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Fearful Symmetries: Background

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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I had a bit of an eye-opener these past couple of weeks. I’ve been working on typing up the notes and brainstorming we did for creating Prague in 1620 for the Fearful Symmetries game, and the sheer amount of material that came out of those discussions is a little daunting.

We spent about four hours doing the city creation. I’ve got over 20 pages of material from that time.

It’s a little overwhelming, and also, I think, a wonderful testament to the ease and value of the city creation process in DFRPG. Also, to the very creative and enthusiastic players I’ve got.

Now, I’m going to link in the .pdf of our setting bible, but I want to talk about some of the things we did with it, first.

1. Transparency

One of the things I was wary about with collaborative setting construction is the fact that the players know a lot of the big secrets and threats of the campaign right from the get-go. I’m changing my mind about this. I was, I now consider, wrong to worry. Maybe it’s just my players, but they don’t seem to have much of a problem keeping player knowledge separate from character knowledge, especially (and this is a key point) if they know how cool it will be when their characters find stuff out.

Yeah, the players know that the Sedlec Ossuary is a hotly-contested piece of real estate between a cabal of necromancers and some gypsy clans dedicated to the mysteries of Osiris and Anubis. And they think that’s a cool thing to have – after all, they came up with the idea. But their characters don’t know, and the details are left up to me as GM to flesh out, so they get the pleasure of having their characters drawn into the battle unawares, and can still be surprised by some of the twists and turns.

I wanted to see if being completely open during the city creation heightened or lessened the interest level: if the players knew all the big secrets, would that mean the game wasn’t interesting for them. Well, we’ve only played one session so far, but I’m coming down firmly on the side of it heightening interest. And a lot of that has to do with the next point.

2. Investment

Wow. Getting the players to decide what goes into the mix in the city, who the main bad guys are, what the power structure is like, and what places are important: golden. I sat back and let them do most of the fleshing out of things during city creation, adding (as I recall) one theme, the suggestion of a few locations, and some brainstorming on appropriate Aspects. The rest is all them.

This does more than just take a lot of the burden for setting creation off the GM; it also makes sure that the elements of the setting are all things the players think are interesting, that they care about. That they want to have as part of their characters’ story. Now, both my players made characters newly-come (or returned) to Prague, so they are not hooked right in to the current situation, but because the players built the current situation, there are numerous things to hook them (both characters and players) into the stories. Things that allow for quick emotional investment right off the hop.

What this means for a GM is that, as long as you use the elements of the setting that the players have created and link them to the characters (and Your Story has a whole chapter on how to do that using Aspects), you’re pretty much guaranteed to come up with a basis for a scenario that will capture the attention and interest of your players.

3. Dramatic License

No one in my group is an expert on the Thirty Years’ War. We’ve done some cursory research, and Clint knows a lot about pretty much everything, but we’re not going for complete historical accuracy in the setting. Of course we aren’t – it’s a fantasy game. So, we’ve played a little fast and loose with both history and geography. Some examples:

  • I couldn’t find the name of the Lord Mayor of Prague in 1620 – there may not have been one, for all I know. So, I made up the name, taking the first name from one Mayor listed on Wikipedia and the last name from another.
  • Zuckerbastl was the name of the man running the thieves in Hradcany around 1610. We wanted a King of Thieves for Old Town in 1620, so we transplanted him.
  • I couldn’t find any real geographic information about White Mountain, where an important battle takes place in November 1620, so I just made it all up.
  • I get frustrated trying to use all the proper diacritical marks in the proper Czech and Slavic names, so I’m ignoring them.

The idea, of course, is to create a gameable setting with the flavour of the time and place you want. And that’s what we did. So, for any real experts on the Thirty Years’ War, or 17th-century Prague, or any native speakers of the language, there are lots of grievous errors and things that we just out-and-out changed. No offense is intended. It’s just a game.

We also deviate a bit from the Dresden Files canon. We’re using it as a starting place, but we’re trying to establish what the milieu would have been like in 1620 Bohemia. So, I’ve been re-reading The War Hound and the World’s Pain by Michael Moorcock, which is the only fantasy novel set during the Thirty Years’ War that I know of, and I’ve decided that, instead of the Nevernever (which name doesn’t quite fit the feel of the time period), we’ll have the Mittelmarch, the lands on the borders of Heaven and Hell. Still works the same, but different name for a different time and place.

4. Filling in the Blanks

We did a lot of brainstorming at the city creation session, and I took notes and filled out the city sheets, but there were still some holes, or pieces that didn’t fit quite right with other pieces. As I’ve been typing up the setting bible, I’ve been doing a little bit of polishing, elaborating on some bits and making minor changes to others in order to make the whole thing work together.

I’ve also been looking at the areas we hadn’t touched upon, and thinking about how they can work into the game if I need them to. Really, the primary focus is going to be – really, must be – on the stuff the players came up with, but it’s always good as a GM to have a couple of surprising ideas in your back pocket in case you need them. But I’m keeping my mouth shut about what they are.

And there you have it.

So, here’s the setting bible.

I’m working on incorporating the setting bible into a wiki on Obsidian Portal, so I’ll post a link to that in the sidebar when it’s ready.

This Friday is our second session, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Birthing Pains: High Concepts, Templates, and Troubles

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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So, I’ve talked about picking the power level for a DFRPG campaign, about choosing the setting, and starting to flesh it out. At this point, if you’re following the recommended sequence in the book, it’s time to start creating characters.

Now, in the previous step, I mentioned that you create faces for the various locations and themes you’ve built for your city, but I sort of glossed over that step, saying I’d deal with it in detail when we got to creating characters. The reason I did it that way is that there’s a fundamental idea that you need to understand to make good characters using this system, whether you’re building PCs or NPCs: the High Concept.

Most RPGs have something analagous to the High Concept, whether its the Race/Class combination, or the Profession, or the Archetype, or Template, or whatever they call it. DFRPG lets you make up your own, but that is, in some ways, tougher than choosing off a list. And the fact that it becomes the first and most central Aspect of your character means that it’s an important choice that you need to think about.

The system also uses templates to define characters, showing what powers you need to buy to play a Changeling or Wizard, for example, and picking one is usually the first step in building a PC. I personally have found that it’s most helpful to think about the two things at the same time: while you’re picking through the templates, think about what the High Concept for your character will be, and let the cool ideas you come up with for your High Concept influence the choice of template.

That bit of preamble is mainly to explain why I’m breaking this post up into the categories I am. I’m going to deal with High Concepts first, mainly because they are important both for PC and NPC creation, then I’m going to move on to Templates, and close with a discussion about Troubles. I’ll follow this up with a post on the rest of the character creation process.

Sound good? Good. Here we go.

High Concept

There’s a nice discussion in Your Story about picking a High Concept, with lots of examples to illustrate the ideas. The important points to make sure you hit are that the High Concept should distil the basics of your character into a short phrase, and that it should describe what you want your character’s role and flavour to be in the game. The first part can be simple; the second tends to be somewhat more difficult.

Let’s look at some examples. Harry’s High Concept is Wizard Private Eye. Now, that three-word phrase is loaded with information about who Harry is, what he’s like, and what he’s good at. See, he’s not a Private Eye Wizard, for one thing. Wizard comes first for Harry – that’s how he defines himself. It’s the most important thing for him. But the Private Eye bit is also important: it tells us that Harry pokes into things, that he has investigative skills, and that he helps people. If you want to stretch things a little farther, based on what you know about the White Council, it also implies that he’s not fully on board with their secrecy and their non-involvement, that he’s something of an outsider among them, associating more with the mundane world than many of them.

