The Curse of Sorcerer: In Utero
I just had the special opportunity to play the “In Utero” scenario for Sorcerer, from Sex and Sorcery. Run by Canyon of Reavers fame - having decided one experience with the system was not enough.
I leapt at the chance, obviously, but better is the reason why.
I’ve never actually gotten to play Sorcerer from the other side of the table. I don’t think I was born yet when the game was released initially, and it was niche even then. Now, even the niche message boards have dropped it for Hârnmaster and Red Markets. But it’s still what I think I can call my favourite game, because I’m a designer at heart.
The systems are nothing less than beautiful. Interlocking mechanics of risk, reward, gamefeel, and game direction. Their influence has doubtlessly been ticking away in the back of my mind since I read it years ago.
The basic mechanic is the currency of dice; every success (and what is failure but someone else succeeding?) rolls over into the next action if they connect to the same action, and so on, and so on.
An example I used to explain it once was that, say The Dread Pirate Sloan wanted to defeat his rival Captain Shay. To do this, he’d roll his 5 dice of Cover (Terror Of The Seas) against Shay’s 5 dice (Captain). This representing their martial prowess, swordsmanship, and so on.
He could win, but barely, and Sloan wants to avoid a drawn out fight because his Stamina is lower than Shay’s. So what can he do?
Persuade his first mate in an attack on Shay’s island fortress. Rally his crew with a speech before they draw into port. Lead them on a running charge to the fortress wall. Cut a man down as he tries to fight them off. Bellow at his crew to bring him Captain Shay. Charge off to find him, vaulting battlements. At last confront his nemesis, and challenge him to a duel.
Every one of these actions can be one or more rolls, from Will to Cover to Stamina. Rolls can be as abstract as they have to in order to contain the dynamism of the action, and each roll’s success adds bonus dice to the next. Even the failure of a roll imparts the potential for bonus dice, since anything interesting enough is grounds for “gift” dice from the referee. Sloan could be confronting Shay with as many as five or six bonus dice by the time they begin their duel.
Sorcerer managed to turn Passion into a symplexic supergame. Unfortunately, this is where it falls victim to what I would call its terrible Curse:
Because the entire game falls to deciding what action is done in opposition to who, as a means to award or subtract dice as a result, it leaves a lot of its real resolution mechanics to “common sense”, which it then has to describe with pages and pages of theory. Only to contextualise rules whose function can be explained in one paragraph.
Sorcerer is my favourite RPG book I cannot get anyone to read for this reason.
All of this, of course, was prevalent in the game I played. It was incredibly fun, since every case of someone doing something creative with the rules was supported by the rules, but that support had a minimum of 12 seconds to hem and haw over “is that what the rules say?”.
As I said to Canyon, “it’s a game with a hundred moving parts, but it’s so fun when you know where all of them are.”
The scenario itself features 3 sorcerers, the players, and 2 demons - demons always being under the referee’s control, although I’ve wondered how a player character demon would work.
Robert Scurlock, PoliSci professor and the kind of guy you can immediately picture in your head when I tell you he’s dating his star grad student Stephanie.
Jennifer Scurlock, Robert’s estranged wife. Ten years ago, she and robert had a desperate attempt at some wacky ritual to save their unborn child, which left her pregnant with a demon she unwittingly calls Robert and her mind never quite whole, wandering in a fugue until only recently learning that her husband isn’t at their abandoned house.
Lucien Scurlock, the two’s biological son bound inside a doppelgänger of Jennifer (“Jen”) and riding her around like a bipedal RV and watching the world through her eyes. He knows that he should have been born by now, and that he has a “father”, a second parent more than his marauding animalistic sociopath of a mother.
The game began with a little Memoriam about jennifer and lucien Binding their respective demons. I didn’t think this was a great decision, even in the aim of onboarding the players to how sorcery worked, since binding is nearly the most complicated and personal part of doing sorcery at all. In the end, the results were the same as the pre generated ones anyway - +1 for Jen and Robert Jr.
What I think would have really helped was bolting down the “statement” for how Sorcery would work in this game. Weird esoterica, or Nick Land style “strange ideas”, or intimate physicality; material which would firmly grasp the player's expectations for the rest of the game.
