If you’ve been reading the comments on this blog, you know the name Rechan. He’s been an avid follower of the DFRPG development, despite not being involved in the playtest at this stage.
He’s obviously really been paying attention, because he’s put up his own DFRPG character based on his reverse-engineering the characters that have been posted here and on other playtest sites.
And he’s pretty darned close to perfect with it.
You should go have a look.
There was a Dresden Files RPG alpha game at OmegaCon!
You can check out some of the info about the game here. There’s characters and a discussion of Birmingham, Alabama. Fun reading.
It’s been a while since my last post. That doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening with the playtest, though. Here’s what we’re looking at:
I’m starting two play tracks next week, each running for three sessions, the first on successive Mondays, and the second on successive Fridays. I’ve asked my playtesters to pick either Mondays or Fridays, and to tell me what characters they’re going to play. I’ve heard back from about half so far.
I’m creating two adventures, each set to run three sessions, and customizing them to the characters to make sure we can let them strut their stuff (and, incidentally, stress test the rules that apply to them). I should have those finished up this weekend.
After each session, I’ll post an account of what went on, what neat things we found we could do with the rules, and anything else that seems to merit conversation.
In the meantime, there are some other folks out there writing about the playtest, as well. You should check out these links:
Here we go: last of the supernatural characters we’ve created. This is Gerhardt Rothman, a policeman with a dark secret he’s trying to hide from.
I’m working on putting together actual play sessions starting next week, so I hope to have some reports on the actual games around then. I’m going to set the adventures in Magical Winnipeg, and will be brainstorming this weekend. I need to create two separate adventures, each of which may take one or two sessions to play out, because of the size of the group. I’d like to tailor each adventure to the group playing it, but I’m not sure how workable that’s going to be in the time I’ve got.
Anyway, the actual playing is coming up. Stay tuned.
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.
Here we have Legion, an example of what you can do if you decide to go the “dark superhero” route.
So, I tried to add another character that I just received tonight, and managed to delete my last post. Sorry, gang.
Anyway, here are the two characters for today:
Rowan Aurelian, Winnipeg’s wizarding celebutante, and
Amadan, a changeling who’s everybody’s best friend.
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.
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:
So, that’s how things look to go over the next couple of months. It’s gonna be a fun run. Stick around.
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:
All in all, we had a good time. The more we try the system, the better things look.
