Catching up on my footdangling

I’m very excited. I’m playing Sorcerer next week. The group has agreed, or at least not protested against, playing something Ellroy-ish. You can’t mention Ellroy without saying crime fiction, and also his worthy predecessors Chandler, Cain and Hammett. More on Chandler later, but I can reveal this post’s title comes from him

I mentioned Judd Karlman’s SF Sorcerer in the last post, and I have had another of Judd’s ideas lying on my hard drive for a couple of years, his non-supernatural crime setting for Sorcerer, which I actually suggested to the group a couple of weeks ago.

The setting is called Blood Simple, which apparently derives from Hammett, but I know it from Coen’s hommage to the genre, their first film of the same name.

The big difference between Chandler and (late) Ellroy is the historical landscape and the politics. I like both, and whatever the players prefer I think we can accommodate. In Chandler the crook may be a low-life criminal or a wealthy retired businessman. In Ellroy he’s the DA, the FBI Director or the world’s richest man. So, lets see where the players, and player characters take it.

I am using one of Chandler’s short stories as inspiration for a relationship map, a technique Sorcerer’s author introduced in the book The Sorcerer’s Soul. The map establishes a web of characters and a backstory up until actual play begins. The story was pubishes in 1936 and is called “Goldfish”.