[Role-Playing Games] Chargen From the Vaults - Sorcerer and Capes (Part I)
When last we met, I was talking about more traditionally architected games that I fully enjoy and we walked through character generation for two of them.
Originally the idea was to walk through character generation for three of them, the third being an important member of the early in the RPG scene, Sorcerer. Things being what they are, the article ran a bit long and it seemed to that two systems were a better choice to try and keep people from falling asleep before the end of the text.
But it's a new day, and with a new day comes new opportunities. We are going to pick up with character generation in Sorcerer and then flip the table back around to talk about character generation in Capes, one of the games that I mentioned in the GM-less role-playing game treatise.
The Annotated Sorcerer
Ron Edwards, Myth and Legend
One of the most ridiculously outspoken advocates for indie gaming in the early days was Ron Edwards. He was, and is, a big man with big opinions and a mouth to match. To suggest that he engendered strong feelings in others is sort of like saying that Mahatma Gandhi may have ruffled some feathers when he suggested to the Jews that they shouldn't put up a fight against the Nazis.
You probably think I am engaged in ridiculously extreme hyperbole. You probably weren't involved in those discussions.
I will grant that, given the distance of time to get away from how irritating the guy actually is, he was and is a visionary, with a surprising grasp of "a new way to do things" which was visibly and notably better in a lot of ways. Unfortunately for everyone else, he was also of the camp that said "and this is the only way to do things," which is never a good plan when it comes to trying to function within the architecture of tribes that make up the role-playing game industry.
Sorcerer
What It's About
Which brings us, almost inevitably, to Sorcerer – Ron Edwards' greatest hit, in a very real sense, and in my personal pantheon of RPG designs, one of the leading lights right up there next to Over the Edge. (Which if you read my last article is no small feat. Neither, I hear, is getting all the way through my last article.)
Sorcerer throws aside one of the tenets that were strong in the early 90s when it comes to game design. Generic systems were all the rage. It was the heyday of Hero and GURPS and a thousand other heartbreaker systems which enter the atmosphere and burned up before landing.
Sorcerer decided to do something different.
It's a Game About Sorcerers
It's a game about sorcerers.
And by that I mean literally all of the player characters are capable of summoning and binding demons to do their will – most of the time. Those demons come in a myriad of form and not always visibly as demons.
Perhaps with your gun in your hand you're just a little bit faster, better, and hurt people a little deeper. Maybe with your girl at your side, you've got the confidence and moxie to charm the pants off of any Board of Directors and everything just seems to break your way. Or maybe you have a literal demon bound in thrall to you which executes your darkest wishes – but you never intended to have one in the first place and you really wish those darkest wishes would just go away.
Maybe with your gun in your hand, you look at other people and think about how much better the world would be without them. Maybe your best girl is always on about how terrible your friends are and how you don't really need anyone but her. Maybe that literal demon which comes to you in the night demands you go and break a heart, right down in the soul of another person, in order for it to leave you alone for another month.
It's a Game About Demons
You see, Sorcerer is a game about demons, too. Personal demons. Really the demons that we all have. There are a lot of literal demons in the game, pretty much all over the place – but we all know that just because we see a thing doesn't mean that a work is about a thing.
Sorcerer is about demons and the people that they are bound to.
That binding is an important part of talking about characters here. It's a literal part of the process, not only of character creation, but character play, because more demons will come into being, usually intentionally, and all of them must be bound one way or another to the sorcerer which summoned them.
Because of the mechanical underpinnings of the game, that binding can push either way. It's not just the demon which is bound to the sorcerer – try and summon and bind something a little more powerful than you, or a lot more powerful, and you may end up bound to the demon more powerfully than you can possibly imagine.
It's this particular aspect of the game which I believe may be the most important, because many games are about dealing with demons. Anytime a setting involves the demonic, demons are going to be dealt with. But Sorcerer comes at it more intimately.
If you're looking for literary suggestions to understand what's going on here, look at the Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock or The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R Donaldson. Or you could just pick up any nonfiction story about people wrestling with their addiction, sometimes winning, ofttimes losing, but always struggling.
