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For quite a while (QUITE a while) I've been toying with an idea for a Sorcerer game based on traditional fantasy and traditional fantasy gaming, that is: wizards, elves, dragons, gods and so forth.

Such a world is different from the S&S genre in that magic is not viewed with modern skepticism, for it simply quite obviously exists, and the gods are an active, visible force in the world, as well as the profusion of intelligent, inhuman races (such as the Fey, dwarves, orcs & other goblin-kin, etc).

Wizards and sorcerers are merely those individuals who have chosen to study the arts of magic in depth, unlike the average peasant who might know a simple charm or two, or an individual like the Grey Mouser who may have studied some sorcery but is not truly a practitioner of the arts.

Demons in this case are spells, or power over magic.
A wizard begins play with a number of demons equal to his Lore.
Humanity, for a wizard, is sanity and connection with reality...plumbing the depths of arcane mysteries can cause the serious student to lose their mind or soul to things better left alone, or become so completely detached from actual life that they neglect the world for their Art.
A spell's Need is to be used.

Priests, on the other hand, are bound to "demons" -- the Gods -- whose power they channel. A God's Need in this case is adherence to the tenets of and performance of the rituals of the faith. Its Desire is, of course, whatever goals and long-term plans the deity has.

A warrior practices...his weapons and armor and warfare are his demons. His weapon's Need is bloodshed when drawn (ala Samurai!), his armor's Need is to protect the warrior...the Desire of both is to be useful and used.
Or perhaps the warrior's demon is a berserker spirit, in the case of certain northern Viking-like barbarians...or heck, both concepts.

I could continue for the other typical classes: rogue (demon: shadows and tools; Need: thievery, etc), bard (demon: music; Need: tale-telling), paladin (variant of a priest), druid (again), ranger (demon: hunting and tracking, the wilds; Need: to be away from 'civilization'), etc.

I'm thinking that "demon" in this scenario -- or rather the concept of a demon solely as a mechanical "entity", not slavering, horrid thingies from beyond (though these would certainly be there as a seperate part of the literature) -- could best be defined as "What you DO and WHY" or "What you're good at" or even "Your skills/lifestyle/pursuits."

I don't want to become too bound into archetypes or "classes," at least as they are traditionally displayed. Magic isn't a thing "these folk over here do," it's a part of life, as it was among the Celts and older peoples, like the Babylonians: people, common people, practice it.

Only the priests and sorcerers and wizards practice the really terrible mojo, and even then there isn't much distinction between each. Source literature -- ie: anthropology and myth -- show that priests and magicians went hand in hand, the gods taught magic, the priests performed it. All ritual magic is based on some divine figure in some aspect, even modern occultism retains this tradition and you will be hard pressed to find a magickal practice which does not include such at its core.

Only in modern fantasy literature and gaming is magic seperated into the rather hollow divide of divine and arcane, with the latter being presented as a sort of ridiculous psuedo-science.

So, I'm not so much trying to port typical fantasy games wholesale into Sorcerer, so much as make the modern standards available for play within a fantasy-inspired game of Sorcerer.

While designing the above, I also briefly toyed with the idea of creating a supplement based on life in ancient Norway -- sorcerers as runemasters, berserkers, godhi (ie: holy men), and so forth, but was unable to find a decent theme for Humanity. Which is unfortunate, since everything else worked very well.

Demons were defined as runes, Gods, ancestral spirits and/or personal totems. Sorcery was based on the two traditional methods -- Seidhr (shape-shifting) and Galdr (runework) (well, to simplify quite a bit).

I had thought to use Humanity as the ancient Norse code (ie: adherence to the Nine Noble Virtues and tradition), but sorcery and magic among the Norsemen was not a soul-destroying sort of affair, and did not go against the the Virtues or tradition, so I wasn't certain how to justify Humanity rolls for using sorcery.

I also tried to use Humanity as Wyrd (destiny, fate, etc.), but again, the practice of sorcery as defined above does not relate as dangerous to one's Wyrd. I don't know, perhaps I'm missing something therein that would make it work.

Hi Raven,

As long as we're going pretty far abstract with the rules, as you're doing, then it seems to me that Humanity = Wyrd makes sense. Low Humanity brings the Wyrd home. That dovetails with my observation that in the Norse sagas, it's the character's lot to make more and more difficult choices, until there's no good choice left, really - and then it all comes down. Almost a Schism-type thing.

The main heroes in Njal's Saga pose neat set of alternatives: Njal's Humanity (as construed here) hits 0, but he has Grace as well; Gunnar's Humanity hits 0 in the classic sense; and Kari manages to come out with positive Humanity, which is why he doesn't die and the feud can finally end peacefully.

Best,
Ron

BTW, I should ntoe that in both cases presented above Lore must be assigned at least a 1 for everyone, since everyone interacts with the Gods and spirits (peasant and noble, sorcerer and warrior, priest and poet). There is no Lore 0 as a possibility for PC or NPC, no more than having Stamina or Will at 0 are possibilities for either.

On to the response:

That's what I thought of at first, as well...but then I started thinking about it (and maybe these are ancient Simulationist tendencies rearing their heads), I asked myself "What specifically about using 'sorcery' would bring your wyrd closer to fulfillment and what about avoiding 'sorcery' would keep your wyrd at bay?"

As the sorcerous rituals (Contact, Summoning, Binding) performed during the game would require Humanity checks, and Banishment can actually net you Humanity, it just doesn't make a logical connect in my mind in the way wyrd/doom/destiny works.

Unless, of course, we're talking Sorcerer episodes wholly as stories or sagas, all of which can be read as the counting of the individual's Doom...in which case creating a Schism-type "end scenario" might be appropriate. That is, the end is known, the doom pronounced, but how does the hero get themselves there?

So Humanity = 0 wouldn't necessarily mean death, only the final result of the workings of wyrd upon the hero -- the Norse were, after all, fatalists in a sense, since they knew fate was inescapable even by the Gods, woven as surely into one's life as one's breath and blood (though they were by no stretch angst-ridden doom-sayers, inescapable fate was simple practicality).

So, a player describes for his character a fate -- a doom -- his destiny -- and Humanity is simply the counting down to that moment, sorcerous acts are performed in relation to that doom -- speaking to the Gods, your ancestors, discovering the powers of a new rune and so forth.

And in this scenario, I'd divorce the concept of the individual invoking the Gods directly from the act of Contact or Summoning -- in a more narrative fashion, it is the player who decides that the time is ripe for the hero to have a vision from Odin, or for some aspect of their destiny to be revealed, and so the dice are rolled to see the influence upon one's wyrd and what the hero gets out of it -- not necessarily by the character's will or idea, only the player's.

Then further, a failed Contact doesn't mean the Gods or spirits or whatnot aren't speaking to you (though it could if circumstances were right) it means they reveal some information your hero would rather not have known, or task him with some quest or become annoyed at the matter, etc.

Hi Raven,

H'mmm ... well, Odin uses sorcery (so to speak) to consult with the Norns about all the "bad stuff" happening, and they tell him that Ragnarok approaches. In-game (again, so to speak), that's not causal, necessarily, but in out-of-game, story-creation terms it works perfectly - the more you use sorcery to find stuff out and get things done, the closer the Bad Hammer comes.

Best,
Ron