While they’re doing me the favor of letting me post to this fine blog, I want to take the opportunity to shout out to our two big rounds of playtesters for the game. The bleeding alpha and the burning alpha both provided a large amount of thorough, mindful feedback and questions, to the point where I ended up not being as visible and conversant a presence to them as I’d have liked… because I was so damn busy fixing the game based on what they pointed out to me. My debt to them is immense.

To illustrate how vast their influence was, I want to tell you a story about thaumaturgy. (Storm Front spoilers ahead.)

If you’ve read the story we have posted here under the “Schedule” tab, you’ll know that for us, magic was a pretty tough nut to crack. For me, the real difficulty was in nailing down thaumaturgy – evocation is pretty much magical combat, and we know what combat has to look like in the Fate system, so that process was more one of refinement than creation. Thaumaturgy was a beast by comparison, mainly because of its sheer scope. It literally does everything else that evocation doesn’t do.

So my first approach was to cleave as literally to the novels as I possibly could – when in doubt, go back to the source, right? I spent hours and hours of time poring back over the stories, figuring out where boundaries were drawn, taking notes on what wizards did to make spells happen, etc etc ad nauseum. There’s a story about the first time I felt like I’d really figured it out on our That’s How We Roll podcast – if only I’d known then what I know now.

So I gave this thing to the playtesters, this detailed, technical piece of work about putting together rituals and assembling components and preparing your space right and so on and so forth…

…and they pretty much told me it sucked.

Maybe not in so many words, but the glut of confusion, hints of boredom, and other signs pointed to a pretty much universal opinion that what I had written was focused on entirely the wrong things. At that point, I was pretty much left with two choices – try and wedge what I had into something at least vaguely workable, or detonate the whole damn thing from orbit and do it over again.

I told you this was going to be a story about playtester influence. I did the latter.

What I discovered since then, and what has led to the system as it currently stands, is that at the end of the day, a spell is a story. The details aren’t there in order to illustrate pieces of a cosmic order, they’re there to show us what a wizard is willing to do in order to see his or her will manifested. The entire plot of Storm Front is partly based on Victor Sells preparing to do his killing magic again, and everything we see – the hollow husks he’s made out of the Beckitts and his own family, the spread of ThreeEye, the willingness to bargain with demons and take lives – these are all part of the story of one spell. (Granted, it’s a story he repeats a few times over since the ritual is cast more than once — but that all stitches together as a larger story of his descent into grief, madness, and death.)

That is what I realized I needed in the game.  Preparation for thaumaturgy is no longer a shopping list of crap you have to go through – it’s an opportunity for you to tell the story of the spell. It’s just as much you sitting in a library paging through arcane tomes as it is you going to the convenience store to get your knowledge spirit some skin mags so he’ll give you some choice incantations. Magic is the wizard’s life.

Without the playtesters, I’d never have seen that. They changed the entire direction of my work. It’s just one example of how they made this game better.

Violent conflict in the Dresden Files is almost always depicted as chaotic, intense, and dangerous. Harry often survives a battle only by inches and almost never escapes a fight without injury or consequence. Others in the series fare even worse. Without supernatural assistance (and even sometimes, with it), violence is not a thing to be engaged in lightly. If you’re familiar with our other game, Spirit of the Century, you know that player characters can be rather hard to take down. Coming into the Dresden Files RPG, it was clear from the get-go that some changes needed to be made in order to fit the mood of the books better. Here’s a short tour of some of the most important features that reinforce this mood:

Stress

Stress in the game is a measure of temporary harm that’s easily shaken off as soon as you have a moment to breathe – glancing blows, mounting exhaustion, scrapes and bruises, and so on. Most combat damage in the game is first dealt as stress. In Spirit of the Century, player characters had a default of five boxes of stress they could take, which could be raised by skills. In Dresden, they have a maximum of four boxes. This, combined with the fact that weapons (and supernatural powers like magic) do additional points of stress damage when they hit, means that it doesn’t take much for an armed attacker (or rampaging wizard) to give you a seriously bad day.

Consequences

Consequences represent lasting harm, things that you have to live with for a while before you recover from them. If you take too much stress, you can use consequences to “absorb” that stress for you, at the cost of having a more permanent injury to deal with. As stated above, it doesn’t often take long before you have to start using these, so like in the books, it’s pretty likely that a violent encounter will leave your character with bruised ribs, broken bones, and other unpleasant things. And compared to Spirit of the Century, they take a lot longer to recover from and deal with unless you have supernatural assistance. In fact, there’s a level of consequence that changes one of your character’s aspects – in essence, it’s a way in which conflict changes who you are on a fundamental level.

Concession

All this adds up to one inevitable conclusion – eventually, when you fight in this game, you’re going to go down hard. Harry has before and more than likely will again. But this kind of danger can’t be random, and it isn’t in the books – when Harry and his friends risk their lives, you know it’s because they’re willing to die to advance their cause.