Now, I’m going to use an example from Fearful Symmetries. Emric Sordason has the High Concept of Rebellious Son of Surtr. From that we have the information that he is half-fire giant and that he and his dad don’t get along. If we extrapolate a little, based on how the fire giants appear in Norse legend, we see that he is probably much more pro-mortal than Surtr is, and not all that keen on Ragnarok.

What you want, in short, is something that’s both definitive and evocative.

Definitive is easy. Simple High Concepts like Cop, Wizard, Changeling, Hit Man, whatever. They give you the information that you want, but they don’t give you any of the feeling. That’s where evocative comes in. When I create characters in this system, I use a simple test to see if my High Concept is both evocative and definitive. I imagine one character in the setting telling another character about my character: “Him? Yeah, he’s…” and I insert my High Concept in to finish the sentence.

“Him? Yeah, he’s the rebellious son of Surtr.”

“Him? Yeah, he’s an outcast trickster spirit.”

“Him? Yeah, he’s a Wizard private eye.”

If I can imagine the other character reacting the right way, then the High Concept works. If I can’t (“He’s a cop? So what?”), then I need to rethink it. the reaction I’m looking for will vary from character to character, but we all have an idea of how we want our characters to be seen by the others in the setting. That’s the reaction that should be inherent in your High Concept.

It’s important that you get the High Concept right, both for aesthetic and mechanical reasons. Aesthetically, you want the High Concept to capture the cool of your character – when you trot it out in play, you want to feel proud of it, not apologetic. It should make you glad to be playing this character, not just sit there as a compromise that you use as a tool.

Mechanically, this is your primary go-to Aspect. This is the one that guarantees you have an Aspect to call on when you’re doing the things you most want your character to do, and the one that guarantees you’re getting the compels for the behaviours you want to be central to your character. For example, the Rebellious Son of Surtr has all the half-giant, mighty magical warrior stuff inherent in the Norse fire-giant mythology to draw on, and also a nice source of Fate points whenever he defies his role as  the mortal-hating, Ragnarok-bringing monster his father wants him to be.

In short, I recommend you spend a little time working the High Concept to get it just right. To paraphrase Samuel Clemens, the difference between the right High Concept and the almost right High Concept is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.

High Concepts for NPCs

The above is mainly aimed at creating PCs, but a lot of it is relevant to creating the NPCs – the faces in your game – as well. You need High Concepts that are both definitive and evocative. Instead of White Court Aristocrat, you want something like White Court Eminence Gris. Instead of Jewish Kabbalist, you want Heir to the Wisdom of Rabbi Loew. Instead of Pious Man of God, you want Saint Hiding in Plain Sight.

Because you’re probably not going to flesh all of your NPCs out in detail, it becomes even more vital that they have a solid, interesting High Concept. Charity Carpenter, for example, is not just Michael’s Wife. Her High Concept is Tower of Faith. Corpsetaker isn’t just a Necromancer, she’s a Body-Jumping Necromancer. With these High Concepts, you don’t need to put a whole lot of extra work into making the character unique and special – you can, but you don’t need to. You can focus on filling out the ones that get the most use in your setting.

So don’t stint on the High Concepts for NPCs, either.

Templates

This is the other big choice at the start of character creation – while the High Concept tells you who your character is, the Template outlines what your character can do. One important thing to keep in mind as you look at the Templates is that they are not exhaustive; they’re mainly a starting point, helping you to flesh out some of the character types we see in the novels.

You don’t need to use a Template to create your character, but the game does a lot of the up-front work for you if you want to play something like a Wizard, Werewolf, or Changeling. It shows you the mix of powers that will make a character feel like the character type in the books. That said, it’s easy enough to mix and match your own version of the various character types.

It’s also easy to tweak the Templates to fit what you imagine your character should be, and the book encourages this. There’s a nice little section on how to build new Templates, as well as a specific discussion on how to use the Changeling Template to reflect other half-human, half-supernatural creatures.

Whether you’re using a Template, tweaking a Template, or building your own character concept, this is a good time to start looking at the Supernatural Powers you want to buy. You’ve got your Starting Refresh set by the Power Level, so you know your budget. Start looking through the Supernatural Powers chapter, either looking at what your Template recomends for you or making a shopping list.

I pretty much guarantee you won’t be able to afford everything you want, but the picking and choosing is part of the fun of creating a character. And if you got everything you wanted up front, character advancement wouldn’t mean all that much, would it?

In my experience, there are two main approaches to this part of character creation. If you have a good, solid character concept, you look for the Template or powers that will most reflect the concept. If you don’t have that solid a concept, you look for stuff you like, and then ask yourself what kind of person would have these abilities. Either way works fine – two different roads to the same destination, where you character has powers that reinforce and are supported by the concept and behaviour.

You may find yourself wanting to do some fine-tuning of your High Concept at this stage, as well, as different powers and abilities may suggest different things for your character. Go with it, is my advice; just remember to keep it both descriptive and evocative.

Troubles

Troubles are the third of the three main pillars of your character. In some ways, it can seem like the second-string Aspect compared to your High Concept, but really it’s the engine that powers your character, both mechanically and dramatically.

See, all good characters, whether in games or in fiction, have some sort of problem that they have to deal with. It helps to lend depth to the character, to show that they aren’t one-dimensional cut-outs. Hercules has a terrible temper. King Arthur has that whole love-triangle thing going on. Sherlock Holmes has problems with both boredom and addiction. Spenser has a code of conduct that makes his life difficult. Harry’s got the dark past that keeps calling to him.

Picking a Trouble for your character is a big decision, because you’re telling the GM, “This is how I want you to mess with my character.” It’s got to be something that is going to complicate your character’s life, but it also has to be something that you, as a player, find fun to explore. If it doesn’t do both things, you’ve got the wrong Trouble.

So, what makes a good trouble? Well, like the High Concept, it’s got to be both descriptive and evocative. The GM has to be able to see how it fits into the world and how to use it (that’s the descriptive part), and it has to illuminate aspects of your character and his/her story that you want to come across (the evocative part). It’s got to be something that will persist in the game world, as well – this is an issue that’s central to the character. If it can be easily resolved, then it’s no good beyond that time. If your Trouble is something simple like I Hate My Roommate, and the first thing you do in the game is move out (or kick your roommate out), then you’ve missed the point.

You want the Trouble to stick around and mess with you all through play, because every time it does, you get a Fate Point. Whenever your Nemesis shows up to make your life difficult, you get a Fate Point. Whenever you lose your Hair-Trigger Temper and scare off a contact, you get a Fate Point. Whenever you decide to do a job the hard way so as not to violate your Code Against Killing, you get a Fate Point. Yeah, it’s going to cause you problems, but you get a reward. And you decided what sort of problems you wanted when you took the Trouble, right?

Of course, as with all Aspects, you want to be able to do more than just get compelled by your Trouble, so you’ve got to pay attention to the wording at least as carefully as you did with the High Concept. Invoke your Code Against Killing to gain the trust of the cops, or your Hair-Trigger Temper to go berserk in combat.

It’s easy to think of the Trouble as a disadvantage, but it’s really not – no Aspects are, even ones that sound negative. All Aspects are tools for you to use to bring your character to life, and to make the stories you’re playing be the ones you want to tell. The way you reveal character is through choices made under pressure, right? Your Trouble is one of the main sources of pressure for your character. How he/she deals with it will go a long way to defining who he/she is.

As with the High Concept, take the time to make your Trouble right. Make sure the wording works for you, and strengthens your concept.

