Man, I feel I'm obsessing over getting everything *just right* (killer Premise, setting, situation, back-story)and that the game is never going to get off the ground. I'm moving in circles planning this upcoming sorcerer game and every time I get a vague idea about one aspect of the game, it cancels out something else that I came up with and I'm left where I started.
The first thing I had was this vivid image in my mind of this Roman-style villa (sort of like Russell Crowe's place in Gladiator). The image was strong enough that I started trying to think of a premise. The Roman thing made me think about the fall of Rome. Perhaps Rome has fallen and it's only a matter of time before the ravaging barbarians arrive at this idyllic country-home, ending civilization as we know. This gave rise to the Premise "Given the imminent end of all that you hold near and dear, do you do Good or Evil?" I know, kind of rough, but it was a start (also, I should mention that I wasn't thinking in explicit Sorcerer terms at this point).
So then I started thinking about back-story, but was totally stumped. At about this time it occurred to me that I could maintain the Premise but switch the setting around and I thought, what if it's not a Roman villa but Saigon in the last few days before the NVA rolled into town?
I got kind of excited about that, but the more I looked into Vietnam stuff the more I realized it was probably heavier than I was willing to get into, and the Premise probably wasn't as appropriate to the setting either. But by this time I had come up with a back story that I really liked from the Stephen King novel "Bag of Bones" (the rape of a black woman and the murder of her son sets up ripples in the social fabric for generations to come.)
So now I have a back-story but no Premise or setting. And &Sword is looking more and more appealing as situation/setting material, but I'm not sure if the back story would fit in well. Argghhh! This is totally frustrating. Before I approach the players I want to at least have a rough idea of Premise, Setting, Situation, and Back-Story, but I can't seem to nail anything down. Does anyone else out there ever get into this kind of rut in campaign design where you just can't settle on something?
-Tor

Oh, I know what you mean. A good place to start is to remember that Sorcerer has a Premise built into it: What are you willing to do to obtain the things you want? After all that's one of the Narrativist game design goals: That the Premise is built into the SYSTEM.

So if you want to do Sorcerer I suggest starting with a variation on the question already at hand. In my case I'm very interested in Academic Arogance and so I'm creating a campaign based on: What are you willing to do to obtain Knowledge, Understanding and Truth?

That helps but I still get caught up in cicular ideals. See the concept started with academics but it spilled out into other areas that I don't know quite how to tie into the game. Basically my Sorcerer cosmology works like this:

Reality is inherently subjective and humans have the ability to shape reality based on what they believe. Academics seek to objectify that reality. Demons are entities which seek to imprison and enslave humans by traping them in an objective reality over which they have no power. Therefore, Demons support Accademics because they diseminate 'Truth' causing more people to have uniform beliefs and therefore make reality more objective. This is why we have lots of reports of magic and miricles in the past and not so much in the present. More and More people are simply coming to believe the exact same things being fed to them by the Academics. The more people there are who believe that gravity is a universal law the less likely someone who doesn't believe it's a universal law can overcome gravity.

So, we have a horrible recursive feedback loop. When an academic approaches a problem he contacts a demon. That is given. The demon gives him advice and helps him solve the problem. A Non-Sorcerous Academic is someone who attributes this whispering to 'inspiration.' However the Sorcerer knows better. The Sorcerer understands the existence of demons but he does not understand their motives and the subjective nature of reality. So, the Sorcerer seeks to discover objective 'truths.' To do this he must prove something to be true and thus contact a demon. However, the Sorcerer also wishes to break the very rules he has created and so he Summons a demon to break those rules. The more he wishes to break the rules the more demons he must summon but in order to summon more demons he must create more rules.

The result is of course a global break down of humanity. The more people believe in an objective reality the more they deny their spiritual power to control their pocket of reality and therefore their lives. The less in control of their lives they feel the more 'dronish' they become and the more hopeless and out of control their lives feel. Frustration results, suicides, murder and crime increase and so on.

And this is where the disjointedness comes from and where I keep going back and forth. I started out as Sorcerer's being academics however I WANT to define a Humanity value of 0 as being the dronish middle-management megacorporation worker bee. But even that's not right. I have a personal bias and hatred for Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy which has recently played a major role in the destruction of a very close friendship and therefore has been very pertenent to some of my players. So there's a part of me that wants to define Humanity 0 as being an Objectivist which fits BETTER with the academic origins of the universe but is harder to describe.

