The Dresden Files RPG

Those of you following us on Twitter may have already seen the link to playtester Rick Neal’s overview of the contents of the two books.  If you haven’t read Rick’s recent blog posts, you should; he’s spilling lots of juicy details, and doing it well enough that we won’t repeat them here.

That said, we’re still seeing some questions about the physical particulars of the books, and we thought it’d be a good idea to give you a quick breakdown of the composition of each book. This overlaps with Rick a fair amount, but not entirely.

So, here are the facts we can tell you about the books:

Each book will be hardcover, full color, 8.5″x11″ in size. You will be getting a “standard” sized product here, not something in a “digest” format like Spirit of the Century.

We don’t have a price point on these yet, though you can make some strong educated guesses by looking at similarly-sized full color hardcover RPG books on the market. We will be doing our best to price these as competitively as we can manage while still making a small profit (handful of dollars) per sale.

Book 1 is titled The Dresden Files RPG, Volume 1: Your Story.  Our current page count estimate on this is about 416 pages. If that number grows it’ll be by 16 pages at most.

Book 2 is titled The Dresden Files RPG, Volume 2: Our World.  Our current page count estimate on this is about 272 pages. If that number grows it’ll be by 16 pages at most.

You will get all of the system you need in book 1, but you’ll be missing tons of useful examples taken from the setting without the second book, so we don’t consider the game to be complete without both books.

You will get most of the setting you want in book 2, but there’s some character-centric setting information — particularly about magic and the like — in the first book, so as you might expect us to say, we don’t consider the setting to be complete without both books.

The preorder will start in April at the earliest, by late June at the latest. The preorder itself will likely orient on selling only the two-book set, rather than each book individually, but once we’re past the preorder and are actually shipping the game you’ll be able to buy each one individually.  As with (nearly) all Evil Hat Productions preorders, you’ll get the PDF right away at no extra cost when you place your preorder.  We very likely won’t sell the PDF as a solo product until after the physical product starts shipping.  (This is a business concern for us: motivating people to preorder the physical books is in our best interests, as it will speed up the rate at which we can recover the high cost of our print run. Thanking our preorderers with free and instant PDF access is our best way to do this. It also gives us a larger time buffer to figure out how best to price and package the standalone PDF product.)

Your Story breaks down as follows by approximate page count:

Chapter 1: Harry’s World - Quick primer on the setting for players. 6 pages.
Chapter 2: The Basics - Quick overview of rules concepts. 8 pages.
Chapter 3: City Creation - Guidelines for collaboratively creating the city where you set your game. 28 pages.
Chapter 4: Character Creation - What it says on the tin. 20 pages.
Chapter 5: Types & Templates - Goes over the kinds of characters you can play and gives recipes for building them. 16 pages.
Chapter 6: Advancement - Covers advancement for characters and also for cities. 10 pages.
Chapter 7: Aspects - Everything you need to know about aspects. 22 pages.
Chapter 8: Skills - Everything you need to know about skills. 26 pages.
Chapter 9: Mortal Stunts – Special abilities that aren’t supernatural powers. 12 pages.
Chapter 10: Supernatural Powers - Special abilities that are supernatural powers. 36 pages.
Chapter 11: Playing The Game - Rules for playing the game: combat, recovery, etc. 30 pages.
Chapter 12: Living With Magic - Setting & system information about magic that isn’t spellcasting itself: wizard biology, hexing, the laws of magic, etc. 26 pages.
Chapter 13: Spellcasting - Handling all elements and styles of spellcasting in the system, plus examples. 58 pages.
Chapter 14: Running The Game - System-oriented GM advice. 34 pages.
Chapter 15: Building Scenarios - How to create scenarios for play by paying attention to your city and your characters. 18 pages.
Chapter 16: Nevermore/Baltimore - Sample campaign setting. 40 pages.

Our World breaks down as follows by approximate page count:

Chapter 1: Old World Order - The politics and factions of the Dresdenverse. ~14 pages.
Chapter 2: What Goes Bump - The monsters of the Dresdenverse. ~70 pages.
Chapter 3: Who’s Who - Comprehensive character guide to the Dresdenverse. ~146 pages.
Chapter 4: Occult Chicago - Kenneth Hite talks about the real world occult background of Chicago. ~20 pages

We’re hoping to get a (very) short story from Jim Butcher for Our World, but that’s still getting worked out.

General product info, status

Howdy again, Dresdenketeers!

(Why, yes, I have been drinking a lot of coffee today, why do you ask?)

Those of you following us on Twitter or read some blog & forum posts on the internet might have heard that I’ve been running Dresden at little cons. Fred thought it would be neat to start this status update by talking about that…since we’ve gotten to a point where we’re actually doing some convention previews of the book! That’s a pretty good status, right?