These three pieces give you the skeleton of your character. By this time, the concept should be pretty clear in your mind. Next time, I’m going to talk about the rest of the character creation process, and how it helps fill out the structure you’ve built with these three decisions.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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After too long a hiatus, we finally got back to the Storm Point game yesterday, for the climactic showdown with the blue dragon that had been giving the group such a problem.

In setting this encounter up, I was faced with a bit of a problem. See, the blue dragon has the artillery role, meaning that its best plan is to stand off from the party and blast away with lightning. Now, if I did that, the party would have no choice but to retreat – I had already established that the terrible storm made flying on their hippogriffs untenable, so they had no real way to take the fight to a flying dragon if it held its distance. On the other hand, the group had already proved that they could rapidly do serious damage to the dragon at melee range, and could pin it down in the process.

I decided to level the dragon up by 2* to give it the survivability it needed at close quarters. However, that bumped its defenses high enough that it was putting it in the unhittable range for the characters. So, I tied the increased level to the way it had harnessed the time-shifting power of the temple they were in, drawing on the potentiality of its future self through some special runestones. While it stayed within range of them, it had +2 to its level. This also let me set up a little skill challenge to run in concert with the combat, where the party tries to shut down the runestones that seem to be feeding power to the dragon.

It turned into a hellaciously tough fight for the group. It didn’t help that they sent the eladrin ranger teleporting ahead to the roof where the dragon was charging up to scout, giving the dragon a chance to attack him as he was all alone and then set up at the head of the stairs to take opportunity attacks on the rest of the party trying to make it to the roof. I also added some streams of lighting between pillars that made attacks on characters crossing the line, and a 20-foot shaft of magical lighting shooting up from the centre of the roof into the sky. In retrospect, this latter addition was not the best choice for an environment that favoured the dragon, because it was powerful enough to penetrate the dragon’s lightning resistance.

I managed to drop several of the party members during the fight, and they were already depleted in healing surges from the battle with the wights the previous session. In fact, I had both defenders unconscious at one point, and it really looked like the dragon would get to fly away again, but quick healing by the cleric and the warlord, and a critical by the newly revived fighter right when he needed it most kept things right where they wanted them to be.

But the group managed to deactivate the runestones, dropping the dragon back to its original stats, and kept it pinned in the big shaft of lightning. The dragon did some serious damage, and I almost had them on the run, but they held their ground and triumphed.

During the fight, I had the temple skip through time every few rounds, changing the scene below the temple to reflect the various ages that it was passing through. Now, resting after the difficult battle, they are turning their attention to the time-jumping of the temple in order to return to their own time.

And that’s next game.

 
 
 

*I had reduced the level by 2 to make it a viable solo opponent for the party, so really it was just returning it to the proper level. Back

From the Armitage Files: The Helping Hands

By | | The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.

**You Have Been Warned**

At the end of last session, I gave my players the first two document hand-outs for the campaign, and asked them to discuss them via e-mail and come up with a couple of potential avenues of investigation that I could develop for this session. I provided a few clues to answer some of their questions, also via e-mail.

Now, I had struggled over whether or not to do that. After all, one of the main focuses of the GUMSHOE system is finding clues. I worried that providing clues outside of the game was essentially stealing thunder from the game session, and might undermine actual play. In the end, I decided to go with it for a few reasons:

  1. Some questions were things that they would just know about things, through skills like Oral History or Streetwise, and it seemed silly to wait until the game session to give them that information.
  2. Some of the questions they were asking just closed of blind alleys for them, avenues of investigation that were both uninteresting* and unproductive.
  3. I wanted them to be fully invested in the adventure during the session, and I didn’t want them suddenly deciding to jump to some other avenue of investigation that I hadn’t considered and prepared. That means making sure they have enough information to be happy with the choice they made.

It seemed to work fairly well, and they picked two threads that they wanted to chase down in the session. I worked out what was going on with both of them, so that whichever one they felt like going after, I had an idea of what they would find.

Without giving away too much of what’s going on in the meta-structure of the campaign, I do want to say that determining what’s going on was a little trickier than I had expected. There’s a question of where in the narrative the characters come in that really needs careful consideration, and I had to rework one of the investigation spines I was building a couple of times to make it work the way I needed it to, given all the other information that I have about the big picture. That’s kind of vague, I know, but my players read this blog, and I don’t want to say too much about the overarching campaign secrets.

For games like this one and Fearful Symmetries, I’ve been using a fairly different method of creating adventures than I do with things like D&D. In D&D, there’s a lot of fairly careful balancing of combat encounters that goes into building an adventures, but the emphasis in both GUMSHOE and DFRPG is more narratively-centred, and the stats are far easier to improvise on the spot, so I find that it’s easier to shape the encounter to what I need on the fly. That means that the entire adventure structure can be looser, and more free-form and character-driven*.

What I do in these games is essentially build a relational mind map of the situation. I put the various elements that I know are part of the situation in circles on a blank piece of paper – the various NPCs, organizations, items, events that I want to have happen, etc. Then I connect them with lines and arrows labeled by the relationship between the various elements. So, I may have an arrow from one NPC to another marked Wants to kill and another arrow back labeled Wants to avoid. As I map out the relationships this way, I add more elements that are needed in other circles, mapping in their relationships as needed, until I have a solid idea of what the entire situation is, and what will happen without player character involvement. Then I look for places where I can let the characters see an edge of the situation to hook them in*.

In play, I look for ways to subtly (or not so subtly, in some cases) show a link from the element the characters get interested in to one or more other elements in the structure. As they explore this situational map, I keep thinking about responses, both from the elements the characters are interacting with, and from other elements that may be affected by the interaction, and trot those out as appropriate. These responses can be anything from cutting and running to sending some guys to explain why the characters don’t want to be poking around any more.

So far, it’s been working pretty well, and I’m enjoying both the reduced prep time* and the way I’m finding my way back to improvisational GMing.

So, when we got together for last night’s game, the characters decided to chase down a certain encyclopaedia salesman (named Philip or Philips) who may or may not have witnessed the sacrifice of a hobo by a charitable organization called The Helping Hands.

Aaron did some library legwork, finding first of all which encyclopaedia companies had salesmen in the area, and then sent them telegrams, asking for the contact information of the salesmen, and found one named Phil Hughes. The gang sent him a letter asking for him to call on Roxy, who posed as Twyla Petty, a pretty young ladder-climber who had inherited a pile from her father and was looking to better her mind in order to attract the right kind of husband. They seeded the hotel suite they rented with a number of Masonic items, because according to the documents, Phil has a real distrust and fear of the Freemasons, and they figured that this will be the first stage in setting him up for a follow-up meeting where they gain his trust and get him to help them*.

Well, it kinda worked. Phil was distrustful of the Freemasons, but he also revealed to Roxy that he was, in fact, a member of The Helping Hands, and very proud of the charitable work they do. After the appointment, they followed Phil back to the rooming house where he stays in Arkham, and then followed him around the rest of his four-day stay in town. Nothing suspicious.

So, they turned their attention to The Helping Hands, got a list of the local chapter officers, scoped out the chapter house both in Arkham and in Kingsport, and staked out the Arkham chapter house during a bi-weekly meeting. When that wrapped up with nothing suspicious, they decided to break into the building to see if they could find anything incriminating.

There was nothing out of the ordinary inside, until they found a hidden fire safe in the floor of the office. A low, raspy voice, coming out of the darkness, told them to leave it alone and get out. There followed a good several minutes of creepiness, with the group debating what to do in hushed whispers, shining their flashlight around in futile attempts to find the speaker, and a horrible moment for them when they heard little scuttling feet above them, and looked up to see a trap door into the attic.

And then something small and nasty dashed out of the darkness and sliced the back of Roxy’s stocking.

