Is Evil Hat the new White Wolf?

Looks like Fred Hicks and the Evil Hat crew have a hit on their hands with the Dresden Files RPG. I have to admit that I’m both a fan of Jim Butcher and the urban fantasy genre but at first I wasn’t too keen on the FATE system. I got over that.
This game was literally years in the making and there were times I was thinking that it just might be another fantasy heart breaker. It had taken so long to create that people were busy doing their own house ruled Dresden games with World of Darkness, Unisystem or Savage Worlds just to name a few.
There’s all sorts of buzz about the DFRPG and there are some pretty good discussions going on over at Jim Butcher’s forums. Folks are already tweaking the game for other poplar urban fantasy worlds or their own. And this is before Origins and before the dead tree version hits the shelves of your FLGS. I just see this game getting more popular.
The urban fantasy genre is still going strong and getting stronger. While I choose to ignore the whiny tween claptrap, shows like Being Human, True Blood and the recently premiered The Gates (the jury is still out on this one) seem to garnering fans. Buffy fans will always be, well, Buffy Fans (me included). And there’s just a whole boatload of fiction and graphic novels. So, this genre is still alive, well and growing.
With this climate White Wolf should be doing well. I speculate that they are but not quite the way they were in days gone by. If you’ve been a gamer for a while, you’ll remember how White Wolf stormed onto the scene out of nowhere. They brought a lot of new blood (OK, pun intended. I couldn’t resist) into the hobby. They stressed story over munchkin crunchy mechanics. And a lot people liked it. But they got scooped up by CCP and it seems most of their focus is on the sometime to be released (maybe 2011) World of Darkness MMO but I think that time line is doubtful since I couldn’t find any neat tidbits from E3. Looks like the guys doing Secret World are going to beat them to the urban fantasy MMO finish line. Then late last year, Ryan Dancy told us that White Wolf is just a “legacy business”. Yeah, White Wolf as a table top RPG publisher is pretty much staggering around mumbling, “Brains.”
Now enter the Dresden Files RPG. The rules are flexible and can be easily tweaked . You’ve got the building blocks to pretty much create whatever urban fantasy world that strikes your fancy. The system stresses story and narrative over “kill the monster and loot it” which is one of the things that drew so many people into the hobby back in the day of Vampire: The Masquerade. Despite the heft of the books, the system should be very easy for non-gamers to pick up quickly and easily. Evil Hat is easily in the position to assume White Wolf’s gothy crown. Of course, the only way to really make a product popular is with huge marketing and advertising budget neither of which I’m sure are available. The other is viral marketing. It might be a good time to reactivate the Bookstore Commandos at your FLGS.
I have no idea what plans if any Evil Hat has for the DFRPG. A few fans have mentioned some supplements to update the game to the most recent novels. Currently, there really aren’t plans for a Dresden SRD like the other FATE games. In my own fanboy deluded imagination, I think it’d be neat if they managed to continue the line in some manner .