During the month of October, I posted once a day for my "Through Sorcerer's eyes" project (now indexed!), where I used Ron Edwards' game, Sorcerer, about people undermining the laws of nature by trafficking with demons, to analyze Roger Zelazny's book, A Night in the Lonesome October, as I read it. I now want to reflect on that analysis in a more centralized and focused way. As always, this will be extremely spoiler-filled, so reader beware!
Throughout the project I kept a certain façade of someone encountering the book chapter by chapter for the first time, by not specifically identifying the tropes and characters brought up, outside of when they seemed relevant to sorcery. I was somewhat inconsistent in this. I did name the Cthulhu Mythos, but mostly failed to identify the protagonist's master as Jack the Ripper, Rastov as Rasputin (or someone close enough), the Count as Dracula, Larry Talbot as the Wolf Man, the Great Detective and his companion as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, or the Good Doctor as Dr. Frankenstein. This put them on equal footing with other main characters, such as Morris and MacCab, "Crazy" Jill, or Vicar Roberts, who did not stand for particular genre characters, although they did seem to stand for tropes: Jill as a classic witch from British folklore and its modern bowdlerization, Vicar Roberts as a clergyman turned Satanist, and Morris and MacCab as generic Victorian occultists.
So the book is a pastiche of Victorian detective, mystery, and horror fiction, combined with Lovecraftian horror. To this, we must add another genre that doesn't quite make the jacket: children's (and adults`) sentient animal literature, such as White Fang and Watership Down. This shows itself in the main living characters in the book being the animal companions. They are the ones with whom the point-of-view character, Jack's dog Snuff, is most able to communicate, and who seem to undergo the most growth. Even supposedly mundane animals, who are not the companions of anyone magical, are capable of verbal communications of some sort, at least with other animals. Notably, humans are not normally capable of speaking to animals, except for Larry Talbot, who, due to his lycanthropy, is able to converse in human form, but only with wolves and dogs. Companion animals are able to converse with their masters, but only during the hour after midnight.
This mixing of genres is challenging to address with a Sorcerer model, because the default premise of the game is to take a naturalistic setting, and add the supernatural to it exclusively through the actions of demons, who are controllable to some level by sorcerers, and whose existence and actions are kept secret from the general populace. But here, there seem to be several separate aspects that seem supernatural, or at least fantastical, and definitely secret. The naturalistic setting in the original game is recommended to be the "here and now", some stylized version of a part of the world we live in, so let's start our journey from there and see where it leads.
We start by being transported back to the late 19th or early 20th Century, near London. Sherlock Holmes, or a stand-in, is well known for his keen ways of observation, so this is not sorcery, but rather skill. Vivisectionists are well-established, although possibly detested. Ritual killings, assaults, and grave-robbing are investigated, but not necessarily understood. Animals are capable of talking to each other, even without any specific summoning of demons, although humans are not aware of this, with each species or family having its own language. Rumors of vampires, werewolves, and other such gothic horrors might abound, but they're not really understood.
Into this stylized, somewhat fanciful Victorian setting are plunged practitioners of many varieties of forbidden magic, which nevertheless feature in common animal companions with which said practitioners can communicate only between midnight and one in the morning, the use of dead body parts, interference with the weather, and concern with an event which happens a few times a century, in which the moon rises full on All Hallows` Eve, and the Lovecraftian Elder Gods can be brought back. The practitioners are drawn to a certain area, and subconsciously position themselves to form a pattern from which one can calculate or divine the specific location of the event.
Some of these practitioners have supernatural aspects that seem independent of what's common between sorcerers. There is a vampire, who could be represented as a sorcerer with a blood-drinking Parasite. There is a werewolf, also potentially representable as someone with Parasite demon, albeit with less control over it. Being a werewolf is something that can be "learned', as we see when the Great Detective becomes one at the end, which suggests a demon being summoned and bound.
At least one potential practitioner isn't even concerned with this upcoming event - the Good Doctor, who is just there to bring the dead to life, which, fortunately, seems to work with the other themes of sorcery pretty well.
One issue to reflect on is where the sentient animals fit in. In my day-to-day analysis, I presumed that they were demons - but an important feature of demons in the base Sorcerer game is that they are very two-dimensional. They are driven by their Need and Desire to a comical degree. The GM is encouraged to play them as cartoon characters. But Snuff, Graymalk, Quicklime, Bubo, and the rest are not two-dimensional. They couldn't be, because otherwise the book, which is mostly from their perspective, would not be as compelling.
One way to try and address this would be to flip the roles - what if the companions are the sorcerers, and the practitioners we called sorcerers were actually the demons? Since we get to see far less of their inner worlds, we could reinterpret Jack, Jill, Rastov, and the rest as somewhat more two-dimensional, even cartoonish. But the problem is that they are clearly the ones binding demons, and in some case, the instigators of supernatural change for the animal companions.
Snuff himself is the biggest problem in this regard, because his origin story almost compels us to identify him as a demon - Jack made him into a supernaturally strong guard dog after he was something else, which he didn't like being as much. Owen's severing of Cheeter's shadow also seems like a sorcerous action, and it was instigated by Owen, not Cheeter.
I kept referring to base game, and the reason is that Sorcerer has supplements. When it came out, there were two advertised: Sorcerer & Sword, which expanded the game to capture the Sword and Sorcery genre, and The Sorcerer's Soul, which is supposed to take Humanity and expand its use, adds angels, and, importantly for our case, allows demons to be played as full-fledged player characters. I have read the first supplement, which is a fantastic read if only for the analysis of the genre, even if you end up using different systems, but have not read the second, which might contain solutions to some of the issues I brought up here.
Stepping back from all this, it's clear that there is potential here for at least one mostly straight Sorcerer scenario. Specifically, the existence of an upcoming sorcerous event, which draws sorcerers from all over to one place. In game terms, perhaps it provides unique bonuses or access to power levels for demons not otherwise available. It makes for a great template for Kickers, whether the characters want to change something significant about the world, or see their role as protecting the existing order using unorthodox means. In my own one-shot, which I hopefully will discuss more extensively sometime in the future, that was pretty much all that I brought over - the setting was modern Troy, New York, in which an event was about to occur which would allow stronger demons to be more easily Contacted, Summoned, and Bound, and the pregenerated characters were human archetypes that I would expect to live around the area in the here and now - although a Passer cat named Graymalk, and an elongated intestinal Parasite named Quicklime, did survive.
