Raptus Regaliter

I still need to work on getting all of the different characters posted. It should be easier now that I have everyone’s sheets sitting in my pile of gaming stuff. Expect those in the next couple of days.

In the meantime, though, we did play our playtest sessions of the actual game. Mostly, we used the first session to sort of bring everyone up to speed on the game mechanics. The nice thing is, it seems like some of the rules as presented in the Dresden Files RPG are a little more clear than they were in Spirit of the Century, especially the rules for performing Maneuvers.

Before I go into the actual play report, I’d like to review some of the characters. We went over Oklahoma “OK Tom” Tomorrow previously, but I haven’t really detailed any of the other characters.

Martin Dover Gentry is a changeling, and the owner of the comic book and curiosity shop, First Edition. He’s built around a magpie theme, so he’s very birdlike. We modified the Supernatural Stunt Bless this House slightly to fit with his theme - in some legends, magpies were the ones who taught people how to build homes, so we thought it was appropriate. Mechanically, it works as written, we just chose not to base it in Faith.

Calista Annabelle Thorn is a werewolf firefighter with a hero complex. She pretty much has the werewolf package straight out of the Character Templates chapter.

Kate is a college cheerleader/novice Wizard. She’s also a spoiled rich girl. She used the basic wizard template, minus Thaumaturgy - the player really had no interest in it.

I won’t go into minute details on each and every roll. I don’t think that it’s important to the playtesting, and, really, the basics of the rules have already been vetted in SotC. On the whole, the regular game mechanics worked excellently.

The Scenario

Martin’s comic shop, First Edition, was robbed. He and OK Tom discover the assailant still in the building and chase him down. After a brief fight*, the mysterious theif tries to get away, but gets creamed by a car. The characters check the thief for signs of life, but instead find him to be a conglomeration of sticks and junk, wrapped up in old jeans and a hoodie and carrying a backpack. In the backpack were the items that were stolen from the comic shop, including an old hand-carved chess set that had been left by the previous owner. The black rook and queen were broken. When the rest of the group showed up at the shop, everyone went searching for clues. Martin, Calista and Kate found a wallet on the construct, and decided to track down the owner to see what he knew.

This is where the added importance of compels came in handy. I compelled OK Tom’s Bicycle Messenger Aspect - he had packages he needed to deliver. Upon making his last delivery, he found a a man dead, clearly murdered. A small green plant was growing out of his chest. A quick once-over of the room revealed the murder victim’s letterhead - he was an artist named Tad Willows, and his logo was a black rook. The package he was delivering also had a logo on it - a black queen. It was sent by one Emily Bellhaven. He used his Psychometry stunt to gather some additional information about the artist, basically discovering the “how” of how he died, but not the “why.” He passed off the information to an underfunded group of cops that we had created during the city creation sessions.

Meanwhile, the rest of the group traced the wallet to the area known as the Woods. Turned out that the wallet owner was a cripple, and a red herring. They were about to head back to First Edition when Kate’s College Student Aspect got compelled - she had a test that she HAD to take. While at school, another one of the stickmen came after her**. She managed to escape by slipping through a crowd, basically using an Athletics as a block against the assailant.

After that, everyone met back up at First Edition to figure out where to go next. Calista decided to use her werewolf senses to sniff out where the stickman came from. OK Tom decided to go digging on his own.

The scent trail led Calista, Martin and Kate on a merry chase around the Portland bus system. A quick compel of Calista’s Werewolf Aspect caused a bit of a scene (”Is that a service animal? We don’t let pets on the bus…”). Martin’s Resources cleared the way, and the chase was on. The three of them followed the scent into the Shanghai Tunnels beneath the city, which were filled with about two inches of water. As they were searching the tunnels, they heard footsteps splashing toward them.

Meanwhile, OK Tom decides to call Emily Bellhaven. It goes straight to voicemail, and he leaves a message, pretending to be the murdered artist. Later, the cops call him back, demanding to know how he knows Ms. Bellhaven, and if he’d be willing to have a detective come and speak with him at the loft. OK Tom, of course, agrees. He shows up at the artist’s loft a while later, and sees a detective’s car out front. So, Tom makes like a delivery boy. The cop questions him as the crime scene unit and coroner’s van show up. The officer demands that Tom hand the package, but loses the social conflict. He tells Tom that he’ll get a court order for it, and to keep the package sealed and safe until that happens. Of course, Tom opens it later. Inside are some seeds, and some chips and grains of some kind of grey stone.

