I was in Borders the other day, & I found myself, as I often do, flipping through the Doctor Who novels. Doctor Who is one of my all-time favorite shows, & I love the novels--not the writing (I haven't read one in years, after being sorely disappointed with what was coming out) but the covers, which are these bright & eerie pieces of pop art. I was looking at one, & the story involved a Tolkien-like writer who wrote an epic fantasy novel called "The True History of the Planets" (or something like that). To me, the title suggested some weird space opera or a baroque conspiracy theory book. But in the DW novel it was a Lord of the Rings-esque fantasy with elves & swords & magic. There was something about the juxtaposition of my expectations & the actual (fake) epic that sparked my imagination in a big, big way. I started getting ideas for an epic RPG narrative called "The True History of the Planets" that would hint at space opera-y stuff (the stars, other planets, other galaxies, time travel, alien races, whizbang action) but would be set firmly on Earth, either in the past or the present (or maybe both) & would involve magic, faeries, ghosts, monsters, secret societies, & occult conspiracies. In my head I saw a golden age comic book of Lord of the Rings if Tolkien had done loads of shrooms & read Borges & Philip K. Dick. Or a gonzo pulp fantasy done by Charles deLint, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Angela Carter, Daniel Manus Pinkwater, Joss Whedon, Robert Anton Wilson, Umberto Eco, Brian Froud, & Tony Diterlizzi. Or maybe it would be Tim Burton doing the Illuminatus trilogy in stop-motion animation. Somewhere in my brainstorming the title got shortened to the shorter, zippier "Planet Zero".

Well, this led me to wonder what RPG system to use. The first thing to come to mind was Changeling--it's got modern-day faeries, magic, lunatics, dreams. That would be perfect, right? But then I read Jesse Burneko's excellent pegging of the Storyteller system (which you can find here: http://indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1989). He's right, Storyteller has no pizzaz, it's got nothing to support protagonism of the PCs, it's got nothing that makes me really want to run it. So I thought about adapting Adventure (the one White Wolf game I like, precisely because it's got zing to it) or Over the Edge.

And then it hit me--Sorcerer.

So, here's the set-up so far. Sorcerers & demons alike work to keep sorcery secret, because if everyone knew about it, sorcerers & demons would be exploited or hunted (with witch burnings & demon Banishings). In fact, there may be a secret society/subculture devoted to Banishing demons. "Demons" in this setting are faeries, ghosts, mythical beasts, & monsters. I'd use the Sorcerer & Sword rules for Immanents & Pacts. I want the sorcery, even in the modern world, to have the feel--the weirdness, the creepiness, the hint of an age disappearing--of sorcery in Sword & Sorcery fiction--Pulp surrealism. Humanity would be sanity--drop to zero & you lose the ability to interact with the common person, to participate in the collective reality construct. (Although take a look at all the "sane" people, who live lives devoid of magic & wonder & mystery. Look at those people who work to wipe out demons & sorcerers. Maybe sanity ain't all that great after all.) Also, demons frequently make oblique references to some sort of elaborate & baroque cosmology, & a war going on for the fate of the various planets/realms/dimensions/planes of existence. Are they telling the truth? Who knows. But they seem to think what they do has an impact on some greater conflict, & they'll push their sorcerers to act on this. Regardless, the narrative would be set in one small corner of the world--the backdrop would be epic, but the immediate setting would be local & personal.

I'm not sure about the title. "Planet Zero" has a nice B-grade SF comic book sound to it which I'm partial to. But "The True History of the Planets" has a good scholarly fantasy epic ring to it. And I may even run it as Sorcerer & Sword, for that "fantasy epic set in the vague prehistory of our world" riff. Or maybe, someday, I'll end up running both.

So...thoughts?

What first strikes me is that you could haul the planetary references back in with the astrological attributions of the planets, either overtly (with the boggles and bugaboos referenceing them) or covertly, as themes.

BTW, have you (or anyone else) read Alan Moore's Promethea?

Lon

Lon--

That's exactly what I was thinking of, in terms of bringing the "spaciness" of space opera into the game.

And I really like Promethea. Good stuff. It's definitely an influence on this.

