TEXT: V o l u m e  O n e
  Y o u r  S t o r y
  the 
  Dresden Files
  R O L E P L A Y I N G
  G A M E
  
  Tell Us
  Your Story
  Beneath the “normal” surface of the world 
  are things and people which most of us don’t 
  want to know about, and will do our best 
  to forget about if we ever come near them. 
  People won’t see what they don’t want to see.
  But that’s most of us. And you—you’re not 
  most of us.
  What’s Your Story? 
  Whether you’re a champion of God, changeling, 
  vampire,  werewolf, wizard, or plain “vanilla” 
  mortal human being, this volume of The Dresden 
  Files RPG gives you all the rules you need to 
  build characters and tell your own stories in 
  the Dresdenverse.  Inside, you’ll uncover the 
  secrets of spellcasting, the extents of mortal and 
  supernatural power, and the hidden occult reality 
  of the unfamiliar city you call home.
  Together with Volume Two: Our World, 
  The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story gives 
  you everything you need to make your own 
  adventures in the thrilling and dangerous world 
  of New York Times best-selling author Jim 
  Butcher’s Dresden Files series!
  ISBN: 978-0-9771534-7-3  EHP3001  $49.99 US
  www.evilhat.com
  The Dresden Files RPG continues with Our World!
  
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  The Dresden Files
  R O L E P L A Y I N G • G A M E
  Volume One: Your Story
  Hell’s Bells, Billy — this printout 
  looks like you dropped it in the mud.
  I sorta did. It was in my backpack, 
  but wolves don’t wear those too well.
  
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  OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a
  The following text is the property of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and 
  is Copyright 2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc (“Wizards”). All Rights 
  Reserved.
  1. Definitions: (a)”Contributors” means the copyright and/or 
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  10. Copy of this License: You MUST include a copy of this License 
  with every copy of the Open Game Content You Distribute.
  11. Use of Contributor Credits: You may not market or advertise the 
  Open Game Content using the name of any Contributor unless 
  You have written permission from the Contributor to do so.
  12. Inability to Comply: If it is impossible for You to comply with any 
  of the terms of this License with respect to some or all of the Open 
  Game Content due to statute, judicial order, or governmental regu-
  lation then You may not Use any Open Game Material so affected.
  13. Termination: This License will terminate automatically if You 
  fail to comply with all terms herein and fail to cure such breach 
  within 30 days of becoming aware of the breach. All sublicenses 
  shall survive the termination of this License.
  14. Reformation: If any provision of this License is held to be unen-
  forceable, such provision shall be reformed only to the extent 
  necessary to make it enforceable.
  15. COPYRIGHT AND PRODUCT IDENTITY NOTICE
  Open Game License v 1.0 © 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
  Fudge System 1995 version © 1992-1995 by Steffan O’Sullivan, © 
  2005 by Grey Ghost Press, Inc.; Author Steffan O’Sullivan.
  FATE (Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment) © 2003 by 
  Evil Hat Productions LLC; Authors Robert Donoghue and Fred 
  Hicks.
  Spirit of the Century © 2006, Evil Hat Productions LLC. Authors 
  Robert Donoghue, Fred Hicks, and Leonard Balsera.
  Any material found in this book which is not directly taken from the 
  above named works is deemed to be product identity.
  The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game: Volume 1: Your Story and 
  The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game: Volume 2: Our World © 2010, 
  Evil Hat Productions LLC (www.evilhat.com).  
  Based on the original works in The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher 
  as published by the Roc imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 
  Arranged through the author’s agent: Jennifer Jackson, Donald 
  Maass Literary Agency. The Dresden Files, all of The Dresden Files 
  book titles, all of the characters, descriptions, and plots from The 
  Dresden Files books and stories, and all quoted material from The 
  Dresden Files books are ©2000-2010 Jim Butcher. 
  Some art within is ©2008-2010 and used with permission of the 
  Dabel Brothers Productions LLC.
  Hmm... Not as bad as the Accords themselves, but still pretty heady stuff, William.
  
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  Credits
  Based on The Dresden Files 
  Books by Jim Butcher
  Lead System Developer
  Leonard Balsera
  Lead Setting Developer
  Chad Underkoffler
  Lead Project Developer
  Ryan Macklin
  Managing Editor
  Amanda Valentine
  Authors
  Leonard Balsera, Jim Butcher, Genevieve Cogman, 
  Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, Ryan Macklin, 
  Chad Underkoffler, and Clark Valentine
  Assistant Editors
  Adam Dray, Ryan Macklin, and Chad Underkoffler
  Artists
  Toren Atkinson, Talon Dunning, Melissa Gay, Ed Northcott, 
  Jennifer Rodgers, Chad Sergesketter, David Seidman, 
  Priscilla Spencer, Christian N. St. Pierre, and Ardian Syaf
  Thanks
  Rob and Fred would like to thank their wives, without whom none of this would be 
  possible, and Jennifer Jackson and Michael Curry who helped make the possibility into 
  a reality. Lenny would like to thank: his two main internal playtesters, Dane Black and 
  Thomas Bates, for helping him with some final kinks; the rest of the team, for shouldering 
  him through trials; Bridget and Samantha, for general moral support; and the Burton 
  Foundation gang (Cole, Willem, Brandt, and Andi), without whom the system used 
  for this game would not exist.  Ryan would like to thank his first gaming group, Sasha, 
  Frank & John, for introducing him to this great hobby.  Chad would like to thank Fred 
  for hooking him on the DF crack, and Priscilla for deeply geeky setting kow-tows.  Clark 
  would like to thank Jess and Allandaros for some translation and insight, his kids for 
  putting up with the insanity that took over the house for a while, and Rob and Fred for 
  the opportunity to work on a project like this. Amanda would like to thank Fred for 
  giving her the chance to work on this, Clark for dealing so well with a stressed out wife 
  who is also his editor, her kids for usually listening to “Mommy’s working right now,” and 
  the whole gang for making this crazy project a truly amazing experience—it’s been fun!  
  But most of all we’d like to thank Jim for his trust, confidence, and support over the 
  last several years, and for sharing the landscape of his wonderfully demented mind 
  with us all.
  Playtesters & 
  Proofreaders
  BLAZERS
  Tina Adams, Johnathan E. Angel, Thomas 
  Bates, Dane Black, Morgan Collins, Mike 
  Daugherty, Chris Demink, Aaron Enriquez, 
  Ashwath Ganesan, Aphrodite Lagios, Lydia Leong, 
  Joe McKeon, Brad McMillan, Janine Reed, 
  Jenna Sparks, Jeremy Tidwell, Vandi Williams
  BLEEDERS
  Christopher Acker, Margaret Acker, Scott Acker, Jon 
  Ames, Rick Anderson, Lesley Barnes, Frankie Bates, 
  Joseph Beam, Ken Beam, Michael Beam, Robert Bohl, 
  Daniel Bowden, Tom Boyce, Mick Bradley, Wallace 
  Cady, Laurie Cason, Joanna Charambura, Dave Cleaver, 
  Nacho Cuellar, James Deykes, Carlos Díaz, Mario Dongu, 
  John Donoghue, Chris Douglas, Rich Flynn, Micheal 
  Frantz, Cindy Freeman, Roland Freeman, Veronica 
  Garcia, Hector Garcidueñas, Sylvia Grove, Carol Hardy, 
  Chris Heim, Ryan Holdbrooks, Tom Horn, Zach Hunt, 
  Gilbert Isla, Shane Ivey , Jeff Johnsen, Shihea Johnsen, 
  Bart Jones, Dan Jones, Rick Jones, Clay Karwan, James 
  Khol, Mark Kinney, Chris Kittinger, Michael Langley, 
  Kenneth Lavender, René López, Paul Luzbetek, Jason 
  Manion, Jarys Maragopoulos, Max Massey, Thomas 
  Mazorlig, Jose Melgarejo, Kati Melgarejo, Chris Miller, 
  Erica Miller, David Moore, Erin Moore, Rick Neal, 
  Brandy Nederlander, Josh Neff, Vic Norris, Devin O’Keefe 
  , Michael Parker, Oscar Pola, Shaun Ray, Fera Reimer, 
  Sandy Schumann, Kieran Schumann, Clint Staples, Penny 
  Staples, Vickie Staples, Joshua M. Stone, Tali Teichman, 
  Jorge Valdez, Russ Wallace, Phil Walton, Rachel Walton, 
  Jeramy Ware, Katie Ware, Lee Weaver, Andrew Weaver, 
  Jill Wetzel, Michael Wheeles, Jared White, Adina 
  Williams, David Wilcox, Todd Woodall, Michelle Yancey
  BURNERS
  Ben Alcorn, Dawn Antoline, Lynn Barnetto, Nick Beach, 
  Alan Bean, Dan Berg, Nicholas Berry, Will Berry, Anna 
  Breig, Dardrae Breig, Kaylina Breig, Marvin Breig, 
  Ryan Breig, James Carpio, Stacey Chancellor, Brendan 
  Conway, Kait & Kyle Cottengim, Emerson Daly, Randy 
  Davenport, Jim DelRosso, Matt Doernhoefer, Brian 
  Dorion, Scott Dorward, Jared Edens, Rick Ewing, Clint 
  Felker, Phil Florian, Kevan Forbes, Jason Freeman, 
  Jessica Friend, Jim Friend, Jim Gardner, Zac Gibson, 
  Laura “Red” Gierach, Matt Glover, Judd M. Goswick, 
  Viktor Haag, Jerrod Hall, Kent Hamilton, Josh Harrison, 
  Shaun Hayworth, Kristin Hayworth, Kaisa Hirvonen, 
  Eric Hontz, Brenda Hovdenes, Justin Hovdenes, Ryan 
  Hupp, Joseph Kerstetter, Kristi Kerstetter, Sean Kessler, 
  Dawn Kessler, Shoshana Kessock, Rainer Koreasalo, 
  Kari Koukka, Teuvo Kovanen, Samara Laufer, Brandon 
  Lemos, Ian Lim, Travis Lindquist, Jabe Lawdonski, Brian 
  J Martin, Catriona Mcbride, Shane McCarthy, Louisa 
  McGuinness, Seana McGuinness, Heikki Meriläinen, 
  Alicia Middlebrook, Warren Morrison, James Nicoll, Sean 
  Nittner, Friend Olsen, Robin Poole, Justin Reyes, Mike 
  Resner, Tate Ricker, W. Adam Rinehart, Sami Ropponen, 
  Benjamin Rose, Matt Sanderson, Tomi Sarkkinen, Ginny 
  & Bob Schauer, Dan Shulsinger, Rohan Smith, Kyle Tracy, 
  Lou Umile, Henry Wang, Paul Wilson, Nancy Wolfberg, 
  Erik Woodbury, Chris Young, Craig Young, Curtis Young
  BURSTERS
  Autumn Armstrong-Berg, Eric Berg, Chandra 
  Blair, Sean Cowen, Doug Laedtke, Ian Laedtke, 
  John Hawkins, Heather Heim, Rob Heim, Erik Jordan, 
  Leif Park Jordan, Gary Lewis, Michael Matlock, Brian 
  Morgan, Christina Mullins, Morrie Mullins, Chris 
  Richeson, Brian Smith, Tara Turney, Jae Walker 
  SECRET WEAPONS
  Chris Hanrahan, Priscilla Spencer
  IT’S HIS FAULT
  Matthew Gandy
  
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  Table of Contents
  Credits 
  3
  Table of 
  Contents 
  4
  Introduction 7
  - Chapter One -
  Harry’s World
  Harry’s World 
  10
  Maxims of the Dresdenverse 10
  What’s Out There? 
  13
  Current Situation 
  14
  - Chapter Two -
  The Basics
  Here’s the Deal 
  16
  Things You Should Have 
  16
  Dealing With the Dice 
  16
  What Are Fudge Dice? 
  16
  The Ladder 
  16
  Rolling the Dice 
  17
  Difficulty 
  17
  What’s On Your Character 
  Sheet 
  17
  Skills 
  18
  Aspects 
  18
  Mortal Stunts 
  18
  Supernatural Powers 
  19
  Fate Points 
  19
  Refreshing Fate Points 
  20
  Earning New Fate Points 
  During Play 
  21
  …And Off You Go 
  22
  - Chapter Three -
  City Creation
  The Living City 
  24
  So What Do We Do? 
  24
  Getting Ready to Make Your 
  City 
  25
  Choose Your City 
  26
  Familiarize and Discuss  
  26
  Researching Your City 
  26
  The Vancouver Method 
  28
  Coming to a Consensus 
  28
  Intentional Inaccuracies 
  30
  A City Full Of Problems 
  30
  Themes of a City  
  30
  Threats to a City 
  31
  Making Themes and Threats 
  for Your City 
  31
  Getting the High-Level View 33
  Someone Cares About the 
  City 
  33
  Mortal Response to the 
  Supernatural 
  35
  Locations in Your City 
  37
  Getting Ideas 
  37
  Recurring Locations 
  39
  Locations and 
  the Supernatural  
  39
  Themes and Threats of 
  Locations 
  40
  Bringing It Together 
  40
  People in Your City 
  41
  High Concept 
  41
  Motivation 
  42
  Faces of Locations 
  42
  Faces of Themes and Threats 44
  Tying Characters Together 44
  The Protagonists 
  45
  Finalize Your City 
  46
  Wrapping It Up 
  48
  Non-City Games 
  48
  On-The-Fly City Creation 
  49
  - Chapter Four -
  Character 
  Creation
  Character Creation Is Play 
  52
  Your Character Idea 
  52
  Choose a Template 
  53
  High Concept 
  54
  Trouble 
  55
  Names 
  58
  The Phases 
  58
  Where Did You Come From?  59
  What Shaped You?  
  59
  What Was Your First 
  Adventure?  
  60
  Whose Path Have You 
  Crossed?  
  61
  Who Else’s Path Have You 
  Crossed? 
  63
  Finish Up Your Character 
  65
  Skills 
  65
  Stunts and Powers 
  66
  Final Refresh Level, 
  Fate Points, Stress, & 
  Consequences 
  68
  Conclusion 
  68
  Quick Character Creation 
  68
  Minimal Preparation 
  69
  On-the-Fly Character 
  Creation 
  69
  - Chapter Five -
  Types & 
  Templates
  Let’s Get Cooking 
  72
  Pure Mortal 
  73
  Champion of God 
  73
  Changeling 
  74
  Emissary of Power 
  75
  Focused Practitioner 
  76
  Knight of a Faerie Court 
  78
  Lycanthrope 
  79
  Minor Talent 
  80
  Red Court Infected 
  80
  Sorcerer 
  81
  True Believer 
  82
  Were-Form 
  82
  White Court Vampire 
  84
  White Court Virgin 
  85
  Wizard 
  86
  - Chapter Six -
  Advancement
  Change Happens 
  88
  Milestones & Characters 
  88
  Minor Milestone 
  88
  Significant Milestone 
  89
  Major Milestone 
  90
  Changing the Defaults 
  91
  Mid-Session Power 
  Upgrades 
  91
  Advancing Cities 
  93
  Themes 
  93
  Threats 
  94
  Locations 
  94
  Faces and Other NPCs 
  95
  
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  - Chapter Seven -
  Aspects
  What Are Aspects? 
  98
  Using Aspects 
  98
  Invoking Aspects 
  98
  Compelling Aspects 
  100
  Interacting With Other 
  Aspects 
  105
  Invoking Other Aspects 
  106
  Compelling Other Aspects 107
  Creating Character Aspects 108
  “Positive” Vs. “Negative” 
  Aspects 
  109
  Situation Vs. Story 
  110
  Heating Things Up 
  111
  Getting on the Same Page 112
  Creating and Discovering 
  Aspects in Play 
  113
  Guessing Aspects 
  113
  Temporary Aspects 
  114
  Assessments 
  115
  Declarations 
  116
  Sample Aspects 
  117
  - Chapter Eight -
  Skills
  What Are Skills? 
  120
  - Chapter Nine -
  Mortal Stunts
  What Are Stunts? 
  146
  What Stunts Do 
  146
  Mortal Stunts vs. 
  Supernatural Powers 
  146
  Building Mortal Stunts 
  147
  Adding New Trappings 
  147
  Extending Existing 
  Trappings 
  148
  Examples of Mortal Stunts 149
  - Chapter Ten -
  Supernatural 
  Powers
  What are Powers? 
  158
  Creature Features 
  162
  Faerie Magic 
  166
  Items of Power 
  167
  Minor Abilities 
  169
  Nevernever Powers 
  170
  Psychic Abilities 
  172
  Shapeshifting 
  174
  Speed 
  178
  Spellcraft 
  179
  Strength 
  183
  Toughness 
  184
  True Faith 
  187
  Vampirism 
  188
  - Chapter Eleven -
  Playing The Game
  Taking Action 
  192
  Non-conflict Actions 
  192
  Simple Actions 
  192
  Contests 
  193
  Assessments 
  195
  Conflicts 
  197
  Running Conflicts 
  197
  Social Conflicts 
  215
  Mental Conflicts 
  217
  Additional Advice for Social 
  and Mental Conflicts 
  219
  Recovering from Conflicts 220
  - Chapter Twelve -
  Living With 
  Magic
  I, Spellslinger 
  222
  Wizard Biology 
  222
  Wizard Senses 
  222
  The Sight 
  223
  Soulgazing 
  226
  Hexing 
  228
  Thresholds 
  230
  The Laws of Magic 
  232
  Breaking the Laws of 
  Magic 
  232
  The First Law 
  235
  The Second Law 
  237
  The Third Law 
  238
  The Fourth Law 
  240
  The Fifth Law 
  241
  The Sixth Law 
  243
  The Seventh Law 
  244
  - Chapter Thirteen -
  Spellcasting
  The Art of the Spell 
  248
  Evocation 
  249
  Inherent Limitations 
  250
  How to Do It 
  250
  What You Can Do With It 251
  Elements 
  253
  Gathering Power 
  255
  Controlling Power 
  256
  Focus Items 
  256
  Backlash & Fallout 
  256
  Rote Spells 
  257
  Other Parameters 
  258
  Thaumaturgy 
  261
  Inherent Limitations 
  261
  How to Do It 
  262
  What You Can Do With It 262
  Determining Complexity 264
  Preparation 
  266
  Adjudicating Preparation 268
  Casting the Spell 
  270
  Using Help 
  272
  Types of Thaumaturgy 
  272
  Sponsored Magic 
  287
  Inherent Limitations 
  287
  How To Do It 
  288
  What You Can Do With It 288
  The Sponsor’s Agenda 
  289
  Types of Sponsored Magic 290
  Examples of Magic 
  293
  Evocation Spells 
  293
  Thaumaturgy Spells 
  296
  Focus Items 
  301
  Enchanted Items 
  303
  Potions  
  303
  
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  - Chapter Fourteen -
  Running 
  The Game
  What the GM Does 
  306
  Running City and Character 
  Creation 
  306
  Choosing Aspects 
  306
  Starting and Ending Scenes 307
  Starting Things Off 
  307
  When a Scene Isn’t a Scene 307
  Making the Transitions 
  308
  Adjudicating the Rules 
  308
  When to Call for a Roll 
  309
  Setting Difficulties 
  310
  Dealing with Time 
  314
  Adjudicating Aspects 
  316
  Adjudicating Skills 
  318
  Adjudicating Powers and 
  Stunts 
  323
  Other Situations 
  324
  Creating the Opposition 
  326
  Types of NPCs 
  327
  Scaling the Opposition 
  331
  - Chapter Fifteen -
  Building 
  Scenarios
  The Nuts & Bolts of 
  Storytelling 
  340
  Assemble Aspects  
  340
  Choose Emphasis  
  341
  Make Connections 
  342
  Tension-Based Connections 342
  Cooperation-Based 
  Connections 
  342
  Create Scenario Ideas 
  343
  Using Tension-Based 
  Connections 
  343
  Using Cooperation-Based 
  Connections 
  344
  Putting It All Together 
  345
  What to Do With Outlying 
  Connections 
  345
  Create Opening Scene 
  Hooks 
  346
  Begin at the Beginning 
  346
  Planning Ahead 
  347
  Create Additional Details 
  349
  The Scenario in Play 
  350
  Dynamic NPCs 
  351
  NPCs and Fate Points 
  351
  Ending a Scenario 
  353
  Alternate Scenario Creation 
  Methods 
  354
  Starting with NPCs 
  355
  Improvising 
  355
  Keeping It Going 
  356
  - Chapter Sixteen -
  Nevermore/
  Baltimore
  Introduction 
  358
  Baltimore: 
  Come for the Seafood, Stay 
  for the Mind-Shattering 
  Supernatural Terror 
  358
  What’s What in Baltimore 359
  The Mundane Community 359
  The Supernatural 
  Community 
  360
  What’s at Stake: Points 
  of Conflict 
  360
  Themes and Threats 
  362
  Who’s Who in Baltimore 
  362
  Vampires 
  362
  The Fae 
  364
  Ghoul Clan Ereshkigal 
  364
  The White Council 
  365
  Other Factions 
  and Organizations 
  365
  Individuals 
  367
  What’s Where in Baltimore 389
  The Fall Line 
  389
  Federal Hill Park 
  389
  Fort McHenry 
  389
  Fort Carroll 
  390
  The Washington 
  Monument 
  391
  National Aquarium 
  391
  The “East Green” 
  392
  Fells Point/Canton 
  392
  Johns Hopkins Hospital 
  392
  Edgar Allan Poe House and 
  Museum 
  393
  The Montrose Estate 
  393
  Clifton Gate House 
  (Heritage High School) 393
  Francis Scott Key Bridge 
  393
  Neutral Grounds 
  394
  Basilica of the National 
  Shrine of the Assumption 
  of the Blessed Virgin 
  Mary 
  394
  Maryland Men’s State 
  Correctional Facility at 
  Baltimore 
  395
  Glossary 
  396
  Index 
  403
  Reference 
  Sheets 
  410
  Any page references that 
  talk about material in 
  Volume 2: our World 
  will be noted with the 
  prefix “oW”. So if you 
  see “oW123”, that means 
  page 123 of our World.
  
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  Rules look good (see 
  comments), but when I stopped 
  by the other night, um… Look, 
  buddy, when you find yourself 
  in your underwear, surrounded 
  by note cards and empty beer 
  bottles, you might be working 
  too hard. I’m just sayin’.
  — Harry
  Introduction
  AuguSt
  Hey, Boss —
  You remember that idea I got last year, when 
  I was organizing your casefiles—the one about 
  how an rPg could be a version of drAculA 
  for the twenty-First century? (‘cause really, 
  what better way to inform about and quantify 
  supernatural threats than with rPg stats?) 
  Well, we (the Alphas) are going to give it a go!
  Since I’ve already partially organized the 
  files, I just collected relevant data on the 
  various critters and creeps you’ve encountered 
  and threw that into the database of notes 
  I keep on Alpha-activities. I’ve been using 
  all that info to generate the text. Still 
  lots more to do—rules and such, mostly. 
  As we write this, can you just fact-
  check it to make sure we’re not saying 
  anything way off-base? thanks! 
  — Will
  mAY
  Hey, Boss —
  All right, I think we nearly have a final 
  product here. Just need to finalize some 
  of the art and to search & replace the 
  names. can you do a final read-through?
  — Will
  I’m not sure that an RPG will 
  have quite the same impact of 
  Stoker’s work (although you’ll 
  have some really well-informed 
  geeks!), but I’ll give this stuff a 
  read. It certainly looks like 
  you’ve put a lot of work into it.
  At the least, this might make for 
  a good training text for your 
  pack (and maybe my apprentice). 
  You all need to stay informed. 
  Knowledge is power, etc...
  — Harry
  How is Bob going to  f
  I’ll find a way, William.
  oH HolY crAP that’s weird. It’s 
  like some sort of magical ink jet!
   Just leave the manuscript on the table and 
  I’ll make some comments.
  decemBer
  Hey, Boss —
  Spellcasting rules are 
  done. can you vet them? 
  — Will
  Sure thing, Billy. 
  I’ll get Bob to 
  look it over, too.
  — Harry
  Hey, I’ve been carting the manuscript around in 
  a backpack (sometimes in wolf form), and we’ve 
  passed it back and forth a couple times, so it’s 
  gotten a little beaten up – after you get it 
  back to me next time, I’ll incorporate your notes 
  and print off a new bound copy at Printastic.
  Ewww, is that wolf drool?
  
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  What Is a Roleplaying Game? 
  In a roleplaying game (or RPG), you and the rest of 
  the group imagine fictional scenarios and events, and 
  then play them out. Because this is the Dresdenverse, 
  these scenarios will involve solving or resolving 
  supernaturally-related crimes or problems in a city 
  of your choice—it could be your home town, it could 
  be some place you’ve never been.
  Each player except for one controls a single player 
  character (or PC). You can think of the PCs as the 
  protagonists in a movie or novel—their actions and 
  decisions are primarily what drive events forward, 
  and you spend most of the time focusing on their 
  reactions to the things that happen during the game. 
  As a player, you get to say what your character says, 
  describe what your character does, and make deci-
  sions for that character.
  One player fulfills a different responsibility than 
  the others and is called the gamemaster, or GM for 
  short. As the GM, you have a variety of duties during 
  the game. You control all the characters the other 
  players don’t control (called, boringly enough, non-
  player characters or NPCs)—basically, everyone else 
  in the game world. Most importantly, you’re respon-
  sible for controlling the opposition to the PCs—
  those individuals who create the crimes or problems 
  the other players are trying to resolve. You also act 
  as a referee of sorts, calling for and judging the use 
  of the game rules when appropriate. Finally, you’re 
  responsible for creating the initial situations that the 
  PCs will respond to during the game.
  What makes this imagining fun is that you don’t 
  decide on the outcomes of these scenarios before-
  hand—there’s no script like there would be if you 
  were performing a play. Instead, the GM presents a 
  situation to the players, and the players react in the 
  moment by saying how the characters respond. You 
  use the game’s rules to help you decide how a partic-
  ular event turns out, whether that’s the outcome of 
  a fight or the effects of a wizard’s spell. You roll dice 
  to bring an element of chance and unpredictability 
  into the game—sometimes, despite your best efforts, 
  things head in unexpected directions. The actions 
  that the players take change the initial situation, 
  forcing the opposition to react or creating new prob-
  lems for the players to deal with. This chain of action 
  and reaction continues until everything is resolved 
  to the group’s satisfaction. Some scenarios can be 
  resolved in a single night; some may take multiple 
  sessions. 
  In that sense, you can look at this activity as a 
  kind of collaborative storytelling; by the time you’re 
  done, the events of the game will look like a plot or 
  storyline, with the PCs as its stars. 
  That’s pretty much all you need to know! It’s fun.
  I Want to Learn…
  …about the Dresdenverse: see Chapter 1 and 
  maybe Chapter 12 in Your Story and, well, 
  all of Our World. 
  …about specific people and critters in the 
  Dresdenverse: see Chapter 3 in Our World.     
  …about the Manual of Monsters: see Chapter 2 
  in Our World.   
  …about the game rules (like character creation, 
  how to play, how to run a game): well, that’s 
  pretty much the point of most of the chapters 
  in Your Story. 
  …the meaning of those words you keep using: 
  lucky for you, there’s a glossary at the end of 
  Your Story.
  What goes Bump
  remINder: replace all real names in publication draft.
  The Dresden Files
  Here are the casefiles, in chronological order:
    “Restoration of Faith”
    “Welcome to the Jungle”
    Storm Front
    Fool Moon
    Grave Peril
    Summer Knight
    Death Masks
    Blood Rites
    Dead Beat
    “Something Borrowed”
    Proven Guilty
    White Night
    “It’s My Birthday, Too”
    “Heorot”
    Small Favor
  Need to add “AAAA Wizardry” to this 
  list—see the OUR WORLD book for more.
  Harry, you 
  had this all 
  out of order. 
  You had “WttJ” 
  filed AFter 
  Small Favor!
  even though the word “game” 
  often implies a winner and a 
  loser, rPgs are different—the 
  goal is to work together to 
  tell a great story. As clichéd 
  as this sounds, if you’re all 
  having fun, then you all 
  win—even if things didn’t 
  go the way you’d planned.
  
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  Harry's World
  - cHAPter oNe -
  Harry’s 
  World
  
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  Harry's World
  Harry’s World
  For most people, Chicago is Chicago, America is 
  America, and Earth is Earth—but there’s more 
  to the world than that. 
  Beneath the “normal” surface of the world 
  are things and people which most humans don’t 
  know about, don’t want to know about, and 
  will do their best to forget about if they ever 
  come anywhere near them. That dead body 
  with the odd toothmarks? Attacked by stray 
  dogs. The traces of thirty different infectious 
  diseases on this corpse? Statistical anomaly. The 
  Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton from the museum 
  scattered in a thousand pieces on the college 
  lawn? Student prank.
  People won’t see things they don’t want to see. 
  Most of the citizens of Chicago would laugh at 
  the idea of magic, even though Harry Dresden 
  has his number and occupation right in the 
  phone book. It’s always possible for everyone, 
  from heroes to bystanders, to turn away and not 
  get involved. It’s often the easiest thing in the 
  world to do. You can choose between good and 
  evil, light and darkness, possibility and necessity, 
  taking action and going home to curl up with a 
  good book.
  The world is weirder, more wonderful, 
  and more deadly than it seems. Some people 
  know this. There are people who know that 
  magic exists and know who to call when they 
  run into it. There are humans who have been 
  divinely blessed or diabolically cursed. There 
  are faeries—small, big, hugely ancient and terri-
  fying. There are dragons, although these days it’s 
  said they consider bearer bonds as well as gold 
  for their hoards.
  The Nevernever—the world of fae and 
  ghosts—is just on the other side of a veil from 
  normal life; courts of vampires divide the night 
  among them; the White Council of wizards 
  tries to protect the innocent and stop the misuse 
  of magic.
  All of this is going on, right under our noses.
  However, this is also a world where a single 
  person, in the right place, at the right time, can 
  do the right thing and save the people he cares 
  about.
  Here in what we often like to call “the 
  Dresdenverse,” we can choose to be people who 
  see, who make our own paths, who do the right 
  thing, and take the responsibility for doing it. 
  Seen clearly, this world is full of light and dark-
  ness, with all the shades of grey between.
  Join us, if only in play. Because it’s only a 
  book, a game, a roleplaying entertainment of 
  magic and monsters.
  Isn’t it?
  You be the judge.
  Maxims of the 
  Dresdenverse
  There are certain themes that hold true in this 
  world which are noticeable enough that you 
  should take them under consideration. They can 
  be roughly summarized as follows.
  Monsters have Nature, 
  Mortals have Choice
  Almost all beings that could be considered 
  “monsters” are, one on one, far more powerful 
  than the average mortal. They have great 
  strength, implausible toughness, blinding speed, 
  and unnatural powers. What they don’t have is 
  choice. 
  A monster’s nature is oriented towards 
  fulfilling its hungers. Vampires need emotion 
  or blood or death, loup-garoux need the hunt 
  and the kill, fae literally cannot step outside 
  their natures or break oaths. These entities have 
  power, but they don’t have the option of saying 
  no. They are what they’re made to be—and 
  some things are simply made cruel, bloodthirsty, 
  or just plain evil.
  On the other hand, mortals have options: 
  choice. That’s their great strength and their great 
  responsibility. Only animals and monsters can 
  truthfully say that they can’t do anything else, 
  or that they can’t be other than what they are. 
  It’s not as 
  though the 
  Archangel 
  Michael came 
  down in person 
  and gave you 
  a Sword made 
  from one of 
  the nails that 
  pinned Christ 
  to the Cross 
  and charged 
  you with a 
  sacred mission, 
  after all. 
  (By the way, 
  if anyone out 
  there HAS had 
  the Archangel 
  Michael come 
  down to charge 
  them with a 
  holy mission, 
  give me a call. 
  I’m in the book.)
  You have got to be kidding me. Billy, nobody but you 
  and Kirby call the world “the Dresdenverse.”
  
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  Harry's World
  Every human being can make a decision about 
  what to do or not do, what to accept and what to 
  refuse, whether to kill or not kill. 
  That said, the situation is often grey and 
  not clear-cut. There are those few who are part 
  mortal and part monster: vampires who struggle 
  to fight their hungers and do the right thing; 
  werewolves who chose lycanthropy to get the 
  strength to defend their community; wizards 
  who accept help from dark sources, but hope to 
  restrain the urges that threaten to engulf them. 
  Choice is the overwhelming theme of these indi-
  viduals’ lives. Will they retain their humanity 
  or will they become monsters? And is there 
  any way that those who are now monsters can 
  perhaps regain some degree of humanity, some 
  capacity for choice?
  For Thomas’ sake, I hope so.
  Things Fall Apart
  The world is growing darker. Humans are 
  choosing the worse over the better, and the 
  monsters are cheering them on. There are trolls 
  under the bridges, vampires running busi-
  nesses behind the velvet curtains, and ghosts 
  sucking the life from babies in maternity wards. 
  Organized crime is strong and getting stronger; 
  gunshots echo in the night; some policemen 
  take payoffs. Drug use is spreading; alcohol is an 
  answer rather than a stopgap; people lose them-
  selves in their searches for pleasure, power, or 
  escape.
  But there are those who stand against the 
  rising tide of shadow. Whether they are ordinary 
  humans, secretive wizards, individuals chosen by 
  supernatural powers, or people empowered by 
  some other means, they will not let the darkness 
  win. Perhaps all the more obvious against the 
  shabbiness of the world around them, perhaps 
  stained or marked by their own errors and 
  problems, they nevertheless hold their ground 
  and work to protect, to support, to rebuild. They 
  choose to use their power for others as well as 
  for themselves. These people exist, and they 
  haven’t given in yet.
  Science Fails
  The comforting rules of science and technology, 
  the certainty that a better computer or a bigger 
  gun will settle the problem—sorry, they don’t 
  work ’round here. Wizards and some other 
  monsters cause nearby technology to malfunction 
  simply by their presence. 
  Monsters aren’t reliably affected by the laws 
  of physics. They seem to treat them as “vague 
  guidelines” more than laws. They can fly, walk 
  through walls, tear apart steel doors, and deflect 
  bullets (or ignore them entirely). All the care-
  fully acquired handguns, sniper rifles, flame-
  throwers, computer security, and mobile phones 
  in the world may ultimately be useless if pitted 
  against the wrong sort of adversary.
  Not only does technology not work around 
  the wizardly-inclined, nobody can really explain 
  why post-WWII technology doesn’t work. 
  There aren’t any convenient rules. No wizard 
  has yet attempted to catalogue his effects on 
  technology.
  Last time Butters and I spoke, he was on about 
  something about Harry’s electromagnetic field 
  (I call it an aura) interfering with electron 
  spin and/or phase jumps in transistors and 
  other solid state electronics. (I think that’s 
  what he said. Technology is just another flavor 
  of faith to me.)
  Furthermore, no monster is going to publish 
  a list of ways that it can be hurt. However, others 
  can. The most recent example of such a tome, 
  Bram Stoker’s Dracula, detailed most of the 
  significant ways in which a Black Court vampire 
  can be damaged or killed. The Black Court still 
  hasn’t recovered. 
  Please change 
  “some other 
  monsters” to 
  “some other 
  supernatural 
  entities”? 
  We’re not all 
  that bad.
  Well, mostly.
  Okay.
  Just freaking 
  change it, 
  Billy.
  Mortals—humans—also have 
  the advantage of numbers. Up 
  until very recently, calling 
  mortal authorities into a 
  supernatural situation was 
  like radioing in an airstrike. 
  Unfortunately, in the course 
  of the Vampire War, some of 
  the supernatural “nations” seem 
  to have gotten hold of the 
  mystical equivalents of nukes.
  “Publish a 
  list” (like this 
  game). Heh.
  By the way, 
  there’s some 
  circumstantial 
  evidence that 
  indicates 
  Stoker was 
  manipulated 
  into writing 
  DRACULA 
  by the White 
  Court. So 
  while no 
  monster is 
  gonna come 
  up with a “Top 
  Ten Ways to 
  Whack Me” 
  list, another 
  monster 
  might do so.
  Also, Billy, have I 
  ever mentioned that 
  sometimes you speak like 
  a freaking superhero in 
  a comic book?(That’s 
  not an insult, but I’m not 
  sure it’s a compliment.)
  
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  Harry's World
  Effective word here being 
  “can”—while Michael, Charity, 
  and Father Forthill have that 
  kind of belief in the goodness of 
  God and that everything will 
  work out to some ineffable 
  plan…I just can’t buy it. Not 
  with what I’ve seen happen.
  For my part, I know that faith has 
  power. However, I am not allowed to 
  understand anything further than that, 
  by nature and by…other issues.
  This dovetails remarkably well with the note 
  above about people choosing not to see what’s 
  going on around them. The scientists who might 
  be able to analyze data on monsters don’t want 
  to know in the first place; then their instruments 
  go nuts, so they dismiss the cases of sponta-
  neous combustion or bouncing bullets as statis-
  tical anomalies. With regard to the supernatural, 
  science can’t tell you what just happened, can’t 
  explain why it happened, and can’t stop it from 
  happening again. 
  Sure, Mr. or Ms. Sciencey-Science, your lab 
  is spotless, filled with the tools and gear of anal-
  ysis, and you have spent years filling your head 
  with logic, knowledge, methods—but the spec-
  imen before you refuses to make sense according 
  to everything you’ve been taught. Meanwhile, 
  it’s very dark outside, something large is moving 
  around in the gloom, and your electric light has 
  started flickering. The monster is getting closer, 
  and you can’t do thing one about it—or even 
  understand what’s going on.
  However, this doesn’t mean that technology 
  can’t be useful, if properly applied (and kept 
  away from wizards who can make it go pfft!). 
  Different creatures have different vulnerabil-
  ities—a flamethrower or a water balloon filled 
  with holy water might be just the thing to even 
  the odds against a Black Court vampire. Even if 
  a bullet in the brainpan fails to take a monster 
  down, extreme applications of kinetic force 
  (such as a car at ramming speed or a crash-
  landing satellite) tend to have some sort of effect. 
  Other tools of technology can be used to pass 
  information, archive data, set up perimeters, or 
  collect evidence. Some technology may be func-
  tional in particular ways against particular types 
  of monster.
  Assuming that a wizard doesn’t accidentally 
  fuse them, of course.
  Belief is Power
  Faith in itself is a form of power and a kind of 
  magic. Strong faith in good (or evil) can act as a 
  defense, an offense, a shield, or a guide, providing 
  many effects which people would normally 
  consider “magic.” This could include things like a 
  glimmer of light from a crucifix in the darkness, 
  burning a vampire’s hands as it grabs you, or a 
  sudden burst of more-than-mortal strength.
  The exact details of the faith can vary. 
  Religious beliefs are the mainstay here: a stag-
  gering number of people have faith in God (or 
  gods). Some people have strong faith in more 
  philosophical beliefs—for example, the funda-
  mental purity and goodness of magic, Tibetan 
  mysticism, or even Communism. 
  The important thing is that if the person has 
  faith in something—true, sincere, pure faith—
  then miracles can happen.
  
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  Harry's World
  Magic is What You Are
  You can’t make magic do something that goes 
  against your fundamental nature. This works 
  on both the deliberate and the emotional levels. 
  An utterly kind, sincere person will not be able 
  to muster malicious hate and bitterness of a 
  level that would allow him to summon demons 
  or blast with hellfire—or, at least, not without 
  very significant provocation. Likewise, a vicious 
  and corrupt thanatologist practicing human 
  sacrifice isn’t going to have healing magic at his 
  command—or, if he does, it may require blood 
  and pain to make it work and will probably be 
  more corrupting than simply leaving the open 
  wound to fester. 
  At least, that’s the theory. Practice has, once 
  again, shown things to be a lot fuzzier than the 
  clear-cut examples above. Again, it all comes 
  back to choice and to the complexity of the 
  mortal mind and soul. Even a kindly old grand-
  mother has the seeds of hatred within her, and 
  even a cold-blooded gangster has moments of 
  tenderness and kindness.
  Magic is an expression of the person who 
  brings it forth. It comes from their beliefs, their 
  morality, their feelings, their emotional connec-
  tions, their way of seeing the world: in a word, 
  their soul. 
  See, boss, William gets it a lot more than you do.
  Shut up, Bob.
  There’s a reason why the soulgaze is the ulti-
  mate proof of sincerity between many wizards. 
  A soulgaze happens when two people (at least 
  one of them a wizard) make eye contact long 
  enough to look into each other’s souls and see 
  what they truly are. In that moment, a wizard 
  not only sees what a person is, but he also sees 
  what their magic is—it’s one and the same. For 
  instance, if you choose to practice black magic, 
  you dredge up the corrupt parts of yourself and 
  make them stronger. You are what you choose to 
  become, what you make yourself into. (Luckily, 
  if you’re mortal, you also always have the power 
  to choose redemption after a slip.)
  Whether it’s faith or magic, all power comes 
  from the basic nature of the mortal or monster 
  who is using it. Evil brings forth evil, and good 
  brings forth good. We are what we do, and we 
  do what we are.
  What’s Out There?
  Here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of the 
  mortals, “semi-mortals,” and monsters running 
  around out in the Dresdenverse. Keep your eyes 
  peeled, and you might recognize them.
  (For further details on the political factions 
  and recent history of these groups, see Old 
  World Order, OW14. For more information on 
  the nature of each of these types of beings, see 
  What Goes Bump, OW28. For discussions of 
  specific individuals, see Who’s Who, OW98.)
  Mortals
  First, you have true mundane mortals. They 
  are unaware of the supernatural goings-on all 
  around them.
  Then you have the clued-in, who have experi-
  enced the weirdness up-close and personal, and 
  may know a bit about the various people and 
  critters involved in occult stuff. Clued-in groups 
  include some people of faith, law enforcement 
  officers who specialize in “black cat investiga-
  tions,” researchers who come across anomalous 
  (read: supernatural) evidence, and even some 
  members of organized crime.
  Next are the minor talents. These are folks 
  who have a (usually limited) supernatural ability 
  of their own. Maybe they can cast a spell or two, 
  know some effective rituals, speak to the dead, 
  see the future, that sort of thing. 
  Sorcerers are more powerful magic-workers, 
  often tapping the power of cults surrounding 
  them to empower spells or rituals or to summon 
  demons. Sorcerers usually don’t have the 
  training, power, knowledge, or ethics of White 
  Council wizards. White Council members have 
  the tools and the talent, but they must abide 
  by certain Laws of Magic. Those who break 
  the Laws are known as warlocks. (Usually, the 
  White Council sends its Wardens to enforce the 
  Laws, but due to the current Vampire War, their 
  hands are a bit full.)
  Lastly, there are necromancers who use the 
  power of death to do magic, like raising ghosts 
  and zombies and all other sorts of creepy busi-
  ness. (Playing with death magic is a big no-no to 
  the White Council, by the way.)
  You could 
  consider 
  necromancers 
  to be bigtime 
  warlocks.
  
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  Harry's World
  “Semi-Mortals”
  “Semi-mortals” are people who have a foot in 
  the mortal world and a foot in the supernat-
  ural world. They retain some aspects of choice, 
  balanced against their nature (see above, page 10).
  These include some types of werewolf, scions 
  of mortal-monster matings (such as change-
  lings, which are part-human and part-faerie), 
  and the poor folks who have been half-turned—
  or infected—by a vampire. (A large percentage 
  of the membership of the Fellowship of St. 
  Giles is composed of people infected and turned 
  halfway into a Red Court vampire.)
  Monsters
  The world is full of monsters. There are other 
  types of werewolves than those mentioned 
  above (four or five in total), and at least four 
  types of vampire (White Court, Red Court, 
  Black Court, and Jade Court), all with different 
  powers, hungers, and weaknesses. Then there 
  are ghouls, the hard-to-dispatch killer thugs of 
  the supernatural set. 
  Add to this the inhabitants of the Nevernever 
  who can by various means cross from there into 
  the mortal realm; these include a multitude of 
  faerie species, spirits, ghosts, and demons.
  A couple dragons and gods are still kicking 
  around, but we don’t know much about them 
  other than they usually don’t seem to get involved 
  in stuff and they are extremely powerful.
  The Order of the Blackened Denarius is 
  composed of Fallen angels bound to thirty 
  silver coins, permitting them to possess mortal 
  hosts; they are extremely bad news. Apparently, 
  angels support the people of faith who wage war 
  against the Denarians. 
  Then there are Outsiders and Old Ones. 
  They want to consume reality. (We think.) We 
  don’t have much information on them because 
  knowing anything about them is against the 
  White Council’s Laws of Magic.
  Current Situation
  The White Council and its allies (the Fellowship 
  of St. Giles, the Venatori Umbrorum, and some 
  mystical monasteries in the Far East) are fighting 
  the Vampire War against the Red Court. For 
  its part, the Red Court is using ghouls (and 
  Outsiders in the Nevernever) against the White 
  Council. It is also trying to bring the White 
  and Black—and possibly the Jade—Courts in 
  to help fight. The White Court is neutral (due 
  to infighting and a recent major setback), the 
  Black Court is very small, and the Jade Court is 
  very mysterious, so they haven’t joined the Reds 
  quite yet.
  The Summer Court and the Winter Court 
  of Faerie are locked in their traditional enmity, 
  though the violence has ramped up due to the 
  Vampire War. The Summer Court has offered 
  mild assistance to the White Council in the 
  course of the Vampire War, but both are only 
  indirectly involved.
  A bunch of necromancers made a play for 
  godlike power a few years ago. Luckily, some of 
  the White Council’s Wardens stopped it.
  The Denarians continue their millennia-long 
  rampage of evil and destruction, checked by 
  the Knights of the Cross. While the Denarians 
  aren’t directly participating in the Vampire War, 
  they are taking advantage of it. The Knights 
  have aided the White Council on more than a 
  few occasions—and have taken heavy losses.
  The first “pure vanilla” mortal has signed onto 
  the Unseelie Accords (see OW14), becoming the 
  first non-supernatural Freeholding Lord. It is 
  likely he will assist the White Council versus the 
  Red Court.
  Then, there’s a mysterious faction out there—
  alternately called the Black Council or the 
  Circle—that is apparently stirring up trouble 
  behind the scenes. 
  Most recently, a huge dust-up happened in 
  Chicago between the Knights of the Cross, the 
  Archive, representatives of the White Council, 
  and the Denarians. (There’s also evidence that 
  the Summer Court and Winter Court of Faerie 
  were involved.) Suffice to say, it wasn’t pretty.
  And that’s what’s going on at the moment.
  By this 
  breakdown, 
  I’m almost 
  tempted to put 
  the Knights 
  of the Cross 
  under “semi-
  mortal.” It 
  seems like 
  Michael often 
  does not have 
  the freedom 
  to choose not 
  to follow 
  his belief 
  structure and 
  mission. Does 
  choice count if 
  you choose to 
  always follow 
  your nature?
  Hey, boss:  
  Pot. Kettle. Black.
  Tangentially… 
  William, I’d 
  consider a “classic 
  werewolf” like 
  yourself and your 
  compatriots to 
  be minor talents, 
  based on free will. 
  Actually, I know there’s a whole lot more 
  going on at the moment, but what with 
  getting married and the day job, I’m not 
  as up to speed as I could be (we should talk 
  about that).  But for the purpose of an 
  intro chapter, I figured that keeping it 
  simple was the way to go.  We’ll get into 
  the more complicated stuff in other places.
  
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  the 
  Basics
  
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  16
  the Basics
  Here’s the Deal
  So, this game is built on a free core system 
  called Fate (www.faterpg.com). It seems a good 
  choice—flexible, dramatic, fairly popular, FREE.
  Rather than reinvent the wheel, we figured 
  we’d just modify the hell out of it for our 
  purposes.
  Anyway, it’s an RPG, and if you’re reading 
  this, you probably already have at least a vague 
  idea of what that means. (If you don’t, make sure 
  you read the introduction to this book.)
  Onward!
  Things You 
  Should Have
  In addition to these rules, you’ll need a few 
  supplies to play the game. Here’s a list of manda-
  tory items, as well as some recommended ones.
  You’ll need:
    Four Fudge dice for each player and the 
  game master (GM). If you don’t have 
  Fudge dice, see the retailer page at Grey 
  Ghost Games (www.fudgerpg.com) or 
  your local or online RPG dice supplier 
  for a pack. (Or see “What Are Fudge 
  Dice?” on this page.)
    Some copies of the character and city 
  worksheets (found in the back of this 
  book or downloaded from our site at  
  www.dresdenfilesrpg.com) or at least blank 
  paper for taking notes during city and 
  character creation.
    Things to write with.
    Between two to six friends (the players).
  You’ll find useful:
    A set of poker chips or glass beads (to 
  use as fate points).
    Index cards to pass along information 
  during character creation, to make notes 
  on things that come up in play, and to 
  use in myriad other ways.
    Snacks.
  Dealing 
  With the Dice
  In this game, you use the dice quite a bit to figure 
  out what happens as you play. Whenever there’s 
  uncertainty regarding an outcome, you don’t just 
  make up what happens—you use the dice to 
  bring that element of chance to how things are 
  going to turn out. The dice allow for unexpected 
  successes and interesting failures.
  What Are 
  Fudge Dice?
  Fudge dice are six-sided dice that have different 
  markings from normal dice—instead of 
  numbers or dots, they have two sides marked 
  with a +, two sides marked with a -, and two 
  sides that are blank (0). If you find yourself 
  without Fudge dice or don’t want to purchase 
  them, you can roll 4 normal six-sided dice. Any 
  die showing a 1 or 2 is treated as -, any die 
  showing a 3 or 4 is treated as a 0, and any die 
  showing a 5 or 6 is treated as +.
  The Ladder
  Most things in the system are rated according to 
  the following ladder (when we say “the ladder” 
  throughout this book, this is what we mean):
  The Ladder
  +8	
  Legendary
  +7	
  Epic
  +6	
  Fantastic
  +5	
  Superb
  +4	
  Great
  +3	
  Good
  +2	
  Fair
  +1	
  Average
  0	
  Mediocre
  –1	
  Poor
  –2	
  Terrible
  Usually, the adjectives are used to describe 
  things—someone might be a Good Driver or 
  Average Scholar. The adjectives and numbers are 
  interchangeable, so if you’re more comfortable 
  with numbers, it is equally valid to say Drive: +3 
  or Scholarship: +1. For clarity, it might be 
   I have to 
  buy special 
  dice for 
  this game? 
  Stars and 
  stones, Billy 
  – I already 
  have a 
  Crown 
  Royal 
  bag full of 
  “special dice.”
  oh, come on, 
  Harry. What 
  gamer doesn’t 
  want an 
  excuse to buy 
  new dice?
  Index cards are just crazy 
  useful at the game table. 
  We end up using them for 
  all kinds of stuff.
  I can use dice I already have?  
  Well, good then.
  
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  the Basics
  best to use both, as in Good (+3) Drive or 
  Average (+1) Scholarship. 
  On this scale, Average represents the 
  minimum level of capability for someone who 
  does something regularly, but not exceptionally. 
  Most people are between Average and Good at 
  the things they do for a living—like Investigation 
  for a private eye—and are Mediocre at most 
  other things. It is only when they are driven to 
  excel that they surpass those limits. 
  Player characters (PCs) push the bound-
  aries of what “normal” people are capable of 
  and, as such, they tend to be Great or Superb 
  at whatever their central passion is. Each PC is, 
  in a sense, the protagonist in his own story; this 
  means that the heroes of The Dresden Files 
  RPG are genuinely exceptional individuals and 
  may well be recognized as such.
  Aww, thanks Billy. It’s nice 
  to know I am exceptional!
  Rolling the Dice
  You will roll four Fudge dice (abbreviated as 
  4dF) to generate a result between –4 and 4. 
  When reading the dice, a + equals +1, a - 
  equals –1 and a 0 (the blank side) equals 0. 
  Some example dice totals: 
  -+-- –2
  +000 +1
  0+0- 0
  The total of the dice is then added to an 
  appropriate skill to get a result. This result can 
  be referred to as the effort made, but sometimes 
  it’s just “the result.”
  Example: Harry Dresden is a Fair (+2) 
  athlete. He rolls the dice to jump over a low 
  wall and he rolls --0+ (–1) for a total 
  result of +1. Checking the ladder, that’s an 
  Average (+1) effort.
  Rolling Beyond 
  the Ladder
  On occasion, you’ll end up rolling for a high 
  or low skill, and getting a result that puts you 
  past the ladder—higher than Legendary (+8) or 
  lower than Terrible (–2). When that happens, 
  just use the number that you came up with. (If 
  you’re feeling creative, come up with your own 
  adjective for this dramatic roll!) This happens a 
  little more often when you get bonuses due to 
  aspects, which you’ll learn about on page 18.
  Difficulty
  When you roll for a result, you are trying to meet 
  or exceed a target value, which is the difficulty 
  for the roll. The difficulty indicates how hard 
  it is to do something. Difficulties are measured 
  on the same ladder as everything else. For 
  instance, it might be a Mediocre (+0) difficulty 
  to jumpstart a car, but a Good (+3) difficulty to 
  repair that same car after a serious breakdown. 
  Guidelines for setting difficulties are found in 
  Running the Game, page 310.
  The difference between the difficulty and the 
  effort (the result of the roll) is the magnitude of 
  the effect, which is measured in shifts. Shifts are 
  used to determine the potency of a character’s 
  efforts and to govern the resolution of complex 
  actions. There’s no such thing as a negative 
  shift—any roll that does not reach the difficulty 
  is simply considered a failure (although failing 
  the roll by a great deal might influence how the 
  group describes the result).
  Example: If Harry is rolling to jump over 
  that wall against a difficulty of Fair (+2) 
  and he rolls a Great (+4) result, he succeeds 
  by two, so he generates two shifts. If he rolls 
  Mediocre (+0), then he fails—he missed the 
  target of Fair by two (but he doesn’t generate 
  negative shifts).  If he rolls exactly Fair (+2), 
  then he succeeds as well, but with no shifts.
  What’s On Your 
  Character Sheet
  A character sheet is composed of four basic 
  elements—your skills, your aspects, your 
  stunts, and your supernatural powers. These 
  represent your character’s resources for solving 
  problems, winning conflicts, and impacting the 
  story during the game.
  Skills are a basic measure of what your char-
  acter can do, covering things like perceptiveness, 
  physical prowess, social and mental capacity, 
  and professional training. Aspects are a set of 
  descriptive phrases that help you out (or make 
  things complicated!) when something that 
  happens in the story is particularly relevant to 
  your character. Stunts expand the function of 
  skills to cover a more specialized niche or allow 
  you to do better in a specific circumstance. 
  Powers cover a wide range of abilities outside 
  the reach of normal mortals and have numerous 
  benefits.
  think of 
  a shift as 
  something you 
  use to “shift” 
  the outcome in 
  your favor.
  Sort of 
  like moving 
  energy from 
  one place to 
  another with 
  magic, then. 
  Geekomancy!
  If you’re really 
  anti-Fudge dice, 
  you can roll 2 
  different color 
  six-sided dice and 
  subtract one 
  from the other. 
  that gets you 
  a range of 
  –5 to +5 and 
  a wilder, more 
  random curve — 
  but it’s just as 
  valid so long as 
  everyone does it.
  Don’t cross 
  the streams!
  
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  Skills
  Characters have skills, like Drive and Guns, 
  which are rated on the ladder (page 16). When 
  you roll the dice, you are usually rolling based on 
  your character’s skill. 
  Nearly every action that your character might 
  undertake is covered by his skills. If he doesn’t 
  have a skill on his sheet, assume that it defaults 
  to Mediocre (+0).
  Skills are covered in greater detail in their 
  own chapter, beginning on page 120.
  Aspects
  Characters also have a set of traits called aspects. 
  Aspects cover a wide range of elements and 
  should collectively paint a picture of who the 
  character is, what he’s connected to, and what’s 
  important to him (in contrast to the “what he 
  can do” of skills). Aspects can be relationships, 
  beliefs, catchphrases, descriptors, items, or 
  pretty much anything else that paints a picture 
  of the character. 
  Some possible aspects include:
    To Serve and Protect
    Sucker for a Pretty Face
    My Grandpa’s Trusty Six-Shooter
    Money-Colored Eyes
    White Council Wizard
    Stubborn as a Mule
    Trained by Tera West
  When one of your aspects applies to a situ-
  ation, you can invoke the aspect to get a bonus 
  by spending a fate point (see below). In this 
  capacity, the aspect makes the character better at 
  whatever he’s doing, because the aspect in some 
  way applies to the situation (such as invoking 
  To Serve and Protect when acting in the 
  interests of the Law).
  An aspect can also gain you more fate points, 
  by bringing complications and troubling circum-
  stances into your character’s life. Whenever your 
  character ends up in a situation where one of 
  his aspects could cause him trouble (such as 
  Stubborn when he’s trying to be diplomatic), 
  you can mention it to the GM in the same way 
  you mention an aspect that might help you. 
  Alternately, the GM may initiate this event 
  if one of your aspects seems particularly apt. 
  Either way, this is compelling an aspect, and it 
  limits your character’s choices in some way. If 
  the GM initiates or agrees to compel the aspect, 
  you may get one or more fate points, depending 
  on how it plays out.
  Aspects are a much bigger topic than we can 
  get into in this overview. For a lot of groups, 
  aspects make up the core of the game. We go 
  into more detail on invoking and compelling, 
  along with what makes a good aspect, in Aspects, 
  starting on page 98.
  As for fate points, we’ll talk more about those 
  shortly.
  Mortal Stunts
  Stunts are the special tricks your character has 
  up his sleeves which allow him to stretch or 
  break the skill rules. Typically, they either give 
  a bonus to a specific use of a skill or broaden 
  a skill to encompass some other way of using 
  it. Some help you take a hit in a fight or other 
  things like that.
  Stunts have very specific uses and rules, 
  which are detailed more fully in Mortal Stunts, 
  starting on page 146. Though not all characters 
  will have stunts, many will.
  For instance, 
  in the earlier 
  examples, 
  Harry – you 
  were using 
  your Athletics 
  skill to jump 
  the wall.
  
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  the Basics
  Example: John Marcone has the Trick Shot 
  Artist stunt. This means that when he’s taking 
  a trick shot at something (not a person), like 
  shooting the rope holding a chandelier, he 
  receives a +2 bonus on his roll.
  Supernatural 
  Powers
  Powers are a lot like stunts, in that they help 
  characters stretch or break the rules. But they go 
  beyond how to use a skill and into using your 
  supernatural nature. Anything a mortal can’t just 
  do, even with a lot of training—wield magic, lift 
  with inhuman strength or run with inhuman 
  speed, recover from damage that would cripple 
  a mortal, etc.—is due to a power.
  Like stunts, powers have very specific uses 
  and rules, which are detailed more fully in 
  Supernatural Powers, starting on page 158. All 
  supernatural characters have powers—that’s 
  what makes them supernatural.
  Example: Thomas Raith gains many powers 
  as a White Court vampire, such as Incite 
  Emotion. This allows Thomas to rouse strong 
  feelings of lust in a target, even from a distance. 
  Fate Points
  The other, and potentially most important, 
  resource that you have during a game is a 
  currency called fate points (FP). Fate points 
  are central to the function of the game system; 
  they are basically a measure of how much power 
  you have to influence the story in favor of your 
  character. When you spend fate points, you take 
  a little bit of control over the game, either by 
  giving your character bonuses when you feel he 
  needs them, or by taking over a small part of the 
  story. To earn fate points, you allow your char-
  acter’s aspects to create complications for him.
  Each player begins the first session of the 
  game with a number of fate points equal to his 
  character’s refresh level (page 68). You’ll refill your 
  total number of  fate points back to that level 
  each time a refresh occurs (page 20). Fate points 
  are best represented by some non-edible token, 
  such as glass beads or poker chips. (Previous 
  experiments with small edible candies have left 
  players strapped for points!)
  You may, at any point, spend a fate point to 
  gain a bonus, invoke an aspect, make a declara-
  tion, or fuel a stunt.
  Gain a Bonus: A fate point can be spent to add 
  1 to any roll of the dice or to improve any effort 
  (such as an attack or defense) by 1. In practice, 
  this is the least potent way to use a fate point—
  you’re usually much better off using one of the 
  other applications discussed below. 
  Invoke an Aspect: Aspects are those things that 
  really describe a character and his place in the 
  story. When you have an aspect that’s applicable 
  to a situation, it can be invoked to grant a bonus. 
  After you roll the dice, you may pick one of your 
  aspects and describe how it applies to this situ-
  ation. If the GM agrees that it’s appropriate, 
  you may spend a fate point and do one of the 
  following:
    Reroll all the dice, using the new result, 
  or
    Add two (+2) to the final die roll (after 
  any rerolls have been done). 
  You may do this multiple times for a single 
  situation, so long as you have multiple aspects 
  that are applicable. You cannot use the same 
  aspect more than once on the same skill use, 
  though you may use the same aspect on several 
  different rolls throughout a scene, at the cost of 
  one fate point per use.
  Example: Maya McKenzie has the aspects 
  Quiet as a Mouse, I Remember Where I 
  Came From, and Uncommon Sense. She’s 
  just grabbed a forbidden book and is trying to 
  sprint out of a sorcerer’s lair before the dark 
  spellcaster’s imminent return. 
  Maya has Good Stealth, but she rolls 
  terribly -0--(–3) for a result of Mediocre 
  (Good – 3), which is far from good enough. 
  Her player, Amanda, points out that Maya’s 
  trying to be Quiet as a Mouse. The GM 
  thinks that’s fine, so Amanda spends a fate 
  point to reroll the dice. She does a little better: 
  0-+-(–1) for a result of Fair (Good – 1). 
  Still, she’s worried it’s not quite good 
  enough, so she suggests that, since Maya 
  Remembers Where She Came From, she’s 
  been in similar scrapes before…The GM thinks 
  that Maya’s street experience is not going to be 
  much use when trying to evade a sorcerer. But 
  she might be able to change her description of 
  what she’s doing to make the aspect fit better. Is 
  that what she’d like to do? 
  Look, I’m sorry, okay? No one told me 
  that’s what the jellybeans were for!
  
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  Amanda decides to stick with the original 
  plan and notes that with Maya’s Uncommon 
  Sense she can identify the best moment to 
  scurry over and grab the book. The GM 
  likes the creative application of the aspect, so 
  Amanda spends another fate point to get an 
  additional +2 on the roll, bringing it up from 
  Fair to Great, which is enough to let her quietly 
  escape the sorcerer’s lair with only seconds 
  to spare!
  Scenes, other characters, locations, and other 
  things of dramatic importance can have aspects. 
  Sometimes they’re obvious, and sometimes 
  they’re less so. You can spend a fate point to 
  invoke an aspect which is not on your own char-
  acter sheet, if you know what the aspect is. This 
  is covered in greater detail in Aspects on page 105.
  As a rule of thumb, invoking someone or 
  something else’s aspects requires a little more 
  justification than invoking one of your own 
  aspects. For scene aspects, it should be some 
  way to really bring in the visual image or the 
  dramatic theme that the aspect suggests. For 
  aspects on opponents, you need to know about 
  the aspect in the first place, and then play to it.
  Example: Biff Abernathy is fighting some thugs 
  in an old warehouse. The scene has the aspects 
  Dark, Cramped, and Warehouse. What’s 
  more, Biff has fought these guys before and 
  knows that they’re pretty cocky, so his player, 
  Fred, figures that they have an aspect like 
  Overconfident. When Biff jumps the first 
  one, he spends 2 FP to invoke the Dark aspect 
  of the warehouse and the Overconfident 
  aspect of the thug. Fred describes the thugs 
  as being so sure of themselves that they’re not 
  being as cautious as they could be, so when Biff 
  drops out of the shadows to cold cock one of 
  them, it comes as a complete surprise. The GM 
  likes the visual, and while the thugs technically 
  have Cocky rather than Overconfident 
  on their sheets, she thinks that’s close enough, 
  so she approves. One of the fate points is spent 
  normally and one goes to the thug, though Biff 
  may be hitting him hard enough that he’ll never 
  get the chance to use it.
  Use certain Stunts and Powers: Some stunts 
  and powers have particularly potent effects 
  and require spending a fate point when used; 
  this will be made clear in the description. See 
  Mortal Stunts, page 146, and Supernatural Powers, 
  page 158, for more.
  Make a Declaration: Declarations are usually 
  handled with a skill roll (page 116), but in some 
  cases you may simply lay down a fate point and 
  declare something. If the GM accepts the fate 
  point, it will be true. This gives you the ability 
  to create things in a story that would usually be 
  under the GM’s purview. Typically, these things 
  can’t be used to drastically change the plot or 
  win a scene. 
  Declaring “Doctor Keiser drops dead of 
  a heart attack” is not only likely to be rejected 
  by the GM, it wouldn’t even be that much fun 
  to begin with. Declarations are better suited 
  to creating convenient coincidences. Does your 
  character need a lighter (but doesn’t smoke)? 
  Spend a fate point and you’ve got one! Is there 
  an interesting scene happening over there that 
  your character might miss? Spend a fate point to 
  declare you arrive at a dramatically appropriate 
  moment!
  Your GM has veto power over this use, but 
  it has one dirty little secret. If you use it to do 
  something to make the game cooler for everyone, 
  the GM will usually grant far more leeway than 
  she will for something boring or, worse, selfish.
  As a general rule, you’ll get a lot more lenience 
  from the GM if you make a declaration that is in 
  keeping with one or more of your aspects. For 
  example, the GM will usually balk at letting a 
  character spend a fate point to have a weapon 
  after he’s been searched for them. However, if 
  you can point out that you’re Always Armed 
  or describe how your Distracting Beauty 
  kept the guard’s attention on inappropriate 
  areas, the GM is more likely to give you some 
  leeway. (This is much like invoking an aspect, 
  but without a die roll.)
  Refreshing 
  Fate Points
  Players usually regain fate points between 
  sessions when a refresh occurs. The number 
  of fate points you get at a refresh is called your 
  refresh level, and it will vary depending on the 
  game (see Character Creation, page 53, for more 
  details). Your refresh level will be reduced by the 
  stunts and powers your character possesses. 
  PCs are not allowed to let their refresh level 
  drop below one; when a character’s refresh hits 
  zero or less, he crosses over that crucial, invis-
  ible line that separates a mortal’s free will from a 
  monster’s compulsion of nature. 
  totally 
  Batman.
  
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  If the GM left things with a cliffhanger, she 
  is entitled to say that no refresh has occurred 
  between sessions. By the same token, if the GM 
  feels that a substantial (i.e., dramatically appro-
  priate) amount of downtime and rest occurs in 
  play, the GM may allow a refresh to occur mid-
  session. (Check out the optional Partial Refresh 
  rule in Running the Game, page 317.)
  When a refresh occurs, bring your current 
  number of fate points up to your refresh level. 
  If the number of fate points you have when you 
  refresh is higher than your refresh level, your 
  current total does not change.
  Example: Evan Montrose and Maya 
  McKenzie have just won a hard fought victory 
  against a dark sorcerer, and they end the session 
  with 4 FP each. The GM feels that was a suit-
  able climax and they refresh at the beginning of 
  the next session. Maya has a refresh level of 8, 
  so Maya gets 4 FP, enough to bring her up to 
  8. Evan’s refresh is only 1 (wizarding is costly), 
  so he gets nothing, but he does get to stay at 4.
  Earning New 
  Fate Points 
  During Play
  You earn fate points when your aspects create 
  problems for your character. When this occurs, 
  it’s said that the aspect is compelled. When 
  your character ends up in a situation where his 
  compelled aspect suggests a problematic course 
  of action, the GM should offer you a choice: 
  spend a fate point to ignore the problem, or 
  acknowledge the problem and earn a fate point. 
  Sometimes, the GM may also simply award a 
  fate point to you without explanation, indicating 
  that one of your aspects is going to complicate 
  an upcoming situation. You can refuse that 
  point and spend one of your own to avoid the 
  complication, but it’s not a good idea to do that 
  too often, because you will probably need the 
  fate point in the future. And let’s face it—that’s 
  a pretty boring way to play anyway. Drama is a 
  good thing.
  Example: Biff has the aspect Dumb Luck, 
  which his player, Fred, has explained to the 
  GM means that Biff has a tendency to have 
  things go his way when he’s at his most dense 
  or foolish, but it also means that he can stumble 
  across very bad or strange things without 
  meaning to. Biff is on his way to pick up his 
  girlfriend Maya when an ambush drops on 
  him. Normally, Fred would roll Biff’s Alertness 
  to try to avoid surprise, but the GM pushes 
  forward a fate point and says, “Wouldn’t it just 
  be Biff’s Dumb Luck if he got jumped and 
  hauled away, leaving Maya thinking she got 
  stood up again?”
  Fred can now choose whether to take the 
  fate point—in which case Biff doesn’t roll 
  Alertness; he automatically fails the roll and 
  skips right to getting kidnapped, since he’s the 
  only PC in this scene—or spend a fate point, 
  evading the downside of his Dumb Luck 
  and getting a chance to avoid surprise with an 
  Alertness roll.
  No. Drama sucks. 
  Give me boring. 
  I long for boring.
  Heh. Cute 
  picture. 
  Looks like 
  Murph could 
  go for some 
  boring, too.
  I make her 
  do that way 
  too much.
  
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  22
  the Basics
  This isn’t just the GM’s show; you can trigger 
  compels as well—on yourself or on others—
  either by explicitly indicating that an aspect 
  may be complicating things or by playing to 
  your aspects from the get-go and reminding the 
  GM after the fact that your character already 
  behaved as if compelled. The GM isn’t always 
  obligated to agree that a compel is appropriate, 
  but it’s important that players participate here. 
  See Aspects on page 100 for a more detailed treat-
  ment of compels. 
  …And Off You Go
  So that’s a quick overview of the basic elements 
  of the game. Don’t worry if it seems like a lot 
  to take in! The following chapters will help you 
  better understand each piece of the whole, and 
  a lot of it is easily picked up by diving in and 
  playing. Before you move on to City Creation 
  and Character Creation, though, you may find 
  it helpful to read over at least the chapter on 
  Aspects. 
  Part of why we decided to base 
  the game on the Fate system is 
  that it sits right at the midpoint 
  between soft, lightweight, story-
  focused games and the harder, 
  “crunchier,” more simulation-
  oriented games out there. In Fate, 
  what a character believes in and 
  what’s important to his personal 
  story can matter just as much 
  as the fact he can sling around 
  spellfire or change into a wolf.
  August 19, Ms. Jennifer J.
  * Lost engagement ring, “just gone!”
  * Put on dresser at night;  
      woke up = adios!
  * Mistaken? Stolen?  
     BF/Hubby resetting it? 
    Check locks. Talk to BF/hubby.
  * She's superstitious. And worried.
  * We have a picture of it! Bonus!
  * Try l with a ost?
  * Go out to Archer Heights, talk to 
     her next Wednesday.
  uh... Harry? Why’s this in here?
  Whups! Sorry, man. I 
  grabbed the paper I had on 
  hand.  Self-employment 
  is a harsh mistress!
  Shut up, Bob.
  I’ll tell you who’s a harsh mistress!
  
