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.

So, right off the bat, there are a lot of great systems out there that, if you want to run Dresden, you can totally do it with. To be perfectly frank, Eden’s “Witchcraft” game, especially tweaked with some of the Cinematic Unisystem changes from the Buffy & Angel RPGs, is about an 80-90% fit right out the door. Eden is a great company, and I mostly regret that Witchcraft supplements don’t come out frequently enough. If I just wanted to run a game this evening, rather than write something, it’s probably what I would use. However, there are three real downsides to it. First, it is almost harder to do a 10-20% tweak than it is to build from whole cloth, because dependencies are a pain. This is not purely limited to game design – there are very few fields where the last mile is not the hardest. Second, Unisystem is Eden’s system, and they have no licensing scheme for it that I know of. Now, they’re cool guys, and we probably could have called them up and said “Hey, we have this property, can we pay you some money to make it Unisystem?” and maybe negotiated something, but that’s an uncertainty and a definite hurdle. The final problem is the most substantial. Until recently, Eden held the licenses for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel RPGs. Obviously, these are two properties with a lot of overlap with the Jim Butcher fanbase, but as far as these things go, they are 800 pound gorillas, and with Unisystem, we would be consciously stepping into their shadow, which would simply not be a smart thing for us to do.

Now, the new World of Darkness system has similar licensing concerns, but even more pronounced because, were I White Wolf, I would tell us to take a flying leap if we asked. Why? Because the World of Darkness has its own cosmology, and much of its success is on the _strength_ of that cosmology. Something like Dresden could only dilute that strength. By the same token, we’d suffer from that sort of dynamic, so no go.

Those are the two that are the big fish for the thematic match, but from a business perspective, why not go with a D&D or d20/OGL based game? There’s a compelling case to be made for it – even though the market is flooded with d20 products, the good products still sell, and are more likely to get penetration into places that sell a limited selection. Now, that’s double-edged. The d20 glut has also meant many retailers are cutting their d20 orders down to the bone, but there are some business reasons to go with it.

What’s more, there’s a compelling argument of familiarity. D&D is still the biggest RPG there is, by a substantial margin, and don’t we want the game to reach that audience?

Now, the cool kid thing to do here would be to give a little sneering smirk and dismiss d20 with a wave, but that would reflect on my ignorance more than anything else. Yes, there are some terrible D&D and D20 products out there, but there are also some really smart, talented people who are making very _good_ products. I can easily argue against using D&D (it’s a bad match) or d20 Modern (It’s a bit too structured) but when you get to some of the real gems of d20, like Green Ronin’s True20 or Levi Kornelsen’s Perfect 20, it’s very clear that there are d20 builds that -could- work.

Which puts them in the same category as the other generic games.

Gurps. Hero. Tri Stat. D6. Risus. Name your favorite and put it here. And here’s where the true challenge begins because, to be perfectly frank, I could build a pretty darn good Dresden game out of any of these.

Now, some are easy to dump. Hero, Gurps and tri-stat all have owners that complicate things. Tri Stat has a reasonable licensing schema, but the system is strongly associated with anime, and that’s a problem from a marketing perspective. D6 and Risus would be more of a matter of filling the serial numbers off, and that would be both insulting and tacky, so we’re not going to do that. True20′s pretty good, but the license is expensive, so no thank you. It is under OGL though, so you can use the rules as long as you don’t call it True20, so that’s got some merit.

Considering these obstacles, we really want to avoid licensing headaches, so we want something under an open license, like the OGL or Creative Commons. The number available is growing, but practically speaking the options really come down to Fudge, Fate or a d20 OGL akin to Blue Rose/True20.*

Now, if we’re doing Fudge, we’re gonna do Fate, simple as that. We made that decision long ago, and we’ll stick by it. But Fate vs True20? Tough call. We know Fate better and can definitely tune it better. True20 has more potential market penetration. Both games are undoubtedly _capable_ of handling Dresden, so what to do?

