Bret, Christine and I are all buddies who don't game together.  Realizing this was silly, we got together to game.  We agreed that we wanted a finite game, 3 session and then we are done and if we want to continue, we can evaluate at that point.  We are all kind of in these odd places in our lives, getting ready to move, and go to new jobs or graduate school or whatever and we all wanted to get a good game or two in before real life swept us all hither and yon.

We agreed over some painless e-mails (agreeing on which game to play can be a real pain in the ass) to play Sorcerer, specifically this untested rough draft of a setting, Sorcerer 2289: Xeno-Demons in the Science Fiction Solar System:  http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc3jjkgb_60fk6m6mcs

I tossed together a one-sheet, with art from concept ships and IO9.com and text from the google doc to make a one-sheet.

http://io9.com/5472264/when-space-opera-becomes-art/gallery/
http://conceptships.blogspot.com/

One-sheet text:

Xeno-tech Demons in a Science Fiction Solar System

Towards the end of the 22nd century, the solar system is rapidly becoming colonized by nation-states, corporate entities and refugees from earth. Probes have been sent into the void beyond Pluto and Charon; data is transmitted from the deep black. Some settlers have even found xenological remnants in the solar system itself, evidence that something had bathed in the light of sol before us. Something else is out there.

Human space travel is slow and tedious. When one travels to another planet, it is akin to someone in the 16th century venturing to the New World via wind and sea. Even using gravity to sling-shot a ship at speeds thought impossible a century earlier, it is still a harrowing 5 month space journey from Earth to Pluto.

Sorcerers are people who will change the course of human history; they have uncovered a piece of alien technology and are seeking to make sense of it. This xeno-tech artifact is their Demon.

Demons are pieces of alien-tech, be it a suit of some kind of armor, a psychological process for training alien brains or a ship from beyond Charon. There is nothing magical about them, though they are fell and they do not belong here.

When Humanity hits 0, your character becomes a cautionary tale, their technology overcoming them. Even worse, their Demon goes out to affect the world in a terrible way, decided by the GM. If the player's Humanity hits 10, they become a paragon, transcending their human shell. Their tech (or their ideas go on to change the world if they have no Demons) goes on to revolutionize the human worlds and make it a better place in a way decided by the player.

Humanity is empathy with other beings.

And I realized my own face was soaked in tears, my eyes filled with them. I could feel the weeping in my swollen throat, the same ache that the songspires had reflected back, not from the ship, I knew suddenly, but from her millennia-departed crew. The knife running through me was the grief of the Martians, an alien pain stored here in ways that made no sense outside folktales around a campfire out on Mitcham's Point, a frozen unhuman hurt in my chest and the pit of my stomach that would not be dismissed, and not-quite-tuned note in my ears that I knew when it got here would crack me like a raw egg.
- Broken Angels, Richard K. Morgan

Judd wrote:
I could tell that after making our characters that we were all a bit cooked, so they wrote down vague names and places on the back of their character sheet (that holiest and most under-rated of Sorcerer prep spots) and we went back and forth a bit over e-mail, which helped to flesh it all out.

I liked that process of e-mailing back and forth, it helped bring out the people and places on the back of the sheet and allowed us all to marinate on things for a while.

Basanti Pathak - young scavenger

Li Fai - saloon owner that is front for underground medical office

Cactus Smith - bitter brother of dead patient

Zhang Park and Zhang Mei - disappointed parents

Zhao Qi - sister

Rahul Sharma - medical teacher

Forever Johnson - colleague and rival

Demon Mentor (internet friend)

Online/Forum Community

Spouse Name:

CEO Victoria Hsu

Junior Lab Researcher Name:

Office w/mini-studio Apartment

Personally Supervised Lab

PDA type thing, always on

Name of town near crash site:

Demon Mentor (internet friend)
Could this maybe be an alien cultist who you talked to online, maybe someone who helped you with your first days of being bound to your demon?

Online/Forum Community
What kind of forum?  Tracking alien artifacts?  Something about uncovering information?

Spouse Name:
Was an arranged marriage, maybe by the corporation or your family?  Was it twue wuv?

CEO Victoria Hsu
I like her already.  Not sure why but I do.

Junior Lab Researcher Name:
Do they look up to you as a mentor?

Office w/mini-studio Apartment
I like what it says about the corporate culture that you have an apartment attached to your office.

Lab (personally super-used)
She's a lab-rat.  Nice.

PDA type thing, always on
Is it a hologram all around you or something more like the PDA's as we know it?

Name of town near crash site:
I will look up some Martian geography and suggest some good names if ya want.

