The Gaming Outpost

Schism from Memento Mori Theatricks

36 pages / $5.95

On the one hand, there’s nothing particularly new in Schism. It’s got psychics, secret organizations, nifty powers, lost humanity, and lots of movie quotes. No new players dropped into this game will feel particularly lost in the setting. It is, in the end, your basic “paranormals on the fringes of society” tale.

But that’s if you ask for the fifty-word overview. The beauty of Schism rests in the details. With this short sourcebook for Ron Edward’s Sorcerer RPG, Jared Sorensen of Memento Mori Theatricks gives us another installment in the continuing trend of “post-X” books. You can see post-superheroes at work in comics with titles like The Authority or The Monarchy. Unknown Armies is a post-wizards RPG. There is an element of awareness present, like the authors are comfortable with the fact that they are playing with firmly established conventions. It’s just how far they can push those conventions that becomes important.

Schism very loosely tells the story of psychic characters, called psychogens. They have powers (selected from a pretty standard bunch including Blast, Float, Freeze, Hunch, Spy, etc.) for whatever reason (there are several possibilities given), join up with a Cabal (an miscellaneous organization), and try to live with plight of their lives. Then it starts to turn things around. “But what if these powers did exist? What if instead of benign gifts from ‘above’ they were horrible, debilitating illnesses?” Sorensen writes at the beginning of chapter one. It’s obvious he’s been reading Unknown Armies (a game he acknowledges in the designer notes at the end). Like the adepts of UA, the psychogens of Schism aren’t necessarily thrilled to be able to walk through walls or possess someone else’s mind. Sure, being what they are lets them do neat stuff, but it comes with a price, one that, in what I think is the best part of Schism, is dictated during character creation.

Every character has a Humanity stat. When this reaches zero (having high powers decreases it, for example), the PC has one more adventure before he dies. His death has already been written about by the player during character creation and it is now up to that character to make sure that he goes out having accomplished something. If you can pull it off, you regain your lost Humanity just before death.

“Dying with Humanity means that your character’s life had some kind of meaning…that it wasn’t all in vain. That in spite of everything, he made the right choice when it was most important. In the end, the character can act heroically. He can make a difference. He can define his own reality rather than simply accept the reality of others.”

Yesterday, Gareth-Michael Skarka’s column dealt with the issue of lack of diversity in gaming. He was quite vocal in his dislike of the near total dominance of fantasy and fantasy elements in role-playing. For the most part, I agree with him. The same situation exists in the field of comic books. Superheroes easily control over ninety percent of the market. Myself, I can’t stand them. I think superheroes look silly, have dumb names, and take up space on shelves that could go to much more interesting works.

But…

Sometimes they work. Sometimes it is possible for a good writer to do something with the genre that makes it worth reading. Warren Ellis’ and Mark Millar’s run on The Authority is one example. Ellis’ Planetary is another. And Joe Casey’s Wild Cats, while not as good, carries some of the same themes. (Those three titles are under the WildStorm label, which seems to be the place for post-superheroes.) All of these operate by taking the core element of the genre-super powers-and staying “true” to only that. In the end, this can function as a far more potent attack on the stagnance and boredom of superheroes than simply ignoring them.

Schism does much the same thing. Psychic powers are, to be honest, exactly the same thing as magic spells. Psychers and wizards are often indistinguishable. So, by employing psi instead of the arcane, one does little to remove fantasy from the work. What we have in this game is a bunch of curse mages. And, in just over thirty pages, Schism doesn’t provide many of the hard details usually found in a campaign setting. It is made clear in the beginning that the city in which the game takes place should remain vague and unnamed. All of the Cabals talked about are presented as examples. What we are left with is a core of psychic powers wrapped in nothing tangible, the effect of which is to bring into striking clarity the nature of the game. There is no way to pass off the psychogens and their capabilities as tangible or as a piece of a larger whole. They take on such a focus that they become fully realized in a way that is impossible with, for instance, the D&D Psionics Handbook. Psychogens in Schism are not tools for adventure. They are like Heidegger’s Being instead of the more granular beings. They function as the entire universe, the totality of the game. The very openness of the game casts the protagonists in intense relief and the face that the death scene is already written only serves to heighten this awareness. Characters in Schism have an endpoint. They will die. And unlike, say, Call of Cthulhu, this death isn’t some inevitable dread. It’s more of a solution, a way to make better a system that has gone wrong.

There are people out there who aren’t going to like Schism. First, it’s a PDF, which doesn’t have quite the same “feel” as a printed book. Second, the artwork, while passable, won’t be drawing short inhalations of awe. While I didn’t come across any typos, there are some formatting mistakes and one movie quote that shows up twice. But those are little details and, due to the nature of the format, easy to fix.

Additionally, this is a sourcebook, not a stand-alone product. However, I’ve never read Sorcerer and had no trouble understanding what Schism was talking about. Some of the specific mechanics require the original rules but the vast majority of it is generic enough to be ported to any system you want.

Schism can be called post-roleplaying. Even if you don’t play it, it is worth reading as a carefully constructed look at what makes this genre and is a work that will enhance anyone’s appreciation for what roleplaying games can be.

Next week: Part 2 of “Surfing in Spandex”