[Sorcerer] The Live Tattoo
Frank Tarcikowski:
Ron Edwards asked me to post about a Sorcerer game we played when he visited me in Germany last December. I didn’t post about it yet because I didn’t feel a need to discuss it, and have resolved to keep more of the good role-playing experiences to myself. However, I think Ron has a point to make about the game and I’d like to hear it, so here goes.
Ron and I had been talking about intensity in role-playing and he had committed to a “real” game of Sorcerer, on which I took him up. Trouble was finding suitable players with sufficient knowledge of the English language (Ron is doing pretty well with his German lessons but he’s not quite there… yet!)
From my regular “girls” gaming group which was then playing TSoY, I asked one player called Mandy who speaks good English. We met at her place. Furthermore, I pm’ed Sven Seeland, whom I remembered from this thread about a Shadowrun game, and he joined us. He had been working all day and was dead tired, but he didn’t want to pass on that opportunity. He handled himself bravely. Also, his English was pretty damn near native speaker level.
Ron started out by explaining some basic stuff. We used a contemporary setting and I must say that it proved to be more intense than the Swords’n’Sorcery I normally prefer. It was, like, more close to home. Also, Ron came up with a cool twist: The demons have some human feature about them and they are the only ones who understand. It was creepy.
Mandy was like, no please, I don’t want some almost human looking demon, I’ll e having trouble sleeping! Then Ron prompted her a little to make up this demon that was like a twin of herself. As Mandy’s tattoo artist character had a telltale that was a little cut that never stops bleeding, she said: “Yeah, like me but without the cut.” And Ron: “Or… covered in them?” And Mandy: “Oh coool.” And so she, who hadn’t wanted a creepy demon first, ended up with the creepiest by far.
Ron also seized on Mandy’s kicker, which was about her trying to create a living tattoo. She emphatically didn’t want to do it by sorcery: She wanted to do it by herself. So the story started with Mandy’s character finding her partner/mentor tattoo artist dead and his torn-off skin spread all over the studio wall. Mandy rolled Humanity gain as she burried the corpse in the back yard, sobbing. (I think Humanity was pretty much the empathy thing from The Sorcerer’s Soul.)
Later on we learned that the dead tattoo artist had made that tattoo as a gift for her, a live tattoo that then had to come of, a crazy cabalistic winged thing that came into existence as, well, an angel. I was the first to understand, as I had read the respective chapter in The Sorcerer’s Soul (you thought demons were scary?) So that mysterious woman was hassling all of our characters, pointing out their failings and saying crazy things like, “I don’t want anything from you.”
My character who was initially laid out as a principally nice guy driven by his dead parents’ expectations turned out to be the only one who turned down the angel. It just, I dunno, worked out that way (“the outlaw prevails”). My parents, whose photograph was my object demon, approved. I like how Sorcerer is unpredictable that way: The fiction leads, as Vincent recently put it, and the fiction may go anywhere. Humanity is the judgement you submit on the fiction afterwards.
My character was more of a sidekick which was totally fine with me, as I enjoyed watching the others play. There was a very cool scene where Sven’s and Mandy’s characters met, and their demons, too. Ron really did a great job at playing those demons, in a way that made you actually like the demon but that was really pretty eerie and also, mean.
Sven’s demon got defiant and Sven’s character, the shy guy, stepped up to behave like a real master, commanding the demon to his will. Mandy’s contained Sven’s demon in her sterilizer (she rolled lucky on that one). In the end they parted without a fight.
So, Ron promised intensity and he kept that promise. The group around Mandy and me is now playing a campaign of Sorcerer & Sword.
- Frank
Ron Edwards:
I really, really enjoyed this game. It was surprisingly intimate and close-feeling among us, I think.
Given the time constraints, specifically going straight from character creation into play, certain GM responsibilities became compromised. I've had problems with this in the past, but in this case, I hit several stumbling blocks or made several poor choices that did not end up causing trouble. It made for a rather vague or, in places inexplicable back-story, but not in a way that let anyone down, I think.
Quite a while ago, the Prairie Home Companion movie surprised me by including a character who was, practically down to the point-build, an Angel going by the rules in Chapter 3 of The Sorcerer's Soul. I found myself drawing upon that about halfway through play, and as usual, it was a risky move. Angels are serious business in Sorcerer and have a way of diverting the whole story onto themselves. Given the story-power they put into the GM's hands, that can diminish the intensity of player authorship. So I went back and forth in my mind, during play itself, in a way which is usually reserved for private prep time.
I wanted to dwell on Sven's character a little bit, because his demon was so heinous that playing it really brought out the adversity of being a sorcerer. Effectively, the demon was a "best friend," who looked like an older buddy-type guy, especially a little rough and tough. (I imagined him looking a bit like Eddie Campbell's Bacchus, actually.) He was the kind of buddy who always belittled the lesser-status friend, so that the friendship became a method of destroying a person's ego and relying entirely on dependency - Sven really grasped my brief vision of what demons were in this game and produced a perfect archetype of the concept. Since I've suffered from such relationships in real life a couple of times, I felt like I could play this demon all day, session after session.
