Child of the Night

Got another of the characters in my e-mail a few minutes ago. It’s almost midnight here, so it’s kind of fitting that I introduce you to Elaine De La Roche, who’s working really hard not to bite you in the neck.

For those of you keeping score at home, we’ve got one more character to go. I’ll post that one as soon as it arrives.

More Supernatural Nuttiness

Last night I held another character creation session. Only one of my players was able to make it, and it was the only night he was able to make this week. So, I created another character alongside him, and we used the character I had created on Monday night – Crazy Tom – to fill out our novels and guest star roles. It worked fine, but Tom’s novel’s getting crazy long.

Here are the folks we came up with last night:

Matthew Cross, star university athlete with an inside line on death.

Paul Roman, our first spellslinger, who has a few… issues.

Away We Go

Tonight was the first supernatural character creation session. It went very well. I had four people attend this evening, and we came up with five characters. Two of the character concepts did not fit the structure of the Supernatural Stunts chapter, but they were both very easy to house-rule in. Took maybe five minutes of discussion, total. I like that sort of robustness in a system.

What were they? One was a ghost, which winds up with a 0 Refresh Rate after all the required stunts. Easy enough to make one of the stunts optional, giving the player a Refresh of 1, and therefor a playable character. The other was a ghoul, which necessitated creating a new permission and deciding what other powers he should have. Easy. Done.

The rules so far stick very close to canon, but have a flexibility that easily allows one to extrapolate and house-rule things. With a little bit of thought and comparison, it’s easy to fit pretty much any concept that fits in the Dresdenverse into the structure and build it for a PC.

So, as a treat for those of you who have been waiting, here’s the first supernatural character to be posted. It’s a supernatural remix of Crazy Tom, one of my mundane characters. I did this to see how the system handled it. I wound up with an interesting pair of characters – supernatural Crazy Tom is more powerful, but mundane Crazy Tom is more resourceful. I like it.

Have a look.

Dresden Fluff

I’ve talked a fair bit about the rules aspect of the Dresden Files RPG that we’ve seen. We’ve also had a look at some of the setting and world bits. I haven’t brought them up before now because I’ve been concentrating on the other pieces. Now I’ve got a little downtime until after the supernatural characters are created, so I want to use it to talk about the setting material.

Wow.

One of the first chunks they sent us was what they’ve been planning to use as the first chapter. It’s called Harry’s World, and it’s a pretty nice overview of the main conceits of the setting, the big players, and the overarching background. It is, in fact, about all you would normally get in a chapter on setting in a lot of other games.

On its own, it’s good. It stands as a solid introduction that lets you understand the rest of the book. It lays out the mindset of the game very nicely, covering a variety of topics. Magic is real. Most people don’t believe in it. Monsters are out there. Some people know about them. Wizards. Shapechangers. Faeries. Vampires. All that sort of thing.

Nothing gets a very detailed rundown – they’re saving that for the later chapters – but really, you’ve got pretty much everything you need right here. If this were the only setting material in the book, you’d be wishing for a little bit more, but you’d be pretty satisfied overall, given how easy it is to build stuff in the system.

The next setting chapter is Who’s Who, and it comes along later in the book, after most of the crunch. It is an encyclopaedic (and I use that word in its fullest meaning) list of all the important characters from the Dresden books. And not just the ones that appear – both Harry’s parents are in there, along with Justin DuMorne and Heinrich Kemmler. There’s a description of each, varying in length based on how much information we get in the books, along with running commentary that adds color and sidebars that talk about using the various characters in the game.

If you haven’t read the books, this chapter is full of spoilers. Be warned.

It also looks like each of the entries is going to get a stat block, but I can’t swear to that. Even without the stat blocks, this chapter is packed with useful stuff for running the game, and is a great source for character concepts. They even suggest a Carpenter Kids campaign, playing the children of Michael and Charity Carpenter, that sounds like it would be a lot of fun, even if only as a one-shot.

