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by Ron Edwards
Adept Press
http://www.adept-press.com
141 pages, small hardcover
$20.00
ISBN: 0-9709176-0-0
Year: 2001
Grade: A-
Reviewed by Lisa Padol
I first met the author, Ron Edwards, at GenCon 2001. He had a table and was explaining his philosophy to all interested parties. By the following year, he had a much larger booth and was sharing the booth with other independent game designers, all willing to demo their games at the drop of a hat. This was the booth for The Forge, the website co-founded by Edwards to promote independent RPGs. I joined a Sorcerer demo, and, exhausted as I was that Sunday, I still had no trouble following the rules or the flow of the game.
This year, The Forge's booth was on my Must Visit list. Ron Edwards won the Indie RPG award for Human of the Year for his tireless efforts in promoting independent games. Sorcerer is still going strong, with several supplements, one of which, Charnel Gods, won the award for Best Indie RPG Supplement.
Ron Edwards is an amazing guy. And his game is good, too.
Sorcerer is almost a cross between a roleplaying game and a metasystem like FUDGE. The PCs are sorcerers in the modern day world who perform sorcery by summoning and commanding demons. All other magic is performed by the demons.
The default tone of the game is a noirish Hellblazer. As with Unknown Armies, the central question of the game is: What will you do to get what you want? The PCs are risking their humanity to deal with powerful forces. What do they hope to gain? Is it worth the cost? This is one of those games that, if it made the radar of extreme Fundamentalists, would probably go on their list as one of Those Games that promotes Satanism. And they would be missing the point. As Michael Miller, co-author of FVLMINATA said, Sorcerer is a very moral game, much as one of its fictional sources, Doctor Faustus, is.
This does not mean that one has to run a gritty, modern day campaign where the PCs struggle against the temptation to summon and control more and more demons to solve their problems and the problems springing out of those solutions. This was the kind of scenario the author ran at last year's demo, and it was great fun. But the game can also be run in a lurid, fantasy pulp style, as demonstrated by Sorcerer & Sword, one of the supplements to Sorcerer. As my domestic partner and reality checker, Joshua Kronengold, pointed out, it can be run like a lighthearted game of Dying Earth. The sandestins controlled by archmages are not dissimilar from the demons of Sorcerer.
Character creation involves splitting 10 points among three stats, Stamina, Will, and Lore. Two more, Humanity and Cover, are derived from these. Cover is the character's day job, more or less, and includes all relevant skills, like a Central Trait in Over the Edge. Humanity will fluctuate over the game, as the sorcerer traffics with demons. Finally, each character has a disadvantage, called a Price. This must actually cause a penalty on rolls.
And that's it for number crunching in character creation for the sorcerer herself. The rest is figuring out the character's background and creating her demon.
A sorcerer starts out with one bound demon, created by the player. Demons all have a Need. If it is not met, or if they are not Bound by a sorcerer, they begin to wither away. This explains why demons want to be bound to sorcerers, preferably weak ones. There are five types of demons, defined by appearance. Is the demon an object, apparently human, or something else entirely? Once that is determined, there is a list of things demons can do with magic. Like sorcerers, demons have Stamina, Will, and Lore, as well as their own stat for power. The number of demonic abilities depends on the demon's Lore. There are no rules to determine how powerful the demon of a starting character should be. I guess that is intended to be negotiated by the player and the GM, especially since the more powerful the demon, the harder it is to control, but it would be nice to have confirmation of this and / or a few guidelines.
The game mechanics are fairly simple. Players roll a number of dice equal to their character's relevant stat, with appropriate modifiers. The idea is to roll higher than one's opponent on as many dice as possible. So, if one player rolls 5, 3, 3, 2 while another rolls 4, 2, 2, 2, the first player has 3 victories. If the next action the player's character takes is related to the successful action, those three victories become 3 bonus dice, increasing the chance of more victories on the next action.
This mechanic of carrying victories over as bonus dice is at the heart of Sorcerer. As the author explained to me at a demo of the game, many people like rolling lots of dice, and there is no reason that this should be incompatible with either a simple system or intensive roleplaying. The system is certainly simple, and, while an author cannot guarantee good roleplaying in other people's games, the system encourages it by providing bonus dice for roleplaying well.
What kind of dice does Sorcerer use? That is entirely up to the players and GM, so long as all the dice are the same type. Just bear in mind that, the more sides your die of choice has, the harder it is for someone with low stats to defeat someone with high stats. My die of choice would be the d10, but it is good to know that, if I found myself with only my d6 dice pouch, or in the home of someone with lots of board games who had never played an RPG before, but was eager to learn, the game would run as smoothly. Heck, if I wanted to try some weird blend of Sorcerer and My Life With Master, the handfuls of d4s used in the latter would fit right into the former.
Much of Sorcerer consists of suggestions for customizing the game. How many sorcerers exist in the world? What, exactly, are demons? What does the Humanity stat mean? All of this is up to the individual group. There are supplements for the game, demonstrating particular ways it might be customized, but all one really needs is the main book.
This is part of the author's agenda. Several RPGs carry a clear authorial message for their readers, and the message of Sorcerer is, "You can do it!" This message is stated explicitly on page 12, and everything about the book reinforces it. Players can try anything. GMs can change anything. Aspiring authors can create their own games. Sure, this is all obvious, but it is very rare to see a game written with his philosophy at its center, yet still supplying a coherent framework for the GM who does not want to invent a game from scratch. It is not pure metasystem, like FUDGE, but has a lot of the customizability of the other game.
The appendixes includes the few charts used in Sorcerer and an essay on the importance of system. This should be required reading for GMs and RPG designers, whether or not they agree with it. It wouldn't hurt for all RPG players to read it.
But at bottom, Sorcerer is not simply a soapbox for its author. It is a game, and he does not lose sight of that fact. The game is well designed, self contained, and almost deceptively simple. The artwork is disturbing, rather than explicitly gross, for the most part. The most lurid illustration is an appropriate accompaniment to the section suggesting a fantasy pulp variant of the game. The layout is crisp and clean, and the text is refreshingly free from typos and other errors.
I recommend Sorcerer to anyone interested in modern dark urban fantasy settings, anyone looking for a new twist on magic or a game that focuses on ethics and power, anyone interested in designing a game or tinkering with mechanics, and anyone who likes the items in the bibliography at the end of chapter one.
