How to Run:Sorcerer

This is a summary of some of the threads found in the Sorcerer: A Menu page, specifically, Sorcerer One-Sheet Preperation and Getting Started.

---

1. Reread the book and the supplements.
2. Decide on a setting.
3. Make the One-Sheet:
   1. List your influences and inspirations and keep them in mind during the process. Re-watching or re-reading your influences can be cool, especially if you can screen the movie or lend the books to the players who will be playing.
   2. What is Humanity? This is the engine that drives the game. Without it, the paintjob might look pretty but it won't go anywhere.
   3. What are Demons? If Humanity's the engine, Demons are the tires.
   4. What are Sorcerers and thus what is Lore? What the players will be is important, they need to understand who they will be portraying.
   5. What are Binding, Summoning, Contacting, Punishing?
   6. Descriptors: Do you need new ones and if so, how are they informing the players about and marrying the PC's to the world? These are important, they are how you display the world. During character creation, I would show them the one-sheets and then while they were still percolating with vague ideas, I'd shove the descriptors in their face and watch their eyes light up.
   7. Give it a look over. Is it fun? What were you trying to do with it and what has it become? How do your rules choices reinforce the feel you are trying to achieve? Reading other Actual Play posts (especially Art Deco Melodrama), re-reading Sorcerer, The Sorcerer's Soul and Sorcerer and Sword are good ideas at this point.
   8. Get feedback from others. Post it. Show it to friends. I find this step invaluable. Very often I have a kernel of a good idea and I'm not even sure what it is. Getting that feedback is invaluable.
   9. Make a one-sheet. This is a blast, it is like making a movie poster for your game. On-line resources, clip-art and fonts can make 'em really nifty. All of your players will have this in front of you. I have put the quote from the Sorcerer rule book, "During combat, role-playing rules the dice!" on all of my one-sheets, so players remember that when they describe stuff, they get more dice and more dice = more power.
4. Create a Relationship Map.
5. Consider what all the various NPCs & so on might be up to, what they'll drive toward during play.
6. Get players together to discuss the one-sheet and basic ideas of the game in full, moving into character creation.
7. Take a few days to look over everything.
   1. Internalize all Kickers into your understanding of play as a whole, spike them if necessary, use them as the basis to revise everything else.
   2. Embrace all characters' demons as if they were your own, favorite, desperate-to-be-played NPCs.
   3. Refine, finish, and possibly totally revise or even replace the Relationship Map you started with.
   4. Rewrite your one-sheet.
   5. Come up with nifty collages built of pictures and words, just as arty handouts.
   6. Totally revise the "what NPCs are up to" stuff, beef it up with steroids and meth, and make sure to include the demons now.
   7. Construct a bandolier of Bangs, realizing that the first session will almost certainly make more use of your prep than any other session.
   8. Consider possible Crosses and Weaves in the same way as Bangs, i.e. a bandolier.
8. Run the first session. Note that the players are only building trust and interest at this stage
9. Do the NPC and demon steps again, in detail, and to make Bangs that are really engaging based specifically the consequences of players' choices during the session.