[Sorcerer] Fixed Humanity, Flexible Consequences....

[jburneko]

Hello,

So, I'm running a new Sorcerer game.  Including various con games this makes my seventh Sorcerer game and my fourth underlying concept.  The concept this time around is Southern Gothic set in post-Katrina New Orleans.  Of five players I think only two of us have ever actually been there.  I spent a lot of time on wikipedia and other sites reading up about the culture and geography.  My wife's family is from Alabama on her mother's side and she herself spent a chunk of her childhood in Tennesee.  Three men, two women, only my wife and I are a couple.  All of us are white and it was requested that race be a substantial issue of play.  Two of the PCs are black.  One is mixed, "can pass for white" and one is white married to a black woman and they have a daughter.

My pre-character generation scenario basically revolved around a family litterally held together by a demon.  The rough situation is that the patriarch is incapacitated and the one who stands to inherit isn't very good at controlling the demon.  Add that the demon is actually in a contain that was lost during the storm.  My final thoughts were, "This family just needs a rival family."

With little to no prompting from me the players provided.  All the PCs are either decended from or married into the same family.  So we have the primarily black PC family, the Valrouxs and the white NPC family the Lassers.  The uber-backstory is that the Valroux's were once the slaves of the Lassers.  One player has introduced the notion that the Lassers stole their sorcerous knowledge from the Valroux's.  The Lassers resent that the Valrouxs have rissen to the same social (and sorcerous) status as themselves.

Post-character gen prep on my part included designating one the Lassers as the "missing father" of one of the PCs and organizing the demons themselves into "family" groups which are split across the two human families.

I'm sure there some people out there who would find this whole setup very offensive, "for a game."  What's making it work for me is that this isn't a Hollywood tale of the oppressed blacks strugling against the oppresive whites.  The prejudice and hatred goes both ways.  My wife is very good at playing the ancient matriarch of the Valroux's who upon discovering that her great grand-daughter (another PC) kissed one of the "Lasser Boys" handed her the family bible and demanded to know if she saw the name "Lasser" anywhere in the family tree.  On my end, I was very surprised how much sympathy I have for the character I'm kind of pushing as the primary antagonist, Wallace Lasser.  Sure, he's an arogant racist but he also has a boat load of unwanted familial expectations and obligations to live up to that were dumped on him by his father.

All of that is background context for what I wanted to discuss which is the mechanical consequences for zero humanity.  In our last session there was a lot of sorcery flying around.  At one point I had the Lasser family lawyer show up with a custody claim on the PC whose father is one of the Lassers.  The Valroux matriarch had him wait in the parlor while she, "summoned" her lawyer.

So, it's the matriarch and the two great grand children (all PCs) working together as a family to summon the lawyer demon.  The matriarch goes to zero humanity on the summoning stage and the male great grand child (the one whose custody is in dispute) goes to zero humanity taking over the binding.

Now, in terms of story consequnces we had worked out what zero humanity means, but not the mechanical consequences.  I agree with the Sorcerer's Soul material that zero humanity = lose your character is prety lame for the majority of story situations.  But Sorcerer has sort of a core philosophy of "customize, but concretely define" behind it which is not what ended up happening here.

For the matriarch, we agreed to upgrade her Parasite demon to a Posessor and that her Humanity would remain at zero until she resisted whatever the possessor was doing with her body with a Will conflict at which point her Humanity would be restored to one but she'd be stuck wrangling the Possessor inside her.

For the great grandson, I had his initial demon (an object demon that originally belonged to the Lasser family) unbind and is either banished or returned to the Lasser family, I haven't quite made up my mind.  I also reversed the polarity of the binding with the lawyer demon from the Sorcerer's favor to the Demon's favor.  Then reset his humanity to one.

In a third case, the possessor in the matriarch used its Taint ability to drive the great grand-daughter's humanity to zero in a sort of bizzare combination between, "I'm your elder, you will do as your told, child!" and voodoo zombi-ism.

All three cases carry with it a sense of "the demons are taking over" and the blurring of the line between the moral behavior and the family obligated/expected behavior but the mechanical consequences were sort of fly-by night decisions made on the spot.

I was wondering what other's thoughts/experiences with this sort of variable mechanical consequences for zero humanity (despite a concrete fictional definition).  Is this sloppy Sorcerer play?  It seems to be working for us.  In fact, I had to kind of call the session a little short because I need time to reflect and really nail down what these demons REALLY want since they've cleary got the upper hand at the moment.  But I'm wondering if I'm trampling on something nuanced I haven't thought of or realized.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

It's fine with me, Jesse, conceptually. It seems to me as if each instance of Humanity 0 is highly considered on your and everyone's parts, and that's what matters. As long as the instances hit the basic definition (or feel? point? key to?) of Humanity in this game, it doesn't matter if they're arriving from different angles.

That's all pretty specific to you and this batch of folks, though. I can think of a number of people I'd advise to have a fixed outcome instead.

Other stuff ...

I was very surprised how much sympathy I have for the character I'm kind of pushing as the primary antagonist, Wallace Lasser.

Heh. Get used to that sensation, for sure. It happens all the time for me, and never quite with the same self-shocking honesty when using any other system.

