At the discord, as part of another conversation, Ron said this:
Here’s what I’d like to see more: plain Sorcerer, with no sorcerers beyond the player-characters, and at the start, few if any demons beyond those they’ve bound, with any other fantastic elements of the situation being considered normal within the fiction. Significantly as well, no exotic or impressive NPCs in mechanics terms, merely people and things and problems (all of which do get plenty of dice). Doing it hard and well, not exotic and clever.
A scattershot discussion followed. This post exists to collect that discussion and further it.
For my part, I noted that in the current Sorcerer game I’m running, we do have NPC sorcerers, but only ones that have come from the Lore descriptors: namely, a coven and a master. 4 sessions in, only the master has shown up, and in a relatively quiet (but menacing) scene. Interestingly, a choice by the player put that character even further in the background than he otherwise might be (here I mean background in the pictorial-metaphor sense, not the “backstory” sense): the character knows, of course, that the master sorcerer has demons, but he doesn’t know *what* they are, and fictionally we’ve collectively taken that to mean that he kind of doesn’t *want* to know what they are. Should he choose to try to “see”, we will do the normal Lore vs. Power rolls and find out what happens. Until then, or until the master has a reason to act forcefully with his demons (which would be something related to the character), this NPC sorcerer is not a big-timer, fictionally speaking. It is almost up to the player to make him one.
Regarding the coven, they haven’t shown up at all yet, and although they individually have their own backstories and statted-up demons, unless the player grabs for them or something else in the fictional situation triggers their interest or need, they will stay in the background, too.
Perhaps what I’m trying to say here is that the NPC sorcerers are simply characters, not conceived of as oppositional pawns for me to push forward on the board. They will show up when they have an interest in the situation.
2 responses to “Plain Sorcerer”
I think that’s the most common cause for the presence during play of sorcerer NPCs: if a PC concept explicitly includes or implies a master-apprentice situation, covens, etc.
Your last two paragraphs are sensible too and worth underlining: the demons from those sorcerer NPCs are characters in their own right, and what they do depends on their own Desires, their relashionship with their master, and what their master wants. They are not there for staged or scripted boss fights. Same for the NPC sorcerers themselves, if any: they do what makes sense they’d do, given the fictional context, their motivations, drives, etc.
So, I have played games with no NPC Sorcerers. I like the discussion on page 44 of the annotated version a lot because it actually enumerates the issues with NPC Sorcerers quite well. But I also like the concluding paragraph of that section which reads:
My current Sorcerer game has a few NPC Sorcerers. Two come from the player’s character sheets. One is a zero humanity burn out who lives out in the Los Angeles forest having entirely turned her back on humanity as nothing but parasites upon the earth. The other is a scary ambitious roommate who is part of the same witchy crafting circle coven the PC belongs to. It’s also been implied that there are a handful of probably low Lore members of the witchy crafting circle who have been called upon at times to participate in rituals which mostly take the form of drunken ragers both public and private. They don’t have names and kind of inhabit the background but their existence has been highly impactful on play.
But one NPC Sorcerer very much conforms to the last paragraph. I invented Clarion Vance, a billionaire modeled off the question “What if Elon Musk was as cool as he thinks he is?”. Vance has a particularly nasty fire demon that basically channels raw destruction into personal power (the demon grants Vance a powerful Cover ability that is basically his whole financial empire).
So let’s talk about where Vance came from and how he avoided the problems on page 44. I’ll start with this one:
Let’s look at the PC’s four Kickers.
Jocosity: “I have just invented a longevity drug that actually works.”
Howard: “I have overheard my fellow tenure committee members plotting against me.”
Thunder: “I have just slept with the executive of a logging company my environmental activist organization is in a lawsuit with.”
Jessica: “A company insider has given me a tip about a connection between their company and the toxic garbage fire burning in L.A.” (This fire is a real thing happening right now).
I think it was the longevity drug and the toxic fire that first put Vance in my head. We know there’s going to be corporate interest in that drug and that fire feels ripe for meeting a demon’s need. Viola! Vance and fire demon. Then I added the idea that Vance was interested in purchasing the logging company pending resolution of the lawsuit. And the fact that the tenure committee wants to advance Vance’s unqualified son under pressure from the university hoping to win Vance’s financial favor.
The key here is that the Kickers aren’t moving the PCs toward Vance. Vance is moving toward the Kickers. Jocosity’s demon is all about Knowledge and Vance comes along with a juicy offer to fund an extensive research program in exchange for exclusive rights. Vance’s son being the subject of the tenure committee is pretty much a detail and doesn’t change the politics of that situation at all. The pending buy-out of the logging company only serves to explain the urgency of the executive’s desire to wrap up the lawsuit. Dealing with Vance’s fire demon doesn’t untangle the other civics issues around the toxic fire.
There’s nothing to investigate here. Vance and his plans are out in the open. He literally invited Jocosity and Jessica into his offices and offered them above board jobs. The only PC he ever went after directly was Jocosity as he really wants that drug and her research. And he did that through a series of escalating fire disasters that threatened people Jocosity cared about. I probably would have done that with a perfectly normal business guy anyway so why not have a fun fire demon to go along with it?
I avoided this by playing Vance as a whole human being. For the most part he was willing to deal with people on the level. He only escalated against Jocosity because (a) he was obsessed with her and her work and (b) she had turned down multiple above board offers. He was also genuinely invested in his son’s welfare and success albeit in that semi-narcissistic rich-guy “my son’s success is an extension of my success” kind of way. Just being the rich guy everyone else wanted a piece of was enough.
So, did the PCs team up and eventually fight Vance? Well, sort of. Eventually Vance escalated to setting fire to Jocosity’s mentor’s house. Everyone arrived on the scene to find the fire demon literally eating the house, with Vance sitting in his car across the street. Jocosity broke the window on the car and Thunder used his demon enhanced punch to kill him. It didn’t feel like a fight, it felt like a murder. And the aftermath was treated like the cover up of a murder.
And this only happened after Jocosity had turned to Jessica’s coven for help; after Jocosity had slept with Thunder in service to his demon’s need; after Jocosity had won academic favor at Howard’s university in a public debate. So much other play and context happened before the players got to, “Maybe we just kill him?” and even then that wasn’t the vibes going into the scene and Thunder’s act was kind of shocking.
And I think more importantly this moment wasn’t “climactic”. It was a crucial pivot point that released a lot of steam from a lot of valves, but we played four more sessions after this point. A big open question became “What do we do about Vance’s son? We just killed his dad.” Another was “What do we do with the fire demon we managed to Contain?” The lawsuit and the tenure committee all remained open topics for some time. Thunder had a lot going on with his brother’s family too as did Jessica with her sorcerous-ly ambitious roommate. So much material beyond, “we defeated the villain.”