Dr. Solis, rather affronted and indignant at this sort of treatment, convinced the others that they definitely needed to open the safe now. Everyone had taken at least a couple of points of Stability loss by this time, and then the voice from the shadows said, “I know who you are.”

That was about the last straw. Roxy made a Locksmith spend to open the safe quickly, and they found inside a few bundles of cash, a deed to the building they were in and a farm outside of town, and a large hand-written ledger book with The Book of the Voice written on the title page. The thing in the darkness said, “You have sealed your doom.”

Roxy had had enough of this, and leaped across the room to turn on the electric lights, catching the thing by surprise. Aaron was looking in the wrong direction, but Roxy and Solis both saw this. Stability checks for them, and Roxy wound up Shaken. The thing vanished into a hole in a corner, and Aaron decided they had to burn the building down, so they did.

They retreated to Aaron’s shop to drink a great deal and examine the book. Here are the stats I came up with for it:

The Book of the Voice is a large ledger filled with the handwritten dictation of the Emissary, the revealed wisdom of the Voice. The Helping Hands keep it in a locked fire safe in the floor of the chapter house office. Most of it is a litany of promises from the Voice to the faithful, reinforcing their sense of entitlement and amorality. Sprinkled in among this are observations about the signs of the advent of the return of the Great Ones and what will follow.

Resource Tome: +1 Cthulhu Mythos, 1 dedicated pool point for questions about the end of the world, the outer gods, and witches.

Magic Potential: 1

Spells:Invocation of the Emissary (Contact Rat-Thing)

Aaron decided to take the next couple of days to pore over the book, while Roxy and Solis went to investigate the farm – the Armitage document claimed that the sacrifice of the hobo took place in a barn. When they got to the farm, Solis went to look at the buildings while Roxy waited in the car on the main road, across the mostly-barren fields.

Now that the party was split, I decided to unload on them. Roxy, waiting on the road, saw a plume of dust coming down the road toward her. It resolved itself into a truck full of large burly men, and she decided not to wait around to see what they wanted, taking off across the field toward the barn where Solis had gone. On foot, of course, with the axe-handle-wielding farmhands hot on her heels.

Solis, meanwhile, had found a patch of disturbed earth in the barn that was thick with maggots. Digging in a little, he found the flayed forearm of a man, just as he felt the double barrels of a shotgun press to the base of his skull.

And Aaron started hearing a horribly familiar voice calling his name in his rooms above his bookstore. And then the rat-thing attacked.

I tried to run the ensuing scenes the way you would see them in a movie, jumping from focus to focus, and that worked fairly well at first, but then Aaron killed the rat-thing with his first shot the second it exposed itself, and things focused on the farm for the rest of the climactic scene, with Solis and Roxy eventually shooting and killing most of their attackers, though there was a good bit with Solis and one of the thugs wrestling on the ground over the shotgun, trying to force the barrel towards each others’ face, until Roxy pistol-whipped the bad guy into submission.

At this point, I had no idea where the adventure would go, but Roxy decided to make a substantial Cop Talk spend to get word to the right people on the police force to investigate the farm and check for the bodies in the barn. The police came to arrest the Helping Hands officers, finding one missing, but taking the other two into custody. They hanged themselves in their cells over the next couple of days.

Aaron burned the body of the rat-thing, along with The Book of the Voice*, though not until he had learned enough from it to get the Cthulhu Mythos point and spend an experience point on getting a point of Magic.

And that’s where we left it. I’ve got one scenario spine still in my notebook, and have asked the players to decide between this session and the next if they want to pursue that one, or something else.

All in all, a good game, I thought.

 
 
 

*To me, at least. Back

*I like D&D. I run D&D. D&D is fun. But no matter how much you like apples, you’ll get bored of them if they’re all you ever eat. And yes, D&D can be as rich and story-centric as any roleplaying game, but the mechanical complexity of combat means that during prep, the GM spends a substantial portion of time building the right balance and mix of opponents for combat encounters. Back

*In The Armitage Files, the hook is built into the campaign, with the mysterious documents making strange references, so that part is easy. Back

*All of which is focused on building evocative, interesting story elements, rather than number crunching. Back

*Yeah, they’ve been watching a lot of Leverage. Back

*For a bibliophile, he spends a lot of time burning books. Back

Fearful Symmetries: The Beginnings

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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It’s been pretty quiet around here for the past week or so. There’s a reason for that.

You may remember I posted some time ago about the new campaign I was starting called Scio Occultus Res. It was meant to be a two-person game using the Mage: The Awakening rules, and I wanted to get things rolling before Christmas. That didn’t happen. What with things being busy, the preparations dragged on and on, and the shiny wore off the idea for the players. So, last week, I kind of forced the issue, and said, “If you get me your player backgrounds by Friday, I will have a game ready for you to play on Saturday.”

They considered, and said that they weren’t all that interested anymore, but still wanted to game this weekend.

Now, I was happy to just have the game out of limbo, even if it was just for it to be cast into the outer darkness. I sent them a list of the game systems that I could have ready for Saturday, and asked them to pick one ASAP, to give me some prep time. They picked The Dresden Files RPG*. And that meant I got to put some of the things I’d been talking about here into practice.

We talked about power level, and the kinds of characters they wanted to play and the stories they wanted to tell, and fixed on Submerged. As things went on, though, I saw they were feeling more and more constrained by that power level – the ideas that had come up in discussing the game meant dealing with mythic, epic kinds of stories and characters, so I decided to give them two extra Refresh, for a starting total of 12*.

And then we talked setting. I had, many years ago, proposed a sort of loose campaign outline for a modern supernatural adventure game that I had called Fearful Symmetries, that focused on a small band of powerful heroes holding the forces of darkness at bay. They liked that idea, but thought it would be more fun in a historical context. The proposed time periods were eventually whittled down to the Thirty Years’ War. We talked about whether to make the setting a single city or a larger area: the Holy Roman Empire, or even all of Europe. We settled, thanks to a little nudging on my part, on Prague in 1620.

Why Prague? Three real reasons:

  1. This was where the spark that started the Thirty Years’ War was struck, and featured prominently in the war, especially in the early years.
  2. Prague is chock full of all sorts of creepy, mysterious, mythical, and just plain weird stuff.
  3. I had already done a fair bit of research on the city when I wrote this several years ago.

Why 1620? Because it’s early in the war, and late in the year the Battle of White Mountain will see the breaking of the Bohemian army and the occupation of the city by the Catholic coalition, which offers some very gameable moments. You’ll see when I get around to posting the setting document.

So, Friday night, we got together early, had some pizza, and ran through the city creation process for Prague. And it was fantastic.

I want to stress at this point that we did minimal research. I read a little in Wikipedia about the Thirty Years’ War, and had done the research on Prague years ago (and on a period ten years earlier than we were setting the game), but really we just wanted to use as much of the actual background as was fun – just the bits that were interesting, flavourful, and gameable. Same thing with the actual geography of the city.

Here’s a quote from the Character Creation chapter of Your Story:

As you create the characters and the world they inhabit, you have begun play.

They’re right. We brainstormed themes and threats, came up with thirteen different locations and their themes and threats, faces for everything, Aspects ditto, and a good, solid idea of the movers and shakers and the status quo. And the whole time, we were having a blast suggesting things, and elaborating on each other’s contributions, and riffing on ideas that seemed to spring from everyone at once. We were constantly amazed at how cool the city was becoming, and got more and more excited as things went on.