On the way home from work tonight I had a thought: what this would be is not Space Opera, not Soap Opera, but...Sorcery Opera. That combination of the grand & epic with the personal & immediate.

Hey Josh,

You might consider making Humanity a continuum between Truthfulness and Deception.

Paul

Paul--

Could you expand on that? What would happen when a character hits zero Humanity?

Hmm...they believe their own lies?

I don't know. Sounds a bit too subtle for Sorcery Opera. When Humanity hits zero, it needs to be big & obvious. Psychotics stumbling around the streets of New York, LA, London, Paris, Tokyo, who know to keep their demons a secret from the forces that would seek to destroy them, but beyond that their whole worldview is completely screwy (compared to most of us).

What are the demons? Alien space-creatures summoned down with arcano-mathmatical equations from the planets themselves? Cuthulu's ugly little runts half folded up in knotted spacetime? Ghosts of dead humans drawn by the metaphysical pull of their ascendant astrological planet then twisted by dark forces which swirl in the ether between worlds? Fragments of the mind drawn out with astrological association and given flesh through sacrifice of blood over meteor rock?

How is Sorcerery preformed? Huge building sized calcualtion engines churning out the mathmatical true names for eldrich horrors? Biogenicly grown host bodies connected to radio-scope recievers which draw alien souls to inhabit them? Arcane plotting of planatery alignments so as to locate natural dimensional rifts?

How does the nature of the demonic (1) tempt people to use it (2) offer more power than possible through mundane means (3) erode humanity?



Why is sorcery kept secret? What precisly about it will cause the population to rise up enmass and banish/burn? On the surface, a Sorcerer is just a guy with intresting friends and pets...unless he does something horrible with them. In the default Sorcerer there is a vague general rule of secrecy...the Demons like to keep a low profile (for some reason). How come? People love to air their personal sins openly- many of which would have gotten you burned or stoned in an earlier age. Why is being a sorcerer so much worse than being a "Prostitue and Loving It- on the next Jerry Springer"?

Perhaps 0 Humanity could represent an obsession with one of the planetary themes, to the almost total exclusion of any other areas of life?

Lon

BW--

"What are the demons?"--Yes. All of those.* At least, that's what they'll seem like. I'm loathe to nail down exactly what demons are before play, especially just me here by my l'il lonesome, with no Player input. I'd rather leave things somewhat vague, with a "this is what it looks like" & let things get filled in through play, rather than detailing everything out as some rich setting that the Players have to fit into somehow.

"How does sorcery work?"--I quite like the "Arcane plotting of planetary alignments so as to locate natural dimensional rifts". Stuff that bends your sanity. Puzzles, enigmas, conundrums, paradoxes. Non-Euclidean geometry, nonsensical language, obscure astrology...yeah, good stuff.

"Why is sorcery kept secret?"--Well, like I said, there are people (possibly secret groups) working to exploit sorcerers & demons, not willing to risk their own sanity but quite willing to risk others' to get what they want. And there are other folks who just want to banish all the demons & kill all the sorcerers. This stuff isn't just "kinda kinky", it's a direct assault on consensual reality & mainstream society. You're not marrying your cousin, you're dealing with hobgoblins & the ghost of your great-grandfather. (It's one thing for John Edwards--hey, that sounds kind of like "Ron Edwards"...coincidence?--to speak to the dead. It's another thing to summon them up & have them help you blackmail your business partner.) Plus, the demons push the sorcerers to keep it all secret--"It's all part of the Great War. If this planet falls, the whole 5th Sector will fall. And you don't want that to happen, trust me. If the Purple Empress gets control of this Intersection, bad things are gonna happen."

Edited in later: * Demons are all those things you said, plus, as I said in the first post, faeries, monsters, mythical beasts, etc. I'd lean closer to the more "traditional" faeries & such, but if a Player wanted to Summon some Lovecraftian weirdie, that would be cool, too.

Lon--

I'd rather leave the actual details of what happens when you hit Humanity 0 (beyond the vague "You go nuts") up in the air. But I love the idea of sorcerers getting obsessed with planetary symbology & associations. There would definitely need to be at least an NPC or two who are like that. ("Hm, hm. Yes. Mars is definitely ascendant right now. Can see it in the signs. Yes. War broke out yesterday in the Middle East. Yes, hm, definitely Mars.")