And finally there's a third component that complicates the matter. I want there to be an "angelic" force. There are no angles to speak of. Instead there are 'enlightened' humans who have managed to cultivate the opressive pervailing objective beliefs to exert their will on the subjective reality and shape it to their needs. I'd like to somehow tie all of this into the Catholic church who understands this (Christ was one such enlightened being) but because of all the politicing gotten things VERY confused over the years. I want this element because I just really LOVE the feel of the movie Stigmata. The religious element may be what ultimately needs to go but the 'enlightened' human element will not.

So how the hell do I tie academics (where the PCs will be since these are the Sorcerers), inhuman corporations, the evils of objectivism, 'enlightened' mysticism AND the Catholic Church all into one cohesive scenario?

It's maddening!

Oh and of course, how much of this do I tell the players? Do I just tell them the game will be dealing with Academic Arrogance and the search for knowledge and let the cosmology be the horrific revelation or do I let them in on more?

Jesse

Jesse,
Word up, my brother, it sounds like we're singing the same sorcerer blues. I wonder if, say, Deadlands GMs ever throw down their pencils, throw their hands up and cry out, "How the hell do I tie academics (where the PCs will be since these are the Sorcerers), inhuman corporations, the evils of objectivism, 'enlightened' mysticism AND the Catholic Church all into one cohesive scenario?" Sheeit.
I wonder if it's a side-effect of a game that doesn't come with a setting or a situation that the GM ends up throwing in everything he's got on his mind (and the kitchen sink). Or I wonder if it's the case of a GM who has wanted to run a narrativist game for years and has this massive backlog of ideas and thoughts that he's wanted to do all that time; and he wants to make sure they all get into this first game (now I'm thinking of myself; but out of curiosity, have you ever gone full-on narrativist before? wow, that sounded more like a support-group question than I intended).
I think for me it's like, I really want to run Sword! I really want to run Soul! I really want author and director stance! I really want premise in there! and kickers! and etc.
Whew. As you mentioned, the premise of Sorcerer is, "what are you willing to do to obtain the things you want?" I wonder how much this plays directly into actual campaign design and preparation. When you're thinking about all this stuff, are you thinking, "Hmmm. Inhuman corporations. How will this tie into the premise?" Or do you more leave the premise to the system and character creation (kickers, price)? Perhaps part of my problem is I'm taking it too literally. When the premise says "things you want" it's talking about what the characters want, but since the characters aren't created at this point my brain does a double-take. Okay, okay, I know that by tying the kickers into the back story you resolve this problem, but it's still a question that I get hung up on: when building setting and situation, do you incorporate premise (if so, how?).
What sort of things do you see the characters doing in this game? Are they all professors? If this were real life, the cosmology would be revealed to them via years of their own research and observing its effects on reality, but since this a narrativist game you can't really do it that way. I mean, what are the Dire Consequences of academic arrogance that the players can observe and react to?
Good to hear I'm not the only one out there with too many ideas for a Sorcerer game,
Tor

On 2001-10-10 20:04, Tor Erickson wrote:
I wonder if, say, Deadlands GMs ever throw down their pencils, throw their hands up and cry out, "How the hell do I tie academics (where the PCs will be since these are the Sorcerers), inhuman corporations, the evils of objectivism, 'enlightened' mysticism AND the Catholic Church all into one cohesive scenario?"

Hey,

What I don't get, and have not understood throughout a lot of discussions of this type, is why all this frenzy about "what to play" occurs in the GM's mind alone.

Looking at Jesse's circle, I see the easiest way to break it imaginable: include the players. I mean, Jesse said it himself, that the rulebook makes most sense when it's read by everyone (or parts anyway). So why not say, (1) Look at this cool game, (2) Here are a couple ideas ("You're all academics, OK, and it's about the loopy stuff when mathematical insight = universe-cozmik insight = going bonkers"), and (3) What do you think? What kind of character do you want to play?

So why be all confounded and frazzled about scenario prep until you've had some input from players anyway, up to and including some character ideas?

The key is knowing when to stop planning PRIOR to discussing stuff with players. If you want to get real heavy, then do start sketchin' on a relationship map first (which has NOTHING to do with events in the run itself), with lots of sticky-out parts. If you want to stay light, then just come up with any kind of interesting, brief back-story idea that exemplifies what YOU think is the worst, most awful outcome of sorcery in this context. Don't develop it much about what's happening today, just what's happened in the past, and not much about that either. Just enough to give you a neat image or two.

Then talk to the players and present 1-2-3. You end up with HUGE amounts of story-meat, NPCs, what PCs are up to (Kickers), a bunch of demons (big grin and thumbs up), and pretty much 80% of the plot motors already humming. Now go and bulk that prep into (1) more details and "glueing" Kickers and back-stories together, and (2) a couple-three Bangs and be ready to go.

