Sorcerer: Incorporated

[Rob MacDougall]

I'm splitting this off from the thread Executive-Class Sorcerer, which points to some if not all of the threads that inspired this idea I had for a Sorcerer game.

Sorcerer: Incorporated

Corporate sigils are super-breeders.  They attack unbranded imaginative space.  They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles.  They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings.  They are a very powerful development in the history of sigil magic, which dates back to the first bison drawn on the first cave wall. The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed symbolic summing up of the world of desire the corporation intends to represent.  The logo is the only visible sign of the corporate intelligence seething behind it.  Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, his cartoonish signature persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance.  People are born and grow up to become Disney executives, mouthing the jargon and the credo of a living corporate entity.  Walt Disney the man is long-dead and frozen (or so folk myth would have it) but Disney, the immense, invisible corporate egregore persists.
--from Grant Morrison's Pop Magic

I've been thinking about gaming in the world of business lately. So many neat ideas come out of business culture—coolhunters and viral marketing and the tipping point—because, after all, so many very smart people are paid very well to come up with these ideas. And I wanted to take up the challenge posed by another post on these boards which said, basically, "Sorceror settings are subversive." Now, ok, maybe dissing corporations isn't all that subversive, but still: can an RPG tackle a truly political premise? If any game can, it's gotta be Sorcerer, right?

So: Sorceror, Incorporated. This is just a jumble of ideas at this point. Any comments, criticisms, guffaws, or pointers to those who have already done it are welcome.

Inspirations: some William Gibson, some Bruce Sterling, some Johnathan Franzen and the like. The great indie comic Hutch Owen's Working Hard. But mostly the nonfiction work of people like Malcolm Gladwell, Douglas Rushkoff, Thomas Frank.

The setting is the cutthroat world of 21st century business. Free market globalism. Omnipresent marketing. Hypercapitalism. McWorld.

Humanity is: whatever there is left that money can't buy.

Which is awful hard to define because commerce is so insidious and the market is everywhere. But Humanity is whatever lies outside the market that makes people worthwhile, special, or sacred as individuals. Humanity is art, in the split-second before it's commodified and sold as product. It's love, in the split-second before it's subordinated to the machine. It's character, in the split-second before it becomes "character," just another brand identity to buy and sell.

Demons are: corporations.

No, corporations don't secretly serve demons. No, there's not a sinister corporation called EvilCorp with a demon hiding in the basement. Demons = corporations. And corporations = demons. All the corporations we know and love—Exxon, Sony, McDonalds, MCI—are themselves sentient, malevolent entities. The sorcerous act of "incorporation" summons them out of nothingness. Each one is bound to a sorcerer and probably pacted to any number of others. They are commerce and the corrupting influence of commerce embodied. Or "incorporated," to be precise. Their true names are not words but logos and sigils. They may take the form of Passers or Possessors or Objects from time to time, but their real bodies are the companies themselves, corporate "bodies" of images and advertisements and liquid assets, not to mention the millions who slave for them everywhere, each and every day.

Sorcerors are: hot shot executives, brilliant viral marketing experts, management gurus, New Economy pundits, and Sunday morning talk-show libertarians. Their blasphemous tomes are glossy issues of Fast Company and Wired and Business 2.0. And boy are they cool.

Cool? Yes. If our sorcerers are top-hatted capitalists off the Monopoly board, or cheesy Reagan-era caricatures out of Dallas and Dynasty, well, then we're not really playing for keeps. No, sorcerers have to be cool and attractive, and modern, because the market is cool, attractive, and modern, almost by definition. Sorcerers are, after all, the high priests of the great corporations. They have the stuff you want, the friends you'd die for. They're living the life you wish you had. And the stuff they do is cool. Memes and viral marketing and high-stakes sorcerous mergers and acquisitions. All that stuff is at least as cool as a 6d6 fireball or a +3 sword...

That's all I've got for now. Thoughts?

Rob

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Rob:

I think this is a rad idea. Reading it, I see the metaphor easily, but at the same time, wonder what makes Sorcerer right for it.

If you ran a game like this, how would you adjucate the following in-game:

- The Contact of a demon
- The Summoning and Binding of a demon
- The Punishment and Banishment of a demon
- Demon powers

[Bryant]

Yeah, these are the lines I was thinking along, Rob. My ad hoc definition of Humanity was "one's ability to function outside the welcoming arms of the corporation." Hm; I thought corps were demon-like enough without being demons. My friend T.Rev gave me that meme a while back; note that legally speaking corporations have a status much like humans. They live forever, potentially. Etc. But you could go either way.

