Azk'Arn actual play

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Way back before GenCon, one of the role-playing groups I'm in got rolling on a Sorcerer & Sword game. I'd been seized with a bizarre notion of an insectoid-fantasy setting, very Heavy Metal, very science-fantasy in which a great deal of the sorcery looks like H. R. Giger biotech. The title character in Alien would fit in quite nicely. But it's definitely sword-and-sorcery, not SF - people have swords, they live in a kind of Melnibonean society, it's all very exotic and fantastical.

That's what I pitched to my players, and they went for it, and after character creation I went into heavy prep mode. We played one game sesion ... several weeks went by without a chance to play ... then we played again, and GenCon hit like a ton of bricks, and then ... well, anyway, we're finally back on schedule and the third session happened last week. It looks like this game will keep going for quite a while. I'm getting huge satisfaction out of play at every possible level.

Here are some of the neat things that have arisen.

1) The rules about Price trading are serious business! One of the player-characters got his "Uncivilized" racked up to -4 dice in the last session, and his stated goal was pretty long-term ... so that means he's walking around with a permanent three-die bonus for anything that furthers that goal.

I think that letting the range and scope of the stated goal vary according to player-desires is a great aspect of that rule that I had not anticipated. Think about it: the player may be simply providing a brief "take the lid off" scene or session, for a short-term goal, or he or she may be pretty much re-defining the character (and affecting potentially dozens or hundreds of dice rolls) almost indefinitely.

2) Dust Devils was the game we played before this one, and you know, I think it really opened up the doors for the players. This is the group that played Hero Wars for so long, and we all do well together, but for most of them, the sort of "Rahh! My character is about *this*!" intensity has been intermittent. Dust Devils really changed all that, especially in its final session, and our current game is notable for the raw, extreme, and rather scary player-characters.

3) As a detail, all of the player-characters' appearances have changed significantly since the opening session. Essinal, the "ritual hostage" court mage, was a dowdy, confused woman with hair in her eyes - now she's all decked out in brocade robes, standing down assassination attempts with her Will (reminiscent of Presence attacks in old-school Champions), and sleeping with the hot warrior-assassin type NPC, by which means she's appeasing one of her Bound demons hosted in his body, as well as the Possessor hosted in her own. Yow!

Kirikin, the hard-case warrior of the bunch, is the one who recently ramped up his Uncivilized Price by three dice, so you can only imagine what that means in terms of appearance changes. In cinema terms, that ripped-up shirt is stayin' that way. He'll do just fine in the court scenes when he escorts the exiled Queen back to them, I'm sure.

Zyzass, the court assassin, has been having Desire/Need conflicts with her demon, as well as delving into a sorcerous Otherworld - hence her Parasite demon has been maturing in her body. So now she has these spines growing out of her shoulderblades and ridgy scales running down her back ...

4) I did miss one opportunity, dammit. Tod, playing Kirikin, had racked up massive bonuses for a single round against a rather horrific foe, and all sorts of motivation was going on at the table. (It so happens I'd egregiously ripped off Howard's Red Nails for this portion of play; if you know the story, the scene was similar but not identical to Conan's fight with Tolkemec). Well, the NPC bastard's defensive roll was excellent - no sale.

OK, I'm the anti-whiff guy, right? But I fucked up, and we went "Aww!" and moved on. This was a mistake on my part - see, earlier, when the same NPC had managed to elude  no less than three rather savage attacks in one round, I'd had the brains to state that every "miss" on the characters' parts indicated the NPC being able to kill one of the faceless NPCs in the scene (he had a ranged weapon). So you see, it was a cool over-the-shoulder, zot-zot-zot round instead of a miss-miss-miss round - by saying this, I made the round "about" the targeted NPC in a way that I think the players enjoyed.

