[Sorcerer] Got My Mojo Workin'
James_Nostack:
Man, I hate this phase of Sorcerer: the phase where I sit around with my thumb up my ass saying, "Jeez, what does the R-Map look like?"
Rather than adapt a single novel, I'm basically trying to see how far I can go with the NPC's from the players' crosshairs. This is because the previous times I've run Sorcerer there are just oodles and oodles of NPC's, and I really want to keep this lean.
Kickers:
* Tommy Joe, the aspiring rock 'n roller, gets protested by the Church Ladies' Auxiliary, and it erupts into a riot in which he punches a pregnant woman
* Zachariah is confronted by the Klan, who is ready to lynch him for leading a mixed-race church meeting
Central characters include:
* Smokin' Joe Tate, a Mississippi bluesman who taught Tommy Joe all he knows about the guitar
* Mavis Belle, a 17 year old black girl who apparently can see the future. Zachariah invited her to testify at his tent revival, and the mixed-race service sent the local bigots into overdrive, leading to attempting to lynch Zachariah as part of his kicker.
Sorcerers include:
* Delilah, a midwife & scavenger living at the edges of the swamp, known to the superstitious as a witch. I'm thinking that Delilah's self-appointed task is to act as helper, guardian, and avenger to the poorest of the black underclass. She's doing this because she sees the need for it, but she's also accumulating lots of social capital and favors to call in.
* Old Saul, a repentant sorcerer who was once part of Delilah's coven and who gave it up to come to Jesus. When Zachariah became an orphan, Old Saul pretty much raised him. (Zachariah's family and Saul's were both so desperately poor that race wasn't a huge obstacle in their surrogate parent/child relationship.)
I'm thinking for demons, that Mavis Belle has some kind of demon with Hint--the hallucinations on a failure work for speaking in tongues, and special damage for an epileptic fit. I'm guessing that Delilah is its master, but I don't know that for sure.
There is also a possessor demon, likely Delilah's, with the power to Daze people's perceptions, permitting the host to pass as white (or black as necessary).....
Roger:
Heck, I'll take a stab at it. Let's see where we end up.
Vertically this is stratified, roughly, into generations. Just sort of turned out that way.
Cheers,
Roger
James_Nostack:
Roger, thank you for the chart! Unfortunately some other parts of character creation don't let it work exactly as you've drawn it, but I'll save it for later use.
FINISHING PREP
I'm trying to do this as close as possible to the core book.
The Sorcerous Technicality
How badly could a rebellious demon screw its master? I mean, if it really, really wanted to? The players' crosshairs included two black sorcerers (Saul and Delilah) in the Jim Crow South. So what about a Possessor demon that lets its host "pass" for white?
The Backstory
Saul Phelps was a sorcerer who had bound Prince John the Conqueror, a Possessor demon dedicated to freedom and evading oppressors. Saul used the demon to build a double-life as a white man. As the Klan became more active in the mid-1920's, "Saul" obtained a favorable bank loan and bought up farmland to be administered by disaffected blacks. But when the Depression hit, the proto-commune failed.
Saul then shared Prince John with his daughter Delilah so she could attend a white school.
At some point Saul + Prince John try to arrange better medical care for the black residents of Methehatchee by getting charitable donations from white church groups. This ends up leading to an affair with a very pretty Christian nursing student named Sally. Prince John's child is a weird half-vegetable thing, and Sally and Saul kill it.
Prince John is incensed. At some point, Prince John possesses Delilah, and lures her into incest with Saul. Horrified when he realizes what's happened, Saul banishes Prince John and abandons his family. Delilah gives birth to Mavis (a demon) 9 months later, but her aunt raises the demon-child.
In the 1950's, when the Klan becomes active again, Delilah summons Prince John and begins a one-woman quest to break the Klan in Methehatchee, regardless of who gets in the way.
Tying This Together
* Saul's proto-commune was on land belonging to Zachariah Cosgrove's family. He later becomes Zachariah's unwilling mentor in sorcery.
* Sally, the girl he had an affair with, would go on to become Tommy Joe's misanthropic aunt
* Mavis, the demon-child, grows up to become a prophecy-spouting teenager in Zachariah's revival meetings
* Delilah is the swamp witch who helped Tommy Joe bind the Mojo Hand
Endings
Delilah is trying to ascertain who's in the Klan, and then she's going to begin by destroying their loved ones. She's also aware that her dad is back in town, and is keen to reveal what he did. (Delilah also tries to help people when she can, but the mission comes first.)
