The Dresden Files RPG

We’re committing to a target date and making progress, so much of what you read below is preserved solely for historical reasons.

For updates on how we’re coming along, check out the “schedule” tagged posts and also the “status” tagged posts.

So When Is It Coming Out?

That’s the question we get asked time and again about the Dresden Files RPG, and it’s completely understandable.  We’re fans too — heck, we’re fans first, publishers second, where the Dresden Files are concerned.

That said, our usual response is to hedge on this.  We joke that the project has been hexed by Harry — system drafts have been nuked, computers have died, lives have changed, developers found themselves suddenly needing to find a day-job to help ends meet.  This should not be a surprise to us — it’s life imitates art, after all, since much of what we’ve just described is part & parcel for the day to day world of one Harry Dresden, Wizard.

Our other response is to repeat a mantra heard over at software giant Blizzard and incant “it will be finished when it’s done!”  For one, we were approached by Jim to do this project, not the other way around, and we want to do right by his “baby”.  For two, the world of the Dresden Files is vast (and getting vaster), so we’ve had a bit of a case of “the more we climb the mountain, the higher it gets” going on.  Still, we know that some folks out there are eager to call this game the “Duke Nukem of tabletop gaming”, which would hurt less if it didn’t have a little bit of a sting of truth to it.  But we’re invoking Blizzard for a reason here.  They get to the finish line.  And so will we.

At any rate, all of this has added up to a single, central truth that when we give dates for publication, we inevitably, assuredly miss them.  So we’ve stopped doing that, and aren’t about to start up again.

All the same, we want to take a chance to break down some of the reasons this game’s taken so long to get done, which we’ll get to shortly, below.  And, as we get a clearer picture of how far off the finish line is and how fast we’re moving towards it, we’ll post more updates on our site’s blog talking about the progress of the game’s development.

We’re Fans First: How It Happened

The first thing to realize about the genesis of this project is that we’re fans first — the Dresden Files RPG came up and knocked on our door, as it were, not the other way around.  This is that story.

Back in 2003, we were just a handful of guys who’d managed to hack the Fudge system into something that was more like how we wanted to play, and we called the result Fate.  Much to our surprise, it grew a sudden and startlingly large community, from a seed planted in the fertile soil of the existing Fudge community.  Then it got noticed by other gaming communities at large, and made a strong showing in one of the first few years of the Indie RPG Awards. Folks started to know who we were, at least in a tiny segment of the internet.

Elsewhere in the land, there was our friend Jim Butcher, who’d managed to go and make a name of himself writing  novels, first and foremost about a wizard private eye named Harry Dresden.  Popularity was on the rise, thanks to Jim’s steadily strengthening writing talent and a bit of an assist from James Marsters (of Buffy fame) lending his vocal talents to the audio books. (Later came a TV show and a comic book and all that, but that’s getting ahead of this point in the story.)

At any rate, being a man of great taste and discernment, Jim happened to have an agent by the name of Jennifer Jackson who was, herself, a bit of a gamer.  She’d heard of us, thanks to those RPG awards, and she knew that Jim knew us.  She also knew that Jim didn’t want to hand the keys for the Dresden Files RPG to just anyone.  So when other courtiers came knocking on her door asking about the Dresden Files rights for an RPG, she turned to Jim, paid attention to what he wanted, and asked him a simple question: “Don’t you know some game-designing friends you’d be more comfortable with developing this game?”

Those friends turned out to be us.

So there we were, with — quite honestly — zero publishing experience, and with the means for gaining that experience not yet clear (the print on demand movement was still slow to pick up speed) — getting asked by our good friend Jim to take his books and turn them into an RPG.  To be honest, we just about lost our minds — doubly so when our significant others supported our decision and desire to pursue this opportunity.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.  The point being that, at the end of the day, this project came to us, not the other way around, and we’re fans of Jim’s work first, publishers second.  It can fairly be said that this game is still a fan project.

But with that at our starting point, and a great vacuum of experience ahead of us that we needed to fill, things started to get … interesting.

