The Forge Archives

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:

QuoteHumanity = 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.

Demons aren't really ghosts, and they're certainly not the "people" themselves. They are ... derived from, or representative of, or left-over from, dead people. They do not look like or think like the original person, although they may be evocative of them in some way. I basically stole all the sorcery-in-action imagery from Garth Nix's Sabriel novels and from Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead, and the kernel of the whole thing is Raven's text about defining demons as the "essence" of dead people, which you can find quoted in The Sorcerer's Soul. I also read Patrick McGrath's Spider recently, and that character certainly qualifies for this Premise as well.

Before going on, I need to say that I ran websearches on "necromancy" and "lich" to find the images I used, and didn't check for copyright on any them. So these sheets can't be used for promotional Sorcerer use or even linked at my website; it's all Personal Use Only. So be warned, these pictures are not copy-safe. Oh yeah, one more thing; they look better in black and white for my purposes in this game.

Our first meeting and character creation session revealed some interesting things. Typically for a first-time role-player encountering Sorcerer, Beth's character is astounding: Victoria Carson, an almost-completely paralyzed survivor of a car accident, and a dedicated altruist and legal/political power-broker. Her demon is the remains of her boyfriend, killed in the same crash, best described as the uber-Possessor ... with Link, Hop, Cloak, Travel, and two sorts of Perception that permit it to zip about, host to host, and do what Victoria wants as she monitors its activities. It eventually bulked up to Power 8 to be capable of all the stuff she wanted it to do. Its Desire is Vengeance, and its Need is justice (!). The real winner, though, was her proposed Kicker - the demon has just discovered her long-ago affair with one of their mutual friends, and even better, this friend, a politician, is an outstanding champion of justice.

Frank's character creation went a little rockier ... he initially suggested that his character was amnesiac, and that his Kicker was the return of memory. But as the discussion progressed, he changed all that and went for something more exotic - a Peruvian shaman-type guy named Urma, who'd actually eaten part of one of his friends in order to survive an accident deep in the jungle. The demon, naturally, was the friend, with a Desire for Vengeance and a Need for blood, basically a smoky scary thing with some protective abilities and Daze. Frank suggested that the demon is all about vengeance on Urma, but it has to be exactly the right vengeance. This worked well for me, because from "demon point of view," what it really wants to know is what's so special about Urma's goals in life that it was so important for him to live. The perfect Sorcerer question. I deliberately did not challenge the amnesia-concept and was pleased to see that Frank eventually jettisoned it on his own.

Nev's character creation was also typical - but in a different way, based on his mostly White Wolf, LARP, and related role-playing experience. For one thing, the character (Craig Liu, a streetfighter-badass type) is chock-full of past trauma: murdered parents, no friends, lost, grim, alone, savage, barely socially functional ... in other words, all set to hunt the GM's clues and fight whomever the GM throws at him (a) with full abandon and rage and (b) no distractions. You can read a bit about his character in these early stages in his thread The dead are too much with us. I was a little worried about this one, but given our discussions in Character ideas and other threads, I figured all would be well. Craig's demon, by the way, was his father, essentially a combat-enhancer, with a Desire for Vengeance and a Need for mercy.

Three demons motored by Vengeance, and with three Needs just begging for difficult character decisions. Cool. As for the Kickers, I've described Victoria's; Craig's and Urma's were both "GM, complicate my life" kind of Kickers - the former basically brings in a mysterious attacker and the latter suggests that the streetfight scene is ostracizing Craig. Again, they were mainly empty pegs for me to fill in, but I was all right with that.

As for my prep, at the time, I was mapping the few Travis McGee novels that lend themselves to relationship maps (most of them do not), and settled upon The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, because it is so bleak and vicious, and (as required for this particular Premise) full of dead people. In fact, I did something a little unusual - instead of backing up to just before the events in the novel, which is the typical relationship-map prep tactic, I started after the events of the novel, in the total absence of the protagonist. In other words, all the people who were almost killed or ruined in the novel were indeed killed or ruined, and the various bad people succeeded in their awful plans and reaped their rewards, and basically, it was all "over."

