If his name sounds familiar to you, that’s because you play RPGs. You might have even heard about a little game he recently worked on titled Trail of Cthulhu.

Welcome aboard!

You can download the episode from this page:
http://thatshowweroll.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=336154

http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/343799.html

Reason #1: Takes a While for the Radiation to Calm Down

Back when we first got the license for the game, we had a completely different idea of where to take Fate 3.0, the system we’re basing the Dresden Files RPG on. We put together a local campaign or two, ran our ideas through the paces, and took a look at what the result was.

It was garbage. Seriously — this was not a game we were going to be proud of, and it wasn’t going to produce the kind of fun we wanted it to produce at the table.

So we nuked it all from orbit and started over.

This was a hard decision — hard on us because there was a lot of effort we had to toss, and hard on you, the fans, because it has pushed out the release of the game by, well, an awful lot. For this, we apologize, but we’d also like to ask for your trust here … we’re doing it to make a better game, the game we want, and hopefully, the game you will want.

As a part of this process, we also produced our game — which has turned out to be quite a success, including an Ennies nomination for Best Rules — called Spirit of the Century. This was the sort of fun we wanted at the table for the core system, Fate 3.0, and based on the feedback we’ve gotten from folks since that game was released nine months ago, we got it right. Since then we’ve been working on figuring out how to alter the Dresden Files RPG specific parts of the system to give us that feel of crazy danger permeating the novels.

It’s quite a ride. It’s quite a long ride, yes… but a good one, too.

Reason #2: We’re Frickin’ Cursed, Here!

Every time we’ve stated an actual release date for the game, we’ve missed it — by a lot. This has made us pretty paranoid about talking about release dates at all over here at Evil Hat. We don’t want the game to get hit by any more entropy curses than it already has. So we draw a circle of obscurity around the date! None shall pass!

Reason #3: You Can’t Predict What Playtesting Will Do

We’re hoping to start assembling “blind” playtest groups sometime (shortly?) after GenCon. Once that ball gets rolling, there’s no telling how long it’ll roll before we’ve gotten all we need to out of the process. And on top of that, there’s some writing yet to be done that simply can’t be done until the playtesting process is over. So in a very practical sense, there’s no way for us to conduct an “honest” playtest to the extent we think we need to and be able to state an honest release date at the same time. Each would cause the other to suffer.

On that playtesting note, we’ll be putting up an announcement here, on this blog hopefully within the next month outlining the playtest sign-up process. We’re likely to do the playtest thing in batches, selecting 2 to 4 groups at a time based on certain criteria (in signing up, there will be a questionnaire to answer) — things like play experience, familiarity with Spirit of the Century, group size, frequency of play, and so forth. We’re likely to want folks from both ends of any particular spectrum, at some point in the process — small groups and big groups, inexperienced and veteran, familiar and unfamiliar. Depending on the amount of response we get to the program (and based on the inquiries, I’m betting it won’t be small) we probably won’t be able to get everyone to playtest, but we do hope to make it a pretty sizeable endeavor.

But in the meantime, we’ve been running ragged over at Evil Hat to do the Summer Convention trifecta — Origins, DexCon, and GenCon — in support of our two current products, Spirit of the Century and Don’t Rest Your Head. Evil Hat Productions is a part of the Forge Booth, so you can drop on by at most times during GenCon’s four days, in the dealer’s hall near the “quiet area”, and look us up (when you get there just ask for the “Evil Hat guys” — most folks will be able to point you our way). We’ll also be attending the Ennies award ceremony Friday evening. As a fundraiser for the Ennies, they’ve put up a seat at our table for auction — so if you’re that particular kind of fanatic, and want to grill us about the Dresden Files RPG in person, consider placing a bid!

Hopefully this post has given folks a bit more of an insight into where we’re at with the game’s release date, and why the delays have been what they’ve been. We know it’s been a long time, and it’s going to be more time yet — but we think in the end y’all will be happy with what the time investment has done for us.

http://masterplan.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=205740

Come on over and join on in — or at least take the opportunity to peek at the skill list! http://www.jim-butcher.com/bb/index.php/topic,2029.0.html

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.

As you may know by now, the Dresden Files RPG will be using a system based on the core engine used in Evil Hat Productions’ other Fate project, Spirit of the Century — which is not to say it will be the same game as that.

Spirit of the Century was written with the goal of supporting cinematic, pulp-style action, where heroes can face down against a mob of ninjas without mussing their dinner jackets. Characters in Spirit can take a lot of punishment without injury — and that’s intentional. And weapons and armor are mere “color” trappings in Spirit. A gunshot poses no more risk than a fist; what matters more is who’s behind the attack.

But the Dresden Files operates on a different footing. Getting outnumbered in the Dresden-verse sucks (if you aren’t prepared for it). A gun is still something to be feared — Harry’s able to hold off an entire pack of Lycanthropes, at least for a time, with the threat of a single pistol. And there are plenty of things out there that, if they can lay their hands on you, can rip your face off in a hot second.

