[Sorcerer] Wealth in a Campaign in the Depression
Plotin:
Quote from: Mackie on July 01, 2009, 11:04:19 PM
I would appreciate some advice on how Ron's ideas regarding Demons being from "not-here". How to keep an area of mystery about demons when some of the play will be about finding out about the demon beforehand.
My thoughts are: Where they come from, nobody knows, but they arent meant to come back. The dead have no humanity, and an incomprehensible outlook on life. Their needs and desires are corruptions of their former life. They are only some unfathonable "reflection" of what they were when alive.
The way I understand it, the people in a Sorcerer setting can well have a pretty decent understanding of demons, of their origins and their agendas – they can even be totally certain that they have these things figured out one hundred percent. But just because they think they have doesn’t mean they have. Every once in a while, a demon does something that goes counter to the ideas of sorcerers. Because, in the end, demons can’t be figured out.
In your setting, demons might behave like the spirits of dead people and finding out about the deceased and his specific unfinished business might well grant you bonus dice on your rituals – but that doesn’t mean that they really are such spirits. It’s enough that the players are aware that the demons might well be something entirely different, the characters can think they know demons backwards.
But if that distinction is not enough for you, maybe you could introduce the “not here”-ness with demon Desires. Sorcerer&Sword names the “Deliberately Incomprehensible” category of Desires, and something that can’t be comprehended might just fit the bill for demons that otherwise seem too mundane.
Ron Edwards:
That's good advice, but another way to look at it would be that everything about demons being "the dead" may well be the case ... but all cosmologies, explanations, justifications, and narratives about why they are here, what happens when you die, and how it is that one's sorcery works, have exactly as much weight in the fiction as such things do in reality. Which is to say, none.
All this really means is that you, as GM, say consistent with the look and feel of demons as initially conceived for the game, but don't ever constrain yourself to play them according to an in-game, character-based understanding of what they are.
One of the most important Will descriptors, which I think gets overlooked nearly all the time, is Belief System. This means the character has relied upon an explanation or narrative, not only about demons but pretty much everything. It could based on faith or a reasoning-process or anything else.
What I want to emphasize is that "Belief System," the Will descriptor, is not particularly different in content from the Price "Mad."
Best, Ron
Mackie:
Im always struck by a qoute from one of the major characters in the City of Heroes RPG, an undeady supervillainess: "I am dead, and the dead cannot change".
Conceptually, the demon/spirits will be only reflections of their living self: Stuff in a rut, distilled, and quite different. They will only behave in distorted ways from their "living selves". Is this enough?. Hopefully, some stories and situations may generate with this situation. A possible NPC might resummon his departed wife, not resolving his greif. However, the demon is just a reflection, and he remains stuck - unable to "let go", but driven to more internal strife by the mockery of the wife he has summoned.
Ron Edwards:
That's definitely what you need. You have it.
It's time to stop scribbling notes and to see what sort of characters the players make. That step will provide much more material for you as GM, and it's best to get to it as soon as possible so you don't accidentally start making more (and too much) material on your own.
Best, Ron
Mackie:
Thanks Ron,
Being GM inexperienced, im gonna kick off with just one player - heck I may be to bad at it to warrant further GMing.
The character is allready done (bar name); a blues guitarist/drifter with his shadow as a demon (its need is to eat fine wine / cigars / food). Kicker done (body of Blind boy williams the guitarist found dead in the players shack), and famiy and aquiantanced drawn up (spent a little more detail on family tree as he may be summoning / contacting them - perhaps to much time).
All thats left now is to play, and see how the "resources" para-ability works out (its set in the depression after all). Maybe ill post in the "Actual play" thread once done (or carry on here?)
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