epic sorcery (long & rambling)

[sdemory]

1) I see everything from decanic icons to Grey aliens to gibbering, Lovecraftian monstrosities as potential demons in this game, and I LOVE the thought of throwing the Fae into the mix. Combining the imagery (alien abduction led by a weeping woman in blue robes astride a leopard, for instance, or a faery rade in which Greys thunder through the sky on huge, bell-bedecked white horses. That sort of thing)
   No matter what, though, I'd like to see them alter the world with their passing. If you're going to have these things be from "beyond the veil," make sure the curtain stays askew when they move on.

2) I don't think there should be a book... at least, there shouldn't be ONE book.
   Work it like the standard Blasphemous Tome. Have one person who's got a few pages reprinted in Black Mask Magazine, while another's got contradictory exerpts referred to in someone's unfinished book review. Myth and rumor will do neat, neat stuff, especially if there's no proof that the book actually exists.

3) I'd throw some oddly-complete organizations into the mix as well. If they're characters in a story, rewrites to adapt the story should show up as established groups that no one's ever heard of before. That's a bit odd, though, and can easily be ignored.

4) I like the pulp feel, as you well know, and hope that you hold on to it as much as possible. Whirring calculating engines fed the blood of virgins to perform Sinister Mathematics, hidden cults of fallen astrophysicists chanting paeans to the void following the Big Bang, jewelled zeppelins that breach the aether to enter hidden worlds... that sort of thing. That may be the way you want to deal with utter loss of humanity, actually. Throw the characters into that pulp reality and divorce them from baseline reality... I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be just as happy with a character that, upon reaching zero Humanity, leapt upon a passing autogyro and, cackling, hied hence to a mountain fastness to plot the universe's destruction as I would a character that did consistently well and walked the edge between the worlds.
   It'd be sort of neat, as well, to make some loss a prerequisite to being able to access the other. Without a certain remove, one is stuck in the here and can't do the "there."

4) I like the demonic sham thing; I'd also like the possibiity that the demons are being played by something bigger and more ineffable than they.

Just rambling now...

Sean

[joshua neff]

The most important thing, for me, is that the setting remains as nothing more than a backdrop for the PCs' story. So...is there really a cosmic war going on? Are the other worlds, other planes of existence? Are there really secret societies manipulating events in the shadows?

I don't know & I don't care. It's all based on what comes out during play. All of this stuff is just fodder for the Players' narrative.

I also want to keep the setting fairly vague. Lots of cool names to drop, lots of neat little ideas--all just firing pins for the imagination. The actual details (who are the Whisper Twins? what does the Circle of Unbroken Light do? what is the Turquoise Encyclopedia?) should remain uncodified, waiting for the Players to do something with them (or ignore them, as they see fit).

I'm not sure, at this point, how "cliffhanger pulp" it'll actually be. I'm tempted to go the gonzo route (having just read Demon Cops) & pump things up a bit--throw bonus dice at the Players like candy as rewards for whizzbang, melodramatic action & drama. But then again, there's a part of me that wants to keep it more low-key. At any rate, it won't be too over the top. I doubt there will be jewelled zeppelins or calculation engines--I want the "space opera epic" stuff to be hinted at, but rarely, if ever, seen.

But then again...maybe...

[sdemory]

... or don't, as is your prerogative. Any game without at least one jewelled airship, though, isn't living up to its full potential.
   I think the machinae and gosh-wow can be left in the background, or put in as things whispered about in fragments of the book:
"I heard that, in the advertisement for "The True History of the Planets" in My Greenest Adventure issue 3, there's discussion of a calculating engine that can call down avatars of the zodiac if fed the blood of a newborn infant born during a particular sign. Interesting..."
   It'd also be a good aspect of the "demonic sham" gambit. Have the demons mention that such and such an effort would be easier with some purified bluestone and a page from the Perfected Codices of Leng... you know, like in page 326 of "The True History of the Planets"!
   I'd still like to see characters who lose all Humanity fully subsumed into the story. Who are the Whisper Twins? Sorcerers who've become entirely fictional. What's the Turquoise Lady's scheme? Check page 65 of "The True History of the Planets." Any game where you can play the Borges fictional invasion angle's got to be pretty cool.

[joshua neff]

Sean--

Yes! Yes! Yes! That quote ("I heard...") is exactly what I'm thinking of--most of this should be hearsay & rumor. Definitely Borgesian in that respect--"This sorcerer once told me about a text that details the conflict between the Green Imperium & the Reflective Hegemony in Parallel 99. But I haven't been able to find the book anywhere."

[sdemory]

The cosmic war thing appeals greatly, partially because some of the characters will choose sides at some point. A group of crazed loners banding together under the banner of a Turquoise Lady or a Twelve-Jeweled Throne of Count Azimuth that may not exist makes for nice, nice imagery... especially if you've got a manipulative bastard who's willing to play sides against each other because he's pretty sure that it's all a sham.
   I want in. I definitely, definitely want in.