Meanwhile, down in the tunnels, the werewolf, wizard and changeling are attacked by yet another stickman. Martin dove for its ankles, effectively blocking the thing while Kate made a grab for its hoodie. Calista used her Supernatural Strength to body check it, taking it out. After that, they followed the tunnels to a door. Beyond that, a good-sized room lined with cupboards and drawers and workbenches. They proceed to start investigating everything.

OK Tom, meanwhile, had gone to Powell’s Bookstore to do a little research. He discovered that the seeds were honeysuckle, and the stone was volcanic basalt, the same kind found at the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. He discovered that the plant growing from Tad Willows’ chest was honeysuckle as well. He makes an attempt at calling the rest of the group. Unfortunately, between Kate’s hexing and their being under ground, the call doesn’t go that well. Ther was, however, some hilarity involving text messaging, and a lack of a QWERTY keyboard. Tom then goes to his Contacts, invoking his Shadowy Contacts aspect, attempting to find out what the hell is going on.

Down in the basement, Calista picks up a new scent - this time of spring flowers, honeysuckle, and fresh cut grass. They follow it to a doorway bearing a plaque with the word ‘Antiquities’ on it. A clever use of Kates hexing shorted out the alarm system, and cleared the way for them to get inside. The trail stopped in one corner, at a stacked up pile of boxes…

Tom got ahold of his contacts, and started grilling them on what was going on. Turns out that the victims were Changelings aligned with the Autumn Court who were expected to make the Choice soon - the presence of the honeysuckle indicated that the perpetrator was a member of the Spring Court.

Meanwhile, I compelled Kate into using The Sight to see past the Glamour that was the pile of boxes. Behind the glamour was Annah, a former Changeling-turned-Fae who is one of the contenders for the Spring Queen throne***. This was, of course, the excuse that we needed to test out the Spellcasting rules. Calista body-checks the Fae and uses a maneuver to give her the Prone aspect. Kate gathers some power, but holds it in check. Annah used Seelie Magic to attempt a Bind maneuver on Martin, but he tags her Prone aspect. She fails the Discipline roll, and causes Fallout. Vines break through the linoleum floor and start coming for everyone, incidentally binding the Fae. Everyone else escapes the effect, but the vines continue to grow out of control, and are about to bind the door closed. Martin’s turn comes around, and he drops his Refresh to buy Wings, giving him a Refresh of 1, and then Intimidates Annah, giving her a “Cowed” aspect. She looks like she’s going to try and escape, so Kate releases the power that she’s gathered with an Evocation effect, knocking Annah unconscious. The vines were still coming, so they tear the Fae out of her bindings and flee back the way they came.

There was some incidental dialogue after that, most of which was questioning and bullying Annah, with me trying to twist the truth without actually lying. We left strings hanging to pick up when the game actually comes out.

* We managed to weasel in a test of the new Grappling rules here - it worked incredibly well.

** Kate’s player is very D&D/White-Wolf minded, and she had trouble grasping the idea of succeeding at a conflict rather than a task. It took quite a bit of explaining, and I don’t think she ever quite “got it.”

*** One thing that never came out during the course of play - mostly because the players never really made it an issue, and it was mostly an entertaining side-note - is that the new Faerie Courts that were created for the Portland setting don’t necessarily play by the same rules as the canon Courts. I wanted to keep the Chess metaphor going, so the Spring and Autumn Courts match the back row of the Chess board - a King, a Queen two Knights, two Rooks, and two Bishops. However, as new as they are, and with their limited resources, not all of the royalty has been chosen. The courts are filling the gaps with more powerful Changelings who are approaching their Choices.

What Worked:

The grappling rules worked really well for us. Much better, in fact, than they do in most systems. I don’t know if anyone else had problems with them, but for us, it was really quick.

Evocation worked well for me, personally. In retrospect, the vine maneuver should have probably affected the intended target - I erred on the side of what I thought was more interesting. But, in a situation where the players know the rules fairly well, spellcasting as written doesn’t take much input from the GM, which is exactly how I like my games to run - let the players do the hard work Also, the Backlash and Fallout mechanics worked really well - I liked using them.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to really test out Thaumaturgy, but the rules, as written, look like they should play well, since they follow the same basic principles.

