Play Sorcerer Backer Refund

Hello,

First, I’ve just sent out an email to backer of <i>Play Sorcerer </i>to begin the process of returning all monies from the Fundable campaign lo’ those many years ago.

Second, let me apologize for not finishing Play Sorcerer. I appreciate all the support for the project. But years have passed since the Fundable backer campaign. The fact is, if I haven’t finished the book by now there’s no reason to think it will ever get finished.

I’m contacting all the backers to return their money. I have a list of all the amounts due.

1) If you would like your money repaid by PayPal, please send me the name of PayPal account to return the money to.
2) If you would like me to mail you a check, please send me your name and address and I’ll get it off in the mail.

I have records of the donations. They are listed by the name each person would have used to make the payment via PayPal.

Finally, if you were a backer but did not receive the email, one of three things has happened:

1) Your email has changed in the intervening years. (It happens!)
2) You used a different email for the PayPal payment than you use for normal correspondence
3) This is the frustrating one: Fundable.com (the Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter) didn’t have all the bugs worked out. (Which might be why they went out of business.) For about two dozen backers the email list was incomplete: I have the portion of the PayPal email address before the “@” and I have the amount donated. But I am missing the domains of those email addresses.

If you contributed to the fund and did not get the email, please contact me at “christopherkubasik” at the email place that starts with a g. Include the email address you would have used to fund the project through PayPal so I can match the name to the amount due.

Also, for the reasons just listed, if you know anyone who backed the project, please pass this information on to them so I can make sure to get all monies refunded.

Sincerely,

Christopher Kubasik

I want to Play Sorcerer

I’ve been locked up writing Play Sorcerer for a couple of weeks now.

During that time I got called in for a week of Jury Duty.

I’d get up at 5:30 or 6, write. Go to court. Write during lunch. Go back to court. Come home. Go to the gym. Come home. Write. Fall asleep. Do it again.

I did the best I could, but it screwed up my forward motion.

Which is back now.

And here’s the thing: You know what happens when you write about how to play a game? You sit there thinking, “Man! This game is fun! I’d really rather be playing this game!”

That’s all.

Back to work.

The book is cooking

Tens of thousands of words lining up.
I have tried to stop typing three times in the last four hours because I am exhausted.
I keep opening the document up and continuing to type anyway.
I can’t stop.
It’s going well.
The final push is here.

Thank you for your patience…

…even if you’ve run out of patience.

I recently came across an article by Laura Miller about Writer’s Block.

I was particularly struck by these paragraphs:

Most cases of writer’s block are not, however, the result of a biochemical imbalance. Those not caused by being, as Eddie puts it, “depressed off my ass,” are more likely to be rooted in fear. It’s here that something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law applies. First proposed by two psychologists in 1908, this principle holds that the more “aroused” (i.e., engaged and challenged) a person is by a task, the better he or she performs, up to the point that the arousal becomes anxiety or worry, at which point performance declines.

In other words, beyond a certain point, the more difficult a writing task, and the more you think it matters, the more likely you are to become blocked. This may explain why journalists with, say, two deadlines per week almost never get blocked: no individual story ever has to carry that much weight. (The paycheck helps a lot, too. Not long ago, a woman sitting next to me on a plane asked if I had a trick for getting past writer’s block, and I replied, “Yes. It’s called a mortgage.”)

I would say that this rang true for me in the case of Play Sorcerer, because Play Sorcerer matters to me. Perhaps it has mattered too much. As I’ve struggled with the project all this time, I’ve struggled with all the support I got for the project – from you – and my desire to deliver something worthy of that project.

The process of working hard on it and stepping away from it has been the process of me doing the work and learning to stop panicking about it. I really have never experienced any project this way before.

For those of you who funded the project, whether or not you regret having done so, or are still excited about having done so (or both!) let me say, “Thank you,” one more time. Though I’ve had my share of excitement and doubt about the whole thing off and on for month after month, I can safely say I feel great about where the book is going and looking forward to having it wrapped up soon.

