[Sorcerer] Ordinary Tragedies Prep Session

[Tim Alexander]

Hey Folks,

Last night was the prep session for my new Sorcerer game. The players are all friends, but they're folks who I haven't done any gaming with. I've been attempting to do some branching and see about injecting some new blood in my regular group. Only one of the new players has had any rpg experience in the recent past, mostly d20 from the sounds of it, so Sorcerer is new to everyone. The people in question are:

Eric: He's the guy with the D20 experience, possibly other stuff as well but all of it mainstream as far as I'm aware.
Rick: He played D&D in high school, and from the sounds of it he played fairly often. He hasn't played much of anything since but remembers gaming fondly.
Mer: Rick's wife, who's never really done any gaming. She reminded me that she'd participated in an abortive game with me in college, a Chill homebrew variant that lost traction due to player interest. So I fibbed a little in saying I'd never played with any of these folks.

We started off by me giving them an overview of Sorcerer as a game and some social contract stuff before moving into discussing the one sheet. Getting input at first was somewhat slow going, but once we started talking about characters people really started to vibe. Eric pitched a teenage kid Sorcery savant with abandonment issues, Mer pitched a dancer who'd never quite made it and ended up as a showgirl, and Rick pitched a stand-up comic at the end of his life looking for his one big shot. Eric's kid especially through me for a loop, though I love what he turned into, I hadn't thought we'd see a teenager as a character in this setting but it's totally appropriate. Unfortunately just as we were getting to the meat of the characters Mer had to leave. She'd made prior commitments not expecting to be as hooked into the game as she ended up being. It's a bummer that she'll have missed out on the roundtable chargen with everyone else, but I left my copy of the book with Rick and he's probably going to help her build a character this weekend and then we'll refine it over email. We discussed doing another roundtable next week for her, but no one was incredibly keen on pushing the beginning of play back another week. Anybody think we're making a mistake handling it this way?

Once we got back to the character discussions things really started to hum and we ended up with the following:

Vic Fontaine (Played by Rick)
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Vic is a stand up comic working a casino club at the end of a career of missed chances. He's been an occult dabbler for years, but has only recently gotten the balls to do anything with it. In an alchoholic haze he murders his partner and uses it as a vehicle to summon a demonic ventriloquist dummy to replace him. Note: The irony of the comic summoning the most cliched hack act prop as a vehicle to stardom was made specific mention by the group.

Stamina: 1 (Left to Die)
Will: 4 (Sycophant)
Lore: 5 (Clinical & Bitch)
Cover: 1 (Broken Down Old Comedian)

Price: Alchoholic (-1 to stressful situations while sober)
Humanity: 4
Telltale: Occultic jewelry (pentagram necklaces, skull rings and the like)
Kicker: Someone knows about the murder and is putting the finger to Vic.

Chip (Bound to Vic Fontaine)
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Type: Object (Ventriloquist Dummy that looks uncannily like Vic, from the red velvet jacket down to the combover hair)
Stamina: 4
Will: 5
Lore: 4
Power: 5

Binding Strength: 2 in favor of Vic
Telltale: Can speak on his own
Desire: Corruption
Need: Applause

Abilities:
Cover (Stand Up Comic/Ventriloquist) O
Perception (Human Failing) S
Taint S
Hint (Hypnosis) S

Gordon Black (Played by Eric)
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Gordon is a latchkey kid of a single mom, roughly fifteen/sixteen. Dad skipped out when he was younger, and Gordon's got abandonment issues in abundance since mom's a cocktail waitress working brutal hours to make ends meet. Gordon's got a surprising breadth of Sorcerous knowledge for his age, most of it gleaned from the internet and specifically what's become an email mentor. He's got bully problems at school and he's summoned up a pair of dobermen passers to help him kick some ass by smashing up the Bully's new camaro.

Stamina: 1 (Junkie: Junkfood and sugar addict)
Will: 4 (Rageful)
Lore: 5 (Clinical & Tribal)
Cover: 4 (High School Kid)

Price: Cupid's Curse (-1 to interactions with the opposite sex)
Humanity: 3
Telltale: Gordon doesn't just wear glasses, they're fused to the side of his head
Kicker: Gordon's new crush at school has just turned out to be the Bully's girlfriend

Spike and Ike (Bound to Gordon)
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Type: Passer (Takes the form of a pair of indentical dobermen pinchers)
Stamina: 6
Will: 7
Lore: 5
Power: 7

Binding Strength: 3 in favor of Spike and Ike
Telltale: Eyes glow red in the dark
Desire: Competition
Need: Attention and Care

Abilities:
Transport S
Travel (Teleport/Blink) S
Link
Vitality
Special Damage (Fire Breathing) Note: Eric sort of settled on the dogs being influenced by creatures out of the D&D moster manual, hence the blink dog/hellhound combination. The group was very behind the idea of having the dogs be 'kick ass' in the eyes of a sixteen year old kid.

After fleshing the rest of things out and doing the diagram on the back of the sheet it was pretty much time to call it a night. Everyone had a blast, I think what's come out of the prep session are a couple of really interesting characters that I can't wait to see what happens to them. In a thread in the Adept Press forum I've got a discussion on the beginnings of the map I'm planning to use and I can already see some pretty major changes are going to be in the works. In practice last night some of the initial vibe that I felt on demons when I wrote the one sheet changed when we all talked it out and made up characters. I like the way things ended up though, and actually I was really happy to see one player prod the other on multiple occaisions when things weren't settling right in either the setting or character. All in all, it was really a blast.

-Tim

[Mike Holmes]

For the dummy, all I can think of is that Twilight Zone episode. Classic. :-)

Mike

[Tim Alexander]

Hey Guys,

I was getting together a post about our first play and realized this never got updated with the final character:

Darlene Pappas (Played by Mer)
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Darlene is a showgirl who had/has aspirations of being a dancing success but has never made it to the big time. She's riddled with male issues. She's got an abusive cultic father in her past (the source of her Sorcerous knowledge via flashback memories,) a bouncer boyfriend who was cheating on her with another showgirl, and a grimy slimeball agent. At the same time, she's an abuser herself, and the way she takes care of her boyfriend's affair is by summoning a possessor into the girl's body.

Stamina: 3 (Abuser)
Will: 5 (Rageful/User)
Lore: 2 (Naif)
Cover: 3 (Showgirl)

Price: Male Authority Issues (-1 to situations involving controlling men)
Humanity: 5
Telltale: Her long hair moves on it's own
Kicker: Dad just showed up.

Helga (Bound to Darlene)
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Type: Possesor (Inhabiting the body of Ashlee Rivers, showgirl)
Stamina: 4
Will: 6
Lore: 5
Power: 6

Binding Strength: 1 in Helga's Favor
Telltale: Skulls in Pupils
Desire: Mischief
Need: Exotic Food

Abilities:
Cover S
Perception (People's desire) S
Vitality (Regeneration) S
Hold
Range (Hold)

Oh, and Mike, the Twilight Zone reference is spot on. I don't know if that's specifically what Rick had in mind, but I think it's definitely informed the group's reaction to it.

-Tim