But for this next round, I totally forgot my own lesson! Tod had, I dunno, twelve dice or something horrific like that - in Sorcerer terms, even a fully-successful defense roll (which Khemect'la, the NPC, did get) should still indicate something astounding associated with that action - I mean, splitting the floor open, changing the environment in some other way, giving everyone in the vicinity a Stamina roll to resist being thrown all over the place ... something. Oh well.

5) I am pleased to announce that the setting is gaining depth rapidly through play. In some ways, there's a two-layer aspect to this process, as it doesn't get conveyed into play until I've processed the last session and prepped it into the next or the following one after that ... so therefore the depth that I'm seeing and prepping with isn't the depth that the players have seen yet. But it'll happen, and already I think there's a lot going on with the setting in play compared to the first run. For instance, a lot of Essinal's actions have been directed toward the benefit of her home realm (not the court of the setting, where she's a hostage), and that's caused me as GM to realize, hey, that home realm isn't just a "name," it's important and I need to prep towards that.

The Azk'Arn setting is going to be featured heavily in the third supplement, and this game is turning it into something I think people will be amazed to see.

Best,
Ron

[Bailywolf]

Without slipping back into old bad habits of hounding for unpublished details, I'd love to hear more about how the setting has evolved through play.  If its under wraps for S3, then cool, otherwise where did it start, and how has it developed?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ben,

Fear not - this is one instance in which I'm reasonably happy to divulge lots and lots. The constraint is time/effort, insofar as I really oughta be scribbling the actual supplement prose rather than musing and enthusing about it ...

One of the key issues about this setting is that issues of reproductive power exist at the core of issues of societal stability and change. Nearly all of the demonic stuff is rooted in reproductive activity; humans get access to power via manipulating or being manipulated by this activity. Also, the setting has a fairly overt sorcery-to-society relationship (not very, just fairly), so for instance a Queen of a human city/citadel is actually Bound to a Queen Demon (using the Old One rules in Sorcerer & Sword), and the reproductive activity of the sorceress is actually meeting the Need of the demon ... and lots more.

Basically, my twin personalities of Berserk Biologist and Surreal Fantasist are having a field day.

I did let a whole ton of things about the setting lie fallow in hopes that they'd develop through play, and quite a few of them have, including (1) the whole culture of the court assassins and (2) a category of demons based on a hybrid of demonic psionics and human schizophrenia.

Best,
Ron

[Bailywolf]

Very cool stuff, and I very much look forward to seeing it print... Paka's "Mu's Bed" setting sparked something... I suddenly had a hunger for details of bizare, byzantine, and baroque S&S social settings...

I just got around to ordering Sorcerer's Soul...can't see how I got by without it for so long, and I've been meaning to mention how much I like what I've read.  I actualy had the desire to run a humanity-themed S&S game... basicly "what is humanity?" being the question with the setting fatalistic, colorful, and complex setting where the demonic and the human blur at the edges... and the humanity score's actual definition itself may evolve through play.  This last element is something I'm still trying to figure out how to work... defining their humanity (or perhaps discovering what it means).  

Anyway, any bones you have time to throw about this setting will be hapily chewed.

-Benjamin

[Thor Olavsrud]

This sounds awesome, Ron. I'll definitely be looking out for more on this.

Coincidentally, my Exalted group is currently delving into a long-lost city heavily inspired by Red Nails. They're freaking out as they realize just how depraved the whole situation is.

[urbwar]

This sounds awesome, Ron. I'll definitely be looking out for more on this.

Coincidentally, my Exalted group is currently delving into a long-lost city heavily inspired by Red Nails. They're freaking out as they realize just how depraved the whole situation is.

Well, actually. the sorcerer is freaking out. I, the drunken master zenith, have all ready set my sights on redeeming these cannibals in the name of the Unconquered Sun :)

(Sorry, had to pipe that in)

Getting back on topic....

