Sorcerer Play-by-Post

[gardenphilosoph]

I thought the community might find this interesting.

I'm a roleplayer whose never actually played a pen-and-paper RPG in person. I've GMed a couple dozen games online, starting out with Call of Cthulhu and branching out into others including Dread, Kult, Hollow Earth Expedition, All Flesh Must be Eaten, and more recently trying out games like Dogs in the Vineyard, 3:16, and now Sorcerer. From my experience I'd say online games are definitely a lot different. For one, they take much longer amounts of time. They very rarely finish (either the players or GM fades out of touch). They require a relatively rules-lite system to keep at a steady pace. On the other hand, since there is time to write long and lovingly thought out posts, they often result in brilliant storytelling.

Anyways, taking my past experience at GMing I've decided to try to run Sorcerer, but this time keeping games at a one-on-one basis. That is, I'll only be taking one player, and hopefully that should make for a much faster game and much smoother story. Since multiple people have expressed interest, I'll be running three games, all using different settings but all still using Sorcerer.

My original setting was the modern world where Demons were sentient, self-willed meme-complexes, cautiously dubbed as memetic fauna. They were able to affect the physical world and thus evolved as symbiotic organisms to sapient creatures, or humans. For mainly thematic reasons, they'd also appear as characters from surrealist-fantasy children's literature - namely, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. I envisioned an eerie Cheshire Cat as an Inconspicuous demon and Humanity as the ability to perceive one's actions from a third person perspective and judge whether one was sane or not.

The player for that eventually canceled, but three more players came in to take his place, and I gave each of them a new setting to suit their tastes.

One of the settings was a world where the Demons were characters and creatures from ancient folklore all over the world, from European fae to Malaysian bloodsuckers. I wanted the folklore to be archaic and antediluvian, not the romanticized forms transformed from eighteenth century poetry. The vampires would be ruddy and dark, beast-like. Faeries would be otherworldy and darkly mischevious, and there'd be exotic demons from rarely heard legends in the East, like the penagalann, a bloodsucking floating head attached to a digestive system, and Japanese obakemono, eerie spirits that would haunt the unfortunate. The 'folklore in a modern world' concept had been done before, but i wanted this to be dark bordering on horrific and cast in a Sorcerer light.

The other setting was inspired by the sanzoku from the rulebook. I loved the idea of Sorcerers locked in physical conflict all across a city, forced to defeat the others to gain power. I turned this into a setting where Demons were a menagerie of grotesque parasites, all inspired by the real-life Cymothoa exigua, the only known parasite to effectively replace a body organ. These parasites would do something similar. They'd crawl into your body, eat your stomach, then serve as your stomach itself. Their Needs would be basic, primitive things like iron or fat, forcing their hosts to act more and more like an animal. Their Desires would be to grow more powerful, so that a 'Sorcerer' would seek others infected with such body-enhancing parasites and fight them in awesome cinematic battles taken right out of the Matrix. I assume that once an opponent is defeated their parasite would either be stolen or eaten, a gory scene, especially if the parasite is an internal organ of the defeated host. Eventually a Sorcerer with multiple parasite-demons would just outright cannibalize defeated opponents to satiate the combined Needs of their horrifically enhanced body. Humanity was literally humanity. At zero humanity, a host would be little more than a gruesome chimaera of parasites working in unison. Contacting, Binding, and Summoning wouldn't be too common but they could probably be represented as looking through medical records and the news for any strange medical anomalies, then tracking and baiting the particular parasite into one's body.

The third setting isn't set in stone yet. Presumably in will be Lovecraftian in nature though, if not taking place directly in the Cthulhu mythos.

[sam]

Eventually a Sorcerer with multiple parasite-demons would just outright cannibalize defeated opponents

That is so awesome.

[greyorm]

At zero humanity, a host would be little more than a gruesome chimaera of parasites working in unison.

This is one of the most awesome Humanity=0 ideas I have ever seen. And I'm really liking the whole setting you detailed. How did it play out? Any chance of a one-sheet? Also, how is Humanity working out with it being, that is, what sorts of things besides sorcery (if any) cause a person to roll Humanity checks?