SorcerersOfUrTuruk

Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk is available from The RPG Drivethru

See The Rogue DM interview with Graham Bottley of Arion Games

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My Troupe

Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk - RPG Review

A lifelong love of roleplaying.
A life changing trip to Thebes.
An ongoing attempt at co-writing Herbertian Dune fan book 7 ‘Sorcerers of Dune’.
A few seasons in Al Raqis (SecondLife) helping develop the Desertborn culture.
An ongoing attempt at writing the ultimate magickal fantasy role-playing game to explore a world where ‘mind-over-matter’ type magick (manifestation of intent at quantum level) is used daily by the mainstream and how rapidly things could change in such environment.

A .pdf copy of Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk (justified as a birthday present to myself for breaking my breadline budget).

I feel qualified to write a review for this one. I glossed over the rulebook, struggling through dry heat to ignore the whispering that I should own slaves and train my party in seduction, possibly including a snake cult priest as one of my five starting characters.


People and Place

Character creation is intricate and complicated, requires study. I have seen versions of these and the system rules so many times that I will learn them more easily as a player rather than by GMing this rpg, at first. As a single-parent dad who introduced my 5 year old to dice-based Wizard and Warrior role-play only yesterday (he’s addicted), I simply do not get the time nor state-of-mind to dedicate to taking on something of such magnitude.

Having made that decision I sat back and enjoyed reading and admiring the art which reminded me of watercolour pictures I have seen made by explorers of ancient Egyptian sites during the late 19th century. There should be more art of Ur-Turuk. In creating any custom world, art which greatly enhances the atmosphere for a game, can be the most expensive and time consuming aspect to produce.


Vahnam

It seems imperative that a Vahnam (a collective of all the Wizards and their small retinue to which all players belong) should get their players heads together before they create their characters, to discuss the Vahnam, its nature and assets. This approach would strengthen the Vahnam’s holdings and potential future development due to foresight. It would also avoid glitches, for example; what if major player characters are from rival factions?

The chapter on creating the physical base for the group is succinct and well done, as this is one of the important aspects of the game. Developing the city of Ur-Turuk for home based adventures is necessary but scant, suggestive. I have a lot of questions and ideas from the summary overview.

There needs to be a lot more about home-based campaigns. The factions are easy enough to understand and improvise with. Activities which the players engage in will affect the life of the city they inhabit.


Artifacts

By contrast to the character creation process, the rules for artifacts themselves seem very basic and limited. While this might not be a bad thing, it is certainly mechanical.

How many artifacts are out there and why are they not already all acquired by sorcerers? Surely Ur-Turuk has a stockpile of such artifacts waiting to be disassembled by different Vahnam. Is there a council of all the Vahnam? A meeting site in the desert for the festival of the eclipse once every few years?

Since the core of the game is the Artifacts, why is there so little gone into this aside from some very limited random creation tables? At the stage where artifacts description is irrelevant and they become reptilian number crunching. The real excitement of role-play is outside of game mechanics, it is the story. A more elaborate backstory involving the source of the wizards power is befitting of this classic. I feel a well thought guide for GMing this rather than a few paragraphs of tables is necessary addition.* I can't wait for the expansion modules, my imagination filling with promise of eastern splendor.


Personal Experience

Create situations regarding integration of all the characters as the story develops. A simple rule that you cannot play the same character in two consecutive seasons / adventures would do this, and make for a busy Vahnam!
The big question; what did each individual character do in that time while the main ones were actively pursuing some adventure? As they are all living communally in the same Vahnam this is the secret flavour of the game. How does each character relate to the other characters in the Vahnam? Make it personal, this is the best way to squeeze the living juice out of this game. Force the magic to take a background role, albeit the ruling force of the groups lives. Game Rule; role-play a scenario of what every character is doing during each season, or at least make vague cover-notes outlining it. The Vahnam journal.

Description is everything. With this game, everything possible should have at least one adjective. This should be a game rule. Play to all the senses. 


Meditation

One question I had hoped to find out more about during reading the rulebook is:

What temperature is the desert at night? What temperature are the cities?