And then we built the characters. I built one along with the players, both because there were just two of them, and because I find it handy to have an NPC in the game that the characters have a good connection with. It gives them a starting point when they go out look for contacts and information. I created a 17th-century version of Amadan, because I think he’s an interesting archetype and a useful role to have available in the game. The other characters are:

  • Isabella Valdstejn, a Seasoned Wizard of the White Council, returning to Prague to attend the funeral of her father, who had sent her away forty years ago when he remarried.
  • Emric Sordason, the Rebellious Son of Surtr, bearing his fire giant father’s sword, which is fated to bring about Ragnarok.

By then, it was late and we called it a night.

I spent Saturday afternoon preparing a simple scenario for that night. Wanting to get away from the more rigid adventure structure encouraged by D&D, I took some solid advice from the indie gaming world. I had first read it in Dogs in the Vineyard*, and it was reiterated in the Building Scenarios chapter of Your Story: build a situation that forces conflict, and let the players figure out how to handle it. Don’t have a preconceived notion of how things are going to be resolved – don’t chart the whole course of the story.

Now, the chapter also strongly recommends tying in the Aspects of the characters but, being an idiot, I hadn’t made a list of them the night before. That meant I needed to build something that they could encounter pretty much at my whim, and I’d need to trust my players to follow up the dangling thread. They’re helpful players, and excited about the game, so I didn’t think it would be much of a problem. That evening, we spent the first little while putting the finishing touches on the characters, and discussing how some of the mechanics work, and then we got down to play.

I let the players set the first couple of scenes, with them meeting in Prague after not having seen each other for some time, having dinner in Isabella’s rooms, and talking. The next day, they went out to her family estate for her father’s funeral, and we did a little more character-building roleplaying along the way. On the way back, I decided to stage a little scene to drive home the situation in Prague. Their character was stopped and searched by a patrol from the city, who questioned them closely concerning their accents and business in city. One of the threats we came up with in the city-building session, you see, was The Emperor’s Spies are Everywhere. Isabella’s story checked out, as did Emric’s offer to buy the squad a drink, so they went on their way without further incident, but the scene helped to establish the mood.

It did more than that, though. I decided to make the squad a group of Swiss mercenaries, and played up their professionalism and attention to both courtesy and detail, thinking that it would lay a good groundwork for contrast when I brought a more brutish group of mercenaries on stage. The captain turned out to be so much fun to play, being polite and clever and completely civilized and businesslike, and he made such a good impression on the players, that I’ve made a note to flesh him out and use him further in the game.

That evening, as Emric was returning to his rooms, he spotted a disturbance in one of the twisting alleys where Old Town and New Town meet. Investigating, he found two rough men holding down a third and trying to pour something from a bottle into the mouth of their victim. He chased them off, and received a token from the man he had saved, saying that Zuckerbastl’s boys owed him a favour. Zuckerbastl is the local King of Thieves, so his favour can come in handy.

The next day, Emric and Isabella began investigating, and found that, even in the frightened city, the disappearances from Old Town were starting to make people talk, and say that Zuckerbastl was losing his grip on things. Our valiant heroes decided to go trolling through Old Town at night, Emric acting slightly drunk, and Isabella concealed behind a veil. They didn’t see anything untoward until Emric was propositioned by a prostitute. One of the bits of information they had picked up was that the disappearances had started with a number of prostitutes, so he paid his money and went up to her room, with Isabella unseen along for the ride.

In the room, Emric questioned the girl – Danika – and shared some wine with her. When he started asking about the disappearances and Zuckerbastl, she said she’d give him information in return for a kiss. He agreed, and this proved to be a mistake.

I told him he now had the Aspect Befuddled, and wanted to do whatever Danika told him to. More than anything, though, he wanted to kiss her again. Before he could, though, Isabella revealed herself to pull Danika off of him, but instead got flung across the room for her pains. Catching her breath, she used a Spirit Evocation to clear Emric’s mind, and Emric picked up the washstand and smashed Danika into a wall, knocking her out. He checked to see if she was still alive, and found her eyes to be completely black.

At this point, the bouncer from downstairs came in, and was not inclined to listen to reason. Isabella used her magic to knock the bed into his legs, dumping him on the ground, and Emric disarmed him and threatened him into submission. They tied him up, and went back to investigating Danika, who was healing very quickly and starting to stir. The signs all pointed to the fact that she was Red Court Infected. She confirmed this, and claimed that Zuckerbastl had a monster in his court that he used to control the girls.

The pair were left with a difficult choice, now: do they kill Danika, or do they let her go free? They know there is no cure for Red Court Vampirism, even at this stage, and the only way she can keep from becoming a monster is to discipline herself forever. They were quite torn, especially Emric, who saw many similarities between their situations. In the end, they decided to take her to St. Vitus Rotunda, one of the oldest churches in Prague, where they knew the clergy had some idea of the supernatural. The priest there told them that they knew how to handle this, and had a convent in Romania set up for cloistering the infected and helping them fight their disease.

Again, it had got late, so we left the game there, with Isabella and Emric planning to pay a visit to Zuckerbastl and find out what’s up.

All in all, I was very pleased with the way the game went, and impressed as hell that the game system (and, of course, my enthusiastic players) could get the whole setting built and running in less than a week. The setting we’ve come up with is rich and detailed, with many, many hooks for stories and adventures. Once I get it typed up, I’ll post the setting document somewhere on the site, along with the characters when my players send me copies.

Kudos to Evil Hat for making the game so fast and fun to set up and run.

And just one further note:

We’re playing DFRPG, and you can, too!

 
 
 

*Which I had just preordered, so I had the latest, greatest pre-printing pdfs to work from. Back

*Let’s call that level Sunk to the Knees in the Muddy Bottom. Back

*Always a killer source for good advice in running a game. Any game. Back

When Magic Comes to Town: City Creation in DFRPG, Part Two

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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Last time, I talked about deciding on your city and coming up with themes and threats for it. Now, before we get on to the next step, there’s a bit of an intermediary step that gets slotted in. You don’t have to do it right at this point, but it can be helpful for moving forward.

Step 1.5: High-Level View

Between deciding what the themes and threats of your setting are and starting to work at the ground-level with locations and faces, the book suggests filling in a little of the high-level view. This is where you can begin to make sure that you’ve got a place for the elements of the Dresdenverse that your characters are most interested in interacting with.

It’s pretty simple, really. First, you discuss what supernatural power groups have an interest in the city – the city itself mostly defines what the interested mundane groups are. If you’ve got a character with a tie to one or another of the power groups, now’s the time to give it a place in city politics. Once you know who’s interested in the city, you get to determine what their interest is. This part will probably draw very heavily on your themes and threats. When you’ve got a good picture of how things are set up in the city, come up with a brief (one or two sentences) statement to describe the supernatural status quo, and another one to describe the mundane status quo.

The next bit is pretty cool. Take the different power groups – both supernatural and mundane – that you’re going to have involved in your story, and map them on a simple plane. The x-axis is a continuum between “Who wants to maintain the status quo” and “Who wants to rock the boat.” The y-axis is a similar continuum between “Who’s in the know” and “Who’s in the dark.” So, for example, most of the mortals in a given city are going to be in the upper-left quadrant (maintain status quo and in the dark), while the Black Council would definitely be in the lower right quadrant (rock the boat and in the know).

Now you’ve got a representative map of the movers and shakers in your city, as well as a snap-shot of the mundane and supernatural situations. You’ve got a solid foundation for the next step.

Step 2: Fill in locations and faces.

