[Sorcerer] Grimm Therapy: Another gradeschool sorcerers riff

[Doyce]

(First off, props: the following set up is all a result of Judd's great grade-school sorcerer's idea, which I shamelessly ripped off and used.  The events of play are obviously from the play group, but the foundation wasn't -- I'm just standing on the shoulders of others.)

One of our players (Lee) couldn't make the Nobilis game last night, so Randy (single guy, no kids), De (Lee's wife, with a 2-year-old in tow), Jackie and I (raising a teenager) started up what will eventually be a short "Grade School Sorcerers" riff.

The following regards character generation, opening kickers, and some observations on playing kids in a game that's designed to create people in dysfunctional relationships.  You can also check out the wiki page for the game at Grimm Therapy, which has the PCs, their demons, a fun little customized character sheet, and the One Sheet that describes the game's customized Humanity and Descriptors (compiled from the excellent thread of Paka's).  I won't be posting the character and demon stats directly (this post is already long enough), so if you're interested, follow the link to the wiki.

So I called up De to see what the plan was, since Lee couldn't come up.  To put it mildly, she was interested in getting out of the house after a long weekend, so we decided to game anyway -- I said I'd "run something".  A tentative gathering time of 4 was also agreed on.

This was around 1.

When we got back to the house, however, the garage door demanded attention.  Between the trip to Home Depot for replacement parts and putting them in, it was a little before three before I got in the house.

Right.  My Life With Master had been vetoed by Jackie ("Not without Lee playing... that's silly."), Dust Devils didn't feel like the right genre at all, and frankly I didn't want to grok an untried system, so that led me around to Sorcerer and the recent great 'grade school' thread on the Forge (previously mentioned)... plus... y'know, with no prep-time and all that great one-sheet material...

Anyway, I grabbed up all the contributed text from the various thread participants, edited it all down to a two-page "One Sheet" detailing descriptors, lore and humanity and started putting together a character sheet (necessary, in my mind, both to capture the feel of the setting as well as to accomodate a few modifications to the standard list of Scores).

Somewhere in there I accidently deleted the one-sheet unsaved and unprinted, had to create it again, and had all kinds of printer difficulties, so it was unfortunately about five-going-on-six before we actually started character generation, but for a no-prep, no-warning thing, the material came out pretty great.

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Character Creation

For a number of reasons, a game like this is going to create some pretty intriguing characters (PCs and NPCs alike).  There's a number of reasons for this, but it can be generally boiled down to two main points:
1. As with vanilla Sorcerer, you're creating a character who by default will already be enmeshed in a dysfunctional relationship, which does all sorts of things when combined with...
2. It's a kid.  I don't know what that means, exactly, but something about creating someone in a critical formative point in life, plus the alchemy of representing them in a system like Sorcerer that tends naturally to be a bit creepy and introspective... well, interesting stuff results.

The characters can be seen on the Grimm Therapy wiki page, to which I will only add a few quick thoughts.  My "What would the shrink say:" bit is a note on how the 'normal' world might see the character and their actions.  Obviously, to the kids themselves, what they're doing is perfectly normal and follows the coherent logic of the rules they've learned as fledgling sorcerers.

Katelyn
Jackie set up someone who... let's say is right up her alley: tomboy, hell raiser, et cetera, but then she twisted things up a bit.  Her 'real world' Cover is 'jock', but her make-belief Past is 'Princess Fiona' -- 'the uber girly-girly' as Jackie put it.  All of her tomboy stuff stems from her demon pet-rocks need for Competition, and Jackie later added that it was all in direct opposition to her mother's wishes for her only daughter (one older brother, one younger) to be 'a nice young lady', but in the make-believe...

What would the shrink say: "Middle-child with an indifferent father, a controlling mother who wants her daugher to 'be a good girl'*, a much older sibling and one not much younger that she bosses around.  Outwardly, she's brash and boyish while secretly she covets the same sorts of trappings and activities that her mother would like.  Seems to think all of her power rises from competition with the outside world."

* - Wish fulfillment on her mother's part?  Do you need to ask? Look at that mess of 'unique spelling' she gave the poor kid for a name.

Player-selected starting position?  The middle of a family reunion picnic, and let's have a double-scoop of family stress next to the potato salad.

