TrueSorcery.com, a one-sheet

[jrients]

Fellow Forge member szilard and I have been working together to produce the following one-sheet.  This is my first serious effort at a Sorcerer game.  Feedback would be most appreciated.

TrueSorcery.com, a Sorcerer one-sheet

Sorcery has existed for millenia, but it has been exceedingly rare. Most of history has passed without a single sorcerer on the entire planet. Every few centuries, someone might discover the basics of sorcery and pass the secrets on to a few students before those secrets are again lost.

Now things are different.  Not everyone can find these secrets and not all who do are capable of understanding them, but sorcery is now far more available than it ever was in the past.

Someone or something has made the basic principles of sorcery available online.  The first time a person visits www. TrueSorcery .com they find a webpage that is totally blank except for the button "download ultimate power".  Clicking on the button will start a download of zipfile containing a bunch of .txt files.  These files are a crude introduction to the art of sorcery and a lengthy but sketchy grimoire.  Subsequent visits to the URL produce only 404 errors, whether you downloaded the files the first time or not.

What is sorcery like?

Sorcery is the art of exploiting the fragmented and chaotic nature of reality to twist the universe to your own ends.  The methods available in the TrueSorcery.com download are the distillation of the hidden works of the Elizabethan sorcerer John Dee.  The basic techniques include induced hallucinations while gazing into a crystal ball, marking surfaces with magic squares, and intoning angelic names.

Although all the occult stuff is necessary, it is not the true key to sorcery.  The most effective sorcery subverts normal human relations.  You want a Possessor? Cause stress in a loved one, the mental anguish will allow you to call a Possessor through to take control of that individual.  You want an Object Demon? Steal or Destroy a treasured item of someone for whom you care. In its absence, an Object Demon may come to replace it.  You want an Inconspicuous Demon or a Passer? Sever a relationship you actually care about in order to forge one with the Demon.  Thus Dee and his apprentice engaged in wife swapping to power a particular operation.

What are demons?

Demons are the cancerous pieces of the universe impeding upon the perceptions of humanity.  We live our normal lives in the middle ground between the solipsism of effete philosophers and the cruel cold machinery of the physicist.  Demons are the horrific flaws in our universe and/or our understanding of it, exposing us to the terrible truth that our lives are meaningless jumbles of coincidences. Only the bonds of love hold these forces at bay.  When they stress or fracture those bonds, fissures are created that sorcerers can pull demons through.

Demons are not people.  Even calling them "beings" is doubtful. Most demons take subtle forms, a mote of light, perhaps, or a disembodied laughter.  They never appear as anything that might be mistaken as a true form.  (You never see a big purple fellow with horns and wings, for example.)  Demons never talk, even those that take human form.  Some communicate in writing, but most make their opinions known only by when they do and do not use their powers.  Possessors and passers all have the tell-tale "inability to communicate", which points not just to muteness, but to an inability to use facial expressions to convey meaning as well.  Most such demons can't even use gestures beyond simple things like pointing a finger.  They have no body language either.  Dealing with them is unnervingly like an encounter with a not-quite-dead corpse.

What is Humanity?

Humanity is the Flesh.  Its foe is the Word or Spirit, the constructed, the artificial, the intellectual, the religious.  Humanity is one's loyalty to the real world of flesh and blood and its inhabitants.  Opposing Humanity is the Spirit, the reified realm occupied by those who think the life of the mind is superior to the life of the flesh.  Hugging a loved one is an affirmation of humanity.  Informing on the questionable activities of a friend because of  "patriotic duty" is an essentially inhuman act.  Anyone who treats people as an exploitable resource is a foe of humanity, but it takes treating loved ones that way to actually cost humanity.  When Spiderman chooses to spend an evening fighting crime when he should be visiting Aunt May in the hospital, that could cost him humanity.  Staying up late into the night having cybersex while your wife spends another night unfulfilled would be a humanity roll situation.

What happens when you reach humanity 0 depends on how you got there, but it generally involves becoming an obsessive wacko.  The informant above becomes paranoid, seeing plots in everything.  Spiderman abandons his life as Peter Parker, never taking off the mask, never stopping in his war on crime.  The husband finds himself kicked out of the house, but he doesn't care because he devotes himself full time to the nastiest parts of the world wide web.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey, I'd play.

What it needs is a set of permitted descriptors for each of the scores, and some recommendations regarding types of protagonists. I also usually like to see some movie or fiction references, for "look and feel" if nothing else.

Best,
Ron

[szilard]

Movie and fiction references, huh? That would probably do some good. Jeff and I have generally liked the ideas that the other has tossed out, but I suspect we might be coming from slightly different directions. That's probably a good way to get something concrete down.

Now I must give it some thought...

Stuart

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jeff and Stuart,

One other thing - the two of you need to decide who wears the pants regarding this material. When it comes down to it, who has final say?

Best,
Ron

[jrients]

Ron,

Thanks for the replies, especially for pointing out the "pants" issue.

Here's what I have in mind for descriptors:

Stamina can be any but Military Training and Specialized Combat Training.  Will can be any but Social Competence.  These two limits are partially to avoid the question "Why would a totally sweet ninja need demons anyway?"  I just don't want to go there.

For Lore Solitary Adept is definitely the big one.  Coven Member, Apprentice, and Mad also work, but Naif doesn't fit what I'd like to do at all.  It's important to me that none of the PCs "stumbled into" having their first demon.  Our heroes are all fully responsible for their status as Sorcerers.

For Price paranoid, arrogant, and bookish/secluded strike home for me.  Others are certainly doable.

The basic idea is that the protagonists should be some variant of the "Everyday Joe gone horribly wrong", like postal employees with the basements full of guns or deranged cabbies or bitter New Age chicks who won't actually confront the cheating men in their lives but will send horrible demons down on them.

Also missing from my initial post:

Demons have authentic Enochian names like Aczinor, Lzinopo, Alhctga, Liiansa, Ahmlicv, Laidrom, and Iczhihal.

PS: Still mediating on source material.  Where the heck in my brain is some of this stuff coming from?

[Mike Holmes]

So basically choose descriptors from the list in the book? C'mon, you can do better than that. Make some of your own.

Mike

[jrients]

Mike,

1) I'm not trying to choose anything.  I'm trying to give suggestions to players so they can choose.

2) The text tells me Humanity needs a definition, etc, etc.  So I understand where you are coming from.  However the text explicitly says

Choose one description each from the lists below for Stamina, Will, and Lore.

(First sentence of last paragraph, page 26.)

Maybe I'm being too starched-collar on my reading.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jeff,

The list is sort of the Sorcerer default, and individual groups are encouraged to come up with lists of their own.

In application, what would happen is that you'd provide three to five descriptors for each score (Stamina, Will, Lore) and some ideas about both Cover and Price, maybe with some inspirational examples. Then at least one player would come up with another possible descriptor or two that makes you go, "Yeah! Obviously! Can't believe I didn't include that," which gets included. And most everyone uses your Price and Cover examples as inspiration and comes up with really good original ones.

Best,
Ron