Then actual play started, and Robert is having dinner with Stephanie, who says she’s unsatisfied, that their relationship isn’t tenable in the long term. She hates having to hide it, lie to her friends, to her family. Robert pushes her off, says they can change everything. It’s only until she gets her degree and then they can go public.
Jen had won the Cover roll to arrive first, and was skulking around, only entering when nudged by Lucien but remaining Cloaked, watching the pair for some advantage. Then Jennifer rang the doorbell. Stephanie had Robert’s attention, so it was Jen who opened it.
Sorcerer does technically have stealth and perception mechanics, but it implores the reader to throw them in the trash. No dice roll is representative of anything a character does “passively”, and things which a character is doing actively are better defined by other stats like Cover or Will.
This is something which came up during the game, as characters met or saw things for the first time that had the opportunity for such action. It’s also the reason that Jen was still unknown to Jennifer after opening the door, since she didn’t actually think enough of it to wonder if there was anyone there.
Robert went to investigate the sounds from downstairs, followed by Stephanie, and getting ambushed by a wife he had given up looking for six years ago. Something which enraged Jen, and provoked the first combat of the session - Jen shoving away Jennifer, Jennifer getting out of the way, Junior psychically attacking Jen, and Lucien doing piss all.
Everyone had the same question for Robert, caught in the middle: “who the hell are these other two women?”, which he just about refused to answer as much as he was able. Literally commanding Jen - who he’d gotten 4 victories on spotting as a demon - using sorcery to try and explain the situation, something which came as a surprise to me since I’d never even seen it as an ability Sorcerers had.
When stephanie pressed him, he floundered about it being complicated, from his past, something he needed to deal with and then he could explain everything. More than Stephanie was willing to put up with, so she went outside to call an uber while they all worked things out.
I felt bad about this, because Stephanie is a really interesting character, but is defined by how other characters respect her autonomy. Lucien wanted to keep her around for study - trying to put together his own model on what family and parenthood might mean for him in the future - but pivoted quickly to asking his father why he hadn’t told her about the power he wields. Which was warped by Jen to be more accusing, and not a little temptuous.
Both demons craved raw meat, but Jen was forthright about it, and it was Lucien who won the roll to compel her to share.
Robert brings Jen aside, and promises her everything he can think of to try and keep her happy. Which fails because Lucien can sense lies and I decided to not just say that for some reason. So Jen got more and more irate with his false promises until deciding to just kill Jennifer and remove the choice entirely.
What resulted was another 10 or 15 minutes of combat where Jen got her ass handed to her with a side of fries, and robert having to hastily Contain her with salt and getting something like 12 successes. I came up with doing my own counter-contain to keep Junior out.
What I realised about midway through was that the whole thing had turned into a kind of blatant metaphor: Robert and Jennifer were sealing up this shared representation of their own fuckups which Jennifer had to defeat on her own since Robert had chickened out, and in doing so they had made a situation where Jennifer physically couldn't bring herself to interact with it anymore.
The game was basically over by then because I was double booked and we couldn't do a part 2. The last bits got hashed out over text as everyone debated what to do; Canyon deciding the end result was Jen getting banished, and Lucien possibly dying as a disembodied fetus. Which felt kind of fair to how I’d played him, really. He should have been way more active in engaging with other characters and trying to get his own way, especially with Robert. I had gone into the game expecting them to be more alike, as though both having an academic’s grasp of human nature.
I think I just never got past the growing pains (haha) of having a character outside my wheelhouse thrust into a situation where there just isn’t time to try and do things the right way.
Ultimately the scenario was an amazing ride. It felt like one big morality play for Robert and whether he was willing to commit to anything except his own selfish desires. I don’t know whether it’s clever or crass for having the women in the story be left behind by his choices, but it makes me want to write a gender swapped version with a chance of passing the bechdel test.
Playing Lucien was great, not just because I love playing weird magic kids in RPGs and he was the weirdest and most magical yet. What I realised was that his relationship to Jen was exactly like that of a child, depending on her to meet his wants and needs while compromising with her own. He was more insightful than anyone gave him credit for, constantly trying to express himself in a world that didn't recognise his ability to do so, and often that resulted in him simply begging adults to acknowledge what he wanted.
I’m planning to run Sorcerer again soon…Misereatur me.