Hello,

I've been holding out on everyone, because for months, I've been running a Sorcerer game and not discussing it here.

The players include our own Nev the Deranged and two of my friends, Beth and Frank. The former always wanted to role-play but wasn't allowed by the guys, and the latter played a lot of D&D back in the 80s, but hasn't role-played since high school. We've played five sessions starting last May, I think, which is pretty slow-paced, but it was a busy summer. We should probably wrap it up in another session or two.

The Premise of the game is best expressed by the handout I prepared for our first get-together 'way back last spring. Sorcery is all necromancy, and it's set in the modern day. To repeat some of it here:

Humanity = expiation through grief, “letting go,” and honoring memory over existence. Therefore losing Humanity is not about failure to care, but caring too much and refusing to accept loss.

... “Demons” in this game are the dead have not proceeded past the Ninth Gate, for whatever reason – and who have found a means (or are forced) to interact with the living world. They are no longer the living beings they were; do not think of them as people. Memory, to them, is nothing but obsession, and they know nothing of life or its priorities, not even as memory.

Without sorcerers, even the returned dead are almost entirely powerless. In this game, demons gain their abilities and Power scores through the Binding process. This idea has many implications both for the setting and for your options during play, so consider it carefully.

All I can say is....DAMMIT WHY DON'T I LIVE IN THE SAME CITY AS YOU!!

Sounds very cool. I hope you'll keep us all posted on things as they progress.

Also: how the Hell do you find the time to run so many games?!

Hi galex,

I should clarify a little ... all of the above material applies to the game as it stood back in late spring of this year, about four months ago. We've played about five sessions since then, so there's plenty to discuss. I'm hoping for a little more feedback here in this thread about the first set of material before doing so, particularly regarding how one decides what to include in a one-sheet.

After that, I'll tell all about the play sessions and link to yet more handouts.

Now, as for all the role-playing time, the answer is fairly easy: I don't have the time. I have a hefty job, I run Adept Press (which is quite a doozy now), I have an active social life, and I both train in and teach martial arts several times a week. Compared to most people I encounter who claim not to have the time to role-play, I'm busier by an order of magnitude.

So to do all this role-playing, I have to make the time and commit to it ... and the nature of the groups, the nature of the content of the games, and the nature of everyone's relationship to their non-participating acquaintances are all involved with that.

1. I'm the faculty advisor for the campus role-playing club, at the university where I work. That allows me to try out lots of games in a limited format.

2. The groups I play with are, for the most part, extremely committed. It's not a matter of me "trying to get the group to meet," far from it. More often, they are committed to meet and I'm trying to shuffle all the other stuff going on so I can make it.

I don't think this commitment is a matter of luck. I think it's because the social context for our role-playing and its content/goals are both functional to an extent that most role-players have never imagined. Therefore the hobby occupies our scheduling attention and that of our significant others and co-workers, none of whom are playing, to an extent that allows it to happen.

Best,
Ron

P.S. What's your real name?

Hello,

First, I'd like to back Ron up about the time thing. If you treat gaming the same way you treat going to the dentist or even showing up for work maintaining a regularly meeting group isn't difficult at all.

Back to Ron's Game:

I like your one sheet and I'm now VERY interested in this game because it deals with a lot of the issues that interest me. I like your comment on the sheet about finding the material disturbing. I DO find it disturbing. I find the Premise behind my own Gothic Fantasy version of Sorcerer distrubing and, to jump games, I find the Premise behind My Life With Master VERY disturbing. And the thing I love is that all that "disturbedness" creatively excites me. It is the engine that makes the game GO. I'm so disappointed by the people I find who either flee because it's disturbing or don't find it disturbing in the first place. It was refreshing to see that spelled out on the sheet.

I am not at all surprised that Vengeance was the common Desire. It's almost like word association: Ghost Story - Vengeance. What do 99.9% of all stories about ghosts deal with? Past wrongs needing to be righted. You asked it yourself on the one sheet, what do the dead want? The most typical answer is: Vengeance. It's one of the reasons I liked The Ring. Samara didn't want Vengeance or Proper Burial or anything like that. She wanted, well as you say on the one sheet, a form of Corruption.