Beyond the obvious utility of this chapter, there’s another benefit. It shows very nicely the different types of people at large in the Dresdenverse, what their motivations and goals are, and the sorts of stories they generate. Just flipping through it should give GMs ample inspiration for setting up encounters, adventures, and entire campaigns.

And then we’re on to the last fluff chapter we’ve received, called Goes Bump. This is the monster section, for lack of a better name. It lists the various classes of supernatural creature out there, from Angels to Zombies, with a description of each type, breakdown of subtypes, and comments and references for everything.

This section will have stat blocks, though the version we got didn’t have them yet. Gotta nail the system down before you start using it to stat things.

Again, the length of each entry varies, based on information in the books. Angels get less than a page in the playtest version, while Demons get a little over four, and Vampires get close to eight.

It’s not just monsters that get listed here, though. This is also the place to find stats for incidental mortals, like police officers or EMTs or minor practitioners, for you to throw in as NPCs on the fly. It’s a toolbox for putting together encounters and adventures, filled with the stats you need for the job and the commentary and description to help you figure out how best to use them.

Now, page counts don’t mean a whole lot at this stage of the project, but the overall count for the fluff sections so far is 256. What that means is that this is going to be a big, meaty book when it’s done, brimming over with neat stuff for the game.

I can hardly wait.

Looking Ahead

We’re approaching a full-on game of the Dresden Files RPG. It’s making me a little giddy.

Here’s how things are looking for our progress:

  1. Evil Hat has said that the spellcasting chapter, which is the last chunk of rules we need, should be sent out to us within a week.
  2. Next Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights, I’ll be hosting character creation for supernatural characters. I have to break it up like that because there are nine people in my playtest group, and that’s too many to handle at once. I’ll post the new characters as I get them, as usual.
  3. By Saturday, March 8, I will start working on a couple of adventures for the game, probably two-to-three session arcs, hoping to finish those by mid-week following.
  4. The week of March 16, I’ll start running sessions. Again, we’ll have to break into smaller groups, which is why I’m creating multiple adventures. I will post play reports as these complete.
  5. Evil Hat is planning to move on to the next stage of testing by the end of April; what they’re calling the Late Alpha Test (as opposed to this phase, the Bleeding Alpha Test). This will probably involve different playtest groups, as they try to get other viewpoints on the system. That means that my involvement in official playtesting will probably wrap up around that time.
  6. Just because the playtest is over doesn’t mean the game is necessarily over. If things are going well, if everyone’s having fun, I will probably continue to run with the rules I have until the final game comes out.
  7. Some time in the future, Evil Hat will publish the game, and I will buy a copy and do a little dance of joy.

So, that’s how things look to go over the next couple of months. It’s gonna be a fun run. Stick around.

After the Fighting’s Done

So, Friday night I ran the second half of the group through the conflicts to test the system. Now that I have no more secrets to keep from the players, I’ll give you some more detail on how things went.

For the Mental conflict, I chose trying a case before the Triumvirate of the Council of Ghosts. The set-up was that the ghost of a woman was released from the Vaughn Street Jail after evidence came to light that she was wrongly convicted of murdering her children back in the 1930’s. Citing this release as precedent, four other executed murderers were suing for release, with the aid of a ghost lawyer. The characters had certain knowledge that the four would take vengeance on the city, rather than move on as the woman had done, and so had to convince the Council not to release them.

For the Social conflict, I had five einharjar from Gimli come into town and start tearing up the local bar where the characters were gathered. The characters had to convince the einharjar to leave. Simple and straightforward.

And for the Physical conflict, I had the daughter of one of the lead detectives of Operation Clean Sweep kidnapped by the Mad Cowz, and held in a drug house guarded by a dozen gangbangers led by a hyena lycanthrope. Straightforward, but not so simple.

