Book 22. The Dresden Files Rpg Volume 1
Title: The Dresden Files Rpg Volume 1: Your story
Author: Evil Hat Productions
Genre: Gaming
Pages: 402
Read before? No
Rating: 9.5 out of 10
My thoughts. If I broke this down chapter by chapter, it would be about 446546546546 words and no one wants that. So let me say this about the book.
The art is beautiful and inventive. They brought so many talented people to do their art. Each is different and yet all of it together really seems to work. Amazing work.
The book is a bit heavy, which is why they split them into two books. I cannot even imagine if they were combined into one book. This one is heavy enough as it is, but that would have been a disaster. This why it isn’t so bad, and that is ok with me.
The biggest part of playing this game is Aspects. They are traits that the characters. Npcs, and even locations can have that push the game a long. Character and Npc aspects could be Stubborn, Right place, wrong time, or maybe even Strange Luck. Location aspects are handled the same way and could be Accorded Neutral Ground, Anything goes, or Wellspring of Magic.
Each person has fate points that can be used to help the player at any time. If they fail a roll badly, they can spend a fate point and use one of their aspects to help them. So if they failed a roll to cast a spell, they can use their Wizard of the White Council to re-roll or add a +2 to the roll. On the flip side to that, the aspects can be used to compel or complicate their lives. The Gm’s job is to do so. So if the player is trying to follow someone they think can lead them to a kidnapped child, the gm can instead say they stumble into a man getting beaten by thugs on the street. You know, Right place, wrong time. If they take this, they actually get a fate point for their troubles, or they pay a fate point to ignore it. This makes creating aspects very important in the game.
It is fun to have a city creation aspect of the game. Most games do not do this, but this allows the city itself to have a lot more ooompf that normal. It is a very cool idea and with the Aspects (traits if nothing else) really giving the city life. Not to mention it is a collaborative effort between everyone and you can come up with really interesting locations for each city. Not to mention the more the aspects, the more they can be used for and against the player.
Character creation is pretty simple. You pick a template, create a background and aspects, choose skills, stunts or supernatural stunts, and then you are done. The fun part is that it is a collaborative thing as well and that is always fun. You have so many different types of characters you can play. Such as, Wizards, were-beasts, mortal, knight of a court, etc.
There is a simple advancement system that allows you to get more skills, aspects, and fate points. I like how simple they made it since Spirit of the Century never had anything like this, and it was important to get it right.
The chapters detailing skills, mortal stunts, and supernatural stunts are pretty simple, but handled well. They break down all of them in a very straight forward way and it is easy to understand.
The playing the game section does a great job of how to handle conflicts and actions in the game. They even give help with social and mental conflicts that I found very helpful.
Probably the most impressive part of the book dealt with magic. The next two chapters were living with magic and spellcasting. The first part dealt with the sight, soulgazing, hexing, thresholds and the laws of magic. Each part was well explained and thorough. Lenny did a great job on the magic sections of this book.
The spellcasting section was awesome. There is so much that goes into the magic of this game that over fifty pages for it. Evocation is what most people are used to. Throwing fire, or using earth and wind. These are things we have seen throughout time in what we consider magic to be. Still, it is very well written, and only mildly confusing (the magic in this game is a bit hard to get at first). Then you get to thaumaturgy, which is beyond crazy. Only because thaumaturgy allows the wizard to do a lot of things that would not normally been possible. Locating someone through divination, summong and binding, wards, and item creation. It is difficult only because it is limited only by the imagination of the player that is using this type of magic. These sections do a great job of explaining how to do this and even gives suggestions on how to make it easier.
One of the coolest things about this is they give example spells from what happened in the books. I enjoyed the hell out of this, for the geek factor if nothing else. It also gives the players a place to start, which is nice.
The running the game section was nice, but not as informative as Spirit of the Century’s section. This isn’t saying it wasn’t helpful, because it was. It is more that the previous book they did gave A LOT of information. On the flip side of that is the fact that the book would have been HUGE if they added much more, so I can understand their reasoning. There is still a ton of great info here.
The building scenarios do a great job of walking you through how to make a scenario based on the player’s aspects. This was good stuff.
Last was the Nevermore/Baltimore section, which was a great glimpse into the sample city of Baltimore. Great characters and locations if you wanted to start a game there. A lot of information including stats and aspects of players in the city. It was the perfect ending to a great book.
Overall, this book rocks! I was lucky enough to get to playtest this game and am proud to have my name in the credits. They did an amazing job with material that I love. I know it was a long journey, but the end result was worth it.