I was inspired by walking bare-foot on cold crazy-paving slabs, thinking about how easily converted to a heated under-floor system they could be with a shovel and a few bricks. The space should be large enough to crawl under and would make an excellent hiding place in any home or ancient temple. That's not to say I thought about burying Sorcerers in the garden.


Bestiary

There are some creatures here which changed my view of the world; riding reptiles! No mention in the rules for the simple exchange of mule packs and horses into raptor-racers and giant lizard mounts trained by an animal trainer. These should not be left to the cliche of ‘the vehicles used by the snake cult as alternative to equine mounts’.


Elephant In The Temple

I am disconcertingly saddened by the situation of facing that the wizards know magic to be a limited and dwindling force in the world. This is immediately the driving force of any wizard character I will ever play; to find out how to make magic more permeable, other than by leaving artifacts in protected storage for the future generations.

What does a Wizard do once having mastered all aspects of magic and maxed out in their ability at it? Surely by then their personal insight into magic might help to answer such questions. If it does, the GM is left entirely to his own devices as to how this might emerge. It does not have to be beyond the canon material. 

A belief that the Alulim will ever return is a religion which the wizards cannot invest energy into relying upon, and yet they must in case it should ever happen. They have to accept their lot; to choose between living a humble and forgotten life of research, a glorious and ultimately mythic life of legend or die trying, or the more altruistic approach to work hard toward the effort of making magic permeable. How else can we truly understand the study of magic than to pursue that specific goal? Learning more about the Alulim becomes imperative. The core rules limit the available knowledge of the Alulim to a few charts which do not even mention the possibility that they left decipherable texts behind; and to the GMs discretion.*


Abstraction

The players invest a lot of time and creative focus into designing their Wizard, retinue and how this integrates with the other players characters, in the formulation of their collective home address.

Personally I cannot put this amount of this type of work into a project without also becoming immersed in aspirations I have for my characters and the group as a whole; “what are the common objectives?”. Although it can be entirely left out of the game with no loss of enjoyment, to my way of thinking a lot of time must be dedicated to discussing this between the group and the GM. There is epic amount of scope to build on the foundations of this books simplicity. For that I like it.

This my sort of a game. It needs expansion packs which twenty years ago would have been integrated into the core rule book; a sign of how the rpg industry is developing.


Summary

The book is a rules system, complex to learn but easy once you know it, set in a promising world which requires a lot from the GM. It seems that the more experience and romanticism a GM has toward understanding and developing the setting is crucial in what will define memorable campaigns. It could be of the realms of 'card-quest permutations the board-game' or it could be Sinbad. It could be even better. 

A collection of proverbs which will characterize the culture begins with the famous;

“What is the world?”
"It is what we bring to the table."

Wizards of Ur-Turuk houses brilliant ideas which will benefit greatly from developing further, integration of some of the ideas; the world and its features. I cannot wait to see the expansion modules. I want to know more about the 7 Lineages. I want to work on the 2nd Edition.*

Next on my reading list is The Thousand and One Nights (again).





*
To address this; I intend to write Enchanted Dawn, a fan based book to re-create the Artifact creation table by giving Artifacts an ‘Original Purpose' which affects the progressive campaign by means of karmic continuum. It is an expanded rules series.

Artifacts are magic and they call to their owners, those who are to learn from them, ultimately unbind them and destroy them, to re-work their energies into their own. [i]But which way around does this flow?[i] Symbols of these connections are multi-sensory, worked into several levels of the storyline. Without making effort to do so, they are simply a pacman pill won at great risk.

What are the long term effects of using magic? In a world where limited artifacts exist and are regularly destroyed, their magic used up by a sorcerer but dies with that sorcerer; the game is established at a time in history when magic is still available. It will not always be so.

Finding out more about the Alulim, is this even possible? Is it possible by using magic?

A Council of the Vahnam meets to address these issues. The Council of Vahnam Library contains a lot of information regarding Artifacts and their origins. Different Vahnam also function as Factions; for and against one another.




Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk is available from The RPG Drivethru

See The Rogue DM interview with Graham Bottley of Arion Games

Google+ Community


ADDITIONAL: 21.9.2015
https://soundcloud.com/snakeappletree-white-lightning-gate/ur-turuk-snake-trance


Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk is ©2015 Arion Games. I make no claim of ownership to this properties. It is common sense that online role-playing games for purposes of roleplaying may be utilized as such. Any apparent or alleged copyright infringement is to be regarded as fan fiction.

Harmony

Harmony

A spaced out guy on heroin asked me today to do him a big favour. Then he stared at me and said a name; “Martin”. I walked away because I want nothing to do with heroin addicts at all. I have never taken heroin myself and never intend to; as a counselor I have known them and decided that once a person takes heroin, they are written off. It is the only way to survive them.

A few hours later and I recall my friend in the last years of junior school. The teachers put us in groups in the assembly hall to do an experiment, posing our groups as politicians persuading the school to vote for us. We offered free sweets as well as free education, better food and longer playtimes, which was what the teachers were promoting by way of their expectations. Prompts earlier in the day had gotten us on track with this aptitude test.

As a child I was highly psychic, I could see clearly what the expectencies were, because they were goading us but it went further, I could pick words up out of their minds and when I spoke these words back to them, energy flowed successfully. I  had observed this so much that I came to crucial point where I had next to learn what happens when the energy ceases flowing, to experience what life is like for most people who do not have the ability which my bloodline is known to - experimenting with the experimenters.

The spirits were guiding me and had explained that this was what was happening by the same method as the living teachers, who were basically organic robots because I found them easy to coerce into rewarding me with energy attention, the type of energy attention summarised by the word fondness toward me for playing their game almost mystically. It made them glow inside, a feel good response. And I was supposed to extend this outward to my peer group. Usually I did this naturally. At this time something subvert was sliding in and making me step aside from myself, perhaps the beginning of a split mind. A lot was going on in my mental development at that time, all of it ignored by the adults because they were too busy educating me, which I believe is another level of the mind splitting between natural response and programmed mental calculus.

There was a choice between Martin and myself which of us needed most to be the spokesperson, who would be better at it. The group feeling was that I should, but Martin also wanted to. So ultimately the decision was down to me and I was hesitating so Martin spoke up first. I was hesitating only because he was my friend and although at the time I had more confidence, I could see that he needed the popularity and confidence from winning this one more than I did myself; even though it would have helped me to grow also, I could feel that by my growing so much from this one exercise I would be at a league above my group of friends friends and would have to leave them behind in my development. So I chose to remain in the sideline and be the encouragement. Thirty years later and I can see it was a kind hearted mistake, that the best intentions are not always for the best and sometimes selfishness rather than selflessness is the right thing to do.

Most of the talk we our group were giving was points which I had raised as our suggestions or put the thoughts into the other kids minds so they could raise them as their own suggestions. All of which was conducive to the flow which was shaping up to be the right shape, the teacher emotionally and mentally fulfilled that we were ticking the right boxes because everyone was having a say and because what we were saying conformed to the shape of the exercise so perfectly.

I was aware that we were top group already we were far ahead of the other groups in our points to be raised, to the extent that spies from the other groups were listening to us and copying our decisions. The teachers were observing all of this and letting them do it, hurrying us up to finish on time whenever we were distracted by the other groups stealing our ideas instead of telling the other groups to come up with their own ideas.

When the time came to speak in front of the whole school, Martin mentioned about yada yada policies plus free sweets as an extra enticement. This was something we had added at the very last minute before Martin had been placed on the podium. It was interesting to note that the entire school were bored up until the point of free sweets being mentioned and then everyone gave us a lot of energy attention. I watched this like wind blowing over cornfields.

