Sorcerer One Sheet: Christopher Gives It A Try

[Christopher Kubasik]

All right.  I've read all the rules.  I've got potential players.  Time to jump in.

Ron asked me what I might put on a Sorcerer One sheet.

I took a break from work, and this is what slammed out:

***

Witch's Brew

Humanity is... Love.

Premise: Is getting love worth losing the ability *to* love?

Setting: Colonial Massachusetts

References: Nathanial Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," "Young Goodman Brown"; Arthur Miller's "The Crucible"; Tim Burton's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

At 0 Humanity you are... an emotionless husk

Demons will... encourage you to get more acts and tokens of "love" from more and more people

Humanity checks to... care for others

Rituals are based on... demeaning yourself

Chrome: Demons are the expected colonial representations: figures twisted from Pagan times, monstrous, bestial, agents of the devil, but part of the world's physical/spiritual ecology. (Matter itself is sinful, remember.)  Demons can also be brooms and strange rings found in the forest (objects), black cats and the ?Grey Man? everyone has seen in the forest, but no one has spoken to (passers), and so on.

Magic is done with pentagrams, blood sacrifice, charms, the laws of contagion, similarity and proximity. All very much a naive view of how one can tap the dark power of matter to produce what God can't provide: touch, caress, comfort and wealth, and the attention of others.

Love, the active form of love that is Humanity, is the ability to give of oneself without expecting anything in return
 

****

Questions:

1) Do the one sheet elements seem sound in terms of gaming/story potential?  (Is my phrasing clear and ready to facilitate narrative possibility?)

2) Am I crazy to set a Sorcerer game in such a *not* combat-ready environment?

3) Does the one sheet sum up a premise (small p) that intrigues? (The strange thing is, when I think of the setting I think, "Colonial America.  Yuck!"  But when I think of a relationship map and how *right!* this setting is for Sorcerer, it gets me pretty jazzed.)

****

Jesse and Ian, I'd be especially interested to hear your comments on this matter since, if I'm lucky, one or both of you might be able to play the story.

My goal is to tease out the elements I need to set up a game (whether with this one sheet or another) with the help of those who've done this before.

Take care,

Christopher

[Blake Hutchins]

Sounds very cool.  Could tie in some Tim Burton-esque Sleepy Hollow elements if you're worried about action, but I think this period sounds fine.  A good sourcebook for the time is Everyday Life during the Revolutionary War.  A century off, but still relevant in terms of small details of home construction, food, and the like.

I'm intrigued by the way you've offered a "rationalization" for the Salem Witch trials and period notions about witchcraft and witches' Sabbats.

Best,

Blake

[Christopher Kubasik]

I did?  Where?  That sounds really cool.  What did I say?

Christopher

[Clay]

Don't be too eager to dismiss the setting as low-action.  The place was still crawling with humans, and where there are humans, there's action.  There's a risk of buying in to the notion that everyone was a puritain,  puritains didn't respond to human emotion and therefor all anybody did was work and go to church.

The vast unexplored and very dangerous wilderness makes a great place to drop off a body. We also know that colonial expansion wasn't just feuled by new imigrants off ships--the traditional method of population growth was merrily employed. Murder weapons were easily to hand as well: hunting weapons, tools (axes and hammers have a long and glorious history as population-reduction tools), and a host of new poisons growing wild.There was active piracy and smuggling. Indentured servitude was in full swing

All in all, there's a lot happening, and plenty of opportunity for the feces to impact the oscillator.  You want something big?  Start with Fornication.  Let that lead to the obvious results of babies who really don't look like the mother's husband, and you've got the potential for as many as three murders.  If Cain could have Abel dead by the end of Genesis I, you can bet that a roughneck colonist can figure out how to be rid of an adulterous spouse and treacherous neighbor inside of an hour.

I think you've got a setting rife with all of the potential action that you're likely to need.

[Ron Edwards]

Christopher,

I agree with Clay; generate conflict and the action takes care of itself.

I strongly suggest including some pertinent, inspiring details about the setting into the one-sheet. Nothing major - just an atmospheric adjective or two, maybe a statement about the daily priorities of life, or maybe a historical specification that the characters' parents certainly endured brutal persecution back in England. Hell, even a period illustration might do the trick.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Well, using the Hawthorne and Miller refernces, I wasn't worried about conflict, per se.  I was thinking of a line in Sorcerer that says something along the lines of, "Sorcerer has fightin' so make sure the cover helps cover that."  I don't mind moving away from that at all, though.

Good points on setting.  This was just my first pass at filling in the basic blanks.  More later.

Thanks,

Christopher

[Blake Hutchins]

Hi Christopher,

Your write-up's focus on love together with the ritual requirement of demeaning oneself suggested images of witches' sabbats with demonic sex, an abandonment to orgiastic, decidedly non-Puritan acts, stuff people of the time would find demeaning and sin-laden.  I thought about the Salem witch hysteria and its potential demeaning aspects as well.  What if the faked seizures were in themselves the girls' attempts at sorcerous acts?  Kind of a stretch, I guess, but it appealed to my sense of irony.  The "victims" act as sorcerers right under the noses of the witch-hunters.

Best,

Blake

[Christopher Kubasik]

Blake,

Right on.