Now we get to the ground-level development of your setting. The rules suggest starting with the locations, and brainstorming until you have a couple of locations per player, rather than just enumerating every neighbourhood in your city. Let’s face it, after all: not every place in a given city is going to be good fodder for a game. So, you want to make sure that you get places that are evocative, have their own story hooks, have some tie to the themes or threats of the setting, and tie to one or another of the movers and shakers you developed above. Each location doesn’t have to have all of the above, but should have at least one.

Really, in my opinion, what you want in a location is for it to serve double-duty. It should work as an interesting backdrop for adventures and it should spark adventure ideas itself. So, here in Winnipeg, we have the Manitoba Legislature, which is a cool building in its own right, and the building and grounds make for an interesting setting for at least part of an adventure. But factor in the elements of sacred geometry and the pagan symbolism built into the structure, and it starts suggesting cults to Hermaphrodite, or cabals of alchemists, or a masonic conspiracy, or any of a number of different story hooks. That makes for a good location.

Again, I’m going to strenuously advocate a collective approach, here. As GM, don’t come up with all the answers yourself. Get your players involved, both in the brainstorming and the fleshing out that follows. You’ll wind up with a better mix of places and ideas than if you had done it on your own. Just for an example, in creating Magical Winnipeg, it was my players who came up with the ideas for the Gimli einharjar, the White Court Pentecostal Churches, the Mad Cowz were-hyenas, and the Consecration of the Two Waters. I wouldn’t have thought of these things on my own, and they add a nice mix of elements to the setting that I used in the playtest.

Keep in mind that locations can be different things. A location might be a neighbourhood, or it might be a building, or a business, or a park, or any other place where the characters will go. It doesn’t even need to be contiguous: the Pentecostal Churches in Winnipeg are all essentially one place, with the same overlying elements, for all that they’re separated geographically. Gimli is some 50 miles or so from the city, but the presence of Odin’s back-up Valhalla there is enough to have an impact on the game. If you’re running a game with a broader base – say, a secret government project that travels worldwide fighting monsters – then your locations can even  be a little abstract, cleaving closer to the power groups than to the geographic areas. So, instead of having the North End of the city, with its gangs and dangers, you might have the Accounting Department, with their ruthless and unexpected audits and reviews.

I’m going to suggest a little something here that I think works well for this stage. Get visual references. Take some pictures, or search online for some, that capture the essence of what you want each location to be. These can be very helpful for fleshing out the locations, as well as evocative for use in play. This is especially useful if you’re playing in a city (or time period) that you’re unfamiliar with. If you’re playing in a Nevernever setting, well, finding references means looking at fantasy art rather than city photographs, but it’s still doable. It may be even more helpful.

Once you’ve got your locations picked, it’s time to flesh them out. One of the first things you’re going to have to do is tie at least some of them (but probably not all of them) into the supernatural world you’re building. You don’t want to go overboard on this, in my opinion, unless you’re setting the game in the Nevernever, or the eternal city of Shangri-La, or Agartha, or inside the Hollow Earth or something. You need to keep the supernatural aspects ignorable by the general populace – otherwise, you wind up with the question of how do mundane folks survive in this dangerous world?

That said, you need some supernatural connections. They’re probably secret, and may not be too heavy, but the connections should be there. So, a nightclub might be a meeting ground for vampires, or a park might contain a wyldfae court, or a certain bookstore and coffee shop might be a regular meeting place for the clued-in. Not everything needs to be magic,  but some things have to be. Otherwise, you’re not playing a modern fantasy game, are you?

Every group is going to have their own sweet spot for this, so talk with the players and find out what your group’s is.

You also need to pick a theme or a threat for each location. Just one or the other. The standards for themes and threats are the same from the previous step, but you only want one for each location, and it should be specific for that location. Now, aesthetically and structurally, it makes sense to tie these in to the overall themes and threats for the city, but you’ve got to make each one slightly different, too. So, if you’ve got a city theme of “Cultural melting pot of the Canadian Prairies,” and you want to riff on that, then you might give the threat of “Dangerous new African gangs,” to the North End location, and the theme “Feeding on the corpse of history,” to the Forks Market (which is a mall built on the site of an archaeological dig). Both deal with the waves of immigration hinted at in the city theme, but take it in different directions.

One really good piece of advice in the book is that, now that you have these locations fleshed out, it becomes tempting to force the players to them, but you shouldn’t do it. Don’t turn the adventures into a sight-seeing trip through your magical city. Stick to a couple of solid locations in each adventure, and make sure there are some that recur so that the characters become familiar with them. Watch what people pay attention to, and give them more of that. You may wind up never using some of the locations your group creates, and that’s okay. It still helped to flesh out the setting and people’s understanding of it. You may wind up needing to create new locations for adventures, and that’s okay, too. You can use the locations you built previously as a solid foundation to build on. Let the story go where the story needs to go, not just where you’ve already got the locations established.

Now, faces. Faces are what the book calls NPCs who represent or embody a given location, theme, or threat. You’ve already got a whole list of locations, themes, and threats; now you just rough out an NPC to go with each of them. Maybe more than one, if the theme is broad or conflicted enough – for example, you might want a cop and a criminal face for a theme like “The police are fighting a holding action against the influx of organized crime.”

I’m going to talk in more detail about creating the NPCs in the next installment, when we talk about creating characters. In fact, the book suggests that you may want to mix creating the faces of the setting with creating the PCs, and I think that’s a pretty good idea. Until then, though really what you want for each face is a high concept, a motivation, and relationships.

High concept is something that, again, I’m going to talk about in more detail next installment. But for now, the simple explanation is that it’s a single-sentence explanation of what the character is. So, for the cop/criminal thing I talked about a couple of paragraphs back, you might choose “Incorruptible Cop” for one and “Ambitious Drug Lord” for the other.

As for motivation, some of this is going to be linked to the location, theme, or threat that your face is representing. Some will be simple: money, power, love, duty, revenge, and so on. Some will be more complex: wanting to prove that you’re worthy of respect, seeking a truth that you know is hidden away, saving someone from themselves, etc.

Relationships are pretty simple. Look at the other characters (PC and NPC) in the game, and see if they have anything linking them. Or if they could have anything linking them. Or maybe you need to create a new character to represent that relationship – the missing son that the PI hopes to find one day, or the rival at the newspaper that drives the reporter to great heights. Whatever. Figure out if there are any links (here’s a hint: faces that share a theme or threat or location probably also have a relationship), and write them down.

I’ve pretty much glossed over the faces bit, I admit. But next time, I’ll circle back with some more information, when we tackle the third step: creating the player characters.

From the Armitage Files

By | | The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night I ran my first session of the Armitage Files campaign for Trail of Cthulhu. It was also my first time running ToC, or any GUMSHOE game, and I have to admit that I was a little anxious about it.

As I mentioned back here, the Armitage Files campaign is largely improvisational, and very much player-directed. I tend to do a fair bit of prep work before a game, building myself a nice, comfortable set of notes for play. Once I’ve got the notes, I don’t mind if I have to deviate from them, or if I decide in play that the something I came up with earlier doesn’t fit, but I like to have that depth of preparation to give me the raw material for improvisation.

Given that this was my first attempt at a ToC game, and that I was not as familiar with the system as I might have liked, I didn’t want to just jump into the main campaign. Instead, I fleshed out a complete, if short, adventure as a sort of intro. I figured that would give me some more experience building scenarios and running the game before I waded deeper into the campaign waters.

The main set-up of the campaign is that the characters are called in by Armitage and his friends to investigate a strange series of documents that have started showing up. So, I wanted the intro adventure to give the characters a reason to interact with at least a couple of the major recurring NPCs from the Armitage Inquiry campaign frame. Roxy’s backstory had her looking into a suppressed report concerning the Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica, and Aaron is a dealer in rare books, so I figured that this would give me a couple of threads to tie those characters into the plot. Dr. Solis, being a friend of the other two and a member of MU’s School of Medicine, could provide necessary introductions and open some professional doors, metaphorically speaking*.

