[RPG]: Sex and Sorcery, reviewed by matthijs (3/5)

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11013.phtml

Matthijs Holter's Summary:

It’s about how boys and girls, men and women behave towards eachother when they play. It’s also about how scenarios can be designed in different ways to tell “male” and “female” stories. It’s about the relationship between birth, death and insanity. The ideas are generally brilliant, but they’re not always well delivered.

Go to the full review for more information.

Post originally by No2 at 2005-02-21 09:32:33
Converted from Phorums BB System

Yuck... pretty grand guignolesque as a concept. Too bad since the idea of gender-based approaches for scenario design is interesting. I'll pass!

Thanks for the good review!

Post originally by Jim Gardner at 2005-02-21 11:12:56
Converted from Phorums BB System

In the Sorcerer system, "demon" can refer to a lot more than just Satanic minions. It's a generic term for any entity that can do things humans can't. Recently, for example, someone in the Sorcerer Forums described a campaign based on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" In this campaign, the "demons" were Toons. Other "demon" examples given in the Sorcerer source books are fairy-tale creatures, nature spirits, aliens, and sentient spaceships (!).

The common thread is that in order to do beyond-human deeds, you have to deal with things that aren't human. These things have agendas and needs of their own; they aren't necessarily evil, but their help always has a price. Sorcerer games often center around the question, "What are you willing to pay for power?"

This means that the "demon foetus" scenario is much different than you might expect. In fact, "Sex and Sorcery" says the scenario was created to introduce the Sorcerer system to players at game conventions. The book shows how the same set-up played out in different ways with different players. Sometimes the results were indeed, "Yuck!" Sometimes the demons were sympathetic creatures just caught in situations they didn't understand.

Don't let me give the wrong impression; parts of "Sex and Sorcery" are definitely not for the squeamish. The book delves into some pretty extreme stuff. But one of the nice things about Sorcerer is that it's full of surprises -- the range of possibilities is much wider than you expect. For me, reading the books made me aware of the degree of tunnel vision in most role-playing games... including the ones I ran before discovering Sorcerer.

Post originally by Ron Edwards at 2005-02-22 21:27:41
Converted from Phorums BB System

Actually, there's only one demon foetus in the In Utero scenario.

The three player-characters are:

The woman who's pregnant with the demon foetus.

The foetal sorcerer who's in the womb of the demon woman.

The man who is the father of the human child, by the human woman.

It's way fun to play. I ran it seven times in rapid succession at a previous GenCon, and boy does it end up differently each time.

Best,
Ron