I'm going to riff a bit...your ideas got my mind ticking over...


What if your decaying humanity is actualy the veils being torn away? You begin to see the god awful truth behind all the mystic symbolism and goblygook "magic"- truths so self-anihilating they can't even be communicated, only experienced. Demons are just be most bare and vulgar surface ripple of the krakens moving just beneath the surface of reality, picking at the tender underbelly of our world with barbed tenticles of abstract mathmatics.

Project Sooth- a multinational black bag operation- actively hunts so called "Rogue Thaumapathic Agents" so as to study their paramathmatical insights (read: to lock them naked in glaringly white cells, implant electroes in their brains, and force them to sommon demons with measured doses of direct neural stimulation of pleasure- or pain- centers of the brain).

The Doomsday Book- an apocalyptic cult who records the names of all known sorcerers and seeks to enlis their aid in bringing about The Final Alignment.

Shiver Network- A loose association of sorcerers who watch out for each other, deal with out of control demons, and engage in blatant rumor-mongering; if it's known somewhere, it's in the Network...but trying to seperate the diamonds from the pig shit is nigh impossible.

Regulators- they Arn't From Here. When sorcery gets out of hand, they descend in their amorphous vessels and lay waste to everything- the Big Stick that keeps everyone in line.

The Beast- created to manage the finances of the EU in 1996, The Beast has grown in power and reach. No computer system connected to the Internet escapes access by The Beast. It lives in the gaps between neural firings, it breaths in data and exhales disinformation, it contacts and binds entire nations with rituals of finances and politics. It is sorcerer and demon and god.

BW--

Good stuff.

One thing I want to keep constant & consistent in the setting & game is that while it appears that there's this huge, epic occult conspiracy going on, & demons keep talking about some massive cosmic war that Earth is a major battlefield for--all of that may just be a lot of bosh. The demons may just be fucking with us, the sorcerers who talk about secret societies & covert organizations may just be bonkers.

I also want to avoid too much of "everybody's in on the secret conspiracy" with huge groups with lots of members who have regular meetings to discuss the hidden fate of the world. Most of the "secret societies" will be a couple of guys living in a basement apartment, printing their newsletter (which nobody reads) on an old Mac. The government agent actively pursuing the PCs? He's working alone, cos if you walk up to your supervisor & say, "Hey, sorcerers exist & we need to co-opt them for our own plans", they don't stick you in the basement with Fox Mulder, they can your ass.

In fact, in my mind, the whole "True History of the Planets" is just a pulp novel written by a schizophrenic Oxford grad student, & the PCs are just characters in the rambling novel.

But I LOVE the Shiver Network & the Doomsday Book.

What if "The True History of the Planets" IS a pulp novel in the game...that a core group of potential nutters have taken as divine scripture...they study its every passage, every nuance. They make it their necronomican bible. A cult of loonies firing off emails about the deep insights coded into a bad pulp scifi novel.

Baily,

I think that you just gave me my daily hallcinogen dose, and no flashbacks to boot. That's a heck of a Sorcerer setting you just dropped on us. Think I'm gonna go drink some malted beverage or other now.

1) I see everything from decanic icons to Grey aliens to gibbering, Lovecraftian monstrosities as potential demons in this game, and I LOVE the thought of throwing the Fae into the mix. Combining the imagery (alien abduction led by a weeping woman in blue robes astride a leopard, for instance, or a faery rade in which Greys thunder through the sky on huge, bell-bedecked white horses. That sort of thing)
No matter what, though, I'd like to see them alter the world with their passing. If you're going to have these things be from "beyond the veil," make sure the curtain stays askew when they move on.

2) I don't think there should be a book... at least, there shouldn't be ONE book.
Work it like the standard Blasphemous Tome. Have one person who's got a few pages reprinted in Black Mask Magazine, while another's got contradictory exerpts referred to in someone's unfinished book review. Myth and rumor will do neat, neat stuff, especially if there's no proof that the book actually exists.

3) I'd throw some oddly-complete organizations into the mix as well. If they're characters in a story, rewrites to adapt the story should show up as established groups that no one's ever heard of before. That's a bit odd, though, and can easily be ignored.