Sorcerer: Some Things It Does Well; Some Things It Doesn’t

Last year I came up with a Sorcerer setting I called “Hidden Gods.” I came up with it to play with folks I already played with and as a tool to introduce a new player.

Just around that time my life and the life of everyone who might have played exploded with new romances, new education, and new success at passion-careers. Figuring out how to manage our time with all this newness became a challenge alongside everything else.

Now the dust has settled and everyone has a better sense of what time is available and how they want to use it – and more gaming is on the table. Also, I’ve met more folks who haven’t played these crazy new games that have come out in the last decade, but want to give them a whirl.

I’ve been whipping up a variety of Sorcerer settings to send out, along with Hero Wars using Glorantha, to see who is interested in what.

My plan is to have a Sorcerer SF setting (“Future Perfect”), a modern day Sorcerer setting (“Hidden Gods”) and a fantasy Sorcerer setting (“Mythic Age” – which I’ll be posting soon.)

If you click on the link above to “Hidden Gods” you’ll find a document that is a little bit different from the one I posted last year.

The difference in the documents is what I want to post about. Something had always been nagging at me about the way I’d set up “Hidden Gods,” and after opening up the doc again recently and mulling it over, I figured out the problem. Significantly, the changes I’ve made to the document touch on the way Sorcerer works in general, so I wanted to do a write-up on the matter.

Last year, the concept of “Hidden Gods” was that there were these Hidden Gods, Lovecraft-type things that were “out there.” The Demons would be the servants of the Gods. I wanted a kind of mythos that we’d all be making up, with cultists and the whole deal. Some Player Characters might be cultists, others might be cops investigating ritual murders that lead them into investigations that make them want to stop the cultists. Others might be journalists investigating the murders that lead them to start tapping the powers of the demons to learn more… And so on.

What I wanted was the whole Cthulhu Mythos mystery-that-is-bigger-than us thing.

I’m sure I still want to make a game like this. But after mulling over “Hidden Gods” I realized that using Sorcerer to do this would be the effect I wanted. Sorcerer can do some things well, and other things not so well.

After my experiment with “Traveller: Holy War,” where I used the GDW Traveller setting with the Sorcerer rules, I had a better understanding of how the Sorcerer rules channel the fiction and started paying more attention to how the Sorcerer rules work or don’t work with certain kinds of stories.

To sum up the Traveller game quickly, we ended up with a fantastic series of sessions of play that that had the tonal feel of SciFi channel’s Battlestar Galactica. I also saw, clearly, that the Sorcerer rules do not care about your big setting. Once the Kickers are activated and the Players and GM are engaged, Sorcerer drives the game toward a strong narrative arc worthy of a long form TV show, focusing on the Player Characters, their choices and their actions above all else. The phrase I’ve come up with is this from these lessons: “In Sorcerer, the setting is what is left in the wake of the character’s actions.”

Looking over the “Hidden Gods” setting I remembered that Ron Edwards has written many times that there should be no “secret reality” that only the PCs know about; no curtain over world we know that, if you only pulled it back, you could see the way the world really works.

Of course, Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos is ALL ABOUT the notion that there is a secret reality to the way the world really is. But I still, at first, could not see why it would not work well.

After examining the issue again, it occurred to me the core issue is this: Sorcerer is about relationships. (Ron once said that the relationship between sorcerers and demons is a dysfunctional relationship. Some people took this to mean the game is about — and only deals with — dysfunctional relationships. But of course this isn’t the case at all. There need to be many relationships in a game of Sorcerer to make the game work – most of them not with demons, and some dysfunctional and some not.)

But the protagonists of a Cthulhu Mythos don’t have a relationship with the mythos gods. They interact, sometimes, with people who have relationships with those gods; they find clues/documents/statues that offer more proof of the dark gods; they come to intellectual understanding of the implications of what they have found…. But they do not have relationships with the mythos gods.

Without that relationship, the connection between the protagonist and the gods becomes one of understanding — understanding of insignificance; of the true, dark nature of the universe; of the frailty of human beings and the weakness of civilization. This is all fun stuff!