The game I ran (once at a house con outside of Minneapolis/St. Paul, and once at an Endgame Oakland mini-con) featured a group inspired by the Alphas and all going to college together. There were three werewolves, one were-wolverine, one were-raven, and a changeling. The characters that I provided were half-finished, intended to make the party (and, really, the adventure) at the table. I pitched the six core ideas around, and when they were picked I handed them a piece of paper with half of the character figured out.

Setting is a little tricky at a con game. I didn’t want to set a game in Chicago, because that’s Harry’s stomping grounds and there’s so much from the books there. I wanted a place were people could explore a little more without feeling weird about this being Harry’s Chicago. (And yes, we talk about this in our own Chicago chapter, which is your Chicago, not Harry’s.) Of course, you never know what city people are familiar with, so I asked if everyone was at least passingly familiar with Sunnydale from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. So far, I’ve yet to meet someone I’ve asked that of who has said no. Bam, everyone has a basic idea of where this werepack goes to school.

Luckily, Dresden Files characters are pretty easy to pitch. Each one has a pair of aspects, a High Concept and a Trouble. (If you’re not familiar with Fate, aspects are descriptors that you can use to boost yourself and the GM can use to make your character’s life more interesting.) So, I just went around telling them these two descriptors and said “from there, it’s pretty much however you see a character with those two things.”

I pitched:

• The Leader of the Pack, who has to deal with a Hero Complex
• A Romantic Werewolf, struggling to keep up with Living a Double Nightlife
• Our Werewolf Nerd, dealing with A 22-Unit Load? Really?
• The Goth Were-Raven, who is Deliciously Deviant
• Our fifth member has a Spirit Like a Wolverine, but he’s also on Academic Probation
• Finally, we have a Hippy Changeling, who often says “My family is…complicated.”

Each one had their stunts & powers figured out in advance, as well as the top few skills. But nearly every convention game of Fate I’ve run where some of the character creation happened at the table has been fantastic, so they came up with various antics and issues they’ve dealt with while at UC Sunnydale. That took around an hour of the four alloted, but there was a lot of fun at during that time, and not-so-secretly it’s how I figure out what’s actually interesting for the adventure.

See, as they’re coming up with different aspects and creating the backstory between them, I’m listening for interesting NPCs that could be either peril-bait or potential nemeses. I have a bit of an adventure skeleton, but it’s pretty malleable because I want the players to go after stuff they said their characters are interested in. I don’t want to go into great detail here, because I want to use this adventure structure in future con games, but the beginning of it:

• Someone at least two people are interested in (friend/lover/etc) disappears. Another person that other people are particularly interested in was assaulted in the attack, but escapes to tell the gang.
• There is evidence of at least one nemesis’ involvement that leads to a dangerous night club. Typically this leads to either the first fight or first stare-down of the game.
• The next lead happens, implicating at least another nemesis is in league. Conspiracy!

With that sort of structure, I’m able to pull the players into peril! You’ll read more about how to build great set-ups in our Building Scenarios chapter, where we talk about tying aspects together to make games pop for characters.

But, enough about this con game. There’s something bigger to talk about!

By bigger, we mean the Dresden Files RPG books. Yes, books. We have so much content that we’re splitting the game into two books. We’ve talked about this a bit online, mainly through Fred’s Twitter, but for those who haven’t heard, here’s the deal: We wrote a lot. A LOT. We really wanted to support the Dresden Files as strongly as we could. It should be no surprise that a game we’ve spend this long making is going to be big. The thing is jam-packed with great rules for making your campaign & playing all sorts of different beasts and badasses from the Dresdenverse, supported by loads of advice for players & GMs as well as a lot of characters and creatures from the books statted out. (To give you an idea of what we mean by A LOT, Fred got to about the 75% mark on the first pass through layout and saw he already had 460 pages of material.  The final combined page count of the two books together could break 600. Over 140 pages of that is our comprehensive tour of the characters of the first ten novels, complete with stats where they’re stattable.)

We’ll talk more about how we’re splitting the book and get into some detail next month. But no status update from me is complete without getting a little peek at what’s to come. Without further delay, I present to you one Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden — as of around the end of Storm Front.

Download Harry Dresden’s Character Sheet (PDF)

Seriously, seeing Fred’s work on this has made me want to play as Harry. So, who’s going to run this for me?

- Ryan

General status

It’s Harry’s Birthday

Harry Dresden was born on a Halloween, so we thought it would be fitting to birth a special announcement of our own: having wrapped up our “text completion” goal at the end of this month (today!), we have settled on a target date for publication–Origins, 2010 (June 23-27, 2010).