Given all this, it’s clear to us that we need to revisit our core ideas for how damage (called “stress” in Spirit of the Century) is handled in the Dresden Files RPG. In this article, I’ll talk about where we’re at with that, right now, and why we arrived there.

But is this the final form of it, that will see light in the published game? Possibly not — and you can be a part of that. Consider this an open “concept playtest” if you’re already familiar with Spirit of the Century, you’re on a good footing for giving the ideas we outline here a test in the laboratory of your own play (and in fact, owning a copy of Spirit will put you on a solid footing for any future ideas we decide to air on this blog, and playtesting in general).

So, enough for the setup. Let’s get on to the particulars!

The Basic Needs

Let’s look at the basics of what we need a damage system to support in order to give us the world of the Dresden Files as written by Jim:

• Fights, when they happen, hurt. It’s not that we want to avoid combat, but anyone who gets into a fight — whether it involves fists, knives, guns, or supernatural abilities — should expect to come out the other side bruised and bloody at minimum — and maybe even with a burned, crippled hand, psychological trauma, or something else equally nasty.

• It needs to allow for “amped up” lethality — if the Nasty Thing can get its hands on you. Harry would have been dead several times over if it wasn’t for some quick reflexes and an ensorcereled leather duster.
• Getting outnumbered stinks. A three on one fight sucks for the “one” in that equation. There’s no cinematic sensibility saying that you can fight off a dozen creatures all at once (unless you’re Michael Carpenter fighting a pack of Red Court vampires — but he’s an exception that we’ll back up with the supernatural powers stuff).
• Preparation can mitigate some of the nastiness here. If you have time to get up a shield, or come into a fight armored to the gills, you’ve got a better chance. Maybe not a greatly improved chance — but a better one all the same.

There’s more to it than that, sure, but that’s a pretty workable list at the outset. I’m not going to get into drawing the connecting lines between each of those bullet points and the implementation we currently have on deck, below — I leave that as an exercise for the reader — but I want you to look at this list and keep it in mind as you read about (and possibly use) the system I talk about below. In practice, it should hit all of those points, and more — but we’re going to keep kicking it around our lab (and maybe you will too, in yours) until we’re dead certain of it.

Back to the Challenge Track

In Spirit of the Century‘s free predecessor, Fate 2.0, we had something called the Challenge Track. But as we put together the pulp version of Fate 3.0 found in Spirit of the Century, we realized that it wasn’t a good fit for what we wanted to do. So the challenge track got set aside and, to some extent, forgotten.

Fast forward to today. While the effects of the Fate 2.0 challenge track don’t quite track as cleanly in the current implementation of Fate, the concepts (and physical layout) of the track definitely have some value for us. We can take the idea of the “stress track” (to use Spirit’s term) and divide it up into “tiers”, like the challenge track did in Fate 2.0. Then, we can combine all of that with the modern Fate 3.0 idea of consequences to produce something pretty exciting. Here’s what a standard stress track might look like smashed together with the Fate 2.0 concept of the challenge track:

Let’s break down the basics of how this would work in play:

• The numbers on the left hand side represent the range of shifts (stress) on an attack that should cause one (or more — see below) boxes to be checked off at that level (or “tier”).

• Each tier has a consequence level associated with it. When all the boxes on that tier fill upthe character takes a consequence of that level of severity.
• Later on, if stress hits a tier that is already full and has a consequence, then a single box on the next tier gets checked off instead, as “roll-over”.

At it’s core, that’s it. But the nice thing about this set-up is that there are a lot of ways to play around with its functions, to get a richly textured (but still pretty straightforward) system of toughness and lethality. So let’s get into that.

Getting Tough

Toughness in the Dresden Files really breaks down into three categories: mortal resilience, armor and basic protection, and supernatural invulnerability (or particularly impenetrable armor). Let’s briefly dig into each one of those.

Particularly tough mortals can take a lot of minor punishment — bruising, but if you shoot or stab them, they’ll still bleed pretty badly. Looking at the challenge track, this sounds like someone who gets several extra boxes at the “Mild” level — they can take a lot of minor punishment before it adds up to a setback (a consequence) — but leaves them just as vulnerable as the next guy when it comes to the nastier stuff in the Moderate and Severe tiers. Pretty simple. At supernatural extremes, this might even extend to the idea of the “Mild” level having unlimited boxes — never producing a Mild consequence, or at the least, never “rolling up” to something worse.

For basic protection — extra-thick hide, kevlar, and so on — there are two ways of looking at it. One is simple damage avoidance — invulnerability, in other words, so we’ll push the discussion of that off to the third category, below. The other form is damage mitigation. So let’s look at that: first off we have the basic idea of toughness as presented above — extra boxes. Certain types of protection might add boxes, then — though they might pad out things at a higher level, like Moderate and Severe, depending on their nature.