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  - cHAPter tHree -
  city 
  creation
  
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  24
  city creation
  The Living City
  When you sit down to play The Dresden 
  Files RPG, you’ll want to know the setting—
  which is to say, you’ll want to come up with 
  and flesh out the city in which your game takes 
  place. Since The Dresden Files RPG mostly 
  takes place in today’s urban jungles, this doesn’t 
  have to take a long time, as you’re already pretty 
  familiar with the way our world works.
  (For crazy stuff like games taking place in the 
  Nevernever or the like, read on—we’ve got you 
  covered, too. We have a loose definition of “city.”)
  There’s a lot of stuff in this chapter. Our 
  purpose is to give you lots of ideas and options. 
  If you don’t really want to immerse yourself 
  in the process we lay out here, it’s no big deal. 
  While we still encourage you to read through 
  the chapter so you see what we’re going for, 
  toward the tail end we provide an on-the-fly city 
  creation technique that highlights the really crit-
  ical parts, letting you get to the gaming faster. (If 
  you do the full city creation process a few times, 
  your own process will probably move toward 
  that anyway as you learn which parts are the 
  most useful for your group.) You should feel free 
  to pick and choose the parts that look fun as you 
  go along. 
  We have two examples of city creation to 
  present, in two different stages of develop-
  ment. In Occult Chicago (OW244), we’ve done 
  the research for you, leaving themes, troubles, 
  locations, and characters for you to define. If you 
  don’t want to bother with that and want to get to 
  rolling dice NOW, we’ve written up Baltimore 
  as a sample setting using this city creation 
  procedure (see Nevermore/Baltimore, page 358); 
  you can use this to start gaming right away. But 
  we’ve really had a lot of fun at our table when the 
  whole group has made a city together. That way, 
  everyone has something at stake. We encourage 
  you to give it a shot.
  A city is much more than just a collection of 
  streets and buildings—it’s a world filled with 
  people, including the players’ characters and all 
  the characters they might encounter. Creating 
  your city includes mapping out both some of 
  the physical locations and the relationships the 
  people who live and work there have with the 
  places and with each other. Once you’re done 
  with city creation, you should be ready to sit 
  down and play. 
  So What Do We Do?
  Below is an overview of the process (which, 
  aside from whatever time you decide to spend 
  on research, will take around an hour or so for 
  an experienced group, but probably most of your 
  first session if this is your first time).
  First, you’ll choose your city (page  26). 
  Everyone’ll agree on some basic facts about it, 
  the sorts of problems (which we call themes and 
  threats) the city is facing, and how the super-
  natural intersects with the city.
  Second, you’ll come up with the various loca-
  tions within the city (page 37). Everyone will get 
  to make at least one, where individual problems 
  are fleshed out and the faces for those loca-
  tions—the people who represent them—are 
  noted down.
  Third, you’ll make the player characters 
  (page 45).
  Finally, you’ll finish up the city, where you’ll 
  turn those themes and some of your threats into 
  aspects (page 46).
  Remember: if this seems like too much, 
  and you want to get to playing sooner, we have 
  some tips for you at the end of the chapter in 
  “On-The-Fly City Creation,” page 49.
  Ummm, Billy, I’ve glanced 
  ahead and it’s the NEXT 
  chapter that’s called 
  “Character Creation.” 
  Yeah, that’s where you’ll find the 
  detailed rules for the process, but 
  it actually HAPPeNS during the 
  stuff in this chapter. We consider 
  character creation to be a part—a 
  big part—of city creation. Your city 
  won’t be much fun to play in if you 
  don’t have people to play in it!
  
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  city creation
  Getting Ready to 
  Make Your City
  As you’re getting started, you’ll need some 
  copies of the city sheets, found in the back of 
  this book or downloadable from our website at  
  www.dresdenfilesrpg.com. There are three sheets 
  to help organize your ideas as you come up with 
  your city: a high-level sheet, a locations sheet, 
  and a faces sheet. We’ll talk more about these as 
  we encounter them in the process. (Of course, 
  you can also do all this with a few blank sheets 
  of paper, if you don’t have copies of the city 
  sheets available.)
  If your group prefers to have one person 
  write down ideas as everyone talks, the sheets 
  are set up for you. We recommend this method 
  for most people, as it helps get everyone on the 
  same page by talking about ideas before they get 
  written down on separate sheets.
  On the other hand, if your group prefers 
  to write ideas down first and present them all 
  together, like writers in a bull pen, then you’ll 
  either need to print up multiple copies of the 
  location and faces sheets, or cut them up and 
  hand parts out. They’re also ready-made for that 
  use. At the end of the process, be sure to consoli-
  date all the ideas onto one copy.
  No matter how you do it, make sure everyone 
  who wants a copy of your city has one. These 
  aren’t just notes for the GM—the players have 
  quite a bit at stake in this city as well!
  What if I want to create 
  the city on my own?
  That’s a pretty fair question for any GM to 
  ask. Maybe you have a really neat idea, or 
  you have players who aren’t interested in 
  any sort of setting creation. But you might 
  want to at least think about our collabora-
  tive approach.
  GMs can certainly take all of this work 
  on themselves. Heck, in many roleplaying 
  games, the job of building the setting is exclu-
  sively the GM’s responsibility. So if that’s the 
  way you want to play it, go for it. Still, even 
  if you do most of the work, consider making 
  it something that everyone contributes to—
  say, with each player writing up a neighbor-
  hood or a particular point of interest. It’ll 
  give them a sense of ownership and—here’s 
  the clincher—it’ll be one less thing you have 
  to do as a GM. Laziness can be a virtue if 
  you apply it the right way.
  Working collaboratively to build a city 
  allows all the players to get their agendas 
  into the mix. If one guy really wants to 
  tangle with some Red Court vampires, 
  this will be a chance for him to bake it into 
  the setting right from the get-go. Not to 
  mention that, due to the collective effort, 
  everyone will have a chance to feel like they 
  have a little bit of expertise and ownership. 
  That’s a powerful tool for the GM in terms 
  of building interest (and investment) in the 
  upcoming story, and we can’t encourage its 
  use enough.
  So, while you might still create the city 
  on your own, at least consider gathering 
  some input from your players.
  The Golden Rule of 
  City Creation
  When you’re stumped, skip that part and let 
  the GM figure it out later.
  Really, it’s as simple as that. Maybe when 
  the GM comes back to it, you’ll all join in 
  and collaborate. Maybe the GM will use 
  whatever you’ve skipped as a mystery during 
  play. In any case, the point of city creation is 
  to get your game going and going strong, not 
  to make you sit around for hours as you try 
  to figure out a specific piece of the setting.
  What about inventing a city?
  You could go the “Metropolis” or “Gotham” route 
  and just make up a city, but you might run into 
  more problems than you anticipated. You’ll have 
  to work hard to come up with every detail—
  where the seedy neighborhood is compared to the 
  ritzy downtown center, which neighbors have easy 
  access to the riverfront, etc. Furthermore, you’ll 
  have to take copious notes to be consistent—not 
  a problem for some people, but if it is for you, you 
  might want to pick a real city. Plus, you may have 
  a sense of disconnection as you come up with facts 
  about locations and people that don’t make much 
  “sense” (even though, if you look at it, cities rarely 
  do make a strict, logical sense).
  In short, it’s easier and often more fun to use 
  real cities; someone else has written copious notes 
  on them and they’ve been “playtested.”
  
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  26
  city creation
  Choose 
  Your City
  The first step is an easy one, but it may be the 
  most important: choose the city. There are a few 
  different directions you can go when choosing 
  a city:
  Your city: This is obvious, but well worth stating. 
  You probably know your city well, if you’ve been 
  living there for a bit. Even if you don’t, it’s easy to 
  be inspired by walking or driving around your 
  city until you see some sights that just scream to 
  you “Hey, I might be a little bit magical! Add me 
  to your game!” Seriously, once you start incor-
  porating your city into your game, you won’t be 
  able to help but notice places or people around 
  town that would make for something fun.
  A city everyone is personally familiar with: 
  Think about nearby cities, places you all have 
  visited, or hometowns. This familiarity will 
  give your game traction, something to build 
  your game around. Of course, you don’t have 
  to restrict yourself to nearby cities if everyone 
  is familiar with some more distant locale, like 
  a common hometown or place everyone went 
  to school.
  A city that everyone is used to seeing on TV: 
  Here, your familiarity will go into more of a 
  caricature of a city than the real nature of it, but 
  that’s not necessarily a bad starting point—even 
  a caricature is a little right. Plus, this process 
  isn’t about making a travel guide. Your group’s 
  conception of the city is more important than 
  the reality.
  The “out of the box” option: Baltimore (page 358) 
  is ready to play. (We recommend checking out 
  Baltimore even if you use another city, as it’s 
  our working example for how to build your 
  city.) Chicago (OW244) is more “some assembly 
  required,” but it gets you well on your way. 
  Example: Baltimore
  Throughout this chapter we’ve included discus-
  sion about how we applied this procedure to 
  come up with Baltimore. You’ll also find some 
  ideas about how it would apply to Chicago—we 
  figured having both couldn’t hurt.
  We looked around a bit for a city to use as 
  an example. We wanted something besides 
  Chicago—whose version of Chicago would 
  we write up anyway?—so we decided to do a 
  different city. Then I thought, “Hmm...Hey, 
  Davian—one of the Alphas and a regular in our 
  Arcanos game—is from Baltimore. I’ll guilt 
  him into helping me write it up.”
  Familiarize 
  and Discuss 
  Picking a city is one thing, but making the leap 
  from an interesting city to the ideas that will 
  propel your game forward is not always easy. 
  Once you know where you’re going to set your 
  scene, the next step is to take the location you’ve 
  chosen and use it to create concrete, practical 
  ideas which you can use in your game.
  Researching 
  Your City
  If the people in your group feel like they don’t 
  have enough information in their heads to make 
  the city feel alive or feel like something more 
  than a quickly hashed-out caricature, we recom-
  mend doing some research. If your group would 
  have fun doing this, turn it into a group activity. 
  Everyone, or at least the players with enough 
  spare time, can take a method and have at it.
  Don’t feel pressure to do this if research doesn’t 
  interest you (see “The Vancouver Method,” 
  below). We want you to have fun with this game. 
  For some people, that means talking about your 
  city and surfing Wikipedia for a few minutes; for 
  others, that means an afternoon at the library or 
  even a day trip to the city, if it’s nearby or if you 
  need a good excuse for a little vacation.
  Hitting the Books
  Modern research tools being what they are, lots 
  of people tend to forget how useful the humble 
  book can be. Some people love that musty 
  smell of paper and binder’s glue with a hint of 
  mildew—if that’s you, here’s your excuse for a 
  day in the stacks of your local library. 
  Musty smells? Paper, binder’s glue, and 
  mildew? William, have you been in Harry’s 
  basement recently or something?
  Talk to the librarian, explain that you’re 
  trying to assemble a guide to your city with an 
  emphasis on the weird. Librarians are mighty, 
  and spending just ten minutes with one can yield 
  Billy, 
  are you 
  explaining a 
  roleplaying 
  game, or 
  assigning 
  homework?
  Hey, some 
  people love the 
  research. the 
  trick is to stop 
  when it’s not 
  fun anymore; 
  if that 
  means not 
  even starting, 
  that’s when 
  to stop.
  
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  city creation
  amazing results. Don’t forget that they wield the 
  awesome power of Interlibrary Loans—if there’s 
  an obscure title out there, chances are your 
  friendly neighborhood librarian can conjure it 
  up for you.
  Don’t discount the usefulness of a bookstore, 
  either, especially if you find a title that you really 
  fall in love with. Travel and tourism guidebooks 
  are extremely useful—we’d almost call a good 
  travel guide on your city an essential buy for the 
  GM. If there are novels written about your city, 
  it might be worth reading one or two.
  Travel
  If your city is close by, consider finding a day 
  when most of the group is available and doing a 
  day trip. Stop by a visitor’s center, grab a bunch 
  of the pamphlets they always have at those 
  places. Pair off, split up, and see what grabs 
  peoples’ attention—self-guided walking tours 
  are great for this. 
  If there’s a college in your city, spend an hour 
  on campus. See where the important buildings 
  are—athletic facilities, labs, libraries, dorms, the 
  student union, student bars and hangouts, that 
  sort of thing. Pick up a copy of the college paper. 
  Drop in a coffee shop or diner (a mom & 
  pop joint, not a chain) and listen to the way the 
  locals talk. Is there a unique local accent? Local 
  idioms and figures of speech? Grab an armload 
  of the free weekly newspapers that are published 
  in every town—coffee shops are usually littered 
  with these.
  Electronic Media
  For many people, the Internet is the first desti-
  nation for research. There’s a good reason for 
  that—it gets you a boatload of good information 
  right the heck now. It’s definitely something you 
  should do for your city. We highly recommend 
  starting with Wikipedia. It’s about the best brief 
  overview you’re going to find anywhere, espe-
  cially if you’re not overly concerned with consis-
  tent truthfulness—you’re looking for story-fuel 
  here more than rock-solid, verified facts. 
  Most locally published periodicals—i.e. 
  newspapers and magazines—have a free web 
  presence these days. Local news broadcasts, both 
  radio and TV, frequently stream to the web—
  these are a gold mine of local flavor.
  Of course, your best tool might simply be 
  your favorite search engine. Here are a few 
  search terms you might find fruitful:
  Use your city’s name, plus:
    neighborhood map (having the names of 
  neighborhoods is important)
    folklore, magic, ghost stories
    humor, jokes
    [urban] legends
    historical maps
    politics
    crime
    dialect
  Cherry pick the stuff that strikes you as inter-
  esting. You’re also going to want to get a feel for 
  how your city looks, which services like Flickr, 
  Google Images, and Google Earth will help 
  you with. Also check out http://del.icio.us/ for 
  entries that use your city’s name as a tag.
  William, you 
  may think you’re 
  kidding, but 
  this stuff about 
  librarians is on 
  the money. If 
  knowledge is 
  power—and it 
  is—they are its 
  gatekeepers. 
  Don’t. Mess. 
  With. Librarians.
  You just 
  think the 
  glasses 
  are sexy.
  Gah. The internet. 
  I’m SO out of touch.
  Billy, 
  you’re 
  getting 
  close to 
  telling 
  people how 
  to profit 
  from the 
  misfortune 
  of others 
  here.
  I’m trying 
  not to—it’s 
  legitimate 
  research! 
  law & order 
  shouldn’t 
  get a 
  mon opoly 
  on “ripped 
  from the 
  headlines” 
  stories, even 
  if their 
  reruns are 
  on 24/7.
  Finding out about the 
  Seedier Side of your City
  Your group may want to have a sense of what the 
  crime is like in your chosen city, since bad guys—
  both mortal and supernatural—are often behind 
  such things. With that in mind, we have a few 
  specific tips for you. If crime isn’t something you 
  want to play with in your city, or is something you 
  want to completely make up, feel free to ignore this 
  sidebar.
  Some local TV news producers love crime 
  stories—the more sensationalized, the better. 
  And that’s exactly what you’re looking for. These 
  stories are frequently available via streaming video 
  on the web, and they’re fantastic sources of local 
  information (and inspiration!). Most are only 
  a few minutes long, and they’re well worth the 
  time spent.
  After your Internet search for jokes and stories, 
  try a grittier approach. Plug the term “prostitution” 
  plus the name of your city into a search engine, 
  and you should immediately locate the red light 
  district. Every city has one. You don’t need to go 
  there, but you definitely want to be able to name it. 
  Similarly, try “homicide” or “drug bust” or “robbery” 
  or pretty much any other specific crime, plus your 
  city’s name.
  Don’t be afraid to make stuff up (see “Intentional 
  Inaccuracies” and “The Vancouver Method,” below). 
  It’s not going to strain anyone’s suspension of 
  disbelief if your group decides that a neighbor-
  hood called “The Waterfront” is a dangerous place 
  after dark. 
  
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  city creation
  Example: Baltimore
  I talked with Davian a lot about what cool stuff 
  we could put into the city. I bought a couple of 
  tourist guides to Baltimore and a collection called 
  Real Ghost Stories of the Chesapeake. 
  This stuff is great location fodder, especially for 
  someone like me who’s never been there. For 
  instance, it turns out there’s a legend of under-
  ground tunnels between Federal Hill Park and 
  Fort McHenry—that’s awesome story fuel.
  I spent time looking at maps. The Fall 
  Line (the geologic dividing line between the 
  Piedmont and the coastal plain) was a particu-
  larly juicy find—I was looking at a map of 
  Baltimore and noticed that the Fall Line runs 
  straight through the middle of the city. I showed 
  it to Davian and said, “You don’t get that kind 
  of structure without magic getting attached to 
  it. That’s gotta be important.” He rolled his eyes 
  and said, “Brilliant deduction, Sherlock.” I also 
  brought up Edgar Allan Poe and his connection 
  to the city, and the Inner Harbor as a possible 
  important location.
  Davian tossed in some great old ghost 
  stories and legends from when he was a kid—
  Black Aggie, ghosts at Fort McHenry, that 
  sort of thing. He brought up some features of 
  the city that we’d really need to include: Fort 
  McHenry, Johns Hopkins, vampires, ghouls, 
  and the Francis Scott Key Bridge. When I asked 
  him why the bridge, his response was “I always 
  wanted to do a fight scene there. And the toll 
  collector’s a trip.” 
  The 
  Vancouver Method
  This is your alternative to doing research, and 
  it’s pretty simple: just make stuff up. Really. We 
  talk quite a bit about research, partly because 
  research can be fun in its own right—the weird 
  stuff you discover is amazing. (Keep in mind the 
  old saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”) But, 
  you can have a lot of fun by just working with a 
  few base ideas and not worrying if you get the 
  details wrong. 
  The name we’ve given this method, 
  “Vancouver,” comes from an element of televi-
  sion production—it’s expensive to shoot televi-
  sion shows in New York or Los Angeles, so most 
  television programs just take skyline shots of 
  the city they’re supposed to be in, then do the 
  actual filming in someplace less expensive, like 
  Vancouver or Toronto. It’s a handy trick, and 
  for the bulk of scenes it’s hardly a real problem. 
  Similarly, if you aren’t that interested in the 
  backdrop of your city, just pick a handful of 
  landmarks and signatures and leave it at that—
  you have everything you need.
  Coming to a 
  Consensus
  Regardless of how you do (or choose not to do) 
  your research, this next part is vitally important: 
  talk about the city you’ve chosen and come to a 
  consensus about what you actually want to play 
  with. Every city in the world is a vast sandbox 
  of ideas, and your game will be much more 
  successful if it only tries to focus in on one or 
  two at a time. That means making sure everyone 
  at the table talks about what toys they want to 
  play with in the sandbox.
  Start with asking everyone, including the 
  GM, the things they want to play with in this 
  city. It might be a reputation the city has (such 
  as organized crime in Chicago), a public figure 
  (such as a governor or wealthy businessman), a 
  prominent building (such as the Empire State 
  Building in New York City), geographical feature 
  (Alcatraz in San Francisco), neighborhood 
  (such as London’s East End), subculture (such 
  as the music scene in Seattle), recurring event 
  (such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans) or what-
  ever springs to mind. It’s perfectly fine to have 
  the same or different answers—the same answer 
  means that more of you definitely want to see 
  something in the game, and different answers 
  give you a bit of variety to build off of. Talk a bit 
  about each suggestion. (Someone might want 
  to take a few notes during this discussion—the 
  cool idea now is the idea you’ll be struggling to 
  remember later.)
  Here are some discussion prompts to get the 
  conversation rolling:
    Why are you interested in that feature of 
  the city?
    Does anyone else find that interesting for 
  other reasons?
    Does anyone find that uninteresting for 
  some reason?
    What role would you envision it fulfilling 
  in a campaign?
  Don’t overthink this stuff or spend too long 
  on it; just get a feel for what people might want 
  to do with this bit of the city (if anything). 
  I don’t buy 
  it. They 
  couldn’t do 
  a TV show 
  based around 
  Chicago in 
  Vancouver.
  You’d be 
  surprised.
  
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  city creation
  Come up with a handful of ideas—the sweet 
  spot is a dozen or so for a group of four or five, 
  but you can get away with fewer. You probably 
  won’t incorporate all of those features into your 
  game initially, but it gives you a wide variety of 
  toys to play with.
  Example: Baltimore
  We decided that important parts of the city we’d 
  explore are: vampires, ghouls, the Fall Line and 
  its ley line, and Edgar Allan Poe. Davian said 
  he had some interesting information about Poe 
  that he’d bring up in a later step.
  We also made up a list of neighborhoods we’d 
  want to revisit later, trying to get a mix of inner 
  city and suburb-like, rich and poor. Fell’s Point, 
  the Middle East (and Johns Hopkins), and 
  Druid Ridge Cemetery are examples of locations 
  we want to explore.
  Davian assures me that a lot of the final 
  product here is true fact. He’s not telling me 
  what’s true and what’s fiction; I have my suspi-
  cions, but I’ll leave that for the reader.
  What if our 
  ideas don’t mesh?
  If you just can’t come to some sort of 
  consensus on where this is going, consider 
  that you might have a play style disconnect. 
  Is one player looking for a kick-in-the-door 
  action game while another wants to explore 
  characterization and intrigue? Does one 
  player want to delve into what it means to be 
  human and demi-human characters strug-
  gling to avoid becoming monsters, while 
  another wants to play with the notion of 
  mortal humans struggling to survive among 
  much stronger predators?
  If it turns out that there’s an incompat-
  ibility in assumptions about play style, keep 
  in mind that the game may run for several 
  story arcs, and that the focus of each one can 
  be very different. Maybe try to agree to start 
  with one style, then move toward the other 
  for the second story arc.
  If your issue isn’t related to incompat-
  ible play styles, perhaps a change of scenery 
  would help. If you decided to go with a 
  different city, would that help resolve the 
  disagreement?
  
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  city creation
  Intentional 
  Inaccuracies
  One thing you might want to play with as a 
  group is the idea of changing a piece of your city, 
  making an intentional inaccuracy. This could be 
  as simple as tossing in a convenient feature to 
  make the city more manageable or make a loca-
  tion work out better (for example, perhaps your 
  city’s baseball park suddenly acquires a huge 
  parking lot where in reality it doesn’t have one), 
  or it could be as far-reaching as working with 
  a version of the city that lives in an alternate 
  history (perhaps the Golden Gate Bridge was 
  destroyed in a war between vampire factions that 
  occurred prior to the start of your campaign).
  A City Full 
  Of Problems
  Themes & Threats
  Once you’ve picked out your city and you have 
  some idea of what looks like fun, you get to fill it 
  with all sorts of problems that the PCs will have 
  to contend with.
  We’ve broken down those issues into two 
  types: themes and threats. Themes are prob-
  lems that have been around for a long time, 
  long enough that people almost take them for 
  granted. Threats, on the other hand, are prob-
  lems new to the city—sometimes so new that 
  hardly anyone knows about them.
  At this stage, you’re going to come up with 
  about three of these problems for the city 
  overall. You’ll also do this a bit more with each 
  location (see page 37) in the city.
  While working on your city, we recommend 
  using some scrap paper for your initial ideas, 
  or maybe even a set of index cards so the infor-
  mation can be passed around the table while 
  everyone works on it. 
  Themes of a City 
  A city’s theme is a statement about something 
  that recurs in the stories we tell about a city. It 
  could be something that the mortal population 
  tells about themselves and their city, or it might 
  be something that the supernatural denizens 
  talk about behind the scenes.
    Some themes are general, things 
  everyone talks about (even if not 
  everyone is directly affected). A city 
  known for corrupt politicians might 
  have a theme like “If he’s a politician, he’s 
  mobbed up.”
    Some themes are more specific to a 
  group in the city. A college town with a 
  notorious fraternity of wealthy trouble-
  makers might have “If the Beta Alpha 
  Chis want it, they get it.”
    Some themes are about cautionary tales 
  people tell each other. Imagine the city 
  where “If a pretty girl wanders alone at 
  night, don’t expect to see her again” is 
  a theme.
  You’ll probably notice that each of these 
  themes is a little dark, a little troublesome. There 
  are two reasons for this: first, your heroes need 
  something to struggle against. Mobbed-up 
   Oh, very 
  funny. Twist 
  that knife.
  Hey, it was 
  just an 
  example…
  
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  city creation
  politicians and cruel dilettantes are the sort of 
  stories that happen, but people don’t want to 
  have happen. Perfect for your heroes. Second, 
  there’s a real sense of accomplishment that 
  happens when, at the end of a story, one of these 
  themes gets turned into something positive 
  (which we’ll talk about more in Advancement, 
  page 93).
  Themes should feel firm and hard to get rid 
  of. If a single person is the mastermind behind 
  some theme, and defeating that person would 
  change the city overnight, it’s probably not strong 
  enough to be a theme. Someone else should 
  always be around to fill a vacuum of power left 
  by the PCs—thus, dealing with a theme is about 
  something bigger than any single conflict.
  Threats to a City
  On the other hand, a city’s threat is a person, 
  monster, group, or even a condition or circum-
  stance that makes (or wants to make) life in the 
  city worse for the mortal occupants. Sometimes 
  this threat comes from outside, like a monster 
  from the Nevernever. Sometimes it comes from 
  inside, like a vengeful father who has decided to 
  dabble in magic.
    Some threats are people or other 
  beings that have no clear agenda (at 
  least, not right away), but make their 
  presence known through their collateral 
  damage or other horrible calling cards. 
  Perhaps “A new warlock is breaking the 
  Laws of Magic.”
    Some threats give you an idea of their 
  agenda, such as “The Red Court is 
  expanding their territory into this city.”
    Some threats are bizarre and more 
  metaphysical than real, though they 
  don’t threaten mortals any less, such as 
  “The Summer and Winter Courts are 
  using this city in their machinations.”
  Threats should feel like someone is behind 
  them that the PCs can get to, either right away 
  or over time. Maybe the way they deal with the 
  problem is to talk and use diplomacy, or fight 
  and use force, but in any case there should be 
  someone or some group of people responsible. 
  That said, you don’t need to flesh out every little 
  bit about them or their motivation right now. 
  Stick with a single sentence, like we did above, 
  and the GM will come back to this later to fill in 
  the rest of the details.
  Making Themes 
  and Threats for 
  Your City
  Aim to come up with one to three themes and 
  threats (total, so don’t go over three). Don’t take 
  too long to brainstorm these—you’ll be revising 
  these ideas as you progress through city creation. 
  You just want an idea of what the PCs will have 
  to deal with. If you’re starting to talk about 
  different ways in which the theme or threat will 
  come into the story and how different people 
  might work against it, stop there. You have a 
  juicy problem, but don’t start obsessing about 
  those details before you’ve even started playing.
  It’s important to keep in mind the intended 
  play style, at least of the first story arc. If 
  your group wants a relatively straightforward 
  monster stomp, or even a mystery-oriented 
  game, strongly consider keeping your themes, 
  and especially threats, immediate and highly 
  endangering. Once you start creating locations 
  and faces, it should be obvious how they link 
  in with the city’s themes and threats—more 
  on this later. On the other hand, if the group is 
  more interested in a game involving lots of poli-
  tics and intrigue, some subtlety and ambiguity in 
  how the locations and faces tie into threats and 
  themes is more useful.
  Once you have a set of themes and threats, 
  write a sentence or two for each one on the High 
  Level City Sheet. “The Idea” is the place for 
  this—we’ll get to the aspect and faces later.
  Example: Baltimore
  This was possibly the easiest step. I really 
  wanted to have the city be right on the edge of 
  complete chaos; Davian assured me we’d have 
  to try hard to avoid this with Baltimore. He 
  added his thoughts on Baltimore straddling 
  two worlds—the cosmopolitan North and the 
  “charming” South—as well as the urban blight 
  and corruption that it seems to attract more 
  than its fair share of. So our themes are “The 
  tourist veneer masks the blight,” and “This town 
  doesn’t know what it wants to be.” Our threat is 
  “We’re looking into the Abyss, it’s looking back, 
  and things are about to get interesting.” We’ll be 
  referring to these themes and threats in exam-
  ples throughout this chapter—just note that we 
  may abbreviate them somewhat when we do.
  “Locations” I 
  get, but what 
  are “faces”?
  they’re 
  characters 
  that represent 
  a city’s theme 
  or threat, or 
  a location. 
  they’re a 
  handy way for 
  the Pcs to 
  interact with 
  those facets 
  of the city.
  Are they 
  always 
  NPCs?
  No, Pcs can 
  be faces too. 
  Patience, boss, 
  we’ll talk 
  more about 
  this later in 
  the chapter.
  
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  city creation
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (High Level)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  The Balance of Power
  City-Wide Themes and Threats
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Faces
  Name 
  Concept
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Faces
  Name 
  Concept
  What is the Supernatural status quo?
  Who is  
  in the know?
  Who wants to maintain the status quo?
  What is the Mundane status quo?
  Who is  
  in the dark?
  Who wants to rock the boat?
  The Status Quo
  Movers and Shakers
  The Supernatural
  The Current Order
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Faces
  Name 
  Concept
  Gilgamesh, the Ghouls
  The Summer Court presence
  The Summer Court dances around 
  the edges, while the entrenched 
  White Court and other vampire sets 
  feed upon the despair and decay.
  Corruption, crime, tourism, and 
  dirty politics. Business as usual.
  #
  @
  X#@
  #
  @X
  Baltimore
  The tourist veneer 
  masks the blight
  Vasiliki Lagios 
  WCV Head
  Russell Carson Rebel 
   
   
   
  Sorcerer
  David Gerard 
  Corrupt 
   
   
   
  ClubOwner
  Alexandra Lagios    WCV 
    
   
   
      Rival 
  Damocles Ravenborn  RCV  
   
   
   
      Poser
  Vastolo & Mirabal 
  Cops
  John Vastolo 
  Dupin Guy
  DECAY AND CORRUPTION
  Vasikili Lagios
  Neutral Grounds
  Alexandra Lagios
  Carson’s Renegades
  Corrupt nightlife, 
  politicians, etc
  The Cops
  The Criminals
  The Dupin Society
  Religious Groups
  CONFLICTING IDENTITIES
  ON THE BRINK
  This town doesn’t know 
  what it wants to be.
  We’re looking into the 
  Abyss, and it’s looking back.
  Nevermore
  
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  city creation
  Getting the 
  High-Level View
  Before you go much further, it’s a good idea to 
  take a moment to get a handle on who’s in the 
  city, in terms of supernatural critters, factions, 
  and mundane organizations.
  This is fairly simple for games centered 
  around mystery or action, and a lot of this 
  section’s advice can be skimmed—although it’s 
  still important that the city’s important charac-
  ters and factions, especially the opposition, map 
  to the themes and threats. 
  Games with lots of intrigue tend to require 
  a bit more forethought about who and what is 
  present in the city. In order to create a good web 
  of influence, dependence, rivalry, and such, the 
  GM and players need to think hard about who’s 
  in town, why, and what it is they want, from a 
  bird’s eye view. 
  In either case, here are some ideas for coming 
  up with those ideas and tying them into the city’s 
  established tone and flavor through its themes 
  and threats. Don’t worry about detailing specific 
  individuals or locations yet; that will come later.
  Someone Cares 
  About the City
  The first thing to think about is what super-
  natural creatures or factions care about your city. 
  Taking a look at your city’s themes and threats 
  ought to give you some strong hints about 
  what sort of supernatural population would be 
  attracted to the place. Who cares about your city 
  enough to have a presence there?
  Some are really straightforward—themes 
  dealing with corruption lead to mercenary 
  ghouls, decay leads to Black Court vampires, 
  desperation suggests magical lawbreakers in 
  hiding from the Wardens. 
  The trick here is combining your themes 
  and threats with any previously stated prefer-
  ences for things people want to examine in the 
  city, even where they might not obviously match 
  up. This requires a little creative thinking, but 
  it’s not that hard to apply a theme in a way that 
  wasn’t expected ahead of time. 
  When you populate the city, think about 
  what each organization or faction wants. Try 
  not to fall back on simple survival, unless that 
  organization or faction is up against the wall 
  for some reason. Think about something more 
  short-term—what are they trying to get when 
  the game comes out of the gate? 
  Someone Cares About 
  the Status Quo
  Consider what the status quo looks like, and 
  who benefits from it (and hence would want 
  to protect it). The mortal cops might, powerful 
  supernatural factions might, criminal organiza-
  tions might. This could involve attempting to 
  keep the peace—the police, the White Council, 
  or a band of plucky werewolves might fit this 
  bill. Or, it might involve maintaining an existing 
  arrangement providing a ready supply of easy 
  prey to the city’s predators—any vampires might 
  be interested in the status quo for that.
  Think about how to apply parts of the 
  city that were mentioned in your city sketch. 
  Did anyone mention supernatural entities? 
  Organizations like the police or the city govern-
  ment? See if any of those would work here. 
  Again, think about how each organization, 
  faction, or powerful individual your group intro-
  duces to the city fits in with its existing themes 
  and threats. Everything should tie to a theme or 
  threat somehow, even if tangentially.
  Looking Forward: 
  What we’re going to do 
  with themes and threats
  The themes and threats aren’t just notes for 
  the GM on what to bring in. Themes (and 
  some threats) will become setting aspects. 
  We’re going to talk a lot more about this 
  idea when you’re making characters, and 
  even more in the Aspects chapter starting 
  on page 105, so don’t worry about it too much 
  right now. After you’ve made characters, 
  you’ll come back to all of these and develop 
  the aspects for your city (see “Finalize Your 
  City,” page 46).
  Alongside that, threats (and some 
  themes) will also generate some faces—
  NPCs that the PCs will have to deal with. 
  That will also be addressed in the “Finalize 
  Your City” section.
  If you’ve played this or another Fate game 
  before, you may have already made these 
  into aspects. That’s great! But if not, don’t 
  worry. Later we’ll tell you how to turn these 
  ideas you have into juicy aspects and faces.
  
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  city creation
  Someone Wants 
  to Rock the Boat
  On the other hand, there are entities, organiza-
  tions, and factions that want to upset the apple 
  cart. Maybe they’re on the outs in the current 
  state of things, maybe they want more power, 
  maybe they’re just out for revenge or simply 
  want to cause mayhem. In any event, it’s these 
  people (or things!) who are going to initiate 
  conflicts.
  Who are these boat rockers? A ghoul clan 
  looking for hunting ground? A Red Court clan 
  looking to strike a decisive blow in the Vampire 
  War? The cops, trying to solve a series of grisly 
  murders? The White Council’s Wardens, 
  attempting to take down a powerful sorcerer 
  who keeps the city’s supernatural community 
  in fear?
  Like those protecting the status quo, think 
  about how to tie in parts of the city from your 
  city sketch. 
  Getting Ideas
  If you’re having trouble coming up with inter-
  esting and flavorful supernatural denizens of 
  your city, take a look at the research you did 
  early in the process. 
  Hang on—I thought you said 
  research was optional?
  I did, and it is. But if people are 
  having trouble with ideas at this point, 
  it might be worth doing some reading.
  OK, makes sense. 
  The most obvious place to start is with ghost 
  stories and urban legends. There’s no need to 
  make them all true, but they provide useful 
  inspirations for things that are overtly magical. 
  Local hauntings are probably real, witches and 
  warlocks of folklore existed (and may still be 
  around), and the man dressed in a bunny suit 
  killing people with an axe in the woods of 
  Virginia? More real than you know.
  This magical significance can be subtle or 
  overt. A given haunting might be a powerful, 
  named ghost which would be fairly overt. A 
  neighborhood, however, might have more 
  hauntings than most of the rest of the city, and 
  that’s just part of its character.
  Once you get beyond the obvious plug-ins, 
  there may also be some places to insert some 
  magical history. If your city has a historical hero 
  or boogeyman, consider keeping him in the past 
  rather than having him still be around today. 
  This opens questions about how he died and 
  what sort of legacy he left behind. A legacy can 
  be incredibly powerful in helping your group 
  sink roots into the setting, as it allows them to 
  tie their own history into it.
  One last subtle but potent vector is knowl-
  edge. The world of magic is mostly secret and 
  what is known tends to be in broken pieces. 
  Putting some small amount of knowledge in the 
  hands of the most mundane people or groups 
  can put a spin on them that can get very inter-
  esting indeed. Police departments are a great 
  example of this, but even something as simple as 
  a bar or bookshop with some awareness of the 
  magical world is going to feel different than one 
  without.
  Your group may come up with a lot of ideas, 
  perhaps resulting in extensive notes. You can 
  summarize those ideas on the High Level City 
  Sheet. Write a couple of sentences in each of 
  the Status Quo boxes, describing who the big 
  players are and how they relate to one another. 
  A summary is fine—your notes should contain 
  the rest.
  In the Movers and Shakers section, list the 
  major players you’ve come up with so far. That 
  section is split between two axes—those looking 
  to hold the line vs. rock the boat, and those in 
  the know about the supernatural vs. those not. 
  You could use that as four boxes to write in. Or 
  you could use that as a chart, placing little dots 
  to show how much people or organizations want 
  to change the status quo and how much they 
  know about the supernatural. 
  Sometimes you’ll come up with an idea that 
  straddles that line—in the earlier casefiles, 
  Chicago’s Special Investigations, for instance, is 
  partly in the know, partly not. Write those in the 
  middle.
  The 
  distinction 
  here is a 
  little too 
  tidy. Some 
  fac tions will 
  want to do 
  both, as their 
  member ship 
  isn’t mono-
  lithic.
  You’re abso-
  lutely right, 
  boss—that’s 
  especially 
  true if a city 
  theme suggests 
  con flicting 
  identities. It’s 
  part of why 
  we present 
  the “status 
  quo” vs. “boat 
  rocker” axis 
  as a continuum 
  rather than an 
  either/or thing 
  on the high 
  level sheet.
  A bunny suit? Seriously?
  there are lots of stories of Bunny 
  man in the Washington, dc area.
  
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  city creation
  Example: Chicago
  You could not have a game in Chicago without 
  “Organized Crime” somewhere in its themes. It’s 
  just too much a part of the legend of the city. 
  It would be easy to get ham-fisted about this 
  and have everything run by, say, an undead Al 
  Capone. More subtly however, you could insert 
  a little knowledge into this aspect, perhaps in 
  the form of a mob boss who understands and 
  appreciates magic enough to know that the only 
  wizard in the Chicago yellow pages needs to be 
  handled very carefully indeed.
  Example: Baltimore
  Davian and I decided to try to get a variety of 
  supernatural players in town. White Council 
  representatives who don’t quite know what to 
  do—that’s “doesn’t know what to be.” A clan of 
  ghouls itching for a fight—that’s both “looking 
  into the Abyss” and “masking the blight.” The 
  Fae and White Court vampires are around to 
  provide the potential for scheming and plot-
  ting—they represent “doesn’t know what to be” 
  as well as “masking the blight.” Maybe there’s a 
  power play going on in the White Court...Oh! 
  And the cops, who would otherwise be trying 
  to keep the peace, are being infiltrated by that 
  White Court clan. Lots of tie-in with themes 
  and threats here.
  davian won’t tell me which of 
  these ideas are really true. I 
  think I’m glad I don’t know.
  Mortal Response 
  to the Supernatural
  It’s entirely possible the mortal population of 
  your city is almost completely in the dark—easy 
  pickings, save for the handful who know enough 
  of the old ways that they stay out of the way. On 
  the other hand, some communities (especially 
  small ones) may follow certain protective habits 
  or traditions—possibly muddled or disguised as 
  anything from local variations of religious prac-
  tice to homeowner’s association rules; others 
  may be knowingly clued in or even have some 
  sort of organized response. Of course, organized 
  groups are pretty rare:  they tend to fall to the 
  extremes of either failure (wiped out by bad 
  guys) or irrelevant success (getting ignored or 
  encouraging the bad guys to pick up shop and 
  move elsewhere, making the group unnecessary).
  A lot of cities will have something like Karrin 
  Murphy’s unit, a particular part of the police 
  force which gets handed the oddball cases. You’re 
  never going to have a “magical” unit on the books. 
  They’re usually hidden behind euphemisms like 
  “Special Crime,” “Special Unit,” “At-Large Issues,” 
  or the like or may even be entirely informal. The 
  effectiveness of these groups runs the gamut—
  some work hard to make a difference but others 
  just look for ways to hide the statistics. 
  Crime, especially organized crime, has a more 
  nuanced relationship with the supernatural. 
  Most petty criminals are no different from any 
  other mortal when experiencing the supernat-
  ural. However, a few insightful criminals have 
  learned to turn magic to their advantage, by 
  learning a bit of magic themselves, employing 
  a practitioner as an “advisor,” or forming an alli-
  ance with a supernatural entity or faction.
  Billy, I’ve never known a town 
  where literally everyone 
  is in the dark. It seems like 
  there’s always somebody 
  who knows something about 
  what’s going on, even if that 
  guy gets written off as 
  needing his dosage adjusted.
   What, they 
  wet their 
  pants and 
  run away?
  It’s a good 
  thing these 
  notes won’t be 
  in the final 
  version. You 
  know marcone’s 
  going to pick 
  up a copy of 
  this book when 
  it’s out.
  Yeah, about 
  that... we 
  need to talk.
  
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  city creation
  Churches may also have some window into 
  the supernatural, but how much varies from 
  church to church. Most churches are already 
  more than busy enough with temporal matters, 
  and even those who are aware of the dangers 
  tend to be very reactive and defensive, acting 
  only for the immediate protection of their flock’s 
  souls (which is not an insignificant task.) 
  Consider the mundane mortals that deal with 
  the supernatural in your city. Cops? Religious? 
  Nobody? 
  Example: Chicago
  Father Forthill at Saint Mary’s of the Angels 
  offers protection from the supernatural. The 
  Special Investigations division of the Chicago 
  PD is an important part of the picture, as are 
  criminal organizations like Marcone’s. Especially 
  as Marcone becomes more aware of Harry’s 
  world, the role of mortals in maintaining 
  Chicago’s safety is great indeed.
  Example: Baltimore
  It’s possible that the cops have an SI-like unit; 
  but we’re not trying to recreate Harry’s casefiles 
  line by line. During our research phase, Davian 
  told me that Baltimore has a lot of churches. 
  Maybe there’s a strong church stand against the 
  supernatural predators? Baltimore has one of 
  the oldest Catholic cathedrals in the U.S., right? 
  Let’s use that—the Basilica of the Assumption. 
  While we’re at it, let’s spread the wealth around 
  a little—we realized that the Roman Catholic 
  Church was getting a ton of the credit when it 
  comes to faith magic. You needn’t be a Catholic 
  to be as awesome as Father Forthill, so we 
  decided to make sure we represent some reli-
  gious diversity in the Baltimore setting. 
  Secondly, we thought about the whole Edgar 
  Allan Poe angle—was he in the know? We 
  decided there’s a society of mortals devoted to a 
  secret body of Poe’s work cataloguing the world 
  of the weird, and they strive to continue it. They 
  cope by being armed with information. Davian 
  even came up with a great name for it—the 
  Dupin Society, after Poe’s detective hero. 
  From a game standpoint, the Dupin Society 
  is a great place to start if you’re having trouble 
  deciding where a non-supernatural character 
  would fit into this sort of game. It’s also a 
  convenient way to have characters from wildly 
  different backgrounds cross paths without 
  resorting to suspension-of-disbelief-breaking 
  contrivance.
  Local Supernatural 
  Community
  In every town, there are people in the know—
  people who bridge the gap between the mundane 
  world of mortals and the supernatural. A lot of 
  the time, especially in bigger towns and cities, 
  the core of the community is practitioners and 
  talents, people genuinely touched by the super-
  natural to some degree. Around them are family, 
  believers, poseurs, people who’ve seen too much, 
  hangers-on, and the like. It’s an eclectic mix, and 
  not everyone is necessarily on the same page. 
  Differences in belief or education abound, but 
  they share one piece of common ground. They 
  understand that there is something more to the 
  world than most people accept. 
  Like any other community, they have places 
  where they can go and perhaps feel safe—bars, 
  shops, clubs, and the like. These places and the 
  people found there are usually highly reflec-
  tive of the city’s themes, which is something to 
  consider as you think about your city’s commu-
  nity of people in the know. Locations and poten-
  tial characters will probably come to mind at 
  this point—make sure you note these down; 
  you’ll detail them soon.
  Example: Chicago
  Chicago has plenty of examples. MacAnally’s, 
  Bock Ordered Books, and St. Mary of the 
  Angels are all locations tied to the supernatural 
  community. For groups, it’s easy to point to the 
  Ordo Lebes and the Alphas, to say nothing of 
  the Red and White Courts and the fae.
  Example: Baltimore
  This stage went really quickly. We decided to 
  have a café in town near Johns Hopkins, one that 
  doubled as an occult bookstore. Maybe we’d have 
  it be Accorded Neutral Ground, but we’d figure 
  that out later. This café would be a hangout for 
  the city’s supernatural-aware community.
  We also brought up the idea of a band of 
  renegade sorcerers, a strong clan of White Court 
  vampires (complete with power struggle going 
  on within), weak and disorganized bands of 
  Red and Black Court vamps, and—Davian kept 
  insisting on this—a strong ghoul clan. 
  In smaller 
  towns and 
  isolated 
  communities, 
  the folks 
  in the know 
  are as likely 
  to be the 
  wise/crazy 
  old geezers 
  with their 
  “superstitions” 
  as any true 
  practitioners 
  or talents.
  
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  city creation
  Locations in 
  Your City
  At this point, you should have a pretty good 
  high-level view of the supernatural—and 
  supernaturally aware—population of your city, 
  and how it ties together with the city’s themes 
  and threats. But a city is a lot more than a 
  high concept and a few threats. No one is just 
  “in Chicago;” they’re “in Hyde Park” or “on the 
  observation deck of Sears Tower” or a thousand 
  other places. While a city is more than just the 
  sum of its parts, we still have to think about 
  those parts—that’s where the stories really take 
  place.
  There are two general types of locations: 
  neighborhoods and points of interest. 
  Neighborhoods are where people live or work, 
  and points of interest are where people go to do 
  or experience something specific. When coming 
  up with these locations, here are some bits of 
  advice to keep in mind:
    Pick locations that seem to have their 
  own story or character. People might 
  talk about the seedy happenings down 
  at the Waterfront, making that a prime 
  location. 
    Pick locations that have a little action 
  or conflict built in, so that something’s 
  always going on even when the PCs 
  aren’t there. The Strip in Las Vegas is a 
  prime example.
    Pick locations that tie in with city 
  themes and threats. Not all of them 
  need a direct link, but most of them 
  should have an arguable connection to 
  at least one.
    Pick locations emblematic of the factions 
  and organizations you enumerated in the 
  previous section.
  That said, don’t try to catalog every single 
  neighborhood or point of interest. Doing one 
  or two per player (including the GM) is a good 
  ballpark. If you find the story goes to a new 
  neighborhood or point of interest in the middle 
  of play, and seems to return there fairly often, 
  then flesh out that location some more.
  As you kick around location ideas, use the 
  Locations City Sheet to record your work.
  Getting Ideas
  There are all sorts of fun ways to come up with 
  ideas for locations, even if you’re not familiar 
  with the city. The Internet is your friend. Google 
  Earth rocks—zoom in and look for cool-looking 
  buildings, streets or other structures that all 
  meet at a nexus, or other eye-catching artifacts 
  of the town. It has attached street-perspective 
  photos of a lot of interesting-looking places, 
  so at the very least it should give you an idea 
  of places to think about. Wikipedia is another 
  great resource, as are social networking websites 
  and web forums where you can talk to people 
  who live in your chosen city. Of course, maybe 
  you prefer dead trees, or maybe your aura fries 
  computers. In that case, hit the library or a 
  bookstore and check out encyclopedias and 
  travel books—these are great ways to get loca-
  tion ideas.
  And of course, the research you did earlier in 
  the city creation process probably turned up a 
  wealth of potentially flavorful locations.
  Once you have your list of locations, you’ll 
  come up with two pieces of information for 
  each: the location’s theme or threat (only one, 
  not both) and its face.
  This is 
  another 
  cool thing I 
  miss out on 
  because I fry 
  electronic 
  gear, isn’t it?
  You can call 
  down actual 
  fire from 
  the sky to 
  flame your 
  enemies, Harry. 
  We computer 
  geeks just 
  have to settle 
  for doing it 
  metaphorically. 
  I think you got 
  the better end 
  of that deal.
  Conceptual Locations
  In some cases, there might be a concept 
  for your city that needs representation—
  it’s probable that such a concept was called 
  out in your city sketch. For Hollywood, 
  California, for example, the entertainment 
  industry is a strong concept that should be 
  reflected in the city. Take a moment to look 
  at your city’s themes and locations; if none 
  of them can be said to represent your city’s 
  important concepts, decide on a physical 
  location that will work as an anchor in your 
  game for that concept—a place where it’s on 
  display and where the characters can interact 
  with it. In the Hollywood example, you 
  might create a film studio location to repre-
  sent the entertainment industry’s presence.
  
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  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (Locations)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Baltimore
  Nevermore
  The Fall liNe
  edgar alleN Poe MuseuM
  The “easT greeN”
  FraNcis scoTT Key Bridge
  NeuTral grouNds
  The WashiNgToN MoNuMeNT
  Federal hill ParK
  The MoNTrose esTaTe
  Fells PoiNT/caNToN
  corridor of magic energy along it.
  history and magic abound
  drug dealers and despair-eaters
  air and water cancel out magic.
  granted a.N.g. status.
  The nexus of the city ley lines
  Tunnels beneath hide the ghouls.
  Wizardly family has secrets.
  Nightlife provides cover for WcVs
  oN The ley liNe
  iF These Walls could TalK
  PoVerTy Breeds desPeraTioN
  Magically grouNded
  accorded NeuTral grouNd
  WellsPriNg oF Magic
  gaTeWay To hell
  sKeleToNs iN The closeT. . . 
  aNd The BaseMeNT
  NighTliFe oN The harBor
  Frank Walker       hydromancer/ 
   
   
        civil engineer
  Paul Mackey     director of the 
                       dupin society
  Wallace “lizard” gibbs
   
        clued-in drug dealer
  ellsworth dillman   Troll Blooded 
   
   
        Toll collector
  diane Basset    Kitchen Witch/ 
                     caffienomancer
  Joe Nowakowski      homeless Vet
  gilgamesh 
        ghoul Tyrant
  Wellington    summer court ogre, 
            estate guardian, Butler.
  curt gazo  White court doorman
  Border between the coastal plain & 
  the east coast of North america. 
    house & museum is also meeting 
  place for dupin society. 
    housing project, complex of 
  2-story apartments, run down. 
  sweet merciful gods this  
  is a tall bridge. 
  a coffee shop where the 
  minor talents congregate. 
  Baltimore’s version—northwest 
  of harbor, 178ft tall, museum.
  Park on the south shore 
  of the inner harbor.
  Wooded estate of the Montrose 
  (formerly Montressor) family.
  The center of Baltimore’s club 
  scene in two neighborhoods.
  #
  @
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  @X
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  @X
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (Locations)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Baltimore
  Nevermore
  The Fall liNe
  edgar alleN Poe MuseuM
  The “easT greeN”
  FraNcis scoTT Key Bridge
  NeuTral grouNds
  The WashiNgToN MoNuMeNT
  Federal hill ParK
  The MoNTrose esTaTe
  Fells PoiNT/caNToN
  corridor of magic energy along it.
  history and magic abound
  drug dealers and despair-eaters
  air and water cancel out magic.
  granted a.N.g. status.
  The nexus of the city ley lines
  Tunnels beneath hide the ghouls.
  Wizardly family has secrets.
  Nightlife provides cover for WcVs
  oN The ley liNe
  iF These Walls could TalK
  PoVerTy Breeds desPeraTioN
  Magically grouNded
  accorded NeuTral grouNd
  WellsPriNg oF Magic
  gaTeWay To hell
  sKeleToNs iN The closeT. . . 
  aNd The BaseMeNT
  NighTliFe oN The harBor
  Frank Walker       hydromancer/ 
   
   
        civil engineer
  Paul Mackey     director of the 
                       dupin society
  Wallace “lizard” gibbs
   
        clued-in drug dealer
  ellsworth dillman   Troll Blooded 
   
   
        Toll collector
  diane Basset    Kitchen Witch/ 
                     caffienomancer
  Joe Nowakowski      homeless Vet
  gilgamesh 
        ghoul Tyrant
  Wellington    summer court ogre, 
            estate guardian, Butler.
  curt gazo  White court doorman
  Border between the coastal plain & 
  the east coast of North america. 
    house & museum is also meeting 
  place for dupin society. 
    housing project, complex of 
  2-story apartments, run down. 
  sweet merciful gods this  
  is a tall bridge. 
  a coffee shop where the 
  minor talents congregate. 
  Baltimore’s version—northwest 
  of harbor, 178ft tall, museum.
  Park on the south shore 
  of the inner harbor.
  Wooded estate of the Montrose 
  (formerly Montressor) family.
  The center of Baltimore’s club 
  scene in two neighborhoods.
  #
  @
  #
  @
  #
  @
  #
  @X
  #
  @X
  #
  @X
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  @X
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  @X
  
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  city creation
  Recurring Locations
  Recurring locations are a great feature of TV 
  shows and novels. In a lot of stories, they’re 
  a vitally important component because they 
  provide a sense of predictability that helps 
  control the story’s pacing—they can do the 
  same thing in your game. These locations tend 
  to come in two very broad flavors, categorized 
  based on what the location does to the player 
  characters’ (and players’) sense of comfort. 
  The characters need a place to call home, 
  someplace where they can drop their wards, get 
  comfortable, and crack open a beer. The players 
  know what to expect here. Of course, once 
  established, the GM can play with this expec-
  tation by threatening these zones of safety and 
  comfort. Handled well, this can introduce an 
  intense sense of danger, outrage, or horror in the 
  players. Be careful, though; do it too much or 
  too early and it can get pretty old, or even lead to 
  players feeling like their trust has been violated.
  The other type is the place that’s predictably 
  uncomfortable—the bastion of a Winter Court 
  faerie lord the PCs visit frequently, a particular 
  section of the Nevernever, or a loud and pulsing 
  dance club run by White Court vamps. The 
  players know what to expect here, too, and it’s 
  never good. They have to be on their guard all 
  the time, never accept a gift, never dance with 
  the beautiful succubus no matter how seductive 
  she is… As with the comforting locations, once 
  these expectations have been established a GM 
  can play with the expectations a bit to keep the 
  players on their toes.
  Recurring locations are extremely useful—
  strongly consider having a few. They may end 
  up being strongly connected to your characters, 
  though, so you might want to come back to this 
  when you’re making characters and sketch out a 
  new location based on what you make up there. 
  Locations and 
  the Supernatural 
  Making the Connection
  Whatever locations you choose, make certain 
  that some have potential for entanglement with 
  the supernatural, one way or another. 
  Imagine how your city looks, purely from 
  the perspective of magical beings with no 
  real interest in the workings of mankind. An 
  ancient being—wizard, vampire, fae, demon, or 
  other—is not going to take any real interest in 
  the politics and economics of the day, and one 
  pile of humanity is much like any other. From 
  their perspective, things need to last a certain 
  amount of time before they’re worth noticing, 
  so the things that they find interesting in a city 
  are more likely to be places of power, powerful 
  residents, and other Big Matters. So when such 
  beings look at your city, what do they think of?
  To that end, think about things that may be 
  unique to your city. If you have some geography 
  on hand that can obviously be made signifi-
  cant, then that’s easy. Having the Empire State 
  Building as the focusing point for New York 
  City’s ley lines is a good, obvious use of this sort 
  of thing. Perhaps the St. Louis Arch is a gateway 
  to something deep in the Nevernever. Maybe 
  the Pyramids at Giza are nowhere near as bad 
  as Chichen Itza. Maybe the top of the Eiffel 
  Tower is a portal to Hell, or something. You get 
  the idea. Tombs, graveyards, mountains, battle-
  fields, and monuments of almost any kind may 
  be of use for this. If you can find some sort of 
  signature landmark, at least consider making it 
  magical.
  If you don’t have specific geography to work 
  with, then no problem; it’s easy enough to make 
  something up. Gateways and potential gate-
  ways are a great hook. One or more doors to 
  the Nevernever provide plots aplenty, depending 
  on where they go and who might want to go 
  through them. Ley lines—lines of mystical force 
  that crisscross the earth like an invisible highway 
  of magic—are another great excuse. Wherever 
  they cross is a place of power, and if a bunch of 
  them cross in one place, like your city, that can 
  easily be of interest.
  It’s also worth considering types of places 
  that you might find in more than one city. Some 
  cities might have an equivalent of Chicago’s 
  Undertown—a neighborhood that’s built in 
  existing underground tunnels but is a bit closer 
  Billy, you 
  can’t reveal 
  that sort 
  of thing 
  here. Pick 
  a different 
  example.
  What, did I 
  guess right?
  Don’t Constrain Yourself!
  We’re spending a lot of time talking about 
  making the city for your game, but don’t be 
  afraid to branch out on occasion. There’s a 
  whole wide world out there—sometimes 
  Harry’s cases take him to the outskirts 
  of Chicago and further (even outside of 
  our plane of existence!) in order to deal 
  with problems.
  
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  city creation
  to the Nevernever, so the veil can be thin enough 
  to pass through accidentally. Mortals seldom 
  visit such places, but they’re the first stop for 
  magical beings, often because they double as the 
  points of entry.
  Any place can be of interest, magically. It 
  might have power to draw on, the veil between 
  our world and the Nevernever might be thin in 
  that spot at particular times of the year, it might 
  be sacred or profane, skewed to some flavor of 
  magic, or important to some manner of creature. 
  All that means is that if a place is interesting to 
  you and your group, making it significant is not 
  hard to do.
  Themes and Threats 
  of Locations
  Now, for each location, make either a theme 
  or threat. A location’s theme or threat is much 
  like a city’s overall theme or threat, but specific 
  to this one part of the city. A lot of the same 
  considerations you used to create your city’s 
  themes and threats hold true here, too: What’s 
  going to make for a great story? Why is this 
  location interesting? What’s going to happen 
  there? A location that will serve as a hotbed of 
  intrigue, like a club that serves as a White Court 
  hangout, might have a theme like “lies, decep-
  tion, and backstabbing.” A locale that you think 
  is just begging for a fight scene, such as an aban-
  doned building, might have a threat to make the 
  fight more interesting, like “dry as a tinderbox.” 
  Especially for threats, don’t be afraid to call out 
  transient situations—you can change threats 
  and themes for locations as their characteristics 
  change. Some of these themes and threats even-
  tually will be turned into aspects or faces—but 
  we’ll talk about that later.
  Locations Sharing 
  Themes and Threats
  As you start making up locations, you might 
  decide that some of them have the same or very 
  similar themes or threats. That’s excellent! You 
  don’t need to constantly invent new problems 
  for every neighborhood or point of interest. But 
  you’ll want to make sure that each place still 
  feels different, so consider different sides of the 
  issue. A theme like “the bad part of town” might 
  mean that one location is notorious for violent 
  crime, while another’s take on that is rampant 
  prostitution. A supernatural threat may be well 
  established and hard to uproot in one location 
  and just beginning to take over in another.
  You could even leave the feel of the theme or 
  threat similar if the face of each of those loca-
  tions has a different take on dealing with the 
  threat. As long as there’s something different 
  about the situation, sharing problems among 
  places is a great way to tie those places (and the 
  people involved) together. 
  Bringing It 
  Together
  Write a sentence or three describing the loca-
  tion on the Locations City Sheet, and record 
  its theme or threat (don’t worry about the 
  aspect yet, we’ll do that in the final step of city 
  creation). Briefly describe a major feature or 
  two (“The lower deck of the bridge is a maze of 
  structural steel, rivets, and concrete with a low 
  ceiling, and the sides are open to the weather.”), 
  and maybe call out if people have to overcome 
  any obstacles to even get there (“The basement 
  door has been blocked off for years; you can only 
  get in through the trap door under the desk in 
  the office.”)
  This seems obvious, but it’s worth 
  mentioning: once you’ve chosen locations in this 
  phase of game preparation, it might be tempting 
  to railroad the action to end up there. Resist that 
  temptation. The action will get there when it 
  gets there, and if a location turns out to be a lot 
  cooler in theory than in actual play conditions, 
  don’t worry about it. If the face for that location 
  is important, the action will get there eventu-
  ally. If it doesn’t, then that location, and the face 
  associated with it, isn’t really as important as 
  you thought it would be. And that’s okay—file 
  away any cool ideas associated with it for future 
  use and let it go. New locations, ones you didn’t 
  think of during city creation, will arise during 
  play; if they feel important, stat them out and 
  add them to the list. And you never know—that 
  spurned location might become important down 
  the road.
  Example: Baltimore
  We went through all the ideas we had for loca-
  tions—the Basilica, the Inner Harbor, etc. I 
  went over the city on Google Earth and found 
  some really cool-looking buildings (the Clifton 
  Gate House and Washington Monument, 
  among others). We decided that a dance club 
  Don’t let Harry 
  near there!
  Hey now, 
  don’t you 
  start in 
  on me! 
  
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  city creation
  in Fell’s Point and the estate of the recently 
  deceased local wizard patriarch would make 
  for great recurring locations, and they each tie 
  in with both “doesn’t know what it wants to 
  be” and “masking the blight.” There’s a fantastic 
  legend (Davian snorts at this word) about 
  tunnels stretching from Federal Hill Park to 
  Fort McHenry. We want that group of Poe 
  scholars to have a home base; maybe that’s the 
  museum they made out of the house Poe lived 
  in. Davian brought up this really old clock tower 
  right downtown, not far from the Inner Harbor; 
  we ended up dropping that idea later, as we just 
  couldn’t hook it in to anything convincingly.
  For a complete list of locations we came up 
  with, look at Nevermore/Baltimore, page 389.
  People in 
  Your City
  The Faces 
  Once your set pieces are up, you’ll need people 
  in them. After all, a city is nothing if no one 
  inhabits it. 
  There are two ways to approach populating 
  your city. The process presented here designs a 
  world full of complicated situations and rela-
  tionships which the PCs will be thrown into 
  once they’re created. On the other hand, you 
  could move onto character creation first, then 
  design the rest of the characters based on how 
  the PCs turn out. Both ways are great; it’s your 
  choice which way you want to do it.
  In this section, you’ll be coming up with 
  various characters that embody your locations 
  and the city’s themes and threats. These faces 
  personify the setting and interact with the PCs. 
  You’ll need to figure out a couple of things for 
  each character—namely, a high concept and a 
  motivation—though it shouldn’t take more than 
  a couple minutes to come up with these few 
  details. If it does, remember the golden rule of 
  city creation: come up with the easy stuff and 
  move on—you can leave the rest for the GM to 
  figure out later, after the game’s started.
  As you go through each step of creating faces, 
  summarize your ideas on the Faces sheet. Again, 
  the GM and players might keep extra notes else-
  where, but the City Sheet is the quick reference 
  guide.
  High Concept
  All characters—PCs and NPCs alike—have 
  a high concept. We talk more about that in 
  Character Creation (page 54), but in short it’s a 
  quick phrase (and aspect) that summarizes that 
  character’s role in the world, usually reflecting 
  the character template in some way. The White 
  Court vampire that runs a nightclub might be 
  White Court Entrepreneur; a police detec-
  tive in the know might be Monster Hunting 
  Cop; a corrupt real estate investor might be 
  Heartless Slumlord; and the ritual sorceress 
  operating under the White Council’s radar 
  might be Dabbling Sorceress. High concepts 
  are explained in a lot more detail in Character 
  Creation; if you haven’t looked at that chapter 
  yet, you might want to jot down the base idea 
  and come back to it once you’ve gone through 
  the process of creating PCs. 
  
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  city creation
  Motivation
  The faces in your city should also have some 
  motivation—there’s something each one wants 
  that he can’t easily get. What is it? The White 
  Court vampire might want to end the police 
  investigation of prostitution at his nightclub, 
  while the detective is determined to end the 
  human trafficking ring he suspects is happening 
  there. The investor might want to quiet the 
  spirits of the burial ground he’s building on, 
  while the sorceress might want to conjure a 
  demon, using the nearby ley line to power her 
  containment circle.
  One of these basic formulas might help you 
  come up with motivations:
    This face wants something from another 
  person or group, and that person or 
  group has a good reason not to just hand 
  it over. 
    This face wants someone else to do 
  something for him, and that person 
  or group has a good reason (at least to 
  them) for not doing that.
    This face wants to stop someone else 
  from doing something that they are 
  currently doing or planning to do.
  The basic idea here is that these motivations 
  involve other potential characters and have some 
  conflict built-in. Since the most interesting 
  conflicts may very well involve the PCs, it might 
  make sense to delay this step until after char-
  acter creation.
  Faces of Locations
  A location’s face is someone who embodies a 
  place or is somehow strongly tied to it, either in 
  a mundane or supernatural sense. Every loca-
  tion needs a face—someone who cares about the 
  location.
  When you create a location’s face, it’s impor-
  tant to know the face’s connection to the loca-
  tion. Is the location the face’s hangout (a White 
  Court vampire owns a nightclub and can be 
  found there regularly, while a police detective is 
  frequently at Precinct Station House 4)? Is the 
  connection financial (the location is a construc-
  tion site, and the face is the investor who owns 
  it)? Is it supernatural (the face is a sorceress 
  performing rituals at the location due to its 
  proximity to a ley line)? 
  The face’s motivation for the location is also 
  useful to think about. Is there something about 
  the location he wants to change? Something he 
  wants to preserve? No one is perfectly happy 
  with his home (or home away from home, in 
  some cases). How does this face’s motivation 
  intersect with the city or location’s themes and 
  threats (if at all)?
  Play Style and 
  NPC Motivations
  When creating the motivations of your faces, 
  consider what style of game your group 
  wants to play. Specifically, how secret should 
  these motivations and relationships be from 
  the players? (Note that we’re saying “players” 
  very deliberately here—this is distinct from 
  “player characters.”) There are two distinct 
  styles that should inform this decision:
  Mystery: The details of the setting around 
  the PCs is a mystery for the players to 
  unravel. This means that (most of) the true 
  motivations of and relationships among 
  NPCs should begin the game as secrets 
  from the players (and, consequently, the 
  PCs). In this style of game, the GM will 
  need to invent most of these details about 
  the important NPCs—possibly with 
  suggestions from the players, but mostly on 
  her own.
  Intrigue/Politics: The players are aware 
  of the relationships among the NPCs, as 
  well as their motivations, even if the player 
  characters may not be fully aware of them. 
  This makes it much easier for the players to 
  engineer intrigue, play NPCs (and perhaps 
  other PCs) against one another, and engage 
  in general skullduggery. To create this 
  style of game, the GM and players should 
  work together to generate the NPCs’ high 
  concepts, motivations, and other details.
  Of course, many games will end up being a 
  combination of both. Even if your game has 
  aspects of both styles, it will probably lean 
  more one way or the other. It’s a good plan 
  for the GM to take the pulse of the table 
  and see what players want to do—both 
  styles can be accommodated with a bit of 
  creativity.
  Does 
  EVERY 
  location need 
  a face and 
  a theme or 
  threat?
  that's the 
  ideal. However, 
  let's say you 
  come up with 
  a neat place, 
  but no face 
  comes to mind. 
  that's okay, so 
  long as other 
  locations are 
  fully fleshed 
  out. maybe 
  some fun 
  action scenes 
  will happen in 
  that sparser 
  location. And 
  as you play, 
  it might take 
  on a life of 
  its own and 
  you'll discover 
  its face or 
  problem. So, in 
  short, can't 
  fill in all 
  the info now? 
  that's cool. 
  don't let it 
  slow you down.
  
