Anyone who's been reading my Whe the GM Say "Better Watch Out..." threads on Actual Play already know what's my deal. Those who haven't, suffice it to say that I'm disatisfied with my groups' style of play and I've finally decided to see about running Sorcerer from them to see what happens, which may or may not result in me leaving the group anyway, but at least I'll have tried.

Anyway, links to helpful threads for first time GMs and how to run and any other advice would be appreciated. (I'll dig a bit myself when I find time)

I'm considering coming up with my own world idea based on U.S. Prohibition circa the 1920's. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but, heck, I started with the title Bathtub Djinn which is too clever for my own good. It kind of fits since both Djinns and booze tend to come in bottles and booze is refered to as "spirits." But then, being new to the whole thing, is coming up with this sort of thing wise? Advice of whether or not to do it as well as ideas on how to develop it (maybe some good prohibition-era movies) would also be appreciated.

Hi Jack,

Some immediate thoughts:

* Unless you're crew is already excited about the prohibition era, I'd watch out. Make sure it's something everybody wants to play.

* Don't get married to the Demons in a Bottle thing. Remember that every player gets a great deal of input on their demon. That's part of the fun, and it's vital to getting that Authorship energy flowing.

Other than that, it sounds just fine. I mean... Why not? Sorcerer works great in lots of settings. The trick is not to get excited about where you think the game is going. Cause it won't, and shouldn't.

Take care and good luck,
Christopher

Hi Christopher

Good points. I'll have to think about the prohibition idea a bit, but it may be a good idea to do it anyway just to drive home the fact that Sorcerer is different and thus they need to play different. I mean I think it's be a good idea to keep them off familar footing such as Sorcerer & Sword because then they'd just fall into old habbits again, or at least try to.

That said, I don't think I like prohibition-era all that much so I'll have to give it some thought.

I'm not married to the demon in a bottle idea any more than I'm married to the prohibition era in general. I may make it that only certain kinds are in bottle. I don't know. Maybe some of the members of this group need something that structured to get them going. Maybe not. More thought needed.

I wonder if you could use Dust Devils for this setting...

...swapping Devil for Djinn... etc...

20's Prohibition could have a fair amount of things in common characterwise with gritty westerns...

Bob McNamee

"Bathtub Djinn" rocks as a title. I love it.

Jack, without presuming not to be talking completely out of my ass, let me suggest you should run something you REALLY dig, not start by trying to reverse-engineer a setting by psychoanalyzing your players. If you find something you think is cool, something that excites you but has hooks for other players to grab onto and take ownership, you're golden. Particularly if you're trying something new and radical like Sorcerer, take an angle that spins your whizzer, you know? Have FUN with it.

If Prohibition doesn't rock your flotilla, don't do it. Instead, make a list of your favorite tropes and build from there.

Best,

Blake

Hey, Blake.

Yeah. I like the title, too. :)

Good advice. I'll have to give a bit more thought on what I'm into I guess. and with luck, the players will get into it as well.

Side question: what is the origin of this usage of the word "trope?" m-w.com says:
1 : a word or expression used in a figurative sense : FIGURE OF SPEECH
2 : a phrase or verse added as an embellishment or interpolation to the sung parts of the Mass in the Middle Ages
The usage here, and I've seen it other places as well, is usually trappings or conventions, as in "genre conventions" hence "genre tropes."

Just wondering.

I second that the title Bathtub Djinn rocks. So instead of worrying about the players' demons being bottle related why not make their nemesis either be or be in control of a demon in a bottle. Seems like a natural match for some less than well meaning bootlegger. Perhaps a bootlegger of some sorcerous skill that uses demons that hide in his bootleg liquor to possess people and use them for his own diabolical ends.

Anyway, you get the idea. Hope your game goes well Jack.

-Chris

Wel you cold blow the lid off things... Overt Sorcery was discussed a while back... how about a permutation on it...

What if...

Instead of booze, what if Prohabition was a national crackdown on Sorcery, eh? Here is a cut-n-paste crib-n-edit (from this site: http://prohibition.history.ohio-state.edu/whyprohibition.htm)


The prohibition movement's strength grew, especially after the formation of the Anti-Sorcery League in 1893. The League, and other organizations that supported prohibition such as the Woman's Christian Witchhunting Union, soon began to succeed in enacting local prohibition laws. Eventually the prohibition campaign was a national effort.
During this time, the Summoning industry was the most prosperous of the Sorcerous industries. Because of the competitive nature of Summoning, the sommoners entered the retail business. Americans called retail businesses selling Demons and Demonic Services by the call Hot-houses. To expand the sale of demonics, Summoners expanded the number of hot-houses. Hot-houses proliferated. It was not uncommon to find one for every 150 or 200 Americans, including those who did not call upon dark powers. Hard-pressed to earn profits, demonkeepers sometimes introduced vices such as gambling and prostitution into their establishments in an attempt to earn profits. Many Americans considered Hothouses offensive, noxious institutions.