To that end, I had an orderly from the sanitarium show up at Aaron’s shop, offering to sell him a strange manuscript. He claimed it was a journal written by someone attached to the university, and offered a page as a sample for Aaron to examine. They arranged to meet the next evening, but the fellow didn’t show.

Because, of course, he was dead.

I built the scenario around a standard MacGuffin setup, deciding that the book in question was a journal written for therapeutic reasons by Danforth, one of the survivors of the Dyer-Lake expedition to Antarctica in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It had been stolen by an orderly after hearing Danforth’s alienist talk about how valuable the contents were to his treatment and misunderstanding the reference. The orderly then offered it around to several dealers in odd books, leaving some of the loose pages with prospective buyers to examine.

I created the journal as a full resource tome by the guidelines in the ToC rulebook, reasoning that this would be a valuable item for the characters to use throughout the campaign, and a good way to introduce some Cthulhu Mythos knowledge to the characters. Here’s the write-up of the book:

Danforth’s Journal

Danforth’s experiences and readings have given him a mad insight into the proto-history of the earth. He has combined his memories of the Antarctic expedition with his reading of the Necronomicon and other forbidden texts, syncretizing a fairly accurate – if rambling and obtuse – understanding of the Mythos, which he has written into his journal.

The book is a small, bound journal of 300 pages, with green leather binding, filled with cramped, rushed script and odd diagrams. Several pages have been torn out and replaced at different places in the book, and other notes have been penciled in over top of the ink writing.

Resource Tome: +1 Cthulhu Mythos, 2 dedicated pool points for questions about Antarctica, proto-history, and the nature of time.

Magic Potential: 1

Spells: Constructing the Star-Stones of Mnar (Elder Sign), Dho-Hna Formula, Fabrication of a Compound for Examination of Non-Linear Time (Compound Liao)

Having created the book and the basic set-up, I mapped out who the interested parties would be, keeping one eye on the Scenario Spine Worksheet in the campaign book. Given that I wanted some conflict (at least potentially) in the adventure, I created a wealthy lumber magnate with an interest in the occult and a lack of morals who was also offered the journal, and a few others (including Cyrus Llanfer at the Orne Library) for the characters to investigate. I made the orderly’s death the result of a drunken, joking use of the Dho-Hna Formula, which happened to be incomplete because of the page that had been left with Aaron. The incomplete spell let the cold and layered time of the polar city overlay the viewer, reducing him (and his wife) into freeze-dried mummies in seconds.

Meanwhile, the lumber magnate had sent some men around to get the journal before anyone else could buy it. They were ready to buy, but were determined to get the book. Finding the orderly dead, they took the journal and snuck back out. They then burgled another bookshop (whose owner had tipped his hand to the lumber magnate by telling him he might have a very interesting book to sell him in a few days) where a page had been left, stealing enough other books that the owner figured that these books were the real target and that the page had just been snatched up because it was in with the receipts inside the safe.

And, of course, Dyer was desperate to get the book back before too many people found out about what happened on the expedition, and the alienist wanted it back for his research.

I actually fleshed out about eight full scenes, with all the clues that the characters might find and where they would lead. I created a hand-out of the journal page, and a list of names of people that the orderly had approached about the book for the characters to find on his corpse. I even worked in some names that occur later in the campaign, laying the foundation for those adventures down the road. And then I set the characters loose on the adventure.

Turns out it’s a whole lot easier to improvise in the system than I feared. I thought that my lack of familiarity with the different skills and how they work would be a real detriment, but it turned out to not really be the case. Here’s what I found:

  • Having a solid idea of what’s going on behind the scenes is vital, but once you’ve created the answer to the mystery and the way things fit, it’s very easy to see what clues may exist and what scenes are going to come up.
  • The skills all say what they do right on the tin, so it’s not hard to determine if there’s something in a scene that a skill might find when the player asks.
  • The focus of the game, the structure of the rules, and the nature of the mechanics all focus on one thing: getting the clues into the hands of the characters. This outlook is incredibly helpful to the GM running the game, because it causes one to always look for a way to give a clue to the players.
  • It takes a while for everyone to get into the swing of the way investigative abilities differ from general ones, and when you should make a spend or not, and stuff like that, but not a very long while. Things were flowing very smoothly and quickly by about half-way through the evening.
  • Going back to the first point above, improvising and changing scenes came very easily for a couple of reasons: one, I knew the shape of the whole thing, so it was easy to come up with appropriate reactions. Two, the mechanical lightness of the system really encourages roleplaying and talking as solutions.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the way the game went, and had a lot of fun. I’m feeling a lot more confident about the campaign.

And how did things go for our intrepid heroes? Pretty well. They managed to really upset Danforth and his alienist, talk their way around the thugs that the lumber magnate was going to have threaten them for the journal page, and completely missed what could have been an exciting climax as lumber magnate tried the (incomplete) Dho-Hna Formula himself, leaving behind another freezer mummy. But they made a good contact in Dyer*, recovered the journal after the death of the lumber magnate by the expedient of Aaron approaching the lawyers about helping to liquidate the magante’s library, and then burned the book.

Yep, you heard me. They burned the book. This marvelous resource tome I had created for them.

In character, it was a good choice, and I didn’t want to penalize them for it or try to talk them out of it. So, I’ve decided that this makes Dyer a staunch ally for them, one that will go to the mat for them if needed later in the campaign.

It was pretty late by the time we wrapped up, but I really wanted to get the first two Armitage documents into the players’ hands that evening, so they can start giving me ideas of what they’re going to investigate, and I can start building the spines I need to run that. So, I glossed over the intro material, gave them the print-outs, and sent them home. This morning, I sent out a more detailed background on what’s going on, along with a request that they start discussing what references in the documents pique their interest most. Once I have an idea of what they’re twigging on in the documents, I can create the structure I need to be able to run the adventures in the same sort of loose, player-driven fashion that I did in the intro scenario.

I’m looking forward to it.

 
 
 

*Because Roxy can handle opening the literal ones. Back

*That is, after they got over their initial theory that he was killing everyone who knew about the journal. Back

I Can’t Believe I Missed This!

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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Yesterday, the good folks at Evil Hat released a huge chunk of The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story for free at DriveThruRPG.com. It’s the chapter on Dresdenified Baltimore, called Nevermore. Not only does it provide a wonderful example of the results of in-depth city building, it gives you a glimpse at some of the layout and art from the game. If you’re at all interested in a glimpse of this game before it hits the street, go now and download your copy.

Did I mention it was free?

When Magic Comes to Town: City Creation in DFRPG, Part One

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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First off, it was very, very difficult for me, as a child of the 80s, to avoid making a Starship reference when it comes to building cities.

Anyway, I’ve talked about setting the power level for a DFRPG campaign. The next big step in getting a campaign going is city creation.

As with most things involved in setting up a DFRPG campaign, the recommendation in the book is that you do this step as a group, and I cannot endorse this enough. Now, I’ve had mixed luck with co-operative setting building, but the troubles I’ve run into tend to be caused by a lack of shared understanding of some of the basic assumptions of the world. Here, in the Dresdenverse, a number of those basic assumptions are clearly spelled out in the source material. This is not to say you can’t change them; only that it gives you a larger plot of common ground when you start getting people brainstorming about the setting.