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  city creation
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (Faces)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Baltimore
  Vasiliki Lagios
  Russell Carson
  Alexandria Lagios
  Dave Gerard
  Dr. Allison Ralston
  Paul Mackey
  Mike Robinson
  Curt Gazo
  Diane Basset
  DeCAy & CoRRuPtion (theme)
  DeCAy & CoRRuPtion (theme)
  on the BRink (threat)
  ConfLiCtinG iDentities
  Johns hopkins hospital
  edgar Allen Poe Museum
  state Correctional facility
  fells Point (Mantis Club)
  neutral Grounds
  White CouRt PAtRiARCh
  PoWeR-MAD soRCeReR
  ChARisMAtiC WCV uPstARt
  CoRRuPt CLuB oWneR
  CLueD-in 
  foRensiC PAthoLoGist
  DiReCtoR of the 
  DuPin soCiety
  CoRRuPt PRison GuARD
  White CouRt DooRMAn
  kitChen WitCh
  i will protect my family’s 
  standing at all costs.
  Power, plain and simple.
  i will lead house 
  Lagios to triumph.
  i want illicit success, but i 
  don’t want to get caught.
  i want to know, no matter 
  who says i shouldn’t.
  i want to 
  preserve knowledge.
  i want to ride that 
  gravy train.
  i’m going to help Alexandra 
  get to the top.
  i want to educate Baltimore’s 
  supernatural folks.
  Alexandra (niece)
  evan Montrose (obstacle)
  Vasiklik (uncle), Dave Gerard 
  (patsy), Curt Gazo (lieutenant)
  Alexandra (she’s playing me); 
  Dr. Ralston (my ex s.o.)
  Dave Gerard (ex), Paul Mackey 
  (Dupin soc member), others
  other society members
  Provides “snacks” to 
  the Lagios Clan
  Dave Gerard 
  (ostensible employwer)
  various patrons
  nevermore
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (Faces)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Baltimore
  Vasiliki Lagios
  Russell Carson
  Alexandria Lagios
  Dave Gerard
  Dr. Allison Ralston
  Paul Mackey
  Mike Robinson
  Curt Gazo
  Diane Basset
  DeCAy & CoRRuPtion (theme)
  DeCAy & CoRRuPtion (theme)
  on the BRink (threat)
  ConfLiCtinG iDentities
  Johns hopkins hospital
  edgar Allen Poe Museum
  state Correctional facility
  fells Point (Mantis Club)
  neutral Grounds
  White CouRt PAtRiARCh
  PoWeR-MAD soRCeReR
  ChARisMAtiC WCV uPstARt
  CoRRuPt CLuB oWneR
  CLueD-in 
  foRensiC PAthoLoGist
  DiReCtoR of the 
  DuPin soCiety
  CoRRuPt PRison GuARD
  White CouRt DooRMAn
  kitChen WitCh
  i will protect my family’s 
  standing at all costs.
  Power, plain and simple.
  i will lead house 
  Lagios to triumph.
  i want illicit success, but i 
  don’t want to get caught.
  i want to know, no matter 
  who says i shouldn’t.
  i want to 
  preserve knowledge.
  i want to ride that 
  gravy train.
  i’m going to help Alexandra 
  get to the top.
  i want to educate Baltimore’s 
  supernatural folks.
  Alexandra (niece)
  evan Montrose (obstacle)
  Vasiklik (uncle), Dave Gerard 
  (patsy), Curt Gazo (lieutenant)
  Alexandra (she’s playing me); 
  Dr. Ralston (my ex s.o.)
  Dave Gerard (ex), Paul Mackey 
  (Dupin soc member), others
  other society members
  Provides “snacks” to 
  the Lagios Clan
  Dave Gerard 
  (ostensible employwer)
  various patrons
  nevermore
  
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  city creation
  Faces of Themes 
  and Threats
  Themes and threats—especially threats—also 
  need faces that embody or represent them in 
  some way. It’s boring for PCs to interact directly 
  with disembodied forces or ideological concepts. 
  Some of your location faces will also work 
  well as faces for themes or threats. Or you may 
  end up revising a location’s face based on a 
  similar NPC you’ll come up with here. Either 
  way, this is a good point to look over your NPCs 
  to see how they could intersect with the themes 
  and threats you’ve come up with.
  Like every other part of creating faces, as 
  you figure this part out for each face, be sure 
  to record it on the Faces City Sheet—but don’t 
  forget to record it on the High Level City Sheet 
  as well.
  Themes and Faces
  To come up with faces for the city’s themes, 
  consider how each theme is exemplified in one 
  (or more) of the NPCs. Consider the “If the 
  Beta Alpha Chis want it, they get it” theme that 
  we discussed before—a face could be a member 
  of that fraternity. If that’s one of your city’s 
  themes, chances are you have a member in mind 
  as an NPC (or even a PC), so that character 
  could be one of the theme’s faces. 
  You can use a face to subvert a theme, too, or 
  to call attention to it by providing the counter-
  example. Think about the theme “If he’s a poli-
  tician, he’s mobbed up” from before. Sure, you 
  could make the face a local kingpin of corrup-
  tion and graft, but what if you chose the one 
  honest, idealistic politician left in the city?
  Finally, you can hold off on associating a 
  theme with a face if you need to. Consider the 
  theme “If a pretty girl wanders alone at night, 
  don’t expect to see her again.” If nothing leaps 
  out at you immediately, let your play reveal who 
  is involved. This is particularly handy if you 
  want to run this idea as a mystery. (Alternately, 
  in this situation you could go the Twin Peaks 
  route and make the face a murder victim—
  maybe have some scenes occur in flashback.)
  Threats and Faces
  It’s fairly easy to come up with faces for city 
  threats. Just tie a threat directly to the face’s 
  motivation, and presto. In the example “A new 
  warlock is breaking the Laws of Magic,” it’s 
  pretty simple to figure out the high concept. But 
  for motivation, you’ll have to ask why—maybe 
  this warlock is looking for respect from a White 
  Council Wizard in the area, or perhaps he just 
  wants to use magic to punish people who have 
  hurt him.
  On the other hand, the face for such threats 
  can be less direct. Maybe the face of this threat 
  is a White Council Warden who suspects one 
  of the PCs is responsible for the crimes the 
  warlock is committing. If the Warden’s motiva-
  tion is “The suspect must confess,” this provides 
  a face to this threat that the PCs can’t easily solve 
  through judicious use of magic and firearms.
  Tying Characters 
  Together
  Faces do not exist in separate vacuums. They 
  should have some sort of connection to each 
  other. If that connection ties into their motiva-
  tion, so much the better. The sorcerer has been 
  hired by the investor to drive out the restless 
  spirits, but is in over her head. The White Court 
  vamp and the detective are in direct conflict with 
  one another. 
  Other connections could come in the form 
  of rivalries, cross-purpose motivations, personal 
  grudges or alliances, etc.
  However, only note ideas down if they seem 
  obvious at this step. By now, you’ve done a lot 
  of work coming up with ideas, and are prob-
  ably really eager to move on to making your 
  own characters. If there are some characters that 
  don’t seem to be tied together, or perhaps aren’t 
  tied to anyone, that’s fine at this point. During 
  play, you’ll come up with so many more amazing 
  ideas; the things the PCs do and the way the 
  GM reacts will inspire you in ways you couldn’t 
  come up with right now, even if they seem 
  obvious in hindsight.
  So… Do 
  all major 
  NPCs have 
  to be faces?
  Well, you can 
  just throw a 
  random NPc 
  in there if 
  you want to. 
  But if they 
  aren’t directly 
  connected to 
  something—a 
  theme, a 
  threat, a 
  location, or 
  even a face—
  why bother?
  ’Cause 
  sometimes 
  after a 
  long day at 
  the office 
  it’s nice to 
  just bash 
  a monster 
  instead of 
  saving the 
  world?
  oK, I’ll give 
  you that. 
  Although even 
  that monster 
  probably ties 
  into something 
  going on in 
  your city.
  I thought all these theme NPCs 
  would have to be villains?
  Not always. Sometimes you want 
  to offer up someone the Pcs care 
  about as a face, so that you can 
  have that person threatened rather 
  than threatening the Pcs directly. 
  “Face” doesn’t mean “evil NPc.”
  
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  city creation
  Example: Baltimore
  Here’s where the meat of our setting design 
  really took place. We came up with dozens 
  of great NPC ideas and several possible PC 
  ideas before settling on the ones in Nevermore/
  Baltimore. 
  Most of this grew from two sources: 
  fleshing out faces for our identified locations, 
  and identifying key NPCs that would become 
  necessary even without being the face of any 
  particular location.
  Again, Davian insisted on a strong ghoul clan 
  with this completely gonzo leader who thinks 
  he’s a god; we turned the ghoul clan into one of 
  the major factions in town. Same thing with the 
  White Court vampires, although a strange thing 
  happened there. We started creating White 
  Court NPCs, and the most interesting one 
  was the up-and-coming firebrand rather than 
  the current leader, especially when matched up 
  with locations we’d come up with. We never 
  did invent a location for the White Court clan 
  leader’s lair, and we think that’s okay—he’s a 
  face of the city theme of “masking the blight.” 
  Alexandra really grabs hold of the city’s threat 
  of “looking into the abyss,” so we made her the 
  main vampire NPC. These vampires feed on 
  despair rather than lust; this led us to the notion 
  of them infiltrating the corrections department 
  rather than the police department; we went back 
  and added the state pen—the location and its 
  face also embody “masking the blight.”
  Running with the idea that the wizards are 
  weak in town, we hit upon the most powerful 
  White Council wizard in town being really 
  green—Evan Montrose, returning from a 
  few semesters abroad to take over when his 
  father suddenly passed. This is an ideal PC, we 
  decided, but more on that later.
  Again, see Nevermore/Baltimore for the final 
  results of our brainstorming. Davian assures me 
  that ultimately very little of it is untrue. He’s an 
  accomplished storyteller, so I’ve no idea when 
  he’s lying to me.
  The Protagonists
  The Player Characters
  Once you’ve cleaned up the location list and 
  created faces, it’s time to sit down and do char-
  acter creation (if you haven’t already). You have 
  enough information about the city now that 
  someone at the table can probably answer any 
  questions that come up. In play, the group is 
  sure to come up with new ideas and elements 
  that you’ll want to incorporate into the city. As 
  the group goes through character creation, stay 
  alert for this sort of thing and take down a new 
  list of city details based on the players’ ideas. 
  The player characters’ aspects may suggest new 
  themes, locations, places, and people, but don’t 
  limit yourself just to those. 
  Picking a Power Level
  Now that you’ve made a big chunk of your city, 
  you’ll have an idea of what sort of threats are 
  looming and what sort of threats the PCs will 
  have to contend with. The important thing is 
  that everyone should be at the same power level. 
  If you haven’t chosen a power level, now is the 
  time to do so. Details on the different power 
  levels are in Character Creation, page 53.
  Should Faces be PCs?
  As you begin character creation, consider that 
  you might have already created the basic idea of 
  some, if not all, of your PCs—the faces. They 
  already have hooks into the city’s locations, 
  themes, and threats. They have at least implied 
  relationships to other characters. If some of 
  them look like fun to play, grab ‘em as PCs! 
  Can they can still serve as faces? Well, the 
  answer to that is “Sometimes.” Think about the 
  other characters—both PCs and NPCs—and 
  how they will interact with the location, theme, 
  or threat that the face-turned-PC represents. 
  Will those other characters still see the PC as a 
  Multiple Faces 
  Sometimes a location, theme or threat 
  might suggest multiple faces, like with the 
  example threat of “The Summer and Winter 
  Courts are using this city in their machina-
  tions.” When that happens, come up with 
  multiple faces.
  That said, this is generally only appro-
  priate if the faces are somehow at odds, 
  either openly or covertly. If they have the 
  same agenda, and one is really a lieutenant 
  for another or something similar, then you 
  really only have one face to worry about at 
  the moment (though whether the boss or 
  the lieutenant is the one you’re focusing on 
  is entirely up to you).
  
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  city creation
  face for that concept? If the concept is an exten-
  sion of that character, chances are you don’t need 
  a new face. However, if the character is just a cog 
  in the wheel of a much larger institution, you 
  might want to create a new face. 
  But most of all, don’t over-think this. Just 
  make a quick judgment call and move on—99% 
  of the time it’s not earth-shatteringly vital that 
  this decision is made one way or the other.
  Arranging the Details
  As a GM, look at each character’s best skills and 
  ask: Who else in the city is that good? Do they 
  know the character? Do they have some sort of 
  relationship? Are they rivals, friends, or both? 
  What do they do with the skill that the char-
  acter doesn’t?
  The same thinking applies equally well to 
  stunts and powers. Who else can do these 
  things? Who wants to be able to? Who knows? 
  Who cares? Everything on the character sheet 
  may suggest an idea for expanding the city 
  details. So, while the players are shifting their 
  focus over to their characters, it’s time for the 
  GM to truly take ownership of the city and 
  make it come alive and, more importantly, shape 
  it so it is relevant and responsive to the lives of 
  the PCs.
  When you’re done, run through your new 
  list of details and decide on how to position 
  them in the city. If they go into existing loca-
  tions or fit existing themes, then great—just 
  write them down as details. Otherwise, create 
  new locations and themes and so forth, turning 
  them into aspects and characters as needed (see 
  “Finalize Your City,” below). At the end of this, 
  you should have a list of thematic aspects and 
  a cast of NPCs, as well as a list full of things 
  which caught your interest.
  Example: Baltimore
  In the previous section, we identified the young 
  wizard Evan Montrose as a great potential PC; 
  his stats exercise the spellcasting rules thor-
  oughly, and he’s an interesting character in his 
  own right (and has a direct, if contentious, 
  connection to the Dupin Society). We decided 
  then to stat up his best friends—one a minor 
  talent and one a pure mortal—as PCs to further 
  demonstrate the different ways to exercise 
  the system.
  Finalize 
  Your City
  You’re almost there now. It’s time to turn all 
  those ideas into game mechanics.
  Turn Themes and 
  Threats into Aspects 
  Now that you’ve been through character 
  creation and understand what aspects are and 
  how to use them, go back to your city details and 
  turn city and location themes and threats into 
  proper aspects. Revisit Aspects (page 98) if you 
  need some extra help. The main thing to keep 
  in mind is that each aspect you make has to be 
  able to affect at least one of the PCs. Remember 
  that the aspect doesn’t have to complicate the 
  PC directly; if it complicates the life of someone 
  he cares about, that works. If an aspect doesn’t 
  touch any of your PCs, directly or indirectly, 
  then it’s a wasted aspect.
  Once you come up with aspects, make sure 
  that everyone around the table understands the 
  intent behind each aspect. One fun way to do 
  this is to go around the table and have people 
  come up with examples of how an aspect would 
  be invoked or compelled. Of course, the GM 
  might want to keep some aspects to herself for 
  now; that’s okay, too.
  Don’t be afraid to reword or rewrite a theme 
  or threat to turn it into a good aspect, but try 
  not to change its basic meaning or replace it with 
  something totally new. If you absolutely have 
  to do that, make sure that all the bits—faces, 
  relationships, etc.—that rely on that aspect still 
  work.
  This also represents the final bit of work 
  you’ll do on your city sheets. The Locations City 
  Sheet and the High Level City Sheet both have 
  room for recording these aspects.
  Theme Aspects
  Turning themes into aspects is sometimes 
  straightforward, but they’ll usually need 
  some rewording to focus in a particular direc-
  tion. The “If he’s a politician, he’s mobbed up” 
  example from earlier could become There’s 
  No Honest Politician (if the point is about 
  the politicians themselves) or Can’t Trust 
  Anyone in City Hall (if the point is about 
  trust)—an aspect that’s punchy and to the point. 
  
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  city creation
  Some themes are a bit more work to turn 
  into aspects that the GM can use to compel and 
  drive the story, like “If the Beta Alpha Chis want 
  it, they get it.” With these, you’ll have to make 
  a decision about the role the theme has with 
  respect to the PCs and the anticipated story 
  you’re going to play in. One way to focus the 
  theme for an aspect would be Beta’s Influence 
  Felt Everywhere (for a more conspiratorial 
  vibe), and another would be No One Says No 
  to the Betas (for more of a street-level fear 
  vibe). Both of those should suggest more ways 
  to use that theme to influence the story than the 
  initial idea does. 
  Our third example above, “If a pretty girl 
  wanders alone at night, don’t expect to see her 
  again,” is another case where the aspect is chal-
  lenging to use as-is. It’s hard to see how to use 
  that aspect to compel the PCs, or how they 
  could invoke the aspect for their benefit. If 
  you’re going for a sense of fear and defeatism, 
  an aspect like Devoid of Hope encapsulates 
  the right feeling. It doesn’t explicitly address the 
  theme described; but thanks to the collabora-
  tive process, everyone knows where that aspect 
  came from and the context for it. On the other 
  hand, if you’re going for a bit more action in 
  your game, something more in-your-face like 
  Nowhere Is Safe When the Sun Is Down 
  is a great aspect—and it covers the theme in a 
  very different way. 
  Threat Aspects 
  Making aspects out of threats is a tricky exer-
  cise—aspects made out of threats are often, 
  frankly, kind of lousy aspects. Luckily, you won’t 
  need to worry about this if you’ve used the 
  threats to create great NPC adversaries ready 
  to cause trouble for the PCs (we’ll talk more 
  about this in Building Scenarios, page 340). And 
  remember that not every threat needs to be an 
  aspect—if you’re stumped, pass and move on. 
  Let’s explore ways to turn some of the exam-
  ples from earlier into things you can use in 
  your game. 
  With the threat “A new warlock is breaking 
  the Laws of Magic,” you might get aspects from 
  the motivation of that threat and how the threat 
  is starting to impact the city’s supernatural 
  community. Everyone Is a Suspect might 
  be a good aspect if the identity of the threat 
  is unknown. Or maybe there’s an aspect the 
  warlock seems to constantly benefit from, like A 
  Season of Raging Storms.
  Overarching threats like “The Red Court 
  is expanding their territory into this city” can 
  be turned into aspects by looking at how that 
  threat has started impacting the city or loca-
  tion. No One Crosses Madame Raquel 
  would be a good aspect for either a more polit-
  ical or more fear-themed story. If you’re looking 
  to play up the specific impact rather than the 
  cause, perhaps they’re expanding their terri-
  tory through the drug market, thus giving us 
  Overwhelming Drug Epidemic. As an 
  added bonus, a face suggests itself here—a Red 
  Court vampire, like this Madame Raquel, or 
  maybe a mortal middleman dealer.
  Then we get to the really weird threats, like 
  “The Summer and Winter Courts are using this 
  city in their machinations.” Hopefully, when you 
  come up with a threat like this, you have a sense 
  of how to use it. At minimum, the local super-
  natural community will likely help us out with 
  Supernatural Community on Edge and 
  Suspicious. Or an event has already happened 
  that’s heralded this threat, like a Summer-
  influenced heat wave that is more than the 
  mortal inhabitants can cope with (for Sparks 
  Fly During This Heat Wave). 
  But again, if a threat has a good face that will 
  provide plenty of opposition for the PCs, you 
  don’t also need to make it an aspect.
  Example: Baltimore
  So, our themes are “The tourist veneer masks 
  the blight,” and “This town doesn’t know what 
  it wants to be.” Those translate fairly well to 
  Decay and Corruption, and Conflicting 
  Identities. Davian argued that Conflicting 
  Identities wasn’t dark enough, but I convinced 
  him that it might help to have some flex-
  ibility built into it—perhaps it could become a 
  threat later.
  
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  city creation
  The threat, “We’re looking into the Abyss, it’s 
  looking back, and things are about to get inter-
  esting,” is flavorful but awfully long. We decided 
  that On The Brink conveys the same meaning 
  with possibly even a wider scope.
  For the various location themes and threats, 
  see Nevermore/Baltimore on page 389.
  Stat Your NPCs
  It’s also time to generate stat blocks for your 
  NPCs. You can do a full stat block for them 
  if you wish, or you can jot down some general 
  notes and use the quick character generation 
  rules from Character Creation (page 68). It’s not 
  vital that they’re all detailed out to the last point 
  of refresh, but at least have enough that when 
  the PCs meet them the GM won’t have to hold 
  up play for five minutes while she generates stats 
  for them. Take a look at Who’s Who (OW98) for 
  an example of this. Sometimes all that’s needed 
  is a couple of aspects and a few relevant skill 
  levels.
  Fill In Your City Sheets
  Once you have all of this done, you can fill out 
  the city’s sheets properly, making enough copies 
  for everyone who wants one.  (We’ve placed 
  examples of filled-out versions of each type of 
  sheet throughout this chapter, so you already 
  have an idea of what this looks like.)
  Wrapping It Up
  Your city might be finalized in the sense that 
  you’re about ready to play with it, but nothing 
  is carved in stone. A static city is a city where 
  nothing happens—the city, as well as its loca-
  tions and NPCs, will advance just like the 
  PCs do. 
  This is another one of those obvious things 
  that’s worth mentioning often anyway: don’t 
  be constrained by the city sheet you have right 
  now. It’s a guide to building a great story, not 
  a straightjacket. You should not feel for one 
  second like you need to live with a bad decision 
  you made during city creation. If something just 
  isn’t working, change it. If altering a detail will 
  create an awesome situation or plot hook, alter 
  it. However, remember that details the group 
  created collaboratively should be changed collab-
  oratively, too—once the players feel ownership 
  over some detail, the GM should be careful 
  about arbitrarily altering it.
  Speaking of the GM, it’s a very good idea for 
  her to keep any notes she came up with during 
  city creation, even the stuff that didn’t make it 
  onto the sheet. It’s very likely that there are some 
  real gems in there—hold onto these for use in 
  immediate tweaks, future plot arcs, and city 
  advancement.
  Once you have a city, a stable of NPCs and 
  locations to house them, and an intrepid band 
  of PCs, it’s time to start telling a story. We’ll 
  talk more about creating Dresdenverse stories 
  in Building Scenarios (page 340), which will crank 
  the storytelling potential of your shiny new city 
  up to eleven.
  Example: Baltimore
  The organization of the sample setting, 
  Nevermore/Baltimore (page 358), doesn’t bear 
  much resemblance to the process outlined here. 
  That’s intentional; what you get by following the 
  city creation process is good, meaty stuff, but it 
  doesn’t make for great reading. The information 
  we generated here has been reorganized to be 
  more readable and, we hope, easier for a GM to 
  get her head around. If you work better from a 
  coherent narrative rather than a stack of notes, 
  you might consider doing the same for your city.
  Non-City Games
  You might have a really neat idea for a game that 
  doesn’t revolve around a city—such as a ragtag 
  alliance of supernaturals who fix imbalances 
  in the Nevernever, a group of friends taking a 
  road-trip across America to help out people in 
  need on the Paranet, or perhaps a globetrotting 
  wizard strike force. In those cases, it might seem 
  like this method of city creation won’t help you, 
  but fear not! We have you covered.
  To make this chapter work for you, just 
  scale it up. Start by thinking about where your 
  game will take place—that’s your “city.” The 
  Nevernever is a vast space, but if your whole 
  game pretty much takes place there, then that’s 
  your starting point. The same thing goes for a 
  game centered on globetrotting (where your 
  “city” is the world) or something a bit more 
  regional (such as “along Interstate 80” for our 
  road-trip idea).
  Once you’ve decided where your game 
  will take place, briefly discuss it using the 
  “Vancouver Method.” Come up with three threats 
  and themes, just like you would with a city. 
  
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  city creation
  Since the game doesn’t entirely take place in the 
  PC’s backyards and favorite haunts, the themes 
  and threats should focus more strongly on the 
  PC group. A threat is either hunting the PCs or 
  is why the PCs are traveling. Themes focus on 
  issues like why the PCs continue this life of trav-
  eling around, when most people would prefer to 
  settle down.
   Once you have your themes and threats, look 
  over the various sections in “Getting a High-Level 
  View,” (page 33) replacing “the city” with your 
  setting concept. For some concepts, figuring 
  out things like who cares about this place and 
  who wants to rock the boat will make sense. 
  But there will likely be some sections that just 
  don’t apply to your concept. Talk it over with 
  the group; if everyone in the group feels like one 
  doesn’t work for your concept, skip that part and 
  move on. Try not to skip more than one or two 
  if you can help it, as those answers provide great 
  material for the GM. 
  Next come locations. Just as you scaled up 
  the idea of “city” to cover a large area, you’ll want 
  to scale the idea of “location” to something larger 
  than just a neighborhood or point of interest. 
  What constitutes a location will greatly depend 
  again on your concept. Talk about where you 
  want to set the action and intrigue in your 
  game. A game in the Nevernever could talk 
  about very general locations (“Winter’s domain,” 
  “Summer’s domain,” maybe some places of your 
  own creation, like “The Demonic Marches”) or 
  specific places (Arctis Tor comes to mind).
  A road-trip game could have all sorts of stops 
  on the way—big cities to small towns to barren 
  landmarks—and would probably benefit from 
  more locations than normal, since the PCs are 
  unlikely to revisit one after leaving. Map out 
  your trip and pick some places that look prom-
  ising. It’s fine to have the occasional long stretch 
  of empty road—many an adventure has started 
  because someone has run out of gas…
  The thing to keep in mind with these loca-
  tions is that, like with scaling up cities, your trou-
  bles and themes need to fit much more closely 
  to what the PCs are doing. Themes and threats 
  that don’t directly tie into the PCs still work in a 
  city-based game because the PCs live and work 
  around the effects of those themes and threats—
  they can’t avoid them forever. With a larger-
  scope game, the PCs can very easily just move on 
  to a new place. So, the threats and themes you 
  come up with for the locations should tie into 
  some reason why the group is there and why 
  they wouldn’t just pack up and leave. 
  Just remember The Golden Rule of City 
  Creation: if you get stumped, move on and let 
  the GM deal with it later. If coming up with 
  a theme, trouble or face for a location seems 
  particularly difficult, skip it. The scale of your 
  concept is much broader than a city, so don’t 
  work too hard in trying to fit all the ideas in. Just 
  run with what works.
  On-The-Fly 
  City Creation
  So, if all that above seems like a lot of work—
  and for some people, it will—we have another 
  way to go about this. However, it’s going to be a 
  bit more work during play for the GM, as she’ll 
  have to make up all sorts of stuff in the moment 
  that you would have otherwise come up with 
  beforehand. Still, it’s an option, and a pretty 
  useful one if you want to try playing this game 
  in one evening.
  First, come up with your city. Talk about it 
  for a few minutes, as we mention in “Choose Your 
  City” on page 26. You may also want to refer to 
  “The Vancouver Method” on page 28.
  Second, pick a single theme or threat for 
  the city. Just one—that’ll be the focus of the 
  first session of play. You’ll need to make that an 
  aspect, as mentioned in “Finalize Your City” on 
  page 46. If you’re having some difficulty here, we 
  have a few generic examples on the following 
  page to get you started.
  Third, stop! You’re done with making your 
  city, for now. Go and make characters, if you 
  haven’t already, and get to playing!
  Later, after you’re done playing and if you’re 
  going to continue this campaign in the future, 
  maybe you’ll want to sit down and do the rest of 
  city creation. If you don’t feel it’s necessary, don’t 
  bother! But we recommend it, because it’ll give 
  you more things to play with, more directions to 
  take the game, and more points where the player 
  characters (and thus the players) can feel a sense 
  of accomplishment and change in the world.
  Depending on the play environment, the 
  GM may come completely prepared with a city 
  and initial aspect, and just pitch that idea to the 
  group rather than built it collaboratively. That’s 
  fine, but we hope you’ll take time together as a 
  group to build the city later. 
  The Demonic 
  Marches?
  this idea I 
  had of a 
  demilitarized 
  zone between 
  Faerie and Hell. 
  It’s not like 
  I have a lot 
  to work with 
  here, even with 
  all you’ve told 
  me about the 
  Nevernever.
  What Harry 
  doesn’t know 
  about the 
  Nevernever 
  could fill dozens 
  of books.
  
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  city creation
  Sample Themes & Threats 
  for On-the-Fly Creation
  Themes
  Desperation Rules All: Just about 
  everyone you meet—the mayor at City Hall, 
  the junkie in the alley, the vampire in the 
  shadows—is against the wall and desperate. 
  Who knows what they’ll do?
  Lies, Deceit, and Betrayal: Everyone 
  has an agenda but nobody’s admitting it; good 
  luck finding anyone you can trust.
  Picking Up the Pieces: The city is recov-
  ering from a major supernatural conflict. The 
  usual way of doing things has been swept 
  aside, and the supernatural community is still 
  figuring out what happens next. This might 
  dovetail nicely with Power Vacuum, below.
  Dark Alleys but Darker Hearts: 
  While petty crime runs rampant, some of the 
  criminals are more than just criminals.
  The Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold 
  makes the rules. Everyone in this town has 
  a price, and nothing is more important than 
  money—except possibly the power it buys. 
  Threats
  The purpose of an aspect is to provide a 
  way for the PCs to interact with parts of 
  the setting. Faces—the characters bringing a 
  threat to the city—may work better than actu-
  ally turning a threat into an aspect, but you 
  can certainly have city aspects that encompass 
  threats, just like you have theme aspects. Here 
  are some examples that demonstrate both 
  approaches.
  Threat: Two powerful supernatural factions 
  control parts of the city, and they’re on the 
  brink of war against one another—one false 
  move will cause an explosion of epic propor-
  tions. An aspect representing this might be 
  This Place is a Powder Keg. Faces repre-
  senting this threat might be opposing vampire 
  lords, one White Court and the other Red 
  Court. Their high concepts are Lord of the 
  Red/White Court, their motivations are “I 
  will destroy my enemies no matter what the 
  cost!” Just use the stats for standard Red Court 
  and White Court vamps (What Goes Bump, 
  pages OW87 and OW89) and bump a couple 
  of the Inhuman powers up to Supernatural.
  Threat: A cruel sorcerer has held the city 
  in his thrall for decades, controlling politi-
  cians and business leaders through blackmail, 
  threats, and outright psychic domination. He’s 
  amassed incredible money and power over 
  the mortal and, to a large degree, the super-
  natural affairs of the city. However, people 
  are beginning to find out what’s been going 
  on, and they don’t like it. A revolt is brewing. 
  An aspect representing this might be A 
  Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Faces repre-
  senting this threat might include the sorcerer 
  himself, whose high concept is Power-Mad 
  Sorcerer and motivation is “This city is 
  mine, and if I can’t have it nobody will!” For 
  someone this powerful, just borrow the stats 
  of one of the Senior Council (see Ebenezar 
  McCoy, for example,  OW192). Another face 
  might be an Idealistic Wizard, whose 
  motivation is “People of the City, unite!” 
  and whose stats can be derived by using the 
  template for Wizard  on page 86 of Types & 
  Templates, with a couple of Refinements.
  Threat: Nobody’s in charge, and everyone 
  thinks they should be. If you want a specific 
  aspect, this is a Power Vacuum. Faces could 
  be leaders of any remaining power centers 
  (such as the Idealistic Wizard from 
  the above example, but now not so ideal-
  istic…), a Crime Lord (motivation: “Power 
  means  money”; stats: see John Marcone, 
  OW187), etc.
  Threat: After many years of drought, this 
  long, hot summer is the final straw—the city 
  faces a series of water shortages culminating 
  in a wave of fires, both accidental and not. 
  Malevolent supernatural forces line up to 
  take advantage of this City on Fire. Faces 
  could be a Corrupt City Fire Marshal 
  (motivation: “Cover Your Ass”; stats, just use 
  Police Detective in What Goes Bump, OW68, 
  and call it close enough), a mundane Heroic 
  Firefighter (motivation: “We gotta defend 
  those houses”; stats and info, use the First 
  Responder EMT in What Goes Bump, OW68), 
  and a summoned but uncontrolled Fire 
  Demon (motivation: “I rejoice in the ashes”; 
  stats: grab the stats for Kalshazzak, OW36, and 
  replace “spits acid” with “breathes fire”). So…
  who summoned that fire demon?
  Gee, Billy, 
  thanks for 
  using one 
  of my most 
  emotion ally
  painful 
  experiences 
  EVER as 
  fodder for 
  your artists 
  on the next 
  page. It 
  doesn’t help 
  that you’ve 
  got Elaine 
  looking so 
  helpless 
  there. 
  Justin had 
  really done 
  a number on 
  her mind.
  I’m trying to 
  stay true to 
  the source 
  material, 
  Harry, and ... 
  well, honestly, 
  you’re the 
  source 
  material. 
  Something 
  about your 
  life keeps 
  putting the 
  people you 
  care about 
  in jeopardy. 
  I can’t help 
  that!
  
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  - cHAPter Four -
  character 
  creation
  
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  character creation
  Character 
  Creation Is Play
  Many roleplaying games propose a simple idea: 
  you create characters, then you begin play. We 
  think it’s even simpler than that. We say, “As you 
  create the characters and the world they inhabit, 
  you have begun play.” The style of character 
  creation we present here does three things to 
  reinforce that.
  First, character creation tells part of the 
  characters’ stories, just like any other game 
  session does. Characters that really come alive 
  have histories of their own and with each 
  other—character creation establishes where 
  they’ve been, what they’ve done, and why they 
  continue to act together against the threats they 
  face. It’s like there’s a game that’s been going on 
  that you’re now stepping into—it’s just that the 
  most interesting parts haven’t happened yet.
  Second, it sets the stage for the next part of 
  the story. Each arc of a roleplaying game sets up 
  the next, so that they flow into one another in a 
  natural evolution of the story. Character creation 
  needs to set up the first story arc the same way 
  any other phase of play does.
  Third, character creation in The Dresden 
  Files RPG is highly collaborative. As with 
  city creation, character creation is best done as 
  a group activity. Doing all of this together will 
  build a stronger foundation for your characters 
  and your game. The character creation process 
  includes a number of built-in ways to estab-
  lish connections between the characters and 
  the setting. Combined with city creation, char-
  acter creation can take a full session to do—this 
  provides a good opportunity to lay out the basics 
  of the setting and allows everyone to learn about 
  it and about each others’ characters. This sort of 
  collaborative story building is, in a word, play.
  During character creation, you and the other 
  members of your group will talk about your 
  characters, make suggestions to each other, 
  discuss how to make your characters connect, 
  and even establish some of the campaign back-
  ground. You’ll want to keep good notes on this 
  process. You can use the character sheet and 
  phases worksheet in the back of this book or 
  downloadable at www.dresdenfilesrpg.com.
  You’ll start by determining your character’s 
  high concept (page 54) and trouble (page 55). 
  Then you’ll build your character’s back-story, a 
  process that takes place over five phases. Each 
  phase outlines events in your character’s life, 
  though not necessarily in chronological order. 
  The first phase sets up the character’s general 
  background, concept, and early history. The 
  second covers the events that pull the character 
  into the Dresdenverse and the setting of the 
  specific game your group is playing. The last 
  three phases delve into your character’s past 
  adventures—both his own and those of the 
  other players’ characters.
  Your 
  Character Idea
  Character creation starts by thinking about the 
  concept for your character. It could be modeled 
  after a character from a favorite novel or movie, 
  or it could be based around some specific thing 
  that you want to be able to do (like break boards 
  with your head, turn into a wolf, blow things up, 
  etc.). But what really drives a character concept 
  forward, and creates the kind of drama that 
  leads to riveting stories, is a combination of your 
  character’s high concept and trouble.
  Remember: when choosing your high 
  concept and trouble, it’s critical to determine 
  why your character does what he does; his 
  trouble should be a prime driver of that why. 
  PCs in The Dresden Files RPG are excep-
  tional. They could very easily find success in less 
  exciting situations than those that come their 
  way in play. You must figure out why your char-
  acter is going to keep getting involved in these 
  more dangerous things. If you don’t, the GM 
  is under no obligation to go out of her way to 
  make the game work for you—she’ll be too busy 
  with other players who made characters that 
  have a reason to participate.
  Because picking a template, high concept, and 
  trouble are all linked, they’re grouped together. 
  You’ll likely have more success coming up with 
  a compelling character idea if you think about 
  them as one big step rather than as separate 
  steps. Only after you have that (and a name, of 
  course!) can you move on to the Phases part of 
  character creation.
  That said, don’t worry too much—if during a 
  later stage your character idea evolves into some-
  thing new, that’s great! You can always go back 
  and tinker with any of these early decisions. (In 
  fact, you’ll see that happen in the example.) 
  Pack 
  mentality, 
  eh?
  Hey, if it 
  works. . . 
  
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  character creation
  Choose a Template
  First, you’ll need to choose a template from 
  Types & Templates (page 72). There, you’ll find 
  packages that tell you what things you’ll have to 
  do in the rest of these steps in order to build a 
  character that matches your concept.
  Most templates (in fact, all but the Pure 
  Mortal template) require a certain high 
  concept (page 54) and some supernatural powers 
  (page 158), as well as suggesting some skills to 
  take.  Thus, the initial template decision will 
  impact everything else down the line.
  The template is crucial to creating your char-
  acter; even with Quick Character Creation 
  (page 68), this step is necessary.
  Power Level
  Of course, you’ll want to know how the power 
  level affects your options regarding magic. 
  After all, this is a game about werewolves and 
  wizards—not boardroom meetings!
  Feet in the Water (6 refresh, 20 skill points, skill 
  cap at Great): At this level you are just getting 
  started with your supernatural life. Highly 
  customizable templates aren’t going to be able to 
  add much, so this is really the “enhanced mortal” 
  game—you can do stuff that even the best of 
  humanity cannot (but only barely). 
  Typical characters might include a Focused 
  Practitioner (page 76), a Lycanthrope (page 79), 
  a Minor Talent (page 80), a Red Court Infected 
  (page 80), a True Believer (page 82), a weak 
  Were-Form (page 82), or a White Court Virgin 
  (page 85). Some base templates are technically 
  affordable, but you’ll seem pretty weak until 
  you can afford some upgrades. These include 
  a Champion of God (page 73), a Changeling 
  (page 74), an Emissary of Power (page 75), or a 
  Faerie Court Knight (page 78).
  Up to Your Waist (7 refresh, 25 skill points, 
  skill cap at Great): This level really represents 
  “name level” for a lot of the templates—that 
  point at which you can definitively be respected 
  as being “that thing,” whatever it is. You might 
  not be all that experienced, but at least you start 
  to register on the supernatural sonar. 
  The Sorcerer  template (page 81) opens up as 
  an option, or you can customize the first level 
  options pretty well.
  The Steps of 
  Character Creation
  Here’s a quick overview of the steps you’ll go 
  through in order to create a character. 
  GM Preparation:
    Review the chapters most crucial to char-
  acter creation: Types & Templates, Aspects, 
  Skills, Mortal Stunts, and Supernatural 
  Powers.
    Set the power level (see this page) for the 
  campaign; this will indicate which sorts 
  of character concepts are valid and which 
  aren’t.
    Make sure each player has a copy of the 
  character sheet and the phases worksheet.
    Have some paper or index cards handy for 
  the Phases part of character creation.
  Creating Characters:
  1. Sketch out your Character Idea:
    Pick a template from Types & Templates 
  (page 72), making note of all of the things 
  you must do in order to build a character 
  of that type. Many templates will place 
  restrictions on what you can do in these 
  steps.
    Zero in on the character’s high concept 
  (page 54) by picking an aspect that sums up 
  the character in a phrase. Keep in mind 
  that many templates require that the high 
  concept indicate the template type.
    Come up with some sort of trouble 
  (page 55)—a recurring complication or issue 
  that makes life particularly interesting and 
  troublesome for your character. This is an 
  aspect as well. 
    Make up a name for your character 
  (page 58).
  2. Build your Character’s Background:
    Go through the first three phases (page 59), 
  picking one aspect for each phase.
    Work with the other players by partici-
  pating in their past adventures and having 
  them participate in yours to round out the 
  final two phases (page 61). You’ll pick an 
  aspect for each phase here, too.
  3. Finish up your Character:
    Assign your skills (page 65).
    Select stunts and supernatural powers 
  (page 66).
    Determine your final refresh level and 
  your stress and consequences (page 68).
  
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  54
  character creation
  Chest-Deep (8 refresh, 30 skill points, skill cap 
  at Superb): At this point, you’re playing with at 
  least minor-league power. You’ll have taken a 
  lot of the upgrades to many of the templates at 
  this stage. 
  Wizard (page 86) and White Court Vampire 
  (page 84) are now character options. 
  Submerged (10 refresh, 35 skill points, skill 
  cap at Superb): You are a major-leaguer; refined 
  customization and combination are options for 
  all templates—it becomes possible at this stage 
  to be a Champion of God with a Sword of the 
  Cross, or a Werewolf who can do earth evoca-
  tions, or a Red Court Infected who becomes 
  the Emissary of the Buddha as a way of taming 
  his impulse control. For the stronger templates, 
  this power level provides some tweaking; for 
  the weaker ones, it provides the chance to make 
  your character supernaturally one of a kind. 
  Example: Jim looks through Types & 
  Templates and decides that, since the GM is 
  planning a Submerged power level, he’ll pick 
  the Wizard template. That means he’ll need a 
  high concept that declares his character’s nature 
  as a wizard, and he’ll have to take the various 
  supernatural stunts listed.
  High Concept
  Once you’ve decided on the template, you prob-
  ably have a direction for your high concept 
  (unless you chose the Pure Mortal template, in 
  which case you’ll need to come up with a char-
  acter idea now). But there’s more to this step 
  than just saying “Oh, I’m a wizard.” (After all, 
  your template does that!) Here’s where you start 
  nailing down the core parts of your character 
  that make him a unique version of that template.
  In short, your high concept is a phrase that 
  sums up what your character is about—what 
  and who he is. It’s an aspect (page 98), one of 
  the  first and most important ones for your 
  character.
  Think of this aspect like your job, your role 
  in life, or your calling—it’s what you’re good at, 
  but it’s also a duty you have to deal with, and it’s 
  constantly filled with problems of its own. That 
  is to say, it comes with some good and some 
  bad. There are a few different directions you can 
  take this:
  You could take the idea of “like your 
  job” literally, as with Karrin Murphy’s high 
  concept: Special Investigations Lead 
  Detective.
  You could just go with the template’s 
  requirement without further embellishment, 
  relying on the rest of character creation to show 
  how you’re more than just a carbon copy of that 
  character type, as with Michael Carpenter’s 
  high concept: Knight of the Cross.
  You could throw on an adjective or 
  other descriptor to the template’s require-
  ment to further define your own take on the 
  idea, like Molly Carpenter’s high concept: 
  Wizard-In-Training.
  You could mash up the required high concept 
  from the chosen template with a role or profes-
  sion in society, as with Harry Dresden’s high 
  concept: Wizard Private Eye.
  You could combine the requirement from 
  the template with how your character 
  is connected to his family, especially if his 
  family is well-connected or well-known. This 
  is seen with Thomas Raith’s high concept: 
  Fallen Prince of the Raith Family 
  (since everyone in the Raith family is a White 
  Court Vampire, the high concept still covers the 
  requirement in an implied way).
  Current 
  Fate Points
  Base Refresh Level
     Adjusted Refresh
  FP From Last Session
     Skill Points Spent 
  Total Available
     Power Level 
  Skill Cap
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Total Refresh 
  Adjustment
  The Ladder
  Legendary +8
  Epic 
  +7
  Fantastic 
  +6
  Superb 
  +5
  Great 
  +4
  Good 
  +3
  Fair 
  +2
  Average 
  +1
  Mediocre 
  +0
  Poor 
  –1
  Terrible 
  –2
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  Extreme 
   
   
   
  -8 
   
  Replace Other
  SUBMERGED
  Superb (+5)
  35
  10
  Gee, reduce my entire life to a 
  few words, why don’t you?
  that’s how this game works!
  Could I play a GHOUL NINJA?
  uh . . . Yes!
  I love this game already. 
  No, wait, the opposite.
  
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  character creation
  These aren’t the only ways to play with your 
  high concept, but they’ll get you started. As long 
  as it gives you a good idea about how the core of 
  your character can be a boon and a hindrance, 
  you’re on your way to a satisfying, succinct high 
  concept for your character. But don’t stress out 
  over it—the worst thing you can do is over-
  complicate this by trying to make it into too 
  big of a deal. You’ll be coming up with six other 
  aspects over the course of character creation—
  you don’t have to get it all nailed in one.
  High concepts can have overlap among the 
  characters. As long as you have something to 
  distinguish how your character is different from 
  the others, you should be okay. For instance, 
  if two wizards exist in the same game, you 
  might have Harry’s high concept as Wizard 
  Private Eye while Carlos Ramirez’s would be 
  Hot-Shot Warden—they’re both wizards, 
  but now we’re clear on how they’re different. If 
  a high concept must be similar among all the 
  characters (such as if the GM pitches an idea for 
  an all-Warden campaign), it’s crucial that their 
  troubles differ. Otherwise, you may have charac-
  ters that feel too similar to each other.
  (If you’re having a problem here, read over 
  the next section on troubles. That part might 
  unlock some ideas for you.)
  Example: After picking the wizard template, 
  Jim has to work his character’s nature as a 
  wizard into the high concept. He likes the 
  idea of a down-on-his-luck detective type of 
  character, so he mashes it together to make 
  Wizard Private Eye.
  Trouble
  In addition to a high concept, every character 
  has some sort of trouble (which is also an 
  aspect) that’s a part of his life and his story. If 
  your high concept is what or who your character 
  is, your trouble is the answer to a simple ques-
  tion: what complicates your high concept?
  Trouble has many forms, though it can 
  generally be broken up into two types: internal 
  conflicts/personal struggles, and external prob-
  lems. Both threaten the character or are difficult 
  to contain. Whatever form the trouble takes, it 
  drives the character to take action, voluntarily 
  or not. A character that does not have some 
  sort of recurring issue is going to have a much 
  harder time finding motivation, and that sort 
  of character doesn’t tend to have many reasons 
  Intro to Choosing Aspects 
  A lot of character creation focuses on coming up 
  with aspects—some are called high concepts, 
  some are called troubles, but they basically all 
  work the same way. Aspects are one of the most 
  important parts of your character, since they 
  define who he is and they provide ways for you 
  to generate fate points and to spend those fate 
  points on bonuses. If you have time, you really 
  might want to read the whole chapter we have 
  dedicated to aspects before you go through the 
  process of character creation. 
  In case you’re pressed for time, here are some 
  guidelines for choosing aspects.
  Aspects which don’t help you tell a good story 
  (by giving you success when you need it and 
  by drawing you into danger and action when 
  the story needs it) aren’t doing their job. Those 
  aspects which push you into conflict—and help 
  you excel once you’re there—will be among your 
  best and most-used. 
  Aspects need to be both useful and 
  dangerous—allowing you to help shape the story 
  and generating lots of fate points—and they 
  should never be boring. The best aspect suggests 
  both ways to use it and ways it can complicate 
  your situation. Aspects that cannot be used 
  for either of those are likely to be dull indeed. 
  Bottom line: if you want to maximize the power 
  of your aspects, maximize their interest.
  When you’re told you need to come up with 
  an aspect, you might experience brain freeze. If 
  you feel stumped for decent ideas for aspects, 
  there’s a big section focusing on several methods 
  for coming up with good aspect ideas in Aspects 
  (page 108).
  If your character doesn’t have many connec-
  tions to the other characters, talk with the group 
  about aspects that might tie your character in 
  with theirs. This is the explicit purpose of Phases 
  Four and Five (page 61)—but that doesn’t mean 
  you can’t do it elsewhere as well.
  If you ultimately can’t break the block by any 
  means, don’t force it—leave it completely blank. 
  You can always come back and fill out that aspect 
  later, or let it develop during play—as with the 
  On-the-Fly Character Creation rules (page 69). 
  Ultimately, it’s much better to leave an aspect slot 
  blank than to pick one that isn’t inspiring and evoca-
  tive to play. If you’re picking aspects you’re not 
  invested in, they’ll end up being noticeable drags 
  on your fun.
  I do NOT 
  like 
  where this 
  running 
  example 
  is going. 
  Didn’t 
  you have 
  a whole 
  bunch of 
  char-
  acters 
  from the 
  Balti more 
  example 
  last 
  chapter?
  trust me, 
  you’ll laugh.
  I know I will.
  
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  character creation
  to go out and do the crazy things that make for 
  adventure. Without adventure, things would just 
  be boring!
  Most characters have several troubles they 
  have to deal with, often reflected by the rest of 
  their aspects (which you’ll select as you create 
  your character), but there is usually one core 
  trouble that shapes the character. This aspect will 
  probably be the one most thoroughly exercised 
  during play (at least in terms of compels—see 
  page 100).
  Trouble is a potent hook for the GM and 
  players to draw on for ideas. As you think about 
  your character, try to figure out what kinds of 
  problems you want your character to continually 
  deal with. Try to pick one that has no easy solu-
  tions—many may not have solutions at all!
  Also, troubles are one of the major ways that 
  characters get compelled, which is important for 
  getting fate points back. So it’s to your advantage 
  to play to your character’s troubles in the adven-
  ture as much as you possibly can. (Troubles 
  are like giant red flags to the GM saying “Hey, 
  pick me!”)
  To get a sense of the different forms that 
  troubles can take, consider some of the main 
  players in the Dresdenverse:
  Some external troubles are about the diffi-
  culties of being able to do your job or your 
  role in the first place—the sort that you have 
  to live with rather than beat up—like Karrin 
  Murphy’s Unbelieving Bureaucracy. 
  This has no easy solution, because it’s not some-
  thing she can just fix by kicking ass and taking 
  names.
  Some internal troubles are about your 
  darker side and how that interferes with 
  what you need to be in order to live up to 
  your high concept, like Harry Dresden’s The 
  Temptation of Power. This has no easy 
  solution, because it’s about an ongoing internal 
  and external struggle, and minor victories and 
  defeats abound.
  Some troubles are hard to peg down 
  between internal and external, like those 
  that involve loved ones. Often, they don’t 
  even seem like troubles at all, until they’re 
  threatened. Such is the case with Michael 
  Carpenter as a Family Man, or Thomas 
  Raith’s True Love in My Family’s Hands. 
  These troubles do not have easy solutions, since 
  neither character is going to walk away from 
  those they love in their time of need.
  Sometimes the trouble is something you 
  bring down upon yourself, which also crosses 
  the line between internal and external. Molly 
  Carpenter’s Doom of Damocles falls under 
  this—it’s internal because it reflects the tempta-
  tion of quick power, and it’s external because 
  the White Council watches her with unfor-
  giving scrutiny.
  Since your trouble is an aspect, it’s something 
  you should also be able to invoke, right? (What’s 
  “invoke”? See page 98.) Because we’ve been so 
  focused on how this complicates your character’s 
  life, it’s easy to miss how a trouble also helps your 
  character.
  In short, your experience with your trouble 
  makes you a stronger person in that regard. 
  Dealing with personal struggles leaves you 
  vulnerable to being tempted or cajoled, but 
  it can also give you a sense of inner strength, 
  because you know the sort of person you want 
  to be. External problems often cause trouble, but 
  I could do 
  with some 
  boring right 
  about now.
  You get it in your 
  love life, boss.
  If I sent 
  Christmas 
  cards, you 
  would not 
  get one.
  come to think of it, my trouble is 
  probably “Harry dresden Is my Friend.”
  Ha ha. Very funny.
  
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  character creation
  people do learn hard lessons from the troubles 
  they deal with. They especially learn how to 
  maneuver around many of the smaller issues 
  their troubles present.
  Here’s the “bright side” to the troubles we’ve 
  mentioned:
  Murphy’s Unbelieving Bureaucracy often 
  makes her life hard when her job comes into 
  contact with major supernatural entities, but 
  she can also use her experiences dealing with 
  her superiors and fellow cops to know who will 
  give her slack, who she can trust, and who will 
  believe her when she says something “crazy.”
  Harry’s The Temptation of Power aspect 
  represents the dark part of himself, but because 
  he’s used magic for foul purposes, he’s in a good 
  position to defend against forces wielding black 
  magic, to resist temptations, and even to use 
  some of the “greyer” magic he knows. (Same 
  deal with Molly’s Doom of Damocles, which 
  comes from a similar origin.)
  As a Family Man, Michael has to deal with 
  the allies of darkness threatening his family; 
  but his family is also a source of strength, and 
  anyone who sees him in action knows he will 
  fight tooth and nail for them. (The same can be 
  said for Thomas Raith’s True Love in My 
  Family’s Hands.)
  When you’re setting up a trouble, it should 
  be the sort of issue that’s not going to para-
  lyze the character completely. If the trouble is 
  constantly interfering with the character’s day-to-
  day life, he’s going to spend all his time dealing 
  with it rather than other matters at hand (like, 
  perhaps, the current adventure). There has to 
  be some wiggle room between “continually” and 
  “constantly.” You shouldn’t have to deal with 
  your inner conflict or external pressure at every 
  turn—unless that’s the core of what that partic-
  ular adventure is about. 
  Let’s again consider some of the main charac-
  ters who inhabit the Dresdenverse. 
  Murphy could avoid her trouble entirely if she 
  really wanted to. There’s plenty of normal crime 
  to deal with, and if the weird stuff slips between 
  the cracks, who cares? (Besides the victims, of 
  course. And therein lies the proverbial rub.)
  If Harry’s life was calm, it wouldn’t be too 
  hard to stay on the straight and narrow. He 
  intellectually knows that the power of dark 
  magic is not worth the price, but every now 
  and again, things get really bad and he has to 
  make a choice. Suddenly he has to decide what’s 
  worth more. 
  Similarly, Michael’s life is usually pretty clear-
  cut. He goes out, fights the good fight, his 
  family understands and supports this, he comes 
  home, and all is well. That’s fine until his voca-
  tion threatens his family—then the decision 
  becomes much murkier. For Thomas’ trouble, 
  the Raiths do treat Justine well—she’s a useful 
  agent, and she’s also a lever to use on Thomas. 
  (Think “overhanging threat” here.)
  While Molly is under the constant threat of 
  capital punishment, she has friends and family 
  (and a hell of an experienced teacher) that go 
  the extra mile to help her stay on the right path. 
  She is not alone in her struggle, but that doesn’t 
  mean she’s immune to it during times of crisis.
  Before you go any further, talk with your 
  GM about your character’s trouble. At this 
  point, make sure you’re both on the same page 
  in terms of what it means. Both of you may want 
  to look at how this aspect might be invoked 
  or compelled (see “Getting on the Same Page” 
  on page 112 in Aspects) as one way to make sure 
  you’re both seeing the same things—or to give 
  each other ideas. Plus, the GM will come away 
  from this conversation knowing what you want 
  out of your trouble, better equipped to make it 
  an important part of the game.
  Example: Jim has a phrase in mind for his 
  trouble, Doom of Damocles. He takes a 
  moment and talks with the GM to decide what 
  that means—the character’s on probation, as 
  someone who once used magic to kill. If he does 
  it again, he will be executed. The GM questions 
  this as a trouble, because it can really only be 
  used once and, when it is, it’s pretty final. Jim 
  offers an idea that some people are on the watch 
  for him and treat him like he’s some sort of 
  villainous scum who’s just going to give in to the 
  black again. Grinning, the GM starts making 
  up an NPC to fit this idea…
  Hey, I have 
  a GREAT 
  idea for a 
  new game! 
  It’s called 
  PUPPY 
  LURVE. 
  It’ll be 
  about the 
  trials and 
  tribulations 
  of some 
  teenagers/
  twenty-
  somethings 
  (who can 
  shapeshift 
  into wolves!) 
  and the ups 
  and downs of 
  their inter-
  personal 
  relationships. 
  Plus the 
  heartbreak 
  of acne.
  Awesome, I’ll 
  playtest it!
  Include photos 
  of hot werewolf 
  chicks, and I’ll 
  buy it!
  Sarcasm 
  is lost on 
  you two.
  William, in the examples above you’re saying Harry’s Trouble is The 
  TempTaTion of power — but in the last example on this page it’s The Doom 
  of Damocles...?
  Yeah — it’s not obvious at first, but his trouble aspect 
  will change over the course of character creation.
  
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  character creation
  Names
  If you haven’t already, it’s time to give your char-
  acter a name. You can name your character what-
  ever you want, but often character names have a 
  certain poetry to them. Think about other char-
  acters that are similar to the high concept you 
  have in mind, and how their names say a little 
  something about who they are.
  Example: Jim wants to make a wizard who 
  specializes in throwing around fire and is extra-
  hard on locations due to property damage. 
  These ideas make him think of Dresden in 
  World War II, when it got bombed to hell 
  and gone. The character’ll also be a private 
  eye, and he has recently seen the HBO movie 
  Cast a Deadly Spell, about a normal 
  private eye in a world of magic. One of the 
  characters in the movie has a distinctive way 
  of saying, “Haaaarry wants to see you.” The 
  name “Harry” gets stuck in Jim’s head, and so 
  he runs with it, combining it with the earlier 
  idea—and thus, Harry Dresden is born. 
  The Phases
  Important: Before moving on to this step, you 
  need to have figured out your template, high 
  concept, trouble, and name.
  Each phase is a section of your character’s 
  background—the key events in his past that 
  form who he is. There are five in total, and each 
  gives you an opportunity to define a new aspect 
  for your character. 
  The first two (“Where Did You Come 
  From?” and “What Shaped You?”) can be done 
  in either order. It’s the third (“What Was Your 
  First Story?”) that really supercharges this 
  process, defining the initial adventure your char-
  acter “starred” in and anchoring relationships 
  with the other characters in play. The last two 
  phases (“Whose Story Has Crossed Your Path?” 
  and “Who Else’s Path Have You Crossed?”) 
  represent your character’s participation in other 
  characters’ stories, showing how his overall story 
  collided with the events of their stories and got 
  him involved.
  Each phase will ask you to write down two 
  things on the phase worksheet:
  First, a summary of the general details of 
  what happened in that phase of your char-
  acter’s life, known as the phase’s summary. 
  A paragraph should suffice, but you can 
  write more if you’re inspired. Each phase will 
  suggest different ideas for the summary.
  Second, an aspect that reflects some part of 
  that phase. The aspect can cover the general 
  vibe from the summary, or it can focus on 
  some piece of it that still resonates with your 
  character in the present day. Some phases will 
  suggest specific directions for their aspects.
  If you’re stalled on developing an aspect 
  from the summary you’ve written, take a look 
  at Aspects (page 108). And as with aspects, if you 
  later come up with new ideas for a summary 
  that you’ve already written down, you can always 
  come back and change it. Nothing is ever written 
  in stone.
  Characters and Betrayal
  Some players might be interested in high 
  concepts or troubles that make their char-
  acters prone to acts of betrayal. If you want 
  to make your character’s story and decisions 
  about whether or not he’ll betray his friends, 
  there needs to be some reason why betrayal 
  is a valid option—and in a gaming group 
  where the characters to be betrayed are 
  played by your friends, that’s a hard one. If 
  betrayal is being wicked just for the sake of 
  being wicked, that’s not a compelling choice. 
  Much more interesting is something like 
  a trouble pulling you between two strong 
  loyalties—say, a conflict between loyalty to 
  the mundane mortal mafia and a responsi-
  bility to the edicts of the White Court.
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Phases Worksheet
  Phase Three
  Phase Five
  Phase Four
  Phase Two
  Phase one
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Character
  Player
  Template
  High Concept Aspect
  Musts
  Trouble Aspect
  Rising Conflict: What shaped you?
  The Story: What was your first adventure?
  Guest Star: Whose Path Have You Crossed?
  Guest Star Redux: Who Else’s Path Have You Crossed?
  Background: Where did you come from?
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  What nation, region, culture are you from? What were your family circum-
  stances like? What’s your relationship with your family? How were you 
  educated? What were your friends like? Did you get into trouble much? 
  If you’re supernatural, how early did you learn this? Were there problems?
  Who were the prominent people in your life at this point? Do you have 
  enemies? Close and fast friends? How did did your high concept and 
  trouble aspects shape you and events around you? What were the most 
  significant choices you made? What lessons did you learn in this time?
  Story Title
  Guest Starring . . .
  Story Title
  Whose Story Was This? Who else was in it?
  Story Title
  Whose Story Was This? Who else was in it?
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  WIZARD PRIVATE EYE
  THE DOOM OF DAMOCLES
  JIM B.
  HARRY DRESDEN
  WIZARD
  Evocation -3, Thaumaturgy -3, The Sight -1,  
  Soulgaze, Wizard’s Constitution
   So, this guy 
  named Jim 
  is playing 
  ME, huh? I 
  hope he gets 
  it right!
  Absolutely 
  WRONG. 
  It’s simple: 
  my dad’s last 
  name was 
  “Dresden” 
  and I’m named 
  after of one 
  of his heroes: 
  “Harry” 
  Houdini.
  By the 
  way, “Jim” 
  – ROLL 
  BETTER, 
  when I’m 
  hip-deep in 
  crap, ok? 
  Jerk.
  Well, if you want 
  to pretend that 
  Jim is real and 
  you’re a made-up 
  character…Works 
  for me.
  Shut up, Bob.
  I know people in the Mafia who 
  will buy this book. They would 
  resent the lack of capitalization.
  Except headstone inscriptions.
  
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  character creation
  Where Did You 
  Come From? 
  (Background)
  This phase covers the character’s youth; if your 
  character is older than 20 to 30 at the time the 
  game starts, this phase expands to cover much of 
  his young adulthood. In an abstract sense, this 
  first phase deals with the core concept for your 
  character as a “normal person” and is an ideal 
  launching pad for your character’s high concept 
  (page 54). Even a supernatural character has some 
  strong ties to the mortal idea of free will. This is 
  why your wizard isn’t just a wizard, since that 
  concept exists solely in the supernatural world. 
  He’s also a private detective, and that’s what 
  grounds him as a normal guy.
  Youth is a time of adventure and excitement, 
  as well as the time when we are most shaped 
  by our family and environment. This phase is a 
  chance to talk about your character’s family and 
  upbringing. 
  When writing the summary of this phase, 
  consider answers to the following questions:
    What nation is your character from? 
  What region? What culture?
    What were his family’s circumstances 
  like? (Rich? Poor? Scholarly? Isolated? 
  Pious? Political?) How big is the family? 
  (Small? Average? Large? Very large?) 
  What’s your character’s relationship with 
  his family? (Loving and close? Volatile? 
  Non-existent?)
    How was your character educated?
    What were your character’s friends like? 
  Did your character get into much trouble 
  in his youth?
    If your character is supernatural, how 
  early in his history did he learn this? Did 
  this cause problems?
  When coming up with this phase’s aspect, 
  consider one that’s tied either to the most 
  important or significant events of the phase or 
  to the character’s national, cultural, or familial 
  upbringing. 
  Example: Jim’s background for his character 
  has Harry growing up the son of a stage magi-
  cian. His mother died before he ever got to know 
  her, so young Harry was always traveling with 
  his father. Eventually, his father died as well, 
  and Harry found himself adopted by Justin 
  DuMorne, a wizard who recognized Harry’s 
  bloodline and potential. Since Wizard is 
  already covered in Harry’s high concept, Jim 
  thinks about what would ground Harry in the 
  mundane elements of his background. 
  Losing his parents seems to be the most 
  significant thing from this time, and it certainly 
  lays the groundwork for Harry’s emotional 
  troubles down the road. Toying with aspect 
  ideas such as Angry Orphan and Adopted 
  Prodigy, he settles on My Mother’s Silver 
  Pentacle, something tangible he can keep, 
  both a memento and a reminder of his isolation 
  and loss.
  What Shaped You? 
  (Rising Conflict)
  This phase represents your character’s “middle 
  history,” when his high concept most strongly 
  comes to the forefront. Think about his high 
  concept and a situation that would call it into 
  sharp relief, forcing him to make a choice or 
  otherwise take decisive action. 
  This is also the time when your character 
  starts coming into his own, beginning to realize 
  his true potential. This may be when super-
  natural power awakens within your character, 
  or simply when he is first faced with a difficult 
  choice between right and wrong and he steps up 
  to bat as a protagonist within the game’s larger 
  story.
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Phases Worksheet
  ase Two
  Phase one
  Character
  Player
  Template
  High Concept Aspect
  Musts
  Trouble Aspect
  Rising Conflict: What shaped you?
  Background: Where did you come from?
  Phase Aspect
  What nation, region, culture are you from? What were your family circum-
  stances like? What’s your relationship with your family? How were you 
  educated? What were your friends like? Did you get into trouble much? 
  If you’re supernatural, how early did you learn this? Were there problems?
  Who were the prominent people in your life at this point? Do you have 
  enemies? Close and fast friends? How did your high concept and trouble 
  aspects shape you and events around you? What were the most significant 
  choices you made? What lessons did you learn in this time?
  Events
  Events
  WIZARD PRIVATE EYE
  THE DOOM OF DAMOCLES
  MY MOTHER’S SILVER 
  PENTACLE
  Grew up son of stage magician (Malcolm). 
  Mother (Maggie) died in birth. Spent much 
  time on road w/dad. Then dad died (brain 
  aneurysm). Adopted by Justin DuMorne, a 
  wizard, to be trained in the arts of magic.
  JIM B.
  HARRY DRESDEN
  WIZARD
  Evocation -3, Thaumaturgy -3, The Sight -1,  
  Soulgaze, Wizard’s Constitution
   I’m not 
  laughing 
  yet, Billy.
  Think 
  HARD 
  about 
  changing 
  this “running 
  example” 
  character.
  
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  character creation
  Some questions to consider during this 
  period:
    Who were the prominent people in your 
  character’s life at this point? Does he 
  have enemies? Close and fast friends?
    How did your character’s high concept 
  and trouble aspects shape him and the 
  events around him? (Assuming your 
  character came into his high concept and 
  trouble by this point.)
    What were the most significant choices 
  your character made?
    What lessons did this time period teach 
  your character?
  Example: The most important person in 
  Harry’s life at this time is his first love, Elaine 
  Mallory, a fellow apprentice of DuMorne’s. 
  Harry eventually realizes that Justin 
  DuMorne is a bad guy, interested in pursuing 
  dark magic and human sacrifice. Justin 
  enthralls Elaine and forces her to put a binding 
  spell on Harry, intending to enthrall him as 
  well. 
  Harry barely escapes with a demon at his 
  heels and seeks the help of Leanansidhe, his 
  honest-to-god faerie godmother. He strikes a 
  bargain to gain enough power to face Justin, 
  and he returns, killing his former master. 
  Eventually he’s brought before the White 
  Council for violating the First Law, but his 
  execution is stayed when Ebenezar McCoy 
  offers to sponsor him, taking over his wizardly 
  training. But Harry remains under the Doom 
  of Damocles; one wrong step, and it’s off with 
  his head.
  There’s a lot of stuff going on here which is 
  good potential aspect material. Harry’s already 
  got the Doom of Damocles as his trouble, 
  and Jim doesn’t really want to change that, so 
  the GM asks him what else the events of the 
  phase might say about Harry as a character. 
  Jim decides that Harry has a really serious chiv-
  alrous streak to him, and that Justin’s enthrall-
  ment of Elaine was a huge emotional catalyst in 
  that situation. He chooses Chivalry Is Not 
  Dead, Dammit as his aspect.
  What Was Your 
  First Adventure? 
  (The Story)
  The third phase is your character’s first true 
  adventure—his first book, episode, case, movie, 
  whatever—starring him. You’ll need to come 
  up with a title for this adventure. (This can be 
  a lot of fun, but don’t burn too much time on 
  it.) A quick way to do it is to pick an arbitrary 
  rule to guide the selection of the title. The rule 
  could be as simple as “two words, each with 
  the same number of letters”—that gets you 
  Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, 
  and so on. Or it could be thematic, like poker or 
  Phase Three
  Phase Five
  Phase Four
  Phase Two
  Phase on
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Rising Conflict: What shaped you?
  The Story: What was your first adventure?
  Guest Star: Whose Path Have You Crossed?
  Guest Star Redux: Who Else’s Path Have You Crossed?
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  educated? What were your friends li
  If you’re supernatural, how early did you learn this? Were there problems?
  Who were the prominent people in your life at this point? Do you have 
  enemies? Close and fast friends? How did your high concept and trouble 
  aspects shape you and events around you? What were the most significant 
  choices you made? What lessons did you learn in this time?
  Story Title
  Guest Starring . . .
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  MY MOTHER’S SILVER 
  PENTACLE
  CHIVALRY IS NOT 
  DEAD, DAMMIT
  Grew up son of sta
  Mother (Maggie) died in birth. Spent much 
  time on road w/dad. Then dad died (brain 
  aneurysm). Adopted by Justin DuMorne, a 
  wizard, to be trained in the arts of magic.
  Met first love, Elaine Mallory, a fellow 
  apprentice of DuMorne’s. Eventually learned 
  that DuMorne was a bad dude. Justin enthralled 
  Elaine, I escaped, sought help of faerie godmother 
  (Leanansidhe), returned to kill Justin.  
  Placed under the Doom, adopted by Ebenezar.
  
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  character creation
  gambling terms for a character who’s all about 
  luck—Suicide King, Aces High, All In. 
  Check it out…William picked up on your 
  casefile-naming pattern, boss. Should we tell 
  him about how it’s your insurance against 
  head injuries?
  You just did.
  Oops!
  “Oops” my eldritch, 
  spellslinging ass.
  Then, you need to think up and write down 
  the basic details of this story for the phase’s 
  summary. The story doesn’t need to have a 
  lot of detail—in fact, a pair of sentences (see 
  below) works pretty well, because your fellow 
  players will add in their own details to this past 
  adventure in the next two phases (as you will to 
  theirs).
  If you find yourself stuck, look first to your 
  character’s trouble. Find a dilemma that has 
  a chance of throwing that idea into question 
  or focus again. That said, you needn’t directly 
  address the issue there—just provide an oppor-
  tunity for it to be a factor.
  You can also look to a tried and true author’s 
  trick—the “story skeleton” (or “story question”). 
  A story skeleton fits this format:
  When [something happens], [your protagonist] 
  [pursues a goal]. But will [your protagonist] 
  succeed when [antagonist provides opposition]?
  Simple as that, but powerful when put into 
  effect. Consider:
  When a series of grisly supernatural murders 
  tears through Chicago, wizard Harry Dresden 
  sets out to find the killer. But will Harry 
  succeed when he finds himself pitted against a 
  dark wizard, a Warden of the White Council, 
  a vicious gang war, and the Chicago Police 
  Department?
  Many good stories can begin with a simple 
  story question much like the one shown above. 
  It introduces a bunch of key ideas for Harry’s 
  story—the White Council, Warden Morgan’s 
  involvement and antagonism, Murphy and the 
  C.P.D., and Chicago as the backdrop. Great 
  stuff—and it does it in two sentences. 
  Example: Jim uses the story skeleton concept 
  (see above) as the basis of Harry’s third phase 
  and titles it Storm Front. Harry ends up 
  in trouble with all sorts of authorities—wizards 
  and cops at the least—over the course of the 
  story and ruffles a lot of feathers, insisting on 
  getting the job done himself, his way. He settles 
  on Not So Subtle, Still Quick to Anger 
  as his aspect, reflecting Harry’s particularly 
  bull-headed method of getting things done.
   After coming up with this idea, Jim 
  rethinks the Doom of Damocles trouble, 
  because defeating the dark sorcerer probably 
  convinces the White Council of his good inten-
  tions—or at least leaves them with testimony 
  suggesting he should be taken off probation. He 
  decides to change his trouble to something else, 
  and eventually settles on The Temptation 
  of Power as a new trouble, suggesting a 
  pattern where people offer him power he doesn’t 
  want, but often needs. 
  Whose Path Have 
  You Crossed? 
  (Guest Starring)
  In this phase, you tie the group together by 
  having each character contribute a minor, 
  supporting role in another character’s first 
  adventure. For instance, imagine the role that 
  Karrin Murphy, Michael Carpenter, or a pack of 
  amazing young werewolves might play in a novel 
  about Harry’s exploits.
  Phase Three
  Phase Five
  Phase Four
  Phase 
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  The Story: What was your first adventure?
  Guest Star: Whose Path Have You Crossed?
  Guest Star Redux: Who Else’s Path Have You Crossed?
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  trouble aspects shape you and events around you? What were the most 
  significant choices you made? What lessons did you learn in this time?
  Story Title
  Guest Starring . . .
  Story Title
  Whose Story Was This? Who else was in it?
  Story Title
  Whose Story Was This? Who else was in it?
  Events
  Events
  Events
  CHIVALRY IS NOT 
  DEAD, DAMMIT
  STORM  FRONT
  NOT SO SUBTLE, STILL 
  QUICK TO ANGER
  that DuMorne was a bad dude. Justin enthralled 
  Elaine, I escaped, sought help of faerie godmother 
  (Leanansidhe), returned to kill Justin.  
  Placed under the Doom, adopted by Ebenezar.
  When a series of grisly supernatural murders 
  tears through Chicago, wizard Harry Dresden sets 
  out to find the killer.  But will Harry succeed 
  when he finds himself pitted against a dark wizard, 
  a Warden of the White Council, a vicious gang 
  war, and the Chicago Police Department?
  I am unsure whether to be impressed 
  or offended at this description 
  of the STORM FRONT case. 
  Leaning toward “offended.”
  Hating on 
  this “Jim” 
  guy now. 
  the Alphas aren’t Amazing (50) —
  they’re more like Remarkable (30).
  my ego is wounded, but I’m 
  loving your gamer snark.
  