I did this for a couple of reasons - first, the novel, like all the McGee novels, isn't really very interesting. Bad guys are up to no good, and McGee stops them or partly stops them. I wanted that all over with; I wanted successful, happy, fat bad guys who'd gotten away with everything. Second, as I mentioned, dead people mean potential demons, in this version of Sorcerer. The more the better. And finally, I wanted the player-characters' Kickers to be the only jump-start material I had to work with, not NPC plots or plans of any kind. Or to put it better, I wanted to come up with NPC plots and plans strictly in the context of the three Kickers. Also, since the map is based over-simplistically on a single "bad guy," I spiced things up by taking another McGee novel called A Purple Place for Dying and just attaching the two maps together.

For purposes of early events, as a GM, I played "round robin" with demons and NPCs ... Victoria's demon was possessing the fellow who tried to kill Urma, but not by her orders; Craig's fight situation was all wrapped up with an undercover cop who was connected with the possessed fellow, as well as with a woman who was married to, and being cheated by, the guy who co-opted Victoria's demon ... basically, imagine at least one character associated with Player-character A looking over his, her, or its shoulder toward Player-character B, and so on. I trusted that my role-playing of the demons and the players' own proactivity would take it from there without trouble.

Anyway, that's my first post, bringing us up to late spring. I've provided extensive handouts for nearly every session of play so far, so I'll continue to post them and comment on the play-sessions themselves in this thread.

For now, though, what do you think? Any questions, insights, points of view?

Best,
Ron

P.S. I think the image links are wonky on that webpage; bear with me and I'll see if that can get fixed.

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).

Quote... 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.

At their worst, yes. The demons' Corruption would be meaningless without the humans' Desecration. One of the main bastards in the story actually used a necromantic Token based on his murder of one woman to ensnare and marry her sister.

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.

All of the player-characters' decisions about their demons, so far, have hit this issue like a gong. We still have a session or two to go, though, so I suspect some points have yet to be made.

Best,
Ron

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.

QuoteQuite 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).

Help me out with what you mean by 'pre-creative phase,' is this just an absence of 'here's what I've been doing lately' on the part of the characters and letting that evolve backwards in play from the kickers?

QuoteSome 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.

I was reading your Mon Mouri thread recently and it came to mind while reading this description, so I think it's definitely left it's mark. I'm really curious to see how the players have handled all this in play, but I'll refrain from asking for details since I know the other threads are coming.

-Tim

Hi Tim,

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

OK. Let's take a look at the fundamentals of Story (in the very strict sense of novels, film, and theater).

Character in a Setting faces a Situation ... [character creation, Kicker creation, pre-game prep and discussion, and in emotional terms, the glimmerings of Premise]

... and takes Action, with certain Outcomes ... [System; "actual play"]

... which lead to a far more focused Situation ... [continued play and between-play prep; in emotional terms, full-blown and absorbing Premise]

... which culminates in decisive actions and irrecoverable Outcomes ("climax"). [System again, and in emotional terms, Theme]

Most Narrativist role-playing games, at this point in time, tend to start in the middle or toward the end, specifically the last two steps. I think that's because role-playing practitioners are currently so badly prepared to play in this fashion, that they have to "make sure" it happens by front-loading as much "story already" as they can.

This is my main criticism of the storymap prep protocol that Seth presents in Legends of Alyria, and also of the "blood opera" approach taken by many groups with The Riddle of Steel. If my goal is Narrativist play, then I want the whole process, I don't want to start (to put it crudely) three thrusts prior to climax.

Hey, I'll stick with the crude analogy. I like to start all the way back when I'm puttin' on the cool clothes and deciding which nightclub to go to. That means there's a lot of experiences to have and early decisions to make long, long before the woman and I are actually screwing. A group which is overly-anxious about really getting the story under way (which in my analogy would be tantamount to worrying about whether one should or will get laid, to the detriment of doing so) is going to scoot to the three-thrusts-before stage to alleviate the fear.