But let’s dig at this a bit, and look at, say, a kevlar vest. Conventional wisdom suggests that if you get shot in the chest while wearing kevlar, you’ll still feel it — and the next day, you’ll probably have some nasty bruises on your chest and an ache that won’t go away for a while. So we can conclude this: kevlar certainly doesn’t keep you from getting hurt — it just makes the hurt less nasty. So how would we produce that effect with our challenge track? Easy: change the range. Maybe a Kevlar vest changes the tiers from 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 to 1-3, 4-6, 7-8. While a 5-point hit might put a normal person into Severe consequence territory (“Bleeding From a Gunshot”), a kevlar-adjusted hit would take that down to Moderate (“Deep Bruises”). There we go.

We can combine the effects of these first two approaches to toughness and create, say, an Ogre-blooded changeling who can take a load of punishment that would drop a mortal in short order:

Finally, invulnerability. With invulnerability, we have the idea that the damage that lands could simply have no effect — not even progress towards a consequence. This sort of thing should be used pretty sparingly, but it definitely has its place in the world of the Dresden Files, so we need to support it.

Invulnerability would work pretty simply: after the “stress” value of a successful hit is determined, it would be reduced by a certain number (usually small). If this reduced the stress to zero or below, the hit would slide off of the target with no effect. Certain types of faerie folk, Denarians, Loup Garou and more have all shown signs of some extent of this over the course of the Dresden Files. (Nicodemus in particular has a crazy amount of invulnerability … unless you hit him in a specific weakness. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read Death Masks — one of my absolute favorites!)

Taken together, these provide us a nice amount of texture for “toughening up” the opposition (and the player characters, to at least some extent). We have several ways to make low and middle tier bad-guys tough, but not unbeatable, while allowing for top-class opponents like Cowl and Nicodemus to get cars and masonry dropped on them with only mild inconvenience.

Getting Deadly

The flipside of toughness, lethality, can be just as much fun — though from a design perspective, it can be pretty tricky. In general, I have a strong preference to use a fairly light touch with lethality in my Fate implementations, in part because I don’t want to throw effects into the game that are ruinous to fun. While a very tough opponent can certainly be a challenge to keep interesting and non-frustrating, few things can be less fun to a player than having his character dropped in a single blow.

But with the Dresden Files RPG, we’re also looking for some verisimilitude with the novels and real risk to life and limb. We’ve got to find a good middle-ground, where the fear of getting your arm torn off by a super-strong werewolf is enough to make you run, and the risk of a gunshot wound is bad enough to make a gang of lycanthropes think twice about jumping on you.

Looking at the stress track examples above, we have two clear paths to making something nastier: increasing stress on a successful hit, and increasing the number of boxes marked off when you hit. Both options are pretty nice on their own, but in combination, you can get some real depth (without a lot of complexity). Let’s look at what each technique offers us.

Increasing stress on a successful hit will “pump up” the potential nastiness of any consequences that result. Something that offers a +2 to damage on a hit will jump to the next nastier tier; using the default mortal stress track, a +2 pretty much means you’ll be skipping right past mild consequences and go straight into moderate or worse — feels like a good fit for a knife fight or gun-play. We could call this kind of boost potency or force, if we were coining terminology (this one’s hardly set in stone).

But using the default stress track, this method also doesn’t guarantee a consequence on a “fresh” target. With two boxes per tier, and consequences only happening if all the boxes on a tier fill up, you can hit someone for 5 and not produce a consequence.

Which brings us to our second technique — increasing the number of boxes that get checked off on a hit. Without “potency” involved, this simply accelerates the rate at which a hit will produce a consequence at the level at which it lands. So this technique seems to indicate the amount of trauma or wounding the attack represents: automatic gunfire (and gunfire in general), baseball bats, and so forth may be good candidates for this.

In combination the ideas of potency and trauma (curses! I cannot escape terminology!) work pretty well. And the fact that we can increase one, the other, or both gives us the ability to create some entertaining configurations for deadly things in the Dresden Files, whether they’re mundane weapons (Knife: +1 stress; Crowbar: 2 boxes; Pistol: +2 stress, 2 boxes) or supernatural abilities (Hands of Flame: 2 boxes; Ogre-Blooded Strength: +1 stress).

By the Numbers

So, at the beginning, we said that getting outnumbered stinks. Do we have that already, or do we need to do something about it? At present, I think the answer is that we have it already. Using a standard combat setup from Spirit of the Century — though probably without the minion rules in effect — the simple fact that each opponent in a three-on-one fight is going to get a whack at you, and possibly land a hit, eating up a box, is bad enough (much like the “trauma” concept from above, it’s a fast-track to Consequenceville). So, while we may feel the need to put in some additional rules to address the effects of numbers, for the moment I’m going to table this portion of the discussion and see how it shakes out in the lab.

Conclusion

So there you have it — the “State of the Hat” on the subject of toughness and lethality in the Dresden Files RPG. Combine it with your copy of Spirit of the Century and you’ll have a fairly robust (if occasionally brutal) damage system to spice up your fights. If you do decide to do just that and give these techniques a whirl, drop us a line — either by using the feedback widget or by leaving a comment on this blog post.

Stay tuned in later months as we dig into other sides of “Designing Dresden!” — and possibly revisit this very topic!

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.