But it has no gears for the Sorcerer rules to engage with. I think Ron’s admonishment about not having “the secret reality” is all about this one point. To go down the path of the “secret reality” is to risk walking down a path of intellectual understand — and leaving the playing field of relationships and how the relationships affect each other.

If a sorcerer can’t have a relationship with his new understanding, then how does such an understanding fit effectively into play? How does it avoid becoming an intellectual exercise that avoids the interlocking teeth of the Sorcerer mechanics? Because Sorcerer should never be an intellectual exercise; those teeth are all about being visceral and emotional.

At this time, my answer to both questions is, it can’t. Without personifying the “new understanding” in some sort of relationship, I don’t think the understanding can be anything but solipsistic and intellectual for the Player Characters, and I don’t think such a bit of fiction will fit comfortably with the mechanical gears of Sorcerer play.

To be clear, here are some of the teeth I’m talking about: The definition of Humanity, the definition of Demons, the definition of Lore, and Demon Needs and Wants. All of these might look like they are abstract or intellectual at first glance, but their real purpose is to define a Player Character by the actions he takes, what he does with and to strangers and loved ones; how he conducts himself in pursuit of the things he wants.

Without those elements, you might be having a great time (and you probably would!) finding the cool clues and playing out the implications of your PC coming to understand the secret truth of the world — but there’s a very good chance you would no longer be playing Sorcerer. You could stop using the game’s elements and just have the GM feed you cool new bits of reality. Again, fun! It’s a game I want to play. But it’s no longer Sorcerer for all the reasons I’ve listed above about Sorcerer being about relationships and behavior, not intellectual understanding.

So, when I looked over the “Hidden Gods” setting material, I saw that I was close to making a Sorcerer setting, but had placed some structural elements that would, in the long run, weaken the game.

I ended up taking out the Gods. I kept all the stuff about Lore being about seeing the secret patterns of reality. And then the Demons, rather than being servants of the Hidden Gods, are ability of the sorcerers to take that understanding of the secret patterns of reality and take that understanding to re-shape reality to their whim.

So, yes, I have kept a portion of the notion of the “secret reality” — the sorcerers can see the reality that others cannot. But it isn’t “out there.” It is tangible and concrete to the sorcerers. They have a relationship with the Tarot Deck they use, or the Glass Eye that lets them hidden truths in newspaper articles, and so on. They see the secret reality immediately and can engage with it immediately. It isn’t “out there” — it’s at their fingertips, forcing them to make choices about how they’ll act now that these powers are at hand to use.

This only strengthened my understanding of the game — this notion that the game is really, really about relationships. Not just the relationship between the sorcerer and his demon, but the sorcerer and all the relationships the Player writes down on his character’s sheet. It is the concrete interaction of behaviors, choices and people that make the game sing.

A Sorcerer Character Sheet

You can click over to a PDF version here

This is the Sorcerer Character Sheet design I use when running Sorcerer. Sometimes I switch out the fonts for different settings. It contains a design element that I think is invaluable for Sorcerer play.

You’ll note that in the Sorcerer book the character sheet is divided into two pages — commonly referred to as The Front of the Character Sheet and The Back of the Character Sheet.

The problem is that I’ve seen posts time and time again on the internet about how both GMs and Players stopped looking at the back of the character sheet once play began. “We forgot about it,” is a statement (in one form or another) I’ve read time and again as I’ve scoured the Internet for points where people trip up on the game.

Why is it a problem? Because “The Back of the Character Sheet” should be a huge proportion of active play.

The rules don’t particularly emphasis this in the Sorcerer book. On page 34 you’ll find this:

“The diagram on the back of the character sheet may be used to list all the people, places, demons, and things associated with the character. Such items associated with Cover, for instance, are listed in the Cover section. The real use of the diagram, however, lies in placing the written items near to one another insofar as they are related in story terms. For instance, a sorcerous mentor would certainly be listed in Lore, but it might also be placed up against the boundary with the Kicker section, in which right across from it, written ‘first mission with deliberate murder.’”

On the other hand, on page 46 you’ll find these words, perhaps the most important in the book:

“Sorcery and demonics are just fantasy; real pain and triumph reside in the real human heart. Stories are about people, and there should be lots of people in the game-world with names, problems, and interlocking lives, many of which present problems for the players.”