It's that kind of game.
Annotated Edition?
Here's the thing.
Ron Edwards has an ego at least as large as mine. It wasn't enough for him to publish an excellent RPG about peoples' deep and abiding personal issues, with the system designed specifically to trying get out of the way – except for those times that getting in the way made the story better.
No, he wanted to Kickstart a new edition of the game which combined all of the original PDFs and all of the supplements into two much larger books with the first literally involving the original text of the game directly across from his personal annotations and reasoning about why that mechanic or piece of the game works as it does – or what he would do differently.
It's like a second edition, except with the commentary track turned on and turned up to 11. It's like sitting down with the designer and talking to him at length (except there's no way for you to interrupt).
It's amazing.
The Kickstarter intended to completely fund at a $5000 goal.
In the end, there were $26,792 pledged for people that wanted to see this annotated version of the game. I won't lie to you, $31 of that was mine. I have not only the PDFs but the hard copy books in near pristine condition in my physical library, and they are one of my prize possessions therein.
Worth it. Every penny.
Character Generation
So let's get stuck in.
You are very likely to note a lot of similarities between the system in Sorcerer and Over the Edge. That is no accident. They are both traditionally architected GM-full RPGs at heart, though where they differ is that OTE really wants to stick mechanically, outside of the central Trait resolution, to a very traditional kind of functionality. Task-based tests are the usual, automatic weapon fire is kind of a pain, etc. Sorcerer pushes the narrative angle a lot harder (and for those out in the cheap seats who want to talk about Big Model/GNS, you guys can just keep on walking). A lot of the resolution is more intent-based. More of the central mechanics center around using the story and the ongoing experience to shape mechanical impacts and vice versa.
I'd write more about that, but frankly you don't need me to – just go dig up some of Edwards' own work talking about it at much greater length than I could do any credit to.
Open your text to page 25 in TAS and follow along ...
The basic check list of things that need to be done (but not necessarily in this order) are:
- Choose scores to total 10
- Set Humanity at the level of Stamina or Will, whichever is higher
- Choose Descriptions for all three scores
- Choose Cover and Price
- Choose a Telltale
- List important Non-Player Characters (npcs) and places
- Create the starting demon
- Once-over: check for likeability and combat readiness
- Write the Kicker
Concept
I've always liked The Punisher, which may seem like a really strange thing to bring in here, but I think the idea will do us well. I was talking earlier about a character who's gone may want them to be more bloodthirsty than strictly necessary and I think we'll go with that.
An ex-military killer whose family was murdered by criminals, driving him to do things that necessarily rational people would shy from.
The Punisher meets Hellraiser. This could definitely work.
Let's name him "John Willikowski," because good, strong Polish genes will go a long way here.
Choose Scores to Total 10
There are three basic scores in Sorcerer: Stamina, Will, and Lore. A beginning sorcerer character has values for each that total to ten: 2-6-2, 5-4-1, 1-2-7, or something. Each represents a number of dice. A player-character must have at least 1 in each score.
Only three predefined Scores to worry about and we only have to allocate 10 points between them. Choices are limited.
But that's okay, because the character definition is broad and we already have a general idea of what sort of things this character should be good at and what sort of things his character should be bad at.
Besides we don't only have to define the character himself. We have to define his demon – and that reflects an entirely relevant set of truths about John Willikowski.
But let's start with Lore, working backwards. It specifically refers to how well the sorcerer understands their own training and theory. Are they well versed in the world of demons and the understanding of how sorcerers work? Are they new? Are they getting along on pure instinct?
John doesn't seem like the kind of guy to go in for a long period of study. Much like the people that open LeMarchand puzzles in Hellraiser, I see John as a guy who stumbled into something bigger than he is. Maybe a lot bigger.
Let's give him Lore of 2 to represent the fact that he is pretty much a babe in the woods but he does have the advantage of sheer bloody mindedness.
That leaves us 8 points.