The funny?  Katelyn's family is probably most... normal of the group.  Yikes.

Megan
De started off with a clear picture in her head of someone she knows in real life and how that person was at the target-age-bracket we were using.  What we ended up with was the 'graceless amazon' who just wants to get along with people but is too wrapped up in her own little world to really connect.  Her demon is almost an alter-ego: a tiny, nimble, flying fairie who loves mischief and never gets caught.  On top of all this, you've got her unsympathetic Dad dying under mysterious circumstances.

What would the shrink say: "Bereavement issues in unreconciled conflict with unresolved relationship problems with father.  Uses pranks and mischief to get attention, but denies involvement or responsibility.  Deep in denial stage over father's death."

Starting position?  At the reception/wake thing at her aunt's house, following the funeral.

Nicky
Randy had several character ideas to start out with: one of which was quite dark and the other quite light.  When it was all said and done, he tossed them both and went for something a little more in the middle with Nicky.  Nicky's Past is a Vampire D-like man-with-no-name.  He has a ghost companion who tells him the ins and outs of things (who's been hanging around him pretty much since his mom died a few years ago).  His parasite demon rests in his chest and feeds on fear -- Nicky's preferred method of feeding that need is sneaking out of the house at night and scaring folks out for an evening stroll.

What would the shrink say: "Bereavement issues have lead to a personality shift involving highly antisocial behavior (poss. incl. minor kleptomania).  Emotional disconnect with the world around him and feelings of superiority toward peers.  Fear is a very strong motivator."

Player-selected starting position?  Alone on the nighttime streets, scaring people.

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By the time all of this was done, we had all of an hour and a half to actually play.

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Setting it up
Before play, I clarified the difference between the Real World, playing Make Believe, and being on the Otherside.  After my incoherent babbling (about how the Make Believe echoes into the Otherside so that creatures from there might know about you (or your Past descriptor), even if you've never been to the (dangerous) Otherside), De likened it to "Ireland, areas in Ireland with lots of Fairies, and the REAL Fairie Realm" -- all of which worked very well as an illustration for me.

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Playing the Kickers
Playing kids in this kind of setting (ghosts, goblins, fairies, et cetera, with family issues and stuff mixed in) is pretty thick with metaphors and symbology -- even moreso than a 'normal' sorcerer game.  None of it was (I think) really intentional, but if it's there, I'm sure we put it there somehow.

After having Kickers explained to her, De summarized it with a literary phrase (which I've now forgotten) that basically means "The point in the story where the protagonist can't go back to the way things were."  That's probably one of the clearest ways to say it, IMO.

Megan's Kicker
Dad just died, and it looks like something from the Otherside had something to do with it.

De described how it was that she found out about the Otherside's involvement... while at the casket, Dad's body moved and fluttered ("like dead leaves moving when a breeze goes by").  This gave me something to work with as far as what the story bits were.

We started her off at the wake/reception thing, out in the back yard behind a tool shed.  Long grass had grown up back there around a pile of rusted junk and trash, and Megan was sitting on some of it when Morganthe (her fairy) shows up and starts bemoaning how BOOOOOOOOOOORing everthing is.  The two develop a plan to amuse themselves by taking all of one squirrels cache of nuts and swapping them for a different squirrels cache of nuts to watch the resulting chaos.

To implement this plan, Morganthe decides that they need a basket to transport nuts back and forth, so Megan goes back into the house to get the wicker basket in which the sympathy cards for the funeral have been collected.

Oh yes she did.

Anyway, De decided that Mom was locked away in the bathroom to cry ("because Dad was kind of a jerk and she shouldn't act as sad as she feels where people can see her"), so Megan told "the Aunts" that Mom needed the cards and made off with the basket.  She then bundled up the cards and hid them away in a closet ("I don't want to destroy them, but I don't want to see them either.") and headed back out into the yard to find that Morganthe got bored waiting and headed into the trees without her.

(It *just* occured to me that in retelling the events of the wake/reception thing, De indicated that everyone was sitting around reminiscing about Dad as a boy and how nice and funny he was then... and that there was nothing said about Dad-as-an-adult... as though the best things anyone could think to say were in the distant past, back when Dad was Megan's age, even.)