Maybe the point is to give up YOUR commitment to "the predetermined objective." Lose your notion of "the objective" and let the players' own interests sculpt it out of the relationships and horrible back-story information. Hell, two-three sessions along, take the time to state it more clearly to yourself and then develop it into something real big and ugly.

Am I missing something? Why does this seem so basic to me?

Best,
Ron

First things first:

On 2001-10-10 20:52, jburneko wrote:

Okay, first of all I have to have a long hearty laugh over the irony of this statement. You see, I *AM* a Deadlands GM. I have an ongoing Deadlands game that I run once a month. Sorcerer is reserved for my (smaller) weekly weeknight group where we rotate games and GMs.

Hmm, it all sounds a bit like Mage to me... your description above could serve pretty well as an experience of the Ascension War to me.

Hello Ron,

I really think there are two things that are holding me back from going to the players just yet.

1) I'm not sure how much of the cosmology I want to actually reveal to them right away. Obviously I want them to know the Premise: Academic Arrogance. And the Humanity Definition: Empathy For The Subjective (Sort of, If you know anything about Objectivism then you know my idea of 0 humanity). I will obviously want the players in on these and change them if they're not interested. Trying to force these things on them would be a bad idea.

2) I'd like to have some assemblance of a backstory. I'm not talking about an 'objective' here but more like some kind of a villain figure and a horrible humanitarian crime as well as some smaller crimes that have resulted from the larger crime. The reason being is that assuming we spend one entire session hammering out issues and creating charaters I'll have one week to integrate these characters with the backstory. I'd rather not have to both create AND integrate in the same week. I want AT LEAST an outline.

2 sort of contradicts 1 in that if we end up changing the Premise and or Humanity definition then I'm screwed. I WILL have to rewrite the backstory entirely and probably change the setting and the cosmology and everything else. Which is why I'm probably going to end up discussing these issues via email with my players before hand so that I know where I stand.

Jesse

Hello Again,

I just emailed the following to my players. I thought I'd put it here as well to help anyone else who may be strugling with how to approach their players and with what.

------------------------------------------------------------
Hello guys,

I've pretty much made up my mind that the next BIG game I want to run is Sorcerer. There are some issues I'd like to discuss with you so that I can incorporate them into my planning.

Sorcerer is a Narrativist. I'd like to try and simplify it a bit so that we all have a basic understanding. All Narrativism boils down to is an emotional metagame that is imposed on top of the regular roleplaying experience. That is, the Narrativist game poses an emotional or moral Question called a Premise and the Players are expected to author an Answer called a Theme through the actions and decisions of their Character. If the players don't have any kind of emotional or intellectual commitment to the Premise there is absolutely no point in playing.

Sorcerer, being a Narrativist game, has a Premise built into it. That Premise is: How much Humanity are you willing to sacrifice to gain the things you desire? It is the basic Faustian Question. If this basic question doesn't excite or stimulate you on an emotional or intellectual level AT ALL, then there is no point in playing Sorcerer. If you are not interested in exploring this question through your roleplaying the game will be very boring. Narrativists hold that a good Narrativist game will have the Premise actually reflected in the System. Thus Humanity is a major score in the game. You make Humanity loss and gain rolls based on your actions and that includes the metagame level of the motivations behind as well as the consequences of your actions. At zero Humanity your character becomes an NPC, although even that is open for discussion. Besides how many Humanity dice you roll, Humanity has very little in game effect. How Humanity loss and gain effects your character is entirely up to you.

The Sorcerer rule book is very vague in many areas. Specifically the players as a group are expected to define a few things such as: What is a demon? What sub-Premises, if any, are you interested in? What is Humanity exactly? We can hammer out many details durring actual character creation however there are a few details that I need NOW so that I can plan appropriately. Namely, Premise and the defnintion of Humanity. I have a few sugestions but again, if these don't excite you on an emotional level there's no point in playing so please offer alternatives if these don't do it for you.

Premise: Academic Arrogance. Rephrased to match with Sorcerer's core Premise: How much Humanity are you willing to sacrifice to obtain Knowledge, Understanding and Truth. This of course carries several sub-Premises such as: "What is the nature of Truth?" and so on. Under this Premise, Demons are the source of academic inspiration. Anyone who has attempted to objectify reality has consorted with Demons, most of them just don't know it. Sorcerer's know better. All Sorcerers are Academics but not all Academics are Sorcerers. This makes Sorcerers a very funny paradox. Sorcerers summon and bind Demons to break the very rules of reality they seek to discover.

