So, I’m a nerd.
Not a huge shock, but I figure I’m going to lay that one right out there to frame the question of “why use Fate, and not some other system?” because it’s easy to assume that the decision to go with fate was based purely on the fact that we wrote it. In fact, while there’s some truth to that, it’s not necessarily for the obvious reasons.
How many neighborhoods are there in your city? Chew on that for a minute. It seems like a pretty innocuous question, but the answer is probably “more than you think”.
See, when I started, I figured, I would gather up a list of Baltimore’s neighborhoods, maybe winnow it down some to get a list of the interesting ones with an eye towards which ones would be well suited towards which scenes. So I started with a quick google of “Baltimore neighborhoods map” and found the official maps on the city of Baltimore’s homepage. Score! I’d just grab those and work down from there. Start with one of the 9 general areas (Central, N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE, SE) and grab the neighborhood list and….
Man, that’s a lot of neighborhoods.
(This got a bit too long in writing – thus, the delay – so I’m breaking it up a bit, and starting with the foundation.)
Start with the map. On a national map, we look at Baltimore and can infer a few things. It’s coastal mid atlantic, which suggests a certain amount of colonial history. In the three main bands of US immigration (religious in the north, criminal in the far south and mercantile in the middle) it’s firmly in the mercantile stripe.
Zooming in a little further, it’s clear that Baltimore looks a little squeezed into things, between DC, Philadelphia, and Delaware, all in the shadow of New York. The natural harbor of the Chesapeake Bay seems like a natural city location, but the protection of the harbor is probably a double edged sword, since it takes traffic further out of its away than just going up the river to Philly. This points me to a question: how did Baltimore develop?
Warning, this is more about process than the specifics of the game.
So, my knowledge of Baltimore at the start of this process was pretty limited. I’d driven around the city some, and I knew that you had crazy stuff like Poe’s grave, and Anthony Bourdain’s magnificently dismissive description of Baltimore. Beyond that I had a few jokes (Driving in Baltimore, you can end up in two places: The harbor, or dead). As such, I had a big challenge in front of me: what in god’s name do I need to do?
Stepping back, I thought a bit about what I would want out of the final write up. A bit of history, sure, but interesting history, which is to say, history that I could draw plot seeds from. The major imports of the late 18th century just aren’t going to be useful to know unless there’s a plot seed somewhere in them. So that means that no, this is not an opportunity to write a treatise on trade in the age of sail.
Similarly, I want a map, but I don’t want a gaming map. A pretty map of streets with a numeric key of interesting locations is almost entirely useless to me as a GM. The city is not a dungeon, and I don’t really want to be dealing with player’s making turn-by-turn navigation decisions within the city. I need to know enough about the geography of the city to know the general flow of things. Beyond that, I want a linguistic map of the city. I want a map that reflects how people describe the city, which means a map of neighborhoods and important streets.
Similar to history, I also want to dig up folklore and ghost stories. Every area in the world has its own stories, from colonial stories about witches to modern urban legends.
Trappings of flavor are also important to get. From humor to dialect to media portrayal, this is going to have more signal to noise than history, but it will serve much the same purpose. There’s a temptation to grab every quirky nugget of trivia and offer it up as local color, but that needs to be strictly curtailed.
Lastly, I want to find a theme. This last is an interesting challenge, and once I won’t really be able to address until I’ve looked at the first three needs, but it’s going to be very important, because it answers the question that “Stories in Baltimore are usually going to be about….” This isn’t something to lock ourselves into anything, but it helps provide a reason that the city is Baltimore and not someplace else.
To give an example, if we were writing about DC, the theme would be power, plain and simple. Why? Because that’s what DC is all about – it’s where the thousand most powerful people in America do their business. It’s the place where all other currencies; money, information, sex and more, get cashed in for the real stuff – power. As a GM, this is like candy for me. Power struggles, questions of real vs. illusionary power, where real power comes from, the responsibilities of power – all these ideas are rich with potential game ideas, all drawn from a fairly simple theme.
I want to find something similar for Baltimore, and I have a few ideas, but we’ll see what research brings up.
For some context, I’m Rob Donoghue, and I’m writing the RPG along with Fred. For our sanity, we split up certain tasks, and as I was recompiling some notes, I started writing some of the design process for my own sake, and Fred pointed out that it was the sort of thing that might be worth sharing. As such, I’ll be posting about elements of the design process as we continue to work on the game.
I suppose it’s best to begin at the beginning. When we started designing the Dresden Files RPG, setting was a key question. The novels take place in Chicago, so it will be necessary to provide some setting information on the windy city, but the books also pretty much dominate that city, which means two things. First, if you want to run a game in Chicago, the novels will already do you pretty well. Second, if you want to run your own game without taking Harry and friends into account, you’re going to want another city.
With that in mind, we decided we’d pick another city and give it a proper writeup, both as an alternative setting and as a guideline for GMs looking to magic up a city that they’re already familiar with.
It’s to that latter end that I’m writing this now. When I finish, I’ll distill it into bullet points of wisdom for the game, but there’s some utility in making the process a little transparent.
So that comes to the question: what city to use? As the resident research monkey, this one ended up in my lap.
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