We created Portland in two sessions. The first took just a hair over three hours (from other posts, this seems about the right amount of time), the second took maybe an hour. We had an additional player for the second session.
Choosing a city - we started with a list of about a dozen candidates, purposely avoiding cities that other groups were doing - took us maybe a half hour. A couple of players weren’t jazzed about Portland at first, but once we got to sketching it up, the city started to take on a life of its own, and everyone started getting really excited. We found the Wikipedia article on Portland incredibly handy, and we had one player at the table on her laptop pretty much the entire time, looking up information as we needed it. Once we figured out the themes we were playing with, translating them into Aspects was a snap.
Creating locations was absolutely the most enjoyable segment of city creation. So enjoyable, in fact, that we went completely overboard, creating nine locations between four players (including myself as the GM). This is probably the root of our troubles during the second session. Still, this is what the players latched onto. They came up with locations, Aspects, and Faces almost faster than I could write them down.We also took some liberties with the city, creating one or two locations that don’t actually exist, such as the neighborhood known as The Woods, but were interesting in light of the setting. In any event, as I said, we wound up with nine locations all told. This process took the most time.
We hit the Touch of Magic section next, and found that, in our discussions of the locations, we’d already started addressing this point. This is about the time that the redundancy issues started manifesting. When we were coming up with locations, we basically asked ourselves, “Is this magical? If so, how?” for each location and character associated with it. So we found ourselves hitting this all in one fell swoop. So when we got to this question, we sort of went “Oh, this is already done,” and moved on.
The same issues occurred as we continued down the list of questions. The creation of locations and personalities gave rise to the answers to the last few questions organically, to the point where we were asking ourselves, “Why are we going over this again?” Again, it could be that we were just overzealous during the early parts of city creation, but the remaining questions just seemed redundant – they were the questions we were already asking ourselves as we created the locations.
One interesting thing to note is that we used index cards to create the city. Each location had it’s own card, so we were able to sort of map out the city physically as we worked, which gave us a visual aid to work with. Again, this could have contributed to the last questions seeming redundant. By giving ourselves a visual map, of sorts, we were able to see what the relationships between the locations, factions and faces of Portland were, which already put us in the mindset of creating conflicts and alliances and motivations. On the other hand, it could also have been the fact that three of the five players that were involved were also playing in a Burning Wheel game that we had just created the setting for, so we had an idea of what to expect.
Overall, the process worked well. One suggestion that we thought might help would be a step-by-step example of how city creation worked. Alternately, since the city is basically a character, itself, it might work to break it down into distinct Phases, similar to character creation. An example city sheet would be helpful as well.
Aside from that, though, everything seemed to turn out well. Despite the fact that we managed to answer several questions ahead of time, everybody at the table was stoked to create characters and get to exploring a Dresdenified Portland.
We plan on running through character creation in the coming week. All of us have read at least one or two of the novels by now, so we have a somewhat better idea of how the Dresdenverse works, and what characters should be occupying it.
