The Forge Archives

My copy of Sorcerer just arrived, although I've been lurking here at The Forge for about a year. I'm giddy. I just wrote up a new setting which I'd been kicking around for a long time as a potential historical Unknown Armies setting for a long time, but which works perfectly for Sorcerer (I think). I got started on it by stumbling across a picture at the Library of Congress of Harry Houdini and the Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo posing together in 1923 and looking like proper badasses. I managed to dig up some other amazing public domain photos of magic and carnival acts from the period. But then I stalled.

After reading Menand's The Metaphysical Club last summer, about the club of philosophers that included Oliver Wendell Holmes (also a proper badass) and both James brothers, I realized where I wanted to go with this stuff: I wanted an American counterpart to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but weird-historical instead of literary. I later discovered the Harlem magician Black Herman, whose invented Zulu background fit perfectly with the American theme of ethnic metamorphosis that was emerging (Hungarian-born Erich Weiss becomes Italianesque-by-way-of French-cum-American Harry Houdini, whose most famous act is ?The Metamorphosis?; American-born William Robinson becomes Chinese Chung Ling Soo), and I rounded out my extraordinary gang with the aging Annie Oakley and alums P.T. Barnum (possibly succeeded by L. Frank Baum) and H.P. Blavatsky.

The result, which looks okay (thank you thank you) but may need some textual massaging, is this four-page PDF:

http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~rowan/metamorphosis.pdf">The Metamorphosis

Feedback, s'il vous plait.

And thanks for all the inspiration over the last year.

Matt

Anyone who references the Deptford Trilogy is good by me - in my opinion, the best fantasy series I've ever read, precisely because it ain't fantasy.

Anyway, this is a strikingly good Sorcerer setup. I'd play in a heartbeat. It strikes me that the HBO series Carnivale and this intersect a bit. If you haven't seen it, I recommend doing so.

I'm reminded of an interactive fiction game called "The Act of Misdirection" by Callico Harrison.


http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=4972


Feel free to email me if you want more information about this game, or Inform games in general, or interactive fiction in general.

If nothing else, I could probably put together a transcript for you.



Cheers,
Roger

I don't know if you're interested in more literary references, but the novel The Prestige by Christopher Priest is a wonderful book about a rivalry between two stage magicians in turn-of-the-century England.  The central conceit is the Prestige:

Quote
Every magician's illusion consists of three stages. In the "set-up" stage, the "nature of what is to be attempted is hinted at, or suggested, or explained." We are shown that there is nothing up the magician's sleeve. Of course, he is misdirecting our attention all the while. In the second stage, the magician gives a performance, during which he displays his talents and skills perfected by years of practice. Finally, there is the third stage, "the prestige,"--the effect of the magic. The rabbit pulled miraculously from an empty hat, for instance, is the prestige of that trick.

The accompanying, silent partner of the prestige is the misdirection or deformation which makes it possible...

It's a great setting and a very nice handout.  If you don't mind me asking, what do you envision the players doing, what type of characters?

Neat doc. But did I miss the humanity description somehow?

Mike

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. In response to Mike: I haven't fleshed this out to the level of a real setting write-up. Here's what I've been thinking about, in keeping with the theme of cultural reinvention, for Humanity:

Humanity is a measure of how connected a character is to his or her cultural, ethnic, and personal identity. It entails physical changes (skin tone, hairstyle, prosthetics) as well as psychological ones (memory loss, changed habits).

Humanity 0 means that a character has completely forgotten who he or she is and becomes a purely synthetic being.

Humanity loss occurs when acting out of accord with your original values and traditions.

Humanity gain results from strengthening cultural and social ties, old or new.

Those definitions should make for some interesting stories: the Michael Jackson effect, assimilation of immigrants, etc. They also hint at what demons are after: some of them might demand cultural transformation, while others sap the memories and personal individuality of their masters. I envision two major "races" of demons working at cross purposes, each with a different set of humanity effects: one side, the ancestral spirits, aligned with the past and cultural tradition, and the other side, the demons of "progress", aligned with cultural transformation. Dealing with the first requires the sublimation of personal identity to cultural/historical objectives, while dealing with the second requires the sorcerer to forsake his cultural identity and take on a radical new persona of his own invention.

Demons are of an unknown nature -- they take various forms, including spirits of the dead and classical red-skinned imps with small horns and goatees, but they may all be ghosts, otherwordly demons, manifestations of certain abstract cultural forces, or projections of the sorcerer's own psyche.

Lore is similarly underdetermined: it's a combination of traditional occult knowledge (including weird science), spiritual awareness, and openness to otherwordly influences.

Thought it might center on something like that. I can see Satanism (with or without Satan) playing into this, somewhat, in that it's a reaction to mores. Crowley ought to be on the list somewhere, no? He's basically rejected his culture's Judao-Christian basis.