This setting sounds really interesting. I like the concept of procreational sorcery. It's different (well, it's been featured in some movies, stories, etc, but not as much as in the ritual aspect)

Is there any ties to Tantric ritual at all (or at all in the planned book)? On another note, will there be any mention of Hentai, which has a common habit of having demons raping women? Granted, most of it is gratuitous, but I know some features the use of sex as part of a ritual (Venus 5 is one that springs to mind). Not the best of examples, but I was curious if the connection would be mentioned at all...

[Bailywolf]

Something relevent to reproductive sorcery:

A nice cultural element I have discovered in my recent readings on Roman traditional religions relates to the nature of the Roman family, fmaily gods, and the Pater Famelia- the male head of the household.

A traditional Roman family had a single male at its head, and he acted as both the practical head of the family but also the family's intermediary with the divine in the form of the household or hearth gods- the Genis Loci.  This hearth god literaly represented the power of the pater familia to beget children.  In the Roman mind the fetility force which ensured good crops, harvests, fertile livestock, and the conception of children resided in the MALE head of household- the creation of life was a male force, not a female.  The female was a fertile field into whcih a male could sew his seed...or a vessel for the fermentation of offspring...


The possible S&S aplication of these ideas are awesome...especialy when you put such a social and mystical tradition into conflict with a more earth-mother female fertility tradition.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

The whole concept of reproductive effort as a source of power over other things is central to one of the "story types" I'll be describing in Chapter 2, and that concept will be illustrated in full in Chapter 3 (In Utero). However, my spin on it is very unusual - I'm suggesting that either confirming or rejecting a particular "sphere" of reproductive activity is a source of such power.

Therefore castration counts just as fertilization does; withholding sexual access counts just as gettin' it on does.

The real fun comes in when you use a sacrifice/rejection of one aspect of reproduction to guarantee or reinforce another aspect ... tie this into the rules for one-after-another sorcerous rituals, with dice-victories being applied to following rolls, and things get very interesting very fast.

The Azk'Arn setting represents both the story types presented in Chapter 2, so this stuff is only part of that setting.

Best,
Ron

[joshua neff]

One thing I'm wondering, Ron, which has nothing to do with the reproductive stuff, is the basic set up of the Azk'Arn stories.

In Clinton's Sorcerer & Sword thread, he talked about how it was established at the very beginning what form the stories were to take & what order they'd be played in. Did you & your Players do something similar? Is Azk'Arn a single, linear story or a series of stories told out of order? And what were the PC's Kickers?

Edited for punctuation, because I'm getting to be more & more of a stickler for that.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Josh,

Funny, I just scrawled some notes in my little madman-notebook about that very thing. Unlike Clinton's group, we did not specify whether the present story is before or after any other story. We're leaving that up to decisions to make after this one is over.

So the answer is "Neither." No, we don't currently know when this story occurs relative to others we might play using these characters in this setting. However, that doesn't mean that the current story is necessarily chronologically first either. We might decide later to run stories that occur earlier in the sequence, or much much later, or whatever.

As for prepping for this story, I followed my own advice in the supplement very carefully. I presented the sketchy setting ideas and we kicked that around a little. The players thought up some character ideas, and I came up with a scenario-context: "The Queen is gone from the Citadel of Miirun," and we took character creation further from there. I emphasized that however the players wanted to situate themselves relative to the situation was up to them.

The Kickers
They all decided to link to the situation very closely, although again I clarified that they didn't have to.

Julie decided that Zyzass had been assigned to assassinate the Queen but had not done so, and that Zyzass herself had been targeted for assassination. Maura decided that Essinal had figured out that her demon had been involved in the Queen's disappearance, and her demon is a Possessor, which means ... well, you see. Tod decided, through some group discussion, that his character had come upon the Queen herself miles away from Miirun.

Presto, I the GM suddenly had to generate lots of prep concerning the Queen as a person, the culture of assassination in the society, what the hell a bunch of mercenaries are fighting over miles from Miirun, a whole bunch of stuff about drugs, a bunch of stuff about the Queen's Children (all 144 of them), an entire category of demon (the Possessor bit), and more.

Best,
Ron