Just a lark.


But playing a crew of eliet G-men using the powers of Darkness to defend the American way (such as it was) or a desperate Hell-legger running bottled demons from Canada to Chicago while your partner- a squat scaled cigar chewing fiend- rides with a tommy gun in his lap...

It's a pretty freakin' cool idea. I'm thinking it's crying out for serious use of the pacting rules from Sorcerer & Sword. I picture a wealthy and influential elite with a cellar full of bottles, each a pacted demon keeping a rival in line or contributing to the strength of some corporate venture. Of course, it's only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose and the whole economy crashes...

Paul

All this sounds very cool. Whatever happens, I wish you luck and fun - its sounds awesome.

Hi Jack,

I'm flattered that you're considering Sorcerer - no matter what, even if you go with another game entirely, I'm going to benefit from your thoughts about it. Here are some of my responses to the thread ...

1) Jack, the next step is just jammin' with the players. Tell'em exactly what you told us in the first post, describe the game to them (and let them look at and read the book, very important), and see what they come up with. I think that response will do most of the work.

2) The term "motif" meaning repeated phrase or image comes from fine arts, mainly music. The first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony are a motif. I'm pretty sure people are using "trope" more or less as a synonym for motif; this may or may not be a terminological abomination, I dunno.

3) Benjamin! You are an astounding font of quick & cool Sorcerer interpretations. If I could only arm-lock you and noogie you until one of them got down on paper, in full, as a mini-supplement ...

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: 1) Jack, the next step is just jammin' with the players. Tell'em exactly what you told us in the first post, describe the game to them (and let them look at and read the book, very important), and see what they come up with. I think that response will do most of the work.

Hey,

She looked at me, with some bovine perspiration on her upper lip area, and said,
"Just get me wasted and you're halfway there, 'cause if my mind's tore up, then my body don't care,"
I rubbed my chinny-chin-chin, and said, "My my my, what sort of thing could this lady get high upon ..."

Heh. I'm a bad man.

OK, then, handouts might do the job too. On the other hand, I think the Sorcerer text has a kind of up-front "smack" effect on the reader that might be just right for Ted. I've seen people try to break the system before, and they always fail ...

Best,
Ron

Hey Jack,

Ron's correct. I use "trope" as a fancy way of saying "metaphor," "literary archetype," or "motif." My writer's group uses trope a lot in this wise, and I've picked it up as a figure of speech.

My bad for confusing things.

Best,

Blake

Har! Thanks Ron... but the brain just won't sit still.

I've never had an issue with the Sorcerer mechanics... they always seem to enforce the right mood, reward the right style of play, and withstand quite a lot of wheel-kicking. I think your players will find the best way to squeeze a little extra mechanical juice out of their characters is to really play the hell out of them. In Champs you teach players to squeeze those points until they scream... not so in Sorc.

Its taken me a while to get my head around Sorcerer... it neatly sidesteps many typical RPG problems by redefining what's importiant... game design Tia Chi. Sorcerer ballances in play.

That said, I'd like to hear more about your game concepts... how are your defining Humanity, how do the sorcery rituals work/manifest, and what is the premise(s) you are considering?

With the setting you are considering... I think you have the oportunity to tie Vice strongly into your sorcery... Prohabition was a time of mass transgression, when the greatest thrills came from persuing the illegal and the amoral... gambling, drinking, whoring, homicide for fun and profit... a school of sorcerers who's rituals all revolve around gambling games...and who's demons manifest as lucky charms, dames, decks of cards, or that tickling feeling at the back of your neck you get just before the wheel stops turning when you KNOW your number is up...

Hey, Blake

Not a problem. It's just that fairly recently I had started seeing that word being used and I started using it myself without really thinking about it. Much like how I bought Vanilla Coke because it seemed "in" in spite of the fact I really don't like it. Which is odd because I like Vanilla and I like Coke. Just not together, I guess.