Many of the “people” those sentences refer to will be created by the Players during character creation and they will be marked down inside that box on the back of the character sheet. It is from this box that both the GM and the Players can refer to when looking for inspiration for both game prep outside of play and inspiration for scene material during play.

But, of course, people forget about the box. They don’t use the box. So everyone at the table often loses track of all the terrific non-player characters and details the Players created during play.

Why do they forget about the box? Because the box is on the back of the character sheet.

So, I’ve taken the box and moved it to the front of the Character Sheet. I want everything that matters in front of the Players when they play. And everything in that box matters a lot. It’s certainly as valuable as the scores for Stamina and Will, and just as valuable as the Demons and the Character’s Price.

The details a Player notes down in that box under Kicker, Cover, Price and Lore are a list of all the people, places and objects the Player has decided really matter to the character. If those aren’t listed — and if the GM and the Players don’t tap them — then all that is left is a lot of jurryrigging by the GM to keep things moving and a lot of plot and mystery about some Abstraction the GM is using to keep the Players engaged.

But the truth is, the GM doesn’t have to do much to keep the Players engaged if all the great fictional details that they created around their are character listed right there on the sheet in front of everyone for easy reference. If a Player writes down “Wife, Jenny” under the Kicker, then the GM knows to keep arcing the PC’s Kicker moments in a variety of ways through the game. If a Player writes down “Killed Son” under Lore, no matter what that means and in what context, it means that the Player wants touch on the loss of the son, what the son means in relations to the sorcerous power he’s gained, and will most likely be sparked to creativity if the GM offers him opportunities of atonement, chances to perhaps raise the son from the dead, and so on.

The point isn’t to know exactly how to use the character and details on the sheet at the start of play, but to use them as points of reference as play continues.

By arcing back to the details on the sheet, the GM keeps the narrative details from spinning out of control and across the solar system. The details become the “anchor points” for play. The GM can loop back to them, juggle them, create new permutations of how the Player interacts with them via his character.

Note that this one of the telltales that this game is not like other games written before 1999. In most games there are lots of stats and numbers and if the player wants, he can list some NPCs somewhere on the back. And, often, players new to Sorcerer use it exactly that way. But in Sorcerer the elements are somewhat reversed. There are very few numerical values. The focus of the game is going to be in part those details written in that chart — which now, on this Character Sheet, is dead center on the page.

Finally, Ron suggests that items that are associated on the sheet be written near each other. Notice what this does: It turns the chart into a kind of bullseye. The more an item is associated with items from other categories, the closer those items will move to the center of the chart.

Don’t obsess on this, of course. There will be plenty of character and demons and objects and so on the GM creates that will also intrigue the Players. But the GM should never forget that what the Player has written down on that chart is what the Player has already fallen for and is interested in. And the more weight it has within the fiction of Sorcerer, the closer it will be to the center – which makes it all the more juicy to play with.

All this matters, of course, because when we’re meeting to make stories, we do it on a weekly or so basis. We need tools to remind us what our focus is. A character sheet in a game like Sorcerer is like the notes a novelist or screenwriter has on hand, checking them on occasion so he stays on track with what the project is about. And, in Sorcerer, all those relationships a Player Character has to other people — that’s what the game is really about.

Future Perfect: A Setting for Sorcerer

I’ve always been drawn to the art of Warhammer 40K, loved the SPACE HULK game, but never really knew more about it than that.

I’ve got some people wanting to try Sorcerer, and along with some of the settings I’ve already got, I was thinking of doing something in the 40K universe.

And then I realized I really didn’t want to spend a lot of time learning the 40K universe. So I decided to just steal the art and make up my own setting!

Future Perfect takes place at the End Times of Earth’s history: Resources are running low, wars are still being fought, dynastic families struggle to keep their families and their people alive.

Sorcerers are people who use psionic abilities forged from their own thoughts melded with armored power suits.