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  character creation
  You will now give your story (which is where 
  our index card suggestion comes in really handy) 
  to another player. You can pass your stories to 
  the left or right, or shuffle the stack and hand 
  them out randomly (trading with the person to 
  your right until you each have a title that isn’t 
  yours).
  However you decide to do it, every player 
  should now be holding someone else’s adven-
  ture. Your character has a supporting role in the 
  story you’re holding, which you get to come up 
  with right now. Briefly discuss the story with the 
  player whose adventure it is and add a sentence 
  or phrase to the summary or story skeleton to 
  reflect your character’s supporting role.
  Next, write the title of this story and your 
  character’s contribution down on your phase 
  worksheet. This is important, because your char-
  acter gets an aspect from the supporting role he 
  plays in the adventure. The person whose story 
  it is should also write down the contribution, if 
  there’s room on his sheet.
  Supporting roles come in three forms: they 
  complicate a situation, solve a situation, or both.
  Complicating a situation: Your character has 
  managed to make some part of the story you’re 
  guest starring in uncertain. Of course, since 
  that happened in the past, we know you got 
  out of it all right (or mostly all right, as indi-
  cated by the aspect you take). When describing 
  this, don’t worry about how the situation is 
  resolved—leave that for someone else, or leave 
  it open. Descriptions like “Trying to save a girl, 
  Michael starts a giant monster fight” or “Thomas 
  gets captured by the monster” are enough to get 
  some ideas flowing.
  Solving a situation: Your character somehow 
  solves a complication that the main character 
  in the story has to deal with, or your character 
  aides the main character in the central conflict. 
  When describing this, you don’t have to mention 
  how the situation was created, just how your 
  character takes care of it. Descriptions like 
  “Murphy travels with Harry to the Nevernever, 
  watching his back” or “Billy and the Alphas take 
  on some foes to buy time for Harry” are enough 
  to give us an idea of what happens.
  Complicating and solving: Here, your char-
  acter either solves one situation but creates 
  another, or creates a situation but later solves a 
  different one. Mash up the two ideas, using the 
  word “later” in between them, such as: “Murphy 
  comes to Harry, stumped by a mysterious case. 
  Later, she helps him fight off a beast in a depart-
  ment store.”
  Example: Jim ends up with the card for 
  Shannon’s character, Karrin Murphy. They 
  talk about what he might contribute to the 
  story, and Jim advocates for the direct route—
  Harry comes in with a display of power and 
  helps save the day. Shannon agrees.
  The card for Murphy’s “Restoration of 
  Faith” story says: “When a child is missing, 
  beat-cop Karrin Murphy goes looking for her. 
  But will she succeed when a troll comes into the 
  picture?” Jim adds, “Harry Dresden gets right 
  up in the troll’s face, trades some quips with it, 
  and unloads on it—using its own weapon to 
  smash it!”
  Jim decides to take Epic Wiseass for 
  Harry, as befits both the quips and the nature 
  of his achievements.
  Stories and Index Cards
  In phase three, you each came up with your 
  own story. In phases four and five, you’re 
  going to trade those stories around as other 
  players’ characters get involved. Figuring out 
  how your character fits into someone else’s 
  story can be hard to do if you’ve handed 
  your character phase worksheet to another 
  player, so we want to make a suggestion: use 
  index cards (or whatever scraps of paper 
  you have).
  During the third phase—when you’re 
  writing your story down on your work-
  sheet—take a card and write your charac-
  ter’s name, story title, and story skeleton 
  or summary on it. Then you’ll pass the 
  card around during the fourth and fifth 
  phases so people can contribute to your 
  story. That way, you’ll still have your char-
  acter worksheet when you’re writing your 
  contributions and aspects, and other people 
  will know what stories they’re supposed to 
  hook into.
  Hey, “Restoration” was 
  MY case. What gives?!
  
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  Who Else’s Path 
  Have You Crossed?
  (Guest Starring Redux)
  The fifth phase is identical to the fourth phase, 
  with the sole caveat that no character can 
  contribute to the same story twice. Thus, each 
  character should have a starring role in his own 
  story, as well as a supporting role in two others. 
  Example: “Welcome to the Jungle”—When 
  an ape called Moe stands accused of a murder 
  he did not commit, can Willamena Rogers 
  clear his name?—Mortal cop Karrin Murphy 
  is assigned to the case, and doesn’t buy the offi-
  cial story. She calls in a consultant she happens 
  to know who needs the money...—Harry 
  uncovers a plot cooked up by a trio of hecatean 
  hags, and manages to defeat them with the help 
  of Moe the Gorilla.
  Ah, OK, I think I see what 
  you’re doing here.
  reStorAtIoN oF FAItH
  When a child is missing, beat-cop Karrin murphy 
  goes looking for her. But will she succeed 
  when a troll comes into the picture?
  Harry Dresden gets right up in the troll’s 
  face, trades some quips with it, and unloads 
  on it—using its own weapon to smash it open!
  Fewer Than Three Players?
  Phase five assumes that you’ll have at least 
  three players. If you have only two, consider 
  the following ideas:
  Skip Phase Five and just make up 
  another aspect, either now or in play.
  Skip Phase Five and just play with six 
  aspects.
  Come up with a third, joint-story 
  together, and write about how you each 
  feature in that one.
  Have the GM also make a character. 
  The GM won’t actually play this character 
  alongside the PCs, though—it should 
  just be an NPC. Such an NPC can be a 
  great vehicle for kicking off a campaign—
  if a friend they’re tied to during character 
  creation mysteriously disappears or even 
  dies, that’s instant fuel for drama.
  If you only have one player, consider skip-
  ping phases four and five, leaving the aspects 
  blank to be filled in during play. In a sense, 
  the first few sessions will act as that charac-
  ter’s “guest starring” phases.
  WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
  When an ape named Moe stands accused 
  of a murder he did not commit, can 
  Willamena Rogers clear his name?
  mortal cop Karrin murphy is assigned to the case 
  and doesn’t buy the official story. She calls in a 
  consultant she happens to know who needs the money...
  Harry uncovers a plot cooked up by a trio 
  of hecatean hags, and manages to defeat 
  them with the help of Moe the Gorilla.
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Phases Worksheet
  Phase Three
  Phase Five
  Phase Four
  Phase Two
  Phase one
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Character
  Player
  Template
  High Concept Aspect
  Musts
  Trouble Aspect
  Rising Conflict: What shaped you?
  The Story: What was your first adventure?
  Guest Star: Whose Path Have You Crossed?
  Guest Star Redux: Who Else’s Path Have You Crossed?
  Background: Where did you come from?
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  What nation, region, culture are you from? What were your family circum-
  stances like? What’s your relationship with your family? How were you 
  educated? What were your friends like? Did you get into trouble much? 
  If you’re supernatural, how early did you learn this? Were there problems?
  Who were the prominent people in your life at this point? Do you have 
  enemies? Close and fast friends? How did your high concept and trouble 
  aspects shape you and events around you? What were the most significant 
  choices you made? What lessons did you learn in this time?
  Story Title
  Guest Starring . . .
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  WIZARD PRIVATE EYE
  THE TEMPTATION OF POWER
  MY MOTHER’S SILVER 
  PENTACLE
  CHIVALRY IS NOT 
  DEAD, DAMMIT
  STORM  FRONT
  KARRIN MURPHY 
  KARRIN MURPHY 
  WILL ROGERS, plus MURPH
  RESTORATION OF FAITH
  NOT SO SUBTLE, STILL 
  QUICK TO ANGER
  EPIC WISEASS
  PERPETUALLY BROKE
  WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
  Grew up son of stage magician (Malcolm). 
  Mother (Maggie) died in birth. Spent much 
  time on road w/dad. Then dad died (brain 
  aneurysm). Adopted by Justin DuMorne, a 
  wizard, to be trained in the arts of magic.
  Met first love, Elaine Mallory, a fellow 
  apprentice of DuMorne’s. Eventually learned 
  that DuMorne was a bad dude. Justin enthralled 
  Elaine, I escaped, sought help of faerie godmother 
  (Leanansidhe), returned to kill Justin.  
  Placed under the Doom, adopted by Ebenezar.
  JIM B.
  HARRY DRESDEN
  WIZARD
  Evocation -3, Thaumaturgy -3, The Sight -1,  
  Soulgaze, Wizard’s Constitution
  When a series of grisly supernatural murders 
  tears through Chicago, wizard Harry Dresden sets 
  out to find the killer.  But will Harry succeed 
  when he finds himself pitted against a dark wizard, 
  a Warden of the White Council, a vicious gang 
  war, and the Chicago Police Department?
  When a child is missing, beat-cop Karrin Murphy 
  goes looking for her. But will she succeed 
  when a troll comes into the picture?
  Harry Dresden gets right up in the troll’s 
  face, trades some quips with it, and unloads on 
  it—using its own weapon to smash it open!
  When an ape named Moe stands accused of a 
  murder he did not commit, can Willamena Rogers 
  clear his name? Murphy is assigned to the 
  case and calls in Harry.  Harry uncovers a 
  plot cooked up by a trio of hecatean hags, and 
  manages to defeat them with the help of Moe!
  
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  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Phases Worksheet
  Phase Three
  Phase Five
  Phase Four
  Phase Two
  Phase one
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Character
  Player
  Template
  High Concept Aspect
  Musts
  Trouble Aspect
  Rising Conflict: What shaped you?
  The Story: What was your first adventure?
  Guest Star: Whose Path Have You Crossed?
  Guest Star Redux: Who Else’s Path Have You Crossed?
  Background: Where did you come from?
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  What nation, region, culture are you from? What were your family circum-
  stances like? What’s your relationship with your family? How were you 
  educated? What were your friends like? Did you get into trouble much? 
  If you’re supernatural, how early did you learn this? Were there problems?
  Who were the prominent people in your life at this point? Do you have 
  enemies? Close and fast friends? How did your high concept and trouble 
  aspects shape you and events around you? What were the most significant 
  choices you made? What lessons did you learn in this time?
  Story Title
  Guest Starring . . .
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  WIZARD PRIVATE EYE
  THE TEMPTATION OF POWER
  MY MOTHER’S SILVER 
  PENTACLE
  CHIVALRY IS NOT 
  DEAD, DAMMIT
  STORM  FRONT
  KARRIN MURPHY 
  KARRIN MURPHY 
  WILL ROGERS, plus MURPH
  RESTORATION OF FAITH
  NOT SO SUBTLE, STILL 
  QUICK TO ANGER
  EPIC WISEASS
  PERPETUALLY BROKE
  WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
  Grew up son of stage magician (Malcolm). 
  Mother (Maggie) died in birth. Spent much 
  time on road w/dad. Then dad died (brain 
  aneurysm). Adopted by Justin DuMorne, a 
  wizard, to be trained in the arts of magic.
  Met first love, Elaine Mallory, a fellow 
  apprentice of DuMorne’s. Eventually learned 
  that DuMorne was a bad dude. Justin enthralled 
  Elaine, I escaped, sought help of faerie godmother 
  (Leanansidhe), returned to kill Justin.  
  Placed under the Doom, adopted by Ebenezar.
  JIM B.
  HARRY DRESDEN
  WIZARD
  Evocation -3, Thaumaturgy -3, The Sight -1,  
  Soulgaze, Wizard’s Constitution
  When a series of grisly supernatural murders 
  tears through Chicago, wizard Harry Dresden sets 
  out to find the killer.  But will Harry succeed 
  when he finds himself pitted against a dark wizard, 
  a Warden of the White Council, a vicious gang 
  war, and the Chicago Police Department?
  When a child is missing, beat-cop Karrin Murphy 
  goes looking for her. But will she succeed 
  when a troll comes into the picture?
  Harry Dresden gets right up in the troll’s 
  face, trades some quips with it, and unloads on 
  it—using its own weapon to smash it open!
  When an ape named Moe stands accused of a 
  murder he did not commit, can Willamena Rogers 
  clear his name? Murphy is assigned to the 
  case and calls in Harry.  Harry uncovers a 
  plot cooked up by a trio of hecatean hags, and 
  manages to defeat them with the help of Moe!
  
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  character creation
  Finish Up Your 
  Character
  With all this background and your aspects, you 
  have a pretty good idea of who your character is, 
  and you can write down your final set of aspects 
  on your character sheet. But it’ll take more 
  than ideas to kick supernatural butt! That’s 
  where your character’s skills, stunts, and powers 
  come in.
  Skills
  Once you have mapped out your character’s 
  phases and chosen aspects, it’s time to pick skills, 
  which are detailed in their own chapter (page 120). 
  Depending on the power level of your game (see 
  page 53), a character will get between 20 and 35 
  skill points to spend.
  Superb	
  5	points	(if	allowed)
  Great	
  4	points
  Good	
  3	points
  Fair	
  2	points
  Average	
  1	point
  Mediocre is the default for any skill you do 
  not buy. You may not buy any skills at a level 
  higher than the skill cap (page 53 again). In addi-
  tion, you cannot have more skills at any level than 
  you have one level down from that. So if you buy 
  a Fair skill for 2 points, you need to have at least 
  one Average skill as well for 1 point. 
  This cascades as you go further up: in order 
  to have one Superb skill, you’d also need to have 
  at least one Great, one Good, one Fair, and one 
  Average skill.
  Think of skill ranks as building blocks 
  stacked atop one another, each level representing 
  a rank. Each block needs one below it to support 
  it. That would look like this:
  Great
  Good
  Fair
  Average
  So, when you’re arranging your skills, be 
  careful that they all fit into this structure—you 
  can’t, for example, have this:
  Great
  Good
  Fair
  Average
  If you want the Average skill and the 
  Good skill, you need to have a skill at Fair 
  “between” them.
  You might want to browse the list of skills 
  (see page 120), write down the ones you’re most 
  interested in taking, then select one of the “pack-
  ages” from above that has enough total skills to 
  cover all of them. 
  This seems weird. People 
  aren’t so structured.
  It’s a game abstraction; roll with it.
  Skill Packages
  If the skill columns seem confusing to you, don’t worry—
  here are a few possible ways (far from all of them) to 
  spend your points at the 20, 25, 30, and 35 points levels:
  20 points could be…
    3 Good, 3 Fair, 5 Average (11 total skills)
    1 Great, 2 Good, 3 Fair, 4 Average (10 total skills)
    2 Great, 2 Good, 2 Fair, 2 Average (8 total skills)
    1 Superb, 1 Great, 1 Good, 2 Fair, 4 Average 
  (9 total skills) *
  25 points could be…
    4 Good, 4 Fair, 5 Average (13 total skills)
    1 Great, 2 Good, 4 Fair, 7 Average (14 total skills)
    2 Great, 2 Good, 3 Fair, 5 Average (12 total skills)
    1 Superb, 2 Great, 2 Good, 2 Fair, 2 Average 
  (9 total skills)  *
  30 points could be…
    5 Good, 5 Fair, 5 Average (15 total skills)
    2 Great, 3 Good, 4 Fair, 5 Average (14 total skills)
    3 Great, 3 Good, 3 Fair, 3 Average (12 total skills)
    2 Superb, 2 Great, 2 Good, 2 Fair, 2 Average 
  (10 total skills)
  35 points could be…
    5 Good, 6 Fair, 8 Average (19 total skills)
    3 Great, 3 Good, 3 Fair, 8 Average (17 total skills)
    1 Superb, 2 Great, 3 Good, 4 Fair, 5 Average. 
  (15 total skills)
    2 Superb, 2 Great, 2 Good, 3 Fair, 5 Average 
  (14 total skills)
  Billy, I’ve 
  put a * next 
  to some of 
  the packages 
  above which 
  have skill 
  points like a 
  lower power 
  level game, 
  but Superb 
  skill caps like 
  they’re from 
  a higher power 
  level game.
  they’re there 
  for groups who 
  want to raise 
  the game’s cap.  
  good catch!
  
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  66
  character creation
  Example: Given the power level, Jim has 35 
  points to spend. Since Jim picked a Wizard for 
  Harry’s type, he looks up the Important Skills 
  in the template (page 86): Conviction, Discipline, 
  Endurance, and Lore. Looking up how all 
  those skills work, he knows he wants Harry to 
  have at least one Superb skill. Since he wants 
  Harry to not just be a good wizard, but also a 
  decent private eye, he opts for more skills rather 
  than two Superbs (although it does take a few 
  minutes for him to make that decision).
  He picks Conviction as his top, or apex, 
  skill—Superb. Endurance will be handy, both 
  as a wizard and as someone who gets rough 
  and tumble, so he takes that as one of his Great 
  skills. Jim also picks up Intimidation at Great; 
  people will think twice before crossing Harry. 
  With his top three skills figured out, Jim 
  noodles over the rest for a little bit, swapping 
  around until he’s happy.
  Stunts and Powers
  Once you have your skills, choose stunts and 
  powers for your character. You’ll be spending 
  points off of your refresh level, so make sure you 
  know the base level for your game; it will vary 
  depending on what the GM decides (see page 53). 
  Also remember that, at the beginning of the 
  game and at every refresh, you’ll get fate points 
  up to your refresh level—refresh you spend now 
  means fate points you’ll have to earn later.
  Choosing Stunts
  Stunts allow you to use your skills in ways 
  that go beyond the typical skill rules; they’re 
  discussed in full in Mortal Stunts (page 146). You 
  should usually choose stunts that are associ-
  ated with your character’s supernatural powers 
  or most highly-ranked skills. That said, you can 
  take stunts tied to any skill—even ones left at 
  default—if you want (provided you meet any 
  other prerequisites).
  Each stunt you take reduces your charac-
  ter’s refresh level by one. In general, a character 
  with a non-supernatural high concept should 
  consider spending close to half of his refresh 
  allotment on  stunts. Non-supernatural char-
  acters who go beyond that point tend to have 
  made a lot of compromises and sacrifices to 
  be who they are—John Marcone (OW187) is an 
  example of such a character—and those who 
  fall short of that point may feel like they’re not 
  getting enough bang for their buck.
  Choosing Powers
  Supernatural powers are similar to stunts, but 
  far more potent. Because of that, some powers 
  cost more than one point off your refresh level. 
  You can read all about them in Supernatural 
  Powers (page 158).
  You must take all of the powers that are 
  mandatory for the character template you’re 
  using, so make sure you have those figured out 
  first. After that, you may only take powers that 
  fit your character template and the high concept 
  selected for your character—a vampire can 
  take powers that would give him supernatural 
  strength and speed, but a wizard cannot.
  Important: PCs may not reduce their 
  refresh rate below one. This is the line dividing 
  a mortal’s free will from a monster’s unnatural 
  compulsions. (Even non-supernatural charac-
  ters cannot cross this line, lest they become the 
  kind of “human monster” that haunts the worst 
  events of our history.)
  Example: This part is pretty straightfor-
  ward for Jim, as the Wizard type forces him 
  to spend a great deal of his 10 refresh right 
  away. The powers he must take—Evocation, 
  Thaumaturgy, the Sight, Soulgaze, and 
  Wizard’s Constitution—cost him seven to 
  start. With three points of refresh left, and 
  knowing that he cannot spend that last point 
  and still be a valid character, Jim thinks about 
  other stunts and powers.
  Given the background, the GM suggests 
  Lawbreaker (First), since Harry has killed with 
  magic. Jim takes that, bringing his cost to –8. 
  But Jim also wants to give Harry something 
  to better support the more mundane side of 
  being a private investigator, so he looks through 
  Mortal Stunts. He stops at the Investigation 
  stunt Listening (page 153). Since all mortal 
  stunts cost one refresh, taking that brings his 
  cost to –9—which means Jim is done picking 
  stunts and powers.
  
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  character creation
  Current 
  Fate Points
  Base Refresh Level
     Adjusted Refresh
  FP From Last Session
     Skill Points Spent 
  Total Available
     Power Level 
  Skill Cap
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Sheet
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Character
  Player
  Total Refresh 
  Adjustment
  The Ladder
  Legendary +8
  Epic 
  +7
  Fantastic 
  +6
  Superb 
  +5
  Great 
  +4
  Good 
  +3
  Fair 
  +2
  Average 
  +1
  Mediocre 
  +0
  Poor 
  –1
  Terrible 
  –2
  Aspects
  Skills
  Stunts & Powers
  Stress
  Consequences
  High Concept
  Trouble
  Other Aspects
  Superb (+5)
  # of Slots:
  Great (+4)
  # of Slots:
  Good (+3)
  # of Slots:
  Fair (+2)
  # of Slots:
  Average (+1)
  # of Slots:
   
  1 
  2 
  3 
  4 
  5 
  6 
  7 
  8
  Physical 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Endurance)
  Mental 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Conviction)
  Social 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Presence)
  Armor, Etc: 
  Cost Ability
  Type 
  P/m/S Stress Used? 
  Aspect
  Mild 
  ANY 
  -2 
  Moderate ANY 
  -4 
  Severe 
  ANY 
  -6 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  Extreme 
  ANY 
  -8 
   Replace Permanent
  SUBMERGED
  Superb (+5)
  35
  35
  10
  1
  WIZARD PRIVATE EYE
  HARRY DRESDEN
  JIM B.
  THE TEMPTATION OF POWER
  MY MOTHER’S SIlVER PENTAclE
  cHIVAlRY IS NOT DEAD, DAMMIT
  NOT SO SUBTlE,  
         STIll qUIck TO ANGER
  EPIc WISEASS
  PERPETUAllY BROkE
  conviction
  1
  2
  3
  4
  5
  -9
  Endurance, Intimidation
  Alertness, Discipline, lore
  Athletics, contacts, 
  Investigation, Rapport
  +1 Mild
  Mental
  -2
  Fists, Presence, Scholarship, 
  Stealth, Weapons
   -1 
  listening (Investigation) – +4 to 
  hear things, but Alertness drops 
  to Terrible while listening.
   -3 
  Evocation
   -3 
  Thaumaturgy
   -1 
  The Sight
   +0 
  Soulgaze
   +0 
  Wizard’s constitution
   -1 
  lawbreaker (First) — One strike?
  SPEcIAlIZATIONS
  Evocation 
  Elements (Fire, Air, Spirit) 
  Power (Fire +1)
  Thaumaturgy 
  control (Divination +1)
  FOcUS ITEMS
  Staff  
  (+1 Offense con, Spirit)
  Blasting Rod  
  (+1 Offense con, Fire)
  Shield Bracelet  
  (+1 Defense con, Spirit)
  ENcHANTED ITEMS
  2 slots open for potions, etc
  XXXXXXXXXX
  ########
  @@@@@@@@
  XXXXXXXXXX
  ########
  @@@@@@@@
  XXXXXXXXXX
  ########
  @@@@@@@@
  
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  68
  character creation
  Final Refresh Level, 
  Fate Points, Stress, 
  & Consequences
  With your stunts selected, determine your final 
  refresh level. Your starting refresh is determined 
  by the GM (between 6 and 10—see page 53) and 
  is reduced by each stunt or power taken. No PC 
  should be allowed to have a refresh level below 
  one (see above), so make sure the simple arith-
  metic works out!
  Once you have your final refresh level, take a 
  fate point for each point of final refresh.
  Example: Harry has a final refresh of 1—Jim 
  gets this by applying the –9 cost to the starting 
  Submerged power level of 10 refresh. He gets 
  one fate point—looks like he’ll be taking lots of 
  compels later!
  Finally, you should calculate your character’s 
  stress tracks and determine how many conse-
  quence slots they start with. All characters 
  have a physical, social, and mental stress track. 
  (Some characters also have a hunger stress 
  track; see Feeding Dependency on page 190.) By 
  default, each stress track has two boxes, but 
  this number is modified depending on your 
  skills. The Endurance skill (page 130) adds boxes 
  for physical stress, Presence (page 136) adds boxes 
  for social stress, and Conviction (page 124) adds 
  boxes for mental stress. (Discipline, page 127, is 
  used for the hunger stress track.) Consult the 
  individual skill descriptions to see how many 
  boxes you should add to each track.
  Each character also has one mild, moderate, 
  and severe consequence by default. You can take 
  these in response to any kind of attack (physical, 
  mental, or social)—that’s what “ANY” means 
  on the sheet. Superb skills, certain stunts, and 
  certain powers will give you additional conse-
  quence slots, but only for a specific kind of 
  attack (physical or mental or social).  If you have 
  a skill, power, or stunt that does this, make sure 
  you write down the type of consequence you 
  get on your sheet under the appropriate column 
  (see Harry’s sheet on the previous page for one 
  example).
  Example: After choosing skills, Harry has an 
  Endurance of Great, a Presence of Average, and 
  a Conviction of Superb. Looking at the skill 
  descriptions, this indicates he has a physical 
  stress track of four boxes, a social stress track 
  of three boxes, and a mental stress track of four 
  boxes. He does not have Feeding Dependency, 
  so he doesn’t need to calculate hunger stress. 
  The only additional consequence slot he gets is 
  for his Superb Conviction, giving him an extra 
  mild consequence against mental attacks.
  Conclusion
  At the end of the character creation exercise, 
  each player should now have a complete char-
  acter with:
    A summary of his early history.
    A summary of his rise to power and call 
  to action.
    His first story and two other past adven-
  tures he appeared in, establishing ties 
  to the characters of at least two other 
  players.
    Seven aspects (one for the high concept, 
  one for the trouble, and one for each of 
  the five phases).
    A number of skills (depending on the 
  number of skill points, ranging from 
  the upper single digits into the teens in 
  quantity).
    His mortal stunts and/or supernatural 
  powers.
    His base and final refresh level.
    Fate points based on his final refresh 
  level.
  Quick 
  Character 
  Creation
  Sometimes you don’t have time to do a full char-
  acter creation and you just want to get started. 
  In those situations, simply begin with a blank 
  character sheet, and then briskly run through 
  the highlights of the process. This method 
  means characters will be mostly defined through 
  the first few sessions of play.
  Important: If this is your first time playing 
  The Dresden Files RPG, we highly 
  recommend going through full character 
  creation. Yes, it’s longer, but it’s also built 
  to help you get used to things in the game. 
  (Plus, it’s a lot of fun to collaborate.)
  QuIcK 
  reFereNce
  medIocre: 
  2 boxes total
  AVerAge 
  or FAIr: 
  3 boxes total
  good or 
  greAt: 
  4 boxes total
  SuPerB+: 
  4 boxes total,  
  +1 mild con-
  sequence of 
  appropriate 
  type.
  Hey, Billy, 
  you say 
  stress “boxes” 
  here, but 
  everything 
  I've seen 
  shows circles 
  instead of 
  boxes.
  Boxes, circles, 
  dots—call 
  them whatever 
  you like. the 
  Fate system 
  we're basing 
  this on calls 
  them boxes, so 
  we're sticking 
  with that in 
  the text.
  
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  character creation
  Minimal 
  Preparation
  There are a few short steps to do at the very 
  beginning. Each player should choose the 
  following:
  A name and brief description of your char-
  acter: “Brief ” means a sentence or two. 
  A skill package: Choose one of the sample 
  skill point spending patterns from page 65 of this 
  chapter, based on the number of skill points the 
  GM has set for the game. Each available skill 
  slot in the package should be written down as 
  an empty slot on your character sheet to be filled 
  later.
  A character template: Choose one of the 
  sample packages from Types & Templates on 
  page 72. Write down and rate each important skill 
  and any required powers on the sheet. Be sure to 
  keep track of your refresh (page 20).
  The character’s apex skill: Select and write 
  down whatever skill the character has at his 
  highest skill level. (If you want a little more 
  detail than that, go with the character’s “top 
  three” skills.)
  High concept: You at least need to have your 
  character’s high concept aspect written down—
  everything else can wait.
  Refresh level: Your refresh level is based on the 
  power level the GM has chosen for the game 
  (page 53), modified by the cost of the powers 
  required by your chosen template. This will be 
  reduced further if you buy any more powers or 
  any stunts.
  Fate points: You get fate points equal to your 
  refresh level.
  That’s it. You’re free to fill in more details as you 
  see fit, but that’s all you need to start playing. 
  All the other decisions that you normally make 
  during character creation can be done during 
  play, revealing details about the character 
  through the emerging story.
  On-the-Fly 
  Character 
  Creation
  Once play begins using the above 
  method, whenever the GM calls for a 
  roll on a skill, you have three options:
  1. If you already have the skill on your 
  sheet, roll it normally.
  2. If you don’t have it on your sheet, you can 
  write it down in any empty slot and roll 
  it at the chosen level.
  3. You can roll it at Mediocre.
  This way, you end up filling out your charac-
  ter’s skill slots over the course of play. Similarly, 
  you may write in aspects, stunts, and powers at 
  the point where you would use them. 
  Every time a stunt or power is taken, your 
  character’s refresh rating drops by the appro-
  priate amount—as does his current supply 
  of fate points. So, if your character suddenly 
  reveals an ability that costs 3 refresh points, 
  the refresh rating on your sheet drops by 3 and 
  you must spend 3 fate points immediately. If 
  you don’t have enough fate points, you can still 
  buy the power, but on credit—spend the fate 
  points you have and you “owe” the GM the rest 
  (page 91). You won’t earn fate points when you’re 
  compelled until you’re all paid up. 
  
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  70
  character creation
  You’ll still need to come up with your char-
  acter’s trouble aspect and the other five aspects. 
  As with skills, if you need an aspect and still 
  have a slot open, you can create a new aspect 
  on the spot. The new aspect come into play 
  immediately—you can invoke it or the GM can 
  compel it. 
  Example: One of the players for the Baltimore 
  group, Fred, shows up late and ends up making 
  his character, Biff Abernathy, on the fly. To 
  keep things simple, he decides to play a Pure 
  Mortal. He’s got his concept: an old school chum 
  of Evan’s who comes from a wealthy family but 
  just likes to play sports and practice martial 
  arts—phrased as the high concept Trust Fund 
  Jock—and he’s pretty sure he wants his apex 
  skill to be Fists. He picks a skill package and 
  writes Fists down in the top slot. He also knows 
  he wants Fair Rapport (not Good or higher, 
  even though he has some slots there) to charm 
  the ladies, so he writes that down now in one of 
  the Good slots. Fred has a pretty good sense of 
  Biff’s background, so he picks two aspects that 
  reflect his history: he takes “Sorry, Mouse,” 
  Said Maya’s Steady Boyfriend as his 
  trouble—establishing his connection to another 
  PC—and Krav Maga (a brutal martial art 
  style, he explains). With that in mind, he’s ready 
  to go, with nine fate points in hand (seven for the 
  game’s power level, plus two for the Pure Mortal 
  bonus).
  In his first scene, Biff is “investigating” the 
  Montrose wine cellar when he hears a noise. 
  Suddenly, a wine rack is pushed over on him! 
  The GM calls for an Athletics roll to get out 
  of the way. Biff doesn’t have that yet, but Fred 
  decides that’s something he wants Biff to excel at, 
  so he writes it down in an empty Great (+4) 
  slot and rolls. The roll comes up terribly, so 
  Fred decides Biff needs an aspect. He decides on 
  Dumb Luck, reflecting how Lady Luck seems 
  to have her way with Biff, for better and for 
  worse. Fred describes how the rack just happens 
  to catch on a loose brick in the wall, stopping 
  mere inches before it hits him. He invokes the 
  new aspect to get a reroll which ends up being 
  far less embarrassing. Biff has dodged the rack 
  attack and now faces his opponent.
  Later, the GM describes a scene where he’s 
  caught dodging some representatives from a 
  research group looking for a private grant. Biff 
  comes up with an idea for his character and 
  suggests a new aspect the GM could immediately 
  compel: Mortimer Louis Abernathy III. 
  Fred explains that this aspect means he’s not 
  just some “anonymous” trust fund jock, but he’s 
  someone people know around the city because of 
  his family. And that complicates the situation 
  because it’s impossible for him to avoid public 
  attention, even when he might not want it. The 
  GM grins and agrees, giving Fred a fate point 
  for the compel.
  Some Tips to Help With 
  On-the-Fly Creation
  Some skills are used often enough for things 
  like combat and other conflict resolution that 
  you may end up feeling frustrated if you don’t 
  think to pick them up until it’s too late. Make 
  sure you fill in (or at least make decisions about) 
  Athletics, Endurance, and Alertness early on. A 
  fighting skill like Guns, Weapons, or Fists may 
  be important, too.
  Mortal stunts and supernatural powers are 
  a lot harder to choose on the fly than skills are. 
  It helps if the GM keeps the character’s high 
  concept in mind and suggests a stunt or power 
  when it might be useful—though, thanks to the 
  character templates (page 72), some of this initial 
  guesswork is already done. Be sure to keep track 
  of the refresh cost of stunts and powers.
  Stunts usually come out of the skills you’ve 
  rated near the top of your list. Locate the skill 
  in question in Mortal Stunts (page 146). Each skill 
  has a few sets of stunts under it that may be 
  conceptually linked and can help with quick 
  picking. Mortal stunts have a refresh cost of one.
  Supernatural powers come mainly from the 
  options in the template. When picking powers, 
  make sure to pay attention to the requirements 
  and, moreover, the refresh cost; you will need 
  to pay out a quantity of fate points equal to the 
  refresh cost in order to select that ability on 
  the fly. Even if you buy your power on credit 
  (page 91), your refresh rate cannot drop below  
  one. 
  Don’t worry about apparent contradictions, 
  such as situations where you pick a skill at a high 
  level after rolling it at Mediocre several times or 
  you choose a stunt or ability which would have 
  made an earlier scene play out differently. There 
  is no contradiction. The character was playing his 
  cards close to the vest (Thomas Raith, anyone?) 
  or was just “unlucky” and, like in much adven-
  ture fiction, his abilities only matter from the 
  point where they’re revealed.
  Oh, NOW we 
  get to the 
  Baltimore 
  example…
  THANKS.
  Thanks 
  for that.
  Really.
  
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  - cHAPter FIVe -
  types & 
  templates
  
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  72
  types & templates
  Let’s Get 
  Cooking
  While you and your GM can work together 
  to devise new and strange character types for 
  your own campaign if you wish, the actual 
  Dresdenverse has many already-established 
  peoples (mortal and semi-mortal) to draw from. 
  In game terms, we refer to these “pre-packaged” 
  character types as templates. Think of them as 
  recipes for cooking up your characters quickly 
  and easily.
  In this chapter, we’ll cover those templates 
  best suited for player characters—or at 
  least those that are less prone to turn into 
  zero-refresh-or-below monsters without free 
  will (a look through What Goes Bump, OW28, 
  might give you some other notions, if the GM 
  is amenable). We encourage you to look over 
  these options before settling on a character 
  concept for the game; be sure to make note of 
  the musts portion in particular, as each template 
  has requirements that must be fulfilled during 
  character creation.
  Some of these templates won’t be viable for 
  certain power level campaigns. For example, if 
  your GM sets your campaign’s starting refresh 
  level at 6, full-blown Sorcerers, Wizards, and 
  some other kinds of creatures are going to be 
  off limits due to their “must” refresh cost of 6 or 
  higher. A starting refresh level of 8 will accom-
  modate most of the options here, if barely. Be 
  sure to talk with your GM about the power level 
  for the game, especially if you’re interested in 
  playing a specific type of character
  It may be possible to combine some of these 
  templates, if you can afford each template’s 
  musts. However, it will be rare that those 
  costs work out. We haven’t seen a Wizard-
  Lycanthrope-Red-Court-Infected-Changeling-
  potamus in Harry’s casefiles, and you certainly 
  won’t see one as a playable character in this game. 
  For good reason—bring that much mashed-up 
  mojo to bear in one character and you’re on a 
  fast train to negative refreshville.
  Regardless, while the choices listed here 
  are hardly the only ones available in the 
  Dresdenverse, they represent what we think are 
  the best options for the would-be heroes of your 
  game world. Enjoy!
  Anatomy of a Template
  Look at a template as a recipe. It breaks 
  down as follows:
  Description. Every template starts with 
  this, telling you what you can make with it.
  Musts. The ingredients, if you will. These 
  are what you need to add to make a char-
  acter of the template’s type. You have to take 
  the powers, aspects, and whatnot that are 
  required here.
  Options. Think of these as alternate ways 
  to create a more deluxe version of that type 
  of character—would you like a powdered 
  doughnut or a jelly doughnut?—once you’ve 
  taken care of the musts.
  Important skills. These are skills you need 
  to keep in mind in order to be a particularly 
  effective character of the template’s type. In 
  other words, anyone could be a doughnut, 
  but these are what you need to be a good 
  doughnut. Each skill listed is affected by a 
  must, though many supernatural powers 
  affect a wide variety of skills beyond these.
  Minimum refresh cost. This tells you what 
  the musts total up to in terms of refresh 
  cost, so you can figure out if you can even 
  consider building a character based on the 
  template. If your current available refresh is 
  greater than this minimum, you can. If it’s 
  equal or less, it’s too rich for you (but GMs 
  should pay attention here, either in terms of 
  setting their campaign’s base refresh for PCs 
  or for designing NPCs).
  From the casefiles. A few names referenced 
  in the casefiles that are examples of the type.
  I want a 
  doughnut 
  with white 
  frosting and 
  sprinkles.
  William, why have you listed Pure Mortal first, 
  but alphabetized everything else?
  that’s intentional. I put the non-
  supernatural first, and the supernatural 
  next. there’s only one non-supernatural 
  template, so it didn’t make sense to me 
  to make that explicit with headers.
  You might want to make that reasoning more 
  obvious in the final draft.
  I’m still freaking out over this whole “ink 
  writing itself on the page” thing, you know.
  You’ll get used to it.
  
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  types & templates
  Pure Mortal
  Pure mortals are ordinary (or mundanely 
  extraordinary!) people who don’t have anything 
  supernatural going on—save perhaps for the 
  company they keep or the things they’ve seen. 
  Pure mortals can come from all walks of life—
  police, doctors, mobsters, actors, students, 
  and more. People like Karrin Murphy, Waldo 
  Butters, and John Marcone all qualify as pure 
  mortals, at least as we first meet them in Harry’s 
  casefiles. 
  Pure mortals need a reason to be involved in 
  supernatural goings-on despite a lack of super-
  natural mojo. This reason can be determined 
  in advance, or it can be supplied quickly during 
  play by dropping the character into the middle 
  of some nasty circumstance—which happens 
  surprisingly often in the Dresdenverse.
  While they don’t bring any supernatural 
  oomph to the table, pure mortals can still pack 
  quite a wallop in terms of their mundane abili-
  ties and “civilized world” influence, connections, 
  and resources. Karrin Murphy has the resources 
  of the Chicago P.D.’s Special Investigations 
  unit available to her, while Marcone has been 
  investing his blood money in expanding his 
  power base—both in mortal and supernatural 
  affairs.
  Musts: Pure mortals may not take any super-
  natural powers. In exchange for this restriction, 
  pure mortal characters get a +2 bonus to their 
  starting refresh. If this character ever takes a 
  supernatural power, this refresh bonus goes 
  away immediately (which may be mitigated by 
  dropping one or two mortal stunts).
  Options: Pure mortals may take as many mortal 
  stunts as they can afford without putting them at 
  or over the zero refresh cut-off. That said, some 
  NPC mortals do exactly that. (It doesn’t always 
  take supernatural power to corrupt someone 
  beyond the capacity for free will…)
  Important Skills: None! (Or, to put it another 
  way, any!) No supernatural powers means no 
  specific skills to focus on. The sky’s the limit.
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –0. Instead, increase 
  your starting refresh by 2 before taking any 
  mortal stunts.
  From the Casefiles: No better example exists 
  than Karrin Murphy (OW199), though the 
  men and women of Special Investigations 
  (OW202) all deserve mention, as do folks like 
  John  Marcone (OW187) and Waldo Butters 
  (OW118).
  Champion 
  of God
  Champions of God are among the rarest of 
  mortal humans, actively called to service by the 
  Almighty (in one of many possible guises) to 
  stand against the darkness and beat it back with 
  the strength and light of their faith. They are 
  very few in number, usually limited to the three 
  Knights of the Cross. (Luckily for this game, 
  there are quite a few more faithful, in the form 
  of True Believers, page 82.)
  In your campaign world there may be more 
  folks than just the Knights of the Cross who can 
  rightly be called Champions of God. Talk to the 
  GM about any ideas you have along these lines.
  Would that 
  there were 
  more Michael 
  Carpenters 
  in the world.
  
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  Musts: Champions of God must have a high 
  concept that is in line with their nature as a true 
  holy warrior—such an aspect (e.g., Knight 
  of the Cross) will be the source of many 
  opportunities for invocation, but it also carries 
  the weight of the responsibilities and codes of 
  behavior expected from such men and women of 
  faith. 
  Champions of God must have a fairly high 
  Conviction score (Good or higher recom-
  mended). In addition, Champions of God must 
  take the following supernatural powers:
    Bless This House [–1] (page 187)
    Guide My Hand [–1] (page 187)
    Holy Touch [–1] (page 188)
    Righteousness [–2] (page 188)
  Options: Knights of the Cross carry one of the 
  Swords of the Cross in addition to the above:
    Sword of the Cross [–3] (Item of Power 
  already baked in.) (page 168)
  Important Skills: Conviction (page 124), not to 
  mention some combat skills.
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –5
  From the Casefiles: Michael (OW125), Shiro 
  (OW242), Sanya (OW223).
  Changeling
  Changelings are half-human, half-faerie people 
  who—at least for the moment—are still living 
  life as mortals. But before each changeling, every 
  day, stands the Choice, a razor’s edge dividing 
  their mortal nature from their faerie nature. 
  When they call upon the abilities of their faerie 
  blood, they—bit by bit—push themselves closer 
  to becoming full faerie.
  In play, this means that any time a change-
  ling purchases new powers, it comes with a clear 
  alteration of the changeling’s body, moving him 
  towards a more fae appearance in line with that 
  of his faerie parent (like suddenly growing horns 
  or hooves and so on). Eventually, too much 
  transformation will lead to an inability to retain 
  a grip on mortality, and the character slips into 
  faerie (often becoming an NPC as his power 
  costs rise to exceed his refresh).
  Short of that final decision, the character has 
  the option—using his remaining free will—to 
  make the other Choice to become purely mortal. 
  Doing so means setting aside all of his faerie 
  abilities—in essence, swapping the changeling 
  template for the pure mortal one. When such a 
  Choice is made, it’s permanent—there’s no going 
  back.
  Musts: A changeling must have a high concept 
  indicating his or her faerie parentage (e.g., 
  Ogre-Blooded Changeling or Half-Pixie 
  Heritage). This aspect brings with it some of 
  the baggage of the fae—a vulnerability to cold 
  iron, supernaturally binding gift-exchanges and 
  other such pacts, etc.—making this ripe for 
  compels. Some compels, if accepted, might even 
  mandate that your character take on another of 
  his faerie abilities.
  Note, faerie vulnerabilities mean that—even 
  if your character takes some manner of para-
  normal toughness or healing abilities—those 
  abilities will not protect him against attacks 
  and implements that take advantage of those 
  vulnerabilities. 
  Options: During character creation, you and 
  your GM must work out a set of supernatural 
  powers that the character could inherit from 
  his faerie parent (usually by looking at the list 
  of musts and options for the appropriate faerie 
  template in What Goes Bump). If you wish for 
  that to be a mystery, your GM may determine 
  this list in secret and reveal it incrementally 
  Meryl’s 
  story was a 
  tragic one, 
  and she made 
  the ultimate 
  sacrifice in 
  order to 
  save her 
  friend. Even 
  though I only 
  got to spend 
  a few minutes 
  around her, 
  I’ll always 
  remember 
  her as one of 
  the bravest 
  women I’ve 
  known.
  
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  types & templates
  during play as your character draws closer to 
  making his Choice. 
  Regardless, any ability from this list may 
  be added to your character’s sheet at any time 
  during play, reducing current fate points and 
  refresh as indicated by the ability’s cost. There 
  are no “take-backs” once this is done, save for 
  the Choice to become fully mortal (see above). 
  If taking on another ability reduces your char-
  acter’s refresh to zero or otherwise fulfills all the 
  “musts” of a faerie of the appropriate type, the 
  changeling’s Choice is made and he becomes 
  a full faerie, never mortal again, and now fully 
  subject to the will of the Faerie Courts.
  Abilities a changeling might take include, but 
  are not necessarily limited to:
    Inhuman, Supernatural, or Mythic 
  Speed [varies] (page 178), Strength [varies] 
  (page 183), Toughness [varies] (page 185), 
  or Recovery [varies] (page 185)
    Physical Immunity [varies] (page 186)
    Glamours [–2] (page 166)
    Seelie Magic [–4] (page 166) or 
  Unseelie Magic [–4] (page 167)
    Physical traits such as Wings [–1] 
  (page 165), Claws [–1] (page 162), 
  Diminutive Size [–1] (page 163), or 
  Hulking Size [–2] (page 164)
  Important Skills: None from musts. Varies 
  depending on options taken. 
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –0. The total cost 
  for changelings depends entirely on how deeply 
  your character has made the Choice at the start 
  of play, and this will change over the course of 
  the game—that’s the point.
  From the Casefiles: The changelings in the 
  Summer Knight casefile, though all of them 
  have now either disappeared, died, or made 
  their Choice: Ace (OW99), Fix (OW145), Lily 
  (OW173), and Meryl (OW194).
  Emissary 
  of Power
  Emissaries are mortals who’ve been saddled with 
  a burden of great power—and great respon-
  sibility—by one of the big dogs in the super-
  natural community: vast powers from Faerie or 
  the outer reaches of the Nevernever, one of the 
  true dragons, or something stranger. Emissaries 
  of Power are often the bearers of items of great 
  potency, able to tap into the power of their 
  patron and bring it to bear on their—and their 
  patron’s—behalf. Such champions are usually 
  more victim than anything, though—powers 
  such as theirs come at the price of dark bargains, 
  be it a lifetime of thankless servitude and sacri-
  fice, their eternal soul, or other such “petty” 
  things.
  Knights of the Faerie Courts are an example 
  of this, as are—by certain lights—Champions 
  of God such as the Knights of the Cross. (Both 
  have their own templates found elsewhere in 
  this chapter.) This template, then, is for the 
  outliers, the cases that aren’t covered by the 
  more common, more easily identified Emissary 
  templates. Perhaps there was once an Autumn 
  Court of Faerie that got crushed by Winter and 
  Summer—and some hapless mortal is its cham-
  pion. Perhaps the dragon Ferrovax has need of 
  a functionary that can handle all of that insig-
  nificant mortal nonsense on his behalf. Perhaps 
  something else is afoot.
  If you are looking to play something supernat-
  ural, but unsure what, this template offers plenty 
  of build-your-own options. GMs are, however, 
  encouraged to make the demands of the emis-
  sary’s patron a regular (if not constant) pain in 
  the ass.
  Musts: An Emissary of Power must have a high 
  concept that speaks to the bargain or pact they 
  have made with a patron (e.g., Last Champion 
  Scions
  Not all scions are changelings and therefore 
  won’t fit the Changeling template. Certain 
  kinds of scions—half human, half some-
  thing else—might fall under the Emissary 
  of Power model, as far as templates go. The 
  problem with offering a solid scion template 
  is one of variety. Since there are so many 
  possibilities out there, it doesn’t make a lot 
  of sense to offer a formal template for the 
  type (the Nevernever really wants to breed 
  with us, it seems). So scions are a classic 
  “grow your own” kind of character.
  To get an idea of what you might do to 
  grow your own, start with the Emissary 
  of Power, but also look at the Changeling 
  template—since changelings are the most 
  common type of scion out there.
  Technically, Mouse is a scion.
  Billy, do 
  me a favor 
  and stop 
  inventing 
  problems 
  I don’t 
  already 
  have.
  Actually, there’s 
  some merit—
  That goes 
  DOUBLE 
  for you, 
  Bob!
  
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  types & templates
  of Autumn or Ferrovax’s Toadie). This 
  aspect brings with it all of the strictures and 
  responsibilities the patron places on your char-
  acter—this can sometimes be a moving target, 
  since all the implications of “the fine print” in 
  the agreement may not be obvious at first. It 
  may also mean that the patron can occasionally 
  exercise near-total power over the PC (think 
  of Harry’s predicament when Mab decides to 
  force him to do something—like stab himself 
  in the hand). You and your GM should discuss 
  the terms of this agreement, to the extent that 
  they’re known by your character.
  In addition, the emissary must take Marked 
  by Power [–1] (page 169), though exceptions may 
  be made if it there’s a concept-based reason to 
  do so.
  Options: No two emissaries are alike. Many of 
  the abilities in Supernatural Powers (page 158) are 
  negotiably available, assuming you can afford the 
  refresh cost and match the theme and nature of 
  the emissary’s supernatural patron (if the patron 
  is in some way a mystery to the character, the 
  powers taken may offer a hint). Often some of 
  these powers are essentially contained within 
  an Item of Power (page 167). You might also want 
  to take a look at Sponsored Magic as an option 
  (page 183). If you pick up some kind of spellcasting 
  ability, make sure to investigate “Building a 
  Practitioner” on page 77. 
  Important Skills: Varies, depending on super-
  natural powers and options taken.
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –1
  From the Casefiles: It’s hard to pin down a 
  specific example that isn’t represented by another 
  template-type here (the Champions of God and 
  Knights of the Faerie Courts are specific types). 
  But the fact remains that these types of indi-
  viduals must exist in the supernatural landscape.
  Focused 
  Practitioner
  Focused practitioners are the minor-league 
  of the spell-slinging set. They have one rather 
  narrowly defined aptitude at spellcraft which 
  they practice to the exclusion of all else—usually 
  because they just don’t “get” things outside of 
  their focus. Sometimes this is due to the practi-
  tioner having an intuitive understanding of what 
  they do rather than a trained understanding; 
  sometimes it’s simply the result of a mystical 
  blind spot. Depending on the causes of the 
  focus, some focused practitioners might be able 
  to train into broader spellcasting capabilities, 
  but few do.
  right. So it’s that, and the 
  fact that “prefixmancer” 
  doesn’t exactly roll 
  off the tongue.
  Thanks 
  for that 
  reminder.
  Billy, wouldn’t Vittorio 
  Malvora qualify as an 
  Emissary of Power in the 
  WHITE NIGHT casefile?
  Probably, but he would already 
  have the White court Vampire 
  template, so I thought that 
  might be confusing as an example.
  Real life doesn’t always 
  fit into neat little boxes.
  Don’t make these guys sound 
  like they’re featherweights, 
  Billy. They’re specialists 
  rather than generalists, and 
  their power levels can be 
  all over the map. Mortimer 
  Lindquist, an ectomancer I know, 
  is INCREDIBLY capable 
  at what he does. Some of his 
  tricks are stuff I’m not sure I 
  could easily figure out myself. 
  However, I don’t think I’ve 
  ever heard folks like Mort 
  called by this term.
  Point. If there’s 
  one thing the White 
  Council isn’t a wizard 
  at (heh), it’s P.R.
  Yeah, but this is a 
  judgment-neutral way to 
  do it. most other broad 
  terms I’ve heard—“hedge 
  wizard”, “kitchen witch”, 
  etc.—can come off as 
  insulting or dismissive.
  
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  Each focused practitioner is different, with 
  spellcasting abilities centered on a single theme. 
  Kinetomancers have access to spell abilities 
  that focus on the use of force (and, untrained, 
  can lead to reports of poltergeists due to their 
  subconscious mind flinging power around acci-
  dentally). Pyromancers are the fiery version of 
  the same. Ectomancers can summon and speak 
  with spirits and ghosts, sometimes getting those 
  spirits to do their bidding. Alchemists brew 
  potions subtle and strange. Open up your handy 
  Latin dictionary and peruse the prefixes—there 
  are tons of –mancers out there, and if you can 
  come up with something by playing “prefix 
  mash-up,” it’s likely that one actually exists some-
  where. (Apparently there’s a caffeinomancer who 
  runs a coffee shop in Baltimore.)
  Of course, focused practitioners are subject 
  to the White Council’s enforcement of the 
  Laws of Magic, like any other spellcaster (see 
  page 232). Their narrow focus doesn’t necessarily 
  prevent them from breaking Laws like violating 
  someone’s mind or swimming against the 
  currents of time. 
  (Players should beware the appeal of some-
  thing like an enchantress or chronomancer since 
  it can quickly lead to the Wardens deciding your 
  neck has an appointment with a sword.)
  For the record, I 
  can pronounce 
  “prefixmancer” 
  just dandy.
  You don’t 
  have a 
  tongue for 
  it to roll 
  off of.
  Ah,  a tongue. A 
  skull can dream!
   If chrono-
  mancers 
  exist, I have 
  not heard 
  of them.
  You wouldn’t 
  have.
  Building a Practitioner
  The ingredients for most practitioners are very 
  similar, but the results can be quite varied. 
  Here’s a quick guide.
  Powers
  Wizards and sorcerers tend to have the full 
  boat of true magic: Evocation, Thaumaturgy, 
  the Sight—and in some cases Wizard’s 
  Constitution and Soulgaze. Wizards often go 
  beyond this and pick up a few Refinements.
  Focused practitioners hone in on one 
  particular application, and thus will often end 
  up with one or both of Channeling and Ritual 
  instead. It’s a cost break and results in much 
  narrower spellcraft, but they can still be quite 
  the contenders. 
  When you’re building a spellcaster, the 
  powers are often similar regardless of the type 
  of caster—the configuration of them is where 
  the variety comes in. Your main focus will be 
  on configuring these powers to give your caster 
  his specific identity. Along with these powers 
  comes the opportunity to choose various 
  specializations and to create items and rotes. 
  Skills
  How an arcane practitioner’s skills are set is a 
  big part of the caster’s flavor and identity as 
  well. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to 
  build a caster that is very highly rated in all 
  three of the “spellcaster trinity”: Conviction, 
  Discipline, and Lore (though you could choose 
  to build a spellcaster that’s merely medium-
  rated in all three—a true generalist). 
  The “imbalanced” composition of these 
  three skills, combined with the configuration 
  of arcane powers, is what makes your wizard, 
  sorcerer, or focused practitioner truly unique. 
  Figure out your caster’s approach to magic, 
  and you should be able to use these guidelines 
  as a quick indicator of how to rank his three 
  core skills. Here’s how a high or low rating 
  (relative to the other skills at least) will affect 
  the kind of caster the character is:
  High Conviction: Your caster brings a lot of 
  power to the party. Regardless of his ability 
  to control it, he can really pour out a ton of 
  punishment via evocations. 
  Low Conviction: Your caster is lower on the 
  power scale, usually meaning he’s more about 
  finesse and subtlety than standing firm and 
  fighting. 
  High Discipline: Your caster has tons of self-
  control, which he can use to master the arcane 
  energies he brings to bear and steer effects 
  where he wants them to go.
  Low Discipline: Your caster has less self-
  control. His spells tend to set the environ-
  ment on fire or blow it apart, and he has to 
  be careful that his spells don’t whip back into 
  his face.
  High Lore: Your caster has highly tuned 
  mystical senses. Through his studies, he knows 
  a lot of info about the supernatural world, and 
  can bring that to bear when it comes time to 
  compose a good ritual.
  Low Lore: Your caster is more distracted by 
  the mundane, leaving him with blunted senses. 
  He tends to make up for shortcomings in 
  his lore with long research sessions or other 
  sources of help—such as Harry’s friend Bob.
  
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  Musts: A focused practitioner must have a 
  high concept that names or implies his spell-
  casting abilities and focus (e.g., Haunted 
  Ectomancer or Kinetomancer for Hire). 
  Additionally, a focused practitioner must take 
  one or both of:
    Channeling [–2] (page 181)
    Ritual [–2] (page 181)
  The appropriate focus for each ability must 
  be defined at the time the ability is taken. (Please 
  see the power descriptions for more details.) 
  Players of spellcasting characters should take 
  some time to work out their most often used, 
  most practiced spells before play—see page 257 for 
  the particulars.
  Options: Focused practitioners may take 
  the Sight [–1], but if they do, its use will be 
  colored, narrowed, and limited by the focus of 
  their abilities. For example, an ectomancer with 
  the Sight might see the world in terms of its 
  ghostly spiritual presences and may find himself 
  seeing dead people all the time; a pyromancer 
  might perceive supernatural power and pres-
  ences in the form of flames of various colors and 
  intensity. See “Building a Practitioner” on page 77 
  for more information.
  Important Skills: Conviction (page  124), 
  Discipline (page 127), Lore (page 134).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –2
  From the Casefiles: Mortimer Lindquist 
  (OW174) has gotten the most coverage. 
  Knight of a 
  Faerie Court
  As far as we know, both Courts of Faerie—
  Winter and Summer—each have only one 
  Knight, a mortal granted some measure of the 
  power of his or her patron Court and charged 
  with making certain the Court’s interests are 
  well-represented in the world of mortals and 
  beyond. For the Winter Court, the position 
  doesn’t tend to be a long-term one. Employment 
  is terminated only in the case of death. 
  Those chosen to be the Winter Knight and 
  the Summer Knight are no lightweights, usually 
  catching the attention of the Queens of the 
  Courts because of their already well-developed 
  supernatural capacity. But each is bound, body 
  and soul, by a deep compulsion to adhere to the 
  word of the Mother, Queen, and Lady of his 
  Court. 
  Still, the reason these Knights exist at all 
  is that they alone possess something unique 
  among the members of the Faerie Courts: they 
  have mortal free will—in this, they are able to 
  take action that is flatly impossible for faeriekind, 
  for the fae cannot act in any way other than 
  in accordance with their natures. As such, the 
  Knights are regarded with much more impor-
  tance than might seem apropos to their (admit-
  tedly still potent) supernatural powers.
  Musts: A Knight of the Faerie Court must have 
  a high concept that names the title and mantle 
  he has assumed (e.g., Winter Knight or 
  Summer Knight). No other character in the 
  game may hold this same title at the same time as 
  this character. The aspect brings with it all of 
  the strictures and responsibilities the Mother, 
  Queen, and Lady of that Court might place 
  upon your character. It may also mean that 
  the queens can occasionally exercise near-total 
  power over your character—but them’s the 
  breaks. It’s highly likely they know your charac-
  ter’s True Name.
  In addition, your character must take the 
  following supernatural powers:
    Seelie Magic [–4] (page 166) or 
  Unseelie Magic [–4] (page 167)
    Marked by Power [–1] (page 169)
  Options: Other options abound, such as mixing 
  in elements of a Focused Practitioner, Sorcerer, 
  or Wizard (take note of the potential discount 
  on Seelie or Unseelie Magic in such a case). Your 
  character may carry an Item of Power and may 
  be able to draw upon the power of the Courts to 
  exercise Inhuman Strength, Speed, Toughness, 
  or Recovery. Glamours may also be possible. You 
  should discuss any such options with your GM 
  before your character takes them (and watch 
  those refresh costs!).
  Important Skills: Conviction (page  124), 
  Discipline (page 127).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –5
  From the Casefiles: The late Ronald Reuel 
  (OW219) and the wishes-he-were-late Lloyd 
  Slate (OW229). The current Summer Knight is 
  a guy named Fix (OW145).
  I’ve found 
  some notes 
  that mention 
  some guy 
  named “Binder”, 
  but they’re 
  sketchy at 
  best. Sounds 
  like a focused 
  practitioner 
  to me, though.
  Oh, yeah, 
  THAT 
  guy. Yeah, 
  if I never 
  run into 
  him that’ll 
  be fine.
  
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  Lycanthrope
  Let’s get this clear up front: lycanthropes are not 
  werewolves—though they share some traits in 
  common. But where werewolves change their 
  bodies, lycanthropes change only their minds, 
  aligning their thoughts and senses with those of 
  a beast. While this isn’t as scary as a man turning 
  into a wolf right in front of you (at least at first), 
  they can still mess you up all nasty. Add to this 
  the fact that a pack of lycanthropes in close prox-
  imity to one another have a sort of group-mind 
  advantage, and you’re looking at some serious 
  badasses here.
  Some think that lycanthropy explains the 
  tales of Viking berserkers.
  So, what keeps lycanthropes from taking over 
  the world? Well, to start, they’ve got a bit of a 
  temper problem. Beasts don’t run governments 
  very well. Beyond that, most of their powers 
  aren’t fully in effect except for about five days out 
  of every month—starting two days before the 
  full moon and ending two days after. 
  As such, players may find playing a lycan-
  thrope pretty frustrating—having access to the 
  bulk of your power only 5 days out of every 28 
  may not be a lot of fun for some. When faced 
  with a lycanthrope PC, a GM will have to 
  consider how often she’s willing to stage stories 
  near the time of the full moon—and, if she is 
  willing, how much of a restriction the Human 
  Form (Involuntary Change) really represents. 
  (However, deciding that the full moon is not 
  forthcoming may be worth a compel every time 
  it’s relevant.)
  Musts: A lycanthrope must have a high concept 
  that references his nature as a mind-shifting 
  beast-dude (e.g., Lycanthrope Biker). 
  In addition, the lycanthrope must take the 
  following supernatural powers; these are always 
  available to the lycanthrope, even when not near 
  the full moon:
    Pack Instincts [–1] (page 165)
    Echoes of the Beast [–1] (page 163) 
    Human Form (Involuntary Change) [+2] 
  (page 176)
  The lycanthrope must also take:
    Inhuman Strength [–2] (page 183)
    Inhuman Recovery [–2] (page 185)
  This set of abilities is affected by the change 
  from the Human Form and is only available 
  near the full moon. Some lycanthrope concepts 
  (particularly non-wolf-derived ones) may not 
  require all of these abilities, or may provide a 
  different set of abilities during a particular time 
  period or under particular circumstances. If you 
  are interested in any such possibilities, discuss 
  them with your GM.
  Options: None.
  Important Skills: Alertness (page  121), 
  Endurance (page 130), Investigation (page 133), 
  Might (page 135), Survival (page 143).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –4
  From the Casefiles: Parker (OW205) and his 
  gang of Streetwolves.
  Technically, 
  the term 
  “lycanthrope” 
  only applies 
  to those who 
  draw a wolf-like 
  spirit into them 
  near the time of 
  the full moon. 
  You’ll need to 
  further torture 
  some helpless 
  ancient language 
  to describe 
  another kind of 
  –anthrope.
  You’re a 
  real word-
  nerd, Bob.
  
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  types & templates
  Minor Talent
  The Dresdenverse is filled with mortals who 
  have small, limited powers, whether due to 
  long-forgotten traces of inhuman bloodlines, 
  exposure to the supernatural, or simply the right 
  combination of willpower and belief. These 
  mortals can be referred to as minor talents: 
  people with “one-trick” powers that might not 
  have a lot of mojo—but which can be very 
  effective in the hands of a creative and driven 
  individual. 
  This template is a good option for someone 
  who wants a little supernatural trickery up his 
  sleeve—a mortal but with a little extra flavor, 
  the kind you might rub shoulders with at 
  McAnally’s.
  Musts: A minor talent must have a high concept 
  that mentions the talent in some capacity (e.g., 
  Demi-Semi-Hemigod, Weeps Cassandra’s 
  Tears, or Son of Shadows). The character 
  may then take a single, one refresh cost (or, 
  with approval, two refresh cost) ability from 
  Supernatural Powers (page 158). Specifically, the 
  Minor Ability and Psychic Ability categories 
  should be considered, but the GM may allow 
  the player to look further afield.
  Options: None.
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –1. The total cost 
  rarely rises as high as –2.
  From the Casefiles: Lydia, Harry’s client in 
  the Grave Peril case (OW178); many of the 
  members of Ordo Lebes (OW105); patrons of 
  McAnally’s.
  Red Court 
  Infected
  Red Court vampires—nasty bat-things that 
  live inside an apparently human (and typically 
  gorgeous) flesh-mask, drool addictive narcotic 
  venom, and feed on blood—are able to infect 
  humans, putting them on a potentially inevitable 
  path towards becoming a full-on Red Court 
  vampire. These infected individuals possess 
  some of the same capabilities as the monsters 
  that bit them—at least at a “junior varsity” level. 
  But these victims haven’t turned—they 
  haven’t given up their humanity—yet. Not until 
  they kill, though that often comes fast, as an 
  almost uncontrollable hunger for blood grips 
  them. Still, it’s only almost uncontrollable—
  with the right amount of discipline and careful 
  choices about what sorts of situations they get 
  into, these victims can hold out, at least for 
  a time. 
  If they’re particularly lucky, they may 
  find their way to the Fellowship of St. Giles 
  (OW89)—a secret organization bent on 
  destroying the Red Court. The Fellowship has 
  devised an extra means of controlling vampiric 
  urges through the use of magical tattoos which 
  are normally invisible but flare red when the 
  hunger begins to take hold. They can help keep 
  control, a little.
  It’s worth noting that, without the Tattoos of 
  St. Giles, an infected character using his super-
  natural abilities will be more quickly exhausted, 
  finding himself without his infection-derived 
  powers—and on the cusp of turning once and 
  for all—in very short order. On the other hand, 
  the Fellowship can be very demanding of its 
  members; it doesn’t tattoo someone lightly.
  Musts: A Red Court Infected must have a high 
  concept that addresses the character’s infected 
  status (e.g., Once Bitten, Twice Red or 
  Infected Insurgent). This aspect may be 
  compelled to inflict watered-down versions of 
  the Red Court’s weaknesses on the character—
  he will experience aversion to holy objects and 
  sunlight and, when exercising his powers, he 
  may even be damaged by them. On the other 
  hand, these can also help him resist his vampiric 
  urges when he isn’t using his powers. Further, 
  the infected character must take the following:
    Addictive Saliva [–1] (page 162)
    Blood Drinker [–1] (page 188)
    Feeding Dependency [+1] (page 190), 
  which will affect all abilities listed below:
    At least one of: Inhuman Recovery [–2] 
  (page 185), Inhuman Speed [–2] 
  (page 178), Inhuman Strength [–2] 
  (page 183),  Inhuman Toughness [–2] 
  (page 185). 
    If at any point the character kills another 
  human and drinks its blood, he must 
  immediately “upgrade” to a full Red 
  Court Vampire (OW87). This invariably 
  results in turning the character into an 
  NPC, and an evil one at that.
  For the Recovery and Toughness abilities, it’s 
  unclear how far the Catch (page 185) goes. It 
  often  involves holy stuff, and may include 
  sunlight in some cases. This produces a Catch 
  value from zero to +2 depending on the extent 
  of the abilities and the breadth of the Catch. 
  When the 
  victim is 
  someone you 
  love, it rips 
  your heart 
  right out.
  “Holy stuff”?
  It’s a technical term.
  
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  You’re talking 
  about the game, 
  I’m talking about 
  REAL LIFE.
  Options: Optional abilities beyond those noted 
  above include: 
    Tattoos of St. Giles [–2] (page 190)
    Cloak of Shadows [–1] (page 169)
  Important Skills: Fists (page  130), Deceit 
  (page 126), Discipline (page 127).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –3
  From the Casefiles: Susan Rodriguez (OW219) 
  and her ally Martin (OW190).
  Sorcerer
  “Sorcerer” is a near-pejorative term that many 
  on the White Council use to describe “full spec-
  trum” spell practitioners who don’t have the 
  bloodline, access, resources, and training that 
  a Wizard of the White Council has. The sneer 
  has perhaps a little merit, as these versatile spell-
  slingers are often self-taught or—let’s face it—at 
  least dabbling in some grey, if not outright black, 
  areas of magic in order to get a leg up. This 
  fairly common moral flexibility turns into a slip-
  pery slope in short order. Victor Sells from the 
  Storm Front casefile is one such example of 
  a sorcerer gone too far into the nasty to make it 
  back out with his soul intact.
  Based on what I know, the term is used 
  flexibly. It usually implies someone with some 
  magic talent who uses it solely for destructive 
  purposes, but each person has his own idea of 
  what it means when he uses it.
  As such, sorcerers are either known to the 
  White Council and walking the straight and 
  narrow, or they tend to be in hiding from them 
  (or at least hiding their talents) in the interests of 
  avoiding the pointy proclivities of the Wardens. 
  PCs may be of either type—but regardless, the 
  Wardens, even when stretched thin, cannot be 
  ignored.
  Nor, really, can one ignore sorcerers them-
  selves. While not wizards, they can still be subtle, 
  quick to anger, all that jazz. They have incred-
  ible flexibility in their capacity for spellcraft; 
  while it is very rare to find one as broadly 
  expert as a wizard, they can still specialize in 
  a few areas and, in a pinch, draw from the full 
  range of evocation and thaumaturgical castings. 
  And while they are watched over by the White 
  Council in part, they are not a part of that club; 
  that lack of proximity means they can occasion-
  ally get away with doing something that the 
  Council wouldn’t be too happy about. 
  For many sorcerers, lack of access to the 
  White Council’s resources is just fine by them 
  in exchange for freedom. And so long as they 
  keep their heads down (and their noses clean), 
  sorcerers are numbered among the bigger players 
  on the mortal side of supernatural affairs.
  Musts: A sorcerer must have a high concept 
  that declares his nature as a free-agent spell-
  caster (e.g., Sorcerer Cop or Spell-Slinging 
  Troubadour). In addition, the character must 
  take the following supernatural powers:
    Evocation [–3] (page 180)
    Thaumaturgy [–3] (page 181)
  See the power descriptions for more details. 
  Players of spellcasting characters should take 
  some time to work out their most often used, 
  practiced spells before play—see page 257 for 
  the particulars.
  Options: Nearly every sorcerer also takes the 
  Sight [–1] (and would be considered “flying 
  blind” without it). Sorcerers with a dark past 
  (but hopefully on the path to reform) may need 
  to take a Lawbreaker stunt or two (page 182). 
  Sorcerers may take Refinement [–1] once per 
  spell-ability (once for Thaumaturgy, once for 
  Evocation), but may not take it multiple times 
  per ability—there’s only so far they can develop 
  without being full-on wizards. See “Building a 
  Practitioner” on page 77 for more information.
  Important Skills: Conviction (page  124), 
  Discipline (page 127), Lore (page 134).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –6
  From the Casefiles: Victor Sells (OW225) 
  may be our best example. Mostly self-taught, 
  completely dangerous.
  In this game, a “minor talent” 
  has a single power, a “focused 
  practitioner” has limited magical 
  ability, and a “sorcerer” has 
  more flexible magical ability.
  “Mostly” is 
  right. Not 
  “totally.”
  Technically it’s correct that 
  known sorcerers walk the  “straight 
  and narrow” or end up dead— but 
  most well-behaved practitioners 
  usually get called “minor talents” 
  while those who have started to 
  slide get dubbed “sorcerers.”
  
