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.

Xeno’s Race

Work continues.

I’ve finally settled on how I’ll be organizing the book.  I’ve got tons of notes.  And the notes keep growing! 

In the last few months I’ve also spent a lot of time scouring the Internet looking for posts about Sorcerer and Narrativist games in general.  Where do people get confused?  What issues hang people up.  I keep finding small, subtle points that I might have glossed over that I want to make sure to slip into the book.  

For example, over at Vincent Baker’s Anyway there’s a great discussion going on about how the Shared Imagined Space interacts with the rules. Now, I’ve thought about this matter a great deal. But the discussion there clarified my thoughts on the matter — and I want to bring that clarity to Play Sorcerer.

I’m currently working on a re-write for Michael Eisner. I have a TV pilot that three production companies are interested in. I’ve got a pitch out that Jamie Foxx’s producing partner is interested in. I’m heading off to New York next month to direct a documentary on dance…

And not one of these projects causes me as much anxiety as this book. I just really want to get it right. I was doing a second pass on some pages this weekend, and I think I am.

Long Form TV, Sorcerer, Story and Structure

This morning I dove into the chapter about the concept of “story” in Play Sorcerer. (This is, of course, a complicated, moist and slippery topic. Imagine opening the hood of your car and finding it filled not with a clean, metal engine block, but some sort of early David Cronenberg thing of flesh and internal organs…. That’s what writing about story is like. But it must be done!)

I had just finished describing all the formats of storytelling that exist (comic books, movies, novels, multi-volume novels, plays and so on..) which I stumbled across this statement from Josh Roby over at Cultures of Play:

…I’d contend that ‘nar’ games require abandoning a recognizable format; they aren’t stories in any formal sense, but moral encounters shrouded in theater ephemera.

To which my first thought was, “You mean like, Dexter? Or Battlestar Galactica? Or The Shield? Or the granddaddy of them all, Twin Peaks?

The point isn’t that Josh is wrong, it’s that he’s thinking too narrowly. I think most of us fall into this trap, by the way, since the minute you start thinking about one format, and really puzzling out how to do it well, other formats seem troublesome, if not sometimes wrong. The needs of an episode of Law & Order are very different from, say, the needs for Rosanne, and the brain is going to pick and choose whatever helps it sink into the puzzle it’s trying to solve. But the key is, no single format has a monopoly on a story format, as there are dozens upon dozens of formats for story-like-things, each with formats or techniques or tools of construction that either make viewing/reading/hearing the story effective or not.

We all value different aspects of these formats and techniques over others. There’s nothing strange or wrong about that. If you sit down to paint a painting you need to make some decisions about what you consider to be a “good” painting. Even if you don’t think about it much, you’re still making a lot of decisions along these lines. Everyone must, in no matter what medium. There is no “right” way to write a screenplay. But you must put a lot of thought into what makes a good screenplay for you.

If you walk into the Norton-Simon museum in Pasadena you’ll find a gallery with a Picasso, a Van Gogh and a Cezanne — and each of them is very different. They’re all great paintings, but each man chose what he valued as to what makes a “good” painting to create very different effects.

So, there are lots of formats for what makes story. I like lots of them, myself.

I would agree with Josh that Sorcerer (as a Nar game) might be less like other format than we are used to. But I think it fascinating that there is a whole new genre of long form TV now that is actually the closest thing we’ve ever had to long form RPG play in the “popular” popular culture. (As opposed to, say, comic books or serialized comic strips.)

When Sorcerer first hit print Ron Edwards couldn’t reference story structures like Lost, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos or Damages because such shows didn’t exist. But now we have plenty of multi-character, multi-plot thread, long form serialized content that rises to a climax each season, and heads for a climax for the series run.

It’s an accident of history, of course. But these days when I’m describing the structure of Sorcerer to people I just point at the long form shows on AMC, HBO, SHOWTIME, F/X and the networks and say, “Like that.”

But, to be clear, that’s a great thing to point to. But any RPG is going to be, ultimately, it’s own thing. What will matter is if play delivers what the players who are looking for “story” most value about story.

THE BROTHERHOOD – A Setting for Sorcerer

I played a 9 session game of Sorcerer last year with my buds Eric, Colin and Vasco. (Two sessions for character creation and 9 sessions of play.) Here’s a thumbnail of the game we set up, so you can see how flexible Sorcerer is in terms of setting and detail.

The game was called The Brotherhood. It was set in a state penitentiary, and Lore was all about the brutality of prison life.

Humanity was the ability to play by your own rules and not the rules of the system. Lore was acts of domination and submission. Demons were shivs, tattoos, cell blocks, drugs and so on. If your Humanity reached 0 you were a creature of prison, acting only in terms of domination and submission, never able to connect to another as a person.

David King was in jail for murdering the lawyer of the cult leader who had executed his daughter from behind bars.
Visili was a lifer (by choice) who had a cell block for a demon and never wanted to leave.
Roman was a convicted ex-cop who had murdered his own partner in an attempt to hide his dark deeds.

Each had learned the Lore in order to survive — or, in the case of the guy with the dead daughter — to get access to the cult leader and murder him.

David’s bound demons were a tattooed third eye on his forehead, and the tattoo of a gun on his arm.
Visili’s demon was the cell block he had lived in for the last 30 years.
Roman’s demon was a series of tattoos that covered his body that showed up after he beat the crap out of someone, with each tattoo showing an image of the beating.