Katelyn's Kicker
At a family reunion, Narris starts to warn Katelyn of danger whenever her cousin Christopher comes anywhere near her. That's never happened before. She decides to do something about it and goes looking for him, but one of the grown-ups tells her that Christoper and her Katelyn's little brother Darren went back to play on the old swingset that's back in the trees by the duck pond.

Katelyn gets back to the swingset (one of those classic greyed-steel-set-in-concrete-bases playground setups that are arranged left to right with slide-swing-swing-swing-trapeze-rings-high bar-teeter totter.  Darren has his back to Katelyn and is sitting on one end of the teeter-totter.  Christopher (hereafter "not-Christopher") is standing at the other end of teeter-totter and pushing it up and down with his arms in an uneven pattern to playfully spook Darren. He smiles lazily and ferally and invites Katelyn to join in the fun -- his arms look VERY strong.  (Katelyn nails her Lore roll -- she's been reading Courtney Crumrin, maybe -- and correctly identifies the changeling.)  Katelyn demures and tells Darren that Mom wants him to go back to the picnic.  Darren argues because Mom already said he could play until six.  Katelyn starts to circle around the action, but stops when it's clear that not-Christopher knows she's up to something.

Katelyn goes into 'just a girl' mode and starts picking dandelions ("they're good against bad stuff because they soak up the sun") instead of playing the boy-games, but doesn't think she can get them in a circle around not-Christopher without him "doing something" to Darren, so she brings the bouquet over to Darren to smell, pushing the 'girly' vibe.  When he leans over to take an obligatory sniff, she grabs him with her other hand and clamps him to her side.  (There's some rolling here and Jackie comes up big with a couple 10's and a 9, beating out both not-Christopher and the struggling Darren.)  She backs away from the swingset with her bundle of dandelions held in front of her like a cross before a vampire and carries Darren (kicking and hollering) back toward the picnic.  Not-Christopher just stands there and smiles at them.

(It was at about this point that De noted the inherent creepiness of this kind of stuff around kids, and the subtext laid over something like the changeling Not-Christopher, who becomes a very strong representation of a sexual predator.  Really interesting stuff.)

Nicky's Kicker
While Nicky's out scaring people, one of them (a teenaged girl), turns out to be a ghost. "You can see me... Help me! There's a spectral blue cat watching from the side, but not interacting. The ghost tries to follow Nicky home.

The ghost turns out to be "Erin", who doesn't really remember what happened to her, but knows she's not a ghost because "I'd just... know... wouldn't I?"  She also doesn't think she should be hanging around after she died. ("I was a good person.  I sang in a choir!")  Nicky doesn't really think that there's much he can do to help (and is sort of peeved that his nocturnal play-time has done from Vampire Hunter D to The Sixth Sense); what really draws him in is when Erin hits the end of her "tether".  Apparently, she's been trying to get to her house, but it's too far away and she keeps 'hitting the end of something that feels like a leash'.  This happens again as she follows Nicky.  

Nicky checks out this tether and follows it (using Travel*) back to an old, but still in use factory (I was thinking of the factory from Willard, but no one else had seen it).  Nicky follows the tether to where it leads into the basement of the factory and decides to leave the whole thing for another time:  midnight explorations of the basements of creepy old factories sounds like a really bad idea, even to him.  Erin finds him again on his way back to the house (or he finds her) and makes him promise to help her, because every day it gets harder to remember things.  Nicky tentatively agrees, goes home and sneaks back into the house.  A night of frights has his dragon curled warmly in his chest and he falls asleep asking his ghost-crow about how other ghosts... work.

Megan follow-up
Megan finds Morganthe back in the trees a ways, up on a branch between two arguing squirrels.  Morganthe tries to get Megan involved in the argument, but the squirrels suddenly bolt off into the trees and little Morganthe goes white as a sheet and points behind her as a silent wind stirs the leaves behind Megan.