And then some bastard teacher from another group asked; would we also provide dental care for the damage our sweets were doing to everyones teeth? I felt our group taken aback because we had not discussed this. I knew the right thing to say would be that these are healthy sweets, no sugar in them, that they are fruit sweets and good for health. I could see Martin was not too savvy enough to go that far in his thinking, stumble. He thought about it and then decided that we were dealing with the big bad no here, and the concept of healthy sweets would be laughed at. None of us wanted to be laughed at. I tried to give him extra power to do the right thing, to feel that extra confidence that he could pull it off. He looked directly into the eyes of the teacher who had asked the question, the source of the big bad no, and he folded.

The whole room derailed from the positive attention-track of do-the-right-thing, mention healthy sweets; it was too complicated a response and the pressure was mounting fast. Suddenly the power of that sway went over to answering the question directly as a yes or no answer because that is the most which most of the people there were capable of thinking about at that precise moment. All of the teachers looking at the clock and thinking ‘answer yes or no, hurry up about it!’.

I was in Martin's head while he did his thought process of; ‘yes’ would be the right answer but we did not discuss that in the group and because we did not discuss that I cannot speak for the whole of the group without asking their advice first, also then the next question will be about how can we pay for that additional costs and I don’t know the answer for that either - so positive by emotion but mentally no because this is a mental exercise. Everyone in our group was panicking and it amplified between us, came into a peak in Martin's mind.

All of that thought wave or rather feeling out for the right path went through him while verbally Martin said “yer, yuh, yeah-rur - ah, no”. And everyone in the room groaned and I slapped my face into my palm which in retrospect did more damage to him than I had intended. But it was okay because a year later he became the boss character in our group because he was games-master in our dungeons and dragons sessions (it was advanced fighting fantasy the british version of D and D), so we gave him the importance he needed to feel. I could see all this in perspective at the time it was happening. 

And then the next group repeated exactly what we had said. word for word - and added on top that they would also provide free dental care for the free sweets. They were not asked by the teacher about funding for that because the teacher was too busy cheering them on. And of course their group were voted in by the collective programmed consciousness of the entire school. Everyone hated us because the other groups teacher kept reminding the whole school that we were the group of kids who wanted to rot everyones teeth. Why that teacher was permitted to be a part of the rival team while no teachers were a part of our team I cannot answer.

I felt guilty because I should have shouted out ‘yes’ while Martin was dithering but by then I had been told to be quiet and the teacher on our team was using body language, leaned forward and used her hand to ward me down by lingering it over me and pressing down on the air, to prevent me from interrupting the discourse. It annoyed me then as much as it annoys me now as a memory.

This pattern has stuck with me throughout my whole life and today a heroin addict who was sitting on the street while I took pictures of a seagull ripping up a dead pigeon to eat, opened this memory up. By sharing it here I am sincerely hoping to do four things; heal myself, heal Martin, heal the heroin addict, and heal anyone else from making the same mistake. The lesson is;

speak up for what is right 

even (and especially) if people are trying to manipulate you or pressure you into being silent.

Speak up for what is right because the butterfly effect ripples out and prevents people from turning to heroin. Staying quiet causes people to say no when they mean yes, causes mistakes to happen which over time and the decades become bigger mistakes because we did not put in enough positivity to cause the world to be better.

The group of kids who won that debate were the bully kids who went on to beat up on the brainy kids. They really did not deserve to win it. The teachers were out of touch with the way energy flow works. Adults have forgotten and have detached from how kids experience the world where they can feel the energy flowing and know the right thing to do but between that and talking in taught words, being educated; the connection turns into the opposite of what it should naturally have been.

We mourn humanity being detached from nature as a cause for the worlds ills and this memoir is precisely a lesson in how that process happens. Pressure and domination even so simply as a hand gesture, pressuring people to speak before they have thought things through or connected with their instincts and emotions to make a holistically sound decision, because the political games are a world away from doing the right thing.

The adults do not know harmony because they have no connection with it and it is so difficult to detox ourselves to return to that state of being. We are persecuted for being there in that state by the heartless controllers who are not, it happens so often that most of us give up and become like them simply to survive living amongst them. We forget that the friends around us are a part of us too and that our energies never stop; they only change and return to us later. We need to tend for those energies, take good care of them by letting them grow, nurturing them.

This is a true story, especially the supernatural bits.