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  True Believer
  Faith has power in the Dresdenverse, where 
  the strength of your belief can—when focused 
  properly—turn back the tide of darkness. There 
  are special mortals among us whose beliefs are 
  so strong that they cross into the territory of 
  true supernatural power. These mortals are 
  called true believers, for lack of a better term. 
  At their most extreme, true believers are 
  among those actually called upon by a higher 
  power to take action (and are better represented 
  by the Champion of God template on page 73). 
  But short of that, these men and women of 
  faith can still give pause to the creatures of the 
  Nevernever, for the strength of their convictions 
  is a palpable supernatural force.
  Musts: A true believer must have a high concept 
  that speaks to the strength of his or her abiding 
  faith in a higher power or other similar construct 
  (e.g., Man of God or Zen Nun)—in short, a 
  belief in something powerful and life-affirming 
  beyond oneself. A high Conviction skill (Good 
  or better) is highly recommended. 
  Additionally, true believers must take the 
  following supernatural powers:
    Bless This House [–1] (page 187)
    Guide My Hand [–1] (page 187)
  Options: True believers may also have 
  Righteousness [–2] (page 188), and a select few 
  might even carry some holy relic, warranting a 
  custom-designed Item of Power (page 167) agreed 
  upon with the GM.
  Important Skills: Conviction (page 124).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –2
  From the Casefiles: Father Forthill (OW147). 
  Were-Form
  The Dresdenverse is rife with shapeshifters of all 
  stripes (many nonhuman). Some humans have 
  learned (or were simply born with the capability) 
  to take on the form of a beast; when that beast 
  is a wolf, we call them werewolves, but there are 
  many other were-forms out there. The animal in 
  question isn’t supercharged or innately magical 
  (other than the fact that it has a human intel-
  lect kicking around in its noggin), but with some 
  practice, the shapeshifter can use it as easily 
  as his human form, within the limits of what 
  that animal can do. Unlike lycanthropes, loup-
  garoux, and some other types of shapechangers, 
  most were-form shifters are entirely in control 
  of their change. There’s no full moon business 
  going on with us.
  William, just as a note, there are some were-
  forms that are supercharged or innately 
  magical.
  Musts: A were-form shapeshifter must take a 
  high concept indicating that—whether heredi-
  tarily or by choice— he is a shapeshifter, able 
  to take on a single animal form (e.g., Crime-
  Fighting Werewolf or Weregoat 
  Wiseass). The type of animal must be specified 
  at the time the character is created.
  It’s true! Weregoats exist! Though truth be 
  known, Harry’s more of a wiseass than most 
  of them.
  Hey, now!
  In addition, the following supernatural 
  powers must be taken:
    Beast Change [–1] (page 174)
    Echoes of the Beast [–1] (page 163)
    Human Form [+1] (page 176)
    At least two refresh points’ worth of 
  abilities from the options list below.
  The Beast Change ability allows the player to 
  restructure his skills when in animal form. This 
  second skill configuration should be worked out 
  before play begins. See page 174 for details.
  Options: The character may take up to two 
  of these abilities—Inhuman Recovery  [–2] 
  (page 185), Inhuman Speed [–2] (page 178), 
  Inhuman Strength [–2] (page 183), or Inhuman 
  Toughness [–2] (page 185)—so long as those 
  abilities are in sync with the animal form he 
  assumes. Similarly, abilities may be taken from 
  Folks with the power of true 
  faith are few and far between, and 
  their faith is always rooted in a 
  higher power that’s in some ways 
  unknowable. Murphy might have a 
  deep and abiding faith in the power 
  of the law, but law is a knowable 
  thing—it doesn’t have any kind 
  of magic to it in that sense. The 
  various manifestations of God 
  are a different matter. I suppose 
  in a way it’s a specialized kind of 
  sponsored magic—more specific and 
  limited in many ways, but incredibly 
  powerful in times of great need.
  I put Father 
  Forthill here 
  because, while 
  he might not 
  be a sword-
  swinging Knight 
  of the cross, 
  he’s still 
  someone you’d 
  want at your 
  back when 
  the demons 
  come pounding 
  on the door.
  
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  the Creature Feature category (page 162) or the 
  Minor Ability category (page 169) if they can 
  be shown to be a part of the creature’s natural 
  advantages.
  Thus, a werewolf might have:
    Inhuman Speed [–2] (page 178)
    Inhuman Strength [–2] (page 183)
    Claws [–1] (page 162)
    Pack Instincts [–1] (page 165)
  A wereraven (were there such a thing) might 
  have:
    Diminutive Size [–1] (page 163)
    Inhuman Speed [–2] (page 178)
    Wings [–1] (page 165)
  Shouldn’t you add in “Unkindness Instincts [–1]” 
  here, William?
  Huh?
  Bob’s being a word-nerd again: 
  the collective noun is “an 
  unkindness of ravens.”
  You and your GM should work together 
  to determine what advantages the chosen 
  animal form has. Note, some advantages will 
  be expressed already due to the Beast Change 
  reshuffling of skills; if an animal is more resil-
  ient or deadly, that might simply be reflected 
  by boosting the character’s Endurance or Fists 
  skill as a part of the Beast Change, rather than 
  going to the full extent of Inhuman Toughness, 
  etc. Similarly, the improved senses the creature 
  might enjoy are covered by Echoes of the Beast 
  (and carry over to the human form). In a pinch, 
  if these don’t seem like enough, toss in one or 
  two mortal stunts (page 146) that tie into the 
  random side-effects and benefits of the chosen 
  beast.
  Important Skills: Varies, since Beast Change 
  allows retooling of skills.
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –3, though it’s often 
  a few points more; as shown, werewolves are –6 
  or –7.
  From the Casefiles: Will (OW114) and Georgia 
  Borden  (OW114) of the Alphas (OW116), 
  among others.
  The wereraven example reminds me, 
  William—shapeshifters of the sort that can 
  change their mass are a very rare breed. If 
  they shift into something smaller, they have 
  to store part of their intellect and mass in 
  the Nevernever, so they can retrieve it when 
  they change back. If they shift into something 
  bigger, they can get the extra mass by way of 
  ectoplasm, so in that respect growing is easier 
  than shrinking.
  Yeah, I thought I remembered seeing something 
  about that. Still, we figured it’d be more fun if 
  we just allowed folks to go for bigger or smaller 
  forms if they could find the points for it. And 
  the whole thing about storing parts of themselves 
  in the Nevernever is rife with story hooks.
  
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  White Court 
  Vampire
  Of all the known vampire courts, the White 
  Court vampires appear to be the weakest—but 
  they are no less deadly. They are also the closest 
  to mortals in behaviors and predilections. They 
  might best be seen as a separate race, able to 
  interbreed with humans (White Court vampires 
  are born, not made—it’s hereditary). They 
  feed on the strong emotions of their victims—
  sometimes, though not always, to the point of 
  death—and they can excite these emotions 
  in their victims as well. Adept at manipula-
  tion, White Court vampires rarely take action 
  directly, preferring to act through catspaws and 
  patsies.
  The truism “you are what you eat” is rarely 
  more accurate than with the White Court. It’s 
  easy to see them as simply “sex vampires,” but 
  that’s only because the majority of those encoun-
  tered in the casefiles have chosen lust as their 
  primary food-source. As such, the Raiths are 
  masters of seduction, and it’s no mistake that a 
  few of their number have established a presence 
  in adult films. But this is just a matter of prefer-
  ence—other dark, intense emotions are viable as 
  food. Fear, despair, and wrath are at the root of 
  the practices of other Houses. Harry’s encoun-
  ters with White Court vampires with other 
  feeding habits have been rare, but indications are 
  that their approach to life is just a bit different 
  from that of the lust-seeking Raiths.
  Some few of their kind choose to and are able 
  to resist the demonic hunger that lives within 
  them. To do so is to live a life of near-starvation. 
  A few manage to find ways around this, feeding 
  off a much larger “herd” in dribs and drabs rather 
  than a single victim in quantity. These are the 
  ones most likely to be viable as PCs, as they grip 
  onto the last vestiges of their free will—making 
  the important choice not to kill, every day.
  Musts: White Court vampires must take a high 
  concept indicating their heritage (e.g., Black 
  Sheep of House Raith or White Court 
  Dancer). This aspect may be compelled to 
  represent some of the White Court’s classic 
  weaknesses—True Love can burn them 
  (leaving scars that don’t fade), and holy objects 
  and displays of faith at least make them 
  uncomfortable.
  Hey, Bob, is it only true love that works 
  here, or are there other...uh, truths?
  One could easily posit that True, and most 
  importantly, selfless Hope or Courage would act 
  as dire counters to despair and fear. But we have 
  a decided lack of, shall we say, experimental 
  data on that front.
  For game purposes, it makes sense 
  if other true emotions work, so 
  I’m going to go with that.
  Unless it’s not known for some reason, the 
  player should determine and at least sketchily 
  detail the character’s House—family is terribly 
  important to the White Court, if only in a 
  “know thy enemy” sort of way.
  In addition, a White Court vampire must 
  take the following abilities:
    Emotional Vampire [–1] (page 189)
    Human Guise [+0] (page 176)
    Incite Emotion (Touch Only) [–1] 
  (page 172)
    Feeding Dependency [+1] (page 190), 
  which affects the rest of the abilities 
  listed
    Inhuman Recovery [–2] (page 185); the 
  Catch is True Love [+0] 
    Inhuman Speed [–2] (page 178)
    Inhuman Strength [–2] (page 183)
  Take It From a Werewolf
  The supernatural mechanism whereby a were-
  form shapeshifter takes on the shape of an 
  animal varies. Harry Dresden looks at the 
  thing my friends and I do when we turn into 
  wolves as the casting of a specialized single 
  spell, but honestly I think that’s more a case of 
  everything looking like spellcasting to a spell-
  caster. I’ve watched Harry do magic, and it just 
  doesn’t feel the same to me—not really. 
  For me, these days, it’s like a switch in the 
  back of my brain. When I flip it, my body gets 
  optimized. My mind is still there—I still know 
  who I am and all that—but my priorities flip 
  around a bit. My senses and body align for 
  the hunt. That’s why (and how) the Alphas 
  are taking back our corner of Chicago from 
  the night. 
  It seems the 
  Malvora feed 
  on fear, and the 
  Skavis feed on 
  despair. Nasty lot, 
  all of them.
  could a 
  WcV feed 
  on a positive 
  emotion, Bob?
  Eating some 
  part of another 
  person is an 
  act of violence, 
  William. Positive 
  emotions don’t 
  go together with 
  that.
  Note - 
  Add “Hope” & “courage” to the catch.
  
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  What’s the 
  escape clause 
  for malvora 
  and Skavis 
  “virgins”?
  Some act of True 
  Hope or True 
  Courage, I’d say, 
  but again we 
  have little data.
  Options: White Court vampires may upgrade 
  some of their listed abilities. They may take 
  the more expensive versions of Incite Emotion 
  (page 172), allowing it to operate at range or 
  through a broader range of emotions, and 
  can upgrade their Inhuman Recovery to 
  Supernatural Recovery.
  Important Skills: Athletics (page  121), 
  Alertness  (page  121), Deceit (page  126), 
  Endurance (page 130), Discipline (page 127), 
  Intimidation (page 132), Might (page 135), other 
  physical skills.
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –7
  From the Casefiles: Thomas Raith (OW212) is 
  the most PC-like vampire of his clan.
  White Court 
  Virgin
  White Court vampirism is a hereditary condi-
  tion, passed along when interbreeding with 
  humans, always breeding true. But the condition 
  doesn’t truly take hold until the “virgin” White 
  Court vampire has killed for the first time with 
  his emotion-feeding abilities. Unblooded White 
  Court virgins do not have the weaknesses of full 
  White Court vampires, making them difficult to 
  detect.
  Some vestiges of ability—enough to excite 
  emotion and feed on it—exist prior to that 
  point, and a White Court virgin fully aware of 
  his condition might be able to finesse making 
  use of it in a mostly “safe” way. Sadly, many pre-
  adolescent White Court scions are kept in the 
  dark about the true nature of their family—it 
  makes it easier for them to stumble into that 
  first kill, and thus harder for them to fight the 
  reality of their genes. Once the kill is made, this 
  character template is swapped out for the full 
  White Court Vampire template. 
  There is an escape clause, however; if he 
  experiences true, deep, reciprocated love with 
  another, the curse of heritage is broken, and he 
  may live life as a normal, regular human (thus 
  setting aside his modest powers, swapping this 
  template for the pure mortal, page 73). But after 
  his first kill, there is no remedy, even if he should 
  fall in love, however real and true. 
  Musts: White Court virgins must take a high 
  concept indicating their heritage and predica-
  ment (e.g., White Court Family Secret or 
  I Was a Teenage White Court Virgin). 
  This aspect may be compelled to bring the char-
  acter’s heritage to the fore, triggering a sudden 
  buried urge to feed, etc.
  Unless it’s not known for some reason, the 
  player should determine and at least sketchily 
  detail the character’s House—it’s bound to be 
  important.
    Emotional Vampire [–1] (page 189)
    Incite Emotion (Touch Only) [–1] 
  (page 172)
  Options: If your GM agrees, you can slowly 
  slide your way down the path to your heritage, 
  taking on one or two abilities from the White 
  Court Vampire list—but using them will leave 
  you ravenous and in some pretty dire straits 
  in short order. If you do this, you must take 
  Feeding Dependency (page 190) as well.
  Important Skills: Deceit (page 126), Intimidation 
  (page 132).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –2. Pray you don’t go 
  further.
  From the Casefiles: Thomas’ little sister Inari 
  Raith (OW207).
  Are there 
  White court 
  types who feed 
  on wrath?
  I haven’t 
  encountered 
  any of that 
  description, but 
  it would make 
  sense. I imagine 
  their counter 
  would be True, 
  genuine Peace 
  —particularly 
  difficult to come 
  by in your world.
  Inari was as 
  much a victim 
  as I was, here. 
  Her family 
  lied to her 
  about who 
  she was from 
  day one.
  
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  Wizard
  The full wizard in action is a terror to behold. 
  His is an ancient bloodline, heir to the magics of 
  old and able to command their full array; given 
  enough time and preparation, there is very little 
  to limit what a wizard can accomplish beyond 
  the fetters of his own belief in what he can do. 
  In short, a Wizard of the White Council is a 
  lean, mean, arcane ass-kicking machine. 
  The power comes at a price. Wizards are 
  practically walking contraband, the way their 
  own White Council watches over them. The 
  Council’s policemen, the Wardens, are particu-
  larly vigilant (or at least were until things got…
  interesting) about making sure that all known 
  wizards walk the straight and narrow. The Laws 
  of Magic were laid down for a reason, and it’s 
  the capabilities of the mortal wizard that made 
  them necessary. 
  Plus there’s that little problem of a raging, 
  ongoing war between the vampires and the 
  wizards, brought on by one of the White 
  Council’s own members. Players of wizard char-
  acters who are not active in their support of the 
  White Council’s war efforts will need a damn 
  fine reason for why they aren’t off fighting the 
  good fight. That’s not to say that there aren’t 
  plenty of such reasons—but the war is so big, so 
  far-reaching, it simply can’t be ignored.
  Every wizard is different, with his own special 
  aptitudes and approach to magic, but all of them 
  are powerful individuals with a common core 
  set of abilities. They stand with a foot in each 
  world—the mundane and the magical—and are 
  the object of deep interest by a variety of orga-
  nizations, from the White Council of Wizards, 
  to the Courts of the Faerie and the Vampires, to 
  the mortal police and the Mafia, and more.
  Musts: A wizard must have a high concept that 
  declares his nature (e.g., Wizard For Hire or 
  Favorite Son of the White Council). In 
  addition, the character must take the following 
  supernatural powers:
    Evocation [–3] (page 180)
    Thaumaturgy [–3] (page 181)
    The Sight [–1] (page 174)
    Soulgaze [–0] (page 174); discounted due 
  to the Sight.
    Wizard’s Constitution [–0] (page 170)
  See the power descriptions for more details. 
  Players of spellcasting characters should take 
  some time to work out their most often used, 
  practiced spells before play—see page 257 for 
  the particulars.
  Options: Wizards may (and in fact, should at 
  least once) take the Refinement ability (page 182) 
  as many times as they can afford—even multiple 
  times for one particular mode of spellcasting 
  (Thaumaturgy or Evocation). See “Building a 
  Practitioner” on page 77 for more information.
  Important Skills: Conviction (page  124), 
  Discipline (page 127), Endurance (page 130), 
  Lore (page 134).
  Minimum Refresh Cost: –7
  From the Casefiles: Harry Dresden (OW134), 
  but also Warden Donald Morgan (OW196), 
  Warden Carlos Ramirez (OW215), Elaine 
  (OW183),  and, oh yeah, all of the White 
  Council (OW17).
  Billy, I’ve 
  got enough 
  problems 
  with this 
  without you 
  calling me 
  out here.
  It’s not 
  exactly a 
  state secret, 
  but we can 
  leave it out.
  Move Elaine somewhere 
  else before publication, 
  like to minor talent. 
  She flubbed the White 
  Council tests Carlos 
  gave her on purpose; 
  we probably shouldn’t 
  spill the beans here.
  What About Playing 
  An Apprentice?
  An “apprentice” in this case may simply be a 
  wizard without a lot of confidence and skill 
  yet; you can use the Wizard template and 
  just start the character’s skills lower than 
  would usually be optimal.  
  Or maybe you have a lot of potential, so 
  your skills are high, but you have that word 
  “apprentice” in your high concept or your 
  trouble that’s going to get you a bunch of 
  compels, limiting your ability to be effective.  
  If you really want to play up the “hasn’t 
  quite come into her powers yet” angle, you 
  could buy less than the full package of abili-
  ties, ending up with something more like the 
  Sorcerer or Focused Practitioner templates. 
  Keep in mind that latter template in partic-
  ular—you could start out with Channeling 
  or Ritual instead of the full-blown versions, 
  later upgrading those to Evocation and 
  Thaumaturgy when your training completes.
  
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  - cHAPter SIx -
  Advancement
  
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  Advancement
  Change Happens
  Characters are not static objects—they grow 
  and develop over time, evolving in response to 
  the conflicts they face during the game and the 
  choices they make. Cities are similar—but they 
  grow and develop in response to the successes 
  and failures of the various characters. The rate 
  at which both characters and cities grow and 
  change is measured in milestones.
  Milestones & 
  Characters
  Milestones are moments in the game where 
  something has happened to justify some kind of 
  advancement. Milestones largely occur according 
  to the GM’s discretion, and the frequency of 
  their occurrence will do a lot to establish the 
  overall tone and feel of a campaign—frequent 
  milestones allow the characters to grow rapidly 
  and give a sort of “epic” feel to the campaign as 
  the opposition scales in response; infrequent 
  milestones make things feel more grounded and 
  established.
  Milestones fall into three categories—minor, 
  significant, and major. There are some guidelines 
  for when each happens, along with what charac-
  ters can do during each type of milestone.
  Minor Milestone
  Minor milestones usually occur at the end of a 
  session of play, or whenever one significant piece 
  of a story is resolved. A minor milestone allows 
  the characters to evolve in response to the story 
  that’s been unfolding before them. 
  When a minor milestone occurs, you may 
  choose one of the following:
    Switch the rank values of any two skills, 
  or replace one Average skill with one that 
  isn’t on your sheet.
    Change any single stunt for another 
  stunt.
    Purchase stunts or powers, provided you 
  have the refresh to do so.
    Rename one aspect.
  Minor milestones are ideal when you want 
  to switch the focus of your character’s existing 
  abilities or change something on the character 
  sheet, like a skill or the wording of an aspect. 
  Maybe something happens in the story that 
  makes part of your character’s sheet seem inap-
  propriate, or you’ve simply discovered that your 
  choice of skills, aspects, and stunts don’t match 
  your expectations in play. 
  Obviously, these changes should be justi-
  fied as much as possible, either within the story 
  (“Hey, my character’s contact died, so I think I 
  want to make his Joe the Reliable Contact 
  aspect into Vengeance for Joe, okay?”) or 
  as a result of play (“So I thought I wanted this 
  guy to have a Good (+3) Presence, but I’m not 
  really using it much—it’d be more fitting if he 
  had a lower Presence and a higher Rapport, so 
  I’m going to switch it out with my Fair (+2) 
  Rapport.”). If the skill you’re switching out is at 
  Average (+1), you may change it for a skill that 
  isn’t on your sheet. Be careful when switching 
  a character’s peak skills (his highest ones), 
  though—this can significantly change the char-
  acter, which is not the purpose of a minor mile-
  stone. Keep it in character, so to speak. 
  Example: The GM announces that a minor 
  milestone has been reached. Fred, who plays 
  Biff Abernathy, decides that he’s not been 
  portraying the character as Playing The 
  Dumb Jock, and he’d rather change that to In 
  The Scrum, relating his tendency to face prob-
  lems head-on with his skill at rugby.
  the key word there is “beginning.” A gm 
  could certainly house-rule in something 
  like that. I do think it’s a good idea 
  to give players more leeway to change 
  NeW characters, a “try before you 
  buy” sort of deal. this is especially 
  helpful for players new to the system.
  I’d recommend following the minor milestone 
  rules more strictly once a new character 
  has two or three sessions under his belt.
  Billy, at the beginning of 
  our Arcanos campaign we 
  were allowed to switch 
  our characters around a 
  lot more than the minor 
  milestone rules would 
  indicate. Why didn’t you 
  use that idea in this game?
  
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  Advancement
  Significant 
  Milestone
  A significant milestone usually occurs at the 
  conclusion of a scenario or a major plotline (or 
  once every two or three sessions). Significant 
  milestones are about advances of experience, 
  as the characters have learned new things in 
  dealing with problems and challenges.
  When a significant milestone occurs, your 
  character gets all of the following:
    One additional skill rank.
    One of the benefits of a minor milestone.
    Spellcasters may reconfigure their focus 
  and enchanted items and slots.
  Of particular note here is getting one addi-
  tional skill rank to spend on a new skill slot, 
  because it can be a little confusing. The costs 
  are the same as in Character Creation (page 65), so 
  one skill rank buys an Average slot, which you 
  can then fill with any skill you want. If you want 
  a bigger slot, you have to bank a few significant 
  milestones’ worth of advancement first.
  When you’re upgrading an existing skill, you 
  need only pay the difference in cost—if you have 
  an Average slot, you can upgrade it to a Fair slot 
  by paying one rank.
  Important: Remember the rule from Character 
  Creation that says you can’t have more skills at 
  a given rank than you have at any lesser rank 
  (page 65)? That still applies here. As an example, 
  suppose you have a skill layout of one Great, two 
  Good, three Fair, and four Average. Imagine that 
  these are represented as building blocks stacked 
  atop one another, each level representing a rank. 
  Each block needs one below it to support it. 
  That would look like this:
  Great
  Good
  Fair
  Average
  During a significant milestone, you decide 
  you want to upgrade one of your Fair slots to a 
  Good slot:
  Great
  Good
  Fair
  Average
  But this gap (shown as a dashed circle above) 
  means that you can’t make that purchase at this 
  time—you’d need an extra Fair skill in place 
  to “hold up” the Good skill you want. You can 
  buy a slot at Average now and upgrade it over 
  the course of the next two milestones, or simply 
  bank the points to buy a new Good slot directly 
  when you get there.
  Example: The PCs have wrapped up a 
  scenario, and the GM declares a significant 
  milestone. 
  Rob, playing Evan Montrose, decides he 
  would like a bit more oomph in Evan’s spell-
  casting, so he wants to spend his skill point on 
  raising Evan’s Conviction from Good  (+3) 
  to Great  (+4). He can’t, though—it would 
  violate the skill columns (see above). 
  Rob could bank the skill point with an 
  eye toward buying another Good (+3) skill 
  to allow adding another at Great (+4), but 
  instead he decides to add a brand new skill, 
  Athletics, at Average (+1), explaining that Biff 
  has been helping Evan rehabilitate his injured 
  arm through playing basketball.
  He has the option of taking the benefit of a 
  minor milestone: switch two skill levels, or swap 
  one stunt for another (he has no stunts). He 
  declines to do so.
  Changing High 
  Concepts and Troubles
  High concepts are pretty sacrosanct and 
  won’t change with just a minor milestone. 
  If they change at all, it will happen with a 
  major milestone, which you’ll read about 
  later on.
  On the other hand, maybe you’ve taken 
  care of your trouble. Or maybe your trouble 
  doesn’t mean much to your character 
  anymore. Great! Just make sure that you 
  replace it with a new trouble, and not just 
  any random aspect.
  
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  Advancement
  Major Milestone
  A major milestone should only occur when 
  something has happened in the campaign that 
  shakes it up a lot—either when a few scenarios 
  have concluded, or a long, large-scale plotline 
  wraps up. When these happen, the characters 
  jump up a scale of power.
  When a major milestone occurs, your char-
  acter gets all of the following:
    You can “clear out” an extreme conse-
  quence slot, allowing it to be used 
  again.
    An additional point of refresh.
    New stunts and/or powers.
    All the benefits of a significant 
  milestone.
  These milestones signify a major change 
  in the power structure of your campaign—
  your characters are going to be dealing with a 
  whole new tier of obstacles from here on out. 
  Consider how even basic character options 
  are affected by one jump in refresh—7 refresh 
  isn’t enough for a PC to be a full wizard, but 
  8 is. Two refresh covers the cost of buying 
  off the initial decision to play a Pure Mortal 
  (see page 73), allowing the character to take on 
  supernatural powers. Even just the bump to a 
  skill that a stunt provides can radically alter the 
  nature of a character’s effectiveness.
  This is a really big deal; it means that the 
  PCs are directly able to take on more powerful 
  threats and have a wider variety of resources to 
  draw on to face those threats. (To use a boxing 
  analogy, an advancement of power is like step-
  ping up to the next weight class—you might 
  be the most skilled boxer in the world, but if 
  you’re a featherweight, there’s still only so much 
  you can do against a less-skilled heavyweight.)
  Another option the GM has for a major 
  milestone is to increase the skill cap by one rank. 
  This allows the characters to raise their skills 
  up into larger-than-life levels, transcending all 
  previous expectations of human (or inhuman) 
  capability. This can be combined with the 
  normal refresh award as often as the GM 
  wishes. By default, one skill cap increase should 
  probably come every two or three major mile-
  stones, happening a few times per campaign at 
  most. A campaign where the skill cap increases 
  with every new major milestone gain will get to 
  Epic (literally) levels very quickly.
  
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  Advancement
  Example: The PCs have finished a major story 
  arc, and the city will be forever different. The 
  GM declares a major milestone. 
  All characters receive a point of refresh—
  the previous base refresh was 10, now it’s 11. 
  Maya McKenzie’s player Amanda has decided 
  that she wants to improve Maya’s investiga-
  tive abilities. She takes the supernatural power 
  Supernatural Sense (page 165), at the cost of –1 
  refresh. She also takes a stunt called Corner 
  of My Eye (page 149). Maya’s refresh was 6. It 
  went to 7 with the increase, back to 6 with 
  the purchase of Strange Senses, and to 5 with 
  Corner of my Eye.
  She also gains the benefits of significant and 
  minor milestones.
  Changing the 
  Defaults
  The setup in this section is the default, based 
  on what Harry Dresden has experienced 
  throughout the course of his casefiles—if every 
  one of Harry’s biggest casefiles (like the Storm 
  Front case or the Dead Beat case) is the 
  equivalent of a scenario, then every two or three 
  of those would warrant a major milestone.
  Depending on the tone of the game, the GM 
  might want to change the rate at which mile-
  stones occur, or even eliminate some types of 
  advancements entirely. 
  At the very least, minor milestones should 
  always be made available to the PCs. Characters 
  that remain “static” can get boring pretty fast; 
  with enough minor milestones, a player could 
  have a totally different character sheet than 
  the one he started with after the end of a few 
  scenarios.
  Taking away or slowing down the rate of 
  significant milestones means that, on a basic 
  level, the characters are not going to get more 
  capable of dealing with problems. This can be 
  used to firmly set the dial on a campaign in 
  regard to the scope and breadth of challenges—
  a small-scale campaign that deals with solving 
  the personal problems of minor practitioners 
  might never require the characters to amass 
  much more experience than they have, so as to 
  keep conflicts satisfying. However, this has the 
  potential issue of getting old after a while—
  eventually the group will more than likely either 
  end the campaign or expand its scope.
  Not using major milestones means that there 
  are certain levels of supernatural opposition 
  the characters simply won’t be able to contend 
  with—they’re stuck in their particular weight 
  class, and there’s no moving up. Again, this 
  can be used to tightly rein in the aesthetic of a 
  particular campaign—if the campaign focuses 
  on a long conflict between the inhabitants of 
  a city and the White Court vampires in it, the 
  characters won’t ever need the kind of power 
  it would take to wipe out a Denarian. Again, 
  though, this has the potential to reduce the “life 
  expectancy” of your campaign.
  The defaults above allow for the longest-
  running potential campaigns, where the charac-
  ters could even start at the point where they’ve 
  just been introduced to the supernatural and 
  move up in power and experience until they’re 
  contending with the kinds of epic enemies 
  Harry Dresden commonly fights…and even 
  beyond.
  Mid-Session 
  Power Upgrades
  It’s surprisingly easy to take on additional super-
  natural power at a moment’s notice—stressful 
  situations can force potential abilities to rise 
  to the fore; demonic bargains can provide you 
  with magic at the snap of a finger; letting your 
  inhuman nature take a bit more control can 
  change your available resources significantly. 
  Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to wait for a 
  milestone to receive these abilities—you and 
  Completely Revising 
  Characters
  If there’s enough downtime in your 
  story between a major milestone and the 
  next adventure, you might also consider 
  re-creating your characters as a group—
  adjusting aspects, reconfiguring skills, buying 
  stunts and powers, etc. While you don’t need 
  to go through the phases part of character 
  creation again, it’s a chance to rethink or 
  replace your character’s high concept.
  As long as there’s some commonality to 
  the character for a sense of continuity, this 
  isn’t a problem.
  For example, let’s say a certain police 
  officer decided to take up a Sword of the 
  Cross…
  Don’t go 
  there.
  okay, okay! 
  Do we want to 
  let them know 
  about the stuff 
  that’s out of 
  Harry’s league, 
  like Cowl…?
  Stop. 
  Writing. 
  Now.
  
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  Advancement
  Temporary Powers
  In rare circumstances, it might be appro-
  priate for a character to temporarily take on 
  supernatural powers. Usually, this happens 
  when a supernatural entity imbues someone 
  with power for a short time in order to 
  take on a threat or fulfill some part of its 
  agendas. (Murphy taking up a Sword of the 
  Cross temporarily in the Small Favor case 
  might be a good example of this.)
  Regardless of the circumstances, tempo-
  rary powers should be dealt with in a 
  similar fashion to mid-session upgrades, 
  but with less cost—the player has to spend 
  fate points equal to the power’s usual cost, 
  but not permanent refresh. As with normal 
  mid-session upgrades, the player can “owe” 
  the GM some compels if there aren’t enough 
  fate points to pay for it.
  Once again, this should only happen 
  under rare circumstances, and the benefits 
  shouldn’t last longer than a scene—most 
  things that can bestow power only do so 
  temporarily, when the situation is extremely 
  dire, and when there isn’t really another 
  option. 
  your friends are cornered, everything seems 
  hopeless, and you reach out to some eldritch 
  being for aid to save your butt. Simple despera-
  tion has made many a supernatural heavyweight.
  When these moments occur, it’s appro-
  priate for the GM to allow you to make these 
  changes—but at a cost. 
  The first, of course, is appropriate justifica-
  tion; you shouldn’t be able to just willy-nilly 
  change things on your sheet. The group should 
  agree that the story justifies the change, or you 
  should provide a clear rationale for it. The ratio-
  nale could involve your character’s high concept 
  (such as “My changeling is sliding more toward 
  his Winter nature”) or come about due to the 
  current circumstances (such as “I volunteer my 
  service to the demon for this magic”).
  The second is that you must permanently and 
  immediately drop your refresh rating and trade 
  in fate points equal to the cost of the power, just 
  like the rules for “Creation On-the-Fly” on page 69. 
  Remember that your refresh cannot drop below 
  one (except for truly exceptional circum-
  stances—see “Going Off the Deep End” below).  If 
  you don’t currently have enough fate points to 
  pay for the upgrade, you can accrue a “debt” with 
  the GM for the difference. This functions almost 
  precisely like debt from supernatural sponsor-
  ship (see “Sponsored Magic” on page 287), except it 
  doesn’t have to be tied to a particular entity—
  you owe the GM a number of compels that 
  don’t get you fate points. These compels should 
  usually be against your character’s high concept 
  and be related to the circumstances under which 
  the new powers were taken. Once you’re out of 
  debt, compels accrue fate points as normal.
  Going Off the Deep End
  The most extreme version of a mid-session 
  power upgrade is to take your character to zero 
  (or less!) refresh on purpose. This gives your char-
  acter access to incredible power in a hurry at the 
  ultimate price—your character no longer retains 
  enough humanity to act against his supernatural 
  nature and will become an NPC. There is no 
  way around the final choice—once you make it, 
  you’re effectively giving up control of your char-
  acter, just as surely as if he’d died. Red Court 
  Infected and Changelings are probably the most 
  likely characters to face this choice.
  Keep in mind that, just because you’re volun-
  teering to take your refresh to zero or beyond, 
  it doesn’t mean that all of Supernatural Powers 
  becomes a shopping list. The restrictions of your 
  high concept still apply, as well as the nature of 
  any entities who might be offering you power for 
  this last hurrah. 
  This should never be treated as a frivolous 
  event—it’d be lame if you set your character up 
  to go out in a blaze of glory and didn’t get the 
  chance for dramatic payoff. So, if you volun-
  teer to upgrade your character’s powers to the 
  point where your refresh drops to zero or below, 
  you get to retain control of the character for as 
  long as it takes to resolve the immediate conse-
  quences of your choice. Usually this means 
  playing out the rest of the scene or the very next 
  scene; after that, your character is an NPC. You 
  can use this to set up the circumstances of your 
  character’s departure and put a nice (or not so 
  nice) capstone on his story.
  Makes me think of Meryl. 
  Poor kid.
  So, the 
  GM is kinda 
  like an 
  Outsider? 
  Bad juju, 
  Billy.
  
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  Advancement
  Advancing 
  Cities
  If you did quick city creation and are happy 
  playing with that, this part might not interest 
  you much. But if you’re playing with a fully 
  developed city, then you’ll want to have some 
  idea about what happens as the PCs interact 
  with it. The good news is that not only will this 
  make your city feel more alive, but having a fully 
  fleshed out city can give you some more concrete 
  guidelines for when to make certain types of 
  milestones happen for the characters.
  We aren’t necessarily suggesting that the city 
  should change every time the characters do—
  places are more static than people. The next few 
  sections show you all the various things you can 
  change, rather than dictating when you should 
  change them. As with milestones, it’s largely at 
  the GM’s discretion as to when a city element is 
  able to change. Usually, this process will be intui-
  tive as you examine the events in your scenarios.
  There are two main types of changes: changes 
  to theme and threat aspects (based on what the 
  characters have done) and changes to locations 
  and faces (based on where the characters have 
  decided to go).
  Themes
  Theme aspects can change if the players have 
  made a city-based or location-based theme 
  aspect irrelevant in the story. This sort of change 
  is the biggest change in scale, because themes are 
  so ingrained in how people see the city or loca-
  tion—usually because whatever’s inspiring that 
  theme has been around for years and people 
  have grown used to it.
  Since they’re so entrenched, it should take 
  a considerable amount of effort to change the 
  aspect. These changes are the ones that should 
  happen slowest in the city, compared to dealing 
  with threats. Along with that, themes are never 
  completely removed—they’re changed, either 
  for good or ill. Changes come in three flavors: 
  lessening a theme, inverting a theme, and wors-
  ening a theme.
  Lessening a Theme
  If the PCs strike a huge blow against the forces 
  that are supporting the theme, but don’t eradi-
  cate it altogether, the theme could be “lessened.” 
  When this happens, the GM rewords the theme 
  aspect to sound less imposing. It’s still there, but 
  not as severe.
  Example: The Baltimore crew (page 362) has 
  managed to deal a blow to the Decay and 
  Corruption theme aspect. Depending on 
  how they went about it, the theme could be 
  changed to something slightly less bad, like On 
  The Take, or maybe even outright positive, 
  like Aspire to Past Glory.
  Inverting a Theme
  Here’s where big change really happens. When 
  the PCs undercut the power base of what makes 
  the theme possible, then they’re able to change 
  the city itself. Such changes are reflected in 
  removing the old aspect and replacing it with a 
  totally contrasting one based on what the char-
  acters did.
  Example: If Evan and company manage 
  to score very large victories against sources 
  of corruption in the city, that Decay and 
  Corruption aspect would need to be inverted. 
  A contrasting aspect might be something like 
  Honest at Heart, representing an under-
  lying core of purity in the population.
  You don’t need to lessen a theme before 
  inverting it. Some themes will end up being 
  more like light switches—they’re either on or 
  off, all the way. Use your judgment to decide 
  when lessening before inverting makes sense.
  Worsening a Theme
  Not everything is sunshine and puppy dogs—
  themes can also get worse. If the PCs manage 
  to let a situation escalate, the GM is within her 
  rights to reword the theme to be more imposing.
  Example: Of course, if they just let things go 
  to hell, then the gang would have to deal with 
  a worse aspect—the GM changes Decay and 
  Corruption to Cesspool of Devilry!
  WHY 
  NOT?
  
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  Threats
  Threats are a little more straightforward. If you 
  used the threat as an aspect in city creation, 
  remove it when the PCs successfully take care 
  of it. Unlike themes, dealing with threats means 
  erasing the aspect rather than changing it. Of 
  course, resolving a threat isn’t the only option—
  threats can get worsened, too.
  Resolving a Threat
  Depending on the scale of the threat, it should 
  take anywhere between one and several sessions 
  to resolve and remove. A small-time location 
  threat might only take one, whereas a major 
  city-based threat would take many. (This is the 
  GM’s decision.)
  Once a city-based threat is removed, the GM 
  should come up with a new threat within the 
  next couple of sessions—the supernasties rarely 
  leave a city alone for long. A location-based 
  threat should only be replaced if the location is 
  particularly interesting to the players and there’s 
  still ongoing story around that area of town. 
  Even then, waiting a few sessions before filling 
  it in allows the PCs to look into other problems.
  Example: Miracle of miracles, the Baltimore 
  PCs manage to defuse the powder keg that is 
  Baltimore and establish some semblance of 
  stability. The GM removes On the Brink as 
  a threat and considers what to add next.
  Promoting a Threat
  On the other hand, failing to defeat a threat 
  could mean it gets a real foothold. This takes 
  some time, though less for a location than for an 
  entire city. If the threat gets what it wants and 
  incorporates itself into the city, the threat can 
  be promoted into a new theme aspect. Some 
  threats are happy with getting what they want 
  and then leaving (usually with a trail of bodies 
  behind them).
  Example: The various factions of Baltimore 
  remain On the Brink after the first major 
  milestone. The GM declares that they’ve 
  settled into a sort of Cold War mentality, and 
  the tension becomes routine. On the Brink 
  becomes a city theme, and a dark feeling of 
  inevitable doom begins to pervade everything.
  Locations
  When you hit significant and major mile-
  stones, you might want to consider adding and 
  removing locations, since those are good times 
  to re-think where you want to play in your city.
  Adding a Location
  There are two reasons you might want to add a 
  location: an interesting place keeps coming up 
  in your game and you want to stat it out with 
  its own theme, threat, and face; or you want to 
  change your game up. 
  The first is fairly easy; if someone notices 
  such a location, ask the group during the next 
  milestone if it’s worth statting up. If, as a group, 
  you can quickly come up with its theme, threat, 
  and face, then it’s a good candidate for adding.
  Adding locations to change up the game is 
  a little more involved. You’ll want to ask what 
  that location offers that others don’t—maybe 
  you’re looking for a bit more intrigue in the rural 
  outskirts of town, and you don’t have a location 
  Ain’t that 
  the truth!
  Linking Milestones 
  & City Aspects
  If you’re looking to play a city-heavy 
  game—where cleaning up the city and 
  making it better for the mortal denizens is 
  a top priority—consider linking the PCs’ 
  advancement to how well they are encour-
  aging the city’s advancement:
    Lessening a City Theme… 
  Significant Milestone
    Lessening a Location Theme…
  Minor Milestone
    Inverting a City Theme… 
  Major Milestone
    Inverting a Location Theme…
  Significant Milestone
    Removing a City Threat… 
  Significant Milestone
    Removing a Location Threat…
  Minor Milestone
  Of course, this should be adjusted for the 
  amount of effort needed. If it takes several 
  sessions to remove a location’s threat, then it 
  was a bigger menace than it seemed at first 
  and should probably be bumped up a cate-
  gory or two. Likewise, taking a single session 
  to invert a city theme hardly warrants a full 
  major milestone.
  John 
  Marcone, 
  white 
  courtesy 
  phone!
  
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  Advancement
  like that. Depending on how close you stuck to 
  real-world facts during city creation, this may 
  involve more research on your part, or it might 
  mean just making something up and being sure 
  that everyone else can buy into this change.
  Coming up with new locations otherwise 
  works the same as when you were creating the 
  city (page 37).
  New Location, Old Face
  One trick you can use when coming up with 
  a new location is to promote an existing 
  NPC—either friendly or hostile to the 
  PCs—as the face of this new location. This 
  way, there’s some level of familiarity to this 
  location built in already. In addition, if this 
  is a drastic surprise to the characters (or 
  even the players!), it could be the core of a 
  new mystery.
  “Removing” a Location
  When you’re adding locations, you may realize 
  that an established location doesn’t seem to be 
  important anymore. If so, note that down next 
  to its entry on the city sheet. Don’t “erase” it—
  that location might serve as a cameo or even take 
  the spotlight once again.
  unless, of course, it was “erased” by 
  a wizard who is hard on buildings…
  Hey!
  Faces and 
  Other NPCs
  Unlike locations, faces are fairly easy to change. 
  They’re like any other character the GM feels 
  the need to change up for story progression.
  Replacing or Adding 
  a Location’s Face
  In most cases, it’s pretty obvious when to replace 
  a location’s face—when you need a new one. If 
  an existing face has moved on (or was moved 
  along), the GM will need to create a new one. 
  Additionally, if one of the faces has proven 
  to be…well, boring, the GM could consider 
  replacing the face with a more interesting NPC. 
  You can also move an existing face to a new loca-
  tion, as described above.
  Adding a new face can also happen when you 
  add a new location. See City Creation (page 41) 
  for all the details on creating faces. 
  Changing or Adding 
  a Face for a City 
  Theme or Threat
  Sometimes beginning a new story arc demands 
  that the GM introduce a new face for a city 
  theme or threat. Alternately, a face who fills a 
  vital role in your story (head of a faction, etc.) 
  might die or otherwise be written out of the 
  story and need to be replaced. When these sorts 
  of things happen, the GM should create this 
  new NPC just like it’s done in City Creation 
  (page 41), including tying him in with a city 
  theme or threat.
  If the city’s aspects—its themes or threats—
  have changed, the GM should consider revising 
  the NPCs tied to those changed aspects. Would 
  altering one or two of the NPC’s aspects help 
  the NPC remain closely tied to the new theme 
  or threat? In extreme cases, the NPC might 
  need to be replaced completely. 
  Missives from Captain Obvious!
  
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  Advancement
  Changing Existing NPCs
  The GM needs to exercise the most discretion 
  when changing existing NPCs. These changes 
  largely depend on what kind of relationship 
  you want them to have with the PCs over time. 
  Consider the following general categories:
  Static NPCs: These are NPCs (or monsters) 
  that the GM doesn’t plan to advance, per se. 
  Perhaps they’re meant for the PCs to eventu-
  ally grow strong enough to overcome after a long 
  story arc. In this case, they shouldn’t grow more 
  powerful (or, at least, grow at a much slower rate 
  than the PCs). 
  Rivals and Nemeses: A great technique for 
  maintaining a good long-term rival or nemesis 
  NPC (or peer NPC ally, for that matter) is for 
  the GM to advance that NPC using exactly the 
  same process the PCs go through—when the 
  PCs hit a minor, significant, or major milestone, 
  the GM should advance the NPC the same 
  way. This helps the NPC stay approximately as 
  powerful as the PCs.
  Other NPCs: There are no hard and fast rules 
  here—when the GM thinks an NPC needs to 
  get a bit more powerful or change in some way, 
  the GM should make those changes.
  Aspects and Changed NPCs: The GM should 
  adjust NPCs’ aspects as required to keep pace 
  with in-game events. Add new ones that become 
  important (don’t forget conflict consequences!), 
  remove existing ones that are no longer relevant, 
  and resolve troubles where appropriate.
  New Face,  
  Same as the Old Face…
  When replacing a face for a location or 
  a city theme or trouble, think about the 
  old NPC’s high concept and motivation. 
  You don’t want the new character to seem 
  so much like the last face that it feels like 
  there’s no change. Remember, this character 
  was probably written out of the story for a 
  reason.
  If the high concept is similar, make sure 
  the motivation is different. Or, if you need 
  the motivation to be the same or similar, 
  twist the high concept into something new. 
  Consider how the old NPC was removed 
  from the story and if this new NPC would 
  be a friend or foe of the old one.
  Oh, look, the next page has me 
  getting my ass kicked by yet 
  another half-naked villainess. 
  My life is messed up.
  Sexy. Deadly. Honestly, I have no idea why 
  they flock to you as much as they do, boss. 
  Well, the former set, at least.
  Now that you bring it up, that is something I’ve been struggling 
  with while getting the art together for these books. 
  See, georgia has me thinking a lot about how women get 
  portrayed in game art—and I’m trying to stay aware of that—but 
  I’m also trying to stick close to the source material of your cases.
  Fidelity to the casefiles is important to me, Harry; it’s the best source of 
  information I have. But this also means that 90% of the time I’m just going 
  to be showing stuff that you’re doing. And that includes getting your ass 
  kicked by half-naked villainesses. I mean, the red and White court vampires 
  and the Fae seem to be somewhat clothing averse, and they’re not alone, so 
  it does seem like a lot of your adversaries are running around half naked.
  there are a lot of strong women in your life, but often that 
  strength comes out in conversation, not action—but action is what 
  makes it into the art. So we’ve got murphy kicking ass here and there, 
  the Archive completely going to town on the denarians...but it’s not 
  as extensive as I’d like. We may have to live with that, though.
  If only I 
  could have 
  a nemesis 
  who wasn’t 
  any more 
  powerful 
  than I am.
  Who is your 
  nemesis, 
  anyway? So 
  many people 
  want you dead…
  Thanks. 
  Really. 
  You sure 
  know how to 
  make a guy 
  feel good.
  
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  - cHAPter SeVeN -
  Aspects
  
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  Aspects
  What Are 
  Aspects?
  The central character attributes in The 
  Dresden Files RPG are called aspects. 
  Aspects cover a wide range of elements and 
  define what makes your character unique—basi-
  cally, they describe the core of your character’s 
  identity. (By contrast, skills, stunts, and super-
  natural abilities could be said to paint a similar 
  picture of what your character can do, rather 
  than who he is.) 
  Aspects can be:
    Relationships (Mama’s Boy, 
  Apprentice to Ancient Mai)
    Beliefs (The Lord Is My Shepherd, 
  Nothing Is Forever)
    Catchphrases (Can’t Keep My 
  Mouth Shut, “It’s Not My Fault!”)
    Descriptors (Wiseass Wizard, 
  Rugged as the Road)
    Items (Sword of the Cross, 
  My Mother’s Pentacle)
    Pretty much anything else that paints a 
  vivid picture of the character (Big Man 
  On Campus, Anger Is My Constant 
  Companion)
  In terms of game rules, aspects are the main 
  avenue by which you gain or spend fate points 
  (page 19) for your character. Fate points are a kind 
  of currency that can be spent for bonuses, and 
  they are earned when aspects cause problems 
  and complications for the character. 
  Here’s a summary of all the ways that aspects 
  are used in the game:
  Invocation: Spend a fate point, describe how 
  one of your character’s aspects is beneficial to 
  him, and get either a +2 bonus or a reroll to a 
  skill roll.
  Invocation for effect: Spend a fate point and 
  describe how one of your character’s aspects 
  allows you to make a declaration (page 116) of 
  fact about something in the game.
  Compel: Either receive a fate point when one 
  of your character’s aspects works to his disad-
  vantage, or spend a fate point to avoid that 
  disadvantage. 
  Tag: On any aspect you create or discover in 
  a scene, get the first invocation for free (as in, 
  without spending any fate points). 
  At the start of a game, you’ll place aspects 
  on your character as part of the process of char-
  acter creation (page 52). Starting player characters 
  (PCs) have seven aspects, including one aspect 
  each for their high concept (page 54) and their 
  trouble (page 55). These aspects are effectively 
  permanent, though they can change over the 
  course of time. 
  In addition, during the city creation process 
  (page 24) you will also place aspects on the setting 
  in which the game takes place—these work 
  just like character aspects do, defining the most 
  important features and elements that make the 
  city unique.
  You will also encounter temporary aspects 
  during the course of play. These aspects 
  might be placed on your character to describe 
  momentary changes of condition or circum-
  stance (Off-Balance, Broken Nose), or 
  they might be placed on an environment to 
  highlight elements that might come into play 
  during a scene (Gas Main, On Fire, Uneven 
  Terrain). Typically, you will use your skills to 
  create or discover these aspects during play (see 
  page 113 for more information).
  Using Aspects
  The process of using an aspect begins by 
  proposing that one is relevant. Either a player or 
  the GM may make this proposal. Next, deter-
  mine if the aspect’s relevance is working for or 
  against the character that has the aspect. 
  As a general rule, if it’s for, it is considered an 
  invocation and the character will probably be 
  spending a fate point; if it’s against, it’s consid-
  ered a compel and the character will probably 
  be receiving a fate point. Each type of aspect use 
  has specific rules governing how it functions, 
  but if you ever find yourself confused about 
  the basics of using aspects, come back to this 
  fundamental idea.
  Invoking Aspects
  When you can apply an aspect to the situation 
  your character is in, it can be used to give you 
  a bonus. Doing this requires spending a fate 
  point (see below) and is called invoking the 
  aspect. In this context, the aspect makes your 
  character better at whatever he’s doing, because 
  the aspect in some way applies to the situation. 
  A 
  BROKEN 
  NOSE 
  doesn’t feel 
  “momentary.”
  It’s an 
  abstraction. 
  A broken nose 
  doesn’t really 
  redefine who 
  you are (in 
  most cases) — 
  that’s what 
  we mean by 
  momentary.
  You can 
  invoke 
  & compel 
  aspects that 
  aren’t yours, 
  right?  
  Like aspects 
  on other 
  characters 
  and scenes?
  Yeah, we discuss 
  that in detail 
  a little later 
  in the chapter.
  
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  Aspects
  Invoking an aspect can be used to either:
    Pick up all the dice you rolled and re-roll 
  them; or
    Leave the dice alone and add 2 to the 
  result.
  It is possible to use more than one aspect on 
  a single roll, but you can’t use the same aspect 
  more than once on the same roll or action 
  (even if you’ve re-rolled the dice, that’s still the 
  same roll or action). Re-rolls are riskier than 
  just taking the +2 bonus—you can always 
  end up worsening things or not making much 
  improvement—but when the dice just didn’t roll 
  your way, a re-roll can be a much cheaper way 
  to recover. The +2 option is the surest way of 
  improving a roll that’s good, but not quite good 
  enough.
  The GM is the final arbiter of when an aspect 
  is or is not appropriate (to minimize disagree-
  ments between players and GM, see “Getting 
  on the Same Page,” page 112). Usually this means 
  you must invoke an aspect that is appropriate 
  to the situation at hand. If you want to invoke 
  an inappropriate-seeming aspect, be prepared to 
  describe how the action actually is appropriate 
  to the aspect. The GM’s priority here should 
  not be to strictly limit the use of aspects, but 
  rather to ensure appropriate use by encouraging 
  players to make decisions that keep their aspects 
  interesting. 
  Example: Maya McKenzie is hiding nearby as 
  Biff is about to get pounced on by a rampaging 
  werecat. She rushes to try to push him out of 
  the way using her Athletics as a block action 
  (see page 210), but rolls terribly on the dice, 
  getting --0-. Thankfully, she has an aspect 
  called Biff’s Steady Girlfriend and the 
  GM has previously agreed that this is the sort 
  of thing she can invoke to help Biff out. Maya’s 
  player, Amanda, spends a fate point, invokes 
  Biff’s Steady Girlfriend, and re-rolls 
  the dice.
  Her subsequent roll of +0-+ is better, 
  but she’s worried she needs more than a +1 to 
  her Athletics skill to get both herself and Biff 
  out of the werecat’s way. She can’t use Biff’s 
  Steady Girlfriend again on the same 
  action, so Amanda spends a fate point and 
  suggests that Maya could use her Quiet as 
  a Mouse aspect, what with cats and mice 
  being mortal enemies. The GM looks skeptical, 
  however, so Amanda looks for another aspect 
  that fits. Luckily, Maya also has Uncommon 
  Sense as an aspect and suggests that it makes 
  a better fit—essentially changing her approach 
  from “push Biff out of the way” to “I know cats, 
  so I had an inkling it was going to pounce—
  let’s both get out of the way!” and using that for 
  a little extra motivation to achieve success. 
  The GM agrees, and Amanda spends 
  another fate point, this time invoking 
  Uncommon Sense for a +2 to the result. 
  With an Athletics roll at +3, she’s much more 
  confident that she’ll be able to get herself and Biff 
  clear of the werecat’s rampage—at least long 
  enough for their wizard pal Evan Montrose to 
  whip up something to slow it down.
  You aren’t limited to the aspects on your 
  character’s sheet when you make an invoca-
  tion—any aspect that your character is aware 
  of or has access to can potentially be invoked. 
  This includes aspects on other characters, on the 
  scene (see page 105 for more on scene aspects), or 
  on the city. For details on doing this, see 
  “Interacting with Other Aspects” on page 105.
  Invoking for Effect
  You can also invoke an aspect for effect, using 
  it to declare a fact or circumstance that would 
  be of benefit to your character. This costs a 
  fate point like any other invocation does. For 
  example, you could invoke your character’s 
  Warden Connections aspect to declare that 
  there’s a Warden actually in town.
  Different groups will have different tastes 
  regarding the potential scope of invoking for 
  effect, and your group should talk this over to 
  see where each player stands. GMs are encour-
  aged to be fairly liberal in this regard, provided 
  that the player’s desired effect is consistent with 
  the aspect and the overall sensibilities of the 
  game.
  For example, if the GM is hemming and 
  hawing over whether or not your character can 
  spend a fate point to declare that he arrives at 
  exactly the right moment, invoking your charac-
  ter’s Perfect Timing or Grand Entrance 
  aspect for that same effect should remove any 
  of her doubts. That said, this is not a method 
  for the players to get away with absolutely 
  anything—when in doubt, talk it through with 
  the group.
  As with regular invocations, you can also 
  spend fate points to invoke aspects on the scene 
  or on other characters for effect. See page 105 for 
  more details on that.
  Good luck. 
  Wardens 
  are a little 
  light on the 
  ground these 
  days due to 
  the Vampire 
  War.
  
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  Aspects
  Compelling 
  Aspects
  An aspect can also allow you to gain more fate 
  points by bringing complications and troubling 
  circumstances into your character’s life. When 
  this occurs, it is referred to as compelling the 
  aspect. Usually, a compel focuses on only one 
  aspect, but, in certain rare situations, more than 
  one might be compelled for a larger payout.
  The GM often initiates compels. When she 
  compels one of your aspects, she’s indicating that 
  your character is in a position where the aspect 
  could create a problem or a difficult choice. 
  However, you can also cause the GM to compel 
  another character’s aspects with a similar ratio-
  nale and results (see “Compelling Other Aspects,” 
  page 107). Sometimes, compels even happen by 
  “accident” when a player plays his character’s 
  aspects to the hilt and gets into complicated 
  circumstances without any nudging.
  When you are the target of a compel, you may 
  negotiate the terms of the compel a bit, just to 
  make sure that the outcome doesn’t violate your 
  character concept or create a similarly undesir-
  able effect. Once the terms are set, you have a 
  choice: spend a fate point and ignore the aspect, 
  or accept the complications and limitations on 
  your character’s choices and receive a fate point. 
  When you accept the fate point, the aspect is 
  officially compelled. 
  GMs take note! Keeping the compels lively 
  is your explicit responsibility during play. 
  Staying on top of your compels and leaning 
  in hard on them whenever the opportuni-
  ty’s there will keep the game exciting. Don’t 
  be shy!
  Players take note! If you “self-compel,” 
  bring it to the GM’s attention to get your 
  fate point!
  There are a few ways an aspect can compli-
  cate a character’s life via compels: it limits the 
  responses available to a character in a certain 
  situation, it introduces unintended complica-
  tions into a scene, or it provides the inspiration 
  for a plot development or a scene hook for that 
  character.
  
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  Aspects
  Limitations
  An aspect may limit actions and choices. If 
  your character would normally have a number 
  of choices in a particular situation and acting 
  in accordance with his aspect is going to make 
  more trouble for the character and limit those 
  choices, that’s grounds to compel the aspect.
  It’s important to note that an aspect may 
  dictate the type of action when compelled this 
  way, but it usually won’t dictate the precise 
  action, which is always the player’s decision. In 
  this way, compelling the aspect highlights the 
  difficulty of the choices at hand by placing limits 
  on those choices, using the idea of the aspect to 
  define (or at least suggest) those limits.
  Example: Murphy has an aspect indicating 
  her Quick Temper. The FBI’s just blown 
  into town and is demanding to take over her 
  case. Murphy could shoot her mouth off here, 
  making things pretty uncomfortable for her, so 
  the GM compels her Quick Temper aspect, 
  saying, “These guys are really ticking you off. 
  Maybe you should tell them what you think of 
  the FBI’s usual quality of work…” and sliding 
  forward a fate point. 
  If Murphy accepts the fate point, she’s 
  accepting that her Quick Temper aspect 
  should limit her choices of how to respond here. 
  Maybe she’ll tell the FBI off to their faces, or 
  maybe she’ll simply storm out—that’s her 
  choice—but however you slice it, her Quick 
  Temper should come to the fore immediately. 
  Then again, she’s been having enough trouble 
  as it is at work, and she knows her superiors 
  on the force would be very upset if she got into 
  it with an FBI agent; that could result in nega-
  tive repercussions, so maybe it’s time to suck it 
  up and spend a fate point to keep that temper 
  in check…
  Complications
  An aspect may also complicate a situation, rather 
  than directly limiting your character’s choices. 
  If everything would be going along normally 
  and the aspect makes things more difficult or 
  introduces an unexpected twist, that’s grounds 
  for a compel. In some cases, complications may 
  suggest that certain consequences are mandated, 
  such as failing at a particular action without 
  a skill roll—perhaps your character would 
  succeed at a defense roll against a Deceit action, 
  but his Gullible aspect is compelled, forcing a 
  failure if you accept.
  Example: Harry Dresden has the aspect The 
  Building Was on Fire and It Wasn’t 
  My Fault. He’s trying to rescue a girl from a 
  pair of White Court baddies when he gets into 
  a fight with them. Slinging his blasting rod and 
  shooting off a gout of flame, he aims to burn one 
  of them to ash when the GM slaps down a fate 
  point. “How about you miss and that flame of 
  yours ends up being another Building Was 
  on Fire situation?” 
  Harry’s player, Jim, considers: he’s pretty 
  light on fate points due to his low refresh, and 
  the warehouse is otherwise empty of people—
  no worries about killing anyone. It’s early in 
  the session, so there’s plenty more story to come, 
  and he knows he’ll need those fate points when 
  it does. Plus, the vampires haven’t killed this 
  girl yet, so he’s betting they’re keeping her alive 
  for a reason. 
  On the other hand, he’s wasting an action in 
  the conflict by failing this attack, and he knows 
  that the more he lets this happen, the more of a 
  reputation it gives him as a spreader of destruc-
  tion, which could come back to haunt him later. 
  And he has to live with the fact that some poor 
  uninvolved mortal’s warehouse just got burned 
  down, and this time, it totally is his fault.
  Jim weighs his options, takes the fate point, 
  and agrees to miss (this time, at least). The 
  warehouse begins to burn.
  GM-Driven Compels
  Some compels are used to directly drive the story 
  in one way or another and, as such, are really the 
  province of the GM. A good GM will want to 
  use the aspects of the PCs to create adventures 
  and provide the basis for scenes. 
  This means that sometimes an aspect may 
  add a complication “offscreen,” such as when 
  the GM decides to use a character’s personal 
  nemesis as the villain for a session or to give the 
  character an unpleasant responsibility or assign-
  ment. She might also use a character’s aspect 
  to justify a particular “hook” for a future scene. 
  When this happens, it counts as a compel.
  GMs should not rely on a player’s particular 
  response to this kind of compel to drive a plot—
  remember, the purpose of a compel is to create 
  drama, not force people into things. Keep in mind 
  that a player can always negotiate the terms of 
  a compel—he might have an even better idea 
  for a dramatic way to start a scene or move the 
  story along.
  Not funny.
  OK, maybe a 
  little funny.
  
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  Aspects
  Example: Thomas has an aspect for his 
  family: Fallen Prince of the Raith 
  Family. This means he’s a liability for his 
  house and his father is continually trying to 
  find ways for other people to kill Thomas for 
  him. The Red Court is going to be throwing a 
  lavish ball at the Velvet Room, and Lord Raith 
  has sent Thomas a “note” letting him know 
  that Thomas is expected to attend. The GM 
  suggests that this is a compel based on Thomas’ 
  Fallen Prince aspect, because his status 
  in the family doesn’t leave him many choices. 
  Thomas’ player, Clark, accepts and the GM 
  gives him a fate point.
  There are at least two ways Clark can fulfill 
  the terms of this compel. Thomas can take the 
  easier but possibly deadly choice of attending 
  the Red Court ball, or he can defy Lord Raith, 
  which would take the story in a very different 
  direction—in that case, Lord Raith would 
  come after him with intensity and fury. If he 
  was taken by Lord Raith’s servants, he would 
  have to answer dearly for his defiance...
  Sometimes, it may seem as though there 
  is no practical way to buy out of a “scene-
  starter” compel. Suppose you have the 
  aspect My Dear Brother, and the GM 
  proposes a compel with, “Hey, so you find 
  your brother beaten to a pulp and left on 
  your doorstep, with a note that says ‘Now 
  we know where you live’ on it.” It would 
  be pretty lame to spend a fate point and 
  suggest that it doesn’t even happen. 
  Keep in mind, though, that when you 
  buy out of a compel, what you’re really 
  buying out of is the potential complication 
  that could arise from what’s proposed. 
  You’re giving yourself the option of a 
  response that’s not as dramatic. So you don’t 
  have to say, “No, my brother doesn’t show 
  up on my doorstep.” You might say, “Man, 
  I’ve got a lot going on right now in this 
  story…look, here’s a fate point, and let’s say 
  I call an ambulance and just get him to the 
  hospital.”
  (What about just delaying the arrival of 
  the wounded brother for a scene or two? 
  Either you buy out of the complication or 
  you don’t. If the complication’s going to 
  happen and you want to do another scene 
  first, that’s a thing for the group to negotiate 
  over—see below—but it doesn’t get into the 
  actual mechanics of refusing a compel.)
  Say Yes, Roll the Dice, or Compel 
  You may have gathered this already, but just to be clear, 
  there’s a chance that a compel could happen any time 
  you might otherwise pick up the dice. Usually, when 
  you as a player want to try to do something, the GM 
  will have you roll dice if she has an interesting idea of 
  what might happen if you fail. If she doesn’t, there’s 
  really no reason to roll at all. 
  But, if there’s a good opportunity for your action 
  to complicate things, she might “trade in” the dice roll 
  in favor of making up something that’s interesting 
  and engaging. This is great stuff to make dramatic 
  moments with, and it’s definitely something you can 
  use as well—as long as you’re willing to deal with the 
  potential complications, you might be able to succeed 
  at an immediate task in exchange for future problems. 
  For example, Harry’s aspect of The Building Was 
  on Fire and It Wasn’t My Fault is something he 
  could point at and say “How about I blast through this 
  wall and escape my attackers, but the place catches 
  on fire and starts to collapse?” The GM might say, 
  “Okay, but you’re going to get picked up by the cops 
  because someone spots you leaving the scene,” and 
  accept that as a worthy compel, handing Harry a fate 
  point without the dice ever getting involved. There’s no 
  need to roll and see how the spellcasting went since its 
  success and nasty fallout has already been stipulated as 
  a consequence of the compel.
  Situations like this can really help inspire players to 
  get involved in the evolving story. 
  A Note for GMs: 
  “Accidental” Compels
  It’s worth remembering that sometimes players 
  simply play to their aspects without thinking to 
  ask for a compel. When that happens, the GM 
  should make a note of it (sometimes—even 
  often—with the player reminding her) and, if 
  possible, award the player with a fate point retro-
  actively. If it’s too late for that, the GM should 
  make a note to give that player one extra fate 
  point next session, after the refresh.
  It’s important that the GM keep in mind 
  what sorts of things would normally constitute a 
  compel. Compels happen in order to make certain 
  choices or situations more difficult or more 
  dramatic for the compelled character. Certainly, 
  staying in character and playing in a way that’s 
  appropriate to a character’s aspects should be 
  praised; but it should be rewarded only when the 
  player’s aspect-consistent play has actively made 
  his character’s choices more difficult.
   I demand 23 
  retro active 
  fate points.
  
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  Aspects
  Negotiating a Compel
  In play, players and the GM can both initiate 
  compels. When the GM initiates a compel, the 
  process is very simple. The GM remarks that the 
  aspect might be appropriate here and offers you 
  a fate point. Of course, in a perfect world, the 
  GM would always be aware of all aspects and 
  always know when they should be compelled 
  and rewarded. In practice, the GM is keeping 
  track of a lot of stuff and may not realize that 
  you have an aspect that is appropriate to the 
  situation. 
  When this happens, you should feel free to 
  capture the GM’s attention and point to the 
  appropriate aspect, holding up a fate point and 
  raising your eyebrows or giving some other 
  signal to indicate you thinks it’s time for a 
  compel.
  When you call attention to one of your char-
  acter’s aspects, it may be as formal as “I think my 
  Green Eyes of Jealousy aspect applies here,” 
  or it may be conversational, like, “Boy, that guy 
  talking to my girl is pretty suave, as I watch them 
  with my Green Eyes of Jealousy” (bran-
  dishing a fate point). There’s no one way to do it 
  and groups are encouraged to fall into whatever 
  pattern is most comfortable for them.
  After a player or the GM suggests a compel, 
  the immediate next step is to negotiate over the 
  terms. Usually, the person who suggests the 
  compel has an idea in mind already, but that 
  doesn’t mean things are set in stone. Remember: 
  compels are supposed to make things more 
  dramatic and interesting, not force people into 
  boxes. So, you should feel free to offer a suit-
  ably dramatic counter-proposal if you feel it’d 
  be more in keeping with your character, suggest 
  alternate details, and so on. Likewise, GMs 
  should feel free to turn up the heat on a player 
  who’s proposing a weak compel.
  Example: Harry and Billy are in the park 
  investigating a sudden rain of frogs and have 
  gotten into an argument. Due to some recent 
  developments in the Grave Peril case, Jim, 
  Harry’s player, has changed one of his aspects 
  to I Work Alone. As the argument gets more 
  heated, Jim suddenly turns to the GM and 
  brandishes a fate point menacingly, insisting, “I 
  Work Alone!” 
  The GM blinks for a few moments before 
  remembering the recent addition to Harry’s 
  sheet. She smiles and slides forward a fate 
  point. “You do work alone, as it so happens,” 
  
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  Aspects
  she says. “And it’s left you tired, cranky, and 
  inattentive as you work yourself into an early 
  grave. Which is why you’ve totally failed to 
  notice the ghoul with the shotgun in the shop-
  ping cart, right?” 
  Jim groans. “Yeah. I guess I’m so focused 
  on getting Billy to stop trying to play in the big 
  leagues, I just end up missing it.” He pauses, 
  and adds, “Can we at least make this compel 
  about me losing face to Billy and having to 
  admit he’s right, rather than being about me 
  getting my ass blown away in the first scene?”
  The GM grins and says, “Tell you what. 
  I’ll say that the ghoul doesn’t actually get to 
  take advantage of the fact that you’re defense-
  less, but maybe this hit is a little bigger than I 
  originally thought. Oh, and Billy will get initia-
  tive for the conflict. Deal?” 
  Jim groans again and agrees. The GM 
  hands over a fate point and also describes a 
  black pickup truck pulling up, bringing more 
  assailants with guns. A pitched firefight ensues, 
  and things in Harry’s life have just gotten a 
  whole lot more interesting.
  What’s a Weak Compel?
  When judging whether or not a compel is 
  “worthy,” the primary thing to look for is whether 
  the outcome provides a palpable sense of conse-
  quence to the character and/or the story. If the 
  outcome isn’t going to create something that’s 
  going to matter much in the grand scheme of 
  things, then it probably isn’t enough to work as 
  a compel. Making a compel more worthy might 
  mean that the GM changes the circumstances 
  of a conflict to be less advantageous to a char-
  acter; it might mean that the session suddenly 
  takes a stunning new direction plotwise; or it 
  might mean that the character has an additional 
  problem to deal with that he didn’t before. As 
  long as it’s an effect you can feel in play, it’s prob-
  ably good enough.
  Compelling 
  Multiple Aspects
  Occasionally, a situation will come up in play 
  that seems to be relevant to more than one of 
  your character’s aspects. This should not be seen 
  as a problem—rather, it’s an opportunity for 
  high drama. 
  When a situation is complicated enough 
  to involve more than one aspect, then all the 
  aspects are subject to a compel. You must decide 
  how to deal with this—after negotiating, you 
  can take every compel for a large payout, or take 
  only a certain number and then buy out of the 
  rest. This might mean that you ultimately break 
  even on fate point gain, but that’s okay—it still 
  shows your character’s priorities in a dramatic 
  moment, which is a successful compel.
  Keep in mind that there should be a clear 
  complication or limitation offered by each 
  aspect; one complication that references two 
  aspects shouldn’t give you two fate points unless 
  it’s a really, really big deal. And if that’s the case, 
  you might want to consider the optional escala-
  tion rule instead.
  Example: Michael Carpenter is on a mission 
  from God, seeking out a diabolist. After a 
  period of investigation, he discovers the location 
  of his quarry and that the diabolist is planning 
  Imminent Demon-Summoning Badness ™. 
  Michael is a Knight of the Cross and 
  it’s his job to stop the nefarious bastard (which 
  Michael would never call him, of course), no 
  matter what the cost. To get there in time, he 
  has to drop everything and go right now.
  However, he’s also a Family Man, and 
  some of the diabolist’s minions have captured 
  his family and are holding them hostage at a 
  location across town from the diabolist’s ritual 
  site. He cannot be in both places at once.
  The GM looks at Michael’s player, Ryan, 
  and says plainly, “This is a compel of your 
  Knight of the Cross aspect and your 
  Family Man aspect. You must choose which 
  way you’re going to go.”
  Ryan grits his teeth, thinks about it, and 
  says, “I must do the Lord’s work—faith is what 
  I’m all about, right? I have to go take out the 
  diabolist and put my family in God’s hands 
  for now. But you can bet that as soon as the 
  summoner’s defeated, I’m going to rescue them 
  with all haste.”
  The GM decides that both aspects are 
  certainly complicating Michael’s life—he’s 
  following his obligation as a Knight, which will 
  have as yet untold consequences for his family. 
  She slides over two fate points—he’s going to 
  need them.
  Jeez, 
  Billy, try 
  not to 
  rub that 
  one in or 
  anything.
  Hey, you 
  weren’t the 
  one who had 
  to get naked 
  in a public 
  park in order 
  to put a 
  hurtin’ on a 
  ghoul. I’m just 
  glad that 
  I was going 
  commando in 
  sweatpants 
  that day…if 
  I had a nickel 
  for every pair 
  of boxers I’ve 
  destroyed…
  I really 
  didn’t 
  need to 
  know that, 
  okay?
  