[Bailywolf]

What happens when you loose your Humanity?  You become a Plot Device- literaly a servent of The Plot.

What the fuck is The Plot?

Prophecy, narrative, saga, tale, destiny- it is like a computer program coded into the very fabric of society and culture, mind and flesh.  Millions have already sucumb to The Plot- their lives have become individualy meaningless, carrying only the significanc of the tiny fragment of The Plot which manifets in their daily lives....  "The True History...." well, this crumbly pulp nonsense is like The Plot's flowchart design paradime, you figure the thing out man, and you can figure out The Plot.  It's like turning to the goddamn last page of the novel and figuring out who killed Major Tom and why.  It's like reading the friggin mind of god, man.  My buddy Koravox here, he clued me in, he turned me onto The Plot.  His kind, they came before The Plot got written, his kind are older than humanity man, older than concepts like Story.  Hell, he can't even tell the difference in fiction and fact- but I sure as shit can- and let me tell you chicky-baby, when we turn that last page and The Plot plays out, I sure as shit ain't gonna be here anymore man, no way in hell I'm gonna be stuck here with you goddamn bit players and supporting characters, no way man I'm outside The Plot, I'm a rogue element, I'm like a damn bookworm eating away at the binding to this whole sham.  When I figure out "The True History..." I'm writing my own Plot.   I'll be the Author.  I'll be the god. .....right koravox?  Like you said.  I'll be the god.

[joshua neff]

BW--

Much like Lon's idea of zero Humanity sorcerers getting locked into the symbology of one planet, I think that Plot idea is really cool.

However...

The only real problem I have with it is that it wants to make the "True History" setting (the Sorcerer setting, not the possible pulp novel existing within the game setting) be a coherent narrative, & I'm feeling pomo enough to not want this to be the case. The initial idea I had was sort of a satire of (or nose-thumbing at) White Wolf's World of Darkness. The idea is that it seems that there's a hidden conspiracy, a supernatural world in which battlelines are being drawn & sides have to be taken--but this may or may not be the case. It appears that there's an underlying narrative to the world, & sorcerers are in on the secret narrative--but this may or may not be true. I don't want there to be a coherent, linear narrative underlying everything. In fact, whether it's there or not is essentially unimportant, except as it relates to the story of the PCs. (While The Matrix seems postmodernist, with it's flashy special effects & "reality is a lie" story, it's really not pomo at all, because the narrative lie that is reality is just a mask for the real narrative. The Matrix is splashy, old-fashioned gnosticism, fairly reactionary in its own way.) And like I said with Lon, I'm not comfortable declaring exactly what happens when your Humanity reaches zero, beyond the vague "you go nuts". When I run "The True History", there will be NPCs who are completely focused on astrological symbology & associations. And there will be other NPCs who believe they're part of an epic Plot that can be deciphered by decoding a pulp fantasy novel. But really, they're just nuts (or maybe they aren't--nobody really knows for sure, not even the GM).

Now, this is my take on the matter. If anyone wants to take my basic ramblings & go off on their own riff, feel free. (Although I'll be a wee bit peeved if you end up writing a mini-supplement using it, because at this point, I'm thinking that's what I'm going to do.)

[Bailywolf]

Hey Josh,

IN that rambling thing about The Plot the uncertainity is exactly what i was trying to grap- this is just one lone guy, chain smoking and cursing at fire hydrants, convinced that there is a Grand Plan and its shitty and evil.  

I could see another, drug addled ex-hippie college professor who teaches long rambling seminars on astrological symbolism and pop-culture...but all his pop-culture references are 30 years out of date, and his lectures are full or random quotes and references, but he has Tenure (his demon- it exists as a state of beuracratic systems which ensure his continued employment no matter how random and crazy he gets).

Or a lonely 8 year old who scribbles pictures based on stories his Uncle tells him (his uncle is of course a bug-nuts crazy sorcerer).  The pictures are alive, but only if no one is looking.  And his Crayons have color names like "Blackness of ther Void", "Sacrificial Blood", "Venus Envy Green", "Book Blue", "Chrisis of Purple".

Agent Veldt works for the FBI...or maby the CIA...or perhaps the NSA.  He's never quite sure.  His Contact always varies- a random man on the street, a message coded into the newspaper, people on the TV speaking his name- but his assignments are invariably weird and disturbing.  Recently, he acquired a partner- Mr. Ghuile- an odd fellow who never takes off his shades.  He obeys Agent Veldt's instructions (Veldt has seiniority), and deals with the increasingly violent natutre of Veldt's assignments- wet work, kidnapping, interogation, intimidation.  Agent Veldt handles the people side of things, Mr. Ghuile the nasty side of things.

[joshua neff]

Ah, gotcha. Okay, good stuff, Wolfie. I like it.