That stuck out at me. I'm curious as to why your mind went to Corruption. Also, whenever I list something on a handout as "typical" it always feels like a double edged sword. If a player doesn't use it then, on the one hand, I'm glad because it means he's branching out and taking the core idea in new directions. On the other hand, I worry that perhaps he's missing the core mark altogether. So, I personally, would have been a bit worried in your case where NO ONE took Corruption or at least something related to it like Ruin as a Desire. But all that's wrapped up in why your mind went to Corruption as your example Desire and I could be off base.

Finally, I notice that you included Pact in your list of rituals. In fact I've noticed that you include Pact in MOST of your one sheets. However, Pact was introduced specifically in Sorcerer & Sword as a featured element of that genre. Do you now generally include Pact in ALL of your settings as an available ritual? The less "fantasized" a setting gets for me the less I tend to want to include Pact as a player option.

Jesse

Hi Jesse,

Great feedback. I want to talk all about the Corruption point.

"Vengeance," to me, has always struck me as a secondary thing, leading me to ask, "To what end?" or even "So what?" It also seems, to me, to be all about the living person's perspective at the moment of death, which differs very greatly from how I conceived of the demons in this game. They are not the dead people, nor their ghosts. I don't have a copy of The Sorcerer's Soul on me at the moment, but you'll find the key quote in the second chapter, from Raven, in the beginning part of the chapter where a whole bunch of people provide their visceral take on the word "demon." Its final two sentences concern Corruption as the main issue for demons of this sort ... not necessarily even as a malevolent goal, so much as a peripheral and inherent effect of their interaction with humans.

So if you look at Parl Dro in Kill the Dead, the story is about a demon who realizes that his influence is corruptive, and his son/sorcerer who decides that he can manage his own responsibility about that issue. Or if you look at the role of the Abhorsen as an office or social status in the Garth Nix books, it's based on the same thing: Can I stay human, although I live close to, and talking to, the Dead? In those books, the very nature of the office provides a positive answer to this question, although it seems to me that the subtext is whether the sorcerer really can engage in close emotional connections with other people. (Sabriel's father cannot, Sabriel does, and Lirael has to struggle very hard with it.)

Now, you rightly ask whether that's a problem or inconsistency of vision in our game, because the three player-characters demons turned out to be all about Vengeance. My way of looking at it now, is to say that all demons in this setting have Corruption for their Desire, but also another Desire in tandem with it ... "corruption about what?" or "for what?" Which is to say, the Corruption Desire is a constant, and the other one is that particular demon's focus or sphere for what gets Corrupted, or where its Corrupting attention gets focused. That way we get to play mondo-Vengeance but also see lots of Corruption.

Best,
Ron

Hey Ron,

Great stuff here, creepy and deep. I'm surprised the one-sheet didn't include descriptors, since it seems to be one of the big questions you ask to get a feel for other folks concepts in Sorc. Is that just something you don't normally put on a one sheet, something worked out with the players themselves later, or something you just do in your head to ground the concept?

That said, there's something really visceral about the whole thing, with the demons as echoes of the dead it leaves me with this sort of dirty feeling. Sorcerers seem to be the ultimate abusers in this context, almost raping the memory of the dead. I love the fact that objects only exist as necromatic tokens, it lays a weight to them that seems really appropriate for the setting.

On characters, did you have them create any ties to one another, however tangental? Are they even in the same geographic location, or are you handling all of the tie-ins via the map and the kickers? I'm pretty excited about reading the rest of these.

-Tim

Hi Tim,

Oh, right! Good point about the descriptors. I forgot to mention that one of the very first things I decided about this game was that I'd use the list of descriptors in the main book, without modification.

I decided not to create character ties prior to play, but drive the whole thing based on their Kickers. Quite a bit of the games I've played lately require a certain among of "the story thus far" in the prep stage, and I get really tired of that. I like playing Sorcerer to include the pre-creative phase of story-making, such that the first session might seem to wander a bit, but also such that the emotional priorities for the shared-created plot arise directly from playing the characters under stress (i.e. the Kickers).

... there's something really visceral about the whole thing, with the demons as echoes of the dead it leaves me with this sort of dirty feeling. Sorcerers seem to be the ultimate abusers in this context, almost raping the memory of the dead.

Hi Ron,

My real name is George.

After reading your one pager intro, I was struck by a couple of things.

