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Monday Mashup #20: The Hobbit

In honor of that New Zealand flick I’ve been reading about in all the popular newsmagazines, we’ll mashup The Hobbit today. It’ll be kind of a relief to do a story that has something that more or less resembles the typical adventuring party for once. It’s one of those big adventuring parties I remember from massive sprawling college AD&D games, but it’s still an adventuring party.

My mashup is a Sorcerer one-sheet. None of that Sword and Sorcerer stuff, either. (Although I do owe a debt to Charnel Gods.)

Sorcerer One-Sheet: Under The Mountain

Premise:
How do you change when you leave the safety of home?

Demons are:
Items kissed by magic, lent power by blood. Maybe it’s the dead men who get stuck inside making them dangerous, or maybe every charm and trinket is a gateway to the tunnels below the subways. Either way, they talk to you in your dreams. You can’t get where you’re going without help, but you can’t get help for free.

Sorcerers are:
People who can see the spirits inside things. Most spirits are asleep; demons are awake and angry. You don’t have to go out and do things just because you can see spirits, and it’s better not to, because you always wind up bringing trouble back home. But some people are too curious for their own good.

Sorcery is:
Just a matter of picking up an old tennis shoe on the street, if you can see what lives inside. And if you can find the right one — that’s the hard part. You’ll know it when you see it, but there aren’t all that many around.

Humanity is:
How well you fit into your neighborhood. The lower you go, the more you’ve been infected by the way people think across town. If you hit 0 Humanity, you can’t fit in at all anymore.

Player characters are:
Ordinary people with extraordinary gifts that inexorably separate them from their family and friends. People willing to make sacrifices they’ll regret immensely in the days to come. People who say “Oh, that won’t ever happen to me; I can always come home again.”

The setting:
Modern day, urban America in a fairly mythic form. The government won’t do anything for you; the neighborhood is everything. Strong family ties are the most important thing in the world; people without family can’t be trusted, ever, no matter what. If they don’t keep faith with their kin, they won’t keep faith with you. The world is dangerous and dirty and people die randomly all the time, so the only safety is among people you can trust.

The set-up:
Something terrible is about to happen in the South Downs neighborhood. Normally, the PCs would never consider traveling over there, particularly if they knew they’d need to use their gifts along the way; however, something has recently happened (the kicker) that impels them to motion. Possibly this something is related to South Downs, possibly it’s something that happened at home, or possibly it’s something else entirely. Either way, they’ve heard a rumor that South Downs has bad trouble ahead, and they have a motivation to assist.

5 Comments

  1. This week, Bryant gives us The Hobbit as his half of the Mashup. (No, still haven’t seen the movie. This…

  2. Okay, now i’m much more curious about Sorceror.

  3. Well… This is a thing, anyway. Do I get bonus points for also halfway mashing up a much earlier subject, at least?

  4. Sure, kodi, no probs. It’s Christmas, after all.

    John, Sorcerer is very interesting, not the least for its approach to player/GM dynamics. It has a very good web site which I recommend.

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