Saints, Demons, and Other Oddities

What a demented, crazy thing we have wrought. 

 

So, my group and I have finished creating the Dresden-ized version of Utica.  We only got the chance to do it the other night, now that we’re all back on campus while classes haven’t started.  It was a fun time, filled with lots of talking over one another and furious disagreement.  Like I said, fun time.

 

To summarize the actual process, it worked pretty well…the biggest problem we had was that at times we felt like a ship without a rudder.  In the beginning, you’re supposed to come up with up to three theme/aspects for the city, and we didn’t know exactly where to go with this stuff.  We had ideas, and we had plenty of information on the city itself, as the very first thing you’re supposed to do is research the city.  We had even come up with a few possible themes prior to meeting like this.  But when we set down to actually figure out which themes we should be using, the overall reaction was one of, “Oh, that sounds fine.”  It wasn’t clear to begin with what the pros or cons of any given theme would be, aside from maybe determining certain story elements of the game.  The idea of the themes on the whole was somewhat unclear, in that they could either be viewed as thematic concerns for the story, or they could be viewed as aspects of the mundane city.  So, in the end, we settled on our three themes and just moved on from there.  Having the three themes in place did help, but the problem was just actually determining what those three themes were…very sink or swim feeling. 

 

Other than that, the biggest issue we had was following the strictures of the text.  It seemed that the city creation chapter was guiding us to create the mundane city in game terms, and only then to add in supernatural elements.  We…didn’t exactly follow those orders.  The whole time we were creating the city, we did so with an eye for the supernatural, looking for ways to make it magical, places where the mystical could be thrown in.  Even with the themes, we focused on making them themes that reflected both mundane and magical concerns.  I may have been reading the book wrong, but this does seem to be contrary to the basic idea of the chapter, which was to focus on the mundane city, and only then to add in the mystical.  For instance, the book seemed to be saying that you should create the locations for the city, and then maybe turn some of them supernatural.  What we did, however, was create locations of the city which were supernatural or mundane to start off the bat.  So, instead of creating a bar, and then maybe making it more supernatural, we created a bar which right from the outset was supposed to be owned by a Red Court vampire.  

 

All in all, the city creation was really fun, especially because I think we’re all pretty proud of the city.  It’ll be really fun to play in once we get going.  There were just a few places where a strong example in the book would’ve been helpful.

 

So, without further ado, the city itself...

 

 

So, the first set of files has come out, including the City Creation files.  After reading through them, I'm really interested to see how they'll work in practice, particularly with the city that my group plans to Dresdenize. 

About 10 or 15 minutes away from Hamilton College is a somewhat small city, Utica, The Handshake City (according to Wikipedia, God bless the interweb).  For someone who has lived in New Jersey for the vast majority of his life, Utica's a bit of a different thing.  In my town, if you say "The City," you mean New York.  That's always how it's been for me, for the majority of my life: The City is New York City.  So when I first thought about what city I'd like to do for this game, New York was the one that leapt to mind.  After all, there's a tremendous amount of New York to play with, including a unique culture, plenty of major historical events, and millions of people.  I'm most familiar with New York, too, so it was also clearly the easiest city for me to do.

But the other players in my group do not share my fortunate geographical background.  One is from upstate New York, near Hamilton, one is from that state of witchcraft and satanism known only as Massachusetts, and one is even from the land that time forgot, Maine.  (Disclaimer: This is in jest.  I know these states are all quite wonderful places and have given America many of the people who make her great.  *Cue rainbow star* THE MORE YOU KNOW!)  And that's not even counting other possible players.  So it was a little unfair of me to simply assume that New York was the city to do, just because it's the one I'm personally more familiar with.

Hence...Utica. 

With its close proximity to Hamilton, we all know of the city, and we know a bit about it, but actually, part of the allure of using Utica as the city we play in has to do with the fact that none of us know too much.  We're going to be discovering the city, to an extent, as we Dresdenize it, and I look forward to that.  In the end, Utica was the clear choice, though, because it was the city that we were most aware of as a collective. 