I feel like I stole the idea for my demon somewhere. The demon itself is a byproduct of alien tech rather than the tech itself. Zhang discovered a device that aliens used to create neural backups and memory mapping. His demon is the copy of himself that he made with it, except it's wrong and strange because the device was not designed for human neurobiology. His Telltale is related in that he occasionally will repeat a word in a sentence. The Demon's Need is for Rhong to tell it a story about his life.

This is a really strange game with people who are at this odd transition in their lives.  We're all moving in the next few months and this will likely get to be the last time we get to game together (and for some of us, its the first time we are gaming together).  All in all, it was a normal Sorcerer first session.  It is the first of three sessions we agreed on when deciding to play, so I eased back on the bangs, didn't jump to the big ones and let things simmer.

Bret and I had a strange disjointed couple of minutes and it was interesting that he said that it was something we had gone through before, but I will leave room for him to post about it.  It boiled down to me taking his kicker in a direction that he had no anticipated.  He thought it was going to be more of a mystery that his character would have to solve and rather than that, I kind of made it something his Demon was doing through its power to Spawn.  There was some kicker-vertigo to deal with, there.

I really liked how Bret's character dealt with the dead getting up and walking, which was to flat-out freak out.

I almost want a table to check off for when Demon's Needs are denied and when they are fed.  There was a nice moment when Christine's R&D exec shooed her demonic martian ravens away from her boss' computer that I really liked.

It was a solid first game, rolled some dice, and fed some Demonic Needs, denied some Demonic Needs.

The next game should get Christine's character hip deep in contact with other Sorcerers and with Bret's Contact -> Summoning -> Binding of an alien intelligence.

We are in second and third gears and next week I hope we start revving up to 4th.

Yeah I totally ground to a halt. I had set up the Kicker, that the corpses in his lab were getting up and walking around and doing things, with the idea that it would be a mystery and the who and the why would be something I had to chase down. Having it be Copy was cool and I liked how it worked out, but that meant the Kicker resolved immediately. Copy was making corpses do things, I stopped him, and then the rest of the game was, "Well, okay, now what?" I ended up sputtering because one hour into the session, my character just hadn't developed enough for me to have clear goals yet for him to pursue. So I think really what caused me to stumble wasn't that the Kicker went in a direction I didn't anticipate but that it was over so fast and then there was a lot of, "Okay, now what do you do?" that I just wasn't prepared for. Before next session I think I need a new Kicker.

As for the disjointedness happening before, I think the best example was the Houses of the Blooded game you ran awhile back. Really, though, I think it's a conversation better had offline.

Bret,

I really thought that the mysteries solved were out-weighed by the mysteries that were suddenly  kicked wide open.

We know why the corpses are making something and who is doing it but where exactly is the information going and to what purpose?

Let's start the game with some sorcery and see how it goes.  I feel like we are still on the same kicker but if you aren't feeling it, we'll figure out something.

There is an interesting thing when players are going back and forth, not directly involved in each other's scenes.  The players kind of watch what is happening, digesting it all and form opinions about what is going on.  Once they are unleashed into each other's environments, there is a kind of release.

Christine's R&D scientist, Vera, is given sway over a lab with a little boy who has an alien artifact just like her's.  His is a synthetic vulture.  Through experimenting with his demon, she is kinda experiment with her own, asking questions she hasn't fully asked about herself, maybe.  Also, the boy's demon is in a state of outright rebellion and has, in its own non-verbal alien-synthetic-vulture way asked that Vera take over the binding.

Christine is skeeved out by vultures, as am I, which is good.  The fact that they are creepy-looking birds is why I chose it as the boy's demon, that and keeping with the bird motif for certain alien tech.

Bret's character, Dr. Rong, is obsessed with using the alien tech to invent something that will allow humans to map their consciousness and imprint that on other shells (like a clone, for example).  Funny he chose that, because it is exactly the tech that largely defines the Takeshi Kovacs books by Richard K. Morgan, the books that inspired this setting.  I don't believe Bret has read them yet, just a funny coincidence.

Through a series of demon-less rolls, he does it...but now what?

Once he applies for a patent, the government folks roll in, bring him to the R&D facility where Vera works.

Bret failed a summoning roll after a successful contact.  He wanted to imprint an alien technologist over his mind but failed the roll and got a vicious demolisher.  He anted a Maker but failed the roll and got a nasty Destroyer.  I felt like a bit of an asshole GM but the game kept flowing, despite the failure.

I asked Christine to make a Humanity roll when, after interacting with the little boy, kept locked up in an R&D lab, she had dinner with her lab assistant.  She mused for a moment on the poor boy's plight and then launched into the exciting scientific possibilities.