We could split the difference equally, but I'm imagining John as a guy who is almost a diehard like in his ability to take a beating. Maybe he doesn't have the force of personality and presence of mind that others do but he absolutely, positively, will not stop.
As a result, let's make Stamina 5 and Will 3.
Choose Descriptions for Scores
Now we have to choose descriptions for each of these Scores, picked off a list that is specific to a given setting. We're just going to go with the stuff right out of the box because deciding on that sort of thing is really world creation and something that the GM gets to have lonely fun with.
Let's start with John's Stamina. It's at 5 so we actually get to pick two descriptions for it.
One of them is obvious, "military training." That's absolutely in line with how we see Willikowski and his back story. We'll also choose "specialized combat training" to represent the fact that he's been off killing really bad people since the murder of his family and you pick up a few things if you managed to live through the first few sessions.
Now let's look at Will. John doesn't get an extra descriptor on Will because it's under 5, so looking down the list there is a very obvious choice: "rageful and vengeful." It's like they knew we were coming. When John applies his willpower to the universe, it's probably with two upraised middle fingers. Possibly with good reason.
Last is Lore. John is just not really in the sorcerers community, doesn't care about it, may only know about it peripherally. That's a good opportunity to use "naif." He's not quite a babe in the woods, but he's not going to be lecturing on the basics of demonic binding anytime soon.
Score Humanity
Humanity is a big deal in Sorcerer, not because it limits you when it's above 0, and it character generation it starts equal to whichever of Stamina or Will is higher, so John will start with a Humanity of 5. That's actually pretty good.
No, Humanity is a big deal because the very definition of Humanity is what the central conflict and theme of a given GM's game is about. By default, out-of-the-box, Humanity is "often thought of as empathy, social consciousness, honor, or even the character's literal soul." This is where we start to see issues of narrative theme brought hard into the mechanism.
It's so important that there's an entire supplement called The Sorcerer's Soul which spends its entire length talking about and around Humanity and how choices regarding it impact the setting. (Okay, it also talks about designing demons from scratch. Surprisingly, that's not the most important part.)
So, taken as defined out of the box, John Willikowski actually has a fairly high Humanity. He possesses empathy and unawareness of his place in the social order. He probably has an extremely exaggerated sense of honor which comes into play when not dealing with people he feels have morally failed society and incidentally been responsible for the murder of his family.
That probably won't last – but that's the nature of the game.
Choose Cover and Price
Cover
Being a sorcerer is not an acceptable job description; there must be something your character does as well in the workaday world. Pick a profession or lifestyle that suits the character and that is his or her Cover, which gets dice to either Stamina or Will (player’s choice). The character should own and have access to anything reasonable that people who make their living doing whatever his or her Cover is.
Things start getting a little more complicated for us here, but that's a good thing. There's no long list of skills to pick from, no predefined channels through which you have to run – all that stuff is already handled in the context of Score descriptions. Cover is about us trying to come up with a succinct way to say "where does this character fit in to society?"
John Willikowski barely fits into society. But that's okay, because we can describe that pretty succinctly: "hyper-violent criminal-killing vigilante."
That's a perfectly acceptable role. That describes a set of things that he should know about and things that he should be able to do, but not only that, things that he shouldn't know about and things that he shouldn't be able to do. That's important because of the way that Cover is defined in Sorcerer:
Cover is an extremely inclusive term. It is used for all nuances of a given background, lifestyle, or profession, including any physical, social, perceptual, or intellectual elements.
Price
Sorcery doesn’t come cheaply. A player-character must have a problem that has arisen or been made worse through their practice of forbidden arts. It must be worth a penalty die in at least some situations that will happen during play.
The Rule of Prices states: a Price which conveys no penalty dice doesn’t count!
A helpful concept is that people are often worst at things they care most about: a lecher could well have a penalty on all interactive rolls concerning the targets of his or her affections. Things like being obnoxious or having an enemy cannot be taken as Prices because they don’t really cause the character to be bad at doing things.
Here's another place where the traditional game design takes a serious tweak to the left but somehow ends up being more mechanical than its predecessors.
