Science Fiction Sorcerer

Demons are bits of alien technology left in the colonized solar system. When I watched The Expanse, it looked really familiar in lots of ways and it inspired me to dust off this old thing and take it for a spin.

When a player hits 0 humanity, the aliens return.

We learn what the aliens were by the demons created and summoned at the table. We learn about them from the xeno-tech they left behind and that is all made by the players, more or less. So, we made demons together and all demons had the same Desire and Need. I’m not sure how I felt about keeping the Desire and Need the same.

I wish there had been one table that decided to have Creation of Art be the Desire. That would have been interesting. I am considering making pre-packaged aliens to choose from with demons that have a look to them based on which alien species is on the table.

The 3 Sci-fi Sorcerer games were taking about 3 hours with 20 minutes for building demons, writing kickers and rolling that first binding.

The characters were a Professor of Xeno-Tech, a homeless war veteran, the President of the Mars Republic and a starship captain. These character sheets, with the back of the sheet on the front were game-changers and are the only sheets I will ever use from now on.

Thank you to everyone who played! You were all wonderful.

Kickers (can’t quite remember all of them)

• Professor/Black Marketeer is called into a meeting with the local organized crime lieutenants, asking him to kill the current godfather and take over.
• Starship captain finds out that he was stranded on Europa on purpose and he knows who did it.
• Starship captain discovers that someone from his crew has been transmitting military intel to some filthy mud-sucker from earth.
• The President of the Mars Republic is woken up to deal with food riots.
• The Starship captain’s ship is locked down on an orbital satellite because the Satellite Warden knows something is wrong about his ship’s logs.
• The professor receives a call that her uncle and mentor is dead.
• Homeless/vet is approached by his handler to come back to the government program that paired him with his demon.
• Homeless/vet finds his buddy dead in his shelter bunk.
• The President of the Mars Republic is blackmailed by the Senate Majority Leader about his use of Xeno-Tech.

Writing kickers at the table made me nervous but once I started weaving them together with one player seeing consequences of another’s kicker in their scenes the players leaned into one another and started to meet and interact in interesting ways. Some didn’t and some did.

Humanity

There was an important moment in a Sci-fi Sorcerer game that I need to write down:

The Professor of Xeno-Archeology/Black Marketeer was meeting with the local crime boss, thinking that he would kill him. As he walked in the crime boss was reading the newsfeed, commenting on a bit of news from an earlier scene from the other character at the table, the President of the Mars Republic. After a little back and forth, the player turned to me and said, “I don’t want to kill this guy. I like this guy.”

This was the turnaround moment of the game, where players starting linking their characters together through play and talking to one another like humans do. It also prompted me to remind players of the third game that though they are Sorcerers they do not have to be sociopath demon-feeders who ask everyone they meet to put-the-lotion-in-the-basket. Turns out, that third session was the most successful.