Anyway, I was say "trope" all the time and suddenly I had a Princess Bride flash:
You keep saying that. I no think it means what you think it means.
And, shucks, if I didn't look it up and find that out to be so. But that's no big deal. Language is a living thing. It grows and changes over time. If it didn't, we wouldn't have contractions and be saying "for sooth" a lot more often than be do.

Bailywolf wrote: I've never had an issue with the Sorcerer mechanics... they always seem to enforce the right mood, reward the right style of play, and withstand quite a lot of wheel-kicking. I think your players will find the best way to squeeze a little extra mechanical juice out of their characters is to really play the hell out of them. In Champs you teach players to squeeze those points until they scream... not so in Sorc.

That said, I'd like to hear more about your game concepts... how are your defining Humanity, how do the sorcery rituals work/manifest, and what is the premise(s) you are considering?

On the whole Trope subject, it does get overused, but it does have a jargon use in language not expressed well in most dictionary definitions. IOW, it expands on that first definition that Jack found. It means any common figurative use of speech. Thus, a metaphor used frequently is a Trope, for example, as well as all sorts of other figurative language.

So, Blake's use is not too far off the mark. Especially when refering to Sorcerer. He's saying that your use of the Bottle/Demon metaphor is the sort of Trope that you you need to consider for inclusion into your game. Or that's how I read it.

Mike

OK, trope talk aside, I've been giving some thought to what I'll actually be running. I figure I'll go basic, modern day, all that stuff. I may set in in Chicago because setting it around here will give one player (Ted) an advantage over the GM since he's in sales in the area. Last thing I need is a lesson in local geography.

I figure I'll start with the PCs being childhood friends who are now all grown up. Some of them may have stayed in touch, some of them may not have seen the others in a decade or two. The idea here is to give the PCs a ready-made relationship but it is extremely flexible. It may be nice to see your old friend from fifth grade but would you loan him fifty bucks?

One thing I definately wish to stress is why these characters have a demon. I plan to put this on my player's handout: Why do you have a demon? People don't summon them up for shits and giggles. You have a reason for summoning an unatural creature into reality and binding it to your person. Why would you do such a thing?

Most of the plot will come out after the PCs are actually created, but I'm toying with villian ideas. I figure a cabal of some kind with some sort of evil sorcerer who's out to get at least one of the PCs for one reason or another. This is sort of the Cobra to their GI Joes and with any luck it will either 1) work or 2) fade into the background as other antagonists prove to be more interesting.

This is what I've got so far.

One thing you might want to do is ensure there are no "incidental demons" or "accidental sorcerers". The Naive sorcerer who "found" some object demon but doesn't really know what it is is a HUGE cop out in Sorcerer. Its actually a cool concept for veteran Sorcerer players to use, but in the 3 games I've run (with different characters each time) there were 4 of these Naive sorcerers and what they REALLY were was just a way for the players to not have to committ to anything and make the GM drive everything.

Your idea for making them give a reason for why they have a demon is fantastic (I'm definitely stealing it if I run Sorcerer again). I'd go a step further with it and make sure they have a reason for "why they knowingly and intentionally summoned" the demoned.

Valamir wrote: Your idea for making them give a reason for why they have a demon is fantastic (I'm definitely stealing it if I run Sorcerer again).

My potential game has taken an odd turn. BTW I'll probably keep posting updates to this in this thread until I actually run a session, which'll go in actual play or something really really significant happens, like I post in Actual Play, in which case it ceases to be a potential game and becomes actual.

Anyway, it turns out that someone my wife works with and her husband are roleplayers. I really don't know a whole heck of a lot about them. D&D has been mentioned, so they're probably gamist/dungeon crawlers.

However, with them & my wife, that's only three players, a much smaller group, and the recommended size in the rulebook. Because of this, it'd probably be better to run with these people simply because there are less players (thus less demons, at first anyway) and because I don't have long-standing issues with them the way I have issues with "Ted."

My wifes co-worker, we'll call her "Katie" because that's her name (getting tired of calling "Ted" Ted. How about a round of applause for that?), has been bugging the wife that the four of us should hang out together anyway.

Well, we'll see how that pans out. I'd also like to try to run a mini-session with the wife as well just to break that little barrier.

I did mention an interesting in running a game called Sorcerer to two of the players when we drove them home last night. There was little by way of interest of even curiosity expressed. One guy responded "So you fight demons in the game?" and the other, mostly in response to the fact that we'll be playing my friend's homebrewed game for a while in the near future "I'd like to play D&D." Man alive! This is a hard sell, like Fight Club. I didn't see the movie in the theatres because the trailers just didn't sell me. It's one of those movies where your interest in it can only come from watching it. Or so it seems to me.

