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labcats2010-05-14 12:47 am
drcpunk.livejournal.com) wrote in labcats2010-05-14 12:47 am
Sorcerer Idea
I was chatting with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mnemex about how, while I'd like to take another crack at running a Sorcerer game, I'd have to make sure I had the right group of players (and yes, fewer than five -- three is probably ideal). There's a friend of ours who was in the last game, and all three of us know that Sorcerer just isn't the game for her.
No harm, no foul -- not all games are for everyone. There are certain types of temptation she doesn't really want her PCs actually in danger of falling to, and those temptations are pretty much what Sorcerer is about.
Or is it? mnemex came up with an interesting variant. I'm not sure if it's been done before, but it goes like this:
Demons are Angels. Angels want to save us all, really and truly. They want us to be worthy of Heaven. They want us to be perfected.
The thing is, perfection is the opposite of Humanity. How much of your Humanity are you willing to give up?
The idea would need work. I'm not sure if I could run the game, but I can see possibilities. It's actually not that far from the concepts involved in the Grail Quest in some of the Arthurian source material I read when working on my dissertation.
Malory was a champion of humanity. For him, the hero was Lancelot, as much because of as despite of his failings. But, the author of his source material did not see it that way. To the Cistercian monk who wrote the vulgate Queste del Saint Graal, Lancelot was a despicable sinner who had a chance at salvation and spurned it.
Galahad was the hero of the French author's tale. Perfect, inhuman Galahad. He cannot interact with humanity once he's achieved the Grail. The Grail Quest destroyed the kingdom on Earth. Ties to family, to king, to ladies, to brother knights -- all these things are irrelevant if one is to achieve perfection.
Another way of going at it is to see perfection as a spiritual alchemy, with alchemists similarly trying to put aside all human distractions in their quest for perfection.
One of the challenges here is to play not only the demons -- the angels -- as hard as one can, but also to play those who would distract the sorcerers from their quest for perfection. They need to be played like the heroine of the Tam Lin story, ready to do anything to save the man she loves from otherworldly forces. There needs to be at least one person like that for each PC.
mnemex about how, while I'd like to take another crack at running a Sorcerer game, I'd have to make sure I had the right group of players (and yes, fewer than five -- three is probably ideal). There's a friend of ours who was in the last game, and all three of us know that Sorcerer just isn't the game for her.No harm, no foul -- not all games are for everyone. There are certain types of temptation she doesn't really want her PCs actually in danger of falling to, and those temptations are pretty much what Sorcerer is about.
Or is it? mnemex came up with an interesting variant. I'm not sure if it's been done before, but it goes like this:
Demons are Angels. Angels want to save us all, really and truly. They want us to be worthy of Heaven. They want us to be perfected.
The thing is, perfection is the opposite of Humanity. How much of your Humanity are you willing to give up?
The idea would need work. I'm not sure if I could run the game, but I can see possibilities. It's actually not that far from the concepts involved in the Grail Quest in some of the Arthurian source material I read when working on my dissertation.
Malory was a champion of humanity. For him, the hero was Lancelot, as much because of as despite of his failings. But, the author of his source material did not see it that way. To the Cistercian monk who wrote the vulgate Queste del Saint Graal, Lancelot was a despicable sinner who had a chance at salvation and spurned it.
Galahad was the hero of the French author's tale. Perfect, inhuman Galahad. He cannot interact with humanity once he's achieved the Grail. The Grail Quest destroyed the kingdom on Earth. Ties to family, to king, to ladies, to brother knights -- all these things are irrelevant if one is to achieve perfection.
Another way of going at it is to see perfection as a spiritual alchemy, with alchemists similarly trying to put aside all human distractions in their quest for perfection.
One of the challenges here is to play not only the demons -- the angels -- as hard as one can, but also to play those who would distract the sorcerers from their quest for perfection. They need to be played like the heroine of the Tam Lin story, ready to do anything to save the man she loves from otherworldly forces. There needs to be at least one person like that for each PC.
no subject
The thing is, I don't think that Beth's interested in playing (or at least, not usually) the kind of person who -- in a 'standard' Sorcerer game, is constantly flirting with true evil -- always on the cusp of doing something truly awful.
Reversing the equasion still presents the same kinds of tension -- of humanity vs ideal, power vs price. But the range of characters that is suited to that kind of story is completely different.
no subject
There was a character who was a Vulcan, but one who worked hard to connect with his human emotions, explaining what Vulcans did with people like him: They were very patient and took extra time to try to teach him the ways of Vulcan. And, at the end, he had to give up his hard won humanity to save a live, probably Spock's.