Interesting Times: The Learning Experience(s)

Once we had the contract for the project all worked out, the Evil Hat company formed, and so on, we found ourselves busily trying to locate as many carts as possible so we could put them all ahead of the horse.  This first took the form of two big rookie mistakes, but more carts were yet to come.

Rookie mistake number one was that we underestimated the amount of experience we needed to build — which lead to us announcing that we’d acquired the rights to the Dresden Files RPG well before we should have.  Late in 2004, we let it slip to the world, and launched the original form of this website.  The problem is, we didn’t really understand how much work lay ahead of us, and in fact grossly underestimated it.  So folks’ expectations started to build on assumptions that turned out to be years ahead of reality … and it was entirely our fault.

Rookie mistake number two was that we ran out and started getting art for the project.  We expected we’d want a fair amount of it, and figured that it would take quite some time to get it all, so getting that ball rolling early would make the most sense.  In hindsight, not so much; our art needs for the project have changed and evolved over time, and while we’ll still be able to use everything we acquired at the time, some of it is going to require some “creative re-imagining” to make it work exactly right.  Water under the bridge.  The upside of this, though, was that we got the chance to work with a wide variety of really talented artists, and quickly built the art direction part of our experience that was lacking.

Threaded through all of this early effort was an attempt on our part to learn what was involved in the publishing business.  A lot of what we learned scared us.  Tales of lost shirts abounded, and large negative dollar amounts (when we could find such specifics) weren’t uncommon.  Print on demand was starting to suggest some interesting thoughts, but was clearly structured for a much smaller printing effort than we anticipated for the Dresden Files RPG.  This left us with an abundant perception — rightly so — that it was easy to screw up your first publishing effort.  But more on that in a moment.

Still, we got what writing we were ready to do, done, bringing Genevieve Cogman the deceptively-simple task of summing up the world of the Dresden Files for the players.  We also  worked through our outline to try to grapple with what all needed to be in a “one-stop-shop” single-book presentation. Splat books just weren’t going to be our style.  And we read all of the novels and short stories we had access to, three or four times, wrapping our heads around what all was contained in the setting.

But we were also looking at our Fate system and running it through some paces to figure out what it could or couldn’t do to hit the right note with the Dresden Files RPG.  And soon enough we came to an uncomfortable conclusion: the system wasn’t ready for the job.  It lacked some of the moving parts necessary to really hit the world of the Dresden Files square between the eyes.  In short, it needed an industrial strength upgrade, to move from its then-current “2.0″ state to Fate 3.0 … whatever that was going to be.

We got to work, building on some early theories of what those changes to the system needed to be.  We got pretty deep into it too, sketching out a number of new system ideas, running a short-length local playtest campaign and a couple one-shots to kick the tires.  The problem, of course, was that the tires didn’t respond too well.  After a few patches and continued efforts to move forward, we had to admit to ourselves that the tires were just thoroughly shot.

It was an incredibly hard truth for us to face.  We were maybe a good year in, or close to it at that point.  We’d put a lot of effort into the system, pushed it pretty far, sunk a lot of effort into at least building a skeleton system for what the Dresden Files RPG could become … but it was crap, and we weren’t about to put out a crap game.  There was only one way to be sure.  We had to nuke it from orbit and start over.

So we did.

Round Two: Becoming a Publisher

Stress levels were high for us at this point.  Coming back from ground zero wasn’t easy.  We made several difficult steps forward, then a few back, over and again as we tried to get a new, fresh approach to things.  Here it really started to sink in that the project was bigger than us. For a while there, it was too much; Fred had to walk away from the project for a few months to get his head clear (and come to a realization that his day job with an internet company was adding far too much stress on top of the stress coming from the project — eventually, he quit that job to put his attention on Evil Hat full time).

At this point, we knew we needed help, and brought Leonard Balsera (“Lenny”) onto the team, a committed, creative fan from our burgeoning Fate community. Lenny challenged us to make Fate what it really wanted to be, and cleared out some blocked neural pathways for us, forcing us to sit down and write the game that was how we were running it at the table.

Around the same time, we realized that part of what had made Fate 2.0 a possibility was the support that the fans had given us.  But with the Dresden Files RPG, it just wasn’t possible to get the same kind of fan involvement due to the nature of developing a licensed game.  At least, not on the level we had once had.  But we wanted it — hell’s bells, we needed it.  But how to get that?