What Didn’t:

There wasn’t really any mechanical issues that didn’t work.

When it came to antagonists, I had some problems, mostly due to the fact that there weren’t any fully statted out examples of things like True Fae. For the constructs, I basically used the goon rules from SotC - they were +2 at pretty much everything, with 2 boxes of Stress. For Annah, the recently changed Changeling, there wasn’t anything to go off of. I intended for her to be a weak Sidhe, but she came off as significantly underpowered. Some minions might have helped, but she was really an excuse to bust out some evocation.

Other Thoughts and Feedback:

One thing that we saw, specifically with the Supernatural Stunts chapter, was an organization issue. Since nobody was super familiar with the rules, the lack of an alphabetized list of supernatural Stunts made things a little bit difficult. It’s a minor issue that will most likely be mitigated in the final product, assuming it’s got a comprehensive index like SotC does.

One of the players also asked about someting that occurs in the source fiction, and how it’s intended to be handled in the game. In the books, Harry is often drained after casting a lot of spells, to the point where even calling up simple effects is beyond him. This player wanted to know how the game modeled that. I told him that it was pretty well handled by taking consequences in exchange for power, and, if that wasn’t good enough, the character’s Wizard aspect could be tagged or compelled to represent that. So, I was a little curious as to whether that was the intention, or was it something that just isn’t important enough to gameplay to matter.

So, that’s pretty much it, as far as our DFRPG playtest went. Really, the problems we had were pretty minor, and we’re all pretty stoked for the full game to come out. I think that this system will sing in long-term play.

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Things have been slow as far as the DFRPG playtesting has been going. Fortunately, since my wedding is all done, and things have finally started to calm down, we’re actually getting a chance to play over the next few weeks. The hard part - character creation - is already done. As they come in, I’ll be posting the characters.

We decided to go with a standard naming convention for everybody’s novel (those of you who have played Spirit of the Century know what I’m talking about). All of them are a phrase that start with a number. This isn’t exactly supposed to indicate chronology, we just wanted a way to tie everyone into the same “series” as it were. The novels, preceded by the PC they are about, are as follows:

• Martin - First Edition
• Calista - Second Degree
• OK Tom - Third Wheel
• Kate - Fourth Quarter

I’m tempted to title the playtest scenario in the same way, but I can’t seem to come up with anything that starts with the word Fifth. If anybody has any ideas, feel free to post a comment.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how easy character creation went. Nobody at the table is exceedingly familiar with FATE/SotC, so it was nice to see that the character creation rules clicked pretty well for everyone. Not that they’re particularly difficult, but people latched on to them early on, and just ran with it. Even the newest player managed to create a novice Wizard with little problem. The only real issue we ran into was some confusion about the text, which was, I believe, an editing problem.

Probably the nicest thing was when we got to the “guest starring” phases, and people really started talking to each other about how they wanted their stories to intertwine. I really think that it helped get everyone on the same page and excited about playing the game.

On the mechanical side, it’s kinda nice not having so many Aspects in Dresden as there were in SotC. I think that people had an easier time coming up with things. Building the concept and theme of each character into an Aspect was also a nice touch.

As for skills, we went with the default 25 skill points, which gives a pretty good range of skills. Capping them at Great (+4) also gave the characters some room to diversify their skills. I don’t see this system as one that really rewards specialization as much as a lot of skill-based systems do.

On the downside, I wish that the character creation chapter talked about the Stress tracks, and how your skills relate to them. SotC starts characters out at 5 stress boxes, with skills and stunts that can push them up to 10. Dresden defaults to 2 boxes. This means that characters can get taken out pretty quickly (although, fortunately, the game isn’t designed to be particularly lethal), and are probably going to be picking up a lot of consequence aspects. The problem that I see is that the rules for increasing your available stress boxes are split between several chapters. I have no problem with them being detailed separately - like say, in the Skills and Stunts chapters - but it would be nice if there was a sidebar or chart that showed what skills and stunts increased your available stress.

All that being said, here’s the first character  that I’ve gotten turned in to me. This is OK Tom, played by my friend and TMD co-host, Randy.