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  Aspects
  Interacting 
  With Other 
  Aspects
  The aspects on your character are not the only 
  aspects that you can use. Your fellow players’ 
  characters have aspects, of course, as do some 
  NPCs. Sometimes even the scene itself may 
  have aspects (called, shockingly, scene aspects), 
  like Dark or Cluttered; see page 198 in Playing 
  the Game for more details. Additionally, the 
  city where your campaign takes place will have 
  aspects on it that your group will make up 
  during city creation (see page 24), which can be 
  considered scene aspects on nearly every scene.
  To interact with an aspect other than your 
  own, your character needs to directly interact 
  with the object, location, or person that has 
  the aspect you want to invoke, in a way that 
  is appropriate to the action in progress. This 
  means that if a scene has an aspect of Ill Met 
  by Candlelight, not only can characters be 
  described as emerging from the shadows with 
  eerily under-lit faces, but those characters may 
  also invoke the aspect to aid their Stealth rolls 
  (thanks to the low lighting implied). They might 
  later invoke it to knock the candles over and set 
  the room ablaze, or to trigger encounters that 
  are inopportune to one or more parties (“Ill 
  Met” indeed!).
  Your character also needs to have reason-
  able access to the aspect in question. With scene 
  aspects, this is easy—your character usually just 
  needs to be present in the scene to interact with 
  the aspect. There are several ways you can gain 
  access to an aspect that is on another character 
  or scene:
    Discover it via assessment (page 115)
    Create it with a declaration (page 116)
    Establish it with a maneuver (page 207)
    Inflict a consequence (page 203)
  If your character can interact directly with the 
  owner of the aspect in an appropriate manner 
  and has reasonable access to the aspect in ques-
  tion, you may use that aspect in a number of 
  different ways.
  Escalation 
  (Optional Rule)
  Rarely, in moments of high tension or 
  drama, the GM can choose to escalate a 
  compel. This optional rule should only 
  be used when your character is having a 
  defining moment in his story. As a result, 
  some GMs may wish to require that your 
  character’s high concept (page 54) be in play 
  when this optional rule is used.
  Escalation can only occur when you 
  have bought out of a compel. To escalate, 
  the GM slides forward a second fate point 
  and prompts with something like, “Are you 
  sure…?” 
  If you accept, you’ll get two fate points 
  instead of one, in addition to getting back 
  any you’ve spent to buy out of the compel in 
  the first place; if you refuse, it’s going to cost 
  you another fate point (for a total of two). 
  In the rarest of cases, when the story is at its 
  highest tension, the GM may escalate a final 
  time, making the reward and cost to buy out 
  three fate points. If you are willing to spend 
  three to refuse this truly epic compulsion, 
  the book is closed.
  You can also prompt the GM to start an 
  escalation. When sliding forward your first 
  fate point to buy off a compel, say something 
  like, “I won’t go along for one fate point…” 
  Most GMs will look at the situation at 
  that point and decide whether or not it’s 
  a moment of high drama. If it isn’t, they’ll 
  accept the proffered point; but if it is, the 
  escalation’s on!
  GMs may also want to consider turning 
  the crank each time a player chooses to 
  escalate. Each step of the back-and-forth 
  between player and GM should add some 
  detail to the story that shows the stakes are 
  escalating—it’s not a simple game of chicken 
  via sliding tokens around on a table. For 
  example, if the aspect compelled is Greedy 
  and escalation is in effect, things should be 
  spiraling rapidly from a simple moment of 
  avarice to an urge so powerful that klepto-
  maniacs would blush and give pause.
  Whatever the case, escalation should be 
  done sparingly. Compels will bring enough 
  heat on their own most of the time—you 
  don’t always need to be dropping nuclear 
  bombs.
  
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  Aspects
  Invoking 
  Other Aspects
  The procedure to invoke an aspect that isn’t on 
  your character is precisely the same as a regular 
  invocation: just declare how that aspect is rele-
  vant, spend a fate point, and take a +2 or a reroll. 
  The only thing to keep in mind is that, if you’re 
  invoking an aspect on another PC or on a NPC 
  to gain an advantage over them, that character 
  will receive the fate point you spent, either at the 
  end of the exchange (in conflict, see page 197) or at 
  the end of the scene (outside of conflict).
  Example: Biff’s player, Fred, knows that Maya 
  has the aspect Biff’s Steady Girlfriend. 
  It’s something both players set up during char-
  acter creation to highlight how Biff somehow 
  always ends up needing Maya to help him 
  out of a jam. It’s Biff’s turn to act, and since 
  Maya has shown up, he thinks it’s a great time 
  to use some teamwork to get the heck away 
  from the rampaging werecat. Fred describes 
  Biff grabbing Maya in his arms and making a 
  dive to get behind the wind-wall that Evan has 
  whipped up, saying he’s going to invoke Maya’s 
  Biff’s Steady Girlfriend aspect to do so. 
  Just as when he invokes his own aspects, Fred 
  spends a fate point and decides to use it as a +2 
  on his Athletics roll.
  This particular invocation was to Maya’s 
  advantage as well as Biff’s, so she does not get 
  the fate point that Biff spent.
  Later in the game, Biff is talking to 
  someone in a bar who’s been spying on him, 
  and he knows from a previous assessment that 
  the guy has a Bad Temper aspect. He decides 
  to invoke the guy’s aspect with his Intimidation 
  roll to get the guy to lose his cool and slip up. 
  Because that invocation creates a disadvantage 
  for the spy, the GM gives that character a fate 
  point at the end of the scene, to save for a future 
  meeting.
  Invocations on other aspects can also be done 
  for effect, allowing you to use someone else’s 
  aspect or a scene aspect to make a declaration. 
  All the guidelines for invoking for effect (page 99) 
  apply here.
  Tagging
  A tag is a special move that you may be able to 
  do when you’re invoking aspects other than your 
  own. Whenever you make a roll to gain access 
  to or create an aspect, as per the list on page 105, 
  you may invoke it one time, and one time only, for 
  free—as in, you don’t spend from your pool of 
  fate points to take advantage of the aspect. 
  A tag is subject to one key limitation: it must 
  occur almost immediately after the aspect has 
  been brought into play. Some minor delay is 
  acceptable, but should be avoided when possible. 
  At worst, a tag should happen sometime during 
  the scene in which it was established. Some 
  assessments are an exception to this time limit; 
  see page 115.
  If you wish, you can allow another character 
  to use the tag for an aspect you’ve discovered or 
  introduced. This allows for some great set-up 
  maneuvers in a fight; you can maneuver to place 
  an aspect on a target, then pass the tag to an ally 
  who attacks, using the advantage on his own roll. 
  This can only be done, however, if it is reason-
  able that the advantage could be passed off. A 
  sniper who uses a maneuver (page 207) to aim 
  his rifle at a target, putting an In My Sights 
  aspect on it, can’t pass the advantage to someone 
  else—the aspect placed is specific to him. But 
  if Harry uses a maneuver to put a Spritzed 
  With Holy Water aspect on a vampire, he 
  could reasonably pass the advantage to Billy, 
  who moves in for the knockout blow.
  Tags, even if they are to a character’s detri-
  ment, do not award a fate point like a normal 
  invocation would. If no fate point was spent, 
  there’s no fate point to pass around.
  Example: Harry Dresden has just used 
  his wizard’s senses to discover that the 
  Shadowman, a dark sorcerer who sent a toad 
  demon to eat him and his date, is observing 
  events from nearby using a sorcerous scrying 
  spell. This knowledge is the result of a skill roll 
  that revealed that the aspect Shadowman 
  Watching was (secretly) on the scene. Harry 
  decides to send a spell back up the link by way 
  of saying hello, and since he just discovered 
  (“assessed,” page 115) the aspect, he is due a tag. 
  When he casts the spell, he uses the tag to add 
  2 to his roll. This is clearly to the Shadowman’s 
  detriment, but since the tag was free for Harry, 
  the Shadowman doesn’t get a fate point. 
  Have I mentioned recently 
  Sells was a real jerk?
  He was a real jerk.
  Kincaid made 
  ample use of 
  “In My Sights” 
  at the Shedd 
  Aquarium. 
  Most of the 
  nickelheads 
  didn’t know 
  what hit them.
  Billy, is the 
  “you” here 
  meant for 
  players 
  or does it 
  include GMs 
  too?
  gms that 
  invoke an 
  aspect on a 
  Pc to gain 
  an advantage 
  over that Pc 
  definitely owe 
  a fate point. 
  good catch!
  
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   Later, Harry sends another spell up the 
  link to shut it down. This time, Harry has 
  to spend a fate point for his +2. Because the 
  invocation here is to Shadowman’s detriment 
  and this time Harry has spent a fate point, 
  Shadowman will receive a fate point at the end 
  of the scene. The GM makes a note of that, and 
  saves that point up for Shadowman to use in 
  the big confrontation a few scenes later.
  Tagging often involves temporary aspects 
  that result from maneuvers. Make sure you have 
  a grasp on how temporary aspects behave, which 
  you can find in the “Conflicts” section of Playing 
  the Game, page 207.
  Compelling 
  Other Aspects
  Being able to interact with the aspects of 
  others creates a powerful opportunity for the 
  clever player to set up another character to be 
  compelled. If you are aware of and can access an 
  aspect on another character or NPC, you may 
  spend a fate point to try to trigger the circum-
  stances of a compel (see page 100) on the target. If 
  the GM decides this is a compel-worthy circum-
  stance, then she takes the offered fate point and 
  proceeds with a compel, running it as if she had 
  initiated the compel herself. 
  This is a chain reaction—the first player calls 
  for the compel, and if the GM accepts it as valid, 
  she negotiates it with the player of the target 
  character, who either decides to accept (gaining 
  a fate point) or avoid (spending a fate point). 
  Once the initiating player spends the fate point, 
  he does not get it back even if the target buys out of 
  the compel. 
  As with a normal compel, the final result can 
  be negotiated as much as is necessary.
  Example: During the course of an investiga-
  tion, Harry Dresden has encountered a fetch, 
  a creature that feeds on fear. The fetch has the 
  aspect Fear-Eater on it, which Harry has 
  recently discovered thanks to a Lore roll to 
  figure out how to attack the fetch.
  Harry wants to draw the fetch to him 
  instead of another innocent victim, so he 
  decides to focus on his own fears, visualizing 
  them and reliving them to draw the fetch in. 
  Harry’s player, Jim, wonders if, rather than 
  going to the dice, he can short-cut all that and 
  go straight to getting the effect that he wants by 
  compelling the fetch’s Fear-Eater aspect. 
  The GM agrees that Jim can do this if he 
  spends a fate point (understanding that this 
  means the fetch then gets to consider and poten-
  tially refuse a compel). Jim agrees, and thus 
  uses Fear-Eater to trigger a compel of “this 
  fetch is drawn to me as its primary target.” The 
  GM, acting as the fetch, then needs to decide 
  if the fetch is willing to spend a fate point to 
  avoid this compel or gain a fate point and come 
  bee-lining for the wizard. If the fetch buys out 
  of it, at least Harry has cost it a fate point; if 
  it doesn’t, he’s drawn the creature to him. It’s a 
  win/win situation, of a sort…
  Scene Compels
  Scene aspects may imply some circumstances 
  that will befall any (or many) of the characters 
  in the scene—Everything Is Burning! is 
  a classic example and a frequent aspect in any 
  scene involving Harry Dresden. In such a case, 
  it’s entirely apropos to act as if that aspect is on 
  each character’s sheet and compel (see page 100) 
  the aspect for each of them, dishing fate points 
  all around and nicely covering the effects the 
  aspect has on the characters in the scene.
  Technically speaking, a player could try to use 
  a scene aspect to initiate a mass compel, but it’d 
  be a pretty expensive proposition—he’d have to 
  spend a fate point for every character he wants 
  to be affected by the compel.
  Game Aspects?
  Some GMs may wish to step out to an 
  even more “meta-” level and allow for a 
  game session or even the entire campaign to 
  have aspects on it (game aspects), like It’s 
  Always Darkest Before the Dawn or 
  The Vampire War. Such aspects should 
  be used sparingly, since their omnipres-
  ence will strongly shape the face of the 
  game. When adding a game aspect to your 
  campaign, ask yourself: am I okay with this 
  showing up in nearly every scene or session 
  (or at least the majority of them)?
  Low blow, 
  Billy. Low 
  blow.
  But so true!
  You’re 
  helping.  
  Stop helping.
  Why’s the 
  GM asking 
  for a fate 
  point here? 
  Shouldn’t 
  I... uh, Jim... 
  be getting a 
  “tag” here?
  Well, three 
  things. one, 
  a tag is an 
  invoke, not a 
  compel, though 
  your gm might 
  be fine with it 
  as a “tag for 
  effect” thing. 
  two, we figured 
  on the example 
  being clearer if 
  we didn’t bring 
  tags into it. 
  three, maybe 
  the tag was 
  already used 
  or expired.
  
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  Aspects
  Creating 
  Character 
  Aspects
  More than anything else, aspects are your most 
  explicit way of telling the GM, “This is the stuff 
  I want to see in the game.” If you pick an aspect 
  like Thorn in the Red Court’s Side, then 
  you should be able to expect that the GM will 
  put you at odds with vampires of the Red Court 
  pretty regularly. GMs should want players to use 
  their aspects and should design the story of the 
  game such that it is based on and around the 
  aspects the players have chosen for their char-
  acters (we’ll talk more about this in Building 
  Scenarios, see page 340). Players should pick the 
  aspects they want to use, and GMs should 
  encourage them to choose aspects that will be 
  both interesting and useful.
  Once you decide on an idea for an aspect, you 
  need to figure out a name that best describes 
  what you intend. There are usually many possible 
  names for a desired aspect, which can make this 
  choice somewhat difficult. However, most of the 
  time an aspect is going to be a phrase, a person, 
  or a prop. These categories of aspects aren’t hard 
  and fast, and there can be some overlap among 
  them—they’re just intended to give you an evoc-
  ative way to think about aspects and help break 
  mental blocks.
  A phrase can be anything from a simple 
  detail (Strong), to a short description 
  (Troll’s Blood Gives Strength), or even 
  a literal quote (“No One Is Stronger Than 
  Throgbal!”). Phrase aspects come into play 
  based on how often the character’s current situ-
  ation matches or suggests the phrase. A colorful 
  phrase adds a lot of flavor and innately suggests 
  several different ways to use it. This potentially 
  makes phrase aspects some of the most flexible 
  aspects in the game. 
  A person can be anyone important to your 
  character. A friend, an enemy, a family member, 
  a sidekick, a mentor—as long as someone 
  matters to your character, that someone makes 
  an appropriate aspect. A person aspect is most 
  easily used when that person is in the scene with 
  your character, but the aspect can come up in 
  other ways, depending upon the person’s history 
  and relationship with your character (ideally, the 
  relationship should be stated in the wording of 
  the aspect). 
  For example, a character might take My 
  Old Teacher Finn as an aspect. Beyond the 
  obvious applications of having Finn show up, 
  a player might also invoke this for a bonus and 
  justify it by talking about “hours spent in Old 
  Finn’s knife throwing classes” or something 
  similar.
  Keep in mind that an organization can be 
  used in the same way, representing both the 
  ability to call on that organization’s resources for 
  aid and the obligation to work for that organi-
  zation’s best interests, even when they conflict 
  with your own. So, Wizard of the White 
  Council is technically a “person” aspect in that 
  sense; it gives a character the ability to call on 
  the Council for aid, but also requires that char-
  acter to deal with whatever problems the asso-
  ciation might bring.
  Props are things, places, or even ideas—
  anything external to your character that isn’t a 
  person. A prop can be useful if it’s something 
  your character has with him or if it’s the crux of 
  a conflict, but it may also imply things about your 
  character or even be significant in its absence 
  (Ah, if only I had my Trusty Toolbox!) 
  and thus earn you fate points (see “Compelling 
  Aspects,” page 100). 
  Again, keep in mind that these categories are 
  allowed to blur if need be—an aspect like “Time 
  to Call the Mayor!” has elements of both a 
  phrase and a person, and that’s just fine. 
  Believe me, some of those Council problems can be real whoppers.
  
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  Aspects
  “Positive” Vs. 
  “Negative” Aspects
  Strictly speaking, the most beneficial aspects 
  for your character are the ones that are most 
  interesting; in this case, “interesting” specifically 
  means that they are double-edged—useable to 
  both the character’s benefit and detriment in 
  different situations.
  You may have noticed that a number of the 
  aspects throughout this book appear to be “bad” 
  aspects—they indicate a downside for a char-
  acter or a directly negative connotation. Aspects 
  like Often Drunker Than a Skunk, A 
  Born Sucker, Stubborn as Hell, and I 
  Can Never Tell a Lie all suggest situations 
  where the character will have to act a certain 
  way—making an ass of himself at an important 
  social function, falling for a line of bull, failing 
  to back down when it’s important to do so, or 
  speaking truthfully when truth is the path to 
  greatest harm.
  So why put such aspects on your sheet if 
  they’re only going to make trouble for you? 
  Simple: you want that kind of trouble.
  On a basic game-rules footing, these are a 
  direct line to getting you more fate points, and 
  fate points are the electricity that powers some 
  of the more potent positive uses of your aspects. 
  Outside of just the rules, a “negative” aspect 
  adds interest and story hooks for a character in 
  a way that purely positive aspects can’t. This sort 
  of interest means time in the limelight. If some-
  one’s trying to take advantage of the fact that 
  your character’s a Sucker for a Pretty Face, 
  that’s an important point in the story and the 
  camera is going to focus on it. They also immedi-
  ately suggest story ideas to your GM, providing 
  her with ways to hook your character in. 
  However, an aspect that has only negative 
  connotations could be limiting to your character 
  in certain ways, because you also need to have 
  an avenue to spend the fate points you’re taking 
  in. Aspects that are more “positive” are the chan-
  nels for what makes your character special and 
  awesome, allowing him to excel in situations 
  where others might not. 
  Likewise, you also don’t want an aspect that 
  has only positive connotations. Not only do they 
  prevent your character from routinely getting 
  fate points but, dramatically speaking, they’re 
  kind of boring. Stories about characters who are 
  always competent and always succeed are lacking 
  in conflict and surprise. If your character starts 
  to become predictable and boring, he’s probably 
  going to stop being a focus of the story.
  So, you definitely want to have hints of both. 
  The Rule of Three
  As a rule of thumb when picking an aspect, 
  think of three situations where you can see the 
  aspect in play. If you have one reasonably posi-
  tive situation and one reasonably negative situa-
  tion out of that set, you’re golden! If the aspect’s 
  uses are all negative or all positive, you may want 
  to reconsider how you’ve worded your aspect—
  try to put in a little of what’s missing. Ultimately, 
  though, one aspect that’s “all good” or “all bad” 
  isn’t much of a problem, so long as you have a 
  good mix throughout your whole set.
  As an example, something like Genius-
  Level Intelligence might seem like it doesn’t 
  provide very much in the way of negative output. 
  So you might change the context of it a little and 
  reword that to Nerdier Than a College 
  Professor. You could still justify getting the 
  same advantages as the original aspect, and 
  you could pick up some potential negative uses 
  in the social arena—maybe the character’s 
  attempts at social interaction are plagued by 
  people perceiving him as just too nerdy, or no 
  one ever takes him seriously when he’s trying to 
  intimidate or impress.
  Powered Props
  A player may want to take a prop aspect 
  for an item that has supernatural power 
  attached to it, to signify a “trademark” item 
  (think King Arthur and Excalibur). This 
  is a great idea, but keep in mind that your 
  character may need to invest other resources 
  (such as stunts, or time and effort) to 
  possess props of particular power. 
  In other words, it’s not enough to give 
  yourself an aspect saying you have a Sword 
  of the Cross—you’ll also have to buy 
  the sword as a facet of your supernatural 
  abilities. Or to look at it a different way, 
  the prop aspect is more about the rela-
  tionship you have with the prop than it is 
  about the prop itself and what it does. For 
  more on supernatural items for your char-
  acter, see Supernatural Powers (page 158) and 
  Spellcasting (page 248).
  
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  Aspects
  Keep in mind that it is possible to find posi-
  tive ways to use negative-seeming aspects. 
  Someone who is Stubborn as Hell may be 
  more determined to achieve his goals. Watchful 
  eyes might dismiss the guy who’s Often 
  Drunker Than a Skunk as “just a drunk” 
  when he’s using his Stealth skill.
  Situation Vs. Story
  Aspects also tend to divide into two camps—
  situation and story—and it’s a good idea to 
  make sure you have aspects of each type.
  The distinction between these is better illus-
  trated with examples, but here’s a general defi-
  nition: situation aspects describe circumstances 
  and events that routinely happen to the char-
  acter, while story aspects describe the reasons 
  why those things tend to happen.
  Situation aspects are often phrase aspects, 
  descriptors like Nick of Time, Last Man 
  Standing, and Always the Butt of a Joke. 
  They provide a set of expectations for the kind 
  of stuff you’re going to see happening whenever 
  that character is around. A good example from 
  Harry’s list is The Building Was On Fire, 
  And It Wasn’t My Fault—there is a pattern 
  of examples in the casefiles where Harry’s pres-
  ence contributes to or results in massive prop-
  erty damage of one kind or another. Characters 
  in novels, comic books, and other fictional media 
  often have these kinds of reliable, schtick-like 
  qualities as a way to make them more vivid 
  and interesting. Over time, they create a sense 
  of familiarity that helps people become more 
  invested in and sympathetic to the character.
  By themselves, though, situation aspects only 
  do half the job. Harry doesn’t just willy-nilly 
  decide to go around setting buildings on fire—it 
  happens because he gets drawn into those bad 
  situations somehow. There are things in his life 
  that drive him toward the events where those 
  situation aspects are going to come into play. 
  This is the role of story aspects.
  Story aspects are most often people and prop 
  aspects, representing those elements of the game 
  world that your character is tied to. They provide 
  a set of the likeliest candidates to bring trouble 
  to your character’s door and provide a reason for 
  him to go out into the night. A good example 
  from Michael Carpenter’s list is the way his high 
  concept, Knight of the Cross, sometimes 
  conflicts with his trouble, Family Man. 
  Michael is wholly devoted to the service 
  of God, his own wife, and his children. As a 
  result, a lot of trouble comes to his door—the 
  Almighty often compels (no pun intended) 
  Michael to leave home for what can only be 
  described as holy quests, and there are a few 
  examples where his family has played a part in 
  Harry’s casefiles, whether as victims, targets, or 
  active participants. 
  These things serve as an inherent impera-
  tive for Michael to do what he does, providing 
  essential context for understanding his actions. 
  For your character, they will also do something 
  else—provide a ready source of material that 
  is guaranteed to get your character into a story. 
  Story aspects help the GM come up with mate-
  rial for the game that will involve your character 
  personally from the get-go, which helps make a 
  more satisfying game for all those involved.
  The real mojo happens when story aspects 
  and situation aspects work together. Imagine 
  your character has both Stubborn as a Mule 
  and Samantha, My Long-Lost Sister as 
  aspects. During the game, the GM is definitely 
  going to provide clues as to the whereabouts of 
  your sister, bring in adversaries who try to use 
  the knowledge that she’s missing as leverage over 
  your character, or even just introduce the poten-
  tial to get more information. 
  Because these things are happening, your 
  character is going to have a lot of opportunities 
  to demonstrate that stubbornness in scenes and 
  conflicts, pushing against all odds in the hopes 
  that he can track his sister down. He’ll make 
  enemies, get into trouble because he’s too stub-
  born for his own good, conquer foes, and gener-
  ally shake up the world around him.
  That’s why it’s important to make sure you 
  have aspects like these. And again, keep in 
  mind that these are not hard and fast catego-
  ries—some aspects might straddle the line a bit. 
  Consider a hitman character with an aspect of I 
  Hate the Person I’ve Become—this might 
  be both a story and a situation aspect in some 
  sense, even though it doesn’t imply a connection. 
  Personal issues can be a very strong source of 
  motivation for some characters, and it’s easy to 
  imagine this hitman getting drawn into a story 
  in an effort to redeem himself in his own eyes. 
  Likewise, the aspect also suggests a number of 
  behaviors that might become trademark for him, 
  like having an uncharacteristic merciful streak, 
  or engaging in wild, destructive behavior out of 
  self-loathing.
  You hear that, 
  Harry? You’d 
  make a great 
  character in a 
  novel!
  That may 
  be one of 
  the scariest 
  ideas I’ve 
  ever heard.
  Billy, your 
  ability 
  to take 
  someone’s 
  life and 
  reframe it 
  so it fits in 
  this game… 
  well, it kind 
  of disturbs 
  me. I just 
  want you to 
  know that.
  Hey, it’s not 
  All a teaching 
  text. People 
  have to play 
  it, too!
  
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  Aspects
  Heating Things Up
  Aspects are one of the major sources for igniting 
  ideas and story hooks for your character. They’re 
  the first thing a GM will look at on your sheet 
  when trying to work out what sorts of stories 
  to throw your way. This is powerful juju, and 
  the best part is that you are in total control of 
  it with the words you choose for your aspect. If 
  one character has the aspect Quick and another 
  has the aspect Sworn Enemy of the Secret 
  Brotherhood of the Flame, which one do 
  you think suggests more ideas for the GM? Your 
  aspects give you a “vote” in what sort of game 
  you’re going to be playing in. Don’t let it go to 
  waste. (If nothing else, you have just established 
  that the Secret Brotherhood of the Flame exists 
  in the setting, and the GM will probably turn to 
  you for further details.)
  At first glance, the most powerful aspects 
  would seem to be things that are broadly useful 
  with no real downside—things like Quick, 
  Lucky, or Strong—and you may be tempted 
  to go with those. Resist that temptation!
  See, there are three large problems with 
  broad aspects like these: they’re boring, they 
  don’t generate fate points, and they surrender 
  your ability to help shape the story.
  Boring is pretty obvious. Consider a char-
  acter who is Lucky and one who has Strange 
  Luck. Both aspects can be used for many good 
  things, but the latter allows for a much wider 
  range of possibilities—and more compels (see 
  page 100 for more on compels). Remember, every 
  time an aspect makes trouble for you, you’ll 
  receive a fate point. Strange Luck means 
  that the GM can throw bizarre—even unfortu-
  nate—coincidences at your character, but you get 
  paid for it. (If this doesn’t seem tempting enough 
  yet, remember that the GM is probably going to 
  do something bizarre to you anyway—shouldn’t 
  you benefit from it and have some say in how it 
  happens?)
  The most powerful aspects are easy to spot: 
  they’re the most interesting ones. An aspect you 
  can use to your advantage, but which can also 
  be a disadvantage, has the most mechanical 
  potency. What’s more, aspects that tie into the 
  setting (connecting your character to a group or 
  a person) help you fill in the cast of characters in 
  a way that is most appealing to you.
  Whenever you’re writing down the name of 
  an aspect, ask yourself, “How hot is this aspect?” 
  If it seems kind of lukewarm, then you might be 
  missing the mark, and it’s time to turn up the 
  heat. You certainly don’t have to do this with 
  every aspect you take, but it’s a great way to stay 
  involved in the overall story.
  Here are a few “good—better—best” 
  examples:
    Tepid: Wizard. 
  Toasty: Wizard Private Eye. 
  Fuego!: The Only Listing 
  Under “Wizard” in Chicago’s 
  Yellow Pages.
    Tepid: Strong. 
  Toasty: Troll-Blood Strong. 
  Fuego!: Strong-Man of the 
  Winter Court.
    Tepid: Dark Past. 
  Toasty: Reformed Evil Cultist. 
  Fuego!: The Ebon Shroud Cult 
  Wants Me Dead.
  In each of these cases, the “tepid” option 
  certainly suggests its uses, but it doesn’t really 
  jump off the page as something that suggests 
  story. The “toasty” option is better since it’s more 
  specific; both GM and player can see some 
  potential story hooks in these, and they serve 
  to differentiate themselves from their lukewarm 
  predecessors. But in terms of rocking the house 
  and suggesting story left and right, “Fuego!” is 
  what you want.
  The Only Listing Under “Wizard” 
  in Chicago’s Yellow Pages could well 
  be a prime driver for why dark and compli-
  cated stories tend to take a full-tilt run at 
  Harry Dresden’s head. Strong-Man of the 
  Winter Court not only suggests that the 
  character is very strong and faerie-blooded, 
  but it also states a relationship with the Winter 
  Court itself. That’s three sides to the aspect right 
  there. The Ebon Shroud Cult Wants Me 
  Dead both references the character’s dark past 
  and complicates his present circumstances, with 
  there always being a chance that some heavies 
  from his former cult will come knocking and go 
  snicker-snack with his head.
  So when you pick an aspect, ask yourself: is 
  this tepid, is this toasty, or is this “Fuego!”?
  See, boss? I told 
  you that ad was a 
  bad idea. 
  Everyone’s 
  a critic.
  
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  Aspects
  Getting on 
  the Same Page
  Aspects are probably the clearest message 
  you can send to the GM about what you want 
  from the game, short of walking right up to 
  her and saying so (which is also a great plan). 
  Furthermore, in all likelihood, the GM is going 
  to have copies of your character sheets when 
  you’re not around, so the aspects you’ve picked 
  are going to represent you in absentia. Once 
  you’ve picked all the aspects for your character, 
  take a step back and look at them. Do they 
  represent your character the way you want them 
  to? If not, change them!
  By themselves, aspects can’t say it all. Short of 
  making each aspect a paragraph or essay, you’re 
  dealing with a few short, catchy phrases and 
  names here. You want them reasonably short, 
  because you want to be able to talk about them 
  casually without running out of breath.
  But the brevity of an aspect’s name means 
  some things are left unspoken. It’s beneficial 
  to take the time with the GM at some point 
  to speak these unspoken things. When you’re 
  picking aspects, one of the best ways to deter-
  mine that you and the GM are on the same page 
  is to discuss where you feel the aspect would be 
  a help or a hindrance. Both you and the GM 
  should look at an aspect not as the end of an 
  idea, but as the beginning of one. You’re both 
  going to bring your own ideas of what the aspect 
  means to the table and, at least to some extent, 
  you’re both right. 
  Usually this works out fine—the combined 
  perspectives make the whole greater than the 
  sum—but sometimes you and your GM might 
  have a radically different idea of what the aspect 
  entails. So be clear with one another and figure 
  out how to iron out any differences of perspec-
  tive—ideally before the fate points start flying, 
  since taking fifteen minutes to get into an intense 
  discussion about what you meant when you gave 
  yourself the aspect “Look Out Behind You!” 
  can be a real momentum-killer for the game.
  Example: In the Baltimore example, Rob is 
  creating a wizard named Evan Montrose. He 
  decides to take the aspect Meticulous since he 
  figures it’s nicely reflective of the character. The 
  GM asks what sort of things it’ll be useful for, 
  and Rob suggests that it’s useful for him when 
  he needs to pay attention to the details and get 
  things precisely right. He figures this will come 
  into play most often when Evan is carefully 
  putting together a thaumaturgical spell.
  The GM likes it, but she asks if there’s 
  any way this might end up causing trouble for 
  Evan. After thinking about it, Rob offers that 
  the aspect probably means that Evan responds 
  poorly when things aren’t done by the book. The 
  GM asks if By the Book wouldn’t be better 
  than Meticulous, but Rob doesn’t like the 
  sound of that—he wants something that feels 
  like it has a broader reach, but does agree that 
  Precision is Everything is a bit spicier. 
  The GM offers the idea that Evan might have 
  trouble improvising and dealing with chaos.
  Rob thinks about this and realizes that 
  Evan also has an In Over My Head aspect 
  on his sheet—the idea definitely plays well with 
  Precision is Everything, suggesting that 
  Evan’s need to do things in specific, particular 
  ways probably means he’s often making the 
  choice to do things the hard (but right!) way. 
  The GM agrees and makes a few notes in her 
  notebook about Evan’s meticulous nature. With 
  a little back and forth, both the player and GM 
  now have a much better sense of how the aspect 
  will work in play.
  After you’ve gotten a couple sessions under 
  your belt, you might feel like you’ve picked one 
  or more aspects that don’t “feel right.” If an aspect 
  doesn’t seem to be working out well for you, you 
  should feel free to change it—just make sure the 
  GM is in tune with what you’re doing and that 
  you keep her in the loop. (She might give you a 
  cool reason to keep the one you have after all.)
  Your e 
  v e r y 
  clever
  uh... what?
  Just working something out.
  Thanks!
  Boss, you dropped the a from the RE
  
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  Aspects
  Creating and 
  Discovering 
  Aspects in Play
  There are several ways previously unknown or 
  nonexistent aspects can show up in play.  Here, 
  we’ll discuss the methods.
  Guessing Aspects
  Sometimes, you might want to use an aspect 
  that’s on a scene or character without actually 
  knowing if the target has the aspect in question. 
  In other words, you’re making a guess—maybe, 
  just maybe, an aspect fitting a particular descrip-
  tion is there—and, while guesses are allowed, 
  they’re subject to some special rules.
  One way to make a guess is to roll it as an 
  assessment action (see page 115); if it’s successful, 
  the GM can reveal whether or not the target has 
  a similar aspect. The good part about this option 
  is that, even if your guess is wrong, you’ll still get 
  an aspect from the target if the action succeeds. 
  The bad part is that a target will usually get a 
  roll to defend himself from being assessed, and 
  therefore the attempt might fail.
  Another route is to spend a fate point and try 
  to guess the aspect, explaining how you intend 
  to use the aspect if it exists. This is basically 
  “gambling” with an invocation or compel—
  you’re committing your fate points on the possi-
  bility that your hunch about the target’s aspects 
  is correct. You won’t get another aspect from 
  the target if you’re wrong, but because you’re 
  spending the fate point, the target will not get 
  the option to defend against you.
  If, conceptually speaking, the guess hits 
  reasonably close to the mark—even if it doesn’t 
  match the aspect’s exact name—the GM should 
  exercise some flexibility and allow it. 
  Example: Harry is sneaking up on a gang or 
  a cult—he isn’t sure which yet—in a shad-
  owed warehouse. His player, Jim, might “guess” 
  that a scene has a Darkness aspect on it and 
  spend a fate point, asking if he can invoke it 
  for his Stealth roll to get near the cult unde-
  tected. The scene has the aspect Shadowed 
  Corners instead; but Jim’s guess is reasonably 
  close to the mark, so the GM reveals that the 
  aspect is Shadowed Corners and allows the 
  invocation.
  If the guess just plain misses the mark, 
  and the fact that the mark was missed doesn’t 
  amount to a significant and potentially secret 
  piece of information, you should get the chance 
  to reconsider your guess and take back the fate 
  point you spent.
  Example: Same as before, but this time, the 
  GM’s idea of the warehouse is that it’s actually 
  pretty well-lit—big fluorescent lights hanging 
  on the ceiling, etc. When Jim spends the fate 
  point and explains his intent, the GM holds up 
  her hand: “It’s actually pretty well lit in here. 
  There are fluorescent lights everywhere, many 
  of them turned on.” Jim takes back his fate 
  point, since this wasn’t a particularly secret bit 
  of information—it just hadn’t been brought up 
  yet.
  If the guess misses the mark, but missing the 
  mark tells you something significant and poten-
  tially secret, the fate point is still spent. This sort 
  of circumstance almost never comes up with 
  scene aspects, but it can come up when guessing 
  at aspects on another character, and may even 
  amount to a “reveal” (see “Assessment,” page 115) of 
  the target’s true aspect.
  
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  Aspects
  Example: Harry’s trying to reason with his 
  lycanthrope captor and spends a fate point, 
  guessing at an aspect on the guy—something 
  along the lines of Reasonable Man. The 
  GM smiles darkly and shakes her head. “No; 
  the more you talk to this guy, the more you 
  realize he’s a bundle of rage under the skin. 
  Reasoning with him won’t work.” The fate point 
  stays spent—Harry has learned some valuable 
  information about his captor and may even 
  be able to guess at the existence of an Easily 
  Angered aspect that he could invoke later on. 
  He could also try to sweet-talk the GM nicely 
  enough that she’ll consider this to be a reveal of 
  such an aspect, allowing for a tag (page 106).
  In the worst case scenario, your guess misses 
  the mark because you’ve been duped. This will 
  most often happen as the result of a Deceit 
  action (see page 126), although it might arise from 
  other circumstances. In such a case, the deceiver 
  can either return the spent fate point to you or 
  leave it spent. 
  If he leaves it spent, you just learned you were 
  duped—you don’t get the benefit of tagging the 
  aspect, but you’ve learned something significant 
  about your target. The deceiver does not get this 
  spent fate point for himself, either—it’s simply 
  gone. 
  If the deceiver returns the fate point to you, 
  things may actually be a bit worse for you—the 
  deceiver gets to place a temporary aspect on you 
  (and tag it), representing how he managed to 
  snooker you.
  Example: Harry is in a limousine with John 
  Marcone. Unbeknownst to Harry, Marcone 
  succeeded in an earlier Deceit roll that let him 
  appear to be Well-Informed and Wary 
  About Wizards. Like all good lies, this 
  has a grain of truth in it: Marcone is indeed 
  well-informed, but he’s not cautious in the way 
  Harry’s been led to believe. When Harry goes 
  for an Intimidation ploy to try to get Marcone 
  to back off, he meets Marcone’s eyes and spends 
  a fate point, saying he’ll invoke Marcone’s 
  Wary About Wizards aspect to improve 
  his roll, with the intent of getting Marcone to 
  back down and break the eye contact before the 
  soulgaze (page 226) hits. 
  But this is exactly what Marcone wanted. 
  He opts to give back Harry’s fate point and 
  turns the tables, putting a temporary aspect of 
  Trapped by the Tiger’s Soul on Harry, 
  and taking the tag to give him a free +2 on 
  his roll as the two enter into a sudden, deep 
  soulgaze. Harry’s doesn’t get the benefit of 
  invoking an aspect that isn’t actually there and 
  has gotten suckered into a soulgaze he didn’t 
  want—with Marcone in the superior position!
  Regardless, guesses can’t, and shouldn’t, be 
  made willy-nilly. There must always be a justi-
  fication for making the guess. If the guess seems 
  unjustified—if the player is “shotgunning” 
  guesses to randomly try to figure out another 
  character’s aspects—the GM is completely justi-
  fied in shutting that player down cold.
  Read Now or Read Later?
  These next three sections (“Temporary 
  Aspects”, “Assessments” and “Declarations”) 
  rely a lot on later parts of the book. If 
  you don’t understand all of it right now, 
  don’t worry! Come back and reread these 
  bits later.
  Temporary 
  Aspects
  Unlike the “permanent” aspects built into a char-
  acter’s sheet, temporary aspects are introduced 
  to (or inflicted upon) a character or scene by the 
  actions of a character in the game, but fade from 
  that recipient over time. Temporary aspects may 
  differ in terms of the duration and tenacity with 
  which they stay on their recipient.
  Most commonly, a temporary aspect results 
  from a successful maneuver (page 207). If you get 
  no shifts on a maneuver roll, the maneuver is 
  considered successful, but the aspect is consid-
  ered fragile—that is, it can only be tagged once 
  and then it goes away. Fragile aspects are usually 
  described as very momentary changes of circum-
  stance—if you use Guns as a maneuver to aim at 
  a target and you don’t get any shifts, you might 
  call that aspect A Quick Bead. When you 
  attack the target, you can tag it; but then you 
  lose your bead on him for some reason, like he 
  shifts position or slips behind cover or some-
  thing else.
  
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  Aspects
  If you get shifts on a maneuver roll, the 
  resulting aspect is said to be sticky—in other 
  words, it “sticks” to the target until something 
  can be done about it. Sticky aspects don’t go 
  away after they’re tagged, allowing people to 
  spend fate points to continue to invoke them. 
  These are usually described in more severe terms 
  than fragile aspects, to represent that they’re a 
  tangible problem or advantage for a character. If 
  you get shifts on a Guns maneuver to aim, you 
  might call that aspect Right in My Sights—
  essentially, you can hold a steady aim on your 
  target until he does something drastic to throw 
  your aim off.
  Sticky aspects may be easier to place on a 
  location or scene rather than on another char-
  acter, because the scene can’t roll to “defend” 
  against your maneuver. This is especially true 
  when they potentially offer complications 
  to everyone present, on both sides, as with a 
  maneuver to add a The Building’s on Fire! 
  aspect to a scene. 
  Getting rid of a sticky aspect requires making 
  a successful maneuver roll to cancel the effects 
  of the maneuver. If a character is in a position 
  to stop you from getting rid of the maneuver, 
  he can try to make an appropriate “defense 
  roll” to oppose you. If he succeeds, the aspect 
  remains. If you succeed, it goes away. If no one 
  is in a position to stop you from getting rid of 
  the maneuver, it’s very easy—you just have to 
  make a roll against a difficulty of Mediocre (+0). 
  Temporary aspects that result from maneu-
  vers will always go away at the end of a conflict 
  or scene.
  Some temporary aspects have real staying 
  power and have the ability to outlast a scene; 
  they may even stay affixed to the target for as 
  long as a session (or more) of play. Those kinds of 
  temporary aspects are called consequences, and 
  each character has a certain limit on how many 
  he can take, based on his skills. They represent 
  lasting effects such as physical wounds, psycho-
  logical problems, and so forth. These aspects 
  usually can’t be removed by normal means—
  they require appropriate justification to remove, 
  as well as the expenditure of a certain amount of 
  recovery time. For more details on consequences 
  and recovering from them, see page 203 in Playing 
  the Game.
  Assessments
  Sometimes you may choose to use your skills 
  to make a careful assessment well in advance 
  of taking action—maybe as part of putting 
  together a plan, or simply observing the target 
  long enough to learn something that would be 
  a critical advantage. This approach is most often 
  used with skills that have an element of percep-
  tion—such as Investigation and Empathy—
  but knowledge skills could also be applied to 
  discover “knowable things.” Here, the skill is 
  not used to place a temporary aspect on the 
  target (as with a maneuver, page 207) so much as 
  to discover an existing aspect on the target that 
  may have been hidden or secret. 
  Because this aspect is freshly introduced 
  into play by your action, you should be able to 
  tag this aspect. However, you’re often going to 
  use assessment as a way to prepare for a future 
  encounter, which may not happen for several 
  scenes. So, if you’ve discovered an aspect this 
  way, you don’t have to worry about the usual 
  time limit (page 106) for tagging until the first scene 
  where you encounter the target of your assess-
  ment. Aspects discovered in this fashion are still 
  present after these time limits expire, so they can 
  still be invoked later.
  All assessment efforts require the use of a 
  significant chunk of time, usually indicated in 
  the skill write-up. However, this time invested in 
  preparation allows these skills to come to bear in 
  more time pressured environments (like a fight) 
  where they would not typically be useful.
  Example: Harry consults with Bob about 
  werewolves, trying to learn all that he can about 
  them. He’s particularly concerned about the 
  loup-garou he thinks he’s going to be tangling 
  with, so he focuses his efforts there—using his 
  Lore skill, with Bob’s help. The GM sets a diffi-
  culty for the Lore roll to discover (assess) an 
  aspect of the loup-garou that might help Harry 
  in an altercation with it. Thanks to Bob’s help, 
  it’s a success, and Harry now knows that the 
  loup-garou is Vulnerable to Inherited 
  Silver.
  William, how 
  does the sort 
  of assessed 
  aspect shown 
  in the loup 
  garou example 
  interact with 
  the notion of 
  “The Catch”  
  (page 185) 
  when dealing 
  with the 
  supernatural 
  toughness 
  abilities?
  think of it as 
  a com ple men-
  tary add-on. 
  the catch is the 
  vulnerability, 
  but the aspect 
  represents 
  part of the 
  advantage the 
  character gains 
  from knowing 
  about it (and 
  is a source of 
  fate points for 
  the creature 
  with the 
  vulnerability).
  
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  Aspects
  Bad form, boss. 
  that’s not a fate 
  I’d wish on anyone.
  Declarations
  Traditionally, perception and knowledge 
  skills usually focus on the discovery of what 
  already exists (“knowable truths”). But in The 
  Dresden Files RPG, these skills also allow 
  for declarations. That is to say, using these skills 
  successfully can allow you to introduce entirely 
  new facts into play and then use those facts to 
  your advantage. These new facts might also take 
  the form of an aspect. (For example, if your char-
  acter has a strong Alertness or Investigation skill, 
  you might use a declaration to add features to a 
  scene for you to use to your advantage—when 
  the fire starts, your character just “happens” to 
  notice that the janitor left a bucket of water in 
  the hallway.)
  As with maneuvering (page 207) and assess-
  ment (above), the resulting aspect can be tagged. 
  Unlike assessment, declaration doesn’t take any 
  actual in-game time at all—just successful use of 
  a knowledge skill at the right moment.
  Example: Evan Montrose finds himself facing 
  a pack of Black Court vampires that he’s trying 
  to ditch, but he doesn’t have any of their usual 
  weaknesses on hand. He doesn’t have time to 
  research things—he’s in the middle of a chase—
  so his player, Rob, decides to invent some details 
  about the environment Evan’s in so he can take 
  advantage of them. He uses his Alertness skill 
  to declare that the scene has an aspect of Pipes 
  Full of Running Water—the GM thinks 
  this is a reasonable, possible, and fun way for 
  Evan to evade his pursuers, so she sets a low-ish 
  difficulty for the roll. If Rob’s roll succeeds, he’ll 
  will find the pipes and should be able to use 
  the scene aspect on a subsequent roll (tagging 
  the aspect, since he introduced it) by opening a 
  main valve and halting their pursuit—running 
  water and Black Court vampires tend not 
  to mix.
  Many skills have a trapping (page  120) 
  allowing some kind of knowledge—for example, 
  someone might use his Guns skill to make some 
  declarations about the firepower an opponent is 
  carrying.
  As with assessments, aspects created with 
  declarations don’t go away after being tagged, 
  so long as circumstances make it reasonable 
  that they hang around. This does mean that 
  occasionally assessments and declarations can 
  backfire on the character establishing them 
  (other characters might use the same aspect, or 
  the GM might bring that aspect back around to 
  complicate the character’s endeavors).
  Example: Rob has declared Pipes Full 
  of Running Water on the scene and used 
  that to help Evan evade his pursuers. Rob tells 
  the GM that Evan will do a tracking spell to 
  help him get a bead on the missing person he 
  was tracking through here. She grins and says, 
  “Makes sense, but you know, now there are all 
  these pipes full of running water everywhere…
  you know running water grounds out magical 
  energy, so those pipes are going to create a 
  natural threshold in this area.” Rob sighs and 
  realizes the spell’s going to be a bit harder than 
  he anticipated.
  So, 
  declarations 
  can make up 
  anything?
  Within reason. 
  If it’s fun and 
  entertaining, 
  it should be 
  easier than 
  if it’s boring. 
  check out the 
  guidelines for 
  setting the 
  difficulties in 
  ruNNINg tHe 
  gAme, page 310.
  GM Advice:  
  Why Do Declarations 
  Seem Easier than 
  Assessments?
  A close reading of the rules here may 
  suggest that declarations are easier than 
  assessments. Declarations take less time 
  and may have lower difficulties than assess-
  ments. This perception is mostly correct.
  The thing is, declarations done by the 
  players take some of the “work” off of the 
  GM. Assessments are largely a case of the 
  players asking a GM to provide them with 
  detail. By contrast, a player driving a decla-
  ration is supplying some of his own content 
  for the game, which makes the GM’s job 
  much easier and, better still, increases the 
  player’s buy-in. 
  I wish I could just 
  declare something 
  like “Red Court 
  vampires are deathly 
  allergic to cheese.”
  So how are 
  these different 
  from the 
  declarations 
  you can make 
  when you spend 
  a fate point 
  like you have 
  on page 20?
  they Are 
  similar. the fate 
  point version 
  is more limited 
  but also more 
  certain. Here, 
  you’re saving 
  the fate point 
  but getting the 
  uncertainty of a 
  skill roll and the 
  traction of a 
  temporary aspect.
  
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  Aspects
  Sample Aspects
  To get a sense of how aspects might be used in 
  play, consider the examples below. Not all of 
  these are “Fuego!” aspects (see page 111) and that’s 
  intentional; “Fuego!” really works best when an 
  aspect is personalized for a particular character. 
  For many, many more examples of aspects, 
  take a look at the sample characters found in 
  Volume 2: Our World, as well as those in 
  Nevermore/Baltimore in this book (page 358).
  Exiled to the Special 
  Investigations Division
  The character is a Chicago police officer in the 
  Special Investigations unit; this is where they 
  send all the problem cops so they can work all 
  the weirdest cases.
  A player might invoke this to: Get a bonus 
  when working with other Special Investigations 
  folks, know things about the stranger happen-
  ings in a city, exercise the authority of the 
  Chicago P.D.
  A GM might compel this to: Complicate the 
  character’s life with his lack of real standing in 
  the police department, drop the weirdest cases 
  on his desk, give him a warrant for a werewolf, 
  that sort of thing.
  Faerie Bargain
  The character has made a bargain with one of 
  the Fae, usually for power or some other benefit. 
  Such bargains have a high price.
  A player might invoke this to: Enjoy the bene-
  fits of his bargain, make contact with the Faerie 
  realms, know things about the Fae.
  A GM might compel this to: Trap the char-
  acter in the terms of his bargain, place the char-
  acter in the middle of a power struggle between 
  the Faerie Courts, complicate his life with Fae 
  meddling.
  A Mighty Fortress Is My God
  The character’s faith in God is central and 
  important to him. It guides him and shapes him, 
  forming a foundation for his actions as a moral 
  being. (This likely goes hand-in-hand with  a 
  strong rating in the Conviction skill—page 124—
  representing the character’s strength of faith.)
  A player might invoke this to: Bolster his 
  prayers, ward off evil, seek guidance from above.
  A GM might compel this to: Temper the 
  character’s reasons for fury with forgiveness 
  and mercy, force him into moral conundrums, 
  complicate his life with the “will of God.”
  My Apprentice
  The character has an apprentice with “lesser” 
  (or at least less-trained) abilities than his own. 
  Naturally, this apprentice is bound to get into 
  troubles of his own and remains a constant 
  responsibility to the character, but he has the 
  potential to grow into a powerful ally.
  A player might invoke this to: Do a little team-
  work with his apprentice or ensure his appren-
  tice is available to send on an errand.
  A GM might compel this to: Get his apprentice 
  in trouble, set up the mentoring responsibilities 
  such that they run counter to the goals of the 
  mentor, engineer a situation where his appren-
  tice must go on trial before the White Council…
  Old World Order
  Due to a long life or strange upbringing, the 
  character is steeped in “Old World” values and 
  rules from another time and place.
  A player might invoke this to: Navigate the 
  political climate of the Red Court or the White 
  Council, negotiate with ancient creatures, 
  enforce an archaic code of conduct in a duel.
  A GM might compel this to: Cause the char-
  acter to behave anachronistically in the modern 
  world or otherwise have difficulties adapting to 
  the current age.
  This Is Not A Shopping List!
  Hey, you! 
  Yes, you, the guy who’s looking over this 
  list like he should start taking aspects from 
  it and putting them on his sheet.
  Stop it! 
  These are examples to get you to imagine 
  much cooler stuff of your own. None of these 
  are as awesome as your own ideas. So don’t 
  treat this as a shopping list—treat it as 
  inspiration to say “I can do better than that!”
  I’m going to 
  start blaming 
  you for 
  everything 
  bad that 
  happens to 
  me, Billy. 
  You are 
  clearly 
  talking to 
  my GM.
  Just close 
  your eyes and 
  think of the 
  fate points…
  
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  Aspects
  Poor Impulse Control
  The character has a penchant for acting from 
  his gut, and quickly at that. Hesitation isn’t a 
  problem for him, but he doesn’t have a tendency 
  to exercise caution, either.
  A player might invoke this to: Respond quickly, 
  attack suddenly, anger or scare someone.
  The GM might compel this to: Cause the char-
  acter to lose his temper, shoot his mouth off, or 
  otherwise leap before looking.
  Walking Under the 
  Doom of Damocles
  The character has broken one of the Laws of 
  Magic, but there were mitigating circumstances 
  that stayed his execution at the hands of the 
  White Council. As a result, he’s on probation—
  under constant surveillance by the Wardens, 
  due to lose his head at a moment’s notice if he 
  missteps even once.
  A player might invoke this to: Draw the White 
  Council’s attention (if they’ve been ignoring 
  something they shouldn’t), establish a “name” 
  or “reputation” in the supernatural community, 
  run a “con” on some supernatural bad guys to 
  convince them he’s one of them.
  A GM might compel this to: Draw the White 
  Council’s attention (if they’ve been missing 
  something the character hopes they’ll keep 
  missing), add complications to the plot (like 
  having a Warden show up every third scene to 
  threaten the character), remove potential allies 
  because they can’t handle the risk of being seen 
  with the character.
  White Court Virgin
  Perhaps unaware of his true heritage, the char-
  acter is from the bloodline of the White Court 
  vampires, but he hasn’t yet consummated his 
  power by feeding upon (and killing) a victim. He 
  is caught between the promise of power and the 
  dark price of it and may find himself drawn to 
  feed in times of stress.
  A player might invoke this to: Attempt to 
  control his abilities, gain insight on interactions 
  with others of the White Court.
  A GM might compel this to: Place a tempting 
  “meal” before the character, entangle him in 
  his family’s machinations to get him “initiated,” 
  tempt him to give into his bestial urges.
  Wizard of the 
  White Council
  The character is a full wizard of the White 
  Council, an heir to a bloodline of power, able to 
  exercise vast and strange powers of magic.
  A player might invoke this to: Maneuver in 
  White Council politics, aid in the casting of 
  spells and the knowing of occult lore.
  A GM might compel this to: Come under 
  White Council scrutiny or obligation, be a target 
  of the White Council’s many enemies.
  and that is 
  SO FUN to 
  live through.
  
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  - cHAPter eIgHt -
  Skills
  
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  Skills
  What Are 
  Skills?
  If aspects define who a person is, skills define 
  what he can do and how he defends himself. 
  Some skills are straightforward, like Michael 
  Carpenter’s conviction and his capability 
  with a sword. Others are more open, like 
  John Marcone’s ability to get what he needs 
  through his resources and charisma. And Harry 
  Dresden’s own inner strength and discipline are 
  skills he uses to wield magic. 
  Almost every time you need to do or react to 
  something, you’ll be rolling one of your charac-
  ter’s skills and adding that skill’s rating, based on 
  the ladder on page 16. Any skills your character 
  doesn’t have listed default to Mediocre (+0). 
  Each skill has a number of trappings, which 
  are the rules for the skill in various circum-
  stances. Each trapping has a name, so it’s easier 
  to reference; whenever you encounter a trapping, 
  you’ll see a K next to it.
  Rules and advice for setting difficulties for 
  various skills and their trappings are covered in 
  Running the Game (starting on page 310) and cross-
  referenced in this chapter on a per-skill basis. 
  Skills are enhanced—either through bonuses 
  to rating or though additional trappings—
  by mortal stunts and supernatural powers, 
  which are covered by their own chapters (page 146 
  and page 158). 
  Here is the list of skills, their trappings, and 
  the page where you can find the rules for them.
  Page
  Skill	
  Trappings
  121
  Alertness
  Avoiding Surprise, Combat Initiative, Passive Awareness
  121
  Athletics
  Climbing, Dodging, Falling, Jumping, Sprinting, Other Physical Actions
  123
  Burglary
  Casing, Infiltration, Lockpicking
  123
  Contacts
  Gathering Information, Getting the Tip-Off, Knowing People, Rumors
  124
  Conviction*
  Acts of Faith, Mental Fortitude
  125
  Craftsmanship
  Breaking, Building, Fixing
  126
  Deceit
  Cat and Mouse, Disguise, Distraction and Misdirection, False Face Forward, 
  Falsehood and Deception
  127
  Discipline*
  Concentration, Emotional Control, Mental Defense
  128
  Driving
  Chases, One Hand on the Wheel, Other Vehicles, Street Knowledge and Navigation
  129
  Empathy
  Reading People, A Shoulder to Cry On, Social Defense, Social Initiative
  130
  Endurance*
  Long-Term Action, Physical Fortitude
  130
  Fists
  Brawling, Close-Combat Defense
  131
  Guns
  Aiming, Gun Knowledge, Gunplay, Other Projectile Weapons
  132
  Intimidation
  The Brush-Off, Interrogation, Provocation, Social Attacks, Threats
  133
  Investigation
  Eavesdropping, Examination, Surveillance
  134
  Lore
  Arcane Research, Common Ritual, Mystic Perception
  135
  Might
  Breaking Things, Exerting Force, Lifting Things, Wrestling
  135
  Performance
  Art Appreciation, Composition, Creative Communication, Playing to an Audience
  136
  Presence*
  Charisma, Command, Reputation, Social Fortitude
  138
  Rapport
  Chit-Chat, Closing Down, First Impressions, Opening Up, Social Defense
  139
  Resources
  Buying Things, Equipment, Lifestyle, Money Talks, Workspaces
  140
  Scholarship
  Answers, Computer Use, Declaring Minor Details, Exposition and Knowledge Dumping, 
  Languages, Medical Attention, Research and Lab Work
  142
  Stealth
  Ambush, Hiding, Shadowing, Skulking
  143
  Survival
  Animal Handling, Camouflage, Riding, Scavenging, Tracking
  144
  Weapons
  Distance Weaponry, Melee Combat, Melee Defense, Weapon Knowledge
  * These skills affect stress tracks. See page 201 for more on stress tracks.
  
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  Skills
  Alertness
  (Stunts, page 149)
  Alertness is a measure of your character’s passive 
  awareness—his ability to stay on his toes and 
  react to sudden changes in his environment. In 
  short, it is the perception skill to notice things 
  that you are not looking for. High Alertness 
  characters strike early in a fight, tend to pick up 
  on details of a scene simply by entering it, and 
  are rarely surprised. They include bodyguards, 
  outdoorsmen, and sneaky criminals.
   
  K Avoiding Surprise 
  Alertness
  Whenever the trap is sprung in an ambush 
  (see Stealth, page 142), you can make one final 
  Alertness  check against the Stealth of your 
  attacker in order to see if you are surprised. If 
  you fail this check, roll all your defenses as if 
  they were Mediocre for the first exchange. If you 
  succeed, you may defend normally at your full 
  skill levels.
   
  K Combat Initiative
  Alertness
  Alertness determines initiative (order of action) 
  in any physical conflict. To minimize the die-
  rolling, your group can use the listed value for 
  everyone’s Alertness to determine the order of 
  everyone’s actions. 
   
  K Passive Awareness
  Alertness
  You will rarely ask to roll Alertness—if you 
  are actively looking for something, Investigation 
  (page 133) is usually more appropriate. 
  Alertness is reactive perception. That is, 
  Alertness is more appropriate for things that 
  you do not expect or are not looking for—such 
  as the spiked pit trap in the hallway you’re casu-
  ally walking through. It’s a skill that, typically, 
  the GM calls for you to roll.
  Athletics
  (Stunts, page 149)
  Athletics measures your general physical capa-
  bility—except for raw power (which is Might, 
  page 135) and stamina (which is En dur ance,  
  page 130). 
  Athletics covers running, jumping, climbing, 
  and other broadly physical activities you might 
  find in a track and field event. Characters with 
  high Athletics move further and faster than 
  the rest of us, making it difficult to catch or hit 
  them in a fight—think of athletes, soldiers, and 
  outdoorsmen.
   
  K Climbing
  Athletics
  Athletics is the skill used for climbing. The GM 
  sets the difficulty for how hard it is to climb a 
  given obstacle. (For advice on setting difficulties 
  and designing climbing challenges, see page 318.) 
  At the GM’s option, you may use shifts to speed 
  the process if you succeed (see page 193).
   
  K Dodging
  Athletics
  You can use Athletics as a defensive skill to 
  respond to physical attacks. This works very well 
  in conjunction with taking a full defense action 
  (yielding a +2 to the roll; see page 199). The one 
  important thing to note is that taking a full 
  defense action means that you can’t use Athletics 
  for other things, like sprinting—though as with 
  all skills, you can move one zone as a supple-
  mental action (page 213) by taking –1 to the roll 
  for your main action.
   
  K Falling
  Athletics
  When you fall, you may roll Athletics to try to 
  limit the severity of the result. For guidelines on 
  the severity of falls, see page 319.
   
  K Jumping
  Athletics
  This is not the Olympics—jumping is some-
  thing you do to leap obstacles or span bottom-
  less chasms, and in those situations the GM sets 
  a fixed difficulty for characters to meet or exceed. 
  (For advice on setting difficulties and designing 
  jumping challenges, see page 319.) Generally, that 
  difficulty is the bare minimum that clears the 
  Billy, I better have a 
  decent score in this.
  Well, you aren’t a bodyguard or really an 
  outdoorsman…does that make you a sneaky 
  criminal?
  Shut up, Bob.
  
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  Skills
  distance, so beating that by a few shifts is a good 
  idea. Outside of that, jumping is often consid-
  ered an extension of normal movement. 
   
  K Sprinting
  Athletics
  You can use Athletics to move faster by taking 
  a sprint action. Normally, you can only move 
  one zone as a supplemental action (page 213) by 
  taking –1 to the roll for your main action. If 
  you spend your entire action moving, you are 
  sprinting; rolling Athletics against a target diffi-
  culty of Mediocre, you can cross a number of 
  zones and borders equal to or less than the total 
  shifts of effect. If you get no shifts on your roll, 
  you can still move one zone as long as there are 
  no borders. See page 212 for additional details.
   
  K Other Physical Actions
  Athletics
  Athletics is often the “when in doubt” physical 
  skill, and it can get a lot of use. Sometimes 
  there’s confusion about when to use Athletics 
  and when to use Might. As a rule of thumb, 
  Athletics is used to move yourself, while Might 
  is used to move other things and people. When 
  an action calls for both, they might modify one 
  another (page 214). If there is no clear indication 
  which should be primary, default to Athletics as 
  primary and Might as the modifying skill.
  Myself, I practice 
  sprinting regularly. 
  Seconds count when 
  you’re up against 
  a monster.
  
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  Skills
  Burglary
  (Stunts, page 149)
  The ability to overcome security systems, from 
  alarms to locks, falls under the auspices of 
  Burglary. This also includes knowledge of those 
  systems and the ability to assess them. Without 
  a lucky break, a criminal with only Stealth and 
  Deceit will find himself limited to small-time 
  thievery, while one who adds Burglary to his 
  repertoire will soon be pursuing bigger targets. 
  Characters with a high Burglary skill include 
  burglars, private eyes, and even some cops.
  William, Harry should have a decent score 
  in this.
  Shut up, Bob.
   
  K Casing
  Burglary
  You can use Burglary as a very specialized 
  perception skill, specifically to assess the weak-
  nesses and strengths of a potential target. Here, 
  you try to determine the existence of unobvious 
  or hidden aspects using assessment (page 115). 
  Declaration may occur as well if you come up 
  with an entertaining new aspect to place on the 
  target of your future burglary (like Security 
  Camera “Blind Zone”). Thus, either the GM 
  can indicate you’ve discovered some flaw, or you 
  can make a declaration about a flaw in the secu-
  rity that you intend to exploit or defeat. When 
  you make a declaration, Casing follows the same 
  guidelines as the Declaring Minor Details trap-
  ping for Scholarship (page 141) but is limited to 
  security facts (including potential escape routes). 
   
  K Infiltration
  Burglary
  Given an opportunity to case an intended target 
  (above), you are much more prepared to infiltrate 
  that location. You can invoke known aspects on 
  the scene. In addition, you can use your Burglary 
  skill to complement (page 214) any skills you use 
  on targets you’ve had a chance to study and 
  prepare for. Thus, Burglary may complement 
  your Stealth and even, in certain circumstances, 
  your social skills such as Contacts or Deceit.
   
  K Lockpicking
  Burglary
  You have a talent for defeating security systems, 
  from simple locks to complex electronics. 
  Naturally, these offer a sliding scale of difficulty, 
  and the tougher targets are often the focus of 
  the aspects you choose to reveal or declare when 
  you case the place. Further, your Craftsmanship 
  or Scholarship skills might modify (page 214) 
  Burglary when dealing with particularly intricate 
  mechanical or computerized security targets.
  Contacts
  (Stunts, page 150)
  The Contacts skill represents who you know 
  and how good you are at finding things out from 
  them. You may know a guy, or know a guy who 
  knows a guy, or maybe you just know the right 
  questions to ask in the right places. Whatever 
  your methods, you can find things out just by 
  asking around. Characters with a high Contacts 
  skill are connected, always with an ear to the 
  ground, their fingers on the pulse of the city. 
  They include reporters, private eyes, and spies.
  The Contacts skill doesn’t work in a 
  vacuum—you need to be able to get out and 
  talk to people for it to be useful; when that isn’t 
  possible, neither is the skill. Contacts are also 
  limited by familiarity. Finding yourself in an 
  entirely unfamiliar environment means drasti-
  cally increased difficulties (+4 or more) on your 
  Contacts rolls. For every week you stay in the 
  area and expand your social networks, the famil-
  iarity penalty is reduced by one.
   
  K Gathering Information
  Contacts
  As with the answers and research trappings 
  from Scholarship (page 140), gathering informa-
  tion begins with a question. The difference 
  here is that you’re posing the question to your 
  contacts—you go out and talk to people, trying 
  to learn the answer to a question like, “Who’s 
  trying to kill me?”
  Describe where you are going to talk to folks 
  (usually “the street”), and the GM sets the diffi-
  culty. Roll normally, and then the GM explains 
  what you discovered. If the roll fails, then you 
  may take extra time to try to succeed (page 316). 
  This is much like scholarly research, but instead 
  of needing a library, you need to talk to people. 
  Ah, yes. 
  I ask this 
  question 
  often.
  
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  Skills
  These people must have the right level of access 
  to answer the question (this corresponds to the 
  “quality” of the library). If you are being shut out 
  for one reason or another, no amount of dogged 
  persistence through time investment is going 
  to help. When that happens, it usually means 
  there’s another problem you need to solve first.
  One important warning about authenticity—
  being the most informed guy and knowing all 
  the latest gossip aren’t necessarily the same 
  thing. The Contacts skill discovers what people 
  know, and people always have their own biases. 
  Information is only as good as its source. 
  Your use of Contacts rarely tests the truth 
  of the information provided, save by the 
  discovery—through several sources—that 
  contradictory answers are coming in. If you 
  want to determine the truthfulness of the infor-
  mation you’re uncovering, that means more 
  in-depth conversation with individuals...and it 
  may involve using Empathy, Rapport, Deceit, 
  Intimidation, and more.
  Finally, consider that it is difficult to use the 
  Contacts skill secretly. Rolling the Contacts skill 
  usually indicates that you are going out and 
  talking to people. If you’re asking some particu-
  larly sensitive questions, word is going to get 
  back to the people who have the real, deeper 
  answers—people who might see shutting you 
  up as the best way to keep their secrets.
   
  K Getting the Tip-Off
  Contacts
  Contacts also keep you apprised of the general 
  state of things, sometimes without you going 
  out and making an active effort. In this way, the 
  Contacts skill acts as a sort of social Alertness, 
  keeping you abreast of things that might be 
  coming your way. It’s far from foolproof and, 
  like Alertness, the GM is usually the one to call 
  for a roll—you can’t go out looking for a tip-off, 
  though you can tell the GM that you’re going 
  out and talking to your contacts just to check on 
  what’s up, which is a good hint that you’d like a 
  tip-off. 
   
  K Knowing People
  Contacts
  If you have a strong Contacts skill, you know a 
  wide variety of people and have at least a cursory 
  connection with virtually any organization in 
  the places you live and work (sometimes even 
  those where you don’t). Deeper connections 
  may come about through concerted effort or the 
  application of stunts. You can roll Contacts as 
  a declaration in any scene to establish that you 
  have a contact at hand, whether in a certain loca-
  tion or in a certain group of people. The more 
  aspects (or other prior established context) that 
  you have relevant to the location or group, the 
  easier the declaration will be. For further guide-
  lines on setting difficulties for Contacts rolls, see 
  page 319. 
   
