Tag: Dresden Files

“It is the nature of the universe that things remain. Nothing ever disappears completely. The very sound of Creation still echoes throughout the vast darkness: The universe remembers.” Ghost Story

In The Dresden Files RPG, the world of the Dresedenverse is a magical place. You may live in Chicago, Baltimore, Edenburg, Scotland, Mexico City; or Your Home Town, but no matter where you live, the supernatural world co-exists with yours. Mortals have been around for a long time, but there are much longer-lived things out there…

Being a game powered by FATE, players have much higher control of story and setting than in many other games. The greatest demonstration of this is in the default assumption of The Dresden Files that your group will create the setting “city” you are playing in before creating your characters. In “Chapter 3 – City Creation”, players work with the GM to develop themes and threats of the setting. From the start, this collaborative approach helps inform the GM what expectations the players have for this game.

Normally, the first choice the group makes is to decide in which city the campaign will take place. If you read my last article, you know I have taken GM license in saying that I want the game to take place in Reno, with my players playing themselves as PCs being introduced to the mysteries of the Dresdenverse. From there, we will decide as a group some themes we might want to see in the setting.

As an example, I am going to throw out a couple of potential Themes to get us started… Let’s say that we want to see some corrupt politicians and gangsters lining their pockets, but in a Reno way (as opposed to “the Chicago Way” or as it’s done in the Big Apple). We may want to emphasize our connection to the Wild West or how mining and gambling have influenced the local scene. This may lead us to historical connections to the silver mining industry of the mid-to-late 1800’s or to the mob bringing legalized gambling into the state or any number of other perceptions we want to have of our fictionalized home town.

Playing with this theme we talk about potential Aspects and get the following:

• Power is Good, but Politics is Better
• It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who you Know
• Good Old Boys

I particularly like the last two, but want to tweak them to be more engaging for our setting. The second might be shortened and therefore more useful: It’s Not What You Know… This now makes it broader and more sinister feeling. I can still use it for its original purpose, but the dangling ending can be used in other ways (i.e. …It’s What You Don’t That Can Kill You, or …It’s What Knows You). This change might also lead to certain implications, maybe that the politically powerful in Reno are clued in to the supernatural players and activities in their town. Maybe it just means that there is a lot going on in Reno that the PCs are unaware of.

The last aspect really speaks to me, especially with a very minor change. Good “Old” Boys. This still evokes the feel of connections equals power, but also suggests many possibilities for me to look at as a GM. Does “Old” refer to vampires, wizards, decrepit Mafiosos, ancient Native American spirits, the Civil War, or all of the above? Are the “Old” in Reno attempting to maintain the status quo because “that’s the way it’s always been” and can’t break the cycle, or to some other villainous end? Are they trying to destroy the status quo?

Thanks for tuning in, next time I’ll show our finalized theme aspects and maybe a Threat as well. We will also discuss the importance of Locations and Faces and how they will help breath life into our setting.

My group is getting ready to wrap up our Warhammer Fantasy game, and embark on a brave new endeavor of John Lewis’: playing Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader using a homebrew rules set. John has always used published rules sets, published settings and homebrew settings. This experience will truly be a first for me, but one that I am looking forward to (I’ll tell you more later…). However, we want to invite another player that we miss playing with. The Catch: he can only game every other session due to work.

There’s been a lot said already about how to manage the loss of players for a given session – play without them, don’t play at all, have the GM run their character, have another player run their character, etc. I personally hate all of these options, both as a GM and as a player, due to the immersive storytelling my group likes to engage in. Fortunately, because of the regularity of the scheduled absences, I’m proposing an alternative. I’m going to run a Dresden Files RPG game on the off weeks for the remainder of the group.

For our group, this should accomplish a bit:

• We get to keep gaming weekly, without leaving our buddy behind.
• This gives John more time between sessions to tweak the rules as needed.
• We get more experience with another incarnation of the FATE system.
• I get to introduce the rest of my group to the Dresden Files setting.

Because of the group’s lack of familiarity with this setting, there will be a pretty steep learning curve for them to fully appreciate the distinctions between the different character templates. Also, the setting itself has a lot of nuance for some of the more powerful templates. As I mentioned in my last article, there are plenty of ways to help bring your players into a setting like this one (400 pages in the player’s book alone). My favorite was to have the players familiarize themselves with the setting. However, they will be doing this with the even more complex Warhammer 40K setting at the same time. I know they can do it, but I don’t want them to be forced to.

I was looking at different ways to approach the campaign: do we play in Chicago (which I happen to have access to some play aids for from a different game we never got around to…), do we play in the Baltimore setting from the player’s guide, or do we play in our (current) hometown of Reno, Nevada? The appeal of this last choice jumped out at me for a variety of reasons, the strongest being the fantastic time we had playing Zombie Cataclysm run by our very own Chris Stevens.

In this game he GM’d, we played ourselves showing up to my house for game night. From that point on, we were in character. We all had done a great job of modeling ourselves using the mechanics of that setting and had a very realistic, yet insanely fun, session. Why couldn’t we repeat that experience in a different game? I think this would be a great approach to introduce my friends to the Dresden Files, at least as it’s seen through the lens of 4 not-yet-clued-in mortals living in Reno.

In the weeks to come, I plan on showcasing some of our campaign/character/plot designs – specifically the use of Fate aspects to help breathe life and importance into the setting and characters.

See you then!