Mike

Yeah, Crowley would fit right into the background -- good call. I see the game starting with all the Victorian/Civil War/Old West stuff fading into the background, and these new forces of modernism and cultural collision taking the fore. Crowley works really well as a point of reference in that transition.

One note: I envision this setting as distinctly American, so I imagine someone like Crowley would figure into it only insofar as he had an American following.

This looks great!

I second Clinton on praising the Robertson Davies reference. Another book reference for you: Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold. A fun novel about the adventures of a Houdini-style illusionist in the 1910s and 1920s, who gets mixed up with the mysterious death of Warren Harding, Yale's Skull and Bones society, and the fight for control of television. And there was a quite good nonfiction book recently about stage magic in this era called Hiding the Elephant.

Your idea for Humanity, and the cost of being Humanity 0, seems a little diffuse for me, though what do I know. But what does it mean to be "a completely synthetic being." Why is that bad? Maybe you could keep what you have but add an element of Humanity also representing your ability to fit in with society. The magician, the showman, these are all characters on the cultural fringe. Humanity 0 could then mean that the person is an utter outcast, untouchable, irredeemably frightening to children and the fairer sex, etc.

Got to love the idea of a "pickled punk" demon. In my old Unknown Armies game, just such a critter (conjoined twins, actually) turned out to be the child of Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz (until it got eaten) and the True King and Queen of America.

Hello,

In Sorcerer terms, arguably, Magnus Eisengrim is Humanity 0. Whether that is "bad" is up to the reader, as it should be, in my view.

Best,
Ron

Wow. Great comments, everybody. This is really helping me out.

I was thinking on the subway this morning that the demons in the setting should be more explicitly presented as spirits of the dead. Even the demons of "progress" or "chaos" or "rebellion", who probably lean toward Satanic/Luciferian/Promethean imagery and rhetoric (thanks Mike), are cultural figures with a specific context. Some of them might be ghosts of the Enlightenment, while some might be the ghosts of African slaves who have every reason to tear down the power structures of America. In this frame, Humanity becomes clearer: it is a measure of of how much one is aligned with the agendas of the living instead of the dead. Humanity gain results from forming relationships with living people and living communities in all their impure complexity, while humanity loss results from absorption in the trappings of the dead and the ideologies of the past.

(Here, of course, it's important to note that alignment with the dead isn't so much about dressing like a goth and hanging out in cemeteries, but instead subordinating the needs of the living to historical cultural imperatives: manifest destiny, class divisions, patriarchy, xenophobia, racial purity, religious bigotry, cultural vendettas, and even less ideologically charged obsessions like nostalgia and artistic preservation. The Promethean/Satanic impulse actually shows up in both the European Enlightenment tradition -- progress, empire, technology, individualism -- and in the anarchist traditions of the abolitionists and trade unionists. Demons of this flavor eventually lead their masters to reconstruct themselves into cyborgs of various types: cross-dressing, sexually ploymorphous, culturally collaged, racially mixed, crippled by industrial accidents and empowered by industrial prosthetics. Here is Magnus Eisengrim and his cohort.)

One of the interesting twists on this somewhat tired formula is that sorcerers are beginning to find themselves recruited by entities aligned with cultures different from the sorcerer's native one. As native cultures fragment and assimilate, the ancestral spirits have begun to look outside their blood descendants for anyone willing to trade cultural allegiance for sorcerous power. Thus we have white men donning feather headdresses or blackface to channel the spirits of Cherokee heroes and Vodun Loa, and Korean pioneers strapping on six-guns and adopting Jesus as their personal savior.

It's in the cities, though, where things get really messy. Young ghosts -- victims of poverty and industrialization, casualties from the Civil War -- have their own agendas which differ starkly from those of their forefathers. Labor unrest, social reform, and radical political philosophies characterize urban life in this period, and you can bet that the dead have a stake in it all.

What keeps this setting fom becoming the World of Darkness is the focus on the human protagonists and their decisions. The dead don't do anything -- they need sorcerers for that.

And in response to Rob:

[Although first, let me say that I'm a big fan: Unknown USA rocked the house. You're way ahead of me on this setting, actually -- I give you mad props on the research you and your players did for that game.]

You're right about the vague Humanity stuff. I'm still not happy with what I've laid out above. But the original idea, which has something interesting in it, was really similar to the humanity definition from the "Posthumanesqe Sorcerer!" thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11478">over here: Humanity measures how well you can relate to "baseline humans", which in this context means living people with a specific set of assumptions about culture, race, religion, and gender. Cultural transgression alienates you from your community, and over-involvement in cultural ideology alienates you from the individuals surrounding you.

Still not happy with this, but I'll send it up the flagpole anyway...

Did someone say, "spirits of the dead?" and "agendas of the dead vs. those of the living?" If so, then check out My current Sorcerer game - modern necromancy and The necromancy game continued.

