I love Sorcerer.

For Halloween this year, I organized what was supposed to be a Sorcerer one shot. Now, by popular demand, we’re planning to play at least one more session to wrap up the Kickers for each character.

The pitch

Here is the teaser I shared with the players to get people excited about the game:

Transylvania, 1887. The forests are filled with moonlight and magic, and the mountains are perforated with tombs older than any Christian grave.

No one was ready when the ruins of Castle Draculea reappeared amid a cloud of iron flies like a sprawling labyrinthine Babel. Secret messengers have crossed Europe, bringing invitations to eclectic and unlikely guests.

You have your own reasons for accepting the call. Maybe you are a noble, enticed by power. A soldier, seeking vengeance. A friar, seeking absolution. A composer, seeking inspiration. A nun, seeking freedom from a curse. A surgeon, escaped from the dungeon. Or a stage magician, seeking forbidden knowledge. Your destiny awaits you in theses twisted, demon-haunted halls.

And the shadows whisper, “How far will you go to get what you want?”

Touchstones

• Dracula, the novel by Bram Stoker
• Koji Igarashi’s Symphony of the Night (Playstation)
• Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics
• Jim Henson/David Bowie film Labyrinth
• Short stories by Edgar Allen Poe and the Sherlock Holmes fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle

I’ve wanted to run some Dracula/Castlevania-inspired Sorcerer for a long time!

Prep

I conducted 2 main kinds of preparation for this scenario: Filling my imagination, and creating some content.

One thing I did to fill my imagination was to re-read the Bram Stoker novel Dracula over the past 2 weeks. I didn’t finish it because it’s not my only reading, but I did savor some of the specific imagery and prose that Stoker employs, and it helped re-establish atmosphere I wanted to include in the game.

Likewise, I popped in my Playstation black disc of Symphony of the Night and re-played some of the game several nights in a row. I also played some of the early levels of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow I, a game I never really mastered. And I re-read the Hellboy stories “Seed of Destruction” and “Wake the Devil”.

Based on my inspirations, I created 2 kinds of content to help us get started quickly: demons, and backgrounds.

Starting demons

In Sorcerer, player characters get their power from a dysfunctional relationship with transgressive personae, AKA demons. By the book, players typically create their own starting demons, based on the inspiration provided by 2 statements the GM provides. Or at least, the players define their demons’ special effects as a basis for the GM to develop the mechanics. Since this was planned to be a one-shot, I took responsibility for this, so the players would have a menu of evocative content to choose from and form their character ideas around. I’ve done this once before, and it worked very well!

Here are the handouts I created detailing the starting demons (pp1–5).

I created 10 starting demons for the players, anticipating only 4–6 players, but by game day I had 9 players RSVP! The demons were:

• The Blood Cloak of Selim the Sinister: A dark Ottoman-style cloak lined with bright crimson silk, that heals you when it gets blood on it.
• Cursed Bloodline: The Vampire’s curse, bestowed upon Dracula’s most favoured scion. You get to play a vampire.
• Greymalkin: A well-groomed, dark grey cat with bright eyes; it boosts your lore and can walk through walls and shadows.
• Ne m’oubliez pas: A small tube of red lipstick made by the Parisian perfume house Guerlain, that makes you very seductive.
• The Orb of Thíristarr: A crystal ball the size of a fist, that shows you what people want and boosts your will when you offer it to them.
• The Shadow Signet: An ornate silver ring marked with unknown glyphs and a waning crescent moon. It basically makes you the goblin monarch, like David Bowie’s character Jareth in The Labyrinth.
• The Scourge of God: An ancient, rust-red sabre, once held by Attila, who claimed it as a gift from the war god Mars. This lets to stir up peoples blood for fighting, makes you a master strategist, and mows suckers down like grass.
• Soul of Wolf: A ravening beast lurks beneath your skin, tearing its way out. You get to be a werewolf.
• Tongs of Saint Dunstan: Battered tongs from a dark age forge. Stolen directly from a Hellboy story, they let you grab demons and beat the Hell out of them.
• The Vampire Killer: A coiled whip of chain with jagged spikes tipped with a serrated talon. This is the classic Belmont weapon from the Castlevania series, and one that Dracula would immediately recognize!

In addition to the demon abilities and stats, each demon sheet also offers a few details for the player character who binds it: the master’s telltale, lore descriptor, and price. In Sorcerer, these details are typically chosen independently of the starting demon, but I did this the last time I ran a Sorcerer one-shot, and it proved both expedient and fun.

One more demon

Of course, I also created stats for Dracula himself: my own twist on the classic, using the rules of lichdom from Sorcerer & Sword.

► SPOILER

See Dracula, p6. This is the only demon I inserted into the scenario, apart from the player demons. I considered inserting Bram Stoker himself as a Naïve NPC sorcerer, but decided against it. I may use him as a highly-driven mundane NPC.

Backgrounds

The other content I created were a handful of short background descriptions to spark character ideas (pp7–8). These were developed for inspiration only, especially to establish atmosphere. I considered character professions that could replace the protagonists in Dracula or play important roles in short stories by Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle.

The prose following each background suggests one way players could link such a character to the Castle Dracula scenario.

Beyond inspiration and atmosphere, these backgrounds could also be slotted directly into a character’s Past descriptor, to help players form character ideas and create their characters more quickly. And that’s exactly what most players did. They showed up eager to play!

Into play!

When we got together, I cut out the backgrounds and spread them out across the table. I cut the demon sheets in half so each sheet had one demon, and spread these across the table too. One player made up his own background, but the rest picked and combined a background and demon from the pool, and we got things started.

I’ll share their character sheets and write about the Kickers next time!