Because of time limitations, we only got to run two of the three conflicts with each group. For the first group last Monday, I ran the social and physical conflicts. For the Friday group, I ran the mental and physical conflicts.

We got off to a slow start, mainly because I had to teach the conflict rules to people in both groups. There was also the expected learning curve delays, as people tried to get their heads around some of the concepts and options they had available to them. Both those factors are to be expected in any system, so we knew they were going to crop up.

Once things got rolling, it was fun. Everyone got to try doing interesting things, and events flowed in a fairly interesting manner.

We did run into a bit of trouble because of the restrictions I put on each conflict, forcing players to stick to either mental, physical, or social tactics. Of course, in a real game, I wouldn’t restrict things this way, but the idea was to test the systems independently of each other.

Anyway, I’m compiling my impressions and reports from the players to send to the Evil Hat folks to let them know how things went. In the meantime, here are a couple of moments that really worked nicely:

  • Anne using her skill at chemistry to spike the einharjar’s drink, making him talk in a squeaky voice, and embarrassing him to no end.
  • Crazy Iris realizing what a huge combined advantage a shotgun and surprise can be.
  • Artemis deciding to use his Lore skill to bluff the einharjar with the threat of Odin’s wrath.
  • Boniface, so careful not to kill any Mad Cowz, accepting a compel to kill one who had almost killed him with a gunshot.
  • Sydney using a combination of Conviction and Lore to stand up to a ghostly lawyer, while Jim’s police training allowed him to lay out the evidence to undermine the case, and Boniface kept the lawyer off-balance with his knowledge of the hidden crimes of the past. Good uses of declarations by all players, filling in details of the Accord of Two Waters, the lawyer, and the criminals.

All in all, we had a good time. The more we try the system, the better things look.

Getting Into the Weird

So, I’m looking over the Supernatural Stunts chapter of the Dresden Files RPG. Interesting stuff.

I mentioned back when I was talking about the mundane character creation that you buy stunts by spending refresh rate. Mundane stunts are one point each. Supernatural stunts may cost more. This means that supernatural characters tend to wind up with fewer Fate Points at the start of a session than other characters, and have to work at getting their Aspects compelled to earn the Fate Points that they’ll need in play. Since compelling someone’s Aspect usually means that their choices are restricted in some way, Evil Hat has equated Fate Points to free will.

That’s right. Supernatural creatures have less free will than mundane folks.

They do a good job of supporting this with references to the source material. Think of how many times Harry gets the ever-loving crap kicked out of him early on in the stories, only to rise from the ashes when he really needs to, and do some kicking of his own.

He’s not just getting beat up; he’s collecting Fate Points for the climactic showdown he knows is coming.

It seems a nice mechanic, and has worked well with the mundane characters. We haven’t made supernatural characters, yet, so I can’t speak to that, but it looks like it will work just as well.

There’s a little twist to the supernatural stunts that set them off from the mundane ones: Permissions. Permissions are stunts that allow you to take other supernatural stunts in keeping with the specific Permission that you’ve taken. They tell you what other stunts you must take, and what other stunts you may take. So, if I want to play a wizard, I need to take the Wizard Permission, and all the stunts that Wizards need to have (things like Soulgaze, and The Sight, not to mention the spellcasting stunts). There are a couple of other stunts I can take if I like.

Not all of these stunts cost Refresh Rate; some are free (these are usually permissions), and some actually return some Refresh Rate (by effectively discounting other stunts by applying restrictions to them). But at the end of the day, you generally wind up with fewer than five Fate Points at the start of a session.

I think it will work; I’ll let you know how things go after I’ve tested them.

This does do one thing that will have a real impact on how players think about character creation: most of the Permissions require you to have at least one Aspect relating to it, often two. This means that, when creating supernatural characters, players need to consider the stunts they’re going to need right from the start, not pick them after deciding everything else. That’s not a bad thing, but it is a change that the players need to be ready for.

Anyway, those are my observations so far. More to follow as testing continues.