First, I love the Sabrielesque necromancy thing, a very good source to borrow from. In your description of Sorcery, the phrase "(1) separate acts of sorcery at the same time may encounter one another on the river" caught my eye. I couldn't tell if you meant the "acts" of sorcery would meet or the "sorcerers performing the acts" would meet. I point this out not so much as a "this is vague and I don't like it", but rather to ask what indeed you meant; both are interesting. And perhaps your wording is meant to keep people guessing.

-George

Hi George,

Good to have you here. With "talex" and "galex" goin' on, I really need the real-name thing to help me out.

The "meeting on the river" business is taken from the Nix novels, because I really liked the idea that sorcery implied, or even facilitated, sorcerers' paths crossing. In fact, we treat Contact very radically: the sorcerer's real body freezes almost solid, and the sorcerer perceives himself or herself to be standing hip-deep in the river. Say some sorcerer in Timbuktoo is doing the same thing at the same time - and that guy will be there too! They'll be standing in the river, looking at one another.

Or, for instance, as has happened in our game, the sorcerer tries to Contact a demon and fails, but - since he's standing in the river - encounters another demon that some other sorcerer is Summoning.

So I guess in response to your "acts or sorcerer" question, the answer is, "either or both."

Best,
Ron

Hey again,

Ah, good stuff on the descriptors, explains their absence.

Quite a bit of the games I've played lately require a certain among of "the story thus far" in the prep stage, and I get really tired of that. I like playing Sorcerer to include the pre-creative phase of story-making, such that the first session might seem to wander a bit, but also such that the emotional priorities for the shared-created plot arise directly from playing the characters under stress (i.e. the Kickers).

Some of my thinking about this comes from our game of Le Mon Mouri last year, when I realized (via my character's "actions") that the player-characters' existence actually desecrated their previous mortal lives rather than preserved them.

Hi Tim,

Help me out with what you mean by 'pre-creative phase,'

Now, with copy of supplement in hand, I'm looking at pp. 26-27:

a demon is the result of someone very tortured, very depressed, or very evil dying without resolution to the extreme issues in their lives. They are literally the living manifestations of the "emotions" of a deceased human or humans...the tortured poet, the starving artist, the scorned lover...perhaps twisted in some way since, now dead, the issue cannot be resolved. ...

To me, the word means a spirit, an entity of semi-malignant nature. Perhaps not meaningfully malignant (no more than a chipmunk means to be cute), they just happen to be, they may not even actively work to cause pain, harm, suffering or etc. Those are just the effects they produce when they are around...so make no mistake, they are corrupt beings. That's the word I'm looking for...corrupt.

Hey again,

Ron Edwards wrote: Being more experienced, confident, and skilled at the Narrativist mode, though, I can back way, way up and take it from the top. This means that I, as GM, really don't have any idea what the story is about aside from what's on the one-sheet, and the story can really be said to be created, lock stock and barrel, through the medium of all of us role-playing together.

Hi Tim,

I always have a number of relationship maps kicking around, based on books I'm re-reading at the moment. (I rarely map a book on the first reading; mapping is too analytical a process, and I read books for very emotional, non-analytical reasons. But I re-read constantly, and sometimes that can be very analytical.) So to ask "Did I have the map ready?" specific to that particular game isn't very useful - think instead of me always having a bunch of recently-scribbled maps on hand, each one with a few notes about what sort of Premise it might be suited to. Sometimes those notes correspond to events or issues in the source novel, and sometimes not.

You know about the Art-Deco Melodrama threads, right? If you haven't, see the Actual Play page at the Sorcerer website, at the bottom of the page, for the links.

How the heck do you successfully start with a full blown premise? It sounds like a much more difficult task than having it come from playing. I'm not familiar with the storymap concept in Alyria, but it seems to me that trying to get a group all on the same wavelength in regards to premise before the start of play is taking a big leap, given the amount that characters (via player choices) evolve through play.

"Blood opera" was coined in discussions between me and Jake, if I recall correctly, before it started showing here as a term at the Forge. It's perfect for most con demos. The idea is that the group as a whole comes up with a locale and a set of Setting-based concerns that have reached a point of crisis. They pose a whole bunch of characters who are deeply embedded in the situation, and then the protagonists are chosen from that list, often in opposition to one another. Play begins at the point of lots of morally-heavy choices for each.

