Stamina for the purposes of taking damage, when in reality he was only going to get an 11, but I didn't extrapolate that revelation to the damage charts.  Sigh.

It's all good though.  Boosting didn't happen that frequently in the playtest, with the demon's Binding strength carried over as a combat bonus being more than enough "plusses" to hit than most people would ever need.  They Weapons are still frighteningly powerful.

And everyone else...thanks for sharing about your problems with demons; I'm interested in hearing more.  There was a substantial difference between my first Sorcerer game, where I really just ignored the demons, and the way I played Charnel Gods, and it's interesting to see how others have come to similar conclusions.

I have more to say, but right I need to go eat.  Ciao!

- Scott

[Valamir]

Just had a stray thought that I'd mention.  It occured to me based on the descriptions of the power level of the Fell Weapons and the idea that the world is moving towards destruction that perhaps the Power level of the Fell Weapons might be tied to Humanity loss.  

Maybe as the characters Humanity gets lower the Power of the Weapons goes up.  That would for game purposes allow you to start out players with mid level demons and then jack them up as humanity declines.  The drop in humanity leads to increase in weapon power, the increase in weapon power is what eventually destroys the world....

Anyway, obviously don't know enough about Charnal Gods to know if this fits but I figured I'd share just in case.

[J B Bell]

Hopefully this is still on-topic . . .

Was the problem that your preference of definition of Demon was not accepted by the group? Did they insist on something else? If you wanted Demons to be "the good old traditional menacing bargain-making ugly-looking (yet suave) demons of fiction" then why didn't you agree to go that way at the start of the game?

I never stated my preferences because I misunderstood my role as GM, trying to be a sort of "cafeteria of role-playing" instead of a guy who damned well has his own ideas about things.  After getting over their initial floundering, the players went for full-bore Mad Inventiveness Mode, leading to the incoherent vision of demons seen in my game.  Though in retrospect it's clear that the all-newby playing group wanted strong leadership, I ushered the players to do exactly what they wanted and then protested only very weakly when they didn't fit my notion of what the story should be like.

Transitioning from Illusionism among 10-year familiar players to even Vanilla Narrativism with new players is Hard.

--JB

[hardcoremoose]

Ralph,

I see what you're saying, and it must be a pretty compelling idea, because Paul suggested something similar at one point (his idea was for the Weapons to be like Tokens, as described in Sorcerer & Sword).  Really though, I'm not looking for a way to make the demons less powerful.  The intent was always for them to be these world-shaking things, but I've also incorporated some guidelines for awarding Bonus Dice to help shore up the disparity when attempting a Bindings.

And although I'm keeping some of the specifics close to my chest for now, there is one very good reason that a Charnel Gods sorcerer might want to lose big to the demon when attempting his Binding.


J.B. Bell wrote

Transitioning from Illusionism among 10-year familiar players to even Vanilla Narrativism with new players is Hard.

Amen brother.  Amen.

Take care,
Scott