• LORE is Selfishness.
• DEMONS are the powered armored suits.
• HUMANITY is Compassion – the ability to see the greater good of humanity, act on the needs of others not connected to you, forswearing or sacrificing your own needs or the needs of those closest to you for someone else.
• RITUALS are acts that rob others of life, love, security and dignity in the name of serving one’s own interests or the interests of those one loves
• At a HUMANITY OF 0 the Player Character can care only for his own needs, losing all connections with those he once fought for or loved. He becomes a gabbish, wandering the land slaughtering all and taking all he finds for himself.

I slammed together a five page PDF to show to my players. You can see it here.

The Basis of Reality; The Basis of Fiction

As I continue working away on Play Sorcerer — and I do! — my brain constantly sees what I read and how I’m writing other projects in terms of the book.

This past summer I was reading Endless Things, the last book in John Crowley’s amazing Aegypt cycle. I was with my family at Spofford Lake in New Hampshire and came across a passage I meant to reference for Play Sorcerer.

I ended up putting Endless Things down so I could Game Master a game of Sorcerer for my nephews and nieces over several days. It’s the end of the year and I’ve only picked the book back up. I started again at that passage I found. It struck me again, and so I thought I’d share it here:

“Except for brief moments of ontological doubt such as anyone would have, Kraft had always known that the physical world – this earth and its universe of stars, its gravity and mass and elements, its living and dying stuff – was the base layer of reality. What we think about it is mere evanescence and spendthrift; what we hope dies with each day; we impose our inexistent notions and grids upon it, but earth and the flesh abide.

“According to Dr. Pons, though, it was actually just the opposite. To him, physical matter had no real existence at all; it wasn’t different from human, or divine, ignorance. It was an illusion, in fact a hoax. The slightest and smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul is more real than any aspect of materiality. And more real in turn than all those emotions, all tears and laughter and love and hate, are the conceptions of the mind – Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom – which give to materiality whatever form and worth it has. Most real of all is the world beyond nature and even Mind: the realm Without, utterly out of reach, the realm of the Fullness and God.

“What Kraft had learned, in those first joyous labors of imagination long ago, was that, different as Dr. Pons’s inverted universe might be from what is in fact the case, it is necessarily very much like the world inside a work of fiction.

“All the myriad material things that we, in our universe, touch and use and love and hate and depend on – our food, our flesh, or breath; cities and towns, roads and houses – in a book these things have no true reality at all. They’re just nouns. But emotions are quite real; there are tears of things, and they are really shed, and real laughter is laughed. Of course. And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, governing, sustaining reality – the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, hidden Author.”

I find this passage revelatory for the difference in the kinds of focus different people want to bring to their roleplaying games, what they want from them, and where the fun is for different people.

For some, building a “world” that feels as substantial as the real one is the goal. Knowing where every item is and what is at hand is the goal and pleasure. Or, I’m sure, to the greatest extent that is possible in the circumstances of a roleplaying game session.

For others, and this would include me, the “reality” of the game is as described by Crowley via Kraft in the character’s notes about fiction: The substance of fiction is not the tables or bread, but the hearts of the characters.

This does not mean the tables or bread do not matter. It means that they are present with less force than what the characters feel. And, in turn, it is what the characters feel that strikes the flint of action, which makes the tale move forward.

If you look at games like Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, In a Wicked Age…, Polaris, Hero Wars, Riddles of Steel, Burning Wheel, Primetimes Adventures among others, with their Beliefs, Spiritual Attributes, Kickers, Forms and so on, you see “narrative mechanics,” not “physics mechanics” driving the game. These narrative mechanics become the chain drive for the game, with the descriptive elements of how hard someone lands a blow being added on top of why someone landed the blow. But the why is the part that matters most.

I suppose I don’t need to, but I will, note how huge the difference is between folks who want to make sure the world is “real” and those looking to build story first. The anger and frustration that “the other side” exists has wasted so much bandwidth it’s ridiculous. It’s hard to discuss these things on the Internet, it seems to me, because people assume all sorts of crazy things. Several people have assured me, in conversations over the years, that in a narrative focused game, things will just happen willy-nilly-all-crazy “just to make a better story.” Ignoring the fact, of course, that if any of us was reading a novel and things were happening all willy-nilly, we’d put the book down pretty fast. The obligations of fiction remain obligations, no matter what the medium.

