In which we head out into the Sorcerer's Solar System
Judd:
Bret, Christine and I are all buddies who don't game together. Realizing this was silly, we got together to game. We agreed that we wanted a finite game, 3 session and then we are done and if we want to continue, we can evaluate at that point. We are all kind of in these odd places in our lives, getting ready to move, and go to new jobs or graduate school or whatever and we all wanted to get a good game or two in before real life swept us all hither and yon.
We agreed over some painless e-mails (agreeing on which game to play can be a real pain in the ass) to play Sorcerer, specifically this untested rough draft of a setting, Sorcerer 2289: Xeno-Demons in the Science Fiction Solar System: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc3jjkgb_60fk6m6mcs
I tossed together a one-sheet, with art from concept ships and IO9.com and text from the google doc to make a one-sheet.
http://io9.com/5472264/when-space-opera-becomes-art/gallery/
http://conceptships.blogspot.com/
One-sheet text:
Quote
Xeno-tech Demons in a Science Fiction Solar System
Towards the end of the 22nd century, the solar system is rapidly becoming colonized by nation-states, corporate entities and refugees from earth. Probes have been sent into the void beyond Pluto and Charon; data is transmitted from the deep black. Some settlers have even found xenological remnants in the solar system itself, evidence that something had bathed in the light of sol before us. Something else is out there.
Human space travel is slow and tedious. When one travels to another planet, it is akin to someone in the 16th century venturing to the New World via wind and sea. Even using gravity to sling-shot a ship at speeds thought impossible a century earlier, it is still a harrowing 5 month space journey from Earth to Pluto.
Sorcerers are people who will change the course of human history; they have uncovered a piece of alien technology and are seeking to make sense of it. This xeno-tech artifact is their Demon.
Demons are pieces of alien-tech, be it a suit of some kind of armor, a psychological process for training alien brains or a ship from beyond Charon. There is nothing magical about them, though they are fell and they do not belong here.
When Humanity hits 0, your character becomes a cautionary tale, their technology overcoming them. Even worse, their Demon goes out to affect the world in a terrible way, decided by the GM. If the player's Humanity hits 10, they become a paragon, transcending their human shell. Their tech (or their ideas go on to change the world if they have no Demons) goes on to revolutionize the human worlds and make it a better place in a way decided by the player.
Humanity is empathy with other beings.
And I realized my own face was soaked in tears, my eyes filled with them. I could feel the weeping in my swollen throat, the same ache that the songspires had reflected back, not from the ship, I knew suddenly, but from her millennia-departed crew. The knife running through me was the grief of the Martians, an alien pain stored here in ways that made no sense outside folktales around a campfire out on Mitcham's Point, a frozen unhuman hurt in my chest and the pit of my stomach that would not be dismissed, and not-quite-tuned note in my ears that I knew when it got here would crack me like a raw egg.
- Broken Angels, Richard K. Morgan
We talked about different planets and they both liked what was going on with Mars, a planet with its own identity but still being torn apart by earth politics.
I could tell that after making our characters that we were all a bit cooked, so they wrote down vague names and places on the back of their character sheet (that holiest and most under-rated of Sorcerer prep spots) and we went back and forth a bit over e-mail, which helped to flesh it all out.
I liked that process of e-mailing back and forth, it helped bring out the people and places on the back of the sheet and allowed us all to marinate on things for a while.
What we've got:
Bret made up an Outlaw Medical Researcher by the name of Zhang Rong with a Possessor Demon whose Desire is Power and whose Need is to Tell a story about my life.
Kicker: The cadavers in his research facility get up and start performing tasks.
Christine made up an R&D corporate researcher by the name of (can't find her name at the moment) with an Inconspicuous Demon whose Desire is Knowledge and Need is to Gather Hidden Information.
Kicker: Following a knowledge impulse to follow her demon, she's led to a recent spaceship crash site (as in this ship just crashed in the middle of a small Martian frontier town).
Next up: Backs of the sheets, prep and the first game this coming Thursday.
Judd:
Quote from: Judd on March 31, 2010, 10:52:37 AM
I could tell that after making our characters that we were all a bit cooked, so they wrote down vague names and places on the back of their character sheet (that holiest and most under-rated of Sorcerer prep spots) and we went back and forth a bit over e-mail, which helped to flesh it all out.
I liked that process of e-mailing back and forth, it helped bring out the people and places on the back of the sheet and allowed us all to marinate on things for a while.