It’s a little misleading to think of city creation as just building the setting. The way things are set up in the book, this process creates not just the setting, but a number of the overarching themes of the game, and shapes the types of stories that you’re going to be playing through and the kinds of characters you’re going to build. In fact, step three of their instructions is to create characters, which you do before putting the final touches on the city. This guarantees that the characters fit into the city, and that the city contains things that the characters care about.

Now, I outlined the steps to city creation at a pretty low-level back here. This time, I’m going to look at things at a higher level, but with more discussion of the four steps. Before that, though, I want to point out that the books have a fully-Dresdenified version of Baltimore, a long chapter on real-world and fictional weirdness in Chicago, some suggestions about what they call The Vancouver Method for just making stuff up, and suggestions for how to build your city on the fly. So, there are a ton of options if building cities in the way they outline is not to your taste.

The four high-level steps are:

  1. Choose a city, themes, and threats.
  2. Fill in locations and faces.
  3. Make the player characters.
  4. Turn themes and threats into Aspects.

I’m only going to do the first step this time, because it alone is a pretty big topic. I’ll continue with the rest of the steps in future posts.

Step 1: Choose a city, themes, and threats.

This step could easily be the easiest one of the bunch. Or, it could be the hardest. It’s simple to say, “Let’s Dresdenify my home town!” Even if you live somewhere kind of boring, like I do, you’d be amazed at what a gameable setting you can throw together with a little brainstorming and discussion. It can be harder to pick a city that no one is really familiar with – that may entail a lot of research, though the book is careful to point out that you should stop doing research when it stops being fun. Even if that point is before you start.

The really difficult part comes in when you realize that you’re spoiled for choice. See, they make a point in the book of saying that, while the default assumption is that you’re going to play in a city, that’s not the only setting that can be built this way. Some of the ideas I’ve been toying with in my head to suggest when my group gets together to build our campaign:

  • Winnipeg. Yeah, we’ve already done it, but we could do it again – better. With more time and a better understanding of the game, I think the results would be even cooler than they already are. We could keep the best stuff, and add to it.
  • A fiefdom in the Nevernever. They mention this idea in the book, and it would be cool to set up a “free faerie city” idea, where the fantasy quotient is higher than in a mundane city – even a Dresdenified one. Anyone remember the Grimjack comics?
  • A few small towns in a larger geographic area. Driving down through the midwest of the US every summer, I’m struck by how the higher population density throws so many little towns into such a small area, and how many of them have colleges. The area around where I grew up here in Manitoba are similar, but with more distance between the places. You could treat the whole area as one city, with the various towns and rural areas being the neighbourhoods. It would allow you to bring a lot more of the feral supernatural stuff.
  • A warden squad. Make the characters responsible for much larger geographic area, like an entire state or province. Again, you’d need to change the resolution level: neighbourhoods become cities and counties, for example. Now, this idea seems to restrict characters to just Wizards, but it doesn’t have to. I figure that most Wizards, like Harry, have some contacts with other character types, which would let you mix in pretty much any character the players want.
  • Mystical archaeologists. Now, the whole world becomes the setting, with the neighbourhoods being different ancient civilizations: Roman, Aztec, Celtic, Greek, Fey, whatever. Or maybe the neighbourhoods become time periods. You cold, of course, just set the neighbourhoods as different geographic regions or archaeological digs, but that’s not nearly as interesting, I think.
  • A traveling company. Here, I’m inspired by something like Carnivale, or the latest season of Heroes. The idea of a traveling carnival with a supernatural element can also have echoes of Something Wicked This Way Comes. But it doesn’t have to be a carnival or circus; the road company of a musical or even a Copperfield-style magic show could work very well. Also, I’m currently reading Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross, and can see the potential of setting it aboard a ship on an extended cruise. Again, the definition of the neighbourhoods grows and changes to fit the framework.

Now, I think it’s pretty obvious from the preceding ideas how the setting you choose will influence the entire campaign, from character choice to the kinds of stories you tell. Some of them imply very specific types of relationships between the characters – they’re all wardens, or they’re all crew members on a cruise ship, or whatever.

Once you’ve got the basic setting picked, the book recommends you start research. Find out more about the place you’ve chosen, so that you’ve got some good ideas to bring to the table for the next part of the process. Read up on the history, the interesting places, visit some tourist sites (even if only online), or check out other source material. Talk to each other about what you’re finding out, and make a list of cool ideas that come to you.

When you’ve got some basic knowledge, you come up with the themes and threats. The book defines themes as problems that have been around for a long time, while threats are problems that are new. For example, in Magical Winnipeg, one theme is the fact that the city is a melting pot of so very many different ethnicities, all dealing with the elements and environment of the Canadian prairie. A threat is the upsurge in violent street crime driven by the dangerous were-hyenas of the Mad Cowz.

In my mind, what you’re looking for in a theme is dynamic tension. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s take a look at someplace like Washington, DC. What I know about the city is purely from reading and watching the news and TV shows, so I freely admit that I’m an outsider and may be behind on the development. Doesn’t matter. It’s just an example.

Washington has a special place in the psyche of the US, as the seat of government and site of numerous important monuments, museums, archives, etc. But it also has a large crime problem and crushing urban poverty. It has some of the richest, most powerful people in America living right alongside some of the poorest, most disenfranchised people. This contrast is something that can work very well as a theme, because it sets up tension between the haves and the have-nots in your story that spawns all sorts of adventure ideas, complications, and opportunities for heroism.

Themes are pervasive. They don’t go away, and are generally beyond the ability of the players to resolve, unless that becomes a primary focus of your campaign or you’re working at a much higher level of power than standard. But in that case, your themes should ratchet up, too, becoming great epic issues: the pull between mortality and immortality, for example. Themes are questions and issues that your characters struggle with, that force them to make choices and take action and thereby define themselves.

Threats, on the other hand, are issues that your characters can come to grips with and overcome. Maybe not all at once, but over the course of a few adventures. Taking on a were-hyena street gang, for example – it may take several adventures to roll up the gang’s hierarchy, but it can be done. Threats are where the conflict comes into the game; they are the primary sources of adventure fodder, though they are heavily informed by the themes.

Now, this is where you need to start thinking about the supernatural elements you’re going to add to the game. Some of the choices you make here will be constrained by the choices you made in setting the power level for the campaign: if you’re running a Feet in the Water game, you probably don’t want a whole bunch of the supernatural right out in the open, unless the campaign is going to focus on the issue of how relatively mundane folks deal with the overwhelming nature of the paranormal. On the other hand, if you’re playing a Submerged game, you want a lot of the magical stuff to be up front, or else your characters are going to walk all over the rest of the people in the world.

But that said, really the amount of supernatural stuff you want to add is going to be a matter of aesthetics. What are you trying to accomplish? What do you want the feel of the game to be? Those things will guide the choices. What I find useful is looking for just the coolest bits of weirdness to layer on, and letting the rest grow organically from there. For example, Winnipeg (like most cities) has a real wealth of ghost stories – the old Masonic Temple, the Hotel Fort Garry, and the Vaughn Street Jail are all said to be haunted, not mention dozens of other less interesting buildings around town. Rather than write up each individual haunting, I tied them together with the Council of Ghosts, based in the Vaughan Street Jail, that deals with policing the restless spirits of the city. That covers a big chunk of the supernatural in a general and interesting way, but leaves me free to create the kinds of ghosts and ghost stories that the game needs.

Where I’m going with this is here: start layering in the supernatural right from the start, but remember that for modern fantasy to work well, you need a solid mundane world to support it. Don’t turn every event in the history of your city or every place of interest into something linked to the supernatural. Use it as seasoning, and let the game shape how it grows and influences the rest of the world.

But more on that next time, when I talk about locations and faces.