I'm not Rob, but I'll take a crack at Clinton's questions:

The Contact of a demon is getting in touch with the right people. Anyone can call the much abused man who sits at the front desk and screens calls. It takes someone who knows the ropes to make a call to the CEO when you've never met her before in your life.

Summoning and Binding -- it's unclear to me that Summoning is an entirely relevant concept. There's face to be gained from getting the CEO to fly out and meet you in Paris, mind you... but one of the rules of the setting seems to be that information is as important as anything physical, if not more so.

Binding is easier, of course. It's a contract. And Banishing? That's getting out of the contract without paying heavy penalty fees. Failures on the Banish are penalties for your next few actions having to do with finance, or penalties for your next contract negotiation. ("I don't think our lawyers can break this NDA, Cicely. We're going to have to pass on your services.")

Containment is keeping the corporation from screwing up your niece's attempt to get a job in Silicon Valley. "I'll have to cancel our contract if you make that call; I know you know Osasoft's VCs." Punishment is... industrial espionage? Something more abstract?

I haven't thought at all about demon powers. I think that "combat" might need to be lifted from the realm of the physical and made into something else, but I'm not sure how to do that. (Along those lines, I'd been thinking that Stamina might be a measure of how good one is at one's Cover, which in this paradigm becomes the things you can do that benefit a corporation.)

[szilard]

Summoning is a meeting. It need not be with the CEO. Meetings, however, are vital. Someone from the corporation needs to be impressed by you.

Punishing is anything that hurts the corporation: bad press, a law suit, whatever.

Banishing is dissolving the corporation, methods could include assuming a majority of the stock or the aforementioned lawsuit.

Demon Powers reflect getting the corporation to work for you. Need a boost to your Cover? That's the personal assistant or consultant that the corporation assigns to you. Special attack? How about a lawsuit from something with near-unlimited resources. That not good enough? Okay, some construction equipment comes and tears down your enemy's house at 3 A.M. - with him in it. It seems the paperwork was in order for the construction of a new facility at that site...

Stuart

[Ron Edwards]

Wait, wait, I'm confused.

Are we talking about adapting the Sorcerer mechanics into non-sorcerous, utterly economic/corp issues?

Or are we talking about a setting for an otherwise-canonical Sorcerer game, in which some few characters are demon-summoning sorcerous player-character sorts?

I was under the impression it was the latter, but folks are responding and suggesting as if it were the former.

Rob, help?

Best,
Ron

[Bryant]

Summoning is a meeting. It need not be with the CEO. Meetings, however, are vital. Someone from the corporation needs to be impressed by you.

Hm... physical presence is a definite recognition of status; if someone will come to where you are, that has significance. OK, I can see that.

The twist, though, is that Binding need not be preceded by Summoning.

Demon Powers reflect getting the corporation to work for you. Need a boost to your Cover? That's the personal assistant or consultant that the corporation assigns to you. Special attack? How about a lawsuit from something with near-unlimited resources. That not good enough? Okay, some construction equipment comes and tears down your enemy's house at 3 A.M. - with him in it. It seems the paperwork was in order for the construction of a new facility at that site...

Yeah.

[Rob MacDougall]

Hi all. Thanks for the comments!

Are we talking about adapting the Sorcerer mechanics into non-sorcerous, utterly economic/corp issues?
Or are we talking about a setting for an otherwise-canonical Sorcerer game, in which some few characters are demon-summoning sorcerous player-character sorts?

You could go in different directions with this, but in my mind I definitely meant the latter.

If I ran this, I'd talk it over with the players, but my assumption was that the non-sorcerous stuff Bryant and others are talking about would all be there, but as cover for actual sorcerous doings. The corporations really would be demons: unholy, sentient, malevolent things that can only truly be dealt with through black magic. The magic would I think combine classic pentagrams and blood sacrifice hoo-ha with corporate contracts and management theory hocus pocus and the like. I'm not sure what the actual ratio of D'Souza to Alhazred should be, but the intertwining of the two is part of what interests me about the setting.

One could use the Binding, Banishing, Combat mechanics to describe corporate takeovers, contracts, industrial sabotage, but as I see it, the PCs would be aware that what was really happening "underneath" all that was dealing with actual demons.

Which answers, I hope, Clinton's question about why, for me at least, Sorcerer is right for this.

Rob

[szilard]

Of course, there are some of us who think that corporations really are demons...