Imagine coming into the middle of John Woo's The Killers, when the cop has gone rogue and the hit man is being hunted by his own people, and both are in love with the same woman. We know it's all going to end badly for everyone, and the best anyone can hope for (and maybe one character finds it) is a scant moment of knowing he's doing what he thinks is right.

Hey Ron,

First, thanks for indulging my probing. Then:

I always have a number of relationship maps kicking around, based on books I'm re-reading at the moment.

You know about the Art-Deco Melodrama threads, right? If you haven't, see the Actual Play page at the Sorcerer website, at the bottom of the page, for the links.

The "meeting on the river" business is taken from the Nix novels, because I really liked the idea that sorcery implied, or even facilitated, sorcerers' paths crossing. In fact, we treat Contact very radically: the sorcerer's real body freezes almost solid, and the sorcerer perceives himself or herself to be standing hip-deep in the river. Say some sorcerer in Timbuktoo is doing the same thing at the same time - and that guy will be there too! They'll be standing in the river, looking at one another.

Hi Tim,

Other than this aspect of being in the 'other,' has anything else come up that brings the characters in contact with it beyond the demons themselves? Or has no one explored that side of things, being caught up in their own stuff?

Wow, no kidding, I got a little excited I guess. :)

Ok, lemme try and break it down.

The contact ritual seems to bring the characters into territory that's sort of the demon's world, or at least less the Sorcerer's world. That in itself is pretty wild, instead of just communicating with the otherworldly demon, you're experience the otherworldly to allow communication with the demon. It seems that this could have a lot of other repurcussions, and so I'm curious if:

A) Have the characters been limited to this experience of the otherworld? Do any of the other rituals touch on this sort of direct experiencing?

B) Are they really there, or is this all in their heads? If they are there, then:

1) Has anyone tried to wade around and see what's on the other side, or is that not an option?

2) Are they vulnerable there to any Tom, Dick, and Harry demon who comes wading by?

-Tim

Hi Tim,

Probably the very best answer is to say, "Read the Nix novels," because I'm following the books' imagery and implications fairly carefully.

A) Have the characters been limited to this experience of the otherworld? Do any of the other rituals touch on this sort of direct experiencing?

B) Are they really there, or is this all in their heads?

If they are there, then:

1) Has anyone tried to wade around and see what's on the other side, or is that not an option?

2) Are they vulnerable there to any Tom, Dick, and Harry demon who comes wading by?

Hey Ron,

Ok, I may have to wander over to Borders here in a minute and grab Sabriel. I could stand a trip out of the office anyway. You answered the core of my questions, which I had still not managed to ask, which was "Do you get to do a bunch of interacting here? Or is it mostly color for the contact ritual?" It sounds like the former, which I have to say is way cool. I can't wait to see more of this, I'm terribly jealous.

-Tim

Hi everyone,

Check out the second handout, which I brought to our first actual play session. It's not much more than a collage for each character based on some free-associative Googling. I do this a lot for characters I play, and it just struck me as fun for these characters as well, to let the players know how their concepts had struck me. See how that works? These aren't "What your character looks like, 'cause I say so," but rather, "What your character work brought to my imagination, given some keystrokes."

Doing this was interesting in unexpected ways. For instance, using "coma" as a search term yielded photos of actual coma victims, and I was instantly repelled at the idea of using these images for Victoria. It struck me as absolutely unethical, and I went for a more conceptual or implied-version, more like a Rebus than an illustration. Also, the demons are pretty much absent from the pictures, because they ended up being so nebulous. Marca is a drift of smoke, Veniamin is invisible, and Grett mainly appears as a fleeting overlay of Craig's father's features over his own.

I also found a few pictures that matched sort-of well with some of the NPCs that had cropped up in the pre-game prep, whether explicit on the backs of the character sheets or just in my notes thus far.

(H'm, looking over the file, I find that the formatting is little off. Well, just imagine 8.5" by 11" sheets with fuzzy borders.)

So how about play? The first session was very much like I've described in the Art-Deco threads: no "story" to speak of, just playing out the Kickers or perhaps their consequences, and pressing for decisive actions from players. Here's how it worked out.

