[Sorcerer] Abattoir Blues

[Per Fischer]

I wake with the sparrows and I hurry off to work
The need for validation, babe, gone completely berserk
I wanted to be your Superman but I turned out such a jerk
I got the abattoir blues
I got the abattoir blues
I got the abattoir blues
Right down to my shoes
(Abattoir Blues, Nick Cave 2004)

We had our character generation session tonight, and I'm very hopeful. Not that I didn't know, but I've got a killer group of players on my hand. In less than three hours we decided on setting and they came up with fantastic characters and ideas. I'm really looking forward to this. Malcolm owns the three first Sorcerer books, never played it but eager to try it out. Myles owns the book and played it once, unsuccessfully, in the past, and Pooka expressed a while ago that he wanted to give it a go as well.
We are playing Blood Simple, Judd Karlman's adaption of Sorcerer. Malcolm suggested the 1950s, and someone, perhaps Pooka, said Chicago. And that was it. Here come the player characters.

Walther Root (created by Malcolm)
STA 2 (Whip-thin), WILL 4 (Too dumb to lie down), LORE 4, COVER 4 (Political radical), Price -1 (Reputation preceeds me), HUM 4. Telltale: parasitic twin.
Walther denied military service and is now working shitty jobs, unable to get anything decent. He's currently working the worst shift at Shelling Bros Abattoir.
Walther's Scumbag is The Conductor, a uniformed guy who takes people over to the wrong side of the tracks.
STA 5 WILL 6 LORE 4 POW 6. Desire: Everything running on time. Need: Names of those who disrupt the El. Abilities: Confuse, Shadow, Spec Dmg (like being hit by train), Travel. Telltale: Smell of ozone.
Kicker: Walther opens up abattoir at 4pm and finds eight naked, disembowelled corpses hanging from the overhead conveyor.

Brent Brown (created by Myles)
STA 3 (Muscle under the fat), WILL 3 (Big shot Ivy Leaguer), LORE 4 (Defrocked scholar), COVER 3 (Blacklisted screenwriter), Price -1 (Club foot), HUM 3. Telltale: Seven left toes.
Brent had a career in movies in LA, but is now struggling to to get any writing work due to allegations of subversiveness and communism. He hired a scumbag to get a girl killed.
Brent's Scumbag is Johnny 'the eyes', a killer. STA 3, WILL 4 LORE 2, POW 4. Desire: Anger, Need: blood. Abilities: Warp(?), Cloak. Telltale: piercing eyes.
Kicker: Brent arrives at his apartment and finds a huge screenplay on the table, with only the name and title blank, and a note asking him to sign it as his own and he will be back in business.
Myles only wrote two things on the back of his character sheet, so I have to ask for some more during the coming week. Plus, Myles's handwriting is as bad as my own, and a degree in cryptography would have been handy to make it easier to read his scribblings

Detective Leon Luntz (created by Pooka)
STA 3 (Rough drinker, rough life), WILL 4 (Mad dog), LORE 3 (Tarnished badge), COVER 4 (Police Detective), Price -1 (low class). HUM 4. Telltale: Dead glare.
Leon is a smalltime corrupt cop, taking some extra income by protecting the girls in Madame Linda's Cat House. He is also under investigation by the IA.
Leon's Scumbag is Carl "Cutter" Brantano. STA 4, WILL 5, LORE 4, POW 5. Desire: Power. Need: Immunity from prosecution. Abilities: Hint, Armor, Big, Cloak. Telltale: Heavily scarred.
Kicker: Leon's partner Det. Bill Torrence is tied up and shot execution-style in front of the police department.

I have a loose R-Map ready based on Chandler's short story Goldfish, which I am now going to have a look at and see how these characters may or may not be hooked on to it. There's certainly a lot of potential here, and forward motion from the get go. Neither of the players included any detailed family connections or close relatives...interesting.
After the players left last night, and I sat down to contemplate, and search for some pictures of 1950s Chicago, I remembered the album Abattoir Blues by Nick Cave, and the title seemed a natural fit.

[Per Fischer]

Judd asked me about the Prices effect and the relationships between the player characters and the Scumbags, and I'll post it here as well for reference.

Prices: in a way they all have the same effect: -1 to all initial social rolls involving people from the middle-class and upwards - at least that's what goes for Walther and Leon, I think Brent's club foot has the same effect.

I didn't mention the relationships, I should have.

Walther traded a list with names of railroad workers to get rid of an FBI agent that had been shadowing him for a while. The conductor on the night train seemed like the kind of guy who could make such a thing happen and Walther went for it. We actually don't know what happened to the agent, but it worked!