Both characters have succeeded in all of their Humanity rolls, meaning that this third and last game will most likely have no alien first contact.  That is fine with me, I think there's more than enough to deal with without the aliens showing up and I rather like them being in the background, mysterious and unknown.

Once the two PC's got in the same room, I really liked their interactions.  I could feel the game shift up a gear at that point.

Next game starts with Dr. Rong being hired by the facility and Vera being asked to finish up her work with the boy and his demon so that she could be given a promotion to the scientists who have an overview of all of the alien tech in the building.

There have been some neat rolls to see who knows who is a Sorcerer, Lore vs. Humanity and who knows what about whom has tipped the balance of play in cool ways.  The Facility Director, Khaza, knows that Dr. Rong is a Sorcerer but still does not know that Vera is and they both know that she is, either through rolls or through hearing directly from NPC's.

By the end of this session, I was reluctant to let it end. Having Rong interacting with Vera was cool, and being introduced to this huge research complex full of things for him to examine and form theories about and come up with ideas for new creations will be great. I felt like there was a lot of "okay, now what do you do?" and I needed more in the setting for him to interact with and react to since I was floundering at points.

The demon summoning wasn't a big deal. I mean, yeah it ended up being a dead end but whatever, I failed the roll and he still had a choice. I think what turned it from an "Oh, crap," choice into a dead end wasn't just the fact that it was a destroyer, but it was both a destroyer AND it did not have the ability that Rong had summoned it for in the first place. If it had been a destroyer and still had what Rong needed, it would have left Rong with a much more difficult decision.

Bret wrote:
By the end of this session, I was reluctant to let it end. Having Rong interacting with Vera was cool, and being introduced to this huge research complex full of things for him to examine and form theories about and come up with ideas for new creations will be great. I felt like there was a lot of "okay, now what do you do?" and I needed more in the setting for him to interact with and react to since I was floundering at points.

Bret wrote: The demon summoning wasn't a big deal. I mean, yeah it ended up being a dead end but whatever, I failed the roll and he still had a choice. I think what turned it from an "Oh, crap," choice into a dead end wasn't just the fact that it was a destroyer, but it was both a destroyer AND it did not have the ability that Rong had summoned it for in the first place. If it had been a destroyer and still had what Rong needed, it would have left Rong with a much more difficult decision.

Hi there,

Regarding Kickers, I think some of my comments in [Sorcerer]Sorcerers in Casablanca - AP may be helpful here:

"Resolving the Kicker" does not mean merely dusting it up with whatever immediate threat hopped into the character's field of vision.

Ninjas attack! I escape out the window.
My dog dies mysteriously! I bury him.
My wife has returned from the dead! I get her to sign the divorce papers (finally) and walk out the door.

All of these conduct a conflict with the most immediate elements of the Kicker. None of them resolve it, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, I think I am not coming in with enough prep of my own as far as what Rong wants to accomplish. After the last session, though, I think I have a lot more direction. The game has been kind of like the Flintstones operating cars - the first session was the feet kind of scrabbling on the ground and the second session we took off like a shot.

And as far as the Kicker, I see now it was a part of a larger picture that hadn't been revealed yet. After the first session, more mysteries had been revealed, sure, but they were threats that Rong was not going to pursue unless there was pressure on him to do so. He knew that Copy was putting together an apparatus to contact the aliens, he knew that was a bad idea, so he stopped Copy. That seemed kind of like the end, but I'm seeing now that there is some larger agenda that all the demons are a part of and it involves the aliens. So yeah, Kicker is not resolved.

Bret wrote: He knew that Copy was putting together an apparatus to contact the aliens, he knew that was a bad idea, so he stopped Copy.

Ron and Roger,

I think there was some tentative playing on all of our parts, in that the players didn't seek out the folks on the back of their sheet until I put them into play and I didn't push hard enough, in general.  I think folks weren't as aggressive as they could have been.  I'm going to blame most of it on the fact that this is the first game we have all played together and we are getting used to each other a bit.

The end of the second session felt like a big step up in energy and I think the third session a week from today will be spot-on.

Thanks,

Judd

First sessions in Sorcerer are almost always like this, often with a weird, underlying sense of incipient excitement that I can only describe as non-cinematic. In other words, low on spectacle, high on something else.

I also like the Flintstones car analogy.

Best, Ron

Roger - he became more of an Egrian protagonist in the second session. He cured death, put himself in a new body, has been trying to give this technology to hospitals that can use it while avoiding corporations and the government, and become a much nicer person than I thought he would be, and I think the way the Kickers are playing out he'll have more of a pivotal role.