But there are differences of focus. And this is the main point I want to touch on. When Crowley writes: “And in a book intellectual order is the most real of all, governing, sustaining reality – the Logos, the tale issuing from its absent, hidden Author,” he is touching on the organizing order of the games I listed above. Beliefs in Burning Wheel and Forms in In A Wicked Age… are part of the reality of the fiction — with greater substance than any sword. Does this mean, once more, that swords do not matter? No. But they are tools used to express the qualities of the characters, the qualities being their feelings and emotions and desires and hopes and hatreds.

The Author of a game of Sorcerer is in fact the Authors — all of them, sitting at the table. The intellectual order is based on the definition of Humanity; the definition of Demons; the Prices; the Telltales; the Kickers; the NPCs, the Objects, the Locations the Players have written on their character sheets; the values of Stamina, Will, Cover and Lore; the descriptors; the Starting Demons; and situation and background notes the GM has made.

Boom. Everything grows from that. And everything is on the table, known to all the players apart from the Game Master’s notes — and these notes should have been grown from the open notes of the Players’ character sheets. (And what are the character sheets in a game of Sorcerer but the Player’s notes, comparable to the Game Master’s notes, but simply known to all.)

These are the elements of the “intellectual order” that Crowley mentions as the basis of fiction. The elements with the numbers — the Scores of Stamina, Will, Cover and Lore — are just portions of the order of the game. Their purpose in the mechanics is simple and elegant. As noted many times, they do not serve the function of Abilities found in some other games: One cannot uses a Score in Sorcerer simply to see how strong a character is, as one could quantify Strength in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Stamina in Sorcerer is only used when tested in conflict with another character or force; when a player has said, “This conflict is worth it to my character.” This quality of “worth it” is, of course, what the game is about. This is the heartbeat of characters in the kind of fiction Sorcerer creates. “Worth it” is not about conflict — it is about the characters and objects and locations on the Player Character sheet — the daughters, friends, lovers, books of knowledge, graves and so on… the things that mean something to a Player’s character.

It is the issue of “worth it” that drives the stories. The Game Master does not have a story or plot or encounters or climax prepped out in any form, because who knows what the Players will decided is worth it for their Player Characters three sessions in. Five sessions in. Ultimately what Sorcerer play is about is the Players discovering over time what they think their characters truly do value.

And what is this value based on? The “smallest human emotion felt by the inward incarcerated soul.” And how do we measure how these values are being acted on? “…the conceptions of the mind – Beauty, Truth, Order, Wisdom.” Or, in the case of Sorcerer, the particular concept of Humanity. And how are these concepts moved into action to reveal these emotions of the characters? Not through a “world” that would hum along even if no one was around to play with it, but through the actions and decisions of the tales Authors.

On My Way to GenCon

I’m flying over Oklahoma right now, after a delay at LAX. I’ve slept 45 minutes out of the last 36 I’ve been so busy getting ready for the convention.

An update: The book, as always progresses. It’s a strange experience to think I’ve really nailed down a concept about Sorcerer, and then wander the lands of the Internet and discover there’s even more subjects to cover than I anticipated. (Sorcerer is all about squalid and degrading character with no redeeming qualities on a moral death spiral? Really? Guess I better add another chapter to the book.)

And a lot of work has been done just going over ideas and concepts and checking them again and again. A big shout out has to got to Jesse Burneko for helping me on this. I keep starting conversations about Sorcerer with him, he keeps thoughtfully replying. We check in with each other to see how we might handle a subtle aspect of the system, look for way to find the basic principle of the game, have conversations about the nature of Kickers and so on. His words have not only been informative, but a pleasure.

On other fronts, in the last year I’ve been working on an original Internet series I sold to Michael Eisner’s company, have had meetings around town about a TV pilot that’s getting good buzz, directed a documentary I’ll be cutting next month, and built a relationship with a Saudi Prince to get funding to make a mini-series about the history of Saudi Arabia that I’ll be writing. I’m very excited about the project. It’s kind of like a real life Dune.