Honestly, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I can see a sorceror in this setting picking up a receiver of a black phone with no buttons. He mentions an address, says "Take care of it," and the bulldozers roll...

Stuart

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Let's stick with Rob's plan, all right, and remember that we're talking about Sorcerer play with demonic stuff going on in the minority, with the corporate stuff (and plenty of Humanity loss) going on as the larger context.

That would mean that not all corporations are demonic. Not all CEOs are sorcerers. Not all hostile-takeovers are Bindings. And so forth.

But some are, and that's where the game rules come in.

Rob, what sorts of score descriptors would you suggest for ...

Stamina
Will
Lore
Cover
Price

?

Best,
Ron

[szilard]

Hi there,

Let's stick with Rob's plan, all right, and remember that we're talking about Sorcerer play with demonic stuff going on in the minority, with the corporate stuff (and plenty of Humanity loss) going on as the larger context.

That would mean that not all corporations are demonic. Not all CEOs are sorcerers. Not all hostile-takeovers are Bindings. And so forth.

Gotcha.

I think I wasn't being clear. I was trying to show how what the workings of a sorcerous CEO-type might look like.

Stuart

[Bryant]

Fair enough, Ron & Rob. I should note that some of my assumptions come from my radical anarchist hindbrain, which thinks that the difference between real demons behind corporations and the current state of affairs is neglibible, but I should remember that my radical anarchist hindbrain does not necessarily live in the same reality as the rest of us.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob,

I'm very, very interested in this concept for playing Sorcerer, as you've described it. Any further ideas?

Best,
Ron

[Rob MacDougall]

Ron,

Thanks for bouncing this back onto the radar screen. I have been thinking about it, about good Descriptors and the like (& I'd love to hear suggestions from the list) but an attack of real life has kept me from writing anything substantial for the forum.

I'll toss out one thing I've been thinking about for now. Maybe people will have some thoughts, and I'll get a chance to write more in the next few days:

I was thinking one way to encourage storylines that dealt simultaneously with both corporate affairs and the very personal demon-sorcerer relationship would be to stipulate that all demons' Needs have to do with their corporation as a whole while all Desires have to do with the personal demon-sorceror relationship. So a demon's Need might be: devouring other corporations, or having its name (corporate logo) emblazoned in as many places as possible, or profiting from the labor of children, or just good ol' fashioned profit margins), while its Desires are for the human sorcerer to do certain things or behave in a certain way.

OR, maybe it would work better the other way, with Needs being things that only the individual sorcerer can provide and Desires being things to do with the company as a whole.

I remember Ron saying that Needs were always specific activities while Desires were more general conditions, but I can't remember the exact reasoning for this.

Basically, I want a situation where sorcerers have to care about the health/success of the company they're bound to but they also have a specific (and likely dysfunctional) personal relationship with that demon.

Rob

[Nev the Deranged]

It's odd, even though I know it doesn't really mesh at all with what you're trying to describe, but for some reason I keep having images out of TRON... MCP was certainly a sentient, malevolent entity with nearly omnipotent resources (or was getting there anyway), and there was definitely an interesting relationship between MCP and his "sorcerer" the CEO (who's name I forget).  It wasn't always easy to tell who was in charge there.

Like I said, it's sort of off topic but I'm never dissuaded from sharing my own wacky takes on anything I see, so =>  there ya have it.

 Toodles!

[Nev the Deranged]

Oh yeah, the law firm someone mentioned on the original thread was Wolfram & Hart.  They specialized in representing demons (which in the milieu of Angel were mostly physical entities that lived much like you and I), sorcerers, cults, as well as companies who used magick or "evil" practices.  Their board of directors were most likely either demons themselves, or extremely high level sorcerers.  They were a great collective villain and well suited to the show.

Naturally, in their business they employed seers, psychics, warlocks, illusionists, etc.  Not to mention demonic thugs when necessary.  Obviously they very rarely lost cases, one way or another.

On a completely unrelated note, someone was mentioning what a high-powered CEO sorcerer might act like... I got a bit of a flash of the character Nikolai Carpathia from the Left Behind series of novels (and movie).  Nikolai is the Antichrist, but his actions in the political and business realms are similar to what I imagine a uber-class sorcerer might be like (naturally, the Antichrist could be considered the most powerful sorcerer possible, in the Judeo-Christian paradigm).

alright, enough babbling.. I'm off to spend what's left of my tax return on comics and games, whee!!

 TTFN