David’s Kicker was that he discovers his daughter was still alive.
Visili’s was that another sorcerer was making a moving to take control of his demon from him.
Roman discovered a member of his crew had betrayed him and set him up for a hit.

A Sorceress of Ancient China Battles an Enemy’s Demon

Or perhaps she’s a warrior from a Hyboria-like fantasy setting, unarmed and lost, who has travelled to the underworld to protect her dead love’s soul.

Or maybe she lives in contemporary Los Angeles, wearing ritual robes, her servant rebelling while she tries to banish it.

Or maybe this is a Virtual Reality environment in the future and the demons are applications the sorcerers use to break the fundamental rules of the game.

Progress Update

Hello All!

Play Sorcerer is a labor of love that I love — but that also causes great stress.

I love Sorcerer, and want this book to do it justice. So while I’ve written dozens upon dozens of manuscript pages, I’ve torn up most of them as I continue working on the project.

The biggest concern is simply this: How to communicate clearly the procedures of Sorcerer?

All of the pieces of the game are interrelated — to a degree I don’t think I’ve ever seen in another RPG. In many RPGs, you have the magic system, and then you have the combat system, and then you have the point buy system.

But in Sorcerer, as a quick example, the conflict system is tied directly to the core premise of the game: How far will you go to get what you want?

Here’s what I mean by that: In every conflict you have to first choose if there’s going to be a conflict. Sorcerer never presumes that two characters are going to stand there and boff each other every turn. Even if the GM unleashes a big monster on a PC, the PC can still take off down the street. Fleeing — and fleeing successfully is always an option and a possibility!

And why might a PC flee? Because he’s a coward? No. (Though that might be the case.) The more common option might be that the Player decides in this case “This fight isn’t worth it.” In other words, he’s not going to go so far to fight this beastie to get into his enemy’s mansion.

And then, during a conflict, the game offers up one choice again and again as the dice hit the table and the circumstances shift — sometime wildly. The Players need to ask for their characters, “How far am I willing to go to get what I want?” Because it’s one thing to grab that idol off the pedestal when your guy gets to go first. But when an NPC firing an Uzi at you has initiative over you, the question becomes, “Do I go on full defense and reduce the odds of getting torn up by bullets? Or do I drive through with my actions with increased odds of getting torn up?”

Of course, the conflict system connects into other matters as well… How Sorcerer builds off the initial color established by the Players, and how the conflict system does the same thing in miniature, as color details that being the fight are the “stuff” that become the “Yes, and…” and “Yes, but…” material of the conflict. It also ties into Kickers, as the GM makes sure to hit the issues and the Kickers the Players laid out on the Character Sheets whenever possible in a fight — because that’s when the dice rolls will really click!

The problem I’ve worked on, even as I’ve continued to write pages, is how to ORGANIZE the material. I want a book that is a good read, but that also serves as a good reference. I’m actually studying Mouse Guard right now, as I think Luke Crane is the best game writer around. No one makes playing an RPG as clear as Luke.

I’ll update when I can, but I promise you most updates won’t amount to more than, “Still Writing!”

However, my plan for the spring was to start adding more info about sample Sorcerer games to this site. I don’t want blogging about Sorcerer to take the place of writing my book about Sorcerer. But I understand folks are curious. I’ll do what I can!

I can only say that I’m very excited about the project and have a clear vision of holding it in my hand and selling it to happy customers.

Christopher

Brill Subsector for Traveller Game

After creating characters with my Players, I had enough information to build out some details for a subsector for the Traveller game. I’m purposefully not filling out all the planets. Using the suggestions from Sorcerer & Sword, we’ll be building the fictional setting through adventure, adding details as we go.

Using the subsector and world creation rules straight out of Classic Traveller, I created the following map. I then reviews notes from my Players Characters and created a history of conflict (social, political and military) with crossed allegiences.

The purpose of the map and the history was to incorporate details from the PCs’ Kickers, Prices, Past and backstory details and put them in motion. A game of Sorcerer and Sorcerer & Sword is about the characters. The fictional world exists to show off the main characters.

Here is a link to the Brill Subsector Map

And here is a Brill Subsector Information Document about the subsector’s history and current political situation.

Again, I could not, and would not, have made the subsector before the Players created their characters. There would be no payoff. The subsector is there to put stress on the key elements the Players have chosen as points of focus for their characters.

Traveller using rules from Sorcerer & Sword

I’ve always loved GDW’s Traveller universe. But the rules never worked for me. After years of fishign around, I think I found a good fit for the game of Traveller I want to play.

Breaking Down Assumptions Before Talking About the Game

I’m still working on the opening pages of the book. It is my hope that by laying down some ground rules for creating stories socially specifically and the act of creation generally I’ll be saving some time further down the road.

I’m writing things like, “A story is not the plot,” and then going on at length about why this is so, drawing analogies from other art forms like painting and music. Part of me would rather get on with the “rules stuff.” But I know that — being honest with myself — I couldn’t do that in good conscience. I believe that I’ve got to tear down some assumptions and set up new bedrock. It’s the same stuff I had to struggle with over the last 20 years. Now I’m writing it all down for the first time.

It is taxing, actually. I’m having to stop and type out ideas and habits I’ve internalized in my own work (not just playing RPGs, but writing scripts). It seems like I’ll have to be boring and frustrating half the readership. But I know that good chunk of the readership will really dig it.

My hope is to have this section of the book sewn up quickly. Once the groundwork is place, I really do think thing will be clearer as to why the tools and mechanics of Sorcerer work, and why they work together to their unique effect.