In fact.... last night after I posted I opened the latest issue of the New Yorker and there was a review of the Crucible, which stirred so clearly memories of how Abigail, still after John Proctor, using her "show" to manipulate sympathy, attention and power.  But she's not working from strength, but from shameless and selfish attention grabbing.  That's demeaning oneself in my book.

Side note: I started with the Premise, thought it would be Los Angeles and the Entertainment industry, thought, "Too obvious," and ended up in Salem.

Thanks,

Christopher

[Christopher Kubasik]

More questions:

1) Can I modulate the kickers/bangs/scenario in any way to set the sessions for a story?  If I say to players, "This is gonna be a three session game" (allowing for the first one to be the "getting used to it all" session), can one actually make that kind of promise?

This will be my first full gear Author Stance game, and it just occurred to me I'm handing away the climax -- right?

2) Just wanted to check this: do you guys set aside one session for character creation?  Is it possible to arrive with an R-map, do chargen, be fucking quick on your feet and tie the PCs to the R-map (I am fucking quick on my feet), and get in some play time the same night, if only roleplaying summoning the first demons and a little bit of story to hit a teaser?

Thanks,

Christopher

[Mike Holmes]

With all that extremely repressed emotion, I'm sure nobody ever blew a gasket.  ;-)  Y'know, I think the Puritans set up the first postal service on the continent.

Potential for violence? Oh yeah.

Mike

[Paul Czege]

Hey Christopher,

Just wanted to check this: do you guys set aside one session for character creation? Is it possible to arrive with an R-map, do chargen, be fucking quick on your feet and tie the PCs to the R-map (I am fucking quick on my feet), and get in some play time the same night, if only roleplaying summoning the first demons and a little bit of story to hit a teaser?

I think you shouldn't rush it. It's not about how quick you are personally. A character creation session done right creates and revs player interest in each other's characters and makes protagonism possible. It's fabulously fun, greases the group up for collaboration, and shouldn't be "chugged." Check out this thread.

Paul

[Mike Holmes]

Do CharGen via email if at all possible. I think its a better format than face to face. And the players can arrive ready to go. Satisfies both Paul's go slow condition, and the urge to start during the first meeting.

Mike

[joshua neff]

I'm going to offer a different bit of advice than Mike.

I no longer would ever have character creation done except as face-to-face with all the players in attendence. I don't do the "I made a character to play in your game" thing--I want every group of PCs, regardless of game being played, to be a cohesive cast of characters (even if they're all at odds with each other in the narrative), created together as a group. I highly value the tossing around of ideas--"Hey, guys, what if my character is a doctor instead of a lawyer?", "Should my character's demon be a passer, or would it make more sense to have it be inconspicuous?", & so on.

For me, the first session is always character creation. At that point, my backstory is written up & I know what sort of color & flavor I'm going for. I have a handout for the players (much more than one sheet--I call them "Player's Guides" & they usually run anywhere from 5-15 pages) that I've given them prior to the first session. We sit down, we all thrash out a cast of characters, & then I rework the backstory so that it has more to do with the PCs.

For the Sorcerer narrative I'm running now we actually had 2 sessions of character creation, once at my regular coffeeshop & then at one player's apartment, when we actually got down to making the character stats, creating their demons, making the initial binding & Humanity rolls. Then we all went away for a week & the next session was the first session of play.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My preferences run toward Josh's. That said, Christopher, we're starting to get into territory that's best handled by you and your players by yourselves. I suggest thinking loose, like a good session musician, and deciding on things like "a few sessions, more than two, less than seven," but not, "three, no more no less." And so on. Use your own reactions rather than relying on our say-so.

Oh well, I'll still offer advice. Go for a character creation session. Sorcerer relies very heavily on Kickers, and although you can move from PC generation to Kickers to R-map integration to play, my basic question is, Why? Why the rush?

C'mon, let the riffs develop, let the players fantasize briefly and maybe turn a couple notions about Kickers 'round and 'round before settling on them.

Or, to quote John Cleese in The Meaning of Life? "Why not a kiss? Before you go galloping toward the clitoris?"

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Man, isn't this just a nice place.

I love posting here.

Thanks, everyone for the help so far.

Three reasons for asking for help on this:

1) Ron's rather omninous comment in an email saying, "It'll be interesting to see how you'll have to change your assumptions about role-playing."  If I can pick up some clues now, I won't have inflict miscued assumptions on the players.

2) I just don't know.  These are my dream games I'm buming into here, but I've yet to play them -- which means tips aforehand can only help me get a better handle on what's work -- in general -- for others.  (So, again, thanks.)

3) The players are players in a group that's been together for a while.  I only met the bulk of them in one gaming session a few weeks ago.  I know I'll be bringing in a whole new bag of marbles, and was a bit hesitent to invoke too many kooky changes what they expect a game to be like.

But then I just realized I shouldn't a) cheat the game to please them b) cheat them by giving them a cheapened version of the game.  

If it turns out they're not interested in doing a session of set up (and, remember, I have [/i]no idea about this either way), then I should turn my attention elsewhere.  (Where I would turn it to is another issue, and the lack of a clear answer probably made me antsy to please -- rather than using the new method: make a group.)

Thanks again,

Christopher