Sorcerer: tuned and custom painted

The year 2013 has started quite well, since Ron Edwards has finally launched his Kickstarter funding for the annotated version of his seminal Sorcerer game. The book itself, which is a compilation of the core book plus the three highly excellent supplements, is ready, and the funding is for the cover art by an artist called Thomas Denmark, which I didn’t know until now.

I have written quite a bit about Sorcerer on this blog, and it remains my favorite game. It’s a so-called “emergent story” game, meaning that the plot is not prepped beforehand, but evolves from and is driven by the actions of the players, and in a very clever way, I have to add. This is hardly shocking these days, but 10 years ago, or even five years ago? Holy shit, did it freak people out. It was wonderful (and scary) watching some people struggling with the concept of not having a GM decide events, happenings and decisions in the game, whether beforehand or during the game. I have played with more than one group of people where not a single one of the players were able to get this apparently mind boggling concept, mainly, I have to admit, due to their rather prejudiced views on what roleplaying is or should be.

If you are interested in what’s actually going on when we roleplay, and how game design is able to support it, there’s no way that you can ignore Sorcerer. And subsequently the list of games since that have borrowed ideas, mechanics, concepts etc. from Sorcerer is as long as my arm.

That being said, Sorcerer is a fairly traditional game with a GM, who controls scene setting, NPCs etc., and players each controlling a player character. On the face of it. Unleash it, and whoa!

Come on, take the red pill.

This rabbit hole goes deep.