Judd - at least for me, I just never saw any reason to seek out the people on my sheet with the exception Basanti who I introduced when I was looking for more alien tech. I mean, I could have if I wanted to do some soft roleplay but as a player and as a GM I often find soft roleplay to be boring unless it's a break in some high-tension or once we've gotten the game rolling and I have some things to say. For example, I was going to instigate some scenes with NPCs (in particular Rong's parents) after the immortality rolls, but then Khaza showed up.

Basically, I see from hereon out if we were to continue playing across many many sessions I would have no problem aggressively seeking out NPCs and goals. That first session I was still trying on a new character and figuring out what he wanted, and I didn't really know until halfway through this last session.

Judd wrote:
There is an interesting thing when players are going back and forth, not directly involved in each other's scenes.  The players kind of watch what is happening, digesting it all and form opinions about what is going on.  Once they are unleashed into each other's environments, there is a kind of release.

Good questions, Dave.

When I start up Dictionary of Mu games at cons, the characters start off all over the globe of Marr'd.  I inform the players that if they want to get into a scene with one another (and they don't have to) that they need to play towards one another and get there.  So, the Khan of Khans announces that he is marching the horde towards Mu's Bed, right after the player watches a scene in which the Witch-King inspects the city's outer-rim defenses.  The characters don't know but the players do and I ask them to use that kind of information to play towards one another.

In this game, the weaving (I think that is the term from Sex & Sorcery, yes?) has been a bit more subtle but I noticed that as soon as Bret's character got into that lab, Bret perked up. Part of this was that his character had all of these new toys to interact with but also, I think, Bret had been watching Christine's play actively and had ideas on how to deal with various elements, even if he wasn't consciously doing it, he was mulling it over.

I am not going to speak for Bret or Christine but I know I do that when I play, watch the fiction go down and get myself pumped to interact with what I see going on around me.

Does that make sense?

More questions are welcome.

Ah, gotcha.  So it's more a matter of the players, rather than the GM, throwing their characters into the settings they want.  And there's presumably some social expectation that the GM will facilitate this rather than block it. 

So when I'm watching Bret in the lab, if I go, "Ohh, now I want to play with those toys!", I can plan on saying, for my next scene, "I want to start in the lab, I have some great ideas for that place!" and knowing that you (Judd) will say, "Okay, there you are!" (after perhaps establishing a few hows and whys).

I'm assuming also that you trust that I plan to do something story-relevant with those toys, rather than just, y'know, poke them and say "cool".  If this trust hasn't yet been established, you might ask me, "Whatchya gonna do in the toy room?" before assenting.

Am I getting this right?

It's interesting: I think "keep an eye on settings you might milk" would grab my interest in a completely different way than "keep an eye on if you want to play toward other characters" would.

I'd say it is more subtle than that, Dave.

There has to be a part of the game where the players enjoy watching each other play too.  That is key, rather than just waiting with baited breath to have something to say in someone else's spot.

If your buddies don't want to play these kinds of games, I'm not sure just re-wording how they work is going to help.

Hello,

David, ordinarily I wouldn't be so didactic as I'm about to be, but this is concerning Sorcerer after all. Also, my experience of generating and writing the rules makes me especially sympathetic to what you're saying, as I hope to illustrate.

You wrote,

I'm assuming also that you trust that I plan to do something story-relevant with those toys, rather than just, y'know, poke them and say "cool".  If this trust hasn't yet been established, you might ask me, "Whatchya gonna do in the toy room?" before assenting.

Judd,

It's tough for me to tell whether this play style really isn't something my buddies would ever like, or whether there's just a period of transition that I might be able to help smooth over.  We only have so many RPG opportunities, so no one wants to play something un-fun... so the more I can pitch how it might be fun, the better the chance they'll give it a shot.  But yeah, I see how gearing up for "my turn" is way less functional than digging "your turn" for its own sake.

Ron,

Cool, thanks for the backstory.  I suspect I may be employing a lot of the same writing habits that you had to weed out of your early drafts.  In my head, I wasn't actually thinking, "GM Judd decides if Player Bret's contribution is permissible," I was more thinking that the guy who bought the book and is teaching the game to a noob* is trying to impart some Story Now mindset.

(I'm used to doing this for most games I introduce; I'm not claiming that it's inherently an issue for Sorcerer.)

Anyway, I totally hear you: if I was sitting down to play Sorcerer, as either player or GM, I wouldn't want any anticipatory content-wrangling either.

Ps,
-Dave

* noob to Sorcerer, but perhaps veteran of AD&D2 / Call of Cthulhu / Marvel Superheroes