Sorcerer: The Walled Garden
I only went and did it. I ran the damned thing, for 3 sessions. It rocked, in every sense of the term. I meant to write a report afterwards every time, but now I don't have to worry about spoiling anything or committing to an element that doesn't work.
PLAYERS
I had 2 people actually free for the listed time; my fault for pitching a game to a mostly OSR server, but Adept Play doesn't have an open games channel anymore and I haven't met anyone else who'd be willing to try actually playing the thing.
The game was only going to be a month long, which fit neatly into 4 weekly games across the month of February. Sorcerer, as a game, really needs to have a set time limit like any decent writer needs to know how many episodes are going to be in a season of TV. It manages how much of an investment gets put into any single "thread", so new problems aren't constantly being introduced which could each take multiple hours to solve.
the pitch was this:
SETTING: INDIANAPOLIS SUBURBS / WALLED GARDENS
HUMANITY: RESPECTING THE FREE WILL OF OTHERS
SORCERY: CIGARETTES AND DECEPTION, SOCIAL HIERARCHY
DEMONS: URGE AND LIES, BURNING SHADOWS
the first session was briefly devoted to character creation and then jumping right into it.
Personally, I'm a believer that any player who takes more than five minutes to make a character hasn't been given the correct information, so I pulled out a whiteboard and gave the players a little longer than that to hammer out their stats, their demon, and their diagram.
This was the first place I slipped up. I had given everyone a week to have their own thoughts, and then bring that to the table. I relied on the initial explanation too much, so when there were things that actually had to be clarified it resolved into the terrible Sorcerer-Brand dickering over exactly what was being applied in fictional and then in mechanical terms.
This would end up being unhappy foreshadowing of a future trend for the rest of the game.
Still, we got everything down in just about half an hour. Canyon was playing Natalie, an agatha christie type femme-fatale housewife, happily married to the garden socials, husband, and two kids. And her demon, The Loverboy - emphasis mine, since most often we just called him "natalie's demon" - a twisting plume of smoke who I immediately had a bead on as a combination of soap-opera romantic and narcissistic enabler. This one-sided polyamory was enhanced by her Kicker as she realises her husband is having an affair.
N's character was Joshua, an architect and powerful sorcerer, suddenly hit with the news he's being fired over a lawsuit by a man named Charles van Dyne, one of his designs being blamed for a building collapse that killed 2 people.
Given the state of everyone's diagrams, I set everyone off at a party where Natalie's demon told her that Don, her husband, was unfaithful, and Joshua's boss Lou had fired him - in a public place, due to Joshua's Price being his notoriously short temper.
My original plan had been to throw in some noir plot hooks, to create some huge dramatic staging like a murder or a string of burglaries for the characters to bond over (positive or negative wasn't important), since a key problem I'd noticed in my other Sorcerer games to date was a lack of interference between player characters due to them being such different people. I just couldn't find a place to string it in amidst the explosion of characters' kickers. I think more than anything, this was what I look back on as what to never do again. The first session can burn as big as god; there's the rest of the game to deal with the aftermath.
There were some tense interactions at that point, and some star character work from Canyon playing Natalie just barely restraining herself from murdering her husband on the spot. She channeled it all into a sudden dance number to get a rise out of him, which began the running joke of just barely failing Will rolls against Don, which would define their relationship for the rest of the game.
Joshua's interlude involved the first appearance of his Demon, Fido; a lazy, energetic alsatian with the voice of Garfield.
Frankly, I should have pressed harder on Joshua to break him out of the mold, get more human connections on his diagram that I could tie together with Natalie, but between getting the legwork for demons over with and the Ballardian overtones of the whole game, it didn't register as much of a problem until it was far too late. I did try to compensate any lack of agency with how I played Fido, as the most hypnotically psychopathic shoulder-devil I felt I could get away with. A little cliche, but evil dogs are fun, and the idea was that Joshua would be compelled to rebel against him at some point..
He told Joshua to go and find his boss to repay the humiliation of his public firing, and convince him to get his job back.
The first session ended there.
The second was more focused on Joshua, to a degree, since Fido used the demonic ability Taint to lower Lou's humanity.
I'm not happy with how this worked, effectively a form of budget hypnosis that should have really screamed for Joshua needing to micromanage the situation. Dwelling on what else I could have done in a mechanical sense isn't as helpful as the clear reminder that none sport freely with the spirit. Any coercion, if a player is trying to get something out of it, puts a gun to the head of both their character and the target.
He got his job back in the short term. But the consequences reared their head as Lou's son had his father committed to a ward, and the replacement resubmitted the paperwork to get Joshua kicked out, to the staunch indifference of an attempted roll otherwise.
Meanwhile, Natalie had a nail biting social conflict with Susan AKA the other woman and Don's employee for team-manager at the insurance firm he worked at. Man, if only we hadn't been using d8s the margins would have been in her favour. It's the main reason I think it didn't go as either I or Canyon expected - Susan having a tearful breakdown and admitting the affair. Although there was a stunning use of her demon's ability to sense lies, which was improvised into a kind of polygraph right there in the trendy cafe they were at. Maybe I should have rolled for that, but not doing so didn't detract anything from the scene.