Now, we’re calling this a target date rather than a definite publication date for a reason: you can miss a target, and given our historical curse with missing stated dates, there’s a chance that’ll happen here (more on that in a moment).  That said, if we can pull it off in any conceivable way, we will at least run an instant content preorder at Origins.

What’s an Instant Content Preorder?

The instant content preorder concept, which we piloted at Endgame out in Oakland, CA (one of the best game stores in the nation), is a pretty simple one: you plunk down the money in advance for your copy of the game, and you get the PDF of the game right away, usually on CD.  There’s no extra charge for the PDF–this is simply a way to make sure that the customer gets to walk away with something tangible and immediately useful when placing a preorder.  This worked so well for Evil Hat via Endgame that we suggested it as a battle-plan for Hero Games when it turned out they wouldn’t have Hero System 6th Edition in physical form in time for GenCon this past year.  So they ran with it– and it was a smashing success, with them selling 220 (or so) copies at the show despite having only 200 CDs on hand.  At Evil Hat we really like the combination of print and PDF products, and we figure this sort of preorder makes the most of its possibilities, commercially and for our fans.

Hard Target

We’ve picked Origins because it’s one of the first conventions of the summer gaming convention season, and it’s big, and we like going to it.  Strategically, mostly that first thing; if we miss the target of having physical copies at Origins, there’s still a chance of being able to bring the physical thing to a few other game conventions later in the summer, especially if they’re conventions that Indie Press Revolution establishes a presence at, since they carry our stuff and use the same warehouse service we do.

This all brings up the question: what stands between here and the target, and why do we still consider it hard to pin down?

First off, just because we’ve completed the text doesn’t mean the text is done with the editing and revision process. We’ve got the next two months blocked out for what we call “final vetting” (both copy-editing and reading over for consistency), which may cause some members of the team to vanish from public view in fits and bursts.  That gets us to the beginning of 2010.

We’re hoping to get some additional involvement from Jim Butcher as well, but– here’s our scheduling curse in action– we’ve managed to hit this point in our process just as Jim is set to be his busiest ever, continuing his work on Dresden #12, Changes (beware spoilers), and then heading straight into some work to get an anthology of Dresden Files short stories put together.  So we’ve got to put some amorphous padding in our timeline to allow for the possibility of getting some Dresden Files RPG unique content from the man himself.  That might not happen anyway, but if it doesn’t we figure folks will still have plenty of Harry Dresden goodness to console them– both from Jim and from us.

Even outside of that, 2010’s timeline can be pretty hairy.  Let’s take Hero Games’ release of their Sixth Edition product as an example: the book was already in the process of being printed in August, when they ran their preorder at GenCon. So folks got the books just a couple weeks later, right? Wrong– those books have just started shipping this past week.  And all of that was based in the time it took the printer to get the books printed, and the books shipped over and through customs.  And more to the point, this is not unusual at all, so that’s a highly unpredictable several months variable in our schedule.

There’s also plenty that has to do after the text exits the editing and approval stages that will be eating the rest of 2009 and the earliest parts of 2010.  There’s money wrangling, settling on the right printer for the job, and before all that, there’s several months of book design and layout, not to mention some additional art acquisition that will need to be done.

Add all of this up, and even with us being as far along as we are today, on Halloween 2009, we’re still looking at a big chunk of time.  There might be just enough slack in it that we’ll be able to pull off a late June target, but there’s far and away no guarantee. (On the other hand, this is also the first time since our decision to stop announcing dates that we’re willing to, well, announce a date!)

But It’s Still Time For Candy After All

So that’s the trick, but we still think that being able to announce our target date publicly is a pretty good treat.  We’re going to be busy as heck in the coming months, but we’re finally seeing daylight at the end of that long tunnel, and it’s gotten us energized like never before.

In the meantime, we’re going to continue to give y’all biweekly peeks into the game’s content, just like we did with Laws of Magic, Character Types, Harry’s World, and now Old World Order.

And this is far from the last time we’ll be posting explicitly (and at length!) about how well the game is doing and how good our aim at that target is looking to be.  We love to run Evil Hat as transparently as we can, and we’ve got no reason to stop doing that now!

That said, there is something you can do to help make this a success: be noisy about your interest!  Tweet, blog, facebook, or whatever else you like to get the word out.  The less time we have to concentrate on doing that, ourselves, is the more we have to focus our attention on getting the actual thing published. And keep talking with us here, on this site in the comments, or over on the RPG forum at Jim Butcher’s boards.  Our fans are what keep us going in more ways than one!

A Note to the Media

Finally, if you have a podcast or blog and would like to interview us about the project, we’d love to talk with you! Email Ryan Macklin, Lead Project Developer, at ryanmacklin@gmail.com, and he’ll be happy to put you in touch with the team.