In the end, it comes down to the Batman/Superman dilemma.

If you are playing a game that stats up characters in an even faintly logical fashion, Superman has at least an order of magnitude more “points” than Batman. They’re incredibly mismatched. On paper, they’re Angel Summoner & BMX Bandit. Yet side by side in the comics, they rock.

This issue is pretty important for the Dresden Files. Harry is a lot more powerful than Murphy or Billy, so how do you handle that issue? If the answer is “Harry is higher level” then you’ve just described a game I don’t want to play, because that more or less implies that the lower level characters are mostly there for color, not because they’re needed or are meaningful contributors. Ideally, I want something that distributes importance in a manner more akin to a novel or comic book.

And here’s where the rubber hits the road. Fate does that. D20 games don’t (nor are they supposed to, for anyone who thinks that’s a criticism of d20 – it’s not).

We want to make sure that when the group consists of the fae halfblood daughter of Jenny Greenteeth, the lover of a Muse, a Kung Fu wizard, the Autumn Knight and a pizza delivery guy, that everyone gets to be awesome.

So to do that, were going with Fate. It’s not the only game that this is possible in, but for our purposes, it’s the best match.

* Clinton Nixon’s Solar System, which powers The Shadow of Yesterday, gets short shrift here, for reasons that would take too long to go into, but I leave it at this: It’s an AWESOME game, it just wasn’t the game we needed.

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.

More than 250 of them. Even the more conservative list from Wikipedia still tops out just over 100, and I can’t even pretend to understand the logic of what makes one place matter and one place not. I am struck with a sinking feeling that I have bit off more than I can chew.

So, I start methodically going through the entries, and doing things like looking up real estate pitches and sales by neighborhood and district, and looking for crime statistics when I can. The Baltimore PD, as it turns out, has a fantastic mapping program to see what crimes have occurred where in what neighborhoods or by address. Flipping through the Baltimore Sun and smaller local papers, going through travel guides, reading books and watching TV, I start accumulating more information than I can really process. And that’s a problem. I had anticipated that the problem would be _finding_ the information, but the reality is once you start looking, there problem is narrowing it down to what information you need.

There’s only one thing to do, and that’s take the pile of research and simply set it aside. There was no way I was going to be able to distill this down to something that was manageable and useful, at lest not this way. It was time to start thinking in terms of what I really need out of the city. Now, I absolutely need a certain amount of flavor, but that’s a slightly different consideration, and is mostly going to depend upon reasonably evocative presentation. More importantly, it’s going to depend upon having something to write about, so it’s sort of the last step. The question is, in purely practical game-running terms, what do I need?

The answer that seems clearest is scenes. I need places to frame scenes that are properly evocative. If I’m going to have a setting in the first place, one of the things I’m going to want to do is have something more concrete to say than “in a nice part of town.” I want to have specific, named neighborhoods. The thing is, as I say that, it seems to make it a lot of work for very little return. What am I really getting out of saying “Guilford” rather than “A very nice residential neighborhood?” And heck, considering the scene will probably take place inside someplace like a home or office, that seems to make the question even more pointed.

Tough question, because in the short term, the answer is really “not much.” On a scene by scene basis, my players are going to be more interested in what’s going on in that scene, and they need me to be descriptive to frame the scene in the first place. If I stop and dwell on the nature and history of the neighborhood, there’s a good chance I’m detracting from the players enjoyment of the scene. This is especially true if I’ve hit on some nugget that I think is cool and I infodump on the players.

For those not familiar, an infodump is when a character or narrator dumps a bunch of information on the reader or viewer, usually to explain a situation so the subsequent scene makes sense (or just because the author decides she wants to educate). This is one of those unfortunate sometimes-necessities of fiction, and one that authors dread because it’s a chore for the reader. If the author is any good she try to find a way to make this something other than awful for everyone involved. Dresden fans might recognize that Bob is a vehicle for exactly this – because he’s got so much personality and character, the fact that the scenes with him are _full_ of information tends not to register as infodumps. Contrast that with cookie-cutter fantasy, where Grimfar The Wise walks in, spouts wisdom, and walks out. Night and day.

