Sorcerer and Steam
Erik Weissengruber:
I am setting up the basics for a Sorcerer session at an upcoming convention. It will be a 2-parter: Part 1 will be the set-up of a 1 sheet and characters, Part 2 will set the players loose in what they created.
Ray Bradbury's Introduction to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea contains an image of the mad scientist as a blasphemer which is the springboard for my thinking:
"n sum, Nemo skins together and rivets tight the very symbol most feared and whispered of by Ahab's mind and Ahab's crew. Casting aside any doubts, precluding any inhibitions, Nemo intrudes to the monster's marrow, disinhabits mysticism, evicts terrors like so much trash, and proceeds to police the universe beneath, setting it to rights, harvesting its strange crops, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral-gold from sunken fool's ships to be distributed to the world's needy." (7)
Which requires him, I might add, to drag his crew to their doom, terrorize the sea lanes, kidnap, murder, etc. So his mad science comes at a cost to himself and the people around him. Sounds like a sorcerer with Humanity problems to me.
Premise: ------ still needs defining
Sorcery:
- If the 19th century's watchwords are Order & Progress & Reason, then the sorcerer must blaspheme against one or more of them. To blaspheme is to transgress publicly. The sorcery need not be public but the blasphemy must be.
Humanity:
- Self-sacrifice: putting others' needs before your own comfort, safety, survival, or prestige. So, yes, some Victorian paragons are also paragons of Humanity, including some missionaries, soldiers, entrepreneurs, administrators, scientists. But is every religious fanatic, Colonel Blimp/Mister Kurtz, robber baron, imperial bureaucrat, steam savant high on Humanity. Far from it.
Inspiration:
Difference Engine
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
The City o' Gloom setting for Deadlands (for colour)
Two Things To Remember:
- Not everything Inhuman is Sorcerous
- Not everything Blasphemous is Sorcerous
More later.
Ron Edwards:
Hi!
My thinking on that issue goes as follows ...
1. If you have a WMD, especially one which may strike a target of your choosing effectively at will, then you are an international power.
2. An international power will eventually gather to it one or more political parties and certainly a number of potential allies, probably unofficial ones. Much of this has to do with whom you threaten with the power and whom you use it on, if anyone, and why.
3. If enough people support these parties and alliances, and if various trade or military contracts are established, then you are now a nation.
Best, Ron
Erik Weissengruber:
I was uncertain as to who the characters would be. There could have been low-level scramblers and tinkerers like the protagonists of Difference Engine (and also the kinds of figures about whom the folks at Steampunk magazine weave their fantasies). But it might be fun to have folks who in addition to real temporal power have real sorcerous power.
Perhaps the protagonists are like Canada's Gerard Bull: spurned by his nation at home, he develops high powered canon and shops them around to dictators like Saddam Hussein until Mossad does away with him. Not a very powerful man but a very dangerous one.
The mashup I'd like to see is the rigid class society of Victorian England face to face with the problems of the twentieth century: the spectre of total war (via blimps, land leviathans, submarines), the administrative/control/surveillance technologies facilitated by advanced computing (Difference Engines), environmental degradation (via the new superfuel, which still has to be mined with human labour).
I'm thinking around 1866: the liberal nationalist revolts of Europe are effectively crushed but assassins are all about, Prussia is on the move towards liberalization, the French are intervening in Mexico, slavery abolished in the USA, re-united USA turning west.
I was thinking of a dark, ultra-dense conurbation for the setting. What I may do now his have sweeping international intrigue, which goes along with Verne's adventure tales. Perhaps the rituals have to take place during some sort of exploration -- foreign lands, enemy territory, new fields of science, the depths of the oceans, the peaks of mountains, etc. The people clearing territory for empire may get public acclaim or get scolded for their reckless ambition. But there real aim is not order and progress but something "other." So it would be Verne/Conan Doyle/Harry Flashman with phantasmagoric echoes of Poe and Shelly and Byron.
Blasphemers could include Anarchists & Rebels (Blasphemers against Order), Mystics/Religious Fanatics/Conspirators/Occultists (Blasphemers against Progress), Visionaries/Lunatics/Monomaniacs (Blasphemers against Reason-as -science) or Atheists/Daredevils/Decadents (Blasphemers against Reason-as-Religion [the state-sanctioned religion of England]).
Technology that complicates the world but is not sorcerous:
- Analytic Engines
- Koshuth's Crystal: polluting superfuel extracted by human labour under difficult conditions (like Deadlands' Ghost Rock)
- Pilatrium: like helium, only moreso and less explosive, enabling lighter than air flight
- Faraday Process: enabling tough but light steel alloys to provide the body for steam machinery
- Swedenbourg Coils: storage, transmission, projection of electric energy
Technology that could be introduced by the right mad scientist with the help of sorcery;
- mesmerism
- instant communication (that's right: no radio without some demons!)
- Babsonium or some other anti-gravity shielding
- summoning ectoplasm
- spirit photography
[last 2 are more late-19th, early 20th c.]
- artificial intelligence
- resurrecting the dead
- transferring minds
- traveling to other dimensions
- space travel
Anyway, a few more starting points will be recorded here. Then I will do a con report in Actual Play.
Erik Weissengruber:
Last few pieces:
I will pitch for these but allow player input.
Premise: What would you do to become the most prestigious technoscientific genius of the age?
(focus squarely on mad scientists, explorers, tinkerers)
Lore: Blasphemous insights
- speculations that contravene accepted canons of Order, Progress, or Reason (religious or secular)
- questionable, controversial, forgotten, discredited, scandalous, paranormal, radical theories NOT the steamtech that is already transforming the world
- importing post-1850's concepts (quantum mechanics, non-Euclidian geometry, genetics, game theory, evolutionary psychology, whatever) requires sorcery
(allowing some play between alternative history and players' engagement with more recent ways of thinking -- productive anachronism)
Erik Weissengruber:
Something to remember from Story Games
http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=12422&page=1#Item_0
"It was identifying this sense of alienation that really helped me get over an obstacle that I had been working on - how to get people to cook up a good character without getting wrapped up in boring Victoriana. The whole point of Victorian-era heroes is that they broke molds and didn't, couldn't, or refused to fit in and play by the rules."
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