The Price has a defined mechanical impact. If there is no mechanical impact, the suggestion is an invalid Price. That defined mechanical impact is a -1 to a mechanical roll.
That cuts out a lot of things that people tend to drag into RPGs as "disadvantages," but which never seem to actually disadvantage them at all. As opposed to merely being a flag directing attention to what the player wants to deal with at the table, here a Price has mechanical weight and the player knows that going in.
For us, we'll just pick something off the example list, but anything – anything at all – which could have and would have a -1 effect to appropriate rolls could be on the character sheet. Let's pick "Paranoid (-1 to all actions unless the character is under physical attack)." That seems an appropriate Price for this poor bastard, spending his life looking over his shoulder and being distracted until someone's in the very act of trying to kill him.
And then he's perfectly focused.
Choose a Telltale
Something gives the character away as a sorcerer, to those in the know. Telltales are details of physical appearance, habit of dress or hairstyle, or a mannerism or speech pattern. They don’t have to be incredibly obvious or informative, but they must be specific and precise.
Here we are at the first purely descriptive mechanic in character generation. It's a lot more powerful than it seems.
This is where you start thinking about what makes your character set apart from non-sorcerers. What sets them apart even among their peers? What is something externally observable that others can notice about you?
"Why are you different? How are you different?"
In John's case, let's say that he has gone through some serious shit to get the demonic help that he has. Bad shit. Ugly shit. Shit so bad that he has extensive scarring across his back and down the back of his legs from being suspended by meat books in order to facilitate his spirit journey.
That's a pretty solid Telltale.
Important NPCs and Places
Under normal circumstances this would be one of the most important sections of the character sheet, outside of deciding on Cover. These are the elements which act as flags, telling people at the table what you feel are important and what you want to put out there to be messed around with.
If you don't care about the things listed here, don't list them. It's really that important.
For us, since we don't intend to actually play this character, it's a little bit throw away, but let's come up with a few ideas, regardless.
John's family's gravesite. -- It's fairly obvious why this might be a very important place for him and come up during play as somewhere other characters find him or look for him on a regular basis.
Julie Willikowski, his niece. -- Someone connected to who he used to be and who can remind him when he starts to lose track of that.
Roger Harmon, his inside informant. -- After all, somebody has to tell him where all these mob guys keep showing up. There's never something better than having someone on the inside.
Create the Starting Demon
While this isn't quite as complicated as building the character, there's a fair amount of stuff going on here under the hood.
Demon creation – generally done by the GM and the GM only. The first demon bound (the one created during character generation) is typically the only one the actual player gets to see the sheet of.
Step-by-step:
- Choose the demon’s Type and an appropriate Telltale.
- Choose all of its abilities, the number of which will determine its Lore score.
- Choose its Stamina score based on how physically tough you think it should be.
- Set its Will score to be at least one die higher than its Stamina or Lore, whichever is higher.
- Set its Power at equal the dice of its highest score, which is its Will.
- Choose its Need and its Desire.
- Once-over: give it a name, clarify its appearance and general behavior, and decide whether any of its scores should be adjusted to fit the concept.
Choose Type and Telltale
This goes pretty easily because there is a list of demon Types and Telltales are free-form, just as for characters.
We know John's gun is his demon, so it's Type is Object.
Now we need a Telltale: "doesn't appear to be any kind of pistol manufactured by any country ever and the markings are in Cyrillic letters but the language is Indo-Persian."
Choose All Demonic Abilities, Number Gives Lore
Here, Sorcerer shows roots in much older traditionally architected games, and by that I mean it throws a huge list of possibilities at you and expect you to sort through them and find the ones that you think are the best fit, then pick them and describe their effects.
I'll admit, it's not my favorite. It's entirely too crunchy for the system as stands, but at the time something like this without an extensive set of examples just wouldn't have been as popular as it ended up.
So – John's gun.
The obvious first stop is Boost, which we'll describe as the gun making him a better, stronger, faster, more murderous death-machine. When in his hand and assuming it is agreeable, John's Stamina becomes even more egregious.