Saul is old now, and hoping to repent. When he realizes what Delilah is up to, he will try to stop her however he can.
Mavis is young and full of zeal--she wants to see just how far she can stretch her wings. She'll try to coopt the revival meeting and force its congregants to serve her utterly.
FIRST SESSION
Recognizing that we'd been pretty tired by the time of Tommy Joe's binding scene last time, we replayed it with additional detail. Notably, the Mojo Hand came from one of Tommy's high school friends, who had died in a car wreck.
Scene 1 (Tommy Joe's kicker)
As Tommy Joe & the Rhythm begin to play their hit single “Fast Charlene” at the Methehatchee County Fair, the Baptist Ladies' Auxiliary, led by Charlene's mom, storms the stage and starts a riot. In the fracas, Tommy Joe accidentally punches his manager's pregnant girlfriend in the stomach in front of a reporter. Tommy Joe slinks out in the confusion, leaving his bandmates to fend for themselves.
Scene 2 (Zachariah's kicker)
Driving home from the hospital (the pregnant girl is Zachariah's estranged cousin), Zachariah comes to a roadblock, and is ambushed by Klansmen infuriated by his leading integrated church services. Unable to talk his way out of trouble, and about to get tarred and feathered, Zachariah called on his demon, Melchidezek, to fly him out of trouble in front of a horrified crowd. Melchidezek is wounded in the escape.
Scene 3
Tommy Joe staggers home to his Aunt and Uncle's house the next morning. His uptight Aunt Sally is giving him grief, but he persuades her to give him one more month to see if he can make it in the music business.
Scene 4
Later that morning, Zachariah meets Lafayette Whittaker, an NAACP field lawyer, who tries to enlist Zachariah to help end Jim Crow in Methehatchee. Zachariah is open to the idea, but mainly focused on visiting a Catholic church to steal communion wafers to pay off his demon Melchidezek.
SESSION TWO
Scene 5
Immediately following, Whittaker and Zachariah drive to his revival camp, to discover night riders knocked down most of the tents, burned some of the goods, and scattered everything to hell and gone.
Zachariah and his flock confer. One of them, a young black woman named Mavis who supposedly is given to visions, is incensed and hopes to lead the black congregants in a general strike against the white businesses of Methehatchee. This unsettles some of the white parishoners. Zachariah tries to talk her out of it, but she overwhelms him with Hint, and he's left with the hallucination that these are the End Times. (Also: Zachariah's mentor, Saul, identifies Mavis as a demon, though not necessarily as his child.)
Scene 6
Tommy Joe is desperate for money to get out of Aunt Sally's house. He tries to hit up his manager, Wild Bill Acres, for money, and after a brief scuffle, they get plastered at Smokey's Vinegar Shack. Tommy Joe auditions for Smokey (a song composed by the Mojo Hand about drowning one's father) and wins the prospect of a paying gig and Wild Bill promises a record deal though he's vague about terms.
Scene 7
Tommy Joe goes to the hospital to apologize to the girl he punched, Mehitibel Cosgrove. His Uncle Asa, a doctor, has managed to save the girl's baby, but warns Tommy Joe that he's out of control and the district attorney is gonna try to crack down. Tommy Joe laughs this off.
He meets Zachariah, who is there to visit with his “slutty” cousin Mehitibel and call her to repentance. Instead, Mehitibel gets the moral upper hand, and they reconcile. Zachariah discovers that Tommy has a demonic hand grafted onto his arm, but doesn't do anything yet.
Later, Uncle Asa confronts Zachariah about this faith-healing nonsense, which he sees as harming the public health. Zachariah challenges him, Faith versus Science—and humiliates Asa completely by practically resurrecting a guy. Zachariah dominates Asa (leader of the White Citizens Council) to come to the revival meetings and help treat poor black folks.
Scene 8
Tommy Joe doesn't want to stay with his Aunt and Uncle, so he arrives at the apartment of his bandmates. They're bitter that he left them to hang during the riot. (One of the bandmates is raving about needing to save his own soul because he saw the Devil last night, revealing to the audience that he was one of the KKK guys trying to lynch Zachariah.) Tommy Joe physically beats his "friends" into submission, and tells them he's moving in; they can sleep on the floor because he's taking the couch.