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.

Best,
Ron

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

Quotea 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.

After my initial inspiration from re-reading the Nix books, I was browsing through the rulebooks and happened upon this quote from Raven. The really interesting thing is that when he originally wrote this in 1998, it didn't resonate with me at all. I kind of went, "H'm, that's one way to look at it," and that was it. Even when I decided to include it in the text for the supplement, it was only in the interests of diversity, not because the concept spoke to me. But when I read it this time, a few months ago, it hit like a train, and I scribbled up the one-sheet within hours.

You can find the original discussion and Raven's full text at the What is a demon? page, within the archives from the old Sorcerer mailing list. The full text is even better for my purposes in this game than the excerpt.

Oh yeah, one more thing. I forgot to answer about the Pacting. That table in the one-sheet was originally created for my Azk'Arn one-sheet, which was indeed a Sorcerer & Sword game. I just copied it over to make the one-sheet for this game, and the Pact remained included because I didn't think much about it one way or another.

Best,
Ron

Hey again,

Quote from: Ron EdwardsBeing 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.

So did you even have your McGee map in place before bringing the one sheet to the players, or did that choice come directly out of your initial talks with the players during chargen? I guess on another front I get the feeling I'm still missing something, since I don't exactly see any other way of handling this given the way you lay out Sorcerer. 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.

So much of what draws me to Sorcerer revolves around the fact that it supports that evolution. Cutting that out to get to the end seems a lot less satifying, or at least harder to pull off while being satisfying. So maybe I'm missing something in what your saying? Also, since I'm sort of falling away here from the game at hand and more into your prep stuff, perhaps this thread isn't the best place to chat this out.

-Tim

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.

QuoteHow 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.

As it turns out, most people seem to be much easier with doing this. You should check out Legends of Alyria, because it's extremely well-written and very clear about the storymap technique. You can read my review of it as well, which talks about the technique. From a recent private-message I sent to Josh Neff, slightly modified:

Quote"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.

By contrast, the way I'm describing my play of Sorcerer tends to be much more difficult for people who come from primarily White Wolf or other late-80s, early-90s game experiences. In many cases, these people have such a difficult time relating the terms "story," "my character," "GM," and "decision" to one another, that issues like "bringing the group together" and "investigating the GM's plot" loom up and obfuscate the process. They are much better off learning about Narrativism from Legends of Alyria, InSpectres, a TROS con demo, or Otherkind than they are from Sorcerer or TROS outside of a con demo (which is more like Sorcerer in this regard).

Best,
Ron

Hey Ron,

First, thanks for indulging my probing. Then:

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

Got it. I can related to this.

QuoteYou 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.

Yes, they're great. I'd love to see a supplement of essentially this, an example book for different settings/premise etc. with the play by play and step by step. I think this thread put a lot of the text in Soul into perspective for me. I keep meaning to write up my take on the three supplements, but I need to reread them now that I've actually read all of them. Does that make sense?

I'll take a gander at Legends of Alyria, and your review. As an aside, I specifically ran into some of this recently when trying to handle a CP2020 game using some of the techniques (mainly r-maps) from Sorcerer. It's been an interesting experiment, but I've found that while your method feels very natural to me for Sorcerer, it seems very difficult for games that don't have such an explicit mechanic to aid premise. Part of that may be my relative unfamiliarity with it.

It's also why I've put off running my tabletop Sorcerer game for a bit. With my local group I think I'm going to introduce Dust Devils first, mainly because the narration portion is so much more mechanical. My experience with the CP2020 game is that they may need some more specific guidelines on handling stance and narrating scenes as players. They're pretty locked into the GM handling that for them, and I think since it's so explicit in DD, it will help them out. Hopefully that will let the Sorcerer game work more naturally when I do it.

Back to your game though:

Quote
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.

This is ridiculously neat. 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?

-Tim


-Tim