Brent had to get rid of this dance girl or whatever in LA, in a desperate attempt to save his career, and used some seedy contacts to eventually locate Johnny Eyes to do it for him. When Brent fled to Chicago, Johnny came along and is now a hitman with a rising popularity.

Carl Cutter was known to Leon's as a mover in the underworld. When Carl was arrested for something, Leon went down to the cells and offered him a deal: walk free in return for access to information about big deals going down. Snap.

I have a question: I'm mildly worried regarding the characters' lack of immediate family members or friends. It may be the players, conciously or unconciously, creating a sort of buffer zone to the premise of the game, it might be me seeing something that isn't there. Thing is, I always use family and close connections when I create characters (I guess these things mean a lot to me, basically my family is what means the most to me) AND I usually use those to create adversity for player characters. Threats against family, or family members going astray or whatever.

I wondering whether I should take this as the players saying: leave those out, or keep it down. Or hit them right in the face with it? I'd just like to hear your thoughts, I am going to ask my players nicely what they think as well (they might even chip in here).

[Judd]

What is on the backs of their character sheets?

That is where stuff like family and friends end up.  It is also probably the most important part of Sorcerer's chargen process.

[Per Fischer]

I copied the sheets in half size and and one page so both sides are visible, to avoid that the back of the sheet is hidden most of the time - I've always done that in my Sorcerer games btw.

"Backs" of character sheets:

Brent Brown: Graham L, head of Paramount, dead starlite. (Cover)

Leon Kuntz: Madame Linda's Cathouse, Blue Note Club (Lore), The Projects, Carla the dancer, Old Yeller - a car (Price), Det. Bill Torrence, Luke Shore Drive PD (Kicker), Chief Henry Markess, Agent Sawyer IA (Cover).

Walther Root: 58th Street Railroad (Lore), Clayton Woodrow FBI, Senator Lloyd Hacker (Price), Joshua and Hiram Schelling (Kicker), Montgomery Gerstein - activist, Dolores Farmer - actress, Schelling Bros Abattoir (Cover).

I've asked Myles, who plays Brent, to email me some more suggestions. As you see, there's actually a lot of good stuff on the other two sheets, except close relatives.

[Judd]

I'd concentrate on the good stuff that is there, rather than worrying about the family members who are not.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Per,

I agree with Judd, to focus on the material that's explicitly available. At most, I might ask a player whether the character has any family as a casual question - not deceptively casual, but genuinely so, with "Maybe, but I don't care" as an acceptable answer.

Best, Ron

[Malcolm Craig]

I should point out that Walter is going nowhere because he was a conscientious objector during WW2, got banged up in Leavenworth for his pains, caught a bad case of the socialisms and now works crap jobs because, well, his views are unpopular.

Family members? I don't see Walter as caring about family. Or maybe his family don't care about him due to his political stance.

The setup session was good fun and we seem to have the basis for a pretty strong story. I'm really interested to see how the tales of the three characters weave together (or not).

Cheers
Malc

[Per Fischer]

Great! I was just looking for some reassurance

I can't wait until the next session

[Per Fischer]

Whoa, we met tonight for the second session of our Sorcerer game, and man did a lot happen. I should say that we played in a pub in Edinburgh, and that's a first for me. It worked surprisingly well - we had a nice booth all the way back at the pub, the music wasn't loud, and there were generally very few other people in that part of the pub anyway.

The first "real" session of play is a tough task for the GM. (I consider prep and character generation as part of play as well, I talking about when we actually start playing out the Kickers) Everything is ready to go and this session is really about getting the whole thing rolling. I think we managed to do that splendidly for Pooka's and Malcolm's characters, but it was harder going with Myles's screenwriter, whose main motivation, according to Myles himself when Malc asked him directly, was self preservation. I might not have pushed hard enough on this one, and maybe I didn't realise how easily Myles could slide off on his Kicker. That said, Myles was trying to play a more quiet and toned down Kicker compared to the other ones. It was a deliberate choice to have a calmer story line, but I don't think we managed quite to kick it into motion.

I had 14 prepared Bangs and I used five of them in play. It's obvious to me that storylines where the player is actively pursuing stuff, Bangs evolve by themselves. All in all we kept dice rolling to only significant situations, and we had a short but hectic conflict with four participants as the final scene for the evening.

