Seana suggested that the players should come up with a few NPCs that tie in to their backstories, and being the lazy GM that I am, I supported it wholeheartedly!
Here are the first ones. They’re not full-fleshed yet by any means, but I’ll probably add the missing detail on the fly.
Milton Keynes has now entered the Dresdenverse. Again.
Apologies for leaving you hanging if you’d read the first draft of this write-up (preserved on this blog for historical reasons) and found that it ended halfway through. As mentioned in my previous post, we ended up taking much, much longer over character generation than we’d planned, and given that we’d decided to revise the city burning afterwards to fix some weak Aspects, everything got held up.
Apologies to anyone who has been waiting for the second half of the city write-up. That will be in the next post. The plan was to post it a week or so after the first half, but after some email exchanges between all the players we decided that we needed to redo large chunks of the city burning. We fell down especially on the location Aspects, in that they tended to provide colour rather than any possible use in play. Based on this, we agreed to meet again to redo them, once we’d spent a week or so doing the characters.
What we didn’t take into account was that creating the characters took us three and a half sessions of three hours each. Given that we also missed a few weeks, this meant a delay of well over a month.
Click to continue reading “Thoughts on Character Generation”
I just read a post about Wordle over at Story Games, and it’s rather wonderful. It’s a site that allows you to create a pretty word cloud based on an RSS feed, so I decided to try it for this blog. And here it is:
Note: It’s getting late, so this is only part 1 of the city creation session write-up for the playtest. I’ll try to type the rest up tomorrow.
We had our city burning session last Thursday, and Milton Keynes has now entered the Dresdenverse. These notes are still a work in progress, as we’re all still researching elements, and they do need to be cleaned up and simplified. We also need to actually name the NPCs, as opposed to just saying who they are, but that will come later.
From the initial email I received, it looks like part of the Dresden Files playtest is going to involve city creation. While I’ve lived in a lot of different cities over the years — Hong Kong, Geneva, New York, London and, um, Dundee — I’m leaning towards using Milton Keynes for the playtest. No, really. Hear me out.
For one thing, MK is the easy option: it’s where I’ve lived for the last seventeen years, and it’s the one shared place that everyone in the Thursday night group knows well, so coming up with details of life here will be pretty painless. Also, more importantly, Milton Keynes is a bloody strange town and making weird stuff happen here will be a doddle.
If you’ve never heard of Milton Keynes, haven’t been here or have only passed through for long enough to get lost and complain about all the roundabouts, here’s a quick guide to the things that I think make MK such a good candidate.
My Thursday night gaming group applied to playtest the upcoming Dresden Files RPG a few months ago. We’d played Spirit of the Century together for about a year and all fell in love with the FATE 3 mechanics. As four out of the five of us were also fans of the Dresden Files novels (Matt hasn’t read them), the playtest sounded like very much our kind of thing.
Well, today I received the mail I’d been hoping for, and we’re amongst the next batch of playtesters! Yay!
One of the stipulations of playtesting the game is to write about the experience in public. Well, this is where it will all be happening. I’ve had Wordpress installed on my server for ages, but never actually had anything interesting enough to say with it until now.
Assuming we have the game materials in time then the current plan is to start doing stuff with them two weeks today (the 7th of August, if I can drive my calendar properly). Damn, I’m looking forward to this!
