So, just to get this out there right off the bat: there is no perpetual mojo machine in the Dresden Files for mortals. Hence, there are no wizards who function as magical item factories.

Items take energy, like all magic does. Magical energy fades. Hence, most items require periodic “maintenance”, as in, the routine infusion of energy from some source. Items like the Swords of the Cross (and most other items of power) don’t count against this limitation, because their mojo is provided by the Almighty, who has, from a mortal perspective, basically unlimited mojo. Humans aren’t so lucky, at least not as individuals.

The limited slots thing is a direct result of not wanting to make that maintenance boring and mechanistic, by deciding instead that there’s only so much slots’ worth of stuff the wizard could be maintaining simultaneously.

(That means Luccio probably has a *lot* of Refinement going just to Item Slots, or the wizard character has assumed the cost another way by taking it as an item of power.)

However….

There is a way to make a specialist wizard who can provide items to his friends (aka the PC group) on a regular basis. Consider the following build:

• A wizard who devotes all his starting Item Slots from both Thaum and Evo into Enchanted Items will have eight (!) Enchanted Item Slots, because Focus Item Slots trade into them at a rate of 1:2.
• Every point of Refinement could potentially net you four more (!) Enchanted Item Slots.
• If you max out Lore at character creation (probably meaning Superb), every enchanted item you craft will automatically be able to bring an effect strength of 5 shifts. Five. Shifts.
• All it costs you is one point of item strength to make enchanted stuff for other people (p. 279). It still takes your slot, yes, but others can use it. So, your friends can use magic items with an automatic effect strength of four shifts. That’s enough for Great (+4) block or Armor:2 defensive items right out of the gate.
• I’m not even counting bonuses from Crafting thaumaturgy specialization.

You’ll probably note that this means the wizard has no focus items, so he’ll be doing his evocations routinely at skill level. That’s the price he pays for the awesome I just laid out above. On the other hand, he’s basically the localized magical equivalent of James Bond’s Q Branch and Batman, with the potential for sixteen (!) Enchanted Item Slots (Wizard stuff + 2 refresh sunk into Refinement) in a Submerged-level game.

Whuf.

Have you seen (or published) a text, audio, or video review of the game? Let us know!

With this game, we had something of a dilemma, there. While we made much — nearly all — of our previous Fate game Spirit of the Century open content, with the Dresden Files RPG we have a brand new boat of intellectual property issues we have to keep an eye on.  We can’t risk accidentally declaring some part of Jim’s world to be open content and fair game.  (His copyright on that would override it in all likelihood, but the tangled knot of legal issues proceeding from there is one we’d rather not get tied up in in the first place.)

And knowing that, we also had the issue that we’ve really thoroughly entangled Jim Butcher’s intellectual property with our own in this game.  It could not ever be as simple as “Oh, this chapter here, that’s fair game; that chapter there, it’s product identity.” As a result, and with some regret, that meant that in the case of the DFRPG we had to make this statement at the end of our OGL copyright block:

Any material found in this book which is not directly taken from the above named works is deemed to be product identity.

As expected, someone has already given us a raspberry over this choice, which is why this post.  Above, you see the roots of the decision.  Now, I’ll talk about related implications and future plans.

First off, that does not mean that the system content of the Dresden Files RPG will never be open.  It just won’t be open by or in this product.  Whatever we can take out, scrub clean, and make open in our planned upcoming Core Fate product will be.  So the sentence I quoted above from the license isn’t a period at the end of the Fate sentence. It’s more of a semicolon.

Secondly, it moves this product firmly into the territory “governed by any rules involving Jim Butcher’s intellectual property”.  This is actually a good thing, because that means that anything that people do with it can be handled more or less under a fan fiction policy. At first blush that might sound like a bad thing — if you aren’t current on the state of fanfic with Jim’s stuff, you probably only know that it’s been living under a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sort of thing that says keep it out of Jim’s sight so he doesn’t have to take legal action against you.

But that changed a few months back, in January of this year.  You can read all of the particulars of Jim’s new fanfic policy here (but you’ll probably need a forum account to do so) – http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,15307.msg0.html

I’ll quote the policy as it currently stands from the above thread here:

We are pleased to announce that Jim is altering his stance on fanfiction, much like Mercedes Lackey did last October.  Rather than upholding the awkward “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy towards fanfiction he used in the past, Jim is embracing the Creative Commons.  Now, fanfiction is to be licensed as derivative, noncommercial fiction under the Creative Commons umbrella.

What does this mean?

A)  You can’t make money from fanfic based on Jim’s work.
B)  Jim still isn’t going to read it.  (Wouldn’t you rather he spend that time writing the next book, anyway?)  Do not send Jim your stories or story ideas.
C)  You need to post a disclaimer on your fic, like this handy example: “The Dresden Files/Codex Alera is copyright Jim Butcher.  This story is licensed under the Creative Commons as derivative, noncommercial fiction.”  In doing so, you waive any rights to that work–you can’t sue Jim for compensation if he writes something similar.
D)  Fanfic can now be talked about in places that had previously been off-limits, like our forum.  We’ve created a separate “Fan Creations” section of the forum for for this purpose.

This is the goodness, then.  You can post about your games, share your ideas about how to hack the setting, the stories that result from your games, etc, under this policy. Jim’s intellectual property remains protected, and since our specific game largely falls under that umbrella, you’re pretty much in the clear from there.

It’s maybe not the best solution for the system-heads out there, but until we can get our Core Fate product out the door, it’s what we can give you for now.  But that’s just for now.  The next step awaits.

You can download the powers list here!

And make sure to check out our new Downloads page as well, which includes printable blanks of the city and character creation sheets.

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:

Oh yeah, that’s The Archive all right.  I can’t tell you how forward I am to seeing the finished version. I hope you’re as eager as I am!

Meanwhile, Fred and Clark are digging in on turning setting guru Chad Underkoffler’s text and notes into DFRPG style “statblocks”.  February did get away from them a little, but Clark’s Baltimore chapter is fully statted (if not yet fully vetted), and our “Goes Bump” (as in, “monsters what go bump in the night”) chapter is practically done as well.  The biggest monster of all, though — the “Who’s Who of the Dresdenverse” chapter — lies ahead of them.  They’re working on the battle plan as we speak.  Soldier on, gentlemen.

Before I sign off, I’d like to give a quick shout-out to our crack editing team: Amanda Valentine, Adam Dray and Chad Underkoffler. I mentioned above that we’re hard at work – we’ll, they’re definitely hard at work with what Lenny & I throw them. In particular, Chad’s been great with keeping the voice & tone of the text consistent. Good editors are too often unsung heroes in the publishing world, so I wanted to take a moment to tell them, “Thank you.”

With that, I’m back to the grindstone. I’ll catch up with you all in a few weeks.

- Ryan

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

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

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

Download the podcast here

(43min 04sec) Fred (or is that Iago?) talks about visiting with Jim at StellarCon, dishes on the future of the Dresden Files and Codex Alera series, and with White Night about to hit stores, talks about Dresden #10. Plus, information about Jim’s signing tour and bookstore appearances, a deeper look at the foundations of the Dresden Files RPG, and a chat with one of our forum regulars about the last four episodes of the TV show.

To discuss this episode or to view the show notes come on over to the Jim-Butcher.Com Forums!

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.