1. Urma's Kicker involved being attacked in such a way that he recognized his old-school Peruvian sorcery in action. That's easy - the attacker was Possessed by a demon, and it used a funky-duty Neat Knife (tm). I also decided that the demon in question was Veniamin, Victoria's demon, because her Kicker strongly implied that Veniamin was alienated from its master. That let me posit that it had cut a deal with an NPC who wanted Urma dead.

Oh yeah! That reminds me of another creative constraint I had laid on myself, for this game: Known Demons Only. In other words, I did not invent any demons for the back-story or bring them into play. Instead, I simply indicated very carefully which characters in the relationship map were dead, and which living NPCs might interact with them in sorcerous terms to generate demons later. So that's one reason why the demon in Urma's Kicker turned out to be Victoria's Bound demon - for the first run, no other demons were present in the game.

During play, this Kicker rocked wonderfully, for three reasons. (a) I decided to role-play the two demons getting together and communicating inside the Possessee's body, which was both visually cool and set up for more demonic role-playing later. (b) Victoria was able to participate in the scene (see below) and that turned out to be a big deal. (c) I'd decided to make the possessed-host an interesting NPC, not just some schmoe, so he was Walter Stone, a city detective. And then Frank blew me away, because he successfully befriended Stone, even after leeching him for blood for Marca! Stone has been a major character ever since and provided a key way for Urma, who was an illegal-immigrant newstand-vendor, to get more connected into the power structure and society of the city.

2. Victoria's Kicker was way fun, because she and Veniamin have Link. That means that she could eavesdrop on its activities (and Veniamin didn't mind; using the "just watch me disobey you, you're not the boss of me" concept) and get pretty surprised as to what it was up to. Looking over my old notes for the session, I find that my decisions about this Kicker remained in flux almost right up to the session itself. Apparently I'd thought that Veniamin would be attacking Craig, not Urma, and then changed my mind:

H'm ... how 'bout if cult guy who attacks Urma is actually Veniamin in action? trying to lure Urma into killing the innocent host? [key: Marca wants Urma to live] & the Widdoes are part of the real cult, which ...

Hey Ron,

Sorry on the slow turnaround on some questions. DSL was down at home over the weekend, and in addition, there's a whole lot to digest here for so 'little' story. :)

1) Did you hand out the handout before our after play. Was there any discussion about it? Did you find out from it whether your concept and the players concept was different? The same?

2) Why the known demon's only constraint? Arbitrary challenge you put on yourself? Were you looking to achieve something specific with it?

3) What the heck did Victoria's player do with all the stuff going on with Victoria's demon? Has there been any punishing? Any sort of confrontation there beyond the show and tell stuff so far?

4) How did the befriending of the detective actually happen? How did they get from leeching to handshaking?

5) Given that a big possible NPC washed up pretty early in Melanie, how have you been moving Craig forward?

-Tim

Hi Tim,

Whew! I was feeling neglected. And hey, all you non-Tims, how about some more comments? I busted my ass for that post.

1) Did you hand out the handout before our after play. Was there any discussion about it? Did you find out from it whether your concept and the players concept was different? The same?

2) Why the known demon's only constraint? Arbitrary challenge you put on yourself? Were you looking to achieve something specific with it?

3) What the heck did Victoria's player do with all the stuff going on with Victoria's demon? Has there been any punishing? Any sort of confrontation there beyond the show and tell stuff so far?

4) How did the befriending of the detective actually happen? How did they get from leeching to handshaking?

5) Given that a big possible NPC washed up pretty early in Melanie, how have you been moving Craig forward?

Hey again,

Ron Edwards wrote: I also recognized that the concept of sorcery we're using permits demons to come into play very easily - just kill someone, or know they've been killed. So I wanted "demonics" in the game to arise from events in the game.

I decided not to. It's clear to me that Nev, much like one of the finest role-players I know, Mario, prefers to have his character's personal crises arise without much reflection on his (the player's) part. If it doesn't "hit" in a given scene, then he won't force it.

The fourth session, in particular, paid off big-time.

Phew! I'm back.

All right, I have to expand my previous post a little as well as deal with Tim's new questions.

this implies to me that in most games you've run that events don't usually trend towards a lot of new demons mid story. Or was it more that you really expected a _lot_ of demons created in this setting, and so didn't want to add more to the mix?

