Dresden Files RPG Play-by-Post Planning

[Mardoc]

Looking good.

Minor point: Ranamar, is he Robert or David?

I'm trying to think what use a local secret organization would have for weather control (that would be worth serious investment), so I'm going to brainstorm a couple: enhance storms near people who angered the Council, direct combat if required, extortion of the local weathermen? Oh, and maybe economic warfare on fishermen, to gain control of that industry

I added possible aspects to Gordon: Child of Wealth for background and Peter's Suicide Note for Rising action. And maybe "My Reach Exceeds My Grasp" makes a better version of Trouble. Would really like feedback on whether they're good/useful, or not.

Also, let's try a 'What Was Your First Adventure"

Wizard Wonders Where?

When a book of demonic summoning rituals is stolen from his library, Gordon must track down the thief before it can be put to use. But can he get there first, when multiple White Court factions, the Winter Court, and a wannabe warlock are all scrambling for the prize?

Aspect: Dangerous Knowledge

[BRickAstley]

Ranamar: All that's looking good. Can't wait to see what adventures a weather wizard would have.

Also, re: mardoc & ranamar, Maybe just control for control's sake? The Twilight Silver Lodge group seems like they could be one who just wants as much control over anything that could influence them as possible. If there's a weather wizard around, why not recruit them to just make things pleasant when they're relaxing and stormy when someone's poking around their business? Who cares about overkill, no one is going to mess with them anyways, and they aren't incurring Council wrath. Definitely puts a elitist spin on them.

Mardoc: I think those are good names for your aspects. I think that trouble one definitely better encapsulates that idea you were going for. And I feel like all of those are pretty descriptive, and I could see them being used for you to take advantage of AND me using them to invoke something bad on you.

That first adventure looks like a good idea. I think the goal is to have a resolution to the first adventure written too? Though that can be devised as others tie in to your story, and come up with a resolution together.

[Ranamar]

Minor point: Ranamar, is he Robert or David?

David seems to be insisting he be called David, no matter what I try to do. I guess I'll roll with it.
(I had pickiness about the name, but... well, as noted, it's stuck in my head as that.)

Now to go back and read the rest.

ETA:
The way I'm thinking of the Silver Twilight Lodge (I need to go back and make sure I get the word ordering right on everything... >.<) is that they're a somewhat criminal organization, but only in a mundanely criminal sense. Like, they wouldn't be above burglary in order to get access to some information or to keep others from accessing it. Inclement weather is a good way to clear a street, after all, so you can fog-smokescreen this time, or you can make it rain really hard on just one block to keep people from looking another time, or you can do the same thing with a blizzard. I can tell you from experience that nobody questions it if a wind strong enough to rattle cars into setting off their car alarms blows down a street. (... and what if there was a localized hurricane-force wind? Meteorology isn't that well understood by the general populace, and people usually try to put locked-room mysteries out of their heads.) But yeah, pretty much BRickAstley's idea. You just need to make sure that you don't juice the storm to lethal levels, of course.

That said, David probably needs a better day job. I'm sure he can get one through contacts in the Lodge. Offhand, I'm thinking Real Estate. I don't think your hours are terribly fixed, and sprucing up the weather for people visiting locations can't possibly hurt sales.
... and yeah, I think I'm going to move his family out to Watertown. I'm more familiar with suburb life, and its population got hit hard by something (deindustrialization, I think, based on a similar effect that's better documented online for Somerville) in the 80s.

[Lewwyn]

Okay so I've been doing a little planning today. I'm still reading the Rulebook and all. But I've been doing a bit of research as well and found an interesting location, but it seems like its been changing.

First my first character idea centered around werewolf. Thinking about how I get there and how I fit into Boston though has led to some interesting discoveries. I haven't fleshed out the high concept or anything yet, but I want to put some ideas down.

I think my character is Chinese. He's a body builder (in China it is a phenomenon called "muscle men"). I think he's going to have magical talent mostly geared towards body enhancement. He'll be vain and self-centered, so while this is mostly about physical enhancement I want him to also be enhancing appearance charm and things like that. But part of this also leads him to trying to be stronger and stronger and I think leads him to Werewolf transformation. I'm thinking maybe muscle men invited him or something, haven't decided yet, but he's new to the werewolf thing and its changing his perception of self and pack and selflessness.

So beauty and beast, no pain and no gain type aspects.

I think he comes from a family of minor wizarding talents, but they are not body builders. Similar focus but on more meditative and mental and inner enhancement. I think maybe his father owns a tai chi center or something and disapproves of his son's direction towards selfish and vain body building. He's tried to train his son in martial arts, but the mental discipline side didn't take as much.

The family is from China, but my character was born in America months after his family immigrated. EDIT: btw I'm considering here the reason for the immigration was some threat back in China. Might be useful for my character's arc or for things that happen in the game later. Also sort of creates possibilities for additional factions and further development of my character.

I think my character name might be Zhou, pronounced Joe.

Lots of room there yet. I need to fine tune it, but this is sort of the beginning of the idea. I really wanted to take advantage of my being in China and the fact that Boston has a big Chinatown.


So on locations. I think I want to make Chinatown one of our locations, but I haven't researched enough yet or written anything up. But in the beginning of my research I came across this gem: Combat Zone. This is basically a red light district that is next to Chinatown, but in the 1990's it looks like it died out in favor of gentrification and such. For the purposes of our setting can it still exist? Maybe as a supernatural scene in the same local. I don't know if its Red Court run or what, but this seems like a historic seedy place that's perfect for the game. Plus the name Combat Zone is just too great.

I'll be working on my character some more today as I research. Any thoughts on my ideas or the locations would be terrific.

