I’ve been on a Shin Megami Tensei kick lately. I finished playing Apocalypse a few weeks ago, and have just finally gotten around to playing Digital Devil Saga. For those that don’t know, Shin Megami Tensei is a meta series of JRPGs about summoning and dealing with demons. By coincidence, I’ve also just discovered Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer, an RPG about, of all things, summoning demons. I’ve been looking for a way to take SMT to the tabletop, and Sorcerer seems like a good fit.
I’ve been working on a hack, but honestly, without any actual play experience, it is hard to see the line between what’s a truly necessary change and what’s just tinkering needlessly. Therefore, I want to dive right in and try a SMT game with Sorcerer with just a few minimal tweaks for the setting, and see what works and what doesn’t.
To do this, I want to run a game in the style of the first Devil Survivor game. PCs trapped in a large area sealed off from the outside world with way too many other people and demons running about. It was my gateway into the SMT series, so I got a bit of a soft spot for it. I also like it because it has a tight situation that is both desperate enough to (hopefully) make it easy to write kickers, and is also time-bound which should be good for an experimental game like this one.
The only real tweaks I am going to make initially (besides defining the things you need to define for ANY Sorcerer game), is ignoring the rules that don’t allow for wild or obvious demons. Demons do not have to be bound to stay in the human world, but they DO need to get their need still, and maybe also eat people. Inconspicuous demons can now be “Conspicuous” demons, which just means they don’t have to take cloak. If that ends up being enough of a drift that things break, then that means that Sorcerer isn’t as good of a fit for SMT that I expected it to be. Everything else, including elements, fusion, and the like, we’ll see what works during play.
I’ve got a restrictive, but workable, time slot for games on Wednesday Evenings that should be free for the near future, so we’ll see if I can’t throw a game together in that time!
You All Meet in a Tavern 