Anyway, the point of this little aside is “Don’t do that.” It really sucks for your players, honest.

So that seems like a pretty strong argument against bothering with neighborhoods in the first place. However, there remain a couple of really strong arguments favor of this sort of information: continuity, focus and inspiration.

Continuity is something that’s going to grow over play, and only starts to matter the second time the players are in a neighborhood. Without continuity, the fourth “really nice neighborhood” scene has no more pop than the first. With continuity, the fourth scene in Guilford has the potential of building upon all the scenes that have gone before. Players may remember people, places and resources, and when players have that information, they have the ability to bring it into play, which is just fantastic. This is, in many way, the opposite of the infodump – it’s organic, familiar growth of knowledge.

Focus is an important bit of sleight of hand. The fact is, cities are pretty big, and it would be possible to run entire campaigns without re-using any scenery. Given that, if the GM wants to find a way to make the city more manageable, she needs to abstract it a little so it will fit inside the player’s heads. The assignment of neighborhoods creates discrete, related patterns which the player can grow to recognize as their city. A finite set create productive limitations on the range of options, channelling these locations directly into places of play, rather than dwelling on the infinite possible list of places.

This spills into geography a bit. There is sometimes a desire to make city neighborhoods into something like countries in Risk. We imagine a map of the city, broken up into neighborhoods, with maybe a handful of pawns representing the characters and potent NPCs sliding from neighborhood to neighborhood. It’s easy to imagine and you get to make really pretty maps for it.

It’s also pretty much bullshit.

The reason I’m focusing here on abstraction of locations rather than abstractions of the whole is that people have an easier time thinking in lines and dots. Lines are how you get places, dots are places where you go. That internal map focuses on what’s important to them and doesn’t really give a crap about any kind of need for completeness. The personal map has empty spaces, some of them known, some of them unrecognized. As you try to help a person build a map of a place, you can either help them create the dots they’ll be interested in, or you can try to shoehorn them into thinking about the map.

Now, thinking about the map is useful and valid in lots of practical situations, but it is not what creates a living, breathing picture. Keeping neighborhoods discrete keeps the list of potential options manageable, while still maintaining variety. Their geography may fuel some interesting points, but it is secondary to the places themselves.*

Anyway, that feeds into inspiration. Once you have a finite set (focus) and recurring elements (continuity) then the neighborhoods can be inspirations for play. Not only do all those interesting things which you’re not infodumping on the players suggest plots, but previous events and people can inspire them. When the GM is looking for ideas, shuffling through the neighborhoods is a great way to get reminded of what’s out there, and what cool things to do.

All right, so we’ve now got a really good sense of what we do and don’t want. We don’t want extraneous data, be it a useless map, an infodump, or an arbitrary use of neighborhoods. We do want continuity, focus and inspiration.

Which is cool on paper, but how does it stack up next to this giant list of neighborhoods I’ve got? Well, that’s where we’ll start next.

* – Ok, to every cartographer I just offended, I am simplifying to be practical here. I love maps. Love love love em. A good map tells a story, usually many stories, and is a rich, robust source of information. Or at least that’s the case if you’re wired to look at them that way, and not everyone is. Worse, the kind of super-abstracted map that most RPG cities are made of more or less kills all the interesting stories that a map has to tell and frankly, no map deserves that. I’m hoping to talk a little bit about reading the map of your city when I get into landmarks, so there’s some love coming, but for the moment, for most groups, the city needs to be a collection of places rather than a map if it’s going to be part of play. If you’re sufficiently into maps that you’re sure I’m wrong, and your group is of a similar mindset, then man, go with the map!

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?