Ron Edwards:
Important technical point for Roger: relationship map lines are kinship and sexual contact, not marriage. So the "fucking" line should be solid.
Best, Ron
James_Nostack:
Table-Level Update
We've continued the game. Due to difficulties with scheduling, we play every 3-4 weeks, which is slower than I would like. I think we're 5 sessions in?
Something weird is going on with my motivation in this game. I procrastinate on doing any prep for it, am more or less bored with the NPC's, and tend to view the game as a chore I can't wait to finish up. But at the end of every session, I say to myself, "Gee, this was much more fun than I expected, the players are great, there's some good stuff here." And then I start feeling apathetic again. It's a terrible attitude for running Sorcerer.
The players are having a good time. Dave, playing Zachariah Cosgrove the crippled preacher, is really just ripping into his character, but he's very frustrated by the dice mechanic, which he feels is too inconclusive. Setting aside that rolling a large number of dice doesn't lead to decisive victory in itself, he's rolled really well several times in argument-type conflicts, only to have people either abandon their actions to resist him, or else just push on through despite a few penalties. I understand why the rules work this way, but I agree I've been repetitive about this, so I'm trying to adopt a more "one-roll and done" approach.
From a GM's point of view:
* Tommy Joe, the early rock 'n roller, had a really weak kicker. Neither the player nor I really knew what to do with him, but I think we've got some material now (see below).
* Sorcerers with Will 6 suck. They're going to dominate the hell out of any social interaction. Constantly throwing them into physical peril begins to get ridiculous, and without a backstory swarming with demons or NPC sorcerers, Lore isn't going to get invoked very often. So unless these guys are constantly running into Will 7 or Will 8 opposition, they just run roughshod over everything. Setting up bangs in which a lot of social pressure gets brought to bear takes a lot of fictional maneuvering and then the players just crush it without a second thought. (Also, they have very high Humanity scores.)
Fiction-Level Update
Tommy Joe, the rock 'n roller, recruited his musical mentor Smokin' Joe Tate to write songs for him. During the negotations, Tate's guitar comes to life and offers to help Tommy Joe put his band together if he rapes the daughter of the District Attorney. (This is a demonic trick courtesy of the sorceress Delilah, who is trying to smash the corrupt white power structure in the town.)
Tommy Joe later harasses the District Attorney's daughter, who was the girlfriend of the Mojo Hand when it was a human, but she runs away.
He then decides he's going to fulfill the Mojo Hand's need by killing its father (gotta have the Mojo Hand on your side if you're going to be giving a break-out performance). So he heads on over to the family's run-down home, dresses up in the father's Klan robe, and murders him with an axe. And sets fire to the house. But not before the Mojo Hand's 8 year old brother sees his face.
Meanwhile, Zachariah Cosgrove, the holy-roller, humiliates the Sheriff (and realizes that he's the leader of the Klan).
Zachariah tries to rally his followers in advance of a general strike and religious demonstration. Then it turns out that his ex-sorcerer lieutenant has abducted the beautiful protege (Mavis the passer demon) and has tied her up, stripped her, and is trying to banish her when Mavis's adopted parents walk in and start shrieking.
This nearly becomes mob justice, except Zachariah browbeats the crowd, and momentarily defuses the scene by getting into a private meeting with Mavis.
So Now What?
The District Attorney and the District Attorney's Wife (the religious zealot leading the riot at the carnival performance) are both gunning for Tommy Joe. The Sheriff's men will investigate the murder of their klan-brother and eventually find the child who escaped and who can identify Tommy Joe. Tommy Joe's uncle is friends with the Sheriff and might intercede - except Tommy Joe's been acting like a snot to his family, so that might not work.
Zachariah is heading into a private conference with a passing demon, a teenage girl whose desire is power and whose need is affection, and whose looking to break her binding to Delilah. (And Zachariah's regular demon, who constantly seeks to corrupt his church, is going to be strongly in favor of bringing this girl on board.) All she wants is to drive out Old Saul, the one sorcerer who knows what's going on and who acts as Zachariah's conscience.
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