  K Rumors
  Contacts
  Contacts are also useful for planting rumors, 
  not just for ferreting them out. At its simplest, 
  you can use Contacts to just “get the word out” 
  effectively and quickly, but you can also use it to 
  change some of the public’s perspective about 
  someone or something over time. 
  Tell the GM what rumor you want to plant, 
  and she assigns bonuses or penalties based on 
  how preposterous or reasonable the rumor is. 
  The GM uses the final roll to determine the 
  result of the rumor. 
  It’s worth noting: your roll is also the target 
  for someone else’s Contacts roll to find out who 
  has been spreading rumors—so be careful!
  The most common effect of a successful 
  Contacts roll to plant a rumor is a “sticky” 
  temporary aspect (page 115). This might even 
  be treated as a social attack (page 215) in some  
  circumstances.
  Conviction
  (Stunts, page 150)
  Conviction represents your strength of belief. 
  This could represent your quiet confidence in 
  yourself, your family, and your friends, or the 
  certitude of your faith in a higher (or, for nasty 
  sorts, infernal) power such as magic or God. 
  No spellcaster ever gets much power without 
  believing in his ability to do magic, and no holy 
  man gives the forces of darkness much pause 
  without Conviction. Characters with a high 
  Hm, faith as a basis for power? I don’t see it.
  Well, you’ve said you’re not 
  hip to faith jazz. Trust me, 
  this ain’t a bad way to model 
  mortal spellcasting.
  If you say so.
  
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  Conviction are powerful, grounded individuals, 
  whose beliefs make them able to weather any 
  storm. They include holy people, patriots, and 
  wizards.
  Conviction is one of the three cornerstone 
  skills for effective spellcasting, along with 
  Discipline and Lore. 
  The Mental Fortitude trapping also adds to 
  your mental stress track (see page 201 for more 
  on stress tracks).
   
  K Acts of Faith
  Conviction
  Roll Conviction whenever you’re called upon to 
  test the strength of your beliefs. When you are 
  under a specific mental or social attack designed 
  to undermine your faith (whether that’s in God, 
  your magic, your friends, or whatever you might 
  believe), you can use Conviction instead of 
  Discipline to defend.
   
  K Mental Fortitude
  Conviction
  Whether facing torture or confronting some-
  thing scary, Conviction is how you draw your 
  strength to survive fear and other psychological 
  distress—combined with strong Discipline, 
  your Conviction strengthens the walls of the 
  fortress of your mind. 
  Used this way, Conviction is a passive ability, 
  representing your mental “toughness” under such 
  circumstances. As such, a higher-than-default 
  rating in Conviction improves your ability to 
  handle mental stress, giving you more than the 
  default number of stress boxes (2) if you take 
  this skill:
  Conviction
  Total # of 
  Mental Stress Boxes
  Mediocre
  2
  Average, Fair
  3
  Good, Great
  4
  Superb+
  4 
  plus one additional mild 
  mental consequence for each 
  two full levels above Good
  So, most wizards are mentally 
  tougher than other people?
  Yup.
  Rock on!
  Craftsmanship
  (Stunts, page 150)
  Craftsmanship is the understanding of how 
  stuff works, reflecting your practical know-how 
  when it comes to using tools effectively. While 
  Craftsmanship can be complemented (page 214) 
  by Scholarship, it can just as easily be the result 
  of a lot of hours of getting your hands dirty 
  and having a natural feel for how things work. 
  Characters with high Craftsmanship are handy 
  around the house and under the hood of a car; 
  they are always helpful when a moody wizard 
  shorts out your GPS. They include inventors, 
  mechanics, and carpenters.
   
  K Breaking
  Craftsmanship
  Craftsmanship is also the skill for unmaking 
  things (in a mundane, practical sense). Given 
  time and tools, a craftsman can topple virtu-
  ally any building, structure, or device. In those 
  circumstances, you can use Craftsmanship to 
  attack these things directly and deal stress or 
  consequences to them (see page 320). In addition, 
  you may use Craftsmanship to set up attacks 
  and maneuvers against another target using the 
  sabotaged building, structure, or device—such 
  as setting up a bridge to collapse when some-
  one’s walking across it.
   
  K Building
  Craftsmanship
  You can use Craftsmanship to build some-
  thing—provided you have a decent under-
  standing of how to build it, as well as plenty of 
  needed tools, materials, and time. The less you 
  have of any of these things, the higher the diffi-
  culty to get it done. Craftsmanship is primarily 
  used with declarations; see the guidelines for 
  building things on page 320.
   
  K Fixing
  Craftsmanship
  Craftsmanship can be used to repair devices—
  again, if you have the time, materials, and the 
  right tools. Details on setting difficulties for 
  repair can be found on page 320.
  Let it go, 
  Billy. I said 
  I was sorry.
  
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  Skills
  Deceit
  (Stunts, page 150)
  Deceit is the ability to lie. Be it through word 
  or deed, it’s the ability to convey falsehoods 
  convincingly. Characters with a high Deceit can 
  easily seem much different than they actually 
  are. They are masters of misdirection and they 
  paint a sheen of seeming truth over the darkest 
  lies. High Deceit characters include grifters, 
  spies, and politicians.
   
  K Cat and Mouse
  Deceit
  You can use the Deceit skill for more than just 
  dodging attention—use it to riposte a social 
  query with a web of deception. When someone 
  else initiates a social conflict, you may use your 
  Deceit as a social attack skill, representing 
  particularly convincing lies as consequences on 
  your target. For example, if the social conflict is 
  a tense business negotiation, you might inflict 
  Thinks I Have Honest Intentions as a 
  consequence, potentially allowing you to exert 
  influence over your target in the future.
  This is a dangerous game. You are opting 
  not to put your False Face Forward (see below), 
  which would keep things on a safer, defensive 
  footing. Instead, you’re going on the attack, 
  making an active, aggressive attempt to turn the 
  tables on your opponent—missteps are quite 
  possible. If your opponent ultimately defeats you 
  in this conflict, the truth will be revealed in some 
  way. However, if you outclass your opponent 
  significantly, this can be a powerful technique.
   
  K Disguise
  Deceit
  Deceit covers disguises, using your Deceit skill 
  against anyone’s attempts to penetrate your 
  disguise. Such disguises are dependent upon 
  what props are available, and they don’t hold up 
  to intense scrutiny (specifically, an Investigation 
  roll) without the use of stunts (representing 
  your deep expertise at disguise), but they’re 
  fine for casual inspection (i.e., Alertness rolls). 
  You may use the Performance skill to modify 
  (page 214) Deceit when attempting to pull off 
  the disguised identity.
   
  K Distraction 
  and Misdirection
  Deceit
  You may use Deceit to try to hide small objects 
  and activities in plain sight and to oppose any 
  perception check for something that you could 
  try to hide, misplace, or distract attention from. 
  When you use this skill to hide something, your 
  skill roll indicates the difficulty of any Alertness 
  or Investigation rolls to discover it.
  This trapping is at the core of stunts that 
  extend the Deceit skill to do things like stage 
  magic or pick-pocketing. Without such stunts, 
  you may attempt those sorts of things but only 
  in the simplest fashion possible and against 
  markedly increased difficulties (typically at least 
  two or more steps harder).
   
  K False Face Forward
  Deceit
  You may opt to use Deceit instead of Rapport 
  as a defense in social conflicts—such as when 
  defending against someone using Empathy to 
  get a “read” on you, or facing down an insult—
  to lull an opponent into underestimating you. 
  This defense roll is modified (page 214) by the 
  Rapport skill.
  If you lose this defense roll, then your oppo-
  nent may proceed as usual—in attempting to 
  hide yourself, you have blundered and revealed 
  a truth, shown an unintentional reaction, or 
  something similar. 
  If you win the defense, however, you may 
  make your successful defense look like a failure. 
  When you do this, you can provide false infor-
  mation to the would-be “victor” (such as, “Wow! 
  That insult really struck home!” when it didn’t). 
  In the case of an Empathy read attempt, you 
  may provide a false aspect to the reader, sending 
  him off with an utterly fabricated notion of you. 
  When he later tries to take advantage of an 
  aspect that he falsely thinks is there, it can end 
  up being a waste of a fate point or worse! (See 
  “Guessing Aspects,” page 113.)
   
  K Falsehood & Deception
  Deceit
  For simple deceptions, all that’s necessary is a 
  contest between Deceit and an appropriate skill 
  (usually Empathy, Alertness, or Investigation, 
  depending on the circumstance). For deeper 
  deceptions—like convincing someone of a lie 
  Harry should 
  have a low score 
  in this.
  Shut UP, 
  Bob.
  
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  or selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge—a 
  social conflict (page 215) is appropriate, complete 
  with Deceit attacks and dealing social stress. 
  Sometimes, Deceit is the undercurrent rather 
  than the forefront of an action; as such, the skill 
  may modify, restrict, or complement (page 214) 
  another (usually social) skill’s use.
  Discipline
  (Stunts, page 151)
  Discipline represents your ability to stay focused 
  on your goals and actions despite distractions, as 
  well as the ability to protect yourself from the 
  psychological fallout of awful or scary events. 
  It’s what makes you able to conquer fear, resist 
  torture, and recite boring math equations with 
  such dedication that a psychic demon can’t 
  bore into your mind. Characters with strong 
  Discipline rarely let fear get the best of them 
  and can perform a wide variety of stressful tasks 
  without breaking their concentration. They 
  include chess grandmasters, air traffic control 
  operators, and wizards.
  Discipline is one of the three cornerstone 
  skills for effective spellcasting, along with 
  Conviction and Lore. 
  See Feeding Dependency (page  190) for 
  how this skill affects a hunger stress track (see 
  page 201 for more on stress tracks).
   
  K Concentration
  Discipline 
  Many other skills may be used in circumstances 
  where unusual concentration is necessary—
  such as using Burglary to pick a lock while 
  you’re getting shot at. In such circumstances, the 
  GM may ask that Discipline be used to restrict 
  (page 214) the skill being used, representing a 
  small penalty if you are not skilled at keeping 
  your focus. Other circumstances may arise 
  where Discipline would be rolled to represent 
  how well you remain focused on a particular 
  task or idea.
   
  K Emotional Control
  Discipline
  Whenever you are trying to master your own 
  emotions, Discipline is the skill you’ll use to do 
  it. This could be as simple as rolling Discipline 
  as a defense against an Intimidation attack or 
  keeping your terror in check in order to avoid 
  feeding the fear-eating monster next door. 
  I thought the Conviction 
  trapping Mental Fortitude 
  handled this. What’s the diff?
  Partially, it’s an active/
  passive thing. check out “mental 
  defense” later in this section.
  
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  Sometimes this trapping may be impaired 
  by a particular aspect on a character—if you 
  have the Prone to Violent Outbursts 
  aspect, for example, and accept a compel on it, 
  then there’s no need to roll Discipline to control 
  the outburst; assume you already failed any 
  such roll.
   
  K Mental Defense
  Discipline
  Discipline is the default skill for defense when-
  ever something tries to deal mental stress to you 
  or tries to mentally or psychologically assault 
  you. At minimum, roll Discipline as the defense 
  against certain Intimidation attacks, as well as 
  against invasive mind magic.
  This means that Discipline and Conviction 
  partner together to represent your overall 
  “fortress of the mind.” With both rated highly, 
  you are rarely affected by emotional and psychic 
  attacks (thanks to strong defense rolls from 
  Discipline) and, when affected, you can take 
  more psychological distress before you start to 
  break down (thanks to the extra mental stress 
  boxes from Conviction). When your Discipline 
  and Conviction skills are not in line with each 
  other, you may be easily affected by distress but 
  have the kind of faith and confidence neces-
  sary to persevere despite that (low Discipline, 
  high Conviction), or you may be very good at 
  “compartmentalizing” your response to things 
  but actually pretty fragile inside (high Discipline, 
  low Conviction).
  Driving
  (Stunts, page 151)
  Driving is your ability to operate a car (and 
  potentially other vehicles). Day to day, it’s pretty 
  easy and shouldn’t be rolled unless circum-
  stances call for it (such as driving fast through 
  busy streets, or in the rainy dark without 
  headlights). With a high skill, you can pull off 
  stunts you usually only see in the movies. Stunt 
  men, mafia chauffeurs, and cops have a high 
  Driving skill.
   
  K Chases
  Driving
  Driving inevitably leads to car chases—one 
  of the major trappings of this skill. In a chase, 
  your Driving skill is used to close the distance 
  between you and the car you’re chasing (or 
  increase the distance if you’re the one being 
  chased). It’s also used to bring quick resolution 
  to the issues brought up by terrain and other 
  obstacles. Car chases are usually handled using 
  one of the extended contest options (page 193).
   
  K One Hand on the Wheel
  Driving
  Trying to do something in a car? Roll Driving, 
  simple as that. If you are trying to do some-
  thing fancy, like driving and shooting at the 
  same time, Driving will restrict (page 214) the 
  skill being used. Note that this trapping gener-
  ally applies to physical actions that you can 
  conceivably do while driving. Since Driving 
  only restricts your other skill, there’s no way 
  you could become better at doing something 
  while you’re also driving a car—your aim won’t 
  suddenly improve because you happen to be 
  driving while you shoot at your target!
   
  K Other Vehicles
  Driving
  If your background reasonably suggests experi-
  ence operating a vehicle other than a car, then 
  Driving may be used to operate those vehicles 
  as well, making this the skill for piloting boats, 
  aircraft, and other motorized vehicles.
  Ah, I see!
  True! Thomas’ WATER 
  BEETLE handles 
  much like a car.
  Some 
  of these 
  pictures show 
  my not-
  blue BLUE 
  BEETLE 
  as blue. 
  What the 
  hell?
  chalk it up 
  to the newbie 
  art director, 
  here. When you 
  give an artist 
  a name like 
  “Blue Beetle”...
  
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  K Street Knowledge and 
  Navigation
  Driving
  The modern city can be a confusing maze 
  of streets and alley-ways, and being adept at 
  Driving means you know your way around cities 
  you’re familiar with (both behind the wheel and 
  on foot). Under pressure, Driving is the skill 
  for getting from point A to point B as fast as 
  or faster than you need and for figuring out the 
  best course. If you’re not familiar with a place, 
  Driving is treated as Mediocre for the purpose 
  of navigation.
  These Boots Are Made 
  For Walkin’
  If your character doesn’t take the Driving 
  skill for some reason, that doesn’t neces-
  sarily mean that he don’t know his way 
  around the city—he might just have to get 
  at the information some other way, by using 
  Contacts, Investigation, or Scholarship. 
  All we’re suggesting with the above is that 
  if you drive around a city long enough, you 
  get some knowledge of how to get around it 
  by default, and that knowledge would also 
  apply when you’re not in the car.
  Empathy
  (Stunts, page 152)
  Empathy is the ability to understand and guess 
  what other people are thinking and feeling. This 
  can be handy if you are trying to spot a liar 
  or you want to tell someone what that person 
  wants to hear. It’s also useful for keeping up your 
  guard during a social conflict. Characters adept 
  at Empathy are very perceptive about people and 
  their motives and often end up as quiet masters 
  of a social scene. They can include reporters, 
  gamblers, and psychologists.
   
  K Reading People
  Empathy
  You can use Empathy to figure out what 
  makes another character tick. After at least ten 
  minutes of intense, personal interaction, you 
  may make an Empathy roll against the target’s 
  Rapport roll (see Closing Down under Rapport, 
  page 138; the target might also choose to defend 
  with Deceit). 
  This is an assessment (page 115) action and, 
  as such, if you gain one or more shifts on your 
  roll, you discover one of the target’s aspects 
  that you weren’t already aware of. It may not 
  reveal the name of the aspect in precise detail, 
  but it should paint a good general picture. For 
  instance, it might not give the name of someone’s 
  brother, but it will reveal that he has a brother. 
  You can repeat this process, taking longer each 
  time, and ultimately reveal a number of aspects 
  equal to your Empathy skill value (minimum 
  of one)—so, a Fair skill (value 2) would allow 
  you to reveal two aspects through at least two 
  different rolls.
   
  K A Shoulder to Cry On
  Empathy
  Characters with Empathy are familiar with the 
  emotional responses of other people and are able 
  to effectively provide comfort and reassurance to 
  those who are emotionally wounded. With the 
  Empathy skill, you can create an environment 
  for another character to justify recovery from 
  mild social or mental consequences. See page 220 
  in Playing the Game for a discussion about recov-
  ering from consequences. Stunts are required to 
  bring this trapping to the level that professional 
  therapists have.
   
  K Social Defense
  Empathy
  Use Empathy as a defense in a social conflict 
  (though it isn’t the only skill that can be used 
  this way). In particular, you must use Empathy 
  to defend against Deceit as you try to sort out 
  truth from fiction in what you’re hearing.
   
  K Social Initiative
  Empathy
  Use Empathy to determine initiative (order of 
  action) in any social conflict. To minimize on 
  die-rolling, Empathy is usually taken simply at 
  its listed value and used to determine the order 
  of actions you and other characters take. 
  Billy, you should have a 
  decent score in this.
  Aw, thanks!
  
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  Endurance
  (Stunts, page 152)
  Endurance is the ability to keep performing 
  physical activity despite fatigue or injury. It’s 
  a measure of your body’s resistance to shock 
  and effort. In addition to addressing fatigue, 
  Endurance is rolled as a defense when fending 
  off poisons and disease. High Endurance char-
  acters can take more punishment than others 
  and can keep going long after the competition 
  has tuckered out. They include thugs, athletes, 
  and rough-and-tumble private eyes.
  The Physical Fortitude trapping also adds to 
  your physical stress track (see page 201 for more 
  on stress tracks).
   
  K Long-Term Action
  Endurance
  Endurance is a passive skill. You will very rarely 
  need to ask to roll Endurance; instead, when 
  strenuous activities have gone on for a while, 
  the GM will call for rolls when appropriate. 
  Particularly, Endurance can come into play in 
  long-term actions as a restricting (page 214) skill, 
  where your ability to keep performing at peak 
  is limited by how well you can overcome fatigue 
  and pain. This is why the Endurance skill of 
  top athletes is on par with (or better than) 
  their Athletics skill. Without a solid Endurance 
  skill, you may be a good sprinter but you will 
  find yourself winded and falling behind in a 
  marathon.
   
  K Physical Fortitude
  Endurance
  Endurance determines your ability to handle 
  physical stress.
  Used this way, Endurance is again a passive 
  ability, representing your “toughness.” As such, 
  a higher than default rating in Endurance 
  improves your ability to take physical stress by 
  giving you more than the default number of 
  physical stress boxes (2):
  Endurance
  Total # of 
  Physical Stress Boxes
  Mediocre
  2
  Average, Fair
  3
  Good, Great
  4
  Superb+
  4 
  plus one additional mild 
  physical consequence 
  for each two full levels 
  above Good
  Fists
  (Stunts, page 152)
  The Fists skill is your ability to hold your own 
  in a fistfight, with no weapons available but 
  your bare hands (with a few exceptions). With 
  specialized training (represented by taking 
  stunts), this may include the practice of a more 
  disciplined kind of fisticuffs, such as martial 
  arts. Characters with a high Fists skill are a blur 
  of fists and feet in a fight—delivering sudden 
  uppercuts and body-blows—and are pretty 
  adept at not getting hit themselves. They include 
  bouncers, thugs, and martial artists.
  Many of the restrictions on the uses of Fists 
  (such as using certain close-combat weapons, or 
  the sorts of things Fists can be used to defend 
  against) can be set aside with the right kind 
  of martial arts training. Invariably, this level of 
  training is reflected with a few martial-arts-
  oriented stunts such as those found on page 152. 
  Without those stunts, you might still have some 
  basic self-defense style training, but you haven’t 
  yet attained the level of “art.”
  I DO get 
  hit in the 
  head a lot.
  Takes a 
  lickin’ but 
  keeps on 
  tickin’!
  Also a skill shared by tiny, 
  scary police officers.
  
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  K Brawling
  Fists
  As a combat skill, Fists is rolled to make attacks 
  and maneuvers when you are using nothing 
  other than your body to get the job done. Brass 
  knuckles and the like allow you to use Fists, 
  but in general, attacks that use a tool—be it a 
  staff, knife, sword, or broken bottle—use the 
  Weapons skill instead. 
  Bare hands have the advantage that they’re 
  always with you, but the disadvantage that 
  they almost never offer a damage boost on a 
  successful hit.
   
  K Close-Combat Defense
  Fists
  Fists may be rolled as a defense against other 
  Fists attacks and against short-reach, close-
  quarters weapons such as knives and short clubs, 
  representing the ability to block or dodge an 
  opponent’s attacks. It can’t be used as a defense 
  when the weapon arguably has a significant reach 
  advantage (swords, staves, and guns), unless you 
  can justify it as an unusual circumstance—e.g., 
  “My skin is bulletproof, so I should be able to 
  block a sword if I do it right” or “I’m right next 
  to the guy, so I’m going to try to push his arm 
  aside as he makes the shot with the gun.” As a 
  rule, Fists can usually be justified as a defense 
  against attacks that come from the same zone 
  as you and rarely against attacks from outside 
  that zone.
  Guns
  (Stunts, page 153)
  Sometimes you just need to shoot things. 
  Thankfully, there’s a skill for that. With a 
  gun, you can shoot up to two zones (page 197) 
  away—possibly three or more, if it’s a rifle 
  (borders, page  212, may or may not count, 
  depending on their  nature). Unfortunately, 
  without a gun at hand, the skill isn’t much use. 
  Characters with a high Guns skill are masters of 
  death; as a result, it’s rare to encounter one who 
  doesn’t have a healthy respect for the dangers 
  inherent in bringing out the weapons. Such 
  characters include policemen, soldiers, assassins, 
  and hunters.
  If someone is devoted to using Guns as a 
  strong component of his fighting style, it can 
  safely be assumed that he possesses at least 
  one or two guns, regardless of Resources rating 
  (though whether or not he will be allowed to 
  carry such things wherever he goes is another 
  matter entirely), so long as it fits the concept.
   
  K Aiming
  Guns
  One popular maneuver among Guns users 
  is aiming. This is done like nearly any other 
  maneuver (page 207), with the idea that you take 
  an action to place a temporary aspect on your 
  target—e.g., In My Sights. On the subsequent 
  exchange, you tag that temporary aspect to get a 
  +2 on the roll, assuming the target hasn’t done 
  something to rid himself of the aspect.
   
  K Gun Knowledge
  Guns
  Guns users are also well-versed in a variety of 
  small arms, large arms, and ammunitions, as 
  well as the care and maintenance of firearms. 
  You may use this skill as a limited sort of knowl-
  edge and repair skill covering those areas.
   
  K Gunplay
  Guns
  Guns is an attack skill, by and large, though a 
  creative player will undoubtedly come up with 
  some maneuvers to attempt when shooting. As 
  far as mundane, mortal weapons are concerned, 
  guns are at the top of the heap in a fight. 
  They’re deadly—getting large stress bonuses on 
  successful hits, forcing consequences, conces-
  sions, and taken out results faster than other 
  means of attack. Better yet, they operate at 
  range, forcing unarmed opponents to take cover 
  or close with you in order to be effective. 
  As an attack, a gun also limits the defensive 
  options available to a target. Targets are gener-
  ally only able to roll Athletics as a defense, repre-
  senting their ability to dodge and get out of the 
  way of the gun—or otherwise present a diffi-
  cult-to-hit target, like taking cover—before the 
  shot’s taken. And guns are often the weapon of 
  choice for an ambush (page 142) which, when done 
  right, leaves the victim’s defense skills locked 
  down at Mediocre—easy to deliver a devastating 
  shot.
  There are two downsides. First, a gun can 
  be taken away from you, rendering this skill 
  useless. Second, you can’t ever use the Guns skill 
  as a defense, which means you need a strong 
  Athletics skill to cover you, just in case. As a 
  Gun-nuts 
  love to get 
  together 
  to talk 
  about guns.
  Could there 
  be a “social” 
  use here?
  You can’t 
  use guns for 
  defense without 
  a stunt, at 
  the least!
  
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  result, Guns ends up being a bit of a one-note 
  wonder—and while that’s one hell of a note, 
  it can be pretty limiting at times, especially in 
  neighborhoods where you’re likely to get the 
  cops responding to reports of gunfire. 
  Remember: when a gun is drawn, it’s a state-
  ment of intent to kill people. Even a great many 
  supernatural creatures will take pause at the 
  sight of a gun barrel pointed their way.
   
  K Other Projectile 
  Weapons
  Guns
  You can also use Guns to cover non-gun 
  weapons that shoot at a distance, such as bows 
  and other such artifacts, though usually with a 
  penalty (–2) if you aren’t trained in their use. If, 
  at the time you take the Guns skill, you decide 
  your character is focused on using a method of 
  shooting other than a gun, you may rename this 
  skill to something more appropriate (e.g., Bows) 
  and face the familiarity penalty when using 
  actual guns instead. Under such an option, most 
  Guns related stunts are still available with the 
  unusual weapon.
  Intimidation
  (Stunts, page 153)
  Intimidation is the skill you use for producing a 
  sudden, strong, negative emotion in a target—
  usually fear. With high Intimidation, you exude 
  menace, choose exactly the right words to chill 
  others to the bone, and get people to lose their 
  cool in an instant. Bodyguards, mob enforcers, 
  and “bad” cops have high Intimidation.
   
  K The Brush-Off
  Intimidation
  If things get to the point of a face-off, there are 
  a lot of other actions an opponent can do other 
  than stand there and be intimidated—such as 
  disengage or pull out a weapon. However, one 
  of the real strengths of Intimidation is that first 
  flash of contact, when people instinctively get 
  out of the way of someone intimidating. Used 
  in this fashion, Intimidation can establish a 
  powerful, menacing first impression. If you are 
  actively doing something intimidating, you may 
  roll a quick contest of Intimidation against the 
  opponent’s Discipline or Presence. If successful, 
  the target is taken aback for a moment, generally 
  long enough for you to brush past them, though 
  the target will usually have plenty of time to call 
  for help if appropriate. This can’t be done in a 
  fight or against any target who is already ready 
  for a fight; but in those “first contact” situations, 
  Intimidation is gold for control.
   
  K Interrogation
  Intimidation
  Intimidation is the “bad cop” skill for interroga-
  tion situations—a special kind of application 
  of the above trappings. It’s not a soft touch; 
  it’s all about getting in the face of the perp and 
  convincing him that you are the harbinger of 
  his personal doom. Other social skills, such as 
  Deceit and Rapport, are necessary to make it 
  an interview rather than an interrogation and 
  belong firmly in the “good cop” camp.
   
  K Provocation
  Intimidation
  When you don’t control the situation well 
  enough to make your target afraid, you can still 
  use Intimidation—just not for the usual “be 
  scary” purpose. Instead, psychological or social 
  attacks may be made to provoke the target—
  usually by enraging them or otherwise getting 
  them to lose their cool. Harry Dresden is partic-
  ularly fond of this trapping and uses it to turn 
  the tables on his captors whenever possible.
  Works for Spider-Man, works for me.
   
  K Social Attacks
  Intimidation
  There are more graceful social skills for 
  convincing people to do what you want, but few 
  skills offer the pure efficiency of communicating 
  that failure to comply may well result in some 
  manner of harm. Nothing personal.
  You can use Intimidation as an attack to deal 
  social stress, cutting through the usual niceties 
  by making things blunt, ugly, and expedient. 
  This can force someone to get to the point, make 
  him spill the truth, or cause him to flinch and 
  show weakness when surrounded by sharks. 
  The target usually gets his choice of social skill 
  to defend against such an attack—for whatever 
  help that might offer him—so long as it’s appro-
  priate to the attack. He might try Rapport to 
  attempt to laugh it off, Presence to keep a poker 
  face, Discipline to keep his cool.
  Is there a 
  rule where 
  you get a 
  bonus for 
  throwing 
  your empty 
  gun at 
  Superman, 
  after all 
  those bullets 
  bounced 
  off him? 
  There must 
  be. Hundreds 
  of TV 
  criminals 
  can’t be 
  wrong!
  Also a skill for  
  creepy PI wizards.
  Bob!  
  Shut up!
  This one 
  doesn’t work 
  so well when 
  the target 
  can literally 
  tear your 
  head off.
  
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  K Threats
  Intimidation
  At its core, Intimidation is about putting the 
  fear of you into someone. To manage this, you 
  must be in a position to make a reasonable case 
  that you actually can deliver some kind of harm 
  or unpleasant circumstance to your target. You 
  can achieve this with reputation, appearance, 
  weaponry, or even with a good, scary speech. 
  Ultimately, this is about power—defined here 
  as your demonstrable ability to control the situ-
  ation, rather than the victim’s control over it. 
  Without this context, the victim may be at an 
  advantage (+2) when defending, or may simply 
  be untouchable by this method of psychological 
  attack.
  Under certain conditions, Intimidation is one 
  of the few skills able to deal direct mental stress 
  (see “Mental Conflicts,” page 217) to a target as an 
  attack, and you can use it both in physical and 
  social conflict situations.
  Investigation
  (Stunts, page 153)
  Investigation is the ability to look for things and, 
  hopefully, find them. This is the skill you use 
  to actively look for something—like searching 
  a crime scene or trying to spot a hidden enemy 
  that you know is somewhere near. Characters 
  with a high Investigation discover the most 
  hidden clues; when they focus their attention on 
  something, they can perceive details more fully 
  and deeply than others. These people include 
  private investigators, reporters, and cops.
   
  K Eavesdropping
  Investigation
  You can use Investigation to focus attention on a 
  target in order to perceive details that you might 
  normally miss. For example, when trying to hear 
  something that might be difficult to pick up on 
  casually, roll Investigation. This makes a strong 
  Investigation skill paramount for eavesdroppers 
  and gossip hounds. All it requires is the invest-
  ment of time and attention.
   
  K Examination
  Investigation
  Deliberately using an assessment action to look 
  for clues, deep patterns, or hidden flaws in some-
  thing most commonly calls for the Investigation 
  skill. This makes Investigation the flip-side of 
  Alertness: it is mindful, deliberate perception, in 
  contrast to the passive perception of Alertness. 
  An equivalent Investigation effort is nearly 
  always going to yield better, more in-depth 
  information than an Alertness effort would. The 
  downside is that Investigation is far more time-
  consuming—“minutes to hours,” as opposed to 
  “seconds to minutes.”
  Also, this is the trapping used to verify the 
  truth of information, whether it’s checking up 
  on a rumor you got via Contacts or spotting a 
  forged document in a pile of paperwork. 
   
  K Surveillance
  Investigation
  Surveillance is the art of using Investigation to 
  keep track of a target over an extended period 
  of time, whether by watching a fixed location or 
  
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  by following the target on foot through busy city 
  streets.
  If the investigator is looking to keep an eye 
  on his target without being seen, a second roll 
  is necessary (using Stealth), per the Shadowing 
  trapping on page 143.
  Long-term Surveillance may call for 
  Endurance rolls as you begin to find it diffi-
  cult to stay awake or keep from running off to 
  a nearby bathroom. Equipment can aid the roll 
  or remove the need for it entirely; a thermos of 
  coffee and an empty bottle are practically “musts” 
  in the professional surveillance business. Having 
  a second person help out so you can take a break 
  is a plus as well.
  Lore
  (Stunts, page 154)
  Lore represents your occult knowledge. Looking 
  at the world at large, most people don’t have 
  this skill or even know it exists. But for those 
  who’ve studied the real teachings of the occult, 
  Lore allows them to gain useful insight into 
  the arcane elements of the mortal world. With 
  a high Lore skill, you can pick up on mystical 
  happenings that are nigh invisible to others, 
  know and discover magical particulars when it 
  comes to assembling the materials for spellcraft, 
  and (in some cases) even perform basic rituals—
  given the right text. Mystics, monsters, and 
  wizards have high Lore skills.
  Lore is one of the three cornerstone skills for 
  effective spellcasting, along with Conviction and 
  Discipline.
   
  K Arcane Research
  Lore
  Above all, Lore is the skill used to research 
  things related to arcane and occult principles. 
  If you’re looking for the right way to fight a 
  monster, the recipe for a potion, or a new protec-
  tive incantation, Lore’s the skill to roll. Other 
  than the subject matter, Lore behaves exactly like 
  the Scholarship skill when it comes to the func-
  tions and methods of research, allowing most of 
  Scholarship’s trappings (page 140) to be used, with 
  the focus changed to arcane and occult matters.
  When a library is needed, it must be rated 
  for providing rare occult texts. Such libraries 
  are few and far between, and thus true practi-
  tioners often must contact the spirit world for 
  the needed information, be it in the form of a 
  bound spirit, a demonic summoning, or some 
  other ritual.
  Or you could drop 
  a load of dough at 
  a reputable occult 
  bookstore, like Bock 
  Ordered Books.
   
  K Common Ritual
  Lore
  Anyone who can light a match can use it to set 
  off a stick of dynamite—whether or not they can 
  do it safely is another matter entirely. The same 
  is true of the practice of “common” rituals—
  sometimes all you need is the untrained use of 
  Lore plus a rare, arcane ritual text to contact 
  and interact with mystic and dark powers from 
  beyond. 
  Common rituals that actually work are very 
  rare. Most common rituals have been rendered 
  powerless thanks to their distribution to the 
  public. (Think of it this way: each common 
  ritual out there represents a conduit to a specific 
  supernatural power, but that entity has only a 
  fixed amount of power it can send down that 
  particular channel. The more people that are 
  aware of a ritual, the more they pull power from 
  that channel. Get too many trying to tap into the 
  same power source, and soon there isn’t enough 
  left for any person to grab power of any conse-
  quence. Thus, one of the White Council’s most 
  effective ways to rob common rituals of their 
  power is through wide publication and distribu-
  tion in various “new age” texts and other books 
  of the type.)
  When given an actual, usable common ritual, 
  Lore is the skill of lighting the wick on the 
  dynamite of that supernatural entity’s power. 
  But unlike a stick of dynamite, that entity is a 
  thinking being, usually with thousands of years 
  of experience in outsmarting humans like you 
  who come knocking and asking for power. More 
  often than not, a common ritual blows up in 
  your face.
  For more on spellcasting with common ritual, 
  see page 290.
  So true.
  
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  K Mystic Perception
  Lore
  Exposure to arcane lore leads to a height-
  ened awareness of the supernatural. In certain 
  circumstances, you can substitute Lore for 
  Alertness to pick up on supernatural details 
  about a scene. These details should be extremely 
  vague, limited to statements such as “You’re 
  getting a bad feeling about this” or “Something 
  about this place is just…wrong.” Used this way, 
  Lore is more an indicator that there’s something 
  weird happening rather than a lens through 
  which to see the weird.
  Might
  (Stunts, page 154)
  Might is a measure of pure physical power, be 
  it raw strength or simply the knowledge of how 
  best to use the strength you have. Might is for 
  lifting, moving, or breaking things. You can use 
  the skill to add a measure of physical power to 
  the efforts of another skill. Characters with a 
  high Might are not supernaturally strong, but 
  they can still bend, break, and lift things that 
  are normally beyond the capabilities of everyday 
  people. They include thugs, furniture movers, 
  and wrestlers.
   
  K Breaking Things
  Might
  Might is the skill of choice for applying brute 
  force to snap something into smaller pieces; it 
  includes breaking boards, knocking down doors, 
  and the like. Using Might, you can damage an 
  item over time or break it with a single dramatic 
  blow. For guidelines on breaking things, see 
  page 321.
   
  K Exerting Force
  Might
  You can use Might indirectly to modify, comple-
  ment, or restrict (page 214) some skill uses. This 
  represents the secondary influence of physical 
  strength on the primary use of another skill. 
  For example, climbing while carrying someone 
  on your back might restrict a normal Athletics 
  roll, whereas getting into a shoving contest with 
  someone might let you roll Fists modified by 
  Might.
   
  K Lifting Things
  Might
  Might controls how much you can lift, shift, or 
  move. The weight of the thing you’re moving 
  determines the difficulty for the roll, though this 
  might be modified by things like leverage and 
  other factors. For a discussion of weight and the 
  lifting of heavy things, see page 321.
   
  K Wrestling
  Might
  In combat, Might can help you with particular 
  applications of Fists and Weapons: if physical 
  force is a very significant element at play, Might 
  will modify (page 214) the primary skill.
  Furthermore, if you successfully engage an 
  opponent in a one-on-one exchange, you can 
  potentially switch from Fists to Might as the 
  primary combat skill by executing a hold or 
  other wrestling move where it’s less about hitting 
  than about overwhelming with physical force. 
  See the grappling section on page 211 in Playing 
  the Game for details.
  Performance
  (Stunts, page 154)
  Performance represents your overall artistic 
  ability, covering the gamut of endeavors that 
  involve putting creative works before an audi-
  ence (painting, dance, music, writing, and some 
  elements of acting). This includes knowledge of 
  composition as well as the performance itself. 
  Characters with a high Performance are incred-
  ibly creative individuals, able to create poetry 
  extemporaneously, dance well enough to make 
  one’s heart soar, or put on an acting performance 
  that will bring a crowd to standing ovation. 
  They include actors, artists, and those with 
  faerie blood.
   
  K Art Appreciation
  Performance
  As a knowledge skill, Performance is identical 
  to Scholarship, though the fields it applies to are 
  more limited and more focused. Thanks to this 
  narrowed focus on the fields of art and perfor-
  mance, a few shifts of success on a Performance 
  roll may pay out more information when 
  compared to the same number of shifts from a 
  Scholarship roll.
  HULK SMASH!
  What about 
  stage 
  magicians? 
  Didn’t you 
  say they use 
  Deceit?
  See below.
  
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  K Composition
  Performance
  As a composition skill, Performance is fairly 
  straightforward—you can make art of virtu-
  ally any type, so long as you are familiar with 
  and practiced in the medium, producing works 
  of a quality equal to your skill. Without stunts, 
  it’s probable that none of them will be master-
  pieces, but any art that’s Average or better can be 
  displayed without any real embarrassment.
  All Art Is Not the Same
  Normally, common sense should dictate 
  whether or not a character is practiced in 
  a particular medium—if the character is 
  a journalist, he probably doesn’t do ballet. 
  Some groups may want to nail this down 
  more specifically, for this skill and for others 
  (like Scholarship). A good guideline is to 
  allow the player to choose areas of specialty 
  equal to the rating of the skill. So, a char-
  acter with Good (+3) Performance is prac-
  ticed in three mediums of art. 
  If you’re going to do this, keep in mind 
  that some characters might be locked 
  out of using the Play to an Audience or 
  Composition trappings, depending on 
  context.
   
  K Creative 
  Communication
  Performance
  While Scholarship covers the technical building 
  blocks of communication—language, grammar, 
  and the like—Performance covers the creative 
  expression of ideas and, as such, covers most 
  means of broad communication like writing. 
  These are not “pure” performances, however, 
  and your other skills play a role in their appli-
  cation, so your writing is usually modified 
  by your Scholarship. There are exceptions, 
  such as dry, academic documents (which use 
  pure Scholarship) and poetry (which uses just 
  Performance).
  Public speaking is a similar creature, but it 
  is more beholden to the charisma and pres-
  ence of the speaker. In those cases, Performance 
  modifies (page 214) whatever skill (Rapport, 
  Intimidation, Presence, or Deceit) you are using, 
  so long as the communication has a creative 
  component.
   
  K Playing to an Audience
  Performance
  First and foremost, Performance is the skill of 
  playing to an audience—producing a reaction in 
  a crowd with creative expression, whether that’s 
  acting or another art form. As such, you can 
  use Performance to declare (page 116) aspects on 
  a scene when those aspects might arise from a 
  moving performance, affecting everyone in a 
  room at once. Usually, aspects declared by this 
  method must be broad, indicating the mood of 
  the crowd, rather than specific and targeted at 
  individuals present.
  For example, if Malcolm Dresden is at a chil-
  dren’s party pulling rabbits out of hats and doing 
  other assorted tricks, he might put the aspect 
  Giggles and Delight on the scene, reflecting 
  the general, joyous mood.
  A classic!
  Presence
  (Stunts, page 154)
  Presence is a multi-faceted skill, representing 
  attributes of leadership, reputation, and 
  charisma. While Conviction represents your 
  overall mental and psychological toughness, 
  Presence is a measure of social toughness—
  whether or not you’ll flinch and lose face in 
  front of others, and how your image stands up 
  to scrutiny and/or attack. Characters with a 
  high Presence carry themselves with a quiet 
  confidence no matter the situation, and when 
  they speak, others stop and listen. They include 
  military officers, mob bosses, politicians, and 
  lawyers.
  The Social Fortitude trapping also adds to 
  your social stress track (see page 201 for more on 
  stress tracks).
   
  K Charisma
  Presence
  Presence is used passively whenever someone is 
  trying to size you up socially. While the Rapport 
  skill also covers your ability to reach out to 
  others and make an impression, it is a deliberate, 
  active skill in comparison to Presence. Much like 
  the split between Investigation and Alertness, 
  Rapport and Presence represent the active and 
  passive sides of making an impression, respec-
  tively. As a rule of thumb, the GM may ask you 
  to roll Presence to gauge impressions when you 
  Billy, 
  I don’t get 
  it — what’s 
  the actual 
  in-system 
  benefit of the 
  Composition 
  trapping, 
  here?
  It’s a lot like 
  craftsmanship 
  when building 
  something, only 
  you’re making 
  art instead of 
  a functioning 
  widget. there 
  are a lot 
  of possible 
  applications 
  there, many 
  of which will 
  manifest as 
  declarations.
  
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  are not actively focusing your efforts on making 
  one. Further, when you use Rapport to make a 
  deliberate impression, you can call in Presence 
  to complement the skill (page 214).
   
  K Command
  Presence
  Use Presence to direct troops, workers, or any 
  other group attempting a task. Any time you are 
  in a position to give orders to a group of followers 
  or functionaries, you may apply your Presence 
  skill to help coordinate their efforts. This will 
  allow you to make a Well-Coordinated or 
  similar aspect available to whoever is rolling for 
  the combined task, via a maneuver (see Playing 
  the Game, page 207, for more details).
  You can also use the skill to get a largely 
  undifferentiated mob of people to behave in a 
  particular way, such as convincing a group of 
  people to evacuate a building or to charge a line 
  of police. If your action has a theatrical element 
  to it, you can use Performance to modify 
  (page 214) the roll.
   
  K Reputation
  Presence
  Presence can represent the strength of your 
  reputation, in that it insulates you from the 
  social maneuvers and attacks of others. This 
  is not the same as fame or notoriety; it’s more 
  a measure of how well you’re able to use your 
  reputation to help you achieve social goals. 
  To this end, there may be reputation-specific 
  circumstances where you will roll Presence to 
  defend against social attacks and maneuvers.
   
  K Social Fortitude
  Presence
  When facing a direct attack like a smear 
  campaign or simply the latest gossip on the 
  streets, Presence is how well you comport your-
  self in an outward, social fashion. Combined 
  with a strong showing in other social skills such 
  as Rapport and Deceit, your Presence makes you 
  particularly difficult to assail in a social scene.
  Used this way, Presence is a passive ability, 
  representing your social “toughness” under such 
  circumstances. A higher-than-default rating 
  in Presence improves the ability to take social 
  stress, giving you more than the default number 
  of stress boxes (2) if you take this skill:
  Presence
  Total # of 
  Social Stress Boxes
  Mediocre
  2
  Average, Fair
  3
  Good, Great
  4
  Superb+
  4 
  plus one additional mild 
  social consequence for each 
  two full levels above Good
  
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  Skills
  Rapport
  (Stunts, page 155)
  The flipside of Intimidation, Rapport is your 
  ability to talk with people in a friendly fashion, 
  make a good impression, and perhaps convince 
  them to see your side of things. Any time you 
  want to communicate without an implicit 
  threat or attempted deception, this is the skill 
  to use, making it appropriate for interviewing or 
  making friends. Characters with a high Rapport 
  can make strong first impressions and they 
  make easy, friendly conversation in any social 
  scene. They include politicians, reporters, and 
  “good cops.” 
   
  K Chit-Chat
  Rapport
  A character skilled in Rapport is a master of 
  small talk and, through casual, friendly conver-
  sation, can get folks to give up information 
  without quite realizing they’ve done it. In a 
  social conflict, you may roll Rapport for maneu-
  vers and “attacks” with this goal in mind. You can 
  also use the skill creatively to grab someone’s 
  attention and keep him distracted by conversa-
  tion while something else is happening in the 
  room.
   
  K Closing Down
  Rapport
  Rapport controls the face you show to the 
  world—and that includes what you choose not 
  to show. As such, when you try to use Empathy 
  to get a read on someone, your attempt is 
  opposed by Rapport as the default. If you simply 
  wish to reveal nothing, you may use Rapport 
  and take the equivalent of a full defensive action 
  (page 199), gaining a +2 on the roll.
  This is over and above the default of a 
  Rapport defense because it’s obvious you’re 
  doing it: you’re closing down, wiping all 
  emotions off your face. This means that closing 
  down is a fairly obvious strategy—your oppo-
  nent will know you’re doing it. It also requires 
  that you be consciously aware that someone’s 
  trying to read you. If you are trying not to look 
  like you’re actively warding off the read, or if you 
  aren’t really aware that you’re being read, then 
  you aren’t taking a full defensive action and you 
  don’t get the +2.  
   
  K First Impressions
  Rapport
  The first time you meet someone, the GM 
  may call for a quick Rapport roll to determine 
  the impression you make (assuming you’re 
  trying to make a good one). This may interact 
  with the Presence skill, depending on the situ-
  ation. Usually, succeeding at this roll can give 
  you a beneficial temporary aspect such as I 
  Look Good, which you might tag or invoke 
  on socially related rolls in that scene. Be careful, 
  though—failing significantly at such a roll could 
  also change the situation for the worse, putting 
  an I Look Bad aspect on you which could be 
  used by someone else.
   
  K Opening Up
  Rapport
  Your skill in Rapport includes the ability to 
  control which side of your personality you show 
  to others by seeming to open up while actually 
  guarding deeper secrets. Since you reveal only 
  true things about yourself, this is not an inher-
  ently deceptive action involving the use of the 
  Deceit skill.
  When you open up, you defend as usual 
  against an Empathy “read” (page  129) with 
  Rapport. If your opponent succeeds and gener-
  ates at least one shift, he finds something out, 
  as usual (a failed defense roll is a failed defense 
  roll after all). If you succeed, your opponent 
  still discovers an aspect—but it’s one of your 
  choosing.
  Used this way, you can effectively stonewall 
  someone without the obvious (and unfriendly) 
  poker face of Closing Down. In addition, you 
  can always choose to reveal something that the 
  other character already knows.
   
  K Social Defense
  Rapport
  Control of outward reactions and a general 
  ease at conversation are both within the realm 
  of Rapport, and both are useful in mounting a 
  defense against social maneuvers and attacks 
  (page 215). Only the rarest of social conflicts 
  prevents you from using Rapport as your 
  defense skill. Rapport is the go-to skill for rolling 
  to defend in social conflicts, much like Athletics 
  is the go-to skill for physical conflicts.
  Father 
  Forthill 
  must have a 
  really high 
  Rapport 
  skill. That 
  man can 
  get anyone 
  to talk!
  Billy, 
  why would 
  someone use 
  “opening up” 
  if it means no 
  matter what 
  he ends up 
  revealing an 
  aspect to his 
  opponent?
  Well, you 
  could ask a 
  marketer that 
  question—she’d 
  tell you that 
  controlling 
  the message 
  is everything. 
  If you open up 
  and show your 
  opponent your 
  tIger-Souled 
  aspect, you 
  have created 
  a very distinct 
  impression. 
  that’s power.
  
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  Skills
  Resources
  (Stunts, page 155)
  Usually Resources is a measure of your available 
  wealth, but the specific form this takes—from 
  a secret family silver mine to a well-invested 
  portfolio—can vary from character to character 
  (and may be indicated and enhanced by your 
  aspects). Characters with high Resources can 
  buy their way into or out of most situations and 
  can easily afford the finest luxuries of life. They 
  include aristocrats, successful criminals, and 
  businessmen.
  It’s important to note that Resources repre-
  sents your personal resources, including your 
  regular forms of income, whether your job 
  is “steady” or not. You may have access to an 
  organization’s resources under certain circum-
  stances; this allows you to roll a different rating 
  than your personal Resources skill. Rolling that 
  way means you’re expending that organization’s 
  resources, not your own.
  For example, a consultant for Monoc 
  Securities might decide to acquire a private jet 
  for corporate use. The consultant’s Resources 
  might only be Fair (+2), but in this case the 
  consultant rolls using Monoc’s expense account, 
  rated at Fantastic (+6). 
   
  K Buying Things
  Resources
  Usually, this skill passively informs the GM 
  what your available resources are, but you may 
  still actively roll Resources for large expendi-
  tures or expenses outside of the daily cost of 
  living—like purchases and bribes. 
  For an idea of the “cost” of things, see 
  page 322. The cost of items is measured on the 
  adjective ladder; you can buy reasonable quanti-
  ties of anything that’s two steps or more lower 
  than your Resources without worrying about 
  it (i.e., not rolling). With justification, you can 
  probably also get things one step below your 
  Resources. For items greater than or equal to 
  your Resources, roll against the cost of the thing. 
  If successful, you can afford the item; if not, 
  you can’t. You can only make one Resources roll 
  per scene.
  Some large-scale conflicts may be all 
  about trying to outspend the other guy. Here, 
  Resources might act as an attack or defense skill.
   
  K Equipment
  Resources
  You are generally assumed to have all the tools 
  you normally need to do your job, whether that 
  job is fixing engines or shooting people. Still, 
  sometimes a situation arises where you need to 
  buy something, either because you didn’t antici-
  pate needing it or because the item is unusual, 
  rare, or illegal. When that happens, measure 
  the price in terms of how much Resources it 
  requires to access and purchase the item.
   
  K Lifestyle
  Resources
  You are assumed to live in accordance with your 
  means. If you’re rich, you may not even need 
  to go shopping (you have people who do that). 
  Generally speaking, if something costs two steps 
  less than your Resources skill, you probably have 
  one already, assuming it’s something that would 
  make sense for you to have obtained previously.
   
  K Money Talks
  Resources
  Wealth puts pressure on social interaction, 
  either subtly or overtly. 
  On the subtle level, whenever knowledge of 
  your wealth affects a situation, the Resources 
  skill may be used to modify (page 214) the actual 
  skill being used (usually a social one). If being 
  less wealthy is actually seen as a positive in the 
  situation (perhaps to gain some “street cred” or 
  what-have-you), then the rules for modifying 
  may be turned around, creating a –1 to the roll if 
  Resources is above a particular level.
  More overtly, you may use Resources as the 
  primary skill in a social interaction where an 
  offer of money is the primary factor. Bribery is 
  the clearest of such cases here, though negotia-
  tions to get a cash-strapped wizard-for-hire to 
  sign on to a case may involve a Resources roll, 
  as well.
   
  K Workspaces
  Resources
  Part of the passive measure of Resources is the 
  personal tools and spaces you have access to. 
  Workspaces are environments where you can 
  perform a certain type of work, and owning and 
  maintaining a world-class workshop, library, or 
  arcane laboratory requires a certain amount of 
  Resources.
  I wouldn’t 
  know 
  anything 
  about that. 
  I’d never do 
  anything 
  just for 
  the money.
  
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  Skills
  You use your Resources to set up the tools 
  you need for your job. Your home may have, for 
  free, a single library, lab, workshop, or arcane 
  library or sanctum of a quality equal to two 
  steps lower than your Resources. As described 
  in Scholarship (see page 142), the quality of a 
  workplace determines the highest possible 
  difficulty of a “question” or project that you can 
  pursue there.
  The breakdown of the various types of skills 
  that need workspaces is shown in the following 
  table. See the respective skills for more details.
  Skill
  Work
  Workspace
  Scholarship
  Academic 
  Research
  Library
  Scholarship
  Scientific Lab 
  Work
  Lab
  Craftsmanship
  Construction 
  & Fabrication
  Workshop
  Lore
  Arcane 
  Research
  Arcane 
  Library
  Lore
  Arcane 
  Spellwork & 
  Ritual
  Arcane 
  Sanctum
  If you wish to have a specialized workspace, 
  such as a workshop that can only work on guns, 
  you may have it at a quality equal to one step 
  lower than your Resources instead. Higher 
  quality workspaces may be constructed, but they 
  require a Resources roll with a difficulty equal to 
  the quality+2 (or +1 in the case of a specialized 
  space) and are not immediately available at the 
  time of purchase (though additional shifts may 
  be spent to reduce the timeframe, as usual).
  Keep in mind that a library doesn’t have to 
  be an actual, literal library full of books—any 
  kind of archived, searchable information can 
  be considered a library for game purposes. So, 
  if you want to have something like a computer 
  mainframe or set of hard drives that holds 
  scanned documents on various topics, you could 
  also consider that a library. Many actual libraries 
  even have large computerized databases now, 
  as opposed to older archival technologies like 
  microfiche.
  By default, the Internet is a Mediocre 
  library—extremely detailed information on a 
  specialized topic is usually access-restricted or 
  buried among useless and speculative informa-
  tion. If you want to, however, you can say that 
  your library consists of access to specialized 
  online databases (like Lexis-Nexis for lawyers) 
  that would allow a higher quality rating.
  Scholarship
  (Stunts, page 155)
  In the Dresdenverse, knowledge breaks down 
  into two camps: mundane and supernatural. 
  Lore covers the latter and Scholarship covers 
  the former. Scholarship operates as a catch-all 
  skill for most kinds of regular, everyday, “book” 
  knowledge with a few practical applications 
  out in the field as well. Characters with high 
  Scholarship may be adept at technology and 
  research, well-versed in the sciences and liberal 
  arts, and good at performing first aid (provided 
  they have experience with it). They include star 
  students, professors, and game show contestants.
   
  K Answers
  Scholarship
  The main use of Scholarship is to answer a ques-
  tion. Questions covered by Scholarship include 
  those of history, literature, and the sciences both 
  “soft” and “hard.” You can ask the GM, “What 
  do I know about this subject?” or “What does 
  this mean?” Often, there will be no need to roll, 
  especially if the subject is within your specialty 
  (as indicated by your background and aspects). 
  But if the GM feels the information is some-
  thing that should be hard to attain (such as a 
  clue), then she may call for a roll against a diffi-
  culty she sets. If you succeed, you receive the 
  
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  Skills
  information. If you fail, you may still attempt 
  to research the topic (see the trapping by that 
  name, below). In some cases (basically, whenever 
  it might be entertaining), you may stumble onto 
  a false lead that gets you deeper into trouble, or 
  you may discover that the information you seek 
  only uncovers deeper, unanswered questions.
   
  K Computer Use
  Scholarship
  Assuming that you aren’t the sort of person to, 
  say, cause technology to short out when you get 
  near it, the Scholarship skill includes the ability 
  to use and operate complex computerized or 
  electronic systems. This doesn’t really include 
  any competence at hacking, per se—Burglary 
  is still used to actually defeat security measures 
  and systems. However, Scholarship should 
  modify (page 214) Burglary whenever computers 
  are involved.
   
  K Declaring 
  Minor Details
  Scholarship
  You may use your knowledge to declare facts, 
  filling in minor details that the GM has not 
  mentioned. These facts must be within the field 
  of your Scholarship, and the GM has the right 
  to veto them. If all’s well, the GM sets a diffi-
  culty for the truth of the assertion, and if you 
  succeed at your Scholarship roll, the assertion is 
  true. If not, you are mistaken.
  In most cases, this is treated as a straight-
  up declaration action, as described on page 116. 
  If your  assertion is correct (i.e., successful), 
  the aspect is placed; it can be tagged once and 
  then invoked as usual (page 106). If your asser-
  tion turns out to be wrong, there is no penalty, 
  but there may be complications—at her option, 
  the GM could place a temporary Mistaken! 
  aspect on you, compelling it to represent the 
  fallout (and netting you a fate point).
  For GM advice on setting difficulties for 
  declarations, see page 313.
   
  K Exposition and 
  Knowledge Dumping
  Scholarship
  Sometimes the GM just needs to give the group 
  a lot of information, and the character with a 
  high Scholarship skill tends to be the conduit of 
  that. When the GM needs to knowledge dump, 
  if you have the highest Scholarship skill, the 
  GM may ask you if she can use you as a mouth-
  piece. Assuming you agree, the GM can share all 
  appropriate background and is encouraged to 
  give you a fate point for having your character 
  temporarily commandeered for the purposes of 
  the story.
   
  K Languages
  Scholarship
  Languages are part of a good classical education. 
  You may speak a number of additional languages 
  based on your Scholarship score (you don’t have 
  to, if it doesn’t suit your concept). Each step of 
  Scholarship above Mediocre gives you knowl-
  edge of one additional language (so one addi-
  tional at Average, two at Fair, and so on). You 
  don’t need to choose the languages when the 
  character is created; you can instead choose 
  languages in the course of play, as is convenient.
   
  K Medical Attention
  Scholarship
  Scholarship covers the scientific and practical 
  knowledge necessary to administer basic First 
  Aid. This allows you to declare that your care 
  is sufficient justification for recovery from mild 
  consequences, because you can create an envi-
  ronment that makes this recovery possible. See 
  page 220 in Playing the Game for a discussion of 
  justifying recovery from consequences. Stunts 
  are necessary to take this to the level of true 
  doctors and surgeons.
   
  K Research and Lab Work
  Scholarship
  Researching a topic is frequently a time-
  consuming and arduous task and exactly the sort 
  of thing worth skimming over with a few quick 
  dice rolls. Treat research as an extension of the 
  knowledge the character has—you know the 
  answers to some questions off the top of your 
  head and can answer other questions because 
  you know what book to look in.
  I see 
  Exposition & 
  Knowledge 
  Dumping 
  addresses 
  the “As you 
  know, Bob…” 
  issue.
  What?
  Nevermind.
  I think coroners count 
  here for the whole 
  “Medical Attention” thing.
  Make that I SURE 
  HOPE they count...
  
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  As such, deeper, dedicated research is 
  something that might happen when you fail a 
  Scholarship check. Provided you are willing to 
  spend time researching (and that the answer 
  can be found), the only questions are how long 
  it will take you and how good a workspace you 
  have access to (usually a library for book things, 
  a laboratory for experimental research, etc.) to 
  discover the answer.
  One important note: because the GM is not 
  always obligated to reveal the difficulty of a given 
  roll, you may not know how much you failed it 
  by, which means you don’t know how long you’ll 
  need to research. Usually you’ll just research 
  until you find the answer, but sometimes, when 
  time is tight, you might find yourself behind the 
  eight-ball. GMs are encouraged to read “Setting 
  Difficulties” (page 310) before making any deci-
  sion about how to deal with a failed roll.
  Academic research requires a library 
  (page 140), while research through experimenta-
  tion requires a laboratory. The quality of these 
  workspaces determines the hardest possible 
  question you can answer within them (so a ques-
  tion of Good difficulty requires a Good library 
  or better). If you attempt to answer a question 
  in a library that’s not equipped to answer it, 
  the GM is encouraged to be up-front about its 
  shortcomings.
  Most high schools and private individuals 
  have Mediocre, Average, or Fair libraries. Small 
  colleges often have Good libraries and labo-
  ratory facilities; larger institutions may have 
  Great ones. Superb and better libraries are few 
  and far between. Many workspaces also have a 
  specialty or two where they are considered to 
  be one step higher—for example, Georgetown’s 
  library specializes in law, so it has a Great library 
  which is treated as Superb for legal questions. 
  Characters may own libraries, laboratories, 
  and other workspaces of their own; see the 
  Resources skill (page 139) for more.
  Stealth
  (Stunts, page 156)
  Stealth is the ability to remain unseen and 
  unheard. Directly opposed by Alertness or 
  Investigation, Stealth covers everything from 
  skulking in the shadows to hiding under the bed. 
  Characters with a high Stealth are like ghosts, 
  passing through the shadows with only the 
  barest whisper of sound. They include burglars, 
  assassins, and sneaky kids.
   
  K Ambush
  Stealth
  With the Stealth skill, you can set up an ambush 
  by rolling to hide as per the Hiding trapping, 
  below. Given time to prepare, you might even 
  create aspects on the scene to set up the ambush. 
  When you decide to strike, the victim gets one 
  last Alertness roll to see if he notices some-
  thing at the last moment. You have the option 
  of keeping your hiding roll or rerolling your 
  Stealth in response to this last Alertness roll. If 
  the victim succeeds, he can defend normally (but 
  not take a normal action in the first exchange). 
  If the victim’s roll fails, he can only defend at an 
  effective skill level of Mediocre.
   
  K Hiding
  Stealth
  When you’re hiding, you’re remaining perfectly 
  still and (hopefully) out of sight. Lighting, 
  obstacles, and other environmental factors can 
  modify the difficulty (page 311), and the result of 
  your Stealth roll is the basis for any contest with 
  a searcher’s Alertness or Investigation.
  
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  Skills
   
  K Shadowing
  Stealth
  Something of a variant on Skulking (see 
  below), Shadowing is the art of following 
  someone without them noticing that you’re 
  doing it. When following someone on foot, 
  the full Stealth skill can be used to pull this 
  off; if you’re following a target by car, Stealth 
  remains primary but is modified (page 214) by 
  your Driving skill. The target usually gets an 
  Alertness check to see if he can pick up on the 
  fact that he’s being followed.
  This Stealth check is often made complemen-
  tarily to an Investigation check required to keep 
  the target in sight, as per the Surveillance trap-
  ping for that skill (page 133).
   
  K Skulking
  Stealth
  Skulking is the art of moving while trying to 
  remain unnoticed. It uses many of the same 
  rules as Hiding, above, but it adds in difficulty 
  factors based on how fast you are moving and 
  the terrain. A slow crawl isn’t much harder, but 
  running is tough. Bare concrete isn’t much of an 
  issue, but a scattering of dried leaves and twigs 
  makes it much more difficult to move quietly. 
  Survival
  (Stunts, page 156)
  Survival is the skill of outdoorsmen, covering 
  hunting, trapping, tracking, fire building, and a 
  lot of other wilderness skills. Characters with a 
  high Survival skill are adept at riding horses, can 
  survive nearly indefinitely by living off the land, 
  and can track a man in the wilderness for days. 
  They include hunters, scouts, and soldiers.
  While the Dresdenverse is centered squarely 
  on the urban landscape, Survival still has its 
  place, either by venturing out into the country-
  side (say, to visit a crotchety old wizard who 
  lives on a farm), stepping into a particularly large 
  urban park, or making it through the night in 
  the wilds of the Nevernever.
   
  K Animal Handling
  Survival
  Survival covers the breadth of your interaction 
  with animals—natural ones for certain, and 
  even some supernatural types. This interaction 
  ranges from calming them to training them to 
  getting a rough kind of “communication” going. 
  This includes handling beasts of burden and 
  carriage animals as well as common pets.
  As such, Survival serves as a stand-in for all 
  social skills when dealing with animals and other 
  beasts. Which is not to say that animals are 
  great conversationalists; but when you’re trying 
  to soothe or stare down an animal, Survival is 
  the skill to roll.
   
  K Camouflage
  Survival
  Survival can be used to construct “blinds” and 
  other ways to help remain hidden outdoors. 
  On a Mediocre or better roll, you can construct 
  a decent, disguised place to hide, which 
  lets Survival complement (page 214) your Stealth 
  rolls.
   
  K Riding
  Survival
  Riding horses (or camels, elephants, or more 
  exotic creatures) uses Survival, with the skill 
  operating much like Driving does when it comes 
  to chases and most maneuvers. Further, Survival 
  simply covers the basics of riding, from taking 
  care of your mount to getting it to remain calm 
  through a stressful situation.
   
  K Scavenging
  Survival
  If you need to scrounge up something from the 
  wilderness—sticks, bones, sharp rocks, vines 
  that can serve as rope, and so on—you can roll 
  Survival to find these things.
   
  K Tracking
  Survival 
  Tracking is the art of looking for recognizable 
  signs of passage and the ability to draw conclu-
  sions that help you stay on the trail of your 
  quarry. As this is partly an application of delib-
  erate perception, the Investigation skill modi-
  fies (page 214) Survival when you use the skill 
  this way. 
  I recommend everyone 
  study a wilderness 
  survival manual. The 
  Boy Scouts one is 
  good; the US Army 
  one is better.
  Cats don’t fit 
  these rules. 
  Trust me. 
  Mister is a 
  handful, at 
  the BEST 
  of times.
  Can you use 
  any of these 
  Survival 
  trappings in 
  a city?
  Some yes, some 
  not without 
  taking a stunt. 
  the animal-
  related ones 
  are a yes; they 
  don’t depend on 
  the environment.
  Oo! Do zombie 
  T-Rexes count 
  here?
  I swear 
  you’re sweet 
  on that girl.
  I like big bones, 
  and I cannot lie.
  
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  Once you get close enough to your prey to 
  be seen or heard by it, the Shadowing rules for 
  Stealth (page 143) come into play.
  Weapons
  (Stunts, page 156)
  Weapons is the skill of fighting with tools: 
  swords, knives, axes, clubs, whips, etc. (except 
  guns—that’s a whole section of its own; see 
  page 131). The exact weapon is more a choice of 
  style than anything else, as this covers everything 
  from fencing to a brawl using broken bottles 
  and chair legs. Characters with a high Weapons 
  skill are familiar with a variety of “old school” 
  weapons and wield them with deadly accuracy. 
  They include swordsmen, circus performers, and 
  Special Forces soldiers.
   
  K Distance Weaponry
  Weapons
  The Weapons skill also covers the ability to use 
  weapons with an unusually long reach (like a 
  whip or long spear) to attack targets in adjacent 
  zones or to throw small handheld weapons up 
  to one zone away. Use this skill to be good at 
  throwing knives as well as fighting with them. 
  If you are Weapons-focused, you have a leg up 
  on folks who fight with their Fists; on the other 
  hand, a Weapons user needs to have a weapon in 
  order to make use of the skill.
   
  K Melee Combat
  Weapons
  Weapons is a combat skill that is used to make 
  attacks and maneuvers (page 207) that incorpo-
  rate the use of a physical weapon—such as 
  knives, swords, clubs, and so on—but not bare 
  hands (which uses the Fists skill; see page 130) 
  and not guns (which uses the Guns skill; see 
  page 131). When used to attack, melee weapons 
  always deal physical stress.
  Weapons allow the character to maintain 
  some reach and attack advantage over a bare-
  handed opponent. On a successful attack, a 
  handheld weapon often causes more physical 
  stress than would a bare-fisted attack at the same 
  level, making this a more wounding and lethal 
  method of combat. The downside, of course, is 
  that someone can take your weapon away from 
  you, rendering this skill entirely unavailable.
   
  K Melee Defense
  Weapons
  As a combat skill, Weapons inherently carries 
  the ability to defend yourself in a fight against 
  other Weapons and Fists attacks, so long as you 
  have a weapon in hand. (You still need Athletics 
  to make yourself a difficult target against ranged 
  fire from Guns.)
   
  K Weapon Knowledge
  Weapons
  You are well-versed in a variety of fighting styles 
  and weapons and you may use this skill as a 
  knowledge skill covering those areas, such as 
  “This sword is from Solingen; I can tell from the 
  hallmark.”
  