So many things happended, I might already have forgotten some of them, so help me out guys if I missed important stuff. Let's begin with Myles's character Brent Brown, blacklisted screenwriter. His Kicker was coming home and finding an untitled anonymous screenplay on his desk, with a note asking him to put his name on it. The script is a pretty accurate a badly disguised re-telling of the period at Paramount Pictures while Brent worked there, including when he hired somebody to kill the starlite Deborah. Brent gets to work and rewrites most of the script, changes direct references, gives it an upbeat ending and sends it off to another production company and burns the original copy. Brent later got Johnny "The Eyes" to find out who sent the script and only managed to find out it was sent from someone at Paramount. Brent was also visited by to FBI agents investigating Deborah's "disappearance", one of which were agent Woodrow, who I got from Malcolm's character sheet. Mr Johnson, head of Paramount, visited Brent in person and asked for the screenplay or at least find out who sent it.
I don't think much more happened to Brent to be honest. The Bangs I used where
* FBI agents (from Chicago field office, maybe one of them is Clayton Woodrow) show Brant a photo of Deborah, the girl he had killed.
*Mr Johnson IN PERSON visits, clearly shaken, asking for the screenplay.

Walter Root, Malcolm's character, started his day with finding six male, naked and gutted bodies hanging from meat hooks in the Schelling Bros Abattoir. And then Joshua Schelling, the boss himself, arrived. This was actually proposed by Malcolm, which was a very nice touch, and we had a great great scene where these two characters struggled with each other and themselves what to do, changing their minds again and again. In the middle of it all a photographer from Chicago Tribune arrives at takes a flash photo of the scene and was allowed to leave the scene in his car. Walter sort of convinces Schelling to get rid of the bodies while he himself takes of to meat with his scumbag, the mysterious Conductor, to arrange for the Chicago Tribune photographer to "disappear". Malcolm failed his Humanity roll for that. Returning to the abattoir he learns that Schelling has instead drunk enough bourbon to pass out on his desk. The bodies are still hanging from the hooks and the first workings are arriving shortly. Here Walter decides to shred the six bodies in the big meat grinder and Malcolm earn another Humanity roll, which he makes this time. (We later learn that Schelling actually tried contacting a dirty cop - Luntz - apparebtly to take care of it all. This was a magnificent complication.)
Walter ends his fantastic day getting beat up by two Italian mobsters after a union meeting at a bar. This was the final conflict scene where Pooka's cop was also involved because he was after the two mobsters. I used the following Bangs for Walter:
* Wayne, photographer from Chicago Tribune has been tipped off to come to the abattoir.
* Workers union rep asks for access to abattoir outside opening hours.

Phew. Leon Luntz, played by Pooka, arrives at work and finds his partner killed, executed, in front of the police station. Luntz promptly leaves the scene and goes on a desperate hunt for information among his contacts and informants. It turns out that it's been a while since he has done any real police work. Pooka made up some great NPCs on the fly, whom Luntz threatened and intmidated without much result. Luntz also has a brief encounter in a men's room with James Sawyer, Internal Affairs, who offers him to spill the beans on his partner Bill to go free himself. Luntz's answer is to slam Sawyer against the wall. Thereafter he calls his Scumbag Carl "Cutter" and asks him to "take care" of agent Sawyer, which I interpreted as "kill" and which earned Pooka a Humanity check - which he failed. All three player characters are now down to 3 Humanity.
Luntz eventually gets the message that Schelling was looking for him, too late of course. Last scene outside the bar where the union meeting is held, Luntz is shadowing the Italians (working for the "Torino Boys") and leaps into action when the two gorillas start beating Walter Root up. I think we had a five round conflict where I had a chance to present the different aspect of that system to the players. Luntz takes a flesh wound himself when shot by one of the mobsters, but shoots one of them and manages to incapacitate the other. In the aftermath Walter manages to crawl away with one of the mobsters' guns. The one that was fired at Luntz. The only bang I used for Luntz was:
* Offered by agent Sawyer to rat on Bill, and his own case will 'disappear'.

I think I've recapped the bulk of the action. It was a pretty good session, the only thing I was dissatisfied about was not being able to kick Myles's character into more problem and forcing harder decisions.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Per,

I decided to pull together some old threads which include an important point. It is, the first session of playing Sorcerer often feels "too light" or "not enough happened" for the GM. However, this always turns out to be a good thing.

See what you think after looking for common points among these:
Art-Deco Melodrama - the final chapter
Getting ready - writing the Bangs!
Sex and Sorcery -- this book rocks!
My current Sorcerer game - modern necromancy (see my post about 2/3 down the first page)
[Sorcerer] Modern Gothic
[Sorcerer] Urban Squalor -- first session
[Sorcerer] By the sword - first session (this one is short but really punches regarding what I want to say here)
[Sorcerer] McCarthy era (see my final post)
[Sorcerer] How do you deal with Mystery Kickers? (only partly related to your topic, but possibly helpful)

Best, Ron