Megan won't turn around because she thinks it's all just a trick so Morganthe can pull her pants down again, but her opinion changes when a 'pointy-fingered hand' settles spider-light on her neck, pulling the warmth from her skin.  Megan, wide-eyed, is mouthing 'get me out of here' at the terrified Morganthe when something leans in close to her ear and breathes "We would like to offer our condelensces at your lo --"

Morganthe suddenly lets out a shrill war-whoop (pixie-equivilant) that interupts the Thing's quoting of a sympathy card and flies down off the branch and straight at Megan, showering pixie-dust everywhere.  She slams into Megan, grabs her by the shirt front, and hauls her double-time toward the house, straining mightily to keep the two of them aloft (kind of... Megan's feet were still dragging on the ground part of the way).  Morganthe manages to keep them moving all the way to the screen door on the back porch.  She lets Megan go and shoots straight up into the air from the released ballast and Megan tumbles right through the screen door and into the porch -- disheveled, dirty, and clutching the wicker basket that used to have all the (missing) sympathy cards in it.

Her aunts are not amused, especially since she claims to have no idea where the cards are.

Katelyn follow-up
Katelyn is soundly berated by her mother when she drags her protesting brother back into the picnic -- very embarrasing for mom.  Katelyn claims Darren was throwing rocks at bunnies and begins wailing about the bunnies and Mom has to separate the two of them.  Mom has a clenched-jaw talk with the sniffling Katelyn and finally lets her off the hook (perhaps mollified by the girly attention to bunnies and the crumpled bunch of flowers clutched in her hand) so that she can "go and play."

Yeah.  Go and Play. Right.

Katelyn heads back to not-Christopher, who is lounging in one of the swings, smiling toothily.  It says something about "they didn't tell me about you... this is interesting" and other similar things.  It doesn't know where Christopher is and probably wouldn't tell her even if it did.  Katelyn thinks things over and decides that if she drives the thing off it might be harder to trade it back for Christopher ("after I go find him"), so she opts to simply Contain it in a ring of dandelions for now.  Not-Christopher simply sits there smiling while she does this, but seems a little peeved that he isn't able to to easily breech the barrier when she's done.

"You're good, but it won't matter."

Katelyn blows some dried dandelion fluff in his face (Punish), which just ticks him off more and she heads back to the picnic to plan.

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Wrapping up for the evening, I closed with a scene of all three of the PCs in the front office of their school.  It's two days later on Monday afternoon, and they each have appointments with the Vice Principle and their parents.  They don't know each other, but there is perhaps a brief moment of solidarity among the Doomed.

Then their parents show up and it's time for the meetings.

END

[Doyce]

Forgot this part:

Unlike Paka, I'm not using the parent-principle conference to point out the parents as "this is why the kids are the way they are" as much as I'm using the event for the simple story element making the PCs aware of one another as fellow outcasts.

For one thing, the parents didn't come out of our story as the 'real demons' as they did in Paka's game, perhaps because the 'standard' demons were introduced integrally to the characters' stories before their parents were even mentioned.

[Judd]

Aye, I am flattered to hear that the idea stuck with ya enough to use.

I'll read this over more carefully later and comment on specific parts.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Doyce, I get a little confused between all the wild stuff you and Judd are doing, so remind me: is this game being played with the same people as the Bibliophage characters? Or separately? And did you continue to play this game, or was it essentially a "let's try it and move on?"

Best,
Ron

[Doyce]

This is a new game that I started up with part of my Nobilis group on an evening when not everyone could make it.  It's on a different night and unrelated to the Bibliophage storyline.  I have not had a chance to continue this game yet (the first session was a week ago), but (like the Clicking Sands thing I did a month ago) I fully intend to continue and complete it.

The group consists of three players:  
* Katelyn is played by my wife Jackie, who came to 'another Sorcerer game' grudgingly but had an absolute ball once a character idea presented itself.  She's easily the most experienced with the rules and really 'got' them faster than I did when we started playing the first game.
* Nicky is played by the same fellow who plays Val Ryan in Bibliophage.
* Megan is played by De, who had never played Sorcerer before.  De is a professional writer (which is how I know her), married, with a 2 year old daughter.  During both character generation and actual play, she was picking up and pointing out literary practices and story elements and seemed very excited and interested in the sorts of things the game brought out in that regard.

Hope that helps.  I hope to play this game again fairly soon and have more to write: I think it will probably be a shorter story than Bibliophage, probably two to four sessions (like a Courtney Crumrin trade paperback :).