Here’s the Baltimore chapter from The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story. All 39 pages of it: PDF Download (Approx 13MB) — you can save us a little bandwidth by downloading it from DriveThruRPG instead!

What story will you tell on the streets of Charm City?

For those who haven’t been a part of our alpha runs, you might not be familiar with one of the big design elements in DFRPG: mortal stunts & supernatural stunts. If you know Spirit of the Century, then you know stunts – those are pretty much what we think of as “mortal stunts” around these parts. And all those wicked awesome creature & wizard abilities are, of course, “supernatural stunts” (which we sometimes shorten to “powers”).

I mention that to say this: Lenny & I spent a couple weeks going over every single supernatural stunt, taking in alpha tester feedback and further observations, and tweaking the language to make it clearer and to consider some unexpected combinations of powers. Some of them were little things, but there were a couple that unexpectedly turned into multi-day conversations – the Toughness stunts started as a “eh, this’ll be quick, we’ll slam it out of the park” ideas that turned into a four-day conversation between Fred, Lenny & myself about how the various limiting factors (or “catches”) should work.

We’re pretty happy with the changes there, but it has eaten up more time than we expected. Along with that, Lenny & I have worked out applying Adam’s redlines on the Spellcraft chapter and working up text on “Sponsored Magic” – how the rules work when the magic you’re wielding comes from another power, like, say, the Summer or Winter Queen.

But, there’s a lot more to this project than just what Lenny & I have been working on!

Awesomeness incarnate, thy name is Clark Valentine. He handed us the Baltimore chapter – which is essentially an application of the City Creation chapter as a playable-out-of-the-box example. Now, I’ll be honest, the idea of playing in Chicago sounds fun, but I prefer to play in places that I could make my own. And I really want to play in Clark’s Baltimore. What he’s made is a fantastic, unstable web of politics and seething inhumanity that’s just ready to boil over, and he’s practically provided you with a dozen PC hooks into it (including just taking characters from the write-up, which is a City Creation method I particularly like). We’re not quite ready to leak anything from Baltimore, but I’m looking forward to when we can!

Our crack editing team of Amanda & Adam haven’t has as much work as we’d like them to have, mainly because Lenny & I have a lot on our plate to get pushed back to editing. But Lenny & Clark aren’t the only writers here! We’ve received the Chicago chapter from Kenneth Hite, and Amanda is going through that right now. I can’t tell you how eager I am to start going through it myself, though I have to get my own work done before I do.

I think that leaves us with what I like to call the Relentless March of Statblocking. Fred & Clark have been working hard stating up all the supernatural critters using our adjustments from supernatural stunts. If you’ve been following Fred on Twitter, you’ll see him talking about stat-blocking quite a bit. I know that I get excited every time, since every single one gets us closer to the goal: getting you a brilliant (and more importantly, finished!) book.

You know what? I’ve been geeking out over all this, and it’s probably hard to geek with me when I’m talking in shotgun updates. So, let’s share with you all what’s been exciting me. Here’s some of that sweet, sweet Fred statblocking action I mentioned:

He Who Walks Behind

Description: Whole appearance unknown, though he is said to have an inhuman face—and spines.

What We Know: AKA The Hunter of the Shadows, Lord of Slowest Terror.

Long considered by Harry Dresden just to be a major-league hunter demon or spectral hit man sent to kill him by Justin DuMorne, it turns out that He Who Walks Behind is the most powerful of all of the Walkers.

He Who Walks Behind has an “anti-sound” scream—a noise that absorbs other noises.

He sponsored the Evil Eye Franchise’s ritual entropy curse targeting Arturo Genosa’s female associates and can apparently possess mortal corpses for at least a short time.

Powers: He Who Walks Behind’s abilities include (as far as we can discern) tons of supernatural strength and toughness, can track nearly anything anywhere, can possess people once summoned, might be able to turn into a gaseous cloud, is covered in spines, can emit an “anti-scream” that eats sound, and can even be called upon to empower rituals without fully entering into our world. Except for evidence that it’s been beaten before, this creature looks to be practically undefeatable.

Weaknesses: Since He Who Walks Behind is the Lord of the Slowest Terror, it’s possible that his normal speed is slower than even a mortal’s usual top speed—this would indeed make He Who Walks Behind glacially slow compared to most other supernatural entities, but still fast enough to walk up to you and kill you proper.

HARRY: That’s highly speculative, Billy. I couldn’t say if you’re right one way or the other.

Harry Dresden somehow managed to kill its temporary shell for a time. It apparently took quite a few years for He Who Walks Behind to regenerate a shell, or perhaps just to regain access to the mortal world again.

Otherwise, as per other Outsiders.

BILLY: What can you tell us about this thing’s powers, Harry? Am I on the right track?

HARRY: You’re in the ballpark, at least. But honestly? I was young and desperate—I didn’t really stop to take an inventory.

For all I know He could have just been toying with me and I surprised him.

BILLY: Got it. I’ll write this thing up as essentially unbeatable.

High Concept: Outsider Assassin

Other Aspects: He Who Walks Behind; Lord of the Slowest Terror

Skills

Discipline: Great

Fists: Superb

Endurance: Great

Intimidation: Superb

Stealth: Great

Most other skills default to Good.

Powers

Claws [-1] (Spines)

Domination (Possession) [-5]

Gaseous Form [-3]

Supernatural Sense (Senses) [-2] May “impossibly” track its prey, assuming it has access to a fresh ritual component from its target—fresh blood or hair, its True Name, etc…

Supernatural Strength [-4]

Supernatural Toughness [-4]

Supernatural Recovery [-4]

The Catch [+2] is a weakness to holy items and expressions of genuine faith

Physical Immunity [-8] (speculative!)

The Catch (Stacked) [+0] is … honestly, I don’t know. Swords of the Cross and Harry Dresden have managed to get past it, but we’ve got no idea what else could.

Zone of Silence [-1] (see below)

Stress

Mental oooo Physical oooo(oooo) Social oooo

Zone of Silence: He Who Walks behind may emit an “anti-scream” placing a “Silenced” aspect on a zone that prevents any sound from being heard within. Each creature in the zone may get a “free tag” on the aspect, once per scene, when making a Stealth roll. The zone dissipates at He Who’s whim, or when He Who exits the zone in question.

(rest of effects summary follows)

Total Refresh Cost: -30

HARRY: I am in so much trouble.

So, I think my next status update is around early March. But if you want to talk with me about the project, I’ll be around at OrcCon in LA & Dreamation in NJ next month. Free free to come up and chat!

- Ryan

There’s something about that image that makes me say, yeah, that’s the Baltimore where I set my scene. And I also ask: so, in the Dresden universe, what’s the story behind it? What caused the fire? Is it covering something up? Is it the sign of a supernatural presence, or a well-known wizard? Who’s going to be investigating it, and what sort of thing is that going to draw them into?

Just yet, I’m not posting my own answers here, because I don’t want ‘em. Games for me are about the surprises in discovering what someone else has thought of. What does this image say to you? How would you answer my questions?

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.

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)