I thought this process was nifty and worked really well, wanted to jot down some more concerning how it went.
Bret had on the back of his sheet:
Quote
Basanti Pathak - young scavenger
Li Fai - saloon owner that is front for underground medical office
Cactus Smith - bitter brother of dead patient
Zhang Park and Zhang Mei - disappointed parents
Zhao Qi - sister
Rahul Sharma - medical teacher
Forever Johnson - colleague and rival
I asked about his sister and we sussed her out a bit, that she is a married photographer.
Christine had:
Quote
Demon Mentor (internet friend)
Online/Forum Community
Spouse Name:
CEO Victoria Hsu
Junior Lab Researcher Name:
Office w/mini-studio Apartment
Personally Supervised Lab
PDA type thing, always on
Name of town near crash site:
I asked some questions about each tidbit:
Quote
Demon Mentor (internet friend)
Could this maybe be an alien cultist who you talked to online, maybe someone who helped you with your first days of being bound to your demon?
Online/Forum Community
What kind of forum? Tracking alien artifacts? Something about uncovering information?
Spouse Name:
Was an arranged marriage, maybe by the corporation or your family? Was it twue wuv?
CEO Victoria Hsu
I like her already. Not sure why but I do.
Junior Lab Researcher Name:
Do they look up to you as a mentor?
Office w/mini-studio Apartment
I like what it says about the corporate culture that you have an apartment attached to your office.
Lab (personally super-used)
She's a lab-rat. Nice.
PDA type thing, always on
Is it a hologram all around you or something more like the PDA's as we know it?
Name of town near crash site:
I will look up some Martian geography and suggest some good names if ya want.
And the backs of the sheets were solid. I had only to look things over and come up with the good ole-fashoined bandoleer of bangs.
Bret Gillan:
I feel like I stole the idea for my demon somewhere. The demon itself is a byproduct of alien tech rather than the tech itself. Zhang discovered a device that aliens used to create neural backups and memory mapping. His demon is the copy of himself that he made with it, except it's wrong and strange because the device was not designed for human neurobiology. His Telltale is related in that he occasionally will repeat a word in a sentence. The Demon's Need is for Rhong to tell it a story about his life.
Judd:
This is a really strange game with people who are at this odd transition in their lives. We're all moving in the next few months and this will likely get to be the last time we get to game together (and for some of us, its the first time we are gaming together). All in all, it was a normal Sorcerer first session. It is the first of three sessions we agreed on when deciding to play, so I eased back on the bangs, didn't jump to the big ones and let things simmer.
Bret and I had a strange disjointed couple of minutes and it was interesting that he said that it was something we had gone through before, but I will leave room for him to post about it. It boiled down to me taking his kicker in a direction that he had no anticipated. He thought it was going to be more of a mystery that his character would have to solve and rather than that, I kind of made it something his Demon was doing through its power to Spawn. There was some kicker-vertigo to deal with, there.
I really liked how Bret's character dealt with the dead getting up and walking, which was to flat-out freak out.
I almost want a table to check off for when Demon's Needs are denied and when they are fed. There was a nice moment when Christine's R&D exec shooed her demonic martian ravens away from her boss' computer that I really liked.
It was a solid first game, rolled some dice, and fed some Demonic Needs, denied some Demonic Needs.
The next game should get Christine's character hip deep in contact with other Sorcerers and with Bret's Contact -> Summoning -> Binding of an alien intelligence.
We are in second and third gears and next week I hope we start revving up to 4th.
Bret Gillan:
Yeah I totally ground to a halt. I had set up the Kicker, that the corpses in his lab were getting up and walking around and doing things, with the idea that it would be a mystery and the who and the why would be something I had to chase down. Having it be Copy was cool and I liked how it worked out, but that meant the Kicker resolved immediately. Copy was making corpses do things, I stopped him, and then the rest of the game was, "Well, okay, now what?" I ended up sputtering because one hour into the session, my character just hadn't developed enough for me to have clear goals yet for him to pursue. So I think really what caused me to stumble wasn't that the Kicker went in a direction I didn't anticipate but that it was over so fast and then there was a lot of, "Okay, now what do you do?" that I just wasn't prepared for. Before next session I think I need a new Kicker.
As for the disjointedness happening before, I think the best example was the Houses of the Blooded game you ran awhile back. Really, though, I think it's a conversation better had offline.
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