Me again with some followup and some additional questions...

Ron Edwards wrote: Your first surmise is correct. The starting-demon dynamic is usually so strong in my games that most of our attention focuses on that. Other demons usually were set into action by me, the GM. So I was hoping that we'd see more player-input into demon creation via the events (i.e. deaths and revealed-deaths) of play.

Problem: I didn't follow up on my intentions of making a really good, kick-ass Rituals and Sorcery handout. It would include special effects for the Gates (beyond the first of which does use the Sorc & Sword otherworld rules) and provide some guidelines for (a) seeking a particular dead person, (b) seeking long-dead vs. recently-dead people, and (c) seeking particular demonic abilities or qualities regardless of who the dead person was.

Frank also used his Lore successfully to get an "image" of Vega's last moments, which provided a look at a new NPC. Combined with Walter Stone's police savvy, this clarified a whole bunch of things for Urma and Craig even as Victoria's actions, via Veniamin, clarified a whole bunch of things for her and brought about the third-session climax for her character.

So this session represented, for me, a certain retrenchment on Nev's part as he started to find his feet as a Sorcerer player and shook off some habits from previous play. This continued through the third session (when he actually took some ribbing from the other players about getting his character into action), but then blossomed during the fourth.

H'm, I just decided explaining the events of play ("the story") isn't going to work too well without the relationship map. So I just set it up, and I'll see about uploading it soon.

-Venue for our first meeting: my basement, in the evening (how Gamer!).
- For our first session of play: my front lawn, in front of all the neighbors, including one magic moment of seeing the jock teenager across the street and his friends head into his house with a box of Axis & Allies under his arm.
- For our second session: my living room, in the afternoon.
- For our third session: my wife's parents' back yard, by their pool, on a very sunny afternoon.
- For our fourth session: Frank's apartment, at their dinner table, in the afternoon.

Hi Tim,

It'll be a few days before all the stuff I want to upload makes it there, but in the interim ...

Various people have reported less Contacting and Summoning in their games than they'd expected or hoped. The reasons are pretty clear to me.

1. Summoning is quantitatively difficult, because Humanity is a negative modifier.

2. People don't remember or process the idea that successful Contact rolls give bonus dice to Summoning, if the special effects or actions carry over.

3. Related point to #2: role-playing bonus dice apply to any roll, which is to say, to Summoning rolls.

4. Coming up with the in-game context for sorcery is flat-out, hands-down, the biggest stumbling block for any group who's used to a post-1990 context for how "setting" and "system" interrelate for a role-playing game. Failing to create such a thing means that #2-3 above have no hook to hang their hat on.

Yes, I'm working on the next handout and planning to rev up the River context substantially.

Frank came up with the psychometry idea by himself, if I remember correctly. I think we're still considering it a Contact of a sort.

When you're dealing with the various players do you handle them scene by scene, or will you play through with them to some breakpoint and then move to the next? Are you keeping them relatively close to each other in time, if not physical space?

Feel free to put me off at some point if you grow weary of me picking at you. :)

4. Coming up with the in-game context for sorcery is flat-out, hands-down, the biggest stumbling block for any group who's used to a post-1990 context for how "setting" and "system" interrelate for a role-playing game. Failing to create such a thing means that #2-3 above have no hook to hang their hat on.

Meaning,

Yes, I'm working on the next handout and planning to rev up the River context substantially.

Frank came up with the psychometry idea by himself, if I remember correctly. I think we're still considering it a Contact of a sort.

I don't quite understand your first question; the two options sound like the same thing to me. I use the simultaneous-scene method and cut back and forth among scenes as they play out. The technique is outlined pretty carefully in Sex & Sorcery, in the last chapter, including a bunch of jargon called Bobs, Weaves, and similar.

Time is a little labile, as we feel free to shift a little forward or a little back regarding separated-in-space scenes' relative positions, but not very much.

I have questions about your collages: Is that fair game for this thread?

First of all, they are tres cool. Extracurricular art for games is (almost) always great.

Do you do these for every game you run? Every game you play in? When you are creating them as a GM, do you find that the content and focus is different than when you create them as a player?

