[& sword] Humanity in Moorcocks Stormbringer?

[Hisho]

after a lot of stress in the last year and an failed attemp to run sorcerer
I found someone to run Sorcerer&Sword with, it will be a one-on-one game but better then nothing.

(my personal gods idea, I'm sorry that I wasn't able to work on the idea any further... but thanks to Mr. Edwards for the tips with the humanity gain/loss description... I thought about it and today it helped me a lot to explain why humanity is so much more then a simple game stat... it is a great story tool)

but now to my question, because of the fact that the only sorcery and sword stories we both know are the stories written by Moorcock we thought that the story should happen in a similar setting.

so we begann defining the ground concepts

the story will happen in a fantastic version of medievel europe, we talked a bit and found some inspirations. Beowulf (the movie), Berserk (the anime) and this movie about the real life of flad dracul (we both could not remember the name of the movie) are examples how the world seems to look like.

sorcery is all about rituals and pacts and absolutly in line with the works of moorcock (I used examples from the stories of elric and corum, he didn't know about the stories but played the RPG Stormbringer once and we talked about some differences in RPG's)

for his character we thought it would be good if he would have destiny=crux of the conflict

so and then we came to the famous humanity... well... and there we stopped... from my explanation and idea of humanity it plays a major part in the story but again I coudn't name it. I could explain humanity in most settings to him, what will get you a gain/loss role but what could be humanity in a story like Elric/Corum.

I know the stories about Elric and I tried to remember a moment wher his his score of Humanity reached Zero... or better said I searched for gain/loss examples but even with the idea of a story similar to Moorcocks in mind I coudn't find a good example for the humanity gain/loss question...

could someone please help me with examples, I have the main elric-novels at hand so something out of them would be perfect...

the only thing that is missing at the moment is a good humanity-description...


Michael K.

[Ron Edwards]

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!

That's Humanity in the Elric stories. It's even nastier because Stormbringer's Need, in my reading, is for Love - which means that it's a horrible Humanity-vampire, worse than most demons; it gets testy when Elric acts on loving someone else.

The better Elric stories, as I see them, all center around love-triangles.

Elric-Cymoril-Yyrkoon
Elric-Cymoril-Stormbringer
Elric-Arioch-Stormbringer
etc ...

Best,
Ron

P.S. Nice to see you again!

[Ron Edwards]

Useful links!

Elric books for Sorcerer & Sword background (help!)
How did I miss this?
Stat scaling in Sorcerer
S&S literary sources
Sorcerer & Sword news (stuff on second page)

Best,
Ron

[Hisho]

oh now i see it, I watched at Elric as the "I fight against my Fate and lose"-person the whole day but didn't see it from that angle.

Humanity is Love, so he is damned because Stormbringer needs love and destroys every other chance of love he has... his ability to "love" other people, especialy close friends and loved ones vs. a life powered by stormbringer who needs "love" from elric.

In his case bangs would be events where he must decide to use the sword or not and how to deal with it, knowing well about the consequences.
Using it definitly leads to destruction, not using it well... he doesn't have a lot of choices...

ok, now I see what makes elric the tragic protagonist he is...

thanks for the links

this time I will try to write back how the game prep works, and my apology for not writing something to your answer on my "personal gods thread"