Designing Dresden 2 – Hitting the Books
Warning, this is more about process than the specifics of the game.
So, my knowledge of Baltimore at the start of this process was pretty limited. I’d driven around the city some, and I knew that you had crazy stuff like Poe’s grave, and Anthony Bourdain’s magnificently dismissive description of Baltimore. Beyond that I had a few jokes (Driving in Baltimore, you can end up in two places: The harbor, or dead). As such, I had a big challenge in front of me: what in god’s name do I need to do?
Stepping back, I thought a bit about what I would want out of the final write up. A bit of history, sure, but interesting history, which is to say, history that I could draw plot seeds from. The major imports of the late 18th century just aren’t going to be useful to know unless there’s a plot seed somewhere in them. So that means that no, this is not an opportunity to write a treatise on trade in the age of sail.
Similarly, I want a map, but I don’t want a gaming map. A pretty map of streets with a numeric key of interesting locations is almost entirely useless to me as a GM. The city is not a dungeon, and I don’t really want to be dealing with player’s making turn-by-turn navigation decisions within the city. I need to know enough about the geography of the city to know the general flow of things. Beyond that, I want a linguistic map of the city. I want a map that reflects how people describe the city, which means a map of neighborhoods and important streets.
Similar to history, I also want to dig up folklore and ghost stories. Every area in the world has its own stories, from colonial stories about witches to modern urban legends.
Trappings of flavor are also important to get. From humor to dialect to media portrayal, this is going to have more signal to noise than history, but it will serve much the same purpose. There’s a temptation to grab every quirky nugget of trivia and offer it up as local color, but that needs to be strictly curtailed.
Lastly, I want to find a theme. This last is an interesting challenge, and once I won’t really be able to address until I’ve looked at the first three needs, but it’s going to be very important, because it answers the question that “Stories in Baltimore are usually going to be about….” This isn’t something to lock ourselves into anything, but it helps provide a reason that the city is Baltimore and not someplace else.
To give an example, if we were writing about DC, the theme would be power, plain and simple. Why? Because that’s what DC is all about – it’s where the thousand most powerful people in America do their business. It’s the place where all other currencies; money, information, sex and more, get cashed in for the real stuff – power. As a GM, this is like candy for me. Power struggles, questions of real vs. illusionary power, where real power comes from, the responsibilities of power – all these ideas are rich with potential game ideas, all drawn from a fairly simple theme.
I want to find something similar for Baltimore, and I have a few ideas, but we’ll see what research brings up.
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