Combined Sorcerer and S&S games... and the Dreamlands

[Bailywolf]

I just found out the CoC folks are producing a new (and quite heafty) Dreamlands book... which is suposed to have excised most of the Lumbly tot and gotten back to Lovecraft's origional well seasoned bizare horror.

I'm going to snag it an use it for a hybrid setting- combine 'conventional' Sorcerer with Sorcerer & Sword... treat Humanity as Sanity (or heck, just rename it) and go to town.  It's been years since I read lovecraft's Dreamquest of U.K. but it was by far my fave of all the C. mythos stuff.  

I've been looking for an excuse to run a combined S/S&S game, and this looks ideal.  The Dreamlands has the perfect level of internal wierdness to acomidate the narritive structures of S&S... it's a dreamworld which borders strangely on our own... full of Immanent demons and stranger creatures... and oportunity for adventure, insanity, enlightenment, or death.  Good S&S stuff.

Before getting wind of Dreamlands, I was toying with a Carter of Mars kind of thing; the PC's would fold (sometimes without warning) to another world, into other lives.  Their demons too would fold, only to be "translated" into the idiom of the world.  A blood-drinking 57 Chevy would become a fierce predatory riding beast.  But the demons would be as baffled as the sorcerers... until the big secret is discovered.  I just haven't been able to come up with the big secret yet.

Ah well.  Anyone else toy with running conjoined S and S&S games?

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

I used the original Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands book as the setting for my game of The Window. I also love the setting and spent some time re-reading "Kadath" and generating my notions of Premise from it.

It seems to me that (characteristically) the Chaosium's treatment of the material was too heavily engaged with maps and lists, and not enough with the themes - that Carter's true "vision of perfection" arose from his childhood memories of the real world, and not from some airy-fairy otherworld at all.

A Sorcerer treatment of this material, for me, would focus quite thoroughly on the notion of "drifting into dream" forever as a function of Humanity loss ... it would bear little or no resemblance at all to SAN loss in the Call of Cthulhu sense.

I'm a little puzzled, though, about your notions of "conjoined" Sorcerer and its supplement - I see the latter as a sophistication or application of the former, and thus already "conjoined." Please clarify.

Best,
Ron

[Bailywolf]

Ah I see.

Almost all the default color for Sorcerer is modern.  Sorcery-in-the-otherwise-real-world.  I know this has nothing to do with the inherent sorcerer-mojo, this being setting independent.  One can ask the same questions with sorcerer set in 1999 as in 1899 as in 99 BC.  

So perhaps I call all fruit oranges, and ignore the apples entirely... so let me say, how about conjoining a modern/postmodern Sorcerer setting with a true (in all it's thematic elements) S&S setting; alternating between them, until the lines begin to blur.

Kind of like the bizzaro comic book The Max.


But...

S&S is quite a particular aplication of Sorcerer and it's elements.  But yet one entirely distinct from a more conventional sorcerer game... just as distinct as Call of Cuthulu is from Dreamquest of Unknown kadath.  Entirely different kinds of stories which share a certain underpinning.

The 'otherworld' ideal (like Lovecraft's dreamland) is a place which manifests in it's nature the literary devices of Sword and Sorcery writing.  The nonchronological flow of adventures, the creation-as-you-go method of world building, the sense that the laws of reality themselves might betray a character.  

Contrast this with the 'real world'.  Now transmigrate characters between the worlds, telling the same alegorical and literal stories simultaneously in both the Otherworld and the Real World.

Even the demons don't understand it.

[Ron Edwards]

Got it! Works for me. I like the idea immensely. It would be most excellent if the rituals of the "waking" sorcerer always reverberated in any number of ways through the Dreamlands, to be encountered by someone actually entering them later.

Best,
Ron

[Clinton R. Nixon]

This is much lamer - I hadn't played anything else but these games at the time - but I did something much like this with Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons and Dragons long, long ago. Every other session was a different game - the Call of Cthulhu characters entered the Dreamlands every night as they slept and took on pulp fantasy-type personas. The big bad cultist they were chasing was, of course, present in both worlds, and what they did each session had a direct effect on the opposite world.

It actually ended up running really well, and I had some seriously happy players in the end.

[Doc Midnight]

Clinton, That's pretty good.

I'm working on a Dungeons and Dragons Campaign works that's set entirely in the Dreamlands. I'm looking forward to this new dreamlands book.

So far the premise is that my players play the parts of guys with common occupations or are members of a noble bloodline or whatever but their lives seem to be dull and meaningless.
They've sort of forgotten the dreams of their childhood.

I'm also toying with the idea of them playing children, trying to create the world they'd like to grow up in.

I know this was a Sorcerer thread but Ron piqued my interest.

Doc Midnight

This is much lamer - I hadn't played anything else but these games at the time - but I did something much like this with Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons and Dragons long, long ago. Every other session was a different game - the Call of Cthulhu characters entered the Dreamlands every night as they slept and took on pulp fantasy-type personas. The big bad cultist they were chasing was, of course, present in both worlds, and what they did each session had a direct effect on the opposite world.

It actually ended up running really well, and I had some seriously happy players in the end.

[Mike Holmes]

I'm also toying with the idea of them playing children, trying to create the world they'd like to grow up in.

Little Cthulhu Dungeon Fears?

the PC's would fold (sometimes without warning) to another world, into other lives

(Ron's gonna hate me.)

Gor!

Mike

[Doc Midnight]

Well I've not played Little Fears yet (hint ron hint) but sort of. It would actually be kinda easy on the CoC thing.

I like the Dreamlands topography and mythos. I used a ton of CoC elements to get them to this point. I think it'll be in the back of their minds anyway.

There will also be some elements of the writings of Steven Brust in there too.

Little Cthulhu Dungeon Fears?