A Sorcerer is someone who has let someone from the hell side of town get close to them. They might be a junky brother, a lover whose a hooker with a heart of venom or a cousin just outta the joint. You keep them out of the slums and pay the price.

Influences: Miller's Crossing, The Soprano's and Streets of Fire

Demons are the people from the hell side of town, the burrough that you can only get to through Dante Tunnel. They've done wrong and the stink of their murder and lies sticks to them. They can't operate in the city, society won't have them. They won't get served in restaurants, cabs won't stop for them and cops will lean on them hard.

Humanity is Empathy, the ability to understand another's pain and relate to other humans. If a player's Humanity hits zero, they pack their bags and move to the hell side of town, never to be heard from by decent society every again.

Once a PC goes over, they have the option of creating a new PC who has their former PC as their primary Demon.

Perhaps I'll use the Demon redemption rules out of Sorcerer's Soul but it'd be damned hard to pull off.

Lore is streetwise. Do you know who to call to score some smack, get someone roughed up or get someone out and out killed? Lore is using the hell side of town to get business done on the right side of Dante Tunnel.

The hell side of town is considered a mystical otherworld as per Sorcerer & Sword. It is a slum with children pawning razor blades on street-corners and dealers announcing their wares as loud and proud as an ice cream man would back home. Don't try to summon or banish here. You're in their world now.

I'm considering a version of Necromantic Tokens but dealing with abuse and neglect of those near and dear to you on the right side of town translating into some kind of power. I'm still hazy here but there's something to it.

Rituals are phone-calls, a whisper in the right ear, or a message or a hundred dollar bill left under a loose brick on the hell side. You can get bonus dice for mentioning a big score to be taken, playing sides in an already begun blood feud, or a moment or two in high society.

Angels are the feds. They're just as wrong as Demons and will destroy your Humanity to get evidence against a Demon, lock 'em up and throw away the key. Summoning them is also easy, a phone call to the Bureau with the right people or crimes mentioned will bring them running. Like Demons, once they're in your door, its hard to get them out. And worse yet, the feds believe they're fundamentally right.

I know I've mentioned this kind of Sorcerer game before but I'm rereading Sorcerer's Soul and just refining the concept. Thought it might be worth a re-think.

This sounds very cool. My friend Jason (6intruder) was working on a similar concept involving Yakuza as the players and demons as regular people.

(edited in) Perhaps you guys should correspond?

BPetroff93 wrote: This sounds very cool. My friend Jason (6intruder) was working on a similar concept involving Yakuza as the players and demons as regular people.

(edited in) Perhaps you guys should correspond?

The above referenced setting can be seen here.

Chris

Christopher Weeks wrote: The above referenced setting can be seen here.

Chris

I like it. If you read the book version of The Godfather, it has a very nice description of (in Sorcerer terms) Don Corleone Summoning, Binding, and nurturing Luca Brazzi.

Which leads me to my thought of the day: this setup seems to lead naturally to Sorcerer-Capos dispatching their Goombah-Demons on missions of violence and vengance... so far so good. (Or, less stereotypically, the Sorcerer-PI gets in touch with his violent buddy -- I think someone mentioned the Easy Rawlins -- Mouse dyad in this context before, in Walter Mosley's mystery novels.)

One neat side effect of this is that the Demons, as actual human beings, could definitely fit somewhere on the R-Map, would complicate the Sorceror's social life. (more fictional examples: Easy falls in love with Mouse's wife; Don Corleone feels compelled to invite Luca Brazzi to his daughter's wedding) Even if the player's humanity score is reasonably high, if a local cop (with Lore of 2 or so) makes him, it's going to have repurcussions.

Now, four possibly annoying questions:

1) What would Telltales be in this setting? I can only imagine gang tattoos, pinky-rings, etc.

2) When there's a Sorcerer vs. Sorcerer conflict, it would be logical for the Sorcerer-Capos to go to ground and let their musclebound Demons do the fighting... works great in a movie, but it might be less exciting for an RPG. Do you see that as a problem?

3) Were you planning to have this be a completely non-supernatural game, with all the sorcery mechanics tied into criminal issues? Interesting idea, but I wonder how well it would satisfy the players.

4) Usually, a Demon that's Banished or that loses its Binding has to go back to where it came from. In a game where "Hell" is the bad part of town, how would that work?

My apologies if the questions are too much, but I'm very interested in this idea. It dovetails remarkably well with the "Sorcerer in Vegas" idea I mentioned recently in this forum, and this approach would eliminate the need for me to develop a new school of magic for my Sorcerers, which I wasn't really looking forward to.

DannyK wrote:

Now, four possibly annoying questions:

1) What would Telltales be in this setting? I can only imagine gang tattoos, pinky-rings, etc.

DannyK wrote: 2) When there's a Sorcerer vs. Sorcerer conflict, it would be logical for the Sorcerer-Capos to go to ground and let their musclebound Demons do the fighting... works great in a movie, but it might be less exciting for an RPG. Do you see that as a problem?