Do others in your group (any group) do similar artistic contributions? What do they do? Do people tend to have schticks (Nev does the sketches, Ron does collages, Laura does musical mixes) or do they tend to do all sorts of things? What length of game generates this sort of art (they might not be appropriate for a one shot, but a six-or-seven session deal seems much more likely.)

Whew. That ended up being a lot more questions than I had intended.

I ask because my college gaming group was very big on extracurricular artistic contribution, particularly music mixes but also costuming (even for tabletops) and sometimes other things (like art or collages or surreal webpages.) It was not something that I had encountered in gaming previously. People got very into these things -- one player in a LARP of mine wrote two novel-length fanfictions about her character. I was never that focused, but I still very much like the mix CDs, and will often have about 60 minutes of music for any given character or game.

yrs--
--Ben

Hi Ben,

I was spoiled in the 80s, playing my first game of Champions with extremely professional and inspired comics artists. Almost every week would bring incredibly good cover art or pages for the comics we were "creating."

Throughout my history with that game, I often paid artists I met through the Champs grapevine to provide portraits, and my final game has a veritable catalogue of images.

However, the lesson didn't take for playing other things until I played Everway, and realized that the card-images were a major feature of play, both for prep and for communication while playing. Looking for certain images always yields other ones, many of which become incorporated into the game as well.

Ever since, I very frequently use images while playing. The internet and Google are of course a godsend for this purpose, but the hundreds of minimally-used gaming books and supplements, as well as my extensive comics and art-books collection, all get mined as well.

Typically, when starting a new game, I'll pass out some text that I've photocopied and images from a variety of sources. Ideally, I like to provide a new handout every session, sometimes with certain rules being clarified, other times with recaps or reminder-lists of NPCs, and still other times just with nifty pictures.

When playing a character, I very often will make a collage page for him or her, very much like the ones I made for this game. Again, none of the images are supposed to be a literal and exact portrait, but the viewer is supposed to look at all of them and create a kind of gestalt or "common source" for them, and that's the character.

I would vastly appreciate similar input from fellow role-players in my groups, but I have also learned - from Amber - that forcing it, or even formalizing it in terms of points or whatever, is counter-productive. But yes, music mixes, other forms of art, or what-have-you are great adjuncts. Sometimes they're used for play itself (e.g. Everway image cards), sometimes they're used mainly for out-of-play appreciation (e.g. the comics art from the Champions game), but it's always welcome.

Best,
Ron

(reposting some stuff I private-messaged to Ron, at his request)

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Ron,

My family has some connections to Navajo culture, and so I've heard second or thirdhand about some bits of Navajo religion/mythology/worldview/superstition/whatever.

One of the things that's worth knowing about is the "chindi." You see, when you die, everything that's good about you disappears... Annihilated. Nothing left. Everything that's bad about you lives on as a spirit called a "chindi." (This extremely bleak afterlife is, according to some Christian Navajos, a reason why there is a significant Christian Navajo population -- the afterlife story in the Old Ways is so absolutely hopeless; belief in heaven, even heaven for a restricted few "saved" folks, is *way* more than they've traditionally been able to hope for.)

A chindi is localized. They stay in the place where the person died, and cause trouble for anyone still there, especially people close to the deceased. There is no way to exorcize a chindi. You just have to leave.

This is one reason that Navajos tend not to buy expensive houses. Because any house may have to be abandoned forever if someone dies in it. If your house was just a hogan, and you can build another one in a reasonable amount of time, that's not such a big deal. So spend your money on a pickup truck instead!

Anyway, your dead folks reminded me a bit of chindis -- though to be honest, they're a lot more mellow than chindis. :)

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(disclaimer: I'm not an authority on Navajo culture; this is just stuff that I've heard from my mom, who was a teacher at a school on the rez for most of a decade. My stepfather is a Navajo convert to Christianity, raised in the Old Ways back in the day, but I've never sat down and talked to him about the Old Ways, cause it never happened to come up in conversation. I learned about chindis from my mom, who had learned it from her students and other sources on the rez. What's in the above paragraphs is the sum total of what I know about chindis; what's in this paragraph is the sum total of the reason I know it, and I welcome correction from anyone better informed. :)

(edit when I realized I'd gotten the word wrong -- instead of "chindi" -- "ghost" -- I'd written "chidi" -- "car". Doh!)