Oklahoma “OK Tom” Tomorrow

High Concept: Psychic Rom Bicycle Messenger

Theme: Heritage v. Progress
OK Tom is trying to reconcile his family’s pressure to adhere to Rom traditions, and his own desire to understand the truth about the universe in all its scientific glory.

Background: Autodidact
He had to hide all his pilfered science textbooks from his family. He spent all his free time with his head in a book.

Rising Conflict: I slept in the bed, now I have to make it.
OK Tom cheated on his girlfriend while she was pregnant with his child. She aborted the fetus. OK Tom values family, and his actions destroyed his chance to have a family of his own. Now, he’s dealing with it.

First Novel: Eye for detail
“Third Wheel” OK Tom’s ex-fiance, one who his family arranged for him, has come back to town with a new squeeze. After an accidental use of psychometry, OK Tom discovers the man to be a serial murderer. Can OK Tom save the next victim all the while keeping it a secret from his family?

Guest Star 1: Watch Kate’s back
“Fourth Quarter” At Kate’s sorority party, OK Tom discovers the truth about an old book of spells just in time to save Kate from a fire she caused.

Guest Star 2: Shadowy contacts
“First Edition” OK Tom overhears Martin complaining about customs; he can’t get his goods across the border. OK Tom comes to the rescue, even though he had no clue how to do it. So he made some new contacts…shadowy ones.

Stunts:
Psychometry
Human Google Map (+2 to navigation-based Driving tests)
Backhanded Compliment (use Rapport for social attacks)
Quick Eye (Investigate twice as fast)

Skills:
Great (+4): Contacts, Rapport
Good(+3): Driving, Investigation
Fair(+2): Scholarship, Craftsmanship, Presence, Resources
Average(+1): 3 to be determined

Refresh: 4

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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.

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We finished up the city creation playtest last night, and it’s a friggin’ blast. The same player who wrote up the first chunk of material is working on a more detailed writeup, but I thought that I’d give y’all my initial thoughts.

The entire process of city creation for the Dresden Files RPG is fun, especially coming up with the locations. It really makes the players want to play in the city and explore all the cool stuff they’ve come up with. One of the best parts, as far as I’m concerned, is coming up with the characters that inhabit the locations. Since the players invent them, the players care about them, so any time a bad thing happens to them, the PC’s are going to jump to the rescue.

On the other hand, we found that, if you go overboard with the ideas at the beginning, you’ll bind yourself up at the end, when everybody starts tossing out story hooks and whatnot. This was the problem that we ran into - we created slightly more that twice the number of locations that were  recommended - 9 locations between 4 players - which really made the last few steps of the city creation process redundant. You’ll see what I mean when we get the full writeup posted.

Still, overall, the city creation rules are solid enough to make me and all my players incredibly excited to play the DFRPG. It’ll be fun to see what comes out of Portland, OR in the Dresdenverse.

The rumor is that we should be seeing a chapter on conflicts next, but that probably won’t happen until after GenCon, since all of the Evil Hat guys are there and will be incredibly busy. In the meantime, though, my groups have a Shadowrun game to finish, a Burning Wheel game to start, and a Werewolf: The Forsaken game to create a character for. Also, we’ll be doing some collaborative stuff (and hanging out) with the folks from Good Omens again, which is always a blast. Not to mention the monthly one-shots that we play

So, despite the slow progress of the Dresden playtesting, there’s still an awful lot of awesome gaming to talk about, so stay tuned.

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One of the members of our group was kind enough to take the mass of 3×5 index cards that we used to build our Dresdenverse Portland and post the bare bones of our creation session. There isn’t any flavor text added, but all of the Aspects, themes, locations, an personalities are there, or at least the seeds of them. As soon as we have some flavor to add - possibly tomorrow, since we’re finishing up the last couple of steps tonight. In any case, enjoy the rough sketch of Portland, OR.

If you’re interested, you can go and join in the conversation about our Dresden playtest on the This Modern Death forum.

Portland, OR

Aspects:
1. Hard to Drive, Easy to Walk
2. This is Really Two Cities
3. Two Big Rivers

Locations
1. Powell’s World of Books - Giant Bookstore
2. Portlandia - Bronze Statue
3. 40 Mile Loop - Giant Magical Circle
4. Olympus Mons Coffee Co. - Wizard Hangout
5. Rose Garden
6. Oregon State Zoo
7. The Woods - New Money Neighborhood
8. Industrial District - Vampire Territory
9. Oldtown - Downtown Portland

Location Details
1. Powell’s World of Books
Theme: Knowledge for Sale

Aspect: We got that somewhere…

Face: Worldly Archivist - Abernathy “Abby”, human cardfile, female, magical housecat.