What exactly constitutes an Academic is open to discussion. I personal like the concept of Professors, Undergrad and Graduate Students. But coffee house pseudo-intellectuals and corporate R&D men seem viable as well. The only criteria is that these people seek to objectify some aspect of reality. The arts are open as well. After all what is an English Professor doing if not attempting to objectify the nature of litterature? Feel free to let your imagination run wild and if you enjoy this setting feel free to throw some early character concepts at me.

I find this setting a bit ironic given my own love of objectifying the nature of roleplaying. Oh well, I guess that's my demon. :smile:

A major inspiration for this setting is the movie Pi. If you've seen that film, you understand where my mind is going with all of this.

Humanity: This is where I'm struggling a little bit. There is a big part of me that wants to define Humanity as: Empathy For The Subjective Nature of Reality. Basically at Zero Humanity your character turns into an Ayn Rand Objectivist. This definition works well with the whole Academic Premise.

However, there's another part of me that want's to define zero Humanity as the middle-management corporate worker drone. I don't know what the actual defenition of humanity would be in this case. But the core idea is that as humanity drops you begin to feel limited more and more by the increasily 'objective' reality that the Academics (and Demons) are churning out. The more you experience an objective reality the more locked in you feel. The more helpless and out of control you feel. After all, if reality is objective you have no way to impose your will upon it. The result is the helpless worker drone who does the same thing day in and day out because they feel they have no way to escape. Eventually they go postal and blow away their co-workers, family and themselves. However, this is MUCH harder to unify with the Academic Premise. Under this definition of humanity I don't know what happens to an Academic Sorcerer at Zero Humanity since they themselves are not experiencing the confinement the rest of the world is.

So if you like the Academic Premise I could really use some suggestions on the Humanity front. Remember these ideas have to excite you personally. If they don't, there's no point in playing. So if you don't like ANY of this please offer suggestions so I can start thinking along different lines. Also if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I look forward to your input.

------------------------------------------------------------
I thought this was a nice comprimise between letting the players in on the Premise and other important details and not giving away some of the more horrific aspects of the cosmology. I wonder what they'll say.

Jesse

Hi Jesse,

It's good, in many ways. Here are my suggestions.

1) Sorcerer is not vague, it's customizable! (On second thought, that's not a suggestion. It's a protest.)

2) Email may not be the best medium. I strongly suggest getting the people together for a face-to-face meeting, rulebook in hand for them to thumb through and get a personal feel for. You may find yourself suddenly managing a game-prep fest, or people may get back to you slowly afterwards.

If there are logistic reasons for not meeting all at once, I suggest sacrificing a whole session-day for this purpose. Believe me, it's not lost time. I shudder at the thought of prepping for Sorcerer wholly by email or phone, without the players interacting with one another about it as well as with me. (Hey! Is that another of these unspoken assumptions? That character prep is strictly a matter of the individual player and GM?)

3) Tone down the ramblings about Humanity's definitions (my apologies, Jesse, but it does ramble) and just present the stuff about it going up and down. Humanity going to 0 is about stuff that bugs you regarding this issue, and Humanity going about is about stuff that seems "more right" to you, and that's that. Customize it further as the rest of the prep continues. Be happy with an embryo and don't expect it to walk upright yet.

Best,
Ron

1) Sorcerer is not vague, it's customizable! (On second thought, that's not a suggestion. It's a protest.)

2) Email may not be the best medium.

I shudder at the thought of prepping for Sorcerer wholly by email or phone, without the players interacting with one another about it as well as with me. (Hey! Is that another of these unspoken assumptions? That character prep is strictly a matter of the individual player and GM?)

3) Tone down the ramblings about Humanity's definitions (my apologies, Jesse, but it does ramble) and just present the stuff about it going up and down.

