Sorcerer and Premise...
The Dragon Master:
After stumbling through creating a setting for a quick one-shot for a new member of our group, and while trying to work out a general setting idea for a mini-campaign for my gaming group it hit me. I've been trying to "brute-force" my way through the process (starting with definitions for demons or sorcery), but where I really should be starting is Premise. Once I have that determined, Humanity should be fairly obvious, and of course Sorcery and Demons would follow logically from that.
Problem is that I can't for the life of me think of a premise I'd really get excited about. I guess this is a question of method. How do you come up with a premise for your sorcerer game?
jburneko:
I start with the Look and Feel of Demons and Sorcery. I dream up images that excite me and then ask myself WHY those images excite me. For example, I'm a fan of the old D&D setting Ravenloft. One day I was flipping through some Ravenloft books and thought, man, I could totally do this wither Sorcerer. I was imagining creepy portrait demons, and bleeding gem stones, and giant spiders, and blood soaked swords and people standing on turrets laughing while lightening strikes in the background. Catholic imagery like stained glass windows, angles and over wrought cemeteries spoke to me as well.I went and red some of the original 18th Century Gothics like Castle of Otronto, The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho. I saw thematic parallels in Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne stories as well as Elric and Kane's sagas.
For the longest time I used to call Humanity in the setting Emotional Sanity because it seemed to me that's what was going on. Passions in those stories are raging and the bad guys end up divorcing their wives, imprisoning their lovers and murdering their families all for relatively understandable feelings. But I never quite got the same spark in other people when I said that. So I kept trying to reword it and reword it and reword it. And finally, I found it. Humanity is LOVE. Not just romantic love, but love for faith, love for family, love for country or duty. This stuff is part of the Romantics Era for a reason. It's about Love.
From there the rest flowed like water.
Humanity is Love! You gain Humanity when you strengthen bonds between yourself and others. You lose Humanity when you weaken or break those same bonds. At zero Humanity you can not Love, only covet.
Sorcerers are people with strong emotional ties to lovers, family, friends, country, faith, etc.
Demons are entities of and symbol of the sorcerer's passions. A succubus lover, a patriarch's portrait, a biblical plague, your dead mentor's eye, the soul of a fallen comrade in the body of another. And so forth.
Lore is based on acts of Passion, Obsession and Devotion.
So there you go. Close your eyes. What does Sorcery look like? What kinds of demons are there? What do the Sorcerers want?
Now.... what is that about to you?
Jesse
rabindranath72:
That's a fairly good explanation/definition of Love. On a related note, my Hyborian Age game which I am running with Pendragon rules includes Love as one of the passions, and something which can be invoked to "resist" sorcerous effects.
I took inspiration from this paragraph of Howard's People of the Black Circle:
Quote
Yasmina understood this better than did Conan. And she dimly understood why Khemsa could withstand the concentrated impact of those four hellish wills which might have blasted into atoms the very rock on which he stood. The reason was the girl that he clutched with the strength of his despair. She was like an anchor to his staggering soul, battered by the waves of those psychic emanations. His weakness was now his strength. His love for the girl, violent and evil though it might be, was yet a tie that bound him to the rest of humanity, providing an earthly leverage for his will, a chain that his inhuman enemies could not break; at least not break through Khemsa.
greyorm:
Can I ask what's wrong with the basic Premise of "What would you do for power?"
Also, are you perhaps trying too hard?
I've only run two sessions of Sorcerer for our group so far, and before this game, I never actually defined the premise or humanity. I know, bad me, right? But when I look at what we developed for play, I'm finding we already have that stuff: we had decided on Enochian demons and I had thought about having Humanity be linked to sanity.
Enochian magic is "look at me summoning angels into my head to take over my body and talk through me" kind of stuff (and not "nice" angels full of light and fluffy-poo feathers, we're talking real traditional angels with fiery swords and sixteen eyes and kicked up sex-drives they aren't supposed to use with mortals), and hidden cosmic secrets in lost or heretical books of the Bible.
One of the players even has a demon that is demanding he build a mind-twisting Escher staircase out of wood and mirrors. What for? He doesn't know. It was throwaway color for the player and it hasn't come up yet, but it will.
And just taking the stuff written, I'm trying to develop conflicts that mean something to them, that take things off their character sheet and background and explode them. A mysteriously returning mentor, the loss of their jobs, potential jail time, betrayal by their coven, betrayal by their demons, terrible choices between that stuff (esp. revenge) and worse stuff (end-of-the-world apocalypse-type stuff), and death everywhere.
We haven't gotten there yet, but it looks like it is coming: what do you risk everything for? Save yourself, let the world rot? Is the world WORTH saving?
Those kinds of things. But for the moment, we're just playing, having a good time, and I'm not worrying about it. The two players are excited about the game, and there's a third player interested in joining, so clearly I'm doing something right in being somewhat lackadaisical over precise definitions and not worrying about it too much. Now, I don't know if that will work for you, and I'm not sure how this experiment will end.
But it does lead to me to wonder: are you trying too hard? Overthinking the whole thing? (I know I'm guilty of doing that, and I'm enjoying NOT thinking about it this time.)
angelfromanotherpin:
In my experience, if you have a setting that is cool and engaging, the system will take care of the Premise. Just pay attention and you'll see it emerge, and then you can play with it.
So don't worry about any of the semiotics stuff too much. Focus on the cool stuff that can happen in the game and at the table.
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