Dresden Files Accelerated

Yours truly, Alan, Eric, and Bob

This is what playtesters look like! Our Thursday night group was very happy to playtest Dresden Files Accelerated, and equally pleased to see it come out in print this week! The people pictured above, as well as Rachel, were part of the alpha playtest of the game.

Our playtest campaign involved Prince (who was still alive at the time, and a withdrawn but real supernatural power in the local scene), a battle in Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, and two evil suburban realtors (a husband wife team - the guy a mortal sex maniac; the wife a vampire - who operated as a wholesome Christian business couple).

Dresden Files Accelerated will get some use at conventions and for mini-campaigns.

The Lords of Paganistan

Vampire Dice for Dresden Files!

We've had three Dresden Files Accelerated playtest sessions with our Thursday Night Group so far, with our fourth scheduled for tomorrow night. It's been fun! In earlier posts with labelled Dresden File Accelerated, I've described the Twin Cities supernatural setting we've created collaboratively. Now I'm going to give you a quick snapshot of the PCs.

The players decided they wanted to live in a commune of sorts in the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis. It's an interesting part of the city: high crime with many low income families, a bourgie corner with upper income families, a lot of renters, an increasing rate of Latino homeownership, and a significant lesbian community. And hippies and alternative types. A bit of everything really, and the largest pagany cultural festival in the metro area.

They decided on a group identity for their commune: The Lords of Paganistan, a motorcycle gang of magical bounty hunters. They fit right in with this neighborhood. Now Dresden Files Accelerated uses Mantles as the template for different classes of supernatural beings, and Weight Classes as the scaling system for the disparate power levels that we see in the Dresdenverse. Our players decided to play the first Weight Class up from Mortals, which is called Unnatural. The PCs are as follows:

• Fred Silverbloom, High Concept: Badass Biker Turning Into A Bug. Fred's Mantle is Changeling: Troll Blood. He is good at fighting but needs to avoid being touched by cold iron. His Trouble is The World Is Not Your Ashtray. He gets really mad when people pollute.
• Lotus, High Concept: Consulting Psychic; Trouble Believes Everything. Lotus is a trip. She has the Mantle Minor Talent: Cassandra's Tears. Lotus has visions of the future that she can't control. Her other aspects include Let's talk it out, Commune with Nature, and Embrace the power of "and." She is the most hippie-like of a hippie bunch. 
• Juice, High Concept: OCD Aspiring Beat Poet. Juice has the Mantle Psychometrist, which means that he can read objects by touching them. First GM ruling in the first session? Whether dead bodies are objects. Trouble: Organic Vegan Only. Juice wears gloves because meat eaters have touched so many things. He doesn't like the contact residue of animal screams that rubs off on the objects that meat eaters touch.
• Draka (aka Donald), High Concept: Bounty Hunter, Trouble: Drinks Too Much. Draka's Mantle is an Einherjar, one of the honored dead who have been returned to the mortal world and who is gifted with battle skill. He always has on a duster jacket (that should be an aspect for him!) and wears a sword under it. 

Next time, I'll tell you about the PCs adventures against Minneapolis' Evil short sale gurus. Realtors make great monsters!

Mayor Betsy And The Prince

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges

Mayor Betsy is clueless. At least about the occult underground in the Twin Cities. That's what the players decided.

The greatest supernatural force in Minneapolis is Prince. That's right, The Prince of the Purple Rain. Not some dumb vampire prince.

Wrong game.

Prince used to lead the Summer Court. But the people of Minneapolis are feeling his absence. Prince has withdrawn his favor from our fair city. We wish he'd come back.

The Revolution is trying to bring him out of seclusion.  Of course, they are all powerful Summer Court functionaries too. They're trying to hold things together, maybe renew things.

Then there is the White Court, fueling a massive wave of gentrification across the metro. Affordable apartments go down; luxury condos go up. What is the White Court up to with all their buying and selling?

Finally there is the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Narayana Kocherlakota. Everyone's sure he's up to something. But no one's exactly sure what.

Narayana Kocherlakota

Midnight At The Witch's Hat

"The Witch Hat Tower And A Full Moon" by Mark Goodman Photo

If this stunning image doesn't convince you that Minneapolis, Minnesota has places of power, I don't know what will. The Witch's Hat in Prospect Park has been part of the Twin Cities' occult landscape since 1913. It was built as a water tower (with a bandstand deck at the top) and it occupies the highest natural spot in the landscape of Minneapolis.

This was just one of the numerous supernatural locations that the we identified in our first playtest session of Dresden Files Accelerated. Others included the Elf House near Lake Harriet...

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Where it looks pretty easy to leave a message... for someone.

Elf House

More to come on the "movers and shakers" in our Minneapolis' Dresden setting, as well as on the cool PCs that our players created using Dresden Files Accelerated's "Mantles".

Dresden Dreams

Winter Knight Dice

The dice fall where they may, and sometimes they fall in your dreams. That was my experience last night. I spent roughly four hours reading the Dresden Files Accelerated Alpha Playtest rules, because our Thursday Night Group will be running it's first playtest session tonight.

We're doing some city generation, character generation, and campaign issues.

Once I had finished reading the rules it was 12 midnight, so I turned in.

Almost exactly an hour later, I woke up from a nightmare.

We had been playing the game.

We were rolling the dice. A spell was being cast.

The roll was a Bad One.

I was more than a little rattled.

It's just a game right?

Except that in the dream it was both real and a game.

Doomsdays & Dresdens

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(episode)

Quick post for today. Yesterday's write up of the USS Constellation for Paul Stefko's Interstellar Patrol prompted someone to suggest that I should do a write-up for the Doomsday Machine itself. I am thinking about how one might do that.

In the meantime, I am preparing to run the first playtest of Dresden Files Accelerated with our Thursday Night Group. I'm thinking our playtest adventures will take place in the Twin Cities, MN, one of the cities that gave birth to Urban Fantasy in novels such as Emma Bull's War for the Oaks.

Should be fun!