Design Diary: Triangulation & The Sorcerer

I spent all last weekend playing Seven-Part Pact with my friends. It was a miraculous experience, and I’m so grateful to my buddy Taylor Moore for setting it up, renting the AirBnB in upstate NY, and bringing his telescope. The aurora borealis shined upon our play session, and one of the players was a professional chef, so we ate like queens. It was really wonderful, and it was fascinating — I was one of the only players without any AP/podcasting experience, and watching some of my friends dial it up to 11 was deeply inspiring. It was the first chance to try out the new Hierophant Domain rules (they work great, by the way) and showed me some really important areas for development with the Faustian and the Sorcerer. These thoughts emerge from debriefing afterwards about the Pact and how the game naturally balances the Wizard through Triangulation.

Triangulation means different things in different contexts, but here I’m going to use it to talk about the ideal relationship between the player, their Wizard, and their Domain. In effect — the design of the game strives to, as much as possible, create a division between these three forces by playing their morality, their obligations, and their desires off of one another. 

If the player’s morality aligns with the Wizard’s desires (i.e the Wizard is, from an outside-the-game PoV, a good person), the Wizard’s Domain should ideally push against those desires. If the player’s morality aligns with the Domain’s obligations (i.e the Domain is encouraging the Wizard to do something morally virtuous), those obligations should conflict with the Wizard’s desires. 

Ideally, there’s never a moment when the player’s morality, the Wizard’s desires, and the Domain’s obligations all perfectly align together. This has historically been the problem with the Librarian/Sorcerer. Books don’t create obligations that compellingly triangulate the Wizard’s morality.

I’m working on yet another new draft of the Sorcerer’s Domain, which will ideally serve to very forcibly triangulate the Sorcerer by focusing the Domain on a part of the Sorcerer that’s been present conceptually for a while but never really explored — the Pact’s obligation to track down and gatekeep magic.

The Scrabble Tiles represent the various schools of magic, and the big beautiful flower is a map of Isha as a panopticon, with the Sorcerer at the center. Magic crops up in the various regions of the Faraway Sea, and the Sorcerer sends his agents out to bring it back to his tower to transform into stickers to put into the Grimoire. It’s ambitious and weird, but that’s Seven-Part Pact for ya — and I’m really excited about its implications.

This new Domain will ideally triangulate the Sorcerer between the player’s morality (as the Sorcerer functions now in a lot of ways as a magic cop, literally gatekeeping the common folk’s access to magic) and the Domain’s obligations (failure to do so will cause magic to run wild, Wizards will lose their special magic privileges, and the Pact will crumble). I’m excited to see if the pressures of this Domain will work to produce a more dynamic and conflicted Sorcerer.

That’s what I’ve been doing this week — I’ve started work for another organization (something I’ll talk more about when I can, but there’s some big stuff coming down the pipeline) and next week I’m gonna try biting into the Faustian’s Domain, and improve some issues around simplicity and simulation.

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