Now, in terms of research, here I'd like to plug the city creation chapter of the DFRPG that we Burners were given.  Aside from lots of interesting and well-explained rules stuff, it has an entire section devoted to researching your city, focused upon finding the information you need to make your city as interesting as possible.  I was very impressed, to put it simply.  It had some suggestions, like an order for your research in which you go to a library and try to find book sources before you go for the internet (oops...sorta didn't follow that one).  The chapter also suggested talking to an actual librarian, because a great number of librarians would be very helpful.  I thought that it was just indicative of the overall quality of the stuff we've been given, and the work of Evil Hat as a whole, that it had these kinds of suggestions.  It covered issues that most RPGs would probably just sort of leave you on your own for. 

That being said, I'm interested in actually creating the city, but I need to follow those suggestions first.  While I know some stuff about Utica, I think I need to find out more to be truly inspired for the city creation.  I've got some interesting ideas, but I think I need more connected to the city.  Also, obviously, as per another suggestion in the chapter, I need to get the other players more involved...some of them have recently entered a communications blackout, however, so I may have to wait for a couple of days before that happens.

The basic idea I have right now for Utica is based on my own perceptions of Hamilton and the surrounding area.  Utica, as I envision it, is a city in Upstate New York, surrounded by wilderness and rural towns (or even villages).  As a result, I easily see that one of Utica's primary themes could be the wilderness versus the city, with many more wild forces and monsters having lived in the area, and done all they could to stop Utica from thriving.  Up until recently, these forces might have had a relatively balanced relationship with the city-dwellers...except now, Utica is growing and developing (this is actually a fact, one of the few I've discovered so far).  Immigrants, particularly from Bosnia, have been coming to Utica, and it is becoming something of a "Second-Chance City".  This could easily aggravate those who had been dwelling around Utica up until now, but perhaps more importantly, I tried to think of a potentially supernatural reason for this to be happening.  The book gave a good piece of advice, that not everything had to be supernatural, and in fact, not everything should be supernatural, so I'm still trying to find a good place to draw the line, but I thought it would be interesting if in the past, Utica had nothing that would've attracted the supernatural crowd, except relative solitude and a connection to a less developed area.  But now, for some reason, ley lines have actually been shifting and have started to converge all over Utica, making the place into one giant nexus of magical power.  So many of the major powers have actually sent delegations up to Utica, trying to get a foothold into the city, to claim all that magical power for themselves...except of course, those old, solitary, wild things that had been there for a while don't take kindly to the newcomers.  All kindsa conflict.

Well, as I said, I still have more work to do before any of this is actually codified, but I'm pretty happy at such an early stage.  Particularly, I was impressed that the chapter had enough in there in terms of basic, generalized ideas, to inspire this much.  The actual process of using the hard rules to get the city created may function differently, but I have a feeling that it'll be more likely we'll be cutting ideas out rather than struggling to get more ideas in.

I am one of the terribly lucky few who have been selected to help out with the new Burning Alpha phase of the Dresden Files RPG.  I've set up this blog in order to post about my experiences doing so, putting up Actual Play reports and any thoughts or ideas I may have throughout the process. 

I love the Dresden Files series, and I also love the Fate system, Spirit of the Century in particular.  So I love the idea of seeing the two of them melded together, especially because, without even seeing the rules, I know the available variety will be tremendous.  I want to make sure everybody else sees and understands how awesome this is going to be, so I'm going to do my best to give as much information as I can.

I'll be playing with a group of my friends at my college, Hamilton College, in upstate New York.  We're your classic geeky college kids, with our esoteric interests and our overly vaunted vocabularies.  We enjoy RPGs, though, and we have plenty of experience with them, so hopefully we'll be able to offer some really salient points about the DFRPG as we go along.

So, here's looking forward to helping out with what I'm sure will be one of my favorite RPGs of all time.