After the game, Sven mentioned that he was inclined to have his character give up being a sorcerer entirely, which made sense considering his experience with the angel (did Frank mention her shower scene? look, no he didn't - well, she had a shower scene). I thought to myself at the time, well, that's a perfect cue for me to consider adversity that would make this demon entirely desirable again after all, even with its awful, horrible ways. I was so intrigued with this idea/challenge as a creative opportunity, especially since no immediate inspiration struck, that I really regret that the three of us probably won't get to play together again.
The game was set in Hamburg, the city we were in, and I drew upon tons and tons of anything I knew - Turkish honor killings, hidden rooms where friends had been kept secret during WWII, and others. I thought it was interesting that Frank's character was Jewish, and instead of making that a big obvious symbolic deal, I tried to place very stereotypical, loud-aggressive German characters into his scenes as a subtle contrast issue to see what happened. This issue means a lot to me because I have strong political views about Germany and Israel. It also made the nature of the character's demon, a family photograph, resonant for me. Playing that photograph as a selfish and brutal demon rather than as a treasured memory was very, very easy.
I hadn't thought about it in those terms until just now.
Mandy is a natural Sorcerer player, the kind of role-player for whom this game was written in the first place. Everything she did, every nuance of the positive-negative elements of a sorcerer's relationship with her demon, every aspect of the character's overwhelming creative idealism - it was perfect. My own GM choices about how to frame the next scene or who appears in a given scene were made effortless, in that context. There was no language barrier whatsoever: multiple times, Mandy would produce a comment as a player or a sentence in-character which made everyone laugh or cry out, and then what happened next with her characer would inspire me to do the same.
Overall, it was one of the best game experiences I had all year.
Best, Ron
Frank Tarcikowski:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on May 10, 2008, 09:42:15 AM
I really, really enjoyed this game. It was surprisingly intimate and close-feeling among us, I think. (...)
Overall, it was one of the best game experiences I had all year.
Yes, that's true for me as well.
I'll have to ponder that bit about my character being Jewish a bit. I decided he was Jewish when I made up his name, the character concept had been made up before and it kind of told me that it would make sense for this character to be Jewish. Maybe that was because I've known some Jews who were struggling with their parents' expectations.
- Frank
Frank Tarcikowski:
I wanted to get back to this.
Quote
The game was set in Hamburg, the city we were in, and I drew upon tons and tons of anything I knew - Turkish honor killings, hidden rooms where friends had been kept secret during WWII, and others.
Know how you never actually go to see the tourist attractions of your home town unless you have visitors from abroad? This was similar: Normally when we do contemporary settings, we either go for exotic places far from home, or if we set them in our home town, we’ll rather make some more personal references to places we actually visit a lot in our real lives. This was kinda like seeing our home town through the eyes of an educated visitor. Which was cool!
Regarding the back story, yeah, there were some inexplicable things like why my ex-girlfriend was also murdered and her skin spread across my wall. But hey, it led to a cool scene and I didn’t mind even though I’m usually a sucker for consistency.
This game was also proof of how real, meaningful character development doesn’t need a long campaign. Sven’s character had two really formative scenes, one with his demon (where he showed him who was master) and one with the angel (where the seed of doubt was planted and, yeah, she had a shower). My character also had two formative scenes, one with his dead ex-girlfriend and one with the angel. Let me tell you a bit about my character.
His parents were upper class. Dad was a successful business man, an industrial I think. My guy really didn’t care much about the business and wasn’t interested in taking his father’s place. He was a talented amateur boxer and wanted to pursue that career. Then his parents died and he had to take over the business. His demon was the photograph of his parents sitting on his desk. One of its powers was to boost cover (businessman, not boxer, I had two). My kicker was some trouble with a tax inspection.
So my guy had this private meeting with the tax inspector scheduled and then all this other stuff happened, like him finding his ex-girlfriend’s corpse in his house and this angel stalking him. I played this in actor stance, and it just felt like he couldn’t let his parents down, he had to save the family business and that was the most important thing. So he burned the corpse and bribed the tax inspector and told the angel he did not believe her.
I can perfectly see how this could have continued: Always wanting to get to the “other stuff”, the stuff from his life as an amateur boxer and a nice person, but never getting around to it, being consumed by running the business and representing the family at important high society happenings, but sacrificing all objects of private luxury to the demon’s need, slowly reaching a boiling point where he can’t stand it any longer.
Still, we did reach a sense of closure after that single session. We didn’t finish the whole story, but we did finish a chapter.
- Frank
Arturo G.:
It is a very nice report. Very encouraging.
This reminds me again that playing the demons to the hilt is key.
I have been reading the "Art, Deco, Melodrama" threads and all the preparation process of a good Sorcerer session looks delicate. How do you manage to come up with consistent characters, demons, kickers and situation so quickly? Is it a matter of experience?
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