I hit some conflicting information right out the bat, with the founding of Baltimore listed as 1706, 1729,1796 and even 1851. That takes some digging, and what I can basically put together is that the port itself was founded in 1706, and at the time, many areas around the bay were called Baltimore. The town was chartered in 1729 (as a tobacco port), incorporated as the city of Baltimore in 1796 and separated from the county in 1851. All that seems kind of later than I originally expected, but a little digging reveals that Maryland of the colonial period simply didn’t have the kind of population and industry that required a port of substantial size. Baltimore’s growth, in fact, corresponded with the rise of the Revolution, and that’s kind of cool.

Is there a theme in there? Something about growth and being a truly American city? Doesn’t really ring well. Growth hints at something, but if I really wanted the American Experience as a theme, I probably would have gone with Philadelphia.

So back to the history, I run through and dig up a variety of interesting nuggets. Some ties into the early telegraph and railroad development in the country (It’s the B in B&O, after all). Occupied by federal troops during the Civil war because it’s loyalties were pretty much in question. Pirates, including Blackbeard, sailed the Bay and there are tales of buried treasure aplenty.

My attention is caught by a great flood in 1868 (Killed 100 people) and a great fire in 1904 (Burned most of the city but, miraculously, killed no one, and spared Fell’s Point). The fire in particular seems like it could be part of the magical history. More importantly, I feel like I’m on the edge of a theme. Baltimore seems to lie in the middle of things as the crux of conflict, rather than a point of balance. Fire and water (even land and water – as ports go, it’s fairly far inland), north an south. I don’t have it yet, but it really seems like the theme needs to revolve around some amount of conflict.

The other thing that does is draw attention to Fell’s point. Fell’s point is a neighborhood on Baltimore’s inner harbor, probably the most colorful of neighborhoods in the city, both in history and in present-day culture. Most of the City’s ghost stories center around Fell’s point, and it’s where Poe did his drinking. Today, it’s the neighborhood where’s you’re likely to find the artsy, funky and weird. It seems very much like the city is grabbing me by the lapels to say “Epicenter of weirdness HERE”. That, however, is meat for a whole other post.

As we go forward, the history of Baltimore is full of boom and bust. Shipyards boom for war, and bust when it’s done. Neighborhoods flourish, and rot. Every city has patterns of growth and decay, but Baltimore always seems like it’s about to emerge from its troubles or is about to slip away forever, and it never quite makes it all the way either way.

And that’s what finally clicks. It’s not jut a conflict, it’s a cycle, a cycle of growth and decay. The theme of the city is about that constantly moving stasis. It gives us the vibrant energy of a Mencken, and the dark depths of a Poe without ever leaving the city limits. Better yet, this is a theme that is _very_ easy to translate into something concrete in the dresdenverse. This seems an excellent expression of the the conflict between the Winter and Summer courts, so a tale of Baltimore will probably hang on assumption of a lot of Fae activity.

This also works on a personal level. I got to Baltimore often enough to recognize it but rarely enough that changes jump out at me, and this cycle is written in its streets. See, the battle against Baltimore’s decay has always been a clever, almost heroic one. If nothing else, it’s been a personal one – in Baltimore, reclamation tends to take place one block at a time, and happens because some people are stubborn, desperate or greedy enough to take a bad block and make it into a good block by force of will alone. Hearing stories about the dollar houses, and the people who joined together to buy a block of houses, there’s just something visceral about it.

Also, I’m a country boy, so I’m always a little leery goings into cities, but I go someplace like New York or DC and there’s at least some logic to where I go or don’t go. In Baltimore, it’s startlingly haphazard. Course, as the joke goes, if you’re driving in Baltimore, you can go two places: the harbor, or the cemetery.

That seems eminently workable, and I now have a theme, and enough of a backdrop to start filling in some other gaps.

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.

The question of theme is one of the reasons that a prospective GM would be well served to pick a city he knows personally. Personally, I have no idea what would distinguish a game in Albany, NY from one in Buffalo, NY, but if I were to sit down with a native, maybe read some papers, read some local fiction, the differences may become apparent. Every city has some hidden awesomeness to it, so pick something that you know well enough to find it.

