So here it is world. After a session of brainstorming and two weeks of emails, New Bay City is in it’s final stage. Tomorrow night, the dice hit the table and things get interesting. Special thanks to the players for coming up with some really wild shit that’s going to be fun. Enjoy.
New Bay City Final
We did all the character and city generation stuff for the Dresden Game this last Friday and it was a blast. Here you meet the characters and learn a little bit more about them.
Artie Aparo: High Concept: Apprentice Wizard & Stage Magician. Trouble: Can’t Mind My Own Business. Other Aspects: You Look Right, I Go Left. Connected To The Art Scene. I Have a MAGIC Cape! Improv is everything.
Alex Wolfe: High Concept: BIG bad (Were-)Wolf. Trouble: I Work Alone. Other Aspects: Demolition Is My Game. I Smell Trouble. Protect The Squishies. I’ll Look At The Man Behind The Curtain.
Mortal Dude (The Player is still coming up with a name): High Concept: “The Dude” of Baseball. Trouble: Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Other Aspects: What Has Been Seen, Cannot Be Unseen. It’s Like There’s A Law For Everything, Man. No One Can Stand Alone. Nothing Goes As Planned.
The players started to run out of creative steam about two thirds of the way through city creation so switched to working on characters. I’m sure there will be some tweaks to the Aspects before play actually begins. It also means that I as GM have a couple of holes to fill in the city and try to make some interesting connections between some of the NPC’s but that ain’t a thing.
They did a great job of creating some pretty interesting NPC’s. A few of these might end up pretty interesting.
Madame Faux-Roux (Drag Queen Voodoo Priestess)
Loop-A & The Sidhe Bitches (All Girl Hexen Wolf Death Metal Band)
Sister Maria (who will still be known as Sister Buffy the Monster Hunting Nun)
Hopefully, later this week I’ll have my crazy notes from the session compiled into a usable format. This is going to be a fun game.
Time to start gearing up for the Dresden Game. Now, I know that usually in a Fate game the idea is to start from scratch and work from them but I didn’t want the players to start off in a total vacuum. So I resurrected New Bay City from the old Mage game. I planning on using this as starting point and inspiration for players and hell if they want to go in a totally different direction. That’s cool too.
I chose to start off this way because most of the players are already familiar with the city and some of the NPC’s (which may or may not return. It’s up to them.) So in a way they already have some emotional investment in the city. Additionally, I still had some locations and NPC’s that never appeared in that game so no use wasting ideas.
The Mundane Stuff: New Bay City is either in eastern Texas or western Louisiana. (It really doesn’t matter for the sake of the game). Think of it as on the Gulf coast somewhere between Houston and New Orleans. It covers roughly the same area and has the same population as Houston.
The Hocus Pocus Stuff: New Bay City sits at the nexus of several ley lines. The boundary between the mortal realm and the Nevernever is thin. The area has always been a supernatural hot spot even before Europeans set foot on this continent.
Inspirations: Arkham, Sunnydale, New Orleans, Santa Carla, San Francisco. I tried to have areas of the city that would emulate what you would consider that standard modern urban environs and places that are just ready for adventure hooks.
What has come to pass: Basically, I’m Dresdenizing (and rediting) the events of the old Mage game as set up. A powerful Black Court Vampire and a renegade sorcerer hatched a crazy plan to plunge the city into an eternal darkness from the Nevernever. To fuel such a powerful spell, they needed sacrifices with incredible power. That meant pretty much every White Council wizard in the city was snatched up and prepped for sacrifice. The ritual was stopped but the sacrifice wasn’t.
Where are we now: The White Council had kept the balance and the peace in the city. With their numbers greatly diminished, every supernatural faction is making a move for power.
Overall Idea; The concept for the player characters is that they are college students and getting ready to get mixed up in this whole thing. I did this for a couple of reasons. One, the characters would still have all the adult rights and responsibilities while still having some of the awkward social and peer problems from high school. Also, it’s an easy way for them to to have something in common quickly and easily.
I know that no campaign survives first contact with player characters and due to the nature of FATE, I expect this. In a couple of weeks we’ll see how it turns out after the players get their hands on it.
Stay tuned. This is going to be fun.
In a bit of shameless self promotion, I took some of my copious free time and threw together a little trailer for my Dresden Files game. Just a webcam, some filters and the freebie version of Movie Maker. And maybe a few more clues for the players. Hehehe. (That was an evil laugh).
Music is “Darkness is Coming” by Kevin MacCleod and used under a Creative Commons License.
This last week we finished up our Spelljammer campaign which meant this week end I took my hefty Pathfinder core book out of my gaming backpack.
Our little group has been playing Pathfinder ever since the Beta rules came out. We averaged about once a week and we’ve played all through a bunch of the Adventure Paths. It’s difficult to say which one was best. They were all fun and I had some memorable characters and moments along the way.
Now, this isn’t anything against Paizo nor is about DNDNext. We’re just changing things up a bit. This week we’ll be starting up a Classic Deadlands campaign and then the week after that I’ll be starting up a Dresden Files game. So stay tuned to for those goodies and hopefully some great tales of misadventure. And don’t worry, we’ll go back and play Pathfinder again.
Since things are gearing for a Dresden Files game, I always look for inspiration. There’s plenty of canon in the Dresdenverse but hell’s bells. I like coloring outside the lines. And I’m kind looking forward to this MMO. But the main thing is that these little trailers are some really good inspiration for things that could happen in a Dresden game. It’s the imagination going and that’s kind of what gaming is all about right?
Now this gives me a real Night Watch feel:
This is just pretty damned awesome.
Yeah, some days it might end up like this
Now if all that doesn’t get you going then we need to check for a pulse.






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