We'll also take Link, which lets John know where the pistol is at all times, even (and especially) when it's out of his reach. This isn't a conscious awareness but something inherent, as if the gun were an extension of his self. Because it's an Object, commanding it to return is probably not going to be terribly useful – except that it will probably turn up somewhere nearby when nobody is looking.
It would be criminally unwise to take a gun-demon without giving it Ranged Special Damage, which counts as two powers for the sake of computing Lore. After all, who binds a demonic gun and doesn't give it the ability to kill people by rotting their souls? That would be silly. So that's what it does.
That brings us to a starting Lore of 4, which is not an insignificant demon.
Choose the Stamina Score
It's a gun, and that's relatively hard to break but it does have a lot of moving parts. Let's go with a Stamina of 3 to represent that it is both made of metal and some springs and moving parts.
(An average human being has a Stamina of 2 so the gun is slightly harder to impair by hitting it with something than a random guy. Seems reasonable.)
Set Will Score
Lore is 4, Stamina is 3, so Will has to be at least 5, so we'll go for that. This is probably going to end up being a problem for John in the long run.
Set Power
That's going to be equal to Will, so a Power of 5.
Choose Need and Desire
If anything, Desire and Need shape the representation of the demonic personality. There is a lot of text in the annotations talking about the difference between Need and Desire, but for our purposes we'll just go with the idea that Desire is a general ideology that the demon likes and thinks the world needs more of. Need, on the other hand, is something that they crave, desire, require, and which must be satisfied – and there are mechanical repercussions for doing so or not doing so. Desire comes from a static list specific to a given GM's setting or campaign while Need is another free-form trait.
In the case of John's gun, we'll go with a Desire for Mayhem. "Explosions, running gunfights, brawls and redneck bars, nuclear war…" That's the general sort of thing that the gun wants, sensibly enough.
We'll go with something that supports the general idea here and give the gun a Need to kill criminals. That means that the summoning and binding of the gun probably involved killing one if not several criminals and that as long as John holds onto the gun it will demand the sacrifice of more. Also "criminals" is kind of loosely defined and could end up being particularly bad. That makes for good storytelling.
Name, Appearance, and General Behavior
We are almost done with the demon write up here so let's engage a bit with some of the back story for the sake of pleasure.
Name: AZ-476u ("Haze")
Appearance: An extremely large pistol of unusual provenance. While the general shape and design recalls Russian heavy pistol design of the 1960s, it bears no direct and documented place of manufacture or easy dating. The material is an almost boring black steel, though the grip is inlaid with what appears to be yellowed bone ribbing. (Scientific inquiry would determined that this bone is human and probably originated in a skull.) Haze sports simple red glowing pip iron sights and feels even heavier than it looks like it would.
Behavior: Haze is a gun. As such it has very little in the way of observable behaviors, though it often appears in public places at just the wrong time – when John is trying to protest that he is entirely innocent and has no ill regard or ill will toward anyone in the room, for example. While Haze does not talk to John directly, it subconsciously influences his behavior with near animalistic urges – urges which John is currently inclined to fulfill but which might become very dangerous in the future.
The Kicker
What is the event that has now shaken up the character?
That's what the Kicker is about.
It's assumed that your character is successful and capable, meaning that they have been doing whatever it is that you have defined them to be doing pretty well up until the moment at which this story starts. The Kicker forces you to confront what makes this character interesting in the context of all the other people at the table.
The addition of the Kicker as part of the character generation process was one of Edwards' moments of vision. Traditional characters were seen as protagonists from the beginning and the game was often just picking up in their life as we start watching them.
Sorcerer shakes that up. All of the characters are shaken up. Something is changed. Something is different. Something is putting a roadblock in their way.
Now we pick up the story and we want to see what's going on.
Think about John Willikowski. He has been a successful hunter of criminals for a number of years. He may have gotten out of some scrapes, there have probably been interesting stories, but he has been largely successful enough to bring him to this point in the narrative.
What could change?
