The Dresden Files RPG

Those of you following us on Twitter may have already seen the link to playtester Rick Neal’s overview of the contents of the two books.  If you haven’t read Rick’s recent blog posts, you should; he’s spilling lots of juicy details, and doing it well enough that we won’t repeat them here.

That said, we’re still seeing some questions about the physical particulars of the books, and we thought it’d be a good idea to give you a quick breakdown of the composition of each book. This overlaps with Rick a fair amount, but not entirely.

So, here are the facts we can tell you about the books:

Each book will be hardcover, full color, 8.5″x11″ in size. You will be getting a “standard” sized product here, not something in a “digest” format like Spirit of the Century.

We don’t have a price point on these yet, though you can make some strong educated guesses by looking at similarly-sized full color hardcover RPG books on the market. We will be doing our best to price these as competitively as we can manage while still making a small profit (handful of dollars) per sale.

Book 1 is titled The Dresden Files RPG, Volume 1: Your Story.  Our current page count estimate on this is about 416 pages. If that number grows it’ll be by 16 pages at most.

Book 2 is titled The Dresden Files RPG, Volume 2: Our World.  Our current page count estimate on this is about 272 pages. If that number grows it’ll be by 16 pages at most.

You will get all of the system you need in book 1, but you’ll be missing tons of useful examples taken from the setting without the second book, so we don’t consider the game to be complete without both books.

You will get most of the setting you want in book 2, but there’s some character-centric setting information — particularly about magic and the like — in the first book, so as you might expect us to say, we don’t consider the setting to be complete without both books.

The preorder will start in April at the earliest, by late June at the latest. The preorder itself will likely orient on selling only the two-book set, rather than each book individually, but once we’re past the preorder and are actually shipping the game you’ll be able to buy each one individually.  As with (nearly) all Evil Hat Productions preorders, you’ll get the PDF right away at no extra cost when you place your preorder.  We very likely won’t sell the PDF as a solo product until after the physical product starts shipping.  (This is a business concern for us: motivating people to preorder the physical books is in our best interests, as it will speed up the rate at which we can recover the high cost of our print run. Thanking our preorderers with free and instant PDF access is our best way to do this. It also gives us a larger time buffer to figure out how best to price and package the standalone PDF product.)

Your Story breaks down as follows by approximate page count:

Chapter 1: Harry’s World - Quick primer on the setting for players. 6 pages.
Chapter 2: The Basics - Quick overview of rules concepts. 8 pages.
Chapter 3: City Creation - Guidelines for collaboratively creating the city where you set your game. 28 pages.
Chapter 4: Character Creation - What it says on the tin. 20 pages.
Chapter 5: Types & Templates - Goes over the kinds of characters you can play and gives recipes for building them. 16 pages.
Chapter 6: Advancement - Covers advancement for characters and also for cities. 10 pages.
Chapter 7: Aspects - Everything you need to know about aspects. 22 pages.
Chapter 8: Skills - Everything you need to know about skills. 26 pages.
Chapter 9: Mortal Stunts – Special abilities that aren’t supernatural powers. 12 pages.
Chapter 10: Supernatural Powers - Special abilities that are supernatural powers. 36 pages.
Chapter 11: Playing The Game - Rules for playing the game: combat, recovery, etc. 30 pages.
Chapter 12: Living With Magic - Setting & system information about magic that isn’t spellcasting itself: wizard biology, hexing, the laws of magic, etc. 26 pages.
Chapter 13: Spellcasting - Handling all elements and styles of spellcasting in the system, plus examples. 58 pages.
Chapter 14: Running The Game - System-oriented GM advice. 34 pages.
Chapter 15: Building Scenarios - How to create scenarios for play by paying attention to your city and your characters. 18 pages.
Chapter 16: Nevermore/Baltimore - Sample campaign setting. 40 pages.

Our World breaks down as follows by approximate page count:

Chapter 1: Old World Order - The politics and factions of the Dresdenverse. ~14 pages.
Chapter 2: What Goes Bump - The monsters of the Dresdenverse. ~70 pages.
Chapter 3: Who’s Who - Comprehensive character guide to the Dresdenverse. ~146 pages.
Chapter 4: Occult Chicago - Kenneth Hite talks about the real world occult background of Chicago. ~20 pages

We’re hoping to get a (very) short story from Jim Butcher for Our World, but that’s still getting worked out.

General product info, status