I will also note that reading the book for the purpose of actually playing it vs. reading it just to read yet another game book is worlds apart. I'm "getting" how the game functions a little better than I did the first time I read it, and I don't thing it has anything to do with this being a second readthrough. So how about them apples?

OK, here's the story. The wife has off tomorrow and she said she'd play Sorcerer with me for a little bit if I did the dishes. I've got 'em soaking in the bathtub now so I'll hold her to her word. Heh heh heh.

Any, we'll spend time creating her character first, but I got a base concept from her the other day.

Her character summoned a demon for protection because of her uncle who is after the family fortune. SHe is somewhat shy around people and prefers the company of animals. I think she also mentioned owning a pet store.

That's about all I've got from her. I can flesh this out that her parents were killed when she was yound and she and her brother were raised by their uncle. Recently her brother died and she suspects her uncle. So she's got the vengence thing going on as well.

So, somewhere in this mess is the Kicker. I'll probably start with her Summoning her demon and then going off to, do whatever she'll do. Kill her uncle? Do detective stuff to prove he did it?

However that resolves itself, she find a clue that tells her that a mysterious underground organisation is involved with her brother's murder which takes her to Chicago where her childhood friends, ie the other as-yet undecided players are.

Now, my question is: Am I doing too much? Part of the idea of running Sorcerer is to try to get a taste of Narrativist play. Am I just railroading her or what? How about the rest of it? Shy really isn't in the sorcerer's vocabulary, is it? or can it?

In a scary bit of syncronicity, I got the Buffy RPG the other day and I asked my wife, who has expressed active distaste for the idea of role-playing in the past, if she would be willing to play. To my complete surprise, she said, maybe. While we were vacationing in Maine, she went so far as to sketch out her character: name, occupation, home, family, looks, background, dependents. All the "role" playing details of a character except the stats, which I can do for her. She even wrote them down for me when we got home.

All in all, it was amazing, given that gettings these sort of detail out of many member of my usual gaming group is like pulling very deeply rooted teeth.

I have no idea if I'm brave enough to actually run anything for my wife, but if I do, I'll use the Sorcerer mechanics.

Anyway, keep us posted Jack. I'm curious how it works out for you.

Ideas keep coming, it seems.

First off, the recent NY Lottery thing on Sept 11th this year, where the numbers came up 9-1-1 with hundreds of winners each getting an award of about $500 got me thinking. In the car on the way to the game last night, I said to the wife "What if with a year all of those winners wound up dead?" An interesting plot hook if I can hook the players right.

Next, I've been considering the nature of demons, or the demons I'll be using. I think I'll use the term Purpurfargade ansiktet from the Stephen King novel Thinner which, according to King, means 'Child of the night flowers.'

"...Is like a child who is varsel--changeling. Gypsies say varsel is always found under lilies or nightshade, which blooms at night"

Hi Jack,

What concerns me is that you seem to be focusing on character hooks - stuff that will be presented in play so that characters will turn their attention toward your "story stuff."

The kind of things you're describing are the sorts of stuff that Kickers provide and that you as GM react to. If you as GM make them up first, then you get a non-constructive tug-of-war between the characters' Kickers and the GM's plans. This isn't to say that you shouldn't prep at all - it's to say that you should concern yourself with back-story content and not worry about how you're going to "interest the players." Really. Instead, just promote and encourage really kick-ass Kickers and realize that it's your responsibility to focus on them and make your back-story relevant and subordinate to them.

When you do this, the whole step of providing "eery and freaky hints" to interest the players at all becomes totally unnecessary.

All of Tor Erickson's posts about prepping and playing Sorcerer would be just right for you, I think. Check out the links in the Actual Play section of the Sorcerer website, for his Southern-Fried Sorcerer game.

Best,
Ron

Thanks for the link, Ron. Very helpful. I'll have to check the others this weekend. Probably the first time I've used the "printer-friendly version" feature on the forums.

One side note, the idea of escalating the Kicker when a player makes up a really lame Kicker that came up in the thread is a typical technique in improv threatre, or so I've read, called "Raising the Stakes"

Raising the stakes
Making the events of the scene have greater consequences for the characters. One technique for advancing.

Everything is connected.

In any case, it appears to me that I've got a good part of the cart before I've even looked into a horse to pull it. It seems to me that the first step is to get a group together. I should focus on that because I am not going to run it for the current group for a number of reasons but mostly because it's too darn big, especially for a firsst time GM playing an RPG he's never played before IMO.