How many sessions so far? Any cool demons to chat about? And what sort of actions brought on all that Humanity loss, anyway?

Best, Ron

[jburneko]

I could see why certain groups would benefit from having upfront fixed mechanical consequences for zero Humanity.  As I said, what we were doing felt okay relative to the fiction but Sorcerer has a weird way of sneaking up on you from the side with unintended results when you're not paying attention.

We're two sessions in, three if you count character creation.  I think the most interesting feature of the demons so far is that their Desire and Needs have been very benign and yet still carry maximum creep factor from the Humanity perspective.  The best examples of these were the two demons that got brought into play last session.

The first is a small child, Drew.  Its telltale is that it's androgynous.  It's a Passer that functions both as a kind of oracle with insight into demonic and family conflicts and a body guard.  Its Desire is for Knowledge and its Need is to be mothered.  Given that this demon was summoned by the great grand-daughter, Jean, there was an interesting conflict to establish what this demon's relationship with the matriarch, Annie, would be like.

The second is the lawyer demon, Bartimus, I mentioned.  His Desire is for Control and his Need is to spend quality-time with a member of its binder's family, or as my wife put it, "Be invited 'round for supper."  His summoning raised an interesting issue of play that doesn't get much discussion.  That is, all the things that can happen between a Contact and a Summon that might impact the outcome of the Summon.  In this case Bartimus asked for a date with Jean but Annie offered to provide dinner with the family as a whole.  Both would satisfy the demon's Need but one wasn't the specific form it wanted.  So, there was a Will conflict whose results I rolled into the Summoning roll.  Annie won, by the way.

As for all the Humanity loss, Humanity in this setting is very complex.  It's *almost* but not quite forked as discussed in Sex & Sorcery.  Basically, it comes down to maintaining an individual identity and value system in the face of family and community traditions, expectations and obligations without being a sociopath.  Blindling adhering to "the way we've always done things" nets you Humanity loss but also rejecting those same things without deference to the fact there might actualy be an underlining practicality to them will also net you Humanity loss.

So basically the three PCs in question have been playing one of the two extremes.  Annie, the matriarch, has been pushing the Valroux family heritage without much consideration for what either Jean or Jimmy want or need.  Jean has been pretty much caving into that while Jimmy's been playing the radical.  It's pretty screwed up.  But within all that there have been some pretty tender moments of family comeradery with genuine understanding between the PCs that have resulted in some Humanity gain.

Looking over all this I realize I haven't talked much about the fourth PC.  I have to agree with Lisa's assessment in another thread that the problem with a larger number of PCs isn't just the inclusion of the demons it's the inclusion of that many PCs worth of STUFF.  It's very easy to integrate two or three PCs stuff into a backstory.   It gets harder with four or five.  So the fourth PC is sort of running his own sub-story paralell to all of this, which is okay by me.

A significant thing to mention about Joseph (the fourth PC) is that the very first thing he did in the game was banish his starting demon.  It was even a snap shot ritual peformed basically off a sharp command of, "Please go away!"  It was a lucky roll of three dice vs ten I think.  This speaks to the strength of the whole Sorcerer character generation process.  There was a little concern from the player that he'd resolved his Kicker right then and there.  Then I pointed out that his Kicker had a whole lot more implications to it than just the fact that his demon was becoming a problem.

Basically, his demon was a Passer (Joshua) that looks exactly like Joseph.  There's a rather involved backstory here but it comes down to the fact that the demon's purpose is to step in when things get hot for Joseph so that he doesn't have to deal with it.  His Kicker was that he decided leave his family and flee some gambling debts.  But then after the storm had come and gone he changed his mind and went back only to discover that his demon had taken his place.  His family has no idea he tried to leave them AND his demon had managed to improve relations with them.  And of course, he still has his gambling debts.

In game, the loan sharks have kidnapped his daughter.  He tried to summon two demons both of which failed.  The consequences of that were damaging to his relationship with his wife who is a member of the Valroux family and thought that she'd gotten away from all that nonsense.  He's now in the process of trying to commit various forms of fraud to gather the money together.

Hope that was interesting.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Jesse,

Haven't forgotten your old friend Tor, have you? I thought it might be fun to compare your experiences with the first "bayou, overalls, southern clan" Sorcerer game ...

Southern fried Sorcerer, part 1
Southern fried Sorcerer, part 2
Southern fried Sorcerer, the final act
Southern fried system comments

Best, Ron

[ironick]

This whole discussion just reminds me of how flexible Sorcerer really is, and how little I've gotten to explore that facet of it, having only ever played Sorcerer & Sword and Charnel Gods.  This makes me want to play a more "pure" Sorcerer game very badly, and also re-read my old issues of Preacher, especially the ones dealing with Jesse's F-ed up family.

Nick

[jburneko]

This makes me want to play a more "pure" Sorcerer game very badly, and also re-read my old issues of Preacher, especially the ones dealing with Jesse's F-ed up family.

It's funny you should mention this.  The more I play Sorcerer the more I think I prefer the Sorcerer & Sword varriant.  There's a lot more leeway in the options provided there that are more in line with my thinking about horror/adventure fiction.  I find the more "pure" form of Sorcerer in some ways more exhausting to run.

Jesse