There's an easy and obvious answer in a much harder, more complicated answer. Sometimes you want the easy and obvious answer. Sometimes that's the story you want.
That would be: "John has finally discovered the criminal group which is responsible for killing his family."
But think about that. John has been killing guys for years. He has been looking for guys for years. In a real sense, this as a Kicker would just be more of the same, dropping us into his story in the middle without actually shaking him up.
Consider this instead: "John has just finished killing the last man responsible for the murder of his family."
Now what? Vengeance done. Things are different. There are questions. Now we have a Kicker which pushes the character into conflict with everything that he's been. Does he stop hunting criminals? His demonic gun isn't going to be thrilled about that and that can lead to some actual mechanical problems. Do old enemies come out of the woodwork as John makes a stab at retiring? Does he even want to try – and do the other people in his life want him to try?
This is the kind of Kicker you want, the kind of story compression that drives gameplay into finding out "what happens next."
I think that'll be our Kicker.
Completed Sheet
Name: John Willikowski
Concept: The Punisher by way of Hellraiser.
An ex-military killer whose family was murdered by criminals, driving him to do things that necessarily rational people would shy from.
Scores
- Stamina 5 (military training, specialized combat training)
- Will 3 (rageful and vengeful)
- Lore 2 (naif)
Humanity: 5
Cover: Hyper-violent criminal-killing vigilante
Price: Paranoid (-1 to all actions unless the character is under physical attack)
Telltale: Extensive scarring across his back and down the back of his legs from being suspended by meat books in order to facilitate his spirit journey.
Important NPCs and Places:
- John’s family’s gravesite — It’s fairly obvious why this might be a very important place for him and come up during play as somewhere other characters find him or look for him on a regular basis.
- Julie Willikowski, his niece — Someone connected to who he used to be and who can remind him when he starts to lose track of that.
- Roger Harmon, his inside informant — After all, somebody has to tell him where all these mob guys keep showing up. There’s never something better than having someone on the inside.
DEMON
Name: AZ-476u (“Haze”)
Appearance: An extremely large pistol of unusual provenance. While the general shape and design recalls Russian heavy pistol design of the 1960s, it bears no direct and documented place of manufacture or easy dating. The material is an almost boring black steel, though the grip is inlaid with what appears to be yellowed bone ribbing. (Scientific inquiry would determined that this bone is human and probably originated in a skull.) Haze sports simple red glowing pip iron sights and feels even heavier than it looks like it would.
Behavior: Haze is a gun. As such it has very little in the way of observable behaviors, though it often appears in public places at just the wrong time – when John is trying to protest that he is entirely innocent and has no ill regard or ill will toward anyone in the room, for example. While Haze does not talk to John directly, it subconsciously influences his behavior with near animalistic urges – urges which John is currently inclined to fulfill but which might become very dangerous in the future.
Type: Object
Telltale: Doesn’t appear to be any kind of pistol manufactured by any country ever and the markings are in Cyrillic letters but the language is Indo-Persian.
Abilities:
Boost, which we’ll describe as the gun making him a better, stronger, faster, more murderous death-machine. When in his hand and assuming it is agreeable, John’s Stamina becomes even more egregious.
Link, which lets John know where the pistol is at all times, even (and especially) when it’s out of his reach. This isn’t a conscious awareness but something inherent, as if the gun were an extension of his self. Because it’s an Object, commanding it to return is probably not going to be terribly useful – except that it will probably turn up somewhere nearby when nobody is looking.
Ranged Special Damage; who binds a demonic gun and doesn’t give it the ability to kill people by rotting their souls? That would be silly. So that’s what it does.
Lore: 4
Stamina: 3
Will: 5
Power: 5
Desire: Mayhem “Explosions, running gunfights, brawls and redneck bars, nuclear war…”
Need: Kill criminals
Kicker: John has just finished killing the last man responsible for the murder of his family.
(Apparently, I have found the maximum length that Steemit will allow a single post to be. So stay tuned in about 20 minutes for part two of this article where I do a step-by-step walk-through of building a character in Capes. I hope you'll join me then.)