The answer came along soon enough.  Rob and Fred were both great lovers of pulp, and pulp adventure fiction had at least some similarities with the stories of the Dresden Files.  Combining this with our realization that we badly needed to get some publication experience that wouldn’t put the Dresden Files RPG itself in jeopardy at print time, we hatched the idea of publishing a separate game, one that got us a chance to showcase the new Fate 3.0 system, a sort of “big public beta-test” of the core concepts.  This would get our work out in front of the eyeballs of the community, and get us that element of community involvement we thought we’d otherwise be missing.

The project would be called Spirit of the Century.  It was going to be a side-project effort, a chance to field-test the system with dozens of players, and wasn’t going to require too much additional effort to produce.

Right.

The next year was spent building SOTC and getting it ready for publication.

But like many parts of this effort, SOTC turned out to be much bigger than expected.  Big enough that when Fred’s brain started shorting out from the effort, he recharged by running off and doing a genuine side-project, a horror game called Don’t Rest Your Head.  DRYH became Evil Hat’s first real publication, giving us a chance to dip a few toes into the strange waters of print on demand (POD) publication.  Bit by bit, we were easing our way in and learning the ropes.  It was a valuable first hands-on step toward learning the actual process of getting a book published.  Fred expected to sell perhaps 30 copies.  It sold a couple hundred faster than he could have imagined.

Half a year later, Spirit of the Century went into preorder, and the public got its first glimpses at the core of the system we were hoping was now ready to support everything the world of the Dresden Files could throw at it.  It took off like a shot, and to date, two years later it has sold over 3,000 copies in print and PDF.

Getting Here From There: Success is a Heavy Burden

But getting Spirit of the Century out into the world was much like birthing a kraken.

Rob had really put his back into the work, and the effort had burned his brain to a crisp.  He continued to work on the Dresden Files RPG, but pulled back a bit, for his own sanity and to allow for living his life a little more.  No matter his involvement going forward, his fingerprints were going to be all over the final product.  It was time to rest, with our blessing.

Fred meanwhile was all ascramble.  With the launch of DRYH and SOTC he had built valuable publishing experience that would be vital in getting the Dresden Files RPG to press … but with the surprise success of both titles, Evil Hat began to demand more and more of his time simply for the day-to-day running of things.

Ultimately the big burden of carrying the development of the game — the design of the system and writing of all the remaining setting material — had to fall on someone other than Rob and Fred.  Evil Hat had finally — in late 2006/early 2007 — become a publisher that could take a shot at getting the Dresden Files RPG made (those following along at home will note that this turned out to be over 2 years after the rookie mistake of announcing the rights  had happened) without screwing it up.  It was another realization that was hard to come by, and took a while for Rob and Fred to admit (in and around this time, Fred’s head spontaneously combusted from overexposure to his job in the internet industry; he quit, but Evil Hat was still eager to keep him busy).

Lenny was already on board from his help with the Spirit of the Century project, and took over the job of lead system developer in concept if not in name. (He has since been properly identified as our system guru; all hail Lord Balsera!)  Fred still did some work here and there, but his time continued to evaporate in service of Evil Hat (and, eventually, in service of his pocketbook; he had to take on some consulting jobs, since Evil Hat wasn’t paying him a thing for his efforts, by his choice and by necessity).  The transition wasn’t as smooth as it could be, but there was no rulebook to follow for this sort of thing.

Realizing that he wasn’t the equal of the remaining setting-writing, in Spring of 2007, Fred turned to friend and fellow RPG designer Chad Underkoffler, a man well distinguished for the depth of research he offered on games like Truth & Justice and the Zorcerer of Zo, both from his publishing imprint, Atomic Sock Monkey Press.  Chad was given the job of well and truly cataloguing everything we needed to know about the world of the Dresden Files and then turning that into rich, velvety setting chapters.  It took months of research and months of writing to get it all done, but ultimately Chad knocked it out of the park.