4) I like the pulp feel, as you well know, and hope that you hold on to it as much as possible. Whirring calculating engines fed the blood of virgins to perform Sinister Mathematics, hidden cults of fallen astrophysicists chanting paeans to the void following the Big Bang, jewelled zeppelins that breach the aether to enter hidden worlds... that sort of thing. That may be the way you want to deal with utter loss of humanity, actually. Throw the characters into that pulp reality and divorce them from baseline reality... I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be just as happy with a character that, upon reaching zero Humanity, leapt upon a passing autogyro and, cackling, hied hence to a mountain fastness to plot the universe's destruction as I would a character that did consistently well and walked the edge between the worlds.
It'd be sort of neat, as well, to make some loss a prerequisite to being able to access the other. Without a certain remove, one is stuck in the here and can't do the "there."

4) I like the demonic sham thing; I'd also like the possibiity that the demons are being played by something bigger and more ineffable than they.

Just rambling now...

Sean

The most important thing, for me, is that the setting remains as nothing more than a backdrop for the PCs' story. So...is there really a cosmic war going on? Are the other worlds, other planes of existence? Are there really secret societies manipulating events in the shadows?

I don't know & I don't care. It's all based on what comes out during play. All of this stuff is just fodder for the Players' narrative.

I also want to keep the setting fairly vague. Lots of cool names to drop, lots of neat little ideas--all just firing pins for the imagination. The actual details (who are the Whisper Twins? what does the Circle of Unbroken Light do? what is the Turquoise Encyclopedia?) should remain uncodified, waiting for the Players to do something with them (or ignore them, as they see fit).

I'm not sure, at this point, how "cliffhanger pulp" it'll actually be. I'm tempted to go the gonzo route (having just read Demon Cops) & pump things up a bit--throw bonus dice at the Players like candy as rewards for whizzbang, melodramatic action & drama. But then again, there's a part of me that wants to keep it more low-key. At any rate, it won't be too over the top. I doubt there will be jewelled zeppelins or calculation engines--I want the "space opera epic" stuff to be hinted at, but rarely, if ever, seen.

But then again...maybe...

... or don't, as is your prerogative. Any game without at least one jewelled airship, though, isn't living up to its full potential.
I think the machinae and gosh-wow can be left in the background, or put in as things whispered about in fragments of the book:
"I heard that, in the advertisement for "The True History of the Planets" in My Greenest Adventure issue 3, there's discussion of a calculating engine that can call down avatars of the zodiac if fed the blood of a newborn infant born during a particular sign. Interesting..."
It'd also be a good aspect of the "demonic sham" gambit. Have the demons mention that such and such an effort would be easier with some purified bluestone and a page from the Perfected Codices of Leng... you know, like in page 326 of "The True History of the Planets"!
I'd still like to see characters who lose all Humanity fully subsumed into the story. Who are the Whisper Twins? Sorcerers who've become entirely fictional. What's the Turquoise Lady's scheme? Check page 65 of "The True History of the Planets." Any game where you can play the Borges fictional invasion angle's got to be pretty cool.

Sean--

Yes! Yes! Yes! That quote ("I heard...") is exactly what I'm thinking of--most of this should be hearsay & rumor. Definitely Borgesian in that respect--"This sorcerer once told me about a text that details the conflict between the Green Imperium & the Reflective Hegemony in Parallel 99. But I haven't been able to find the book anywhere."

The cosmic war thing appeals greatly, partially because some of the characters will choose sides at some point. A group of crazed loners banding together under the banner of a Turquoise Lady or a Twelve-Jeweled Throne of Count Azimuth that may not exist makes for nice, nice imagery... especially if you've got a manipulative bastard who's willing to play sides against each other because he's pretty sure that it's all a sham.
I want in. I definitely, definitely want in.

What happens when you loose your Humanity? You become a Plot Device- literaly a servent of The Plot.

What the fuck is The Plot?