DannyK wrote: 3) Were you planning to have this be a completely non-supernatural game, with all the sorcery mechanics tied into criminal issues? Interesting idea, but I wonder how well it would satisfy the players.

DannyK wrote: 4) Usually, a Demon that's Banished or that loses its Binding has to go back to where it came from. In a game where "Hell" is the bad part of town, how would that work?

DannyK wrote: My apologies if the questions are too much, but I'm very interested in this idea.

Paka wrote: How is sending off a Demon to do the dirty work any different than any other Sorcerer game?

Remember, these are rat bastards, murderers and just setting them loose with no supervision is begging for a slaughter and possibly bad press. I'm sure a creative GM could navigate it.

But it is a good point and something I'd watch out for.

Paka wrote: I would think they'd go back to the hell part of town...or jail. This is something I'd really have to think about. Good questions.

6inTruder wrote:
So are you shooting for the PCs being more like Louie in Ghost Dog, or like Don Vito Corleone?

Paka wrote: I think I'd follow the PC's lead.

Thinking about this, I'm not sure you need the "hell part of town", although it is a cool idea. I think you could say that the hellish and the normal town are superimposed, but most people see only one layer: the squarejohn at the nightclub watches the show and has some drinks, the Demonic hustler sees a bunch of marks and a few Made Men holding court in the corner.

This puts the Sorcerer types in the interesting position of seeing both -- this would reinforce the traditional tension between staying in the life or going straight, with the cliche plot of having to do "one more job" to raise the needed funds.

Paka, I'll probably be running this a little later this year, and I'll post to "Actual Play" when I see how it turns out. I'd love to do it FTF, but it's more likely to happen online.

6inTruder wrote: Okay. Cool. I think the issue DannyK was having (and I REALLY don't mean to put words in his mouth, so if I'm not getting what you were meaning say something) is that if your players are Don Corleone types that they'll just send their stable of demons out to deal with everything while they stay safe at home. You know?

blood-simple (Amer. slang, first used by Dashiell Hammett) 1. State of fear and confusion that follows the comission of murder; "He's gone blood simple."

DannyK wrote:

blood-simple (Amer. slang, first used by Dashiell Hammett) 1. State of fear and confusion that follows the comission of murder; "He's gone blood simple."

That would make a good name for this rule variant, actually.

Another couple of inspirations for this setting are Grosse Point Blank (yes, Martin's the Demon trying to get a Humanity score) and 100 Bullets (picture Graves as a brutal Sorcerer coralling and creating many, many Demons with his brutal offer).

What happens to a Sorcere's Demons when they go to Humanity 0 and move over to the other side of town.

I need to re-read the main rulebook and play this thing before I really write anymore about it, I think. I am at that point where it is an idea that needs to be taken for a spin.

Thanks for the feedback.

OK, Judd is probably ready for me to just go away and leave his thread alone, but I'm still brainstorming this idea. I was thinking of starting a new thread, but I'm really still just running variations on Judd's original idea.

First idea: It occurred to me that you could use the Pact rules in Sorcerer and Sword to represent hiring a master criminal, one that is a cut above the common Demon-thug. Let's say you want the finest safecracker on the West Coast to pull a job for you, but you don't need him and can't afford him to be hanging around your pad every night, waiting for orders and wanting his Needs met.

Second idea: I was looking at Sorcerer and Soul last night, and reading the rules for turning humans into Demons and vice versa. My idea is this: instead of a simple progression from human Sorcerer to NPC Demon, what if ongoing Humanity loss led to the acquisition of an "internal demon"? This would be implemented as either a Possessor or a Parasite Demon.

Now the character is in more trouble, because he's got a Demon within that has its own dark Needs and Desires, and this one won't go home to Helltown at the end of the night. This represents the character being unable to keep the dirty business at arm's length, becoming more ragged and desperate.

Some characters will stabilize at this new, lower level (with some greater personal power), and some will descend further, becoming NPC Demons as described in Sorcerer and Soul.

Now I have to figure out a mechanism for this. You can't go to Humanity=0 twice.... I suppose the character could get a small bonus of Humanity points after acquiring his Posessor Demon. I'm wondering if that would really work in play terms -- it seems almost like a reward for running down Humanity.

Edit: corrected format tags.

DannyK wrote: OK, Judd is probably ready for me to just go away and leave his thread alone, but I'm still brainstorming this idea. I was thinking of starting a new thread, but I'm really still just running variations on Judd's original idea.

DannyK wrote: First idea: It occurred to me that you could use the Pact rules in Sorcerer and Sword to represent hiring a master criminal, one that is a cut above the common Demon-thug.

I really hope you publish this as a mini-supplement, Judd. It's incredibly cool.

Seth L. Blumberg wrote: I really hope you publish this as a mini-supplement, Judd. It's incredibly cool.