[Lewwyn]

Maybe I should go WereTiger or WereDragon... More Chinese.

High Concept: Rebellious/Narsacistic WereDragon ?

[Ranamar]

Lewwyn, that sounds amazing. Keep going!
(ETA: DF dragons are WTFBBQOP plot objects, although something with sponsored magic might work... A Tiger sounds fun, though.)
Red light districts are perfect for white court vampires that like to feed on lust. On the other hand, Storm Front had a red court vampire running a call girl service... but that's not going to have the proprietor as immediately present.
(Also, I think a *lot* of Boston has gentrified in the past 15 years... and we'll be happier if we pretend it didn't happen for all the interesting locations.)

Commodore: You should look at the Item of Power stunt for your staff, and then figure out what power stunt(s) it's mimicking.

Given that affecting the weather is actually a pretty power-intensive job, I'd say that the reason the Silver Twilight Lodge put so much effort in is that he's actually quite the powerful spellcaster. I'm thinking of this for skills, so far:
4s (2):
Discipline
Conviction

3s (3):
Burglary
Contacts
Rapport

2s (4):
Alertness
Athletics
Lore
Resources

1s (5):
Deceit
Endurance
Intimidate
Presence
Stealth

The idea here is that he can throw around some powerful magic, but he's really not a scholar. Meanwhile, the Silver Twilight Lodge gets him a large network of contacts, and, if his day-to-day job is going to be something that requires getting people to agree to things, he ought to be good at it... and his work for the Lodge is going to involve a certain amount of breaking and entering.
At least, that's the idea, at the moment. We can revisit this later, depending on whether something should replace either of the +3s other than Contacts.

[BRickAstley]

RE: Silver Twilight Lodge- I can see them being fine with stuff like breaking laws to get done what they want, in a sort of pompous 'we're above the law' banner. I would hesitate to make them tend to be evil though, we don't want all the supernatural factions at odds with us, that might be a bit much.

I'd say we can definite ret-con the Comba Zone to still be there, and downtone the gentrification. It's much more fun to have a seedier city to play in.

Lewwyn, I'd agree that were-tiger sounds cool and is more chinese, and build-wise it'd be similar to the were-wolf seup. Were-dragon though.... I don't want to say no because it's a wicked idea, but we'd have to figure out a way to make it work and not be too crazy to start with. Looking at your basic refresh allowance, you'd probably just have to shift the focus a bit.

Required: (-1)
Beast Change [–1]
Echoes of the Beast [–1]
Human Form [+1]

Werewolf Example: (-6)
Inhuman Speed [–2]
Inhuman Strength [–2]
Claws [–1]
Pack Instincts [–1]

Weredragon Example base: (-4)
Breath Weapon (Fire)[-2]
Fangs (uses Claws) [-1]
Wings [-1]

If you want him to tend towards being in that group/pack of others:
Pack Instincts [-1]
And 1 extra refresh I don't see a good power for.

If you want him to get extra power from the dragon form only:
One of Inhuman Speed/Toughness/Strength/Recovery [-2]

If you wanna give him some stats to represent his mortal training before the dragon times:
2 extra mortal stunts centered around combat or looks or whatever.



So it looks doable, you can look like a dragon and fly and breathe fire. You just wont be near as fast or tough starting out as say, the were-tiger, kinda more utility than a battering ram. And for your sake I'd hope to god your guy never runs into a real dragon while shifted, they'd probably be pretty offended and you wouldn't much want to deal with that.

[Ranamar]

RE: Silver Twilight Lodge- I can see them being fine with stuff like breaking laws to get done what they want, in a sort of pompous 'we're above the law' banner. I would hesitate to make them tend to be evil though, we don't want all the supernatural factions at odds with us, that might be a bit much.

Needs more work, then.
(I'm open to suggestions, but I'll think of something.)

[BRickAstley]

Heh, sorry, didn't wanna ruin your plans I just went back and read that we currently have for the lodge:

The lodge is neither aggressive nor ambitious

So it's more of a snooty good ole boys mason lodge, at least in my mind. If you wanted to make them line up more with your approach, maybe change our description to more of a vigilante/robin hood type of deal? "We'll do what we think is best for ourselves and those we are around, even if laws or morals say otherwise." It would tend towards minor transgressions, cause they dont want either supernatural or mortal authorities on a witch-hunt against them, but hang morals as the only motive they have.


It occurs to me now that all of our good guys have major catches to them. We've got no-one written who could be considered always good, like the Dresden series puts Michael and Charity and Father Forthill.

[Ranamar]

I clearly missed "The lodge is neither aggressive nor ambitious."
The way I read the setup, it seemed like it was most of the way to a local substitute for the White Circle, and the local warden thinks this works just fine for him. Somehow, in my head, this morphed into "The [less than entirely legal] magic police [mob?] for New England." Territorial but not expansionist, I guess? The upshot is, and I was thinking about this while you were posting... Burglary services won't be needed very often, unless undiscovered tracts that people shouldn't be reading are appearing at a stunningly fast rate. Of course, given the nature of most of those tracts, I'd expect that the last thing the victim would want to do is go to the police.
I do actually like to have things plausible, so I'm going to keep working on it. (This is actually the problem with the name "David": it's not an English name.)
Also, while poking around, I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Or...olden_Dawn
Apparently, this was a real thing. It's suggested that the Cthulhu Mythos's Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight is a pastiche of that. (Somewhere along the way, it looks like in the games by Fantasy Flight Games, it morphed into the Silver Twilight Lodge.)

I'd say that the reason none of us are straight-up good guys is because bad guys get more interesting compellable traits. On the other hand, I suppose you can compel someone to not ignore bad things happening that are distractions pretty well, too.