I’m violating this a little, in that I know DC far better than I do Baltimore. However, I live 20 minutes outside of the city, so it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

Anyway, that means I’ve broken this down to 5 different things to look into, and #5 is really going to wait until after I’ve had a chance to look at the other four.

Now, I can do a lot on the Internet. Between Wikipedia and Google I could probably slap something together in pretty short order, but it’ll be fairly half assed, so let’s start things off in the real world with a trip to the Library.

Retro, yes, but you really will find more there than you will online, especially if you’re looking for local interest material. Now, depending upon how long ago high school was for you, you may have some bad habits to break, or new habits to learn.

Personally, as a power nerd, I’d always had a kind of disdain for encyclopedias. In school, I’d been taught that using them was a kind of cheating, so I’d always been hesitant to hit them. That was quite stupid on my part.

Start with the encyclopedia. If you dread actual books, Wikipedia is a good stand in, but in general, I’d suggest it as supplemental to hitting the books. Ideally, grab two or three encyclopedias and a cup of coffee (yes, you can drink coffee in most libraries these days – it’s fantastic!) and just absorb. Take notes, but in a limited way. You’re looking to capture key words – names, place and events. Don’t worry about context – this is just your opportunity to get an overall understanding and to gather those things that you’ll want to look up later.

Now, armed with a basic backdrop, you might be tempted to wade right into the stacks and put your mad card catalog skillz to use, but hold on a minute. The next step is the real reason we’re at a library, and not doing this all with google. Ready for it?

Go talk with a librarian.

This may seem oddball to some, though I think at least some of you are nodding because you already know the secret. See, a lot of us have an impression of Librarians as some sort of glorified custodians, or worse, have the common gamer hesitancy to talk about our hobby in a non-crazy context. Both of these ideas will shoot you in the foot. Librarians are a special flavor of power nerd, and I promise you, if you have an interesting question for them, they will bend over _backwards_ to find ways to help you with it.

Explain that you’re trying to put together a guide of your city with an emphasis on the weird. Explain you’re looking for accessible history, and if possible any folklore or ghost stories. Then stand back.

(Now, I shouldn’t have to say this, but be polite and let them help you, but don’t assume they must help you. If you do so, or if you neglect to thank them, that is being a jerk, and is a problem far outside the scope of this document.)

Now, it’s possible you will encounter a burnt out, busy, or otherwise unavailable Librarian, but just wait or ask another.

I know I seem to really be hammering this point, but until you have seen the difference that 5 minutes with a real librarian can make, you’re just going to accept that this is powerful, powerful mojo on their part.

If you end up having to look up the stuff by hand, I’m so sorry. I really thought there’d be a good librarian there, so it will take longer, but the final result should be two stacks of books: one of history and local interest, and one of folklore, legends and ghost stories (as an aside, make sure to explicitly look for ghost stories – that tends to be the way that supernatural stories of all stripes get filed).

Now the good news is you don’t have to read all this, but you should skim it. Skimming is a valuable skill, and there’s a nice writeup on how to do it here for those who want a refresher.

Your goal now is to capture hooks. Hooks are, thankfully, very easy to spot because they’re the things that you find interesting. Just putter along and when you hit on something that makes you go “Huh” or “neat!” then write it down. Maybe some of these will suggest other things to read, but the key here is that you should not be investing more time and effort than you are interested in. When you lose interest, then the material has stopped being useful. Wrap up there.

This little outing should give you enough of a foundation that you should already have ideas about what kind of games might run well in the city. Old disasters, organizations, robber barons, crime sprees and just random noise can all take fascinating twists when you say “Why is this magical?”.

With that footing underneath you, the next thing you want to get may be the single most useful book you’ll pick up (and possibly the biggest investment) – hit the travel section of your local bookstore and get a travel guide. If you’re lucky enough to have many to choose from, take a minute to flip through them and pick the one that seems like the most fun to read.