(We also picked up Amanda and Clark Valentine along the way here, around summer of 2007.  Long-standing friends of Jim Butcher, they had done some work in the RPG field for Margaret Weis Productions, and were ready and willing to help us out with our editing and writing efforts.  This was new territory for us — again! — and it took us a while to work out how to make best use of them.  But for the purposes of our story, this is a digression.)

With Chad’s help and work, Lenny was able to appreciate the full scope of magic in the Dresdenverse.  It was daunting.  Both Rob and Fred had taken previous runs at getting the spellcraft system done, and the effort always seemed to die at the 75% mark.  Something was missing.  Lenny got to work, and we all hoped the third time was the charm.

A lot of time and a few gallons of alcohol later, Lenny had something that was ready for testing.

The Year: 2008. The Activity: Playtesting.

The first phase of playtesting, called the “bleeding alpha”, started January 14th, 2008.  Playtesters were incrementally given pieces of the system text, as well as Chad’s setting work, and asked to do some “isolation testing”.  We also put forth the idea of an “anti-NDA” — we called it a disclosure pledge, and we asked our playtesters not to keep mum, but instead to share their efforts with the curious public.  And it worked!  After 3 years of development, the public got a real window into how the game was coming along, without it running through the filter of the publisher itself.

Due to timing and a little bit of Evil Hat’s ongoing entropy curse issues, the playtest ran a bit longer as spellcraft continued to need some hammering and adjustment.  The window got pushed out, and the Bleeding Alphas beat on the system hard, showing us that we did indeed have several big problems we needed to fix … though thankfully none even remotely as large as the ones that had lead us to nuke the first version of Fate 3.0 from orbit in times gone by.  We finally had our independent third party confirmation (aside from the enthusiastic play reports from folks playing Spirit of the Century) that we were on the right track.  Revisions were needed, and that was to be expected.

The bleeding alpha wrapped up around May to June, just in time for the Summer 2008 convention season to come along and completely eat our faces.  (Harry Dresden was right — there ARE invisible demons out there waiting to eat your face.  You’ve been warned.)  This was a big chance for everyone — Rob, Fred, Lenny, and Chad — to get out and meet the public wearing our Evil Hats.  But it also meant that with Fred on the road, the second round of alpha testing would have to wait, and with all four attending GenCon, the revision efforts would have a few delays.

But eventually we emerged and got the next alpha playtesting round, the Burning Alpha, started up.  Technically, we started the ball rolling before GenCon — around July 24th of 2008 or so — but delays due to the conventions were abundant.   Revisions took longer too, for many of the same reasons,  and much like the bleeding alpha did, the burning alpha stretched out as well, only concluding around the time of Thanksgiving.

The second alpha round told us we still had some more work to do on the core, but speaking in relative terms it was, again, not as bad as anything that had come before.  A period of refinement, reflection, and further revision lurked ahead, but one that promised to get our system to stop being a moving target, allowing some of the finishing effort of “stat-blocking” the various creatures and significant characters of the setting, as well as rounding out the remaining text.

And That’s Where We Are

Heading into 2009, the Dresden Files RPG project is moving into a quieter phase — call it the calm before the Storm Front.  While the alpha testing rounds allowed us to share our work with a wider audience (and then in turn have our wider audience share with the public), it’s time at this point for Evil Hat’s project team to turn its gaze inward, to focus more on the project and less on communication (communication, alas, takes up much more time than you’d think — but then, that’s the story of Fred’s distraction in a nutshell), and to get this sucker cranked out.

We are certainly still thinking about having a beta playtesting round, but we aren’t ready to say when that will be.  First and foremost we need to get this rough stone polished, and make it into the game it needs to be.

It’s been a long road, and there are still a few more miles to go.  But the things we’ve learned, the people we’ve met, the fans we’ve made — we’d trade none of that, absolutely none of it, to get this game done any faster.  In fact, when you add it all up, these are the reasons the game will be the best we can possibly make it be.

We also want to thank Jim Butcher for his continued support and understanding about the project taking as long as it has.  Plenty of other authors might have kicked us to the curb by this point, and it’s a credit to Jim that that’s never truly been a concern throughout our extended learning process.

Go thank the guy by buying a book of his.

There are a few we might recommend.

Looking for a current status? Check out the “status” tagged posts.