Lee couldn’t make the Nobilis game tonight, so Randy, De, Jackie and I started what will be a short “Grade School Sorcerers” riff.
Notes to follow regarding character generation, opening kickers, and some observations on playing kids in a game that’s designed to create people in dysfunctional relationships, but for now, you can check out the wiki page for Grimm Therapy, which has the PCs, their demons, a fun little customized character sheet, and the One Sheet that describes the game’s customized Humanity and Descriptors.
Update: Here’s the rest.
So after the golf game yesterday, I called up De to see what the plan was, since Lee couldn’t come up. To put it mildly, she was interested in getting out of the house after a long weekend, so we decided to game anyway — I said I’d “run something”. A tentative gathering time of 4 was also agreed on.
This was around 1.
When we got back to the house, however, the garage door demanded attention — one of the track rollers had finally given up the ghost and snapped off its shaft, plus the whole thing needed a tightening. Between the trip to Home Depot for a replacement shaft&roller (and being amazed such a thing existed) and putting them in, it was a little before three before I got in the house.
Right. My Life With Master had been vetoed by Jackie (“Not without Lee playing… that’s silly.”), Dust Devils didn’t feel like the right genre at all, and frankly I didn’t want to grok an untried system, so that led me around to Sorcerer and the recent great ‘grade school’ thread on the Forge (previously mentioned). I grabbed up all the contributed text from the various thread participants, edited it all down to a two-page “One Sheet” detailing descriptors, lore and humanity and started putting together a character sheet (necessary, in my mind, both to capture the feel of the setting as well as to accomodate a few modifications to the standard list of Scores).
Somewhere in there I accidently deleted the one-sheet unsaved and unprinted, had to create it again, and had all kinds of printer difficulties, so it was unfortunately about five-going-on-six before we actually started character generation, but for a no-prep, no-warning thing, the material came out pretty darn well I think.
I stomp my little foot and pout, but watch with great interest. 🙂
Unlike Paka (who posted the idea on the Forge to begin with), I’m not using the parent-principle conference to point out the parents as “this is why the kids are the way they are” as much as I’m using the event for the simple story element making the PCs aware of one another as fellow outcasts.
For one thing, the parents didn’t come out of this story as the ‘real demons’ as they did in Paka’s game, perhaps because the ‘standard’ demons were introduced integrally to the characters’ stories before their parents were even mentioned.
One of things that I haven’t had a chance to play with in the game yet (mostly because of zero prep-time and only playing through the kickers) was the dual-definitions for Humanity. I think that was the thing that really got me jazzed about the setting (though it was certainly a fun idea in its own right) — two definitions, not necessarily opposites, but definitely at odds, requiring a serious balancing act.
In preparation for the next time we get to play, I’m going to enjoy working up Bangs that require real tension between the two definitions.
I’m not sure Nicky knows from humanity, either kind. He’ll just do what’s in him to do, little Vampire Hunter D wannabe that he is.
Absolutely — it’s never really necessary for the characters (or even the players) to remain or even be cognizant of the Humanity definitions from moment to moment — the system handles that kind of stuff, and it becomes a story of “will this kid lose his childhood imagination, or succumb to it? Grow up or fade away?”