(And here’s a confession – if you really want to skip the whole library thing, you can really just start with this step. Most good tour guides include a decent history section and are chock full of possibilities. Also, if you’re a AAA member, see what they offer.)

Beyond that, grab a few periodicals. Most cities of a certain size have a magazine of their own, and local papers are great references. If you can manage to go into the city itself, go and grab an armful of free weeklies. I have no idea what they’ll be called in your city, but you can find them near coffee shops, and they are the best path to the true weirdness of your town.

NOW it’s time to hit the web.

The web is going to be an excellent resource for maps and photos, and google is going to be your friend for this. As such, I’m going to suggest a few search terms you might find fruitful (I’m missing some, so feel free to add suggestions.) :

Use your cities name plus:
neighborhood Map (having the names of neighborhoods is SO important)
ghost stories
folklore
magic
humor
jokes
historical maps
politics
crime
dialect
prostitution (The goal of this one is to find out where the red light district is. Every city has one. You don’t need to go there, but you definately wan to tbe able to name it.)

You’re also going to want to use google images to look for pictures of your city, and I would also suggest going to del.icio.us and look for entries that use your city’s name as a flag.

Honestly, the web stuff does not need much rigor. Put a folder in your bookmarks and load it up, and just putter through this stuff at your convenience. It should just be a pool you can dip your toe into

The one exception to this is geography – put in a little work here. Get a list of neighborhood names and major streets, and see what you can find out about them. Check crime statistics, house prices and news stories and see what comes up. If you know that the kibble district has a lot of warehouses, and that the Bits neighborhood has a crime rate 4 times the rest of the city, you are now armed with information you want to have when you have something in mind that requires a warehouse or a mugging. Definitely find out where the nice part of town is – several evil people probably live there, so get a sense of what it’s like.

You’ll notice that while this is relatively completist, the emphasis is on being as lazy as possible. There’s a good reason for this – the setting is going to be exactly as interesting as you find it. At the end, you should have:

1. A bible – the travel guide is the most likely candidate for this, but whatever it is, it should be the one book you find most interesting and useful, that becomes you fallback.
   
2. Backdrop – You should have enough history and folklore under you belt that you feel like you could maybe start putting together a magical history of your city, y’know, if you _had_ to.
   
3. Geography – You should have enough maps that the shape of the city looks familiar to you, but more importantly, you should have a list of place names. Remember, people don’t think like maps – they describe places in neighborhoods and streets.
   
4. Flavor – Jokes and local interest news stories give a sense of what sort of things happen in your city.
   
5. Theme – this one is kind of on you. If nothing has suggested itself yet, look up books and poems about your city and see what other people have glommed on to.

Next entry, I’ll run through what this process found around Baltimore.

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.

First off, we wanted an American city. We’re just not going to be able to write a European or Canadian game. My sole regret is that that knocked Quebec City off the list, but that would probably have been too problematic anyway.

We also wanted a real city. Inserting a Gotham or Metropolis (or San Dimas, which is apparently real: Who knew?) into the map would be a break from the source material.

Lastly, it’s important to remember that the city is a character in the game, as much as anyone else. We’re pulling from detective fiction here, and certain cities are better suited for certain types of story, either because of the nature of the city or because of the stories that have already been told there.

So for the first list, we start in the west and work east.

On the coast, there are really five candidates: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. San Jose and Oakland kind of unfairly got the boot as a result of living in the shadow of San Francisco, but so it goes.

Working inland, we stop off and grab Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Austin. There are probably other candidates in Texas, but honestly, if we’re doing Texas, it’ll be Austin: it’s the high culture freak city of Texas.

We skip most of the midwest – we don’t want anything near Chicago. The south… well, let’s cherry pick New Orleans and Atlanta. I’ll also grab Tampa as a placeholder for “some city in Florida”.

That leaves the mid atlantic and New England, which is a virtual smorgasbord. Richmond, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Trenton, NYC, Hartford, Boston and Burlington.