Well, not to be outdone by Jesse, I took the comments and ideas that have been thrown around in this thread and approached my players like so (this is most of an email that I sent to them):
-----------------------
The game I’m interested in playing is called Sorcerer. The focus of the game is on creating intense stories based around the question “How far are you willing to go to attain what you desire?” Each character is a sorcerer with the ability to summon and control demons. Demons can confer undreamed of power, but every demon has a need and a dark desire that its master must help it fulfill. The more you use demons, the more they use you, and every sorcerer fears the day that he ceases to be the master, and instead becomes the slave.
What demons actually are can vary greatly. The setting of the game could be anytime, anyplace. The style of play can range from intense horror (imagine being the priest in The Excorist), to furious action (imagine being Chow Yun Fat in…just about anything).
If you’re interested, what I’d like to do is sit down with the other players and discuss the kind of game that gets you fired up (I’m thinking half an hour would probably do it). If people start getting ideas for characters at that point, great, but we’ll probably meet again after that to create characters.
----------------------
The only thing I was trying to do was to trigger an emotional response("Whoa, cool!" or something along those lines) that would make them want to play and get them in the right mindset for a first meeting.
And yeah, I know, the part about the demon becoming the master isn't exactly true, but it sounded more poetic that way...
-Tor

Hey Tor, the "demon becoming the master" is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the sorcerer's Humanity going to zero.

I liked the writeup a lot. You certainly are being willing to fly blind into the get-together session, as you didn't even hint at setting or other context material. It'll be interesting to see what you all come up with.

Best,
Ron

...why all this frenzy about "what to play" occurs in the GM's mind alone....So why be all confounded and frazzled about scenario prep until you've had some input from players anyway, up to and including some character ideas?

In my experience, the vast majority of prospective RPG scenarios never make it past the planning stages. And I think very often due to social wrestling by those involved.

I spent many years prior to mid-2000 buying and reading games, and reading about and talking about games, but hardly ever playing. During that time, there was a conversation that would happen among me and my friends every three or four months. It was the, "why aren't we playing any games...let's pick and play a game" conversation. I've written elsewhere, either on The Forge or Gaming Outpost, about the "one true game." When game conversation started, it was like each of us pinned all our personal hopes on that game. We behaved like we thought if we could just advocate and elucidate our perspective, our hopes for the game would be realized. It killed nearly every game. The ones it didn't kill were all characterized by having not been initiated by the "why aren't we playing any games" conversation.

But neither is the absence of that conversation as an initiator sufficient for successful gaming. Many times, someone or other would start hyping a game they wanted to run. The group would have a character session. But actual play would never materialize. And after a few of these waste-of-effort character creations, players became cagey, carefully doling out mildly encouraging comments to the prospective GM, but also evading character creation until it became clear the GM's enthusiasm wasn't turning ephemeral and that he had done enough prep that actual play was pretty likely.

So I think failed and successful attempts to get games off the ground teach GM's that they need to navigate a fairly specific social path. The GM learns to avoid too much "one true game" input from their likely players, because when it becomes apparent to players that the game is shaping up in ways that don't coincide with their individual hopes, disenthusiasm rears its head and kills the scenario before it gets off the ground. And the GM learns that they need demonstrate they've overcome the prep-hump for the scenario or they can't get players to make characters.

An attempt to introduce Narrativist play to a group would certainly be facilitated by the players trusting that the GM will actually produce a scenario and going gamely into a character session, and by the GM trusting that input into the game from the players isn't necessarily a "too many cooks/spoiled soup" situation. But I think the typical dysfunctional play group is really too crippled by their history to actually take more than baby steps in that direction.

Paul

Found an anecdote which might be useful on this thread in temrs of hammering objectivist andf giving kudos to catholicism:

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell."
-- St. Augustine

Of course, I feel:

"The good mathematician should beware fundamentalist religionists and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that they have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the
bonds of ignorance and myth."
-- Ian Jordan

Great quotes, Gareth, and they sound like the ideal openers for the mathematical-sorcery mini-supplement Jesse's going to do one day.

What's that, Jesse? "What mini-supplement," you say? Ha ha! As if you think you could escape ...

Best,
Ron

Ah, yes, mathematics Sorcerer. The ideas for mathematics Sorcerer has actually grown out into Academic Sorcerer mainly because I don't think that mathematical mysticism could sustain MY groups interest, so I broadened it a little. However, I WOULD like to do a supplement focused on just mathematicians. The problem is however, that I'd like to include a lot of factual information about the links between mathematics, philosophy and mysticism. While I have read a lot along these lines my retention for specific detail is quite poor and I would not wish to diseminate historical fact without references to back it up. This of course means compiling and expanding my library of mathematical history books and doing a thurough culling of information.

So, some day, Ron, some day. I just have to actually get around to doing some baseline research so that I know what I'm talking about.

Jesse

On 2001-10-12 02:42, Ron Edwards wrote:
Hey Tor, the "demon becoming the master" is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the sorcerer's Humanity going to zero.

I liked the writeup a lot. You certainly are being willing to fly blind into the get-together session, as you didn't even hint at setting or other context material. It'll be interesting to see what you all come up with.

Best,
Ron