Hey… TURBULENCE!!!

But I’ll keep typing.

Projects like this require a lot of starting and stopping of the brain and a great deal of creative momentum to really dig in and solve problems. How exactly do you compress 70 years and four generations of early House of Saud history into seven hours? This means working on Play Sorcerer in snatches when my brain isn’t focused fiercely on setting up larger writing assignments that can pay the bills and all.

The exciting news, for me, at least, is GenCon. I’ll be there all four days, working the Adept Press booth running a Sorcerer Boot Camp each day. The reason this matters to me is that it will let me test a lot of the phrasings and subjects I’ve worked up for Play Sorcerer. One of the big anxieties I have about ht book is, “Okay, I think this book is making sense to help people play Sorcerer. But does it really?” For four days I’ll have a chance to interact with people face to face specifically on this subject, see what words use “click” with people, find out where people get snagged, and what issues people most want to focus on.

The other cool news is that I have what is essentially a chapter of Play Sorcerer in the form of a pamphlet that I’ll be selling at the Adept Press booth. It’s an 8,000 word document, presented in a 8.5″x5.5″ format. It presents the kind of layout and page structure I’ve been working on the for the book. Each page is a self-contained unit — either a mini-essay on a specific facet of the subject at hand, or specific mechanical facet of the subject at had. The idea is the each page is a discreet concept or procedure. The reader gets to read the page and say, “Oh, okay. Got it.” And then turn the page to the next stand alone idea and go, “Oh, Okay. Got it.”

By having this chapter in people’s hands, I’ll get a sense of how that is working out.

Finally, a big shout out to Ron Edwards, not only for making a great game that’s given me so much fun, but also for making sure I made the time for the convention when I wasn’t sure if I should go. He was right, I was wrong. I’m really looking forward to the this week.

If you’re at the convention, please make sure to stop by and say hello!

Hidden Gods

A new setting I’m working up for some old and new players…

Inspirations: Donnie Darko, Videodrome, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Altered States, the poetry of William Blake, Se7en, Zodiac, various cults and cultists (Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate, Charles Manson et al.), Chris Carter’s TV series Millennium, the works of Philip K. Dick.

A contemporary setting.

Sorcerers are... the people who can see the hidden meanings behind things, who expand their sense of truth by studying patterns and connections, leaving behind the mundane, concrete reality the rest of us see.

Lore is… seeing the meaning in everything, building logical understanding of coincidence, struggling every second to see the secret truths revealed. It is getting lost in symbols, patterns and coincidences.. Lore is expanding one’s senses and perceptions toward the edge of insanity.

Demons are… the servants of old gods who want to return. They are things a sorcerer can see and/or hear that no one else can: a guide or conduit into greater perception: a man or a woman only visible to the sorcerer; a pair of glasses that enhance perception; a growth that only the sorcerer can see or touch that leads him forward toward the truth (think of the “water creature” that flows from Donnie’s chest in Donnie Darko.)

Humanity is… appreciating and focusing on the concrete — the day to day, the actual people in your life, the mundane details of the world.

Rituals… involve building elaborate patterns with objects, studying maps or photos for hidden meanings, gathering significant objects and building dioramas until they reveal their truth. Art, sex and psychotropics and all serve as gateways to the “higher” order of meaning.

There are several “factions” of cultists. Some cultists believer they are the gods they hope to summon (or, at least, will become them). Others see themselves as merely servants and hope to curry favor before the coming apocalypse arrives. Some people work for their own personal gain, gathering in loose knit cabals for their own purposes.

An option for Player Characters is to start outside of a cult. For whatever reason the characters has been pursuing an understanding of the Lore: Perhaps a loved one was murdered by the cult. Perhaps they noticed strange coincidences and studied further, pursuing a path to greater and greater understanding of how to tap an understanding of the world no one should ever have. For whatever reason, the Player Character has a stake in what’s going in the realm of Lore. In this case, there his no need start with a bound demon, but its certainly an option. A demon would be of great help in the fight against the cultists.