Probably passed up some decent contenders getting here, but it’s already a pretty big list:

• Atlanta
  
• Austin
  
• Baltimore
  
• Boston
  
• Burlington
  
• DC
  
• Hartford
  
• Las Vegas
  
• Los Angeles
  
• New Orleans
  
• NYC
  
• Philadelphia
  
• Pittsburgh
  
• Portland
  
• Richmond
  
• San Diego
  
• San Francisco
  
• Seattle
  
• Tampa
  
• Trenton
  

Ok, time to break out the axe.

Seattle gets the boot immediately – it’s the Shadowrun city, and I don’t really want to deal with that.

San Diego also gets tossed after a little thought, because it’s a little to close to the big city version of Sunnydale, and while that could be a lot of fun, it’s not what we’re looking to do.

Trenton gets a “I’m not really sure why that’s therein the first place” removal.

Burlington is only there because I grew up there, and while I think it would rock, that’s kind of a fringe position, so it’s gone.

Pittsburgh has a lot going for it, but it’s already spectacularly well represented in gaming, albeit under a pseudonym, so I can pass.

New York City – Man, it may be the greatest city in the world, and it has never really been done justice by any game because it’s just too big. If I were a New Yorker, I might view this as an interesting challenge, but I don’t carry New York in my heart, so it’s just a recipe for disaster, so it is, begrudgingly, off the list.

Boston’s a pretty awesome option. Full of history and crime, it’s probably the most european city in the US, which seems ideal for modern magical crime. Unfortunately, the nice folks at White Wolf seem to have thought the same thing, and have made it the hub of the latest incarnation of Mage. There’s enough overlap there that I want to dodge that.

Austin and Portland get tossed out together. They’re both great, colorful towns, and if this were an Urban Fantasy game more of the Emma Bull sort of flavor, they’d probably be the top contenders, but when I think about both, i don’t really think about any kind of dark undertone. I think about music festivals and the coolest damn hotel in the country.

L.A. gets the boot for some of the same reasons NYC does, but also because LA has it’s own kind of stories, and while they’re good stories, they’d end up overshadowing the ones we want for Dresden.

Unfortunately, that same reasoning also rules out DC. I love DC, but if it’s the center of a game, it better be hopping with federal agencies and shadowy conspiracies, otherwise you’re just letting it go to waste.

Ditto Las Vegas.

New Orleans is almost too obvious, and honestly, I’m not sure you can use it without getting vampire all over yourself, and that smell just won’t go away. Also, since the Hurricane, it’s in such transition that anything we write would get outdated almost instantly.

Salt Lake City is under the shadow of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and while it’s been proven that you can put Mormonism at the heart of a really rocking game, it’d be playing with fire, and I don’t think I could do it justice.

Hartford? See Trenton.

Atlanta or Richmond….that’s tempting. A historied southern city can bring almost as much to the table as boston could. But here’s the thing: it would really have to be southern. Done right that would be magnificent, but I need to accept that I’m a yankee boy at heart, and I just wouldn’t be able to do it justice.

Florida has a similar problem, though it’s not the south – it’s Florida. There’s been so much really good crime fiction out of florida with strong themes of corruption that I ended up tossing it for a lot of the same reasons as LA.

And then there were 3: Baltimore, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

San Francisco deserves some respect in this. You have Silicon Valley on hand for the contrast of tech and magic, and if you need crime, you have Oakland right on hand These kinds of contrasts and themes are powerful stuff.

On the other hand, Baltimore and Philadelphia both have that rich, layered history that comes of being an old east coast city. Baltimore also ends up winning that particular tussle because it’s also a very dark city. It’s a crime-ridden hellhole in parts, and that’s perfect for what we’re looking at.

So Charm City or the City by the Bay? Ultimately, the decision came down to 2 things:

1) Baltimore is the home of Poe. Boo Yah.
2) Baltimore is within driving distance, which will make research much easier.

As such, it’s Baltimore for the win!

Next up: Hitting the Books

(and I note, we actually are further along than this, but it’ll be a little bit before the log catches up)