Touch of Magic: The Magenta Room, hidden room with arcane knowledge

2. Portlandia
Theme: The Power of Icons

Aspect: The Spirit of Portland

Face: Nobody specific, but there is usually some kind of city employee or other nearby that feels the need to protect the statue from “vandals”.

Touch of Magic: The statue has no real magic itself, but it has power as the symbol of Faith in the city.

3. 40 Mile Loop
Theme: Protection Circle

Aspect: The Circle is Broken

Touch of Magic: It’s a Big Fucking Magic Circle

4. Olympus Mons Coffe Co.
Theme: Wizards’ Hangout & Haven

Aspect: It’s Hot Chocolate on a Cold Day

Face: Francesca “Frankie” Matinopalous, Tall Amazon looking woman, lots of tattoos, Suicide Girl, Master Roaster (all machines in the coffee shop are low tech, hand crafted affairs).

Touch of Magic: Incidentally arranged and equipped in a way to make it a haven for wizards. Somewhat New-Agey.

5. Rose Garden
Theme: True Romance/Date Spot

Aspect: Love and Lust

Face: Cantankerous Head Gardener, Arnold, Old Blood (family has been in Portland since the city was founded), powerful wizard, caretaker & protector (maintains the balance of energies in the Rose Garden), crafty

Touch of Magic: Attractive to the Fae (they want to take control of it). Site of Power from Life and Emotion.

6. Oregon State Zoo
Theme: False Sense of Security

Aspect: I Think This’ll Hold It

Face: Comically Exuberant Zoologist, Haresh Patil (NOT Harry!), biology grad student, uber-skeptic

Touch of Magic: Huge brass containment circle set in the center of a big fountain in the middle of the zoo.

7. The Woods
Theme: Rich New Money Neighborhood on the River

Aspect: Old Land, New Money

Face: Passive Aggressive Homeowners’ Association Chairperson, a total fucking bitch, but perky and “friendly” about it, knows who should and shouldn’t be in The Woods, has a dirty little secret

Touch of Magic: Magically Sterile

8. Industrial District
Theme: Seedy Underbelly

Aspect: Deadly After Dark

Face: Black Court Vampire Union Boss, Jeff “Benny” Benjamin (True Name - White Feather) Native American, predates the American Colonies, controls the Black Court in Portland.

Touch of Magic: Black Court Union

9. Oldtown
Theme: Heart of the City

Aspect: Livingroom of Portland

Face: Old Blues musician street performer, notices everything that goes on in his town, full of anectdotes, he gots the blues

Touch of Magic: Mostly mundane, has access to the Shanghai Tunnels

Who Cares?

Black Court Vampires
White Council, especially Arnold
The Fae, they want the Rose Garden
The Sasquatch, U’Bi’K, HATES White Feather
Coroporate America
The PC’s

Who Keeps the Peace?

The PC’s
The Cops
Sasquatch
The White Council
The Fae

How Do Mortals Cope?

An inneffective group of Wiccans
An underfunded Police precinct

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We started working on the city creation rules for the Dresden Files RPG last night. When it gets done, I’ll be sure to post it here, for everyone to see. Let me just say that the entire process is immensely fun, although somewhat time consuming. I have a feeling that, in practice, writing up a city will take pretty much an entire game session and character creation will likely take a whole nother session. On the other hand, withe the Fate system, creating both the city and the characters will most likely be like small games in and of themselves. I really enjoy the collaborative nature of the DFRPG city creation. As a consumately lazy GM, anything I don’t have to make up makes me happy.

During our playtesting session last night, we decided that we’d write up the Dresdenverse version of Portland, OR. So far, it’s a city of incidental magic - a perfect storm of history, custom, and intentional wizardry creating a fantastically interesting location.

Expect a full write-up soon, most likely cross-posted over at the This Modern Death Forums. I can assure you it will be fascinating. And the effect on player ownership of the setting will be awesome. I have some very high hopes for the Dresden RPG.

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