Prophecy, narrative, saga, tale, destiny- it is like a computer program coded into the very fabric of society and culture, mind and flesh. Millions have already sucumb to The Plot- their lives have become individualy meaningless, carrying only the significanc of the tiny fragment of The Plot which manifets in their daily lives.... "The True History...." well, this crumbly pulp nonsense is like The Plot's flowchart design paradime, you figure the thing out man, and you can figure out The Plot. It's like turning to the goddamn last page of the novel and figuring out who killed Major Tom and why. It's like reading the friggin mind of god, man. My buddy Koravox here, he clued me in, he turned me onto The Plot. His kind, they came before The Plot got written, his kind are older than humanity man, older than concepts like Story. Hell, he can't even tell the difference in fiction and fact- but I sure as shit can- and let me tell you chicky-baby, when we turn that last page and The Plot plays out, I sure as shit ain't gonna be here anymore man, no way in hell I'm gonna be stuck here with you goddamn bit players and supporting characters, no way man I'm outside The Plot, I'm a rogue element, I'm like a damn bookworm eating away at the binding to this whole sham. When I figure out "The True History..." I'm writing my own Plot. I'll be the Author. I'll be the god. .....right koravox? Like you said. I'll be the god.

BW--

Much like Lon's idea of zero Humanity sorcerers getting locked into the symbology of one planet, I think that Plot idea is really cool.

However...

The only real problem I have with it is that it wants to make the "True History" setting (the Sorcerer setting, not the possible pulp novel existing within the game setting) be a coherent narrative, & I'm feeling pomo enough to not want this to be the case. The initial idea I had was sort of a satire of (or nose-thumbing at) White Wolf's World of Darkness. The idea is that it seems that there's a hidden conspiracy, a supernatural world in which battlelines are being drawn & sides have to be taken--but this may or may not be the case. It appears that there's an underlying narrative to the world, & sorcerers are in on the secret narrative--but this may or may not be true. I don't want there to be a coherent, linear narrative underlying everything. In fact, whether it's there or not is essentially unimportant, except as it relates to the story of the PCs. (While The Matrix seems postmodernist, with it's flashy special effects & "reality is a lie" story, it's really not pomo at all, because the narrative lie that is reality is just a mask for the real narrative. The Matrix is splashy, old-fashioned gnosticism, fairly reactionary in its own way.) And like I said with Lon, I'm not comfortable declaring exactly what happens when your Humanity reaches zero, beyond the vague "you go nuts". When I run "The True History", there will be NPCs who are completely focused on astrological symbology & associations. And there will be other NPCs who believe they're part of an epic Plot that can be deciphered by decoding a pulp fantasy novel. But really, they're just nuts (or maybe they aren't--nobody really knows for sure, not even the GM).

Now, this is my take on the matter. If anyone wants to take my basic ramblings & go off on their own riff, feel free. (Although I'll be a wee bit peeved if you end up writing a mini-supplement using it, because at this point, I'm thinking that's what I'm going to do.)

Hey Josh,

IN that rambling thing about The Plot the uncertainity is exactly what i was trying to grap- this is just one lone guy, chain smoking and cursing at fire hydrants, convinced that there is a Grand Plan and its shitty and evil.

I could see another, drug addled ex-hippie college professor who teaches long rambling seminars on astrological symbolism and pop-culture...but all his pop-culture references are 30 years out of date, and his lectures are full or random quotes and references, but he has Tenure (his demon- it exists as a state of beuracratic systems which ensure his continued employment no matter how random and crazy he gets).

Or a lonely 8 year old who scribbles pictures based on stories his Uncle tells him (his uncle is of course a bug-nuts crazy sorcerer). The pictures are alive, but only if no one is looking. And his Crayons have color names like "Blackness of ther Void", "Sacrificial Blood", "Venus Envy Green", "Book Blue", "Chrisis of Purple".

Agent Veldt works for the FBI...or maby the CIA...or perhaps the NSA. He's never quite sure. His Contact always varies- a random man on the street, a message coded into the newspaper, people on the TV speaking his name- but his assignments are invariably weird and disturbing. Recently, he acquired a partner- Mr. Ghuile- an odd fellow who never takes off his shades. He obeys Agent Veldt's instructions (Veldt has seiniority), and deals with the increasingly violent natutre of Veldt's assignments- wet work, kidnapping, interogation, intimidation. Agent Veldt handles the people side of things, Mr. Ghuile the nasty side of things.

Ah, gotcha. Okay, good stuff, Wolfie. I like it.