Joshua poked around a hospital, finding out that Lou was committed - something not made public at work - and conferred with his lawyer about getting fired twice. The skinny was that it might be grounds for a countersuit or wrongful termination down the line, but it didn't change anything about van Dyne's case. They would mention it in a meeting with his team set for next week.
Natalie, meanwhile, had passionless sex with her husband and planned a surprise weekend beach trip. I was playing don as both aware and in denial by this point. Susan had told him that Natalie knew, and his life was probably over, but a holiday would be an excuse to spend time with their kids and act the happy family for a little while longer.
Despite expectations, I never had a plan for Don trying to hurt Natalie in any way. I definitely should have planned for Don expecting Natalie to hurt him, and I'm kicking myself for it as I write this. He was paranoid enough to hide everything from her in the first place, and the worst part was that I actually understood why. Everything I learned about her screamed that she was exactly the kind of person who would seek revenge.
Don should totally have been expecting her to kill him. In a sense, I think he was, but he should have in a literal sense.
The third session was Joshua deciding to summon another demon to fix his problems, since it's kind of the only thing he was good at.
The problems I had here were sorcerer-specific, and mostly from just not having the X factor to express exactly how to "do" Sorcery without falling back on the faustian sigils and candles.
Eventually we muddled it out to a small garden party for Lou's son, and Joshua trying to host for his own benefit. This was good for a Contact roll, but the cost for Humanity started to eat away at him enough that he quit.
The beach holiday started with one of the kids, Sally, talking to her mom about an "imaginary friend" that lived in their house. A shadow. I probably held back more here than I should have, but I didn't want to get stuck with implications of an actual romantic relationship between a demon and a kid. So Natalie let it drop as a non-issue and turned to her demon.
Then it was when I finally getting to pull the trigger on what I'd been wanting to do for weeks now: The Loverboy offers to become Natalie's husband. Take over his body, such that she no longer has to choose between them both. This was the first time I've ever actually seen a player get gored on the horns of an ethical dilemma before, but it was one of those situations that would give the character everything she wanted, at the cost of any moral high ground she may have had and the ruinous Humanity cost.
Joshua, meanwhile, finishes summoning his demon at home with his sorcery getup, and I give him a literal silver tongued Parasite named Fixer. But it eats the last of his humanity, and I have to make the interesting choice of what happens when a character does that.
What I decided on was that the character basically enters a fugue state especially susceptible to demonic manipulations until they snap out of it - during which time Fixer had Spider Jerusalem'd the legal team with demonic texts and emails, until one of turned up dead in the bathtub of the apartment Joshua was currently in.
My choice here was contextualised by 1, knowing that this was probably going to be the end for Joshua anyway, due to N. being busy the next week, and 2, having gotten something like +3 on the binding roll for Fixer, but not wanting to having 0 humanity fix any problems as much as create new ones.
In future, I'd go in another direction like players retaining control of their characters but being susceptible to sorcerous rituals, or subsuming their demons in some way.
We jump back to Natalie and Don to dinner that night, at their rented cottage. Kids in bed. Candles. She asks Don outright about Susan. They make Will rolls, and he wins. Begs her just to let them have one weekend before they get home, and he'll explain everything. She calls on her demon, demands the truth, and barely succeeds. Don breaks down, sobbing, and says she already knows.
BAM, she gives the go ahead to her demon to possess Don. Which fails horribly, amazing die rolls on Don's part, and both Natalie and Canyon have their face in their hands as Don lays wheezing on the floor, having just had a font of living smoke try to claw inside his heart.
She runs to the kids' room and calls 911 as her demon fights Don, bodying him with 1 punch and 4 victories on the roll, so +4 dice on his 2nd attempt to possess him. Which he wins with near-total victories.
Natalie hears a thud, silence, and peeks out to see her husband getting to his feet. And he smiles at her, gently smoking, before they embrace.
The sunday together is blissful, but that evening he pulls a burner phone out of the glove box of Don's car - with susan's farewell message on it. Better that her family never knows.
FIN
Frankly, surprised that things ended so quickly! The bit with Susan was a last surprise I had set up, expecting Natalie not to go through with the possession plan and resolving things next session.
Even at the time I felt like it didn't fit with the equally grim end of Joshua's story. Too bloody, too MacBeth.
My general thoughts now are that The Curse of Sorcerer remains. This is a game even I couldn't keep my finger on most of the time.
I think I've run Sorcerer basically every year, once a year, for a while now. Every time, I learn a little more about what to do and what not to do, how to make a game work in better terms. It's my yardstick for my skill as a GM. I think with this year, I can finally look at things comprehensively enough to lose the rose glasses and say it might not be my favourite game anymore. It just has some of my favourite ideas.