General schedule, status

Howdy, folks! It’s Ryan again, doing another status update.

Man, we here at Team Dresden have had a really busy couple of months! Fred & his lovely wife had their first kid, and his duties with Hero Games increased when he was promoted to Art Director. And between moving and having his improv troupe starting to do regular shows for the public, Lenny’s has quite a busy couple of months! Clark & Amanda have been swamped, between work and having their kids out of school. Even I’ve been busy, traveling around as the summer convention season is upon us. We’ve all been crazy busy.

Oh, wait, you mean about the game? Suffice it to say, the usual Summer Curse is upon us — in which much happens, but little of it is progress.

Not that there isn’t progress to talk about. Clark has been a machine in cranking out stat blocks for our Who’s Who chapter — characters from the Dresdenverse. Not a small task when you have to come up with half a dozen aspects for characters. The Magic chapter has been back and forth between editing and rewriting. And we’re starting to get back up to speed, so that we’re ready to jump back in full force after GenCon.

Speaking of GenCon, now seems like a good time to talk about Evil Hat’s presence at GenCon this year. With Fred & Rob having made little gamers this year, they won’t be going, and sadly neither will Lenny. I’ll be there, doing the same crazy experiment I did last year: a twice-daily podcast from the show called This Just In…From GenCon! It’s a live studio show, so if you want to talk to me a bit about how Dresden’s going or anything like that, you can find me in the Westin Hotel, Caucus Room.

While much of Evil Hat won’t be at GenCon, our products are being well represented there! I’m talking about the ENnie Awards. Fred talked a bit about it on his blog, which you can find here: http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/449928.html You’ll also be able to pick up Evil Hat’s games at the Indie Press Revolution booth.

We’re up for various awards for the haunting Don’t Lose Your Mind and fantastic Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies. And I’m up for an award for Best Podcast, for The Voice of the Revolution. It’s an exciting year for Evil Hat, and we’re hoping that — with your support — we’ll get another chance at taking home an ENnie.

Finally, every update I get to share with you something neat about the project. This time, I wanted to share something that amused me when I saw it in the back of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies. Fred did up a new Dresden Files RPG ad for the book, and…well, see for yourself.

I couldn’t help but let out a big guffaw when I saw that. I hope you couldn’t, either.

Anyway, that’s all for this month! Next time I update will be sometime on the other side of GenCon, when we’ve got the machine that is Team Dresden back up to full speed!

- Ryan

General status

Wow, time passes when your nose is to the grindstone.

It’s Ryan again, posting up another project update. Everyone on the project is pretty hard at work, and while it’s hardly exciting to type “so, we’re still working!” it is exciting to be in that state. Fred’s been tweeting about working on the magic & spellcraft chapter, and Lenny & I have been pushing to revise the various chapters, incorporating playtester feedback. Amanda & Adam have been taking the drafts and working on them as fast as we can get them out. Overall, we’re working like a well-oiled machine.

Read more…

General art, jennifer rodgers, status

Hi, it’s Ryan again. It’s been a few weeks since the last update, so it’s time to give you the Dresden Files RPG skinny!

The last update was pretty lengthy, since I had all sorts of news to share. This one will be shorter, but not because we’re lying down on the job! Indeed, we’re hard at work going through the revision process on most of the chapters – particularly the basics, like Aspects & Skills. A lot of the text was inherited from Spirit of the Century, so we’ve been going through and fix any inaccuracies that came up in tweaking FATE for the Dresden Files. Combine that with our editors hard at work going through the drafts we give them, and there’s a lot of work going on but not a lot to blog about.

Still, I have a couple neat points. One is that going back through chapters like Aspects has given us a neat opportunity. Often, we’ll get on the FATE mailing list or on various forums about how aspects work, such as if you can, as a player, compel an NPC’s aspect (which, by the way, you effectively can – check out “To Catch a King (Tagging for Effect)” on p. 42 of Spirit of the Century). Given the last couple years of experience in answering these questions, we’re going through the text to see how we could better present these options to players, focusing in part on making sure the terminology makes sense in the face of three years of public “playtesting”.

Lenny’s looking forward to talk about such things on the site in the future, though probably not often – we want him working on the book first and blogging second!

The other is that I got a chance at Dreamation to sit down with Jennifer Rodgers. She shared with me some pieces that are still in progress, and I have to say I’m always stunned by her work. But rather than tell you, let me show you one:

Read more…

General art, jennifer rodgers, lenny, status, system

Hey, everyone! Ryan here. As promised, we’ve got some updates on the progress of The Dresden Files RPG to share with you all.

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!

Read more…

General baltimore, chicago, ken, lenny, playtest, setting, status, system