To add another dimension to the notion of defeat, we’ve strongly upgraded the role of concession in the system. Basically, it goes like this: straight up losing a fight (aka being ‘taken out’) puts your character’s fate in your opponent’s hands. Period dot, end of story, do not pass go and collect $200. That means that if the opponent wants to kill you, taking you out gives them the authority to say they can do that. Concession lets you, at any point in the conflict before you’re taken out, volunteer to lose in exchange for being able to dictate (within reason) your character’s fate. So “killing you” can become “leaving you for dead by the side of the road”, and so on. And you still lose, which means you don’t get to stop the evil ritual, or save the hostage, or any of that. Sometimes, that can be just as bad as dying.

But it never comes down to “oh, this random die roll got me,” and wrangling things from there. When you put your character’s life on the line, like Harry and his friends, it will be a time when they’re good and ready to give up their life for something. The combination of absolute, terrible risk and dramatically appropriate outcomes reminds me strongly of the Dresden Files, and I hope it will remind you of them as well.

So what are you willing to die for? What price are you willing to pay?

Your adversaries await your answer.

While one of our goals for the Dresden Files RPG was to provide a comprehensive guide to the life and times of Harry Dresden and his friends (and believe me, given the size of our NPC — Who’s Who — and monsters — What Goes Bump — chapters, I think we pulled it off), it wasn’t the most important one for me. One of my biggest points of focus for the project was making sure that gaming groups had the space to make the world of the Dresden Files their own, without having to slavishly adhere to constraints set up by the books.

The first idea which supports that is our central conceit for the game itself – that it’s being written by Billy Borden of the Alphas in an effort to create a Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the 21st century. The information presented in it is the best he could do with the resources he had, but at the end of the day, it’s still just Billy’s best educated guess on the universe he lives in. Nothing guarantees that he’s 100% right about everything, and if you and your group decide that you see some things differently than he does – well, it’s your game, and what you say goes.

Our city creation system also gives you a large sense of ownership and control over setting, allowing you to choose a city and “Dresden” it up, investing it with characters and locations of your group’s choosing. You get to decide what the supernatural community is like in Denver, Las Vegas, Paris, Tokyo… wherever you want. You get to decide what the points of interest are. You get to decide what the themes and mood of the stories you’re going to tell in that city are going to be like. Include or ignore as much real history as you want. Know a lot about your city? Bring that detail into the game. Don’t? Make it up. What matters is that by the end, what your group creates will be your definitive stamp on the Dresden Files universe, your own niche of it to shape and carve.

Don’t want to go through all that work? No problem – we’ve included a sample city, Baltimore, completed as if it had gone through the city creation process, all ready for your characters to move in and make it a home.

And then, of course, there’s Chicago, the default setting of the books themselves. On the one hand, it’d seem that this would be the hardest thing for a gaming group to “own” – after all, a lot of the setting decisions seem to have been made in the books already, right? What if your group’s not interested in that?

Fortunately for you, the powers of erudition possessed by Kenneth Hite are here to help. Going beyond just the books, his chapter on Chicago is a veritable treasure trove of historical, geographical, and thematic tidbits – it’s essentially the research done for you, plenty of information for your group to use the city creation techniques, narrow down what matters, and apply that in your game, tweaking the city’s aspects and locations to fit. The Second City is a vast place, with room enough for campaigns about werewolves struggling through college, cops looking into the weird, and wizards struggling to keep the darkest of forces from hurting humanity. Your Chicago and Dresden’s Chicago may not have a whole lot of overlap when it’s all said and done, but it’ll be yours.

Finally, we provide advice, scattered about the book, on how certain setting deviations might be interesting. Here’s one, from the Who’s Who chapter, talking about how life could have gone differently for everyone’s favorite wiseacre wizard (spoilers ahead!)…

There are a number of times where Harry Dresden could have made a different choice (or suffered a different fate), which would have changed the overall nature of the Dresdenverse. If you don’t like Harry Dresden as the hero portrayed in his case files, make him a villain — or at least an anti-hero.

Here are some suggestions for “alternate Harrys”:

• Pre-Storm Front: Harry (and Elaine) are Justin DuMorne’s thralls; Harry is DuMorne’s enforcer.
• Storm Front: Mr. Dresden, Supernatural Security Consultant to “Gentleman Johnnie” Marcone.
• Fool Moon: Harry the Hexenwolf (he keeps the belt he stole).
• Grave Peril: Count Harry of the Red Court (infected by Bianca or Susan).
• Summer Knight: Winter Knight Harry (he accepts Mab’s offer).
• Death Masks: Harry Denarian (he accepts Lasciel’s coin); there are two chances for this.
• Blood Rites: Harry Dresden-Raith, husband to Lara Raith (basically Lara’s sex-slave or thrall).
• Dead Beat: Harry Demigod (he consumes the Vortex rather than Cowl).
• Proven Guilty: Winter Knight Harry or Harry Denarian.
• White Night: Harry Dresden-Raith or Harry Denarian.
• Small Favor: Winter Knight Harry or Harry Denarian (though this latter one is very tenuous). Slightly more likely is Harry taking up Nicodemus’ offer of support, since they seem to have common enemies.

The three most likely options for an alternate Harrys are Winter Knight Harry, Harry Denarian, or “the thrall of Lara Raith”. Of those, “marrying” Lara is possibly the biggest stretch, and accepting Lasciel’s full power, the least.

Which says something about Harry, doesn’t it?