Best,
Ron

Great stuff, Ron. I just stumbled across a quotation from one of our heroes, O.W. Holmes Jr, which captures some of the feeling I'm going for: he calls the law "the government of the living by the dead". He also attributes the original to Herbert Spencer. But it comes in right at the beginning of a speech on science and law that's perfect for this setting:

From "Learning and Science", speech at Harvard Law School dinner for C.C. Langdell, June 25, 1895

----

Mr President and Gentlemen of the Association:

As most of those here have graduated from the Law School within the last twenty-five years, I know that I am in the presence of very learned men. For my own part, lately my thoughts have been turned to

old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago;

and when once the ghosts of the dead fifers of thirty years since begin to play in my head, the laws are silent. And yet as I look around me, I think to myself, like Corregio, "I too am, or at least have been, a pedagogue." And as such I will venture a reflection.

Learning, my learned brethren, is a very good thing. I should be the last to undervalue it, having done my share of quotation from the Year Books. But it is liable to lead us astray. The law, so far as it depends on learning, is indeed, as it has been called, the government of the living by the dead. To a very considerable extent no doubt it is inevitable that the living should be so governed. The past gives us our vocabulary and fixes the limits of our imagination; we cannot get away from it. There is, too, a peculiar logical pleasure in making manifest the continuity between what we are doing and what has been done before. But the present has a right to govern itself as far as it can; it ought always to be remembered that historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.

...

(my emphasis)

Holmes, the hardened Civil War veteran, is widely regarded as a near-nihilist. But in this speech, he lays down the foundations for a jurisprudence based not entirely on historical precedent but also on scientific thinking. Holmes and The Metaphysical Club, I think, play an important role in usurping the power of the ancestor spirits in this setting.

Matt,

Not much to add here other than to say, thanks very much for the props on Unknown USA. That game was such a blast; I'm glad people have been enjoying reading about it.

Actually, I do have a question that might relate to nailing down Humanity. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman analog you described in your first post - are they the PCs? Or are they just the sorts of character you see the players coming up with?

And also, what, if anything, is the connection between stage magic / showmanship and Sorcery in this setting? Is stage magic the milieu only because turn of the century stage magic is cool (which it is), or is there some other connection? Are all the PCs supposed to be performers / magicians? Could a player run a PC in this game who had no connection to that world whatsoever? Are all magicians sorcerers? Does stage magic offer some sort of metaphor or situation you want to explore?Or is this evolving into a game where stage magic is just one bit of color?

It all sounds very cool, but I suddenly realized I didn't know how the idea of a League of pre-existing historical characters fit with Sorcerer's mandate for player generated Kickers and backstories.

Rob

I think Rob has found the problem brewing with this project: like most of the RPG setting/adventure/campaign.whatever ideas I have, it slowly turns into the Edwards-prescribed "thinly-veiled fiction" as I develop it. I seem to have a little trouble writing up detailed settings without developing the main storyline all by myself.

Specifically, the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" idea, while inspiring at first, quickly generates exactly the kinds of questions Rob has rained -- questions I can't answer yet. It's important to place the PCs at the center of this setting, but asking them to put together a team of historical personages could really cramp their style.

I can envision a number of solutions, but the most flexible of them is also the most appealing: allow a great deal of leeway in choosing historical or original identities for PCs, and also allow significant leeway in fudging and reimagining the details of the lives of historical figures. These two grants of player freedom would also encompass quite a bit of freedom in terms of the historical development of the setting -- it might unfold along lines quite different from our own world if famous historical personages participate in the stories of the players.

Thus, one player may decide to create his PC from whole cloth: he envisions an elderly, half-African, half-Native American ex-slave from South Carolina who summons ghosts using liquor and song. Kicker: She has just arrived in Chicago, where her daughter, recently injured in a factory accident, needs help caring for her city-born children.

Another player seizes on the person of Buffalo Bill Cody, the ex-Army scout and Indian-killer who killed thousands of bison during his lifetime and who ran a Wild West show until his death in the early 20th Century. Kicker: Cody has just been visited by (summoned and bound) a fearsome spirit -- either a Native American ghost or the Bison totem itself -- who has granted him power and extended life in return for an obligation to repudiate the rapaciousness of his youth and works to immortalize the myth of the noble Red Man and to preserve whatever is left of the unspoiled Western frontier. This version of Cody has some resonance with his activities late in life -- he at least gave lip service to conservation and the virtue of the Native American tribes of the West -- but it gives the character a more supernatural background and a place to start from in coming up with Kickers.

As for the questions about stage magic: I think it's evolving into just another piece of color in the setting, although I'd like to see it as a recurring motif. The metaphors it evokes -- conjuration, transformation, misdirection, "show business" -- fit the themes of the setting pretty well, I think.

I'm getting worried that the whole thing is getting a little too comic-booky -- I'd like to stay more low-key if possible. Maybe there's no way around this if you bring historical figures in as PCs.