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  - cHAPter NINe -
  mortal 
  Stunts
  
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  mortal Stunts
  What Are 
  Stunts?
  Just enumerating a person’s skills doesn’t quite 
  give you the full picture of what he’s capable 
  of. Most people have little tricks, advantages, 
  or knacks that they pull out when they need a 
  bit of something extra. Ramirez finds new and 
  exciting ways to get wounded without going 
  down. Marcone can shake a man twice his size 
  to his core just by saying “Good morning.” Harry 
  can do more than just eavesdrop—he can Listen. 
  We call these little knacks stunts.
  What Stunts Do
  Stunts exist to provide guaranteed situational 
  benefits. These benefits might be the result of 
  special training, unique (but non-supernatural) 
  abilities, or something that’s just innately cool 
  about your character. A stunt may grant a char-
  acter the ability to use a skill under unusual 
  circumstances, using it in a broader array of situ-
  ations than normal, substituting it for another 
  skill, or using it in a complementary fashion to 
  another skill. A stunt might allow a character to 
  gain an effect roughly equal to two shifts used in 
  a specific way or to otherwise grant other small 
  effects. Put more simply, stunts allow the usual 
  rules about skills to be bent—or even broken. 
  We’ll get into how to build your own stunts 
  shortly.
  Some stunts may have prerequisites (other 
  stunts or even aspects). Particularly potent 
  stunts may also require the use of a fate point to 
  be activated. In general, a character should not 
  take a stunt tied to a skill he does not have at 
  least at Average level.
  Mortal Stunts 
  vs. Supernatural 
  Powers
  The stunts in this chapter are called mortal 
  stunts because they’re available to everyone—
  supernatural and mundane characters alike—
  and have both feet firmly planted in the realm 
  of what’s possible for a normal (mortal) human 
  to do. Each mortal stunt that a character takes 
  reduces his refresh by 1. (What’s refresh? See 
  page 20.)
  Supernatural powers are very much the 
  same as stunts, although they tend to pack more 
  of a wallop. However, they often have more 
  requirements before they can be taken—usually, 
  at the very least, a high concept aspect (page 54) 
  indicating that the abilities represented by the 
  supernatural powers are appropriate to the 
  character.
  So, that 
  explains it! 
  Wonderful.
  So now 
  I don’t 
  just have 
  trouble 
  paying 
  my rent, I 
  also have 
  some sort 
  of wacked 
  out meta-
  physical 
  debt I’m 
  constantly 
  under. I 
  want a 
  new GM!
  This whole thing with limiting PCs to no more 
  stunts and powers than their refresh allows 
  may seem a bit odd. There are a few reasons 
  it’s here.
  The most obvious reason is that it’s a “game 
  balance” issue—a flexible spending limit that 
  keeps PCs all within a certain power level. But 
  if that’s the goal here, why all that yap about 
  the mortal gift of free will? Let’s look at this 
  from two perspectives.
  First, system-wise, a character with a low 
  refresh is going to be very light on fate points 
  during play. But fate points are a key currency, 
  the big engine that drives the ability to use 
  aspects—and aspects are an important feature 
  for enabling characters to exercise their “story 
  power.” So a character without many fate 
  points at the beginning of a session is going 
  to be “hungry”—compelled (very literally; see 
  page 100) to act in keeping with his aspects in 
  order to get his fate point total up. Ever wonder 
  why Harry Dresden—a low refresh character 
  due to all of his supernatural power—tends to 
  get so beat up and into sticky situations all the 
  time? We know it’s mostly his stellar person-
  ality, but in game terms, it’s because he’s getting 
  compelled left and right by circumstance, 
  filling up on much-needed fate points.
  The effect this has on play produces some-
  thing very much like what we were talking 
  about on page  10—monsters have nature, 
  mortals have choice. So there’s our second 
  perspective: the more power someone has, the 
  more he risks becoming a monster, a creature 
  totally beholden to its nature. Even a mundane 
  mortal can become a monster once his abilities 
  begin to dictate his actions. The mortal gift 
  of free will is a preventative measure against 
  complete monsterhood. And that brings us 
  full circle.
  The Philosophy of Limits
  
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  mortal Stunts
  To remain a PC, no character may take a 
  combination of stunts and/or powers that would 
  reduce his refresh to zero or below. Characters 
  that have gone beyond this limit have, for all 
  practical purposes, lost their freedom of action, 
  thus becoming tools of the game’s story (i.e., 
  NPCs) rather than protagonists (i.e., PCs). 
  In the case of mortal stunts, the character is 
  constrained by what he’s made of himself; for 
  supernatural powers, he’s lost access to the 
  mortal gift of free will. In general, it’s recom-
  mended that non-supernatural characters spend 
  about half their refresh on stunts, but this is just 
  a recommendation.
  Building 
  Mortal Stunts
  What follows later in this chapter is not a 
  comprehensive list of stunts. You, along with 
  your GM, are encouraged to create your own 
  to fit your game. The important thing to keep 
  in mind is that “entry level” stunts—without 
  prerequisites, which mortal stunts usually are—
  are the baseline. If the effect of the stunt is really 
  unusual or particularly potent, it may be some-
  where down the line in a chain of stunts.
  Since a stunt is tied to a particular skill, it’s 
  useful to think about the abilities offered by a 
  stunt as an extension of its skill’s trappings 
  (page 120). So at a very high level, we can say a 
  stunt does one of two things: it either adds a 
  new trapping to a skill or extends an existing trap-
  ping of that skill by applying about two shifts 
  (page 192) of effect in a particular way. 
  Both of these things are often constrained 
  to happen under somewhat specific circum-
  stances (aim for something between almost-
  never-happens narrow and covers-all-situa-
  tions broad). If there’s any hard and fast rule 
  of building stunts, it’s this one: a stunt should 
  never be allowed to act, essentially, as a flat +2 to 
  the skill it affects under all (or even the majority) 
  of that skill’s uses. 
  Furthermore, when used in combination, 
  stunts should avoid overlapping such that their 
  bonuses “stack”—both adding in the same way 
  to the outcome. If such stacking is possible, then 
  the stunts, taken individually, should each be less 
  effective than the norm.
  With those ideas in mind, let’s get into the 
  specifics of building mortal stunts. (To learn 
  more about supernatural powers and get some 
  ideas about how to build those, see page 158.)
  Adding New 
  Trappings
  The first possible use for a stunt is to broaden 
  a skill by giving it a new trapping. Often this is 
  a trapping that’s “transplanted” from one skill to 
  another. Sometimes this trapping may need to 
  be modified, or made more circumstantial, in 
  order to fit its new skill.
  Example: Lenny’s character never fights a 
  monster without two guns in hand. He has a 
  strong Guns skill rating, but his Athletics is 
  only so-so. Lenny decides to build a new stunt 
  called Shot on the Run, transplanting Athletics’ 
  “Dodging” trapping to Guns—now Lenny can 
  roll Guns instead of Athletics in order to dodge 
  physical attacks. His GM considers putting the 
  restriction “…so long as he has a gun close at 
  hand” on Lenny’s stunt idea to help rationalize 
  the use of this stunt—after all, it’s still the 
  Guns stunt, and Lenny’s ability to dodge using 
  Guns suggests that it’s tied to his ability to, say, 
  lay down some gunfire to make himself a less 
  attractive target in a fight. Alternately, it might 
  be done as a “Dodge, only vs. ranged attacks” 
  with the idea that Lenny’s character is using his 
  knowledge of sight-lines and so forth to make 
  himself a difficult target. Both work, offering 
  the same kind of mechanical benefit, but under 
  different circumstances—it’s up to Lenny and 
  the GM to work out what fits best.
  Other times an entirely new trapping is 
  warranted. The default set of trappings for a 
  skill certainly doesn’t cover every conceivable 
  application—it just defines what the skill can do 
  for everyone. Skills are pretty broad in applica-
  tion; specialization happens with stunts.
  Example: Lydia has created a huntswoman—
  someone used to tracking beasts in the wild—
  who’s been drawn to the city by strange super-
  natural prey. Her character has a pretty high 
  Survival skill, covering most of her outdoor-
  oriented capabilities. But she wants something 
  more, so she takes an Herbalist stunt, adding 
  a trapping to the Survival skill that allows her 
  to use it as a knowledge skill when dealing with 
  plants, maybe even allowing for a little herbal 
  first aid.
  
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  mortal Stunts
  Taken all together, this variety of stunt is an 
  easy one to come by. There’s no strange math, no 
  specific application of shifts to consider, just a 
  broadening of scope for the affected skill. These 
  stunts often show up for a character’s highest-
  rated skills, allowing the character to operate at 
  peak effectiveness in more situations.
  Extending Existing 
  Trappings
  The other possible use for a stunt is to improve 
  the use of a skill (usually a single trapping of that 
  skill) under specific circumstances. Generally, 
  this means that the stunt offers an effect equal to 
  about two shifts applied in a specific way (such 
  as reducing the amount of time or difficulty to 
  do something by two steps, or adding 2 to the 
  skill when used in a particular way). Those shifts 
  may be split up, with one stunt offering two 
  different one shift effects (e.g., reducing the time 
  to do a task by one step and granting a +1 to 
  the skill roll when the circumstances are right). 
  Certain applications of skills may be consid-
  ered to be more potent than others (attacks are 
  a good example of this), and as such these may 
  be better done at the one shift mark rather than 
  two. On the other hand, instead of lowering the 
  number of shifts gained, you could require that 
  the character spend a fate point to activate a 
  more potent stunt.
  As noted above (page 147), when applying 
  multiple stunts like this to the same skill, the 
  bonuses should not overlap or “stack.” If stacking 
  is allowed, the amount of effect each stunt has 
  individually should be reduced. To oversimplify 
  this a bit, two stunts might offer +2 each in two 
  different ways, but if they’re set up to both add 
  to the same thing, the result should be more like 
  +3 than +4. But this is just a guideline, subject 
  to the GM’s sense of charity.
  Given these considerations, here’s a quick 
  list of mortal stunt effects that could be used to 
  build your own. (If the same bonus is achievable 
  multiple times through multiple stunts, reduce 
  the effectiveness of any “stacking” stunts by one.)
  Give a +2 to a specific application of a non-
  attack trapping (note that a maneuver, page 207, 
  is not an attack, as it doesn’t inflict stress). 
  This may be reduced to +1 for a broader 
  application, or increased to +3 or even +4 
  for very, very narrowly defined situations. 
  Example: Vampirologist – Gain a +1 to 
  Lore rolls whenever researching vampires and 
  their kin. Specify a deeper sub-field of knowl-
  edge (Red Court), and you gain an addi-
  tional +1 when the research is relevant to the 
  sub-field. 
  Give a +1 to an attack, improving its accuracy 
  under a specific circumstance.
  Example: Target-Rich Environment – 
  Gain a +1 to attacks with Guns whenever 
  personally outnumbered in a firefight.
  Give a +2 to an attack’s result, applied only 
  if the attack was successful, under partic-
  ular conditions. May have a lesser benefit in a 
  secondary circumstance.
  Example: Lethal Weapon – Your hands are 
  lethal weapons. When using Fists to strike an 
  unarmored opponent, you are considered to 
  have Weapon:2; Weapon:1 vs. Armor:1.
  Give one or two expendable 2-shift effects 
  (e.g., additional mild consequences) or a persis-
  tent 1-shift effect (e.g., Armor:1 against certain 
  types of things).  Lean towards one expend-
  able effect if the application is broad (e.g., vs. 
  all mental stress), two  expendable effects if it’s 
  narrow.
  Example: Resilient Self-Image – Your sense 
  of self is strong, enabling you to endure more 
  psychological punishment than most. When 
  facing torture or other extreme interrogation 
  techniques, you may take two additional mild 
  mental consequences (page 203).
  Reduce the amount of time necessary to 
  complete a particular task by two steps.
  Example: Capable Researcher – Some 
  say you were born in a library. Any scholarly 
  research you do is completed two time incre-
  ments (page 315) faster than usual.
  What about me? I’d definitely be faster than 
  “two time increments”! How does eidetic 
  recall fit into your rules, William?
  I’m pretty sure you don’t count as a 
  mortal character, Bob. Ha, you’re 
  an NPC! Or an Item of Power?
  What?!
  
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  mortal Stunts
  Reduce the difficulties faced by a skill under 
  a particular “sub-set” of circumstances by two.
  Example: Hairpin Maestro – Poor tools are 
  no trouble when picking locks. Any increase to 
  difficulty due to poor tools (such as having only 
  a hairpin and a business card) is reduced by up 
  to two.
  Combine any two of the 2-shift effects from 
  above at half value.
  Example: Scene of the Crime – You have 
  a practiced eye when combing over a crime 
  scene. In such a circumstance, you gain +1 to 
  your Investigation roll and arrive at your find-
  ings one step faster than usual on the time table 
  (page 315).
  Get a more powerful effect, but only when you 
  spend a fate point. Usually only allowed once 
  per scene.
  Example: Killer Blow – Add 3 to the 
  damage of a Fists attack on a successful hit, 
  once per scene, for a fate point. This stacks with 
  any other damage-increasing stunts for Fists.
  Examples of 
  Mortal Stunts
  The stunts provided here are examples. We’re 
  giving just a few for each skill but, as indicated 
  above, this is absolutely not intended to be a 
  comprehensive list. When you don’t find some-
  thing here that suits you, use the guidelines 
  above (page 147) to grow your own.
  Alertness
  (Skill & Trappings, page 121)
  Corner of My Eye: When successfully rolling 
  Alertness passively to pick up on details, gain 
  an additional 2 shifts. This reflects the ability 
  to pick up on more pieces of information, but 
  it does not improve the depth of that informa-
  tion (which would take things into the realm of 
  Investigation). 
  On My Toes: Gain +2 to Alertness when using 
  it to determine initiative.
  Paranoid? Probably.: Gain +2 to Alertness 
  when rolling against surprise.
  Athletics
  (Skill & Trappings, page 121)
  Acrobat: Gain +1 on Athletics when using it to 
  survive a fall. Also, gain +1 to attempts to dodge 
  ranged attacks (throwing and guns), so long as 
  you describe it colorfully.
  Fleet of Foot: When sprinting (page 212), gain a 
  +2 to Athletics.
  Human Spider: Difficult surfaces aren’t much 
  trouble to scale; reduce all climbing difficulties 
  by up to 2.
  Mighty Leap: Any borders (page 212) that your 
  character chooses to clear by jumping are 
  reduced by up to 2.
  Too Fast to Hit: When making a full defense 
  (page 199), gain an additional +1 to the roll (for 
  a total of +3) if you also take a supplemental 
  action to move one zone. You do not take the 
  usual –1 penalty for the supplemental action.
  Burglary
  (Skill & Trappings, page 123)
  The Big Picture: When casing a target with 
  Burglary (page 123), you gain the ability to define 
  an additional aspect about the target (such as 
  Broken Window Latch) when you succeed 
  on the roll, for a total of two aspects.
  Cat-Burglar: You’re a thief with catlike tread; 
  you may use Burglary instead of Stealth for 
  Hiding or Skulking (page 142).
  Hacker: You may use your Burglary skill 
  (instead of Scholarship) to do research with 
  computers as per Scholarship’s Computer Use 
  trapping (page 141).
  Yes, Names Matter!
  Stunts are more than just their game-
  rule effects. This is why it’s important to 
  give your stunts a catchy name. This is not 
  optional!
  A name is evocative, getting across the 
  gist of the stunt and giving another bit of 
  flavor to define your character. Also, practi-
  cally speaking, giving it a specific name gives 
  you a shorthand for talking about the stunt 
  with the GM and other players. 
  Hacker’s not so useful 
  if you’re a wizard and 
  computers go FOOF! 
  when you touch ‘em.
  
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  mortal Stunts
  Hairpin Maestro: Poor tools are no trouble 
  when picking locks. Any increase to difficulty 
  due to poor tools (such as having only a hairpin 
  and a business card) is reduced by up to two.
  Safecracker: Any lockpicking effort takes place 
  two steps faster than usual on the time table 
  (page 315).
  Contacts
  (Skill & Trappings, page 123)
  Ear to the Ground: You have your fingers on 
  the pulse of things, with plenty of friends who 
  can give you a heads up. The difficulty of any 
  Getting the Tip-Off (page 124) roll is reduced by 
  two.
  I Know Just the Guy: When you’re looking to 
  gather some information from your network of 
  contacts, you have unerring instincts for finding 
  the right person, fast. When using the Gathering 
  Information trapping (page 123), your efforts 
  are at a +1 and are 1 time increment (page 315)  
  faster.
  Rumormonger: You know exactly how to get 
  the word out, gaining a +2 on your efforts to 
  spread rumors.
  Conviction
  (Skill & Trappings, page 124)
  Devout Words: The strength of your faith 
  alone allows you to give others pause. You may 
  use your Conviction skill to perform a block in 
  physical conflict, potentially preventing someone 
  from making a conflict action against you.
  Person of Conviction: Your social presence is 
  tightly rooted in your identity as a person of 
  deep faith. You may use Conviction instead of 
  Presence to determine your social stress capacity 
  (page 137).
  Resilient Self-Image: Your sense of self is 
  strong, enabling you to endure more psycholog-
  ical punishment than most. When facing torture 
  or other extreme interrogation techniques, You 
  may take two additional mild mental conse-
  quences (page 203).
  Tower of Faith: Strongly held beliefs enable 
  you to protect your mind from the aggression 
  of others. Provided you get a chance to pray or 
  otherwise call upon your faith, gain Armor:1 
  against any social or mental stress in a scene.
  Craftsmanship
  (Skill & Trappings, page 125)
  Car Mechanic: You know the ins and outs 
  of cars like nobody’s business. Gain a +2 on 
  Craftsmanship whenever dealing with a car or 
  truck and a +1 on other personal vehicles (boats, 
  motorcycles, small aircraft).
  Demolitions Training: You are trained in 
  the effective use of explosives (this is a new 
  skill trapping; most people can’t handle explo-
  sives without training). You may use your 
  Craftsmanship skill to place and set explosives 
  appropriately. This allows you to do attacks and 
  maneuvers against structures (see “Challenges,” 
  page 324), and your skill roll also sets the diffi-
  culty  for any characters attempting to avoid 
  damage from an explosive that you’ve placed. 
  Note that to hide an explosive you will still need 
  to use the Deceit skill.
  Junkyard Artiste: You create art by working 
  with your hands and a workman’s tools—works 
  of sculpture, perhaps, or other kinds of modern, 
  “industrial” art. You may use Craftsmanship 
  instead of Performance to create these works of 
  art (see the Composition trapping, page 136).
  Jury-Rigger: You have a talent for improvising 
  with available materials. When jury-rigging 
  (page 320), your repairs last two scenes longer 
  than usual.
  Monkey with a Wrench: Sure, building and 
  fixing is nice, but taking things apart is more 
  satisfying. When using Craftsmanship to take 
  something apart, gain a +1 on the effort and 
  get it disassembled one time increment (page 315) 
  faster.
  Deceit
  (Skill & Trappings, page 126)
  Document Forging: You are trained in the 
  forging of official documents (such as ID, birth 
  records, and the like) or letters. You can roll 
  Deceit to create these documents, but using 
  them or planting them where they will be of use 
  (like in a library or government office) might 
  require the use of other skills, such as Burglary 
  or Stealth. Anyone exposed to these documents 
  gets an Alertness or Scholarship roll to spot the 
  deception; the difficulty is equal to your roll to 
  make the document. Likewise, your roll is also 
  the difficulty for any Investigation rolls to suss 
  out your forgery.
  there’s also 
  a “Blessed 
  Words” stunt—
  built around 
  a maneuver 
  concept—
  that we’ve 
  given several 
  faith-based 
  characters 
  in Baltimore, 
  toward the end 
  of this book.
  
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  mortal Stunts
  Honest Lies: Whenever incorporating a real, 
  valuable piece of the truth (however marginally 
  valuable it may be) into a lie, you gain a +2 on 
  your efforts to pass off the untrue parts.
  Make-Up Artist: Given enough time, you can 
  create very convincing disguises, ones that will 
  hold up to deeper inspection (although not to 
  careful scrutiny and magic). Any attempt using 
  Investigation or Alertness to see through your 
  disguise is at an additional +2 difficulty.
  Pick-Pocket: Whether it’s a simple bump-and-
  grab or something more complicated, you’re 
  adept at getting people to pay attention to other 
  things while you or an accomplice liberates 
  their pockets of their contents. You may use the 
  Deceit skill to perform pick-pocketing with no 
  increases in difficulty. This includes the filching 
  of small items from a desk or someplace similar. 
  Targets of this action usually oppose with 
  Alertness.
  Stage Magician: You may attempt complicated 
  stage magic tricks without penalty and gain a 
  +1 on any attempts with Deceit to create quick 
  distractions. This gives a +1 stacking bonus to 
  attempts to pick-pocket (regardless of whether 
  or not you have the Pick-Pocket stunt).
  Takes One to Know One: You may use Deceit 
  instead of Empathy to catch someone in a lie.
  Discipline
  (Skill & Trappings, page 127)
  Calm Blue Ocean: You are skilled at keeping 
  your emotions in check. Gain +2 to Discipline 
  when rolling to keep emotions under control.
  Supreme Concentration: Your Discipline is 
  considered to be Fantastic whenever Discipline 
  would restrict, complement, or otherwise 
  modify (page 214) another skill. This has no 
  effect on your actual Discipline rating when the 
  skill itself is being rolled.
  Unshakeable: When defending against social 
  or mental attacks with Discipline, any of your 
  aspects (such as consequences or other tempo-
  rary or permanent aspects) that get tagged 
  provide only a +1. If the attacker chooses to tag 
  for a reroll, you may “lock down” one of his dice, 
  leaving him only the other three to re-roll.
  Driving
  (Skill & Trappings, page 128)
  Been There: Your Driving is never treated as 
  Mediocre for purposes of navigation, even if 
  a place is unfamiliar (page 129); use it at the full 
  value instead.
  Like the Back of My Hand: Your knack for 
  shortcuts gives you a +2 to Driving when 
  using it for street knowledge and shortest-path 
  navigation.
  Pilot: Your focus is on aircraft, not cars. Gain 
  +1 to your Driving when piloting an aircraft; 
  choose a specific kind that you’re best with (heli-
  copters, jet airliners, personal aircraft) for an 
  additional +1 when steering that type.
  Shake the Tail: When you are the one being 
  followed in a car-chase, you have a real talent 
  for sudden turns and daring maneuvers to shake 
  off your pursuers. Gain a +2 to Driving in such 
  a  case.
  Aw, man. 
  Phil. Poor, 
  undead Phil.
  
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  mortal Stunts
  Empathy
  (Skill & Trappings, page 129)
  Counselor: You have some formal education 
  in professional counseling or psychotherapy. 
  Your skill can be used to justify another char-
  acter’s recovery from moderate or severe social 
  or mental consequences, provided you have the 
  time and opportunity to provide them with the 
  full extent of your services as a counselor. 
  Read the Surface: You can get a sense of 
  someone quickly when trying to “read” them 
  (page 129). Your first attempt to read someone 
  takes less than a minute of interaction, instead 
  of the usual ten. Any subsequent efforts with the 
  same person do not enjoy this benefit.
  The Social Graces: Keen awareness of the ebb 
  and flow of social situations makes you the 
  master of your circumstances. When deter-
  mining initiative in a social conflict, gain +2 to 
  Empathy.
  Won’t Get Fooled Again: It only takes once for 
  someone to lie to you before you start to wise 
  up to it. Once you’ve discovered a particular 
  person’s lie for what it is, you gain a +2 on any 
  future Empathy rolls when dealing with that liar. 
  (This requires a small amount of book-keeping, 
  but the benefits are worth it!)
  Endurance
  (Skill & Trappings, page 130)
  No Pain, No Gain: You can take a bunch of 
  punishment before it starts to add up. You may 
  take one additional mild physical consequence 
  (page 203).
  Tireless: Your Endurance is considered 
  Fantastic whenever Endurance might restrict, 
  complement, or otherwise modify another skill 
  (page 214). This has no effect when Endurance is 
  rolled directly, however.
  Tough Stuff: The stuff of blunt trauma—fists, 
  sticks, and stones—pose little trouble for you. 
  Against such things, you have a natural Armor:1 
  (which stacks with other forms of protection). 
  This does not apply to things like blades, bullets, 
  and burns, but it makes you a beast in a burly 
  brawl.
  Fists
  (Skill & Trappings, page 130)
  Footwork: You’re fast on your feet and have 
  been in enough fistfights to know how to make 
  yourself a hard target. You may use Fists to 
  dodge attacks instead of Athletics, in all the 
  circumstances where Athletics might apply 
  (page 121).
  Killer Blow: Add 3 to the damage of a Fists 
  attack on a successful hit, once per scene, for a 
  fate point. This stacks with any other damage-
  increasing stunts for Fists.
  Martial Artist: As a result of advanced training, 
  you are able to recognize many styles of martial 
  arts, using Fists as a knowledge and perception 
  skill focused on unarmed fighting. This enables 
  you to make assessments and declarations 
  related to fighting styles and fighting culture 
  using your Fists skill. Such rolls are made at +1.
  Armed Arts: You are practiced with a small 
  number of weapons as part of your martial arts 
  training. Pick two weapons which logically fit 
  in with your training (nightstick and knife with 
  cop training, for example). You may use the Fists 
  skill instead of Weapons when wielding these 
  implements.
  Lethal Weapon: Your hands are lethal weapons. 
  When using Fists to strike an unarmored oppo-
  nent, you are considered to have Weapon:2. 
  Against opponents with Armor:1, your Fists 
  attacks are Weapon:1. There is no benefit 
  against more heavily armored opponents.
  Redirected Force: You’re an expert at turning 
  close-combat attacks (swung fists, thrust knives) 
  against themselves. On a successful defense 
  roll using Fists against such an attack, you may 
  sacrifice your next action (giving this an effective 
  limit of one per exchange) to treat the defense 
  as a successful maneuver on your part (requiring 
  no additional rolling), placing a maneuver aspect 
  like Thrown to the Ground or Taken Off 
  Balance on your attacker.
  Step Into the Blow: When you use Fists to 
  defend against a close-quarters attack and fail 
  that defense, you may sacrifice your next action 
  to counterattack immediately (with Fists) at +1. 
  You may only sacrifice one action per exchange 
  in this way; when you’ve sacrificed your next 
  action once, you don’t have a “next action” to 
  sacrifice if you’re attacked a second time.
  Nice alliteration, Billy. Have you 
  considered a career in poetry?
  Part of me 
  wants Killer 
  Blow to be 
  called “It’s 
  Clobberin’ 
  Time!”
  that’s 
  actually better 
  as an aspect. 
  (But think of 
  what you’d 
  get when you 
  combined that 
  aspect with 
  this stunt!)
  
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  Guns
  (Skill & Trappings, page 131)
  Fast Reload: Provided that you have a supply 
  of ammunition, reloads are rarely an issue. You 
  take no penalty when reloading as a supple-
  mental action (page 213); if you’re in a race to see 
  who reloads first, or anything else having to do 
  with your speed or ability to reload, gain a +1 
  on the roll.
  Gun Nut: Guns. Man, you know everything 
  about them. You’ve seen them all, even the 
  ones that nobody knows about. When rolling 
  Guns as a knowledge skill (page 131), gain +2 on  
  the roll.
  Hand-Eye Coordination: Shooting and 
  throwing aren’t all that different, once you get 
  familiar with ‘em. You may use the Guns skill 
  instead of Weapons to throw manual projectiles 
  (rocks, grenades, boomerangs).
  Pin Them Down: When Aiming (page 131), the 
  aspect you place on the target cannot be removed 
  so long as they do not move out of the zone, and 
  any attempts to leave the zone face an increased 
  border (page 212) of 1 as long as you continue to 
  make Guns attacks against that target.
  Target-Rich Environment: Gain a +1 to attacks 
  with Guns whenever personally outnumbered in 
  a firefight.
  Way of the Bow: To heck with guns; you’re 
  more of a bow and arrow type. You may use 
  Guns instead of Craftsmanship to build and 
  repair such items, and your skill with them gives 
  you an extra +1 damage on a successful hit.
  Intimidation
  (Skill & Trappings, page 132)
  Infuriate: Scaring people isn’t your forte; seri-
  ously pissing them off, on the other hand, is right 
  up your alley. Gain +2 to any roll when delib-
  erately trying to get someone angry with you (a 
  social or mental attack or a maneuver with such 
  a goal). Any consequences (such as grudges) or 
  temporary aspects that result must name you as 
  the source and target of the anger.
  Interrogator: You use Intimidation to scare a 
  “perp” or at least provoke strong reactions out of 
  him. Those reactions should tell you something, 
  even if you don’t get a confession out of your 
  target. Once per scene, whenever you make a 
  successful Intimidation attack while questioning 
  someone, you can set aside the stress you’d 
  inflict and instead treat the attack as a successful 
  Empathy attempt to “read” that person (page 129).
  Rule with Fear: Taking this stunt establishes 
  that your reputation is based on how scared 
  people are of you, far more than anything else. 
  Use Intimidation instead of Presence whenever 
  rolling to represent your reputation.
  Subtle Menace: You don’t need the upper hand 
  or to be in a position of power in order to be 
  scary to someone. When the context of power 
  is absent, or your victim is actually in a superior 
  position, your victim does not get any advantage 
  bonus (see Threats, page 133).
  You Don’t Want Any of This: People stay out of 
  your way—they know better. When performing 
  a Brush-Off (page 132), gain a +2 on your roll.
  Investigation
  (Skill & Trappings, page 133)
  Listening: You can tune out your other senses 
  and simply focus on your hearing, making you 
  able to pick up faint sounds with astonishing 
  clarity. Gain a +4 on your Investigation roll 
  when Listening; however, your Alertness drops 
  to Terrible while doing so, due to the exclusion 
  of your other senses. If a conflict begins while 
  you are Listening, it will take a full exchange 
  for your Alertness to return to normal once you 
  stop.
  Pin the Tail: You’re a tough person to shake 
  once you get on someone’s trail. Gain +2 to your 
  Investigation rolls when trying to keep track 
  of a target during Surveillance (page 133). When 
  Shadowing someone using Stealth, you may 
  use Investigation to complement (page 214) your 
  Stealth skill.
  Quick Eye: When examining a location for 
  clues, your eye is quick to pick out the visual 
  details. Your first Investigation roll to determine 
  deeper details about a scene is two time incre-
  ments (page 315) faster than usual.
  Scene of the Crime: You have a practiced eye 
  when combing over a crime scene. In such a 
  circumstance, you gain +1 to your Investigation 
  roll and arrive at your findings one step faster 
  than usual on the time table (page 315).
  Ah, the Kincaid list of stunts.
  And the Harry 
  list of stunts.
  made this 
  whole section 
  just for him. 
  especially 
  “Infuriate”.
  I hate you 
  both. I am 
  a warm and 
  fuzzy guy, 
  really.
  uh, if you 
  say so, boss.
  
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  mortal Stunts
  Lore
  (Skill & Trappings, page 134)
  Occultist (Specify): You’re an expert on a 
  particular sub-section of arcane lore. This 
  must be limited, but it can still cover a fair 
  number of things, such as “Vampires” (see 
  the “Vampirologist” example on page 148) or 
  “Demons.” Gain a +1 to Lore when researching 
  things covered by such a topic. You must also 
  define a deeper specialty within that category, 
  such as “Red Court Vampires” or “Hunter-Killer 
  Demons,” to gain an additional +1 (for a total 
  of +2) whenever the research focuses on that 
  narrower area. This stunt may be taken multiple 
  times, as long as a different sub-section is 
  defined. Multiple areas of expertise may overlap, 
  however, and in such a case, the bonuses of 
  multiple relevant stunts may stack.
  Finely Tuned Third Eye: Your “sixth sense” 
  that can perceive the presence of a supernatural 
  “ick” factor (see page 135) is unusually sensitive for 
  a pure mortal. Gain +2 to your Lore whenever 
  using it as an Alertness substitute to pick up on 
  the presence of the supernatural. 
  Might
  (Skill & Trappings, page 135)
  Bend and Break: When successfully breaking 
  an object using your Might, increase the effect 
  (stress, usually) by two steps.
  Mighty Thews: When determining approxi-
  mate lifting capacity (page 321), consider your 
  Might to be 2 steps higher than its actual rating.
  Wrestler: Gain +1 to your Might when main-
  taining a grapple (page 211).
  Performance
  (Skill & Trappings, page 135)
  Art Historian: You not only create art, you’ve 
  studied it deeply. Gain a +1 whenever using 
  Performance as a knowledge or perception skill 
  to research or study a work of art. Gain an addi-
  tional +1 in a specific, broad area of art (e.g., 
  music, painting, sculpture), and another +1 in a 
  yet narrower area (e.g., pop music, Renaissance 
  paintings, the Dada movement) for a total +3 
  whenever dealing with your area of greatest 
  expertise.
  Impersonator: Given a few hours to study 
  someone’s behavior and modes of speech, you 
  may imitate their mannerisms and voice, using 
  Performance instead of Deceit to convince 
  someone you are that person. Without strongly 
  controlling the circumstances (e.g., imperson-
  ating someone over the phone), such imperson-
  ations won’t last very long. If combined with 
  the Makeup Artist stunt (page 151) and plenty of 
  preparation, you may use either Performance or 
  Deceit to pull off a full impersonation, using the 
  better skill for all relevant rolls and getting a +1 
  against Investigation rolls trying to penetrate the 
  disguise. 
  Poet: You have an affinity for beauty in written 
  and spoken language. Your Performance is at 
  +2 when composing something with words and 
  is considered to be two higher when used to 
  modify (page 214) a social skill.
  Pointed Performance: When performing for an 
  audience, normally you can only create aspects 
  on the scene that are broad, focused on general 
  moods (Creepy as Hell, Let’s Party!, 
  Uninhibited). With this stunt, you may 
  make performances that target something more 
  specific, perhaps directing that mood at a partic-
  ular person or group. For instance, a satirist with 
  this stunt could attempt to use his performance 
  either to elicit a response from one person in the 
  audience (The Jig Is Up) or to cause the audi-
  ence to direct their mood toward that person 
  (Check Out the Emperor’s New Clothes).
  Presence
  (Skill & Trappings, page 136)
  Leadership: When you talk, people listen. 
  When using Presence to command a group 
  (page 137), gain +1 on the effort. Further, your 
  efforts to coordinate a group are efficient, 
  moving one time increment (page 315) faster 
  than normal.
  Personal Magnetism: You have a calm confi-
  dence that others find appealing. When rolling 
  Presence to establish a “passive” reaction to you 
  (Charisma, page 136), make the roll at +2.
  Teflon Persona: It’s difficult to make you look 
  bad in social conflicts. Provided that the people 
  present are aware of who you are, you gain 
  Armor:1 against any social attacks.
  I am 
  TOTALLY 
  taking Mighty 
  Thews for 
  my GHOUL 
  NINJA 
  character.
  I thought you 
  were joking 
  earlier! If 
  we’re playing 
  an 7 refresh 
  game it’s just 
  barely possible. 
  Playing  a 
  ghoul is 
  -6 refresh to 
  start. In a 7 
  refresh game, 
  you take that 
  stunt and 
  blammo: NPc.
  Plus the 
  general squick 
  factor: your 
  ghoul would 
  have to eat 
  his body weight 
  in meat each 
  day. (It’s an 
  actual Feeding 
  dependency!)
   . . .
  I wanna play 
  something 
  else now. 
  Maybe an 
  EX-COP 
  PI?
  much more 
  doable. 
  What about someone 
  who’s JUST a critic?
  I’d use Scholarship, then.
  
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  mortal Stunts
  The Weight of Reputation: Your reputation 
  is such that it puts you in an easy position of 
  power. People in power are good at scaring folks 
  who aren’t. You may use your Presence instead 
  of Intimidation to scare someone, provided the 
  target knows of you and your “rep.”
  Rapport
  (Skill & Trappings, page 138)
  Best Foot Forward: People just like you, espe-
  cially when you’re deliberately trying to make 
  a good first impression (page 138). You gain a +1 
  on your roll to make a good first impression, 
  and failing that roll cannot give you a negative 
  temporary aspect or make the situation worse.
  Let Me Tell You a Story…: You have the gift 
  of gab, able to draw the attention of others with 
  colorful words and stories. This tends to leave 
  your audience distracted. You may use Rapport 
  instead of Deceit in order to mount a distraction 
  (page 126), so long as you are able to talk to your 
  targets. 
  Sex Appeal: Folks attracted to people of your 
  gender cannot help but notice you. You’ve got 
  “it.” Receive a +2 to the roll on any seduction 
  attempts you make with Rapport, provided that 
  the target is someone who could be receptive to 
  your advances.
  Resources
  (Skill & Trappings, page 139)
  Filthy Lucre: If it involves using money and 
  other gifts in illegal or corrupt ways—bribery, 
  mainly—you have a talent for making it work. 
  Your dirty money travels farther, made friction-
  less by the greasy stain of it all. Gain a +2 to 
  Resources whenever using it for illicit purposes. 
  Lush Lifestyle: Your wealth is well-established 
  and robust, making you the man or woman 
  who has everything. Normally, someone may be 
  assumed to have an item that costs two steps less 
  than his Resources without having to seek it out 
  and buy it, assuming that it makes sense for him 
  to have attained it previously. In your case, it’s 
  any item equal to or less than your Resources.
  High Quality Workspace: Instead of 
  Resources–2, your “automatic” personal work-
  space (page 139) is of a quality equal to your 
  Resources. Alternately, it’s still Resources–2, but 
  it’s able to fulfill two workspace functions (such 
  as Academic as well as Arcane Research). This 
  stunt may be taken multiple times to broaden 
  the number of workspace functions available 
  to you, but it may never be used to improve the 
  quality above the level of your Resources skill.
  Windfall: You’re occasionally able to tap into 
  more Resources than usual, such as cashing 
  out stocks or receiving a periodic disbursement 
  from a trust fund. Once per adventure, you may 
  spend a fate point to make a single Resources 
  roll at +4.
  Scholarship
  (Skill & Trappings, page 140)
  Capable Researcher: Some say you were 
  born in a library. Any scholarly research you 
  do is completed two time increments (page 315) 
  faster than usual—due in large part to the fact 
  that you’ve probably read something about it 
  before. (This ability does not extend to Lore 
  research, which somehow never seems to go 
  any faster no matter how good you are at the 
  mundane stuff.)
  Doctor (Specify): You have a medical degree 
  or the equivalent of such an education. You may 
  use your Scholarship skill to declare appro-
  priate justification for the recovery of moderate 
  physical consequences when outside a medical 
  facility, and for the recovery of severe physical 
  consequences within a medical facility. For 
  research purposes, gain +1 on Scholarship 
  for any medical research and an additional +1 
  in a specific area of medicine. This stunt may 
  be taken twice, with the bonuses on research 
  stacking to indicate particularly deep or excel-
  lent medical knowledge (such as with a heart 
  surgeon, etc.).
  Forgery Expert: You are trained to distinguish 
  forged documents from real ones. You gain 
  a +2 on any roll to spot forgeries or falsified 
  documentation.
  Linguist: You may speak (and read) addi-
  tional languages as if your Scholarship score 
  was 4 higher than it is. You may take this stunt 
  multiple times, adding four more each time. 
  Up to half of the languages you speak may be 
  obscure, rare, or dead, provided you can estab-
  lish an opportunity to study them.
  The Butters 
  list, now. 
  What, no 
  Über-Geek 
  Stunt?
  People can 
  grow their 
  own for that 
  one, I think.
  
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  mortal Stunts
  Scientist (Specify): When using Scholarship to 
  do scientific research, gain +1 in a particular area 
  of focus (e.g., Biology, Chemistry, Physics). Gain 
  an additional +1 in an even more specific area 
  of specialization (e.g., Marine Biology, Organic 
  Chemistry, Quantum Physics). A “Scholar” 
  version of this stunt may be taken instead for 
  something outside of the realm of science (e.g., 
  Literature/19th Century Literature or History/
  Chinese History).
  Stealth
  (Skill & Trappings, page 142)
  Blend In: You blend into a crowd easily. If 
  there’s a crowd to hide in, you gain +2 to your 
  Stealth rolls. This is particularly useful when 
  Shadowing (page 143) someone on foot.
  Stay Close and Keep Quiet!: When sneaking 
  around with a group, you are able to use your 
  Stealth skill to complement (page 214) everyone 
  else’s Stealth skill as they roll to stay hidden and 
  quiet, provided they stay nearby and follow your 
  instructions. Failure on either of these points 
  means they lose the benefits. If you have any 
  aspects specific to your ability to sneak around, 
  your companions may invoke those aspects for 
  their benefit as well.
  Swift and Silent: When Skulking (page 143), any 
  difficulty increases due to fast movement are 
  reduced by up to two.
  Survival
  (Skill & Trappings, page 143)
  Animal Handler (Specify): Roll Survival at +1 
  when using it for Animal Handling or, where 
  relevant, Riding (page 143). Gain an additional +1 
  when dealing with a particular broad type of 
  animal (birds, dogs, cats, horses) specified at the 
  time you take this stunt.
  Go Native: You’re able to survive nearly indefi-
  nitely outdoors, living off the land. Scavenging 
  rolls (page 143) are made at +1, and the time 
  between multiple rolls for a prolonged stay is 
  increased by one increment (page 315).
  Hunter: As an experienced hunter, you know 
  how to track game in the outdoors. Gain +2 on 
  any efforts to use Survival to track something in 
  the wilderness or other outdoor area.
  Weapons
  (Skill & Trappings, page 144)
  Good Arm: Thrown weapons normally have 
  a range of only one zone. With this stunt that 
  range extends to two zones.
  Juggler: Throwing deadly items around is just 
  par for the course for you. Catching them is, too. 
  Even bare-handed, you may use your Weapons 
  skill to defend against a thrown attack, allowing 
  you to catch the item if you succeed on the 
  defense. In addition, you may use your Weapons 
  skill instead of Performance in order to enter-
  tain an audience with your juggling.
  Off-Hand Weapon Training: You know how to 
  fight more effectively with two weapons in hand. 
  Normally, you may only take the damage bonus 
  from one weapon on a successful hit; with this 
  stunt, you may add half of the second weapon’s 
  bonus as well (round up).
  Riposte: On a successful defense with Weapons, 
  you may sacrifice your next action to turn that 
  defense into an immediate and automatically 
  successful attack.  Your attacker must be within 
  range of your weapon, and if you’re mounting a 
  full defense (page 199) you do not get the benefit 
  of the +2 bonus when your defense roll converts 
  to an attack roll.
  Wall of Death: Your skill with your weapon is 
  such that you can attack several opponents at 
  once, creating a veritable “wall of death” around 
  you. This allows you to use the Weapons skill 
  to make spray attacks (page 326) with your melee 
  weapon of choice against opponents that are in 
  your zone. You may not combine the benefits 
  of any other stunt with the effects of Wall of 
  Death.
  Hey, Billy, 
  does this 
  also apply 
  to a zombie 
  T-Rex?
  ultimately, I 
  think “zombie” 
  might trump 
  “animal.”
  Oooh! Juggler + Riposte 
  = It’s All In the Reflexes!
  INdeed!
  The Weapons stunts seem a little 
  more potent or more generally 
  applicable than the Fists stunts. 
  Is there a reason for that?
  Well, Weapons as a skill has a built-
  in limited circumstance — no weapon, no 
  ability to use the skill. that’s not the 
  case with Fists, which gets to be always 
  available. So that played into it.
  
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  - cHAPter teN -
  Supernatural 
  Powers
  
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  Supernatural Powers
  What are 
  Powers?
  Supernatural abilities in The Dresden Files 
  RPG are also represented by stunts, just like the 
  specialties and talents of “mundane” mortals (see 
  Mortal Stunts, starting on page 146). These stunts 
  are called supernatural powers and share many 
  similarities with mortal stunts—but there are a 
  few key differences.
  As with a mortal stunt, taking a supernatural 
  power will reduce your character’s refresh  level 
  (page 20). But here’s the big difference: unlike 
  the mortal version, a supernatural power usually 
  costs more than one point of refresh, in large part 
  because the benefits provided are more than just 
  two shifts or so of effects (page 147). Remember, 
  no player character may take a combination of 
  mortal stunts and supernatural abilities that 
  reduces refresh to zero or lower. Characters 
  with zero or lower refresh have lost the mortal 
  gift of free will and as such become tools of the 
  story—also known as non-player characters. See 
  page 146 for more on the philosophy of free will 
  and PCs.
  Supernatural powers also come at a greater 
  price beyond the simple math of your character’s 
  refresh rate. No supernatural ability may exist in 
  a vacuum—it must come about due to specific 
  reasons rooted in your character’s concept. 
  At the very least, this usually means that the 
  supernatural abilities must clearly derive from 
  your character’s high concept (page  54), but 
  other requirements may exist as well—see the 
  Types & Templates chapter starting on page 72 
  for the particulars for each character type. The 
  end effect is that all supernatural abilities have 
  requirements that must be fulfilled before they 
  can be added to your character; these are usually 
  outlined in the template you have chosen for 
  your character.
  You can think of powers as super-stunts, 
  since they cost multiple refresh points and often 
  offer many shifts of effect (page 192) for more 
  than one skill. And because they’re based on 
  certain prerequisites (via character templates), 
  they’re allowed to be a little more potent per 
  refresh point than their mortal stunt cousins. 
  Supernatural powers have effects that can be 
  further reaching, adding trappings to skills that 
  cover strange supernatural territory. Moreover, 
  the trappings that supernatural powers add can 
  cover actions and abilities that would otherwise 
  be flatly impossible. In addition, they’re generally 
  allowed to ignore the restrictions that mortal 
  stunts have when it comes to stacking effects 
  (page 147). 
  But other than that, they’re built much like 
  several mortal stunts all smashed together, 
  getting two shifts (and maybe a little extra) of 
  effect for every one refresh point they cost. As 
  such, new powers may be built using much 
  of the  same logic as mortal stunts provided 
  on page 147—so long as they’re appropriately 
  enabled  by the character’s high concept and 
  chosen character template. When constructing 
  new supernatural abilities, simply use the 
  stunt construction rules from page 147. For each 
  stunt’s  worth of function (whether in shifts, 
  added trappings or scope, etc.) that the new 
  power provides, price that power at a cost of –1 
  refresh.  Since taking a power means you get no 
  Pure Mortal refresh bonus (page 73), a –1 refresh 
  power is allowed to be a little more effective than 
  an otherwise equivalent stunt.
  Story Power Alchemy: 
  Supernatural Powers 
  and the High Concept
  By drawing straight lines from a char-
  acter’s high concept to his supernatural 
  powers, you gain all of the benefits of having 
  an aspect riding shotgun whenever the char-
  acter’s supernatural abilities are in use. 
  Whenever, say, a wizard goes to town 
  with arcane spell-slinging, he can invoke his 
  high concept (Master Evocationist) to 
  help make it work. 
  If a PC shoots a charging loup-garou 
  with inherited silver, that’s a chance for him 
  to invoke or compel its high concept (Curse 
  of the Loup-Garou). 
  However you look at this, having the 
  high concept involved is a good thing; it ties 
  the core idea of a character together with his 
  special abilities and lets you milk it for all of 
  the “story power” you can.
  Not sure what we’re talking about here? 
  Then it’s probably a good time to go back 
  to Aspects and review the bedrock ideas of 
  what aspects are about.
  Billy, this 
  seems a bit 
  stacked 
  against 
  vanilla 
  mortals to 
  me. Don’t 
  under es-
  timate the 
  abilities of a 
  well trained 
  mortal, 
  or Murph 
  will kick 
  your ass!
  Yeah, I can see 
  how it looks 
  that way. 
  But vanilla 
  mortals get an 
  extra 2 points 
  of refresh 
  just for being 
  mortal—they 
  can spend these 
  on a couple 
  extra stunts 
  or they can 
  just have a 
  boatload of 
  fate points to 
  fling around. 
  In the hands 
  of a creative 
  player, I think 
  it all works 
  out in the 
  end. losing 
  that vanilla 
  bonus is an 
  additional price 
  supernatural 
  characters 
  pay for their 
  powers.
  So, if vanilla mortals have 
  no supernatural powers …
  am I a chocolate mortal?
  
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  Supernatural Powers
  Understanding the Rest 
  of This Chapter
  The following sections group supernatural 
  powers into broad categories. The refresh 
  cost of a power will be listed in its name, 
  like so: Strange Power [–2]. This indicates 
  a power named “Strange Power” that costs 
  two refresh points if you want to add it to 
  your character. 
  Other requirements, if they exist, will be 
  listed as musts. True to their name, musts 
  aren’t optional. 
  Any other configuration options (skills 
  at certain levels, aspects, etc.) that you may 
  (and perhaps should) take but don’t have to 
  take will be listed as options. 
  Skills affected by powers will be listed 
  separately from the description of the 
  power. 
  Finally, the effects provided by each 
  power will be laid out. As with mortal 
  stunts, it’s usually helpful to copy at least 
  the basics of each power’s effects to the char-
  acter sheet for easy reference during play.
  Some of a power’s effects may be 
  upgrades and will be noted with their own 
  cost, which should be applied to the base 
  cost of the power if the upgrade is taken. For 
  example, the Spirit Form [–3] power has 
  Poltergeist [–2] listed as one of its effects. 
  This is an upgrade; if you take Spirit Form 
  together with the Poltergeist upgrade, the 
  total cost to your refresh will be –5.
  Look but don’t touch?
  A number of the powers presented in this 
  chapter aren’t really player character focused. 
  It’s unlikely you’ll see any PC show up with 
  the powers of a ghost, or able to eat some-
  one’s soul and impersonate them and their 
  powers, or living inside a dead body like a 
  zombie or Black Court vampire.
  At least, that’s our take on it. But we 
  could be wrong!  At the least, the GM will 
  be looking at this chapter when building 
  creatures and foes to oppose the PCs—and 
  in some games, she might even see a few 
  “typically NPC” powers she’d be entirely 
  happy to let the players get access to.
  Everyone’s game is different, so we 
  decided it would be best to put all the 
  powers in one place.
  
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  Supernatural Powers
  Page
  Category
  Cost
  Power
  Effects & Upgrades
  162
  Creature Features
  –1
  Addictive Saliva
  Narcotic Saliva
  162
  Creature Features
  –1
  Aquatic
  Can’t Drown; Easy Swimming
  174
  Shapeshifting
  –1
  Beast Change
  Beast Form; Skill Shuffle
  187
  True Faith
  –1
  Bless This House
  Bless This House
  188
  Vampirism
  –1
  Blood Drinker
  Drink Blood; The Taste of Death; Blood Frenzy
  162
  Creature Features
  –2
  Breath Weapon
  Breath Weapon
  172
  Psychic Abilities
  0
  Cassandra’s Tears
  Unbelievable Predictions
  185
  Toughness
  *
  The Catch
  The Catch
  181
  Spellcraft
  –2
  Channeling
  Channeling; Item Slots
  162
  Creature Features
  –1
  Claws
  Natural Weapons; Venomous [–2]
  169
  Minor Abilities
  –1
  Cloak of Shadows
  See in the Dark; Melt into the Shadows
  170
  Nevernever Powers
  –1
  Demesne
  Home Turf
  175
  Shapeshifting
  –1
  Demonic Co–Pilot
  Demon’s Agenda
  163
  Creature Features
  –1
  Diminutive Size
  Hard to Detect; Small is Big; Wee
  172
  Psychic Abilities
  –2
  Domination
  Psychic Domination; Create Renfield; Master Dominator [–2]; 
  Possession [–3]
  163
  Creature Features
  –1
  Echoes of the Beast
  Beast Senses; Beast Trappings; Beast Friend
  189
  Vampirism
  –1
  Emotional Vampire
  Feeding Touch; The Taste of Death; Feeding Frenzy
  180
  Spellcraft
  –3
  Evocation
  Evocation; You Know What You Know; Specialization; Item Slots
  190
  Vampirism
  +1
  Feeding Dependency
  Hunger is Stressful; Limited Reserves; Failure Recovery
  175
  Shapeshifting
  –1
  Flesh Mask
  Flesh Mask; Idealized Appearance; What Lies Beneath
  175
  Shapeshifting
  –3
  Gaseous Form
  Gaseous Transformation
  169
  Minor Abilities
  –1
  Ghost Speaker
  See the Dead; Seen by the Dead; Speak to the Dead; 
  Seek the Dead
  166
  Faerie Magic
  –2
  Glamours
  Minor Veils; Seemings
  166
  Faerie Magic
  –4
  Greater Glamours
  Veils; Seemings; True Seemings
  187
  True Faith
  –1
  Guide My Hand
  Guide My Hand
  188
  True Faith
  –1
  Holy Touch
  Holy Touch
  164
  Creature Features
  –2
  Hulking Size
  Easy to Hit, Hard to Hurt; Everything is Small; Big is Scary; 
  Easy to Detect
  176
  Shapeshifting
  +1*
  Human Form
  Regular Joe/Regular Jane; Rare or Involuntary Change [+1]
  176
  Shapeshifting
  0
  Human Guise
  Normal Appearance
  172
  Psychic Abilities
  –1
  Incite Emotion
  Emotion–Touch; Additional Emotion [–1 per]; At Range [–1]; 
  Lasting Emotion [–1]; Potent Emotion [–1]
  185
  Toughness
  –2
  Inhuman Recovery
  Total Recovery; Fast Recovery; Vigorous; Shrug It Off
  178
  Speed
  –2
  Inhuman Speed
  Improved Initiative; Athletic Ability; Casual Movement; 
  Almost Too Fast To See
  183
  Strength
  –2
  Inhuman Strength
  Improved Lifting; Bruising Strength; Superior Strength; 
  Hammer Blows
  185
  Toughness
  –2
  Inhuman Toughness
  Hard to Hurt; Hard to Kill
  167
  Items of Power
  *
  Item of Power
  One–Time Discount [+1 or +2]; It Is What It Is; Unbreakable; 
  Imparted Abilities
  182
  Spellcraft
  *
  Lawbreaker
  Slippery Slope; Trouble Comes In Threes
  164
  Creature Features
  –1
  Living Dead
  Corpse Body; Death is a Nuisance; Dude! You’re Dead!
  * This cost may vary. See the individual power description for details.
  
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  Supernatural Powers
  Page
  Category
  Cost
  Power
  Effects & Upgrades
  169
  Minor Abilities
  –1
  Mana Static
  Hexing
  169
  Minor Abilities
  –1
  Marked by Power
  Aegis of Respect
  176
  Shapeshifting
  *
  Mimic Abilities
  Eat Power; Mimic Stunt; Mimic Skill
  177
  Shapeshifting
  –2
  Mimic Form
  Take Form
  177
  Shapeshifting
  *
  Modular Abilities
  Function Follows Form
  186
  Toughness
  –6
  Mythic Recovery
  Total Recovery; Really Amazingly Fast Recovery; Indefatigable; 
  Ha! You Call That a Hit?
  178
  Speed
  –6
  Mythic Speed
  Super Supreme Initiative; Extra Superior Athletic Ability; 
  Instant Movement; Like the Wind
  184
  Strength
  –6
  Mythic Strength
  Supreme Lifting; Unstoppable Strength; Supreme Strength; 
  Devastating Blows
  186
  Toughness
  –6
  Mythic Toughness
  Nearly Impossible to Hurt; Nearly Impossible to Kill
  165
  Creature Features
  –1
  Pack Instincts
  Pack Communication
  186
  Toughness
  –8
  Physical Immunity
  Physical Immunity; Stacked Catch [+varies]
  173
  Psychic Abilities
  –1
  Psychometry
  Echoes of the Past
  182
  Spellcraft
  –1
  Refinement
  Refined Spellcraft
  188
  True Faith
  –2
  Righteousness
  Potent Prayer; Desperate Hour
  181
  Spellcraft
  –2
  Ritual
  Ritual; Item Slots
  166
  Faerie Magic
  –4*
  Seelie Magic
  Summer Spellcasting
  174
  Psychic Abilities
  –1
  The Sight
  Arcane Senses; Wizard’s Touch; Opening the Third Eye
  174
  Psychic Abilities
  –1
  Soulgaze
  Soulgaze; Application of the Sight [+1]
  165
  Creature Features
  –1
  Spider Walk
  Like a Spider
  170
  Nevernever Powers
  –3
  Spirit Form
  Insubstantial; Variable Manifestation; Variable Visage; 
  Poltergeist [–2]
  183
  Spellcraft
  *
  Sponsored Magic
  (Depends!)
  186
  Toughness
  –4
  Supernatural Recovery
  Total Recovery; Faster Recovery; Unfaltering; It’s Nothing
  165
  Creature Features
  –1
  Supernatural Sense
  Strange Sense; Strange Senses [–1]; Broad Senses [–2]
  178
  Speed
  –4
  Supernatural Speed
  Supreme Initiative; Superior Athletic Ability; Effortless 
  Movement; Faster Than the Eye
  183
  Strength
  –4
  Supernatural Strength
  Superior Lifting; Bludgeoning Strength; Superlative Strength; 
  Lethal Blows
  186
  Toughness
  –4
  Supernatural Toughness Harder to Hurt; Harder to Kill
  171
  Nevernever Powers
  –2
  Swift Transition
  Everywhere Is A Portal; No Mortal Home [+1]
  168
  Items of Power
  –3
  Sword of the Cross
  All Creatures Are Equal Before God; Divine Purpose; Holy; 
  It’s a Sword; True Aim; Unbreakable; Discount Already Applied
  190
  Vampirism
  –2
  Tattoos of St. Giles
  A Warning to Others; Biofeedback; Deeper Reserves; 
  Supernatural Player; Fellowship Training
  181
  Spellcraft
  –3
  Thaumaturgy
  Thaumaturgy; Specialization; Item Slots
  177
  Shapeshifting
  –4
  True Shapeshifting
  Multi–Form; Skill Shuffle
  167
  Faerie Magic
  –4*
  Unseelie Magic
  Winter Spellcasting
  165
  Creature Features
  –1
  Wings
  Flight
  170
  Minor Abilities
  0
  Wizard’s Constitution
  Total Recovery; Long Life
  171
  Nevernever Powers
  –2
  Worldwalker
  Rift Sense; Rift Maker; Strange Worlds
  * This cost may vary. See the individual power description for details.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (creature Features)
  Creature Features
  The abilities listed here are all about the basic 
  nastiness found in a number of beastly and 
  monstrous creatures in the Dresdenverse.
  Addictive Saliva [–1]
  Description: Your saliva is a powerful narcotic, 
  leaving a victim insensate in the short term. 
  With just a little more exposure, your victim 
  goes straight from senseless to senselessly 
  addicted. For those poor saps, detoxing is a 
  bitch—it’s easier, and more pleasant, just to play 
  along with whatever you demand of them.
  Skills Affected: Fists, Deceit.
  Effects: 
  Narcotic Saliva. You may use your narcotic saliva 
  in a number of ways. The most common way 
  in a fight is to spit it at your target or get close 
  enough to lick him. This is handled with the 
  Fists skill in either case and may only be done 
  to someone in the same zone as you—pref-
  erably in very close physical proximity—
  and it is rolled as a maneuver (page 207). If 
  successful, you place a temporary aspect on 
  the target representing the momentary effects 
  of your venom. 
  Alternatively, you may make a Fists 
  attack—setting aside any damage bonus you 
  might have—to inflict mental stress instead 
  of physical stress. Any consequences resulting 
  from such an attack represent the more 
  lasting effects of the venom—if you score a 
  moderate consequence or worse, or if you 
  take your target out, you’ve really gotten your 
  hooks into him (see below). 
  Typically, however, this saliva is adminis-
  tered out of combat—usually with an act of 
  intimacy (kissing) or unintentional inges-
  tion (spiking the punch). Roll Deceit with 
  a +2 bonus against the victim’s Discipline. 
  This is considered a “consequential contest” 
  (see page 193); if you win, you inflict a relevant 
  consequence (usually Addicted) on the 
  victim, severity determined by the contest.
  Addicts are in pretty bad shape when 
  dealing with you—you don’t even need to 
  spend fate points to take advantage of this. 
  You get to tag (see page 106) their addiction 
  aspect every time you enter a new scene with 
  your new victim/pal, making it very easy to 
  gain—and keep—the upper hand.
  Aquatic [–1]
  Description: You’re an underwater creature, 
  with the benefits that come from that.
  Skills Affected: Athletics.
  Effects: 
  Can’t Drown. You never take stress or conse-
  quences from drowning (this is not the same 
  as an immunity to choking or other means of 
  suffocation).
  Easy Swimming. You may ignore all water-
  based borders while swimming, making your 
  underwater “sprints” all the more effective.
  Breath Weapon [–2]
  Description: You’re able to spit or otherwise 
  throw some sort of self-generated projectile over 
  a short distance.
  Note: You’ll need to lock down this breath 
  weapon to a single type of effect—e.g., acid, fire, 
  lightning, etc.—when you take this ability.
  Skills Affected: Weapons (this is treated as a 
  thrown weapon).
  Effects: 
  Breath Weapon. You can attack targets up to 
  one zone away from you with your breath 
  weapon. Roll Weapons; if you hit, you deal 
  +2 physical stress (essentially, this is a thrown 
  Weapon:2 that you can self-generate).  As 
  with any weapon, you might be able to use 
  your breath to perform combat maneuvers if 
  you can justify it, setting temporary aspects 
  on the scene or on your opponent.
  Claws [–1]
  Description: You have claws, fangs, or other 
  natural weapons that let you add damage when 
  attacking with your “bare” hands.
  Note: Unless you have the ability to conceal 
  your nature or change your shape (whether 
  through Flesh Mask, shapeshifting powers, or 
  the application of a Glamour), your claws are 
  always visible.
  Skills Affected: Fists.
  Effects: 
  Natural Weapons. You have claws (or something 
  similar) which act as Weapon:2 for your 
  Fists attacks. This bonus stacks with stress 
  increases due to Strength abilities (page 183), 
  but  won’t stack with other Weapon:[X] 
  effects per the usual weapon stacking guide-
  lines (page 202).
  That’s 
  disgusting, 
  Billy.
  they did it 
  during the 
  masquerade in 
  your grAVe 
  PerIl casefile!
  Still 
  disgusting!
  Could you take Claws multiple times so you have, say, claws AND fangs?
  You can’t take ANY power multiple times unless it says so; the power covers both anyway.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (creature Features)
  Venomous  [–2]. Your claws are venomous. 
  Make a Fists maneuver; if successful, the 
  target gains a Poisoned aspect. 
  In each subsequent exchange, the target 
  must roll Endurance to defend against an 
  attack from the poison equal to your Fists 
  score. Once the target concedes or is taken 
  out (falling unconscious), the attacks stop 
  (see page 203 for guidelines on being taken 
  out). However, the damage is already done; 
  without proper medical attention, a taken 
  out victim will die soon (within a few hours, 
  perhaps less), though not immediately.
  Proper medical attention will remove the 
  aspect and end the effect. This is an opposed 
  roll—you can roll Fists (since that was the 
  skill for the original attack) to set the diffi-
  culty to mitigate the poison. 
  Diminutive Size [–1]
  Description: You’re very small, or able to 
  become very small at will if you’re a shape-
  shifter—at the very largest, you’re dwarfed by 
  even a small human child.
  Note: This ability is always in effect unless you 
  have the ability to shapeshift.
  Skills Affected: Alertness, Endurance, 
  Investigation, Might, Stealth, combat skills.
  Effects: 
  Hard to Detect. You gain +4 to Stealth attempts 
  to remain hidden.
  Small is Big. Being small, you’re much better at 
  picking up on very small details, gaining a +2 
  to any perception (Alertness, Investigation) 
  rolls needed to spot them.
  Wee. While small, your Endurance skill is 
  taken to be no greater than Mediocre for the 
  purpose of determining your health stress 
  capacity. Your ability to manipulate objects 
  and other uses of the Might skill are consid-
  ered relative to creatures of your small size, 
  rather than human sized. (Since most diffi-
  culties are determined for humans, this will 
  usually impose a penalty between –2 and 
  –4, or in some cases, forbid the use of Might 
  at all.)
  When your size is a factor in combat, you 
  can only inflict 1 physical stress per attack 
  (but this could be improved by damage 
  bonuses from weapons and the like). Your 
  ability to cross distances (using Athletics) is 
  unaffected, but you gain a +1 to Athletics for 
  dodging.
  Echoes of the Beast [–1]
  Description: Some part of you is a beast, an 
  animal—often due to shapechanging abilities or 
  something similar. This brings along the benefits 
  of that animal’s senses.
  Musts: Define the type of beast you share a 
  kinship with at the time you take this ability.
  Skills Affected: Varies, but usually Alertness, 
  Investigation, and Survival.
  Effects:
  Beast Senses. Whether in human form or 
  otherwise, your senses are strongly tuned in 
  a fashion fitting a particular type of beast 
  (you must specify the senses when you 
  take the ability, based on what the beast is 
  known to have). Whenever it seems reason-
  able that you’d have some sort of beast-born 
  advantage of the senses (for example, a keen 
  sense of smell while making an Alertness or 
  Investigation roll), you get a +1 on the roll. 
  
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  Supernatural Powers (creature Features)
  Beast Trappings. You are able to do one minor 
  thing that normal people can’t do, related to 
  the abilities of your beast-kin. This might 
  be tracking by scent (for a wolf or other 
  predator), finding your way around while 
  blind or in total darkness (like a bat), or 
  hiding in plain sight (like a chameleon). This 
  ability works like an extra skill trapping (see 
  page 120) for the skill of your choice. 
  Alternately, you can choose a skill trap-
  ping that already exists and create a circum-
  stance under which you gain a +1 on the roll 
  that fits your beast kinship. For example, you 
  might say that, because you’re kin to leopards, 
  you gain a +1 to Stealth when barefoot.
  Beast Friend. You may achieve at least an 
  instinctual understanding (if not actual 
  communication) with beasts of a similar 
  type. This can allow you to make assessment 
  actions (see page 115) to suss out a particular 
  animal’s motives. 
  Hulking Size [–2]
  Description: You’re very large, or able to become 
  very large at will if you’re a shapeshifter—at the 
  very largest, as tall as a house.
  Note: This ability is always in effect unless you 
  can shapeshift.
  Skills Affected: Fists, Weapons, Stealth, others.
  Effects: 
  Easy to Hit, Hard to Hurt. You’re a pretty big 
  target, giving any attacker a +1 to hit you 
  when target size is a factor. But that increase 
  in body mass means you can soak up more 
  punishment, adding two boxes to the length 
  of your physical stress track.
  Everything is Small. You cannot meaningfully 
  interact with any man-sized objects using 
  skills like Burglary and Craftsmanship (but 
  knowledge-related rolls are unaffected), and 
  you’ll have trouble fitting through normal 
  doorways and into rooms (this will confer an 
  automatic border value of 1 when changing 
  zones as appropriate). But it also means you 
  get a +2 to your Might rolls to lift or break 
  things—on top of any supernatural Strength 
  bonuses you might have—and a +1 on 
  Athletics rolls to cover distance with your 
  gigantic stride.
  Big is Scary. You get +2 on any Intimidation 
  attempt against a target likely to consider 
  your size an advantage.
  Easy to Detect. Your Stealth is automatically 
  considered to be Mediocre, and you may never 
  gain more than one shift on a Stealth roll.
  Living Dead [–1]
  Description: You’re dead, but you keep walking 
  around. It’s kind of gross.
  Musts: You’ve got to be dead.
  Effects:
  Corpse Body. Your body is a corpse. This means 
  that you cannot recover from consequences 
  with time, because your body does not regen-
  erate. Any physical consequences you suffer 
  are permanent until you take some kind of 
  effort to remove them (know any good taxi-
  dermists?) or seek supernatural assistance to 
  reconstruct your body.
  Death is a Nuisance. Unless wholly destroyed 
  or killed by special means, you’re already 
  dead, and that doesn’t seem to have fazed 
  you much. No “death” result is ever perma-
  nent unless special means are used (usually as 
  determined by your creature type).
  Billy, are 
  you saying 
  you can 
  talk to 
  dogs?
  Woof.
  Is that 
  woof-yes, 
  or  
  woof-no?
  
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  Supernatural Powers (creature Features)
  Dude! You’re Dead! And that’s pretty scary 
  to a lot of people. When dealing with folks 
  unaccustomed to the walking dead (and 
  that’s most “regular” people), gain a +1 on 
  Intimidation. The downside? Take a –1 
  penalty on nearly every other social skill 
  (except Deceit). For every level of physical 
  consequence you’ve sustained, increase the 
  penalty/bonus by –1/+1. That said, the 
  effect is short-lived with any one target—as 
  they become accustomed to a reality where 
  the dead walk, they eventually become inured 
  to it as an additional reason to be terrified.
  Pack Instincts [–1]
  Description: You are part of a pack and share 
  a certain kind of unspoken, animal communica-
  tion with one another.
  Musts: You must define who is in your pack, 
  and they all must share this ability.
  Skills Affected: Alertness, Investigation, others.
  Effects: 
  Pack Communion. When near another member 
  of your pack, gain +1 to your Alertness. When 
  in the same zone as others of your pack, you 
  may communicate with one another word-
  lessly. Only single words and simple concepts 
  may be communicated: attack, protect, follow, 
  distract. By focusing your senses, you may 
  make an Investigation roll to pick out the 
  approximate location of others of your 
  pack. When ambushed, if any one of your 
  pack spots the ambush (by succeeding at an 
  Alertness roll), all packmates are considered 
  to have won the Alertness roll as well. 
  Spider Walk [–1]
  Description: You can climb on things the way a 
  spider would.
  Skills Affected: Athletics.
  Effects: 
  Like a Spider. While climbing, you may treat any 
  surface, no matter the angle, as no more diffi-
  cult than climbing up a vertical surface with 
  plenty of handholds. Ceilings? No problem.
  Supernatural Sense [–1]
  Description: You have a supernatural sense of 
  some sort, enabling you to detect something no 
  one could normally detect (e.g., smell hope), or 
  to perceive something normally in situations 
  where you otherwise couldn’t (see in complete 
  darkness).
  Musts: With each supernatural sense, you must 
  identify whether this is a purely mystical sense 
  (using Lore) or a more physical sense (using 
  Investigation and Alertness as appropriate). 
  Note: The sense you define can’t be a “game-
  breaker” without the GM’s approval—no “hear 
  someone’s True Name in their heartbeat,” prob-
  ably no “see through walls.” Alternatively, such 
  things might be possible, but they should prob-
  ably cost an extra one or two refresh at least.
  A number of abilities already encompass 
  some portion of supernatural sensory ability. 
  Don’t purchase this ability unless it’s clearly 
  something extra, above and beyond what you 
  already enjoy from your other abilities.
  Skills Affected: Alertness, Lore, Investigation.
  Effects: 
  Strange Sense. In situations where you might be 
  penalized or otherwise told that it’s impos-
  sible to sense something, you can neverthe-
  less attempt to sense the thing you’ve defined, 
  without penalty.
  Strange Senses [–1]. You may instead define a 
  small set of up to three thematically related 
  supernatural senses.
  Broad Senses [–2]. Take this instead of Strange 
  Senses. You have a wide array of supernatural 
  senses, easily up to a dozen.
  Wings [–1]
  Description: You have wings of some sort—
  gossamer as a faerie, leathery and batlike as a 
  demon—enabling you to fly.
  Musts: Your wings are always present and 
  visible unless you have an ability (Flesh Mask, 
  shapeshifting powers, or the application of 
  a Glamour) allowing you to hide them. You 
  should define the appearance of the wings when 
  you take this ability.
  Skills Affected: Athletics.
  Effects: 
  Flight. You can fly, eliminating or reducing 
  certain kinds of borders (page  212) and 
  enabling travel upwards into zones (page 197) 
  that can’t normally be reached. Winged flight 
  is governed by the Athletics skill, just as 
  running is.
  By the 
  way, there 
  IS a guy in 
  Penn sylvania 
  who can 
  see through 
  drywall. 
  JUST 
  drywall.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Faerie magic)
  Faerie Magic
  The abilities of the faerie focus heavily on the 
  appearance of things. Glamours—faerie illu-
  sions—are the mode of the day, leading to the 
  truism: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is, 
  and it’s probably fae.
  Glamours [–2]
  Description: You are able to create the basic 
  glamours of the fae—minor veils and “seemings” 
  that make something look like what it isn’t.
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Deceit.
  Effects: 
  Minor Veils. With a moment of concentra-
  tion, you may draw a veil over something 
  (not particularly large—maybe the size of a 
  small, tight group of people), hiding it from 
  sight and other means of detection. Use 
  your Discipline or Deceit to oppose efforts 
  to discover the veil. If the veil is discovered, 
  it isn’t necessary pierced—but the discoverer 
  can tell that it’s there and that it’s wrong.
  Seemings. You are able to cause someone or 
  something to appear to be other than what 
  it is—usually this is personal, but it may 
  be used on other objects and people if they 
  belong to you or have entered a pact with 
  you. You may use your Discipline or Deceit 
  skill to oppose any efforts to discover that the 
  seeming is something other than real.
  Greater Glamours [–4]
  Description: As a pure fae of considerable 
  power, you are able to create true seemings—
  actual objects, or near enough as to make no 
  difference in the moment (i.e., ectoplasmic 
  constructs). Your veils are potent and your lesser 
  seemings are flawless.
  Musts: Character must be a pure fae. This 
  replaces Glamours, if the character previously 
  had it. 
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Deceit.
  Effects: 
  Veils. With a moment of concentration, you may 
  draw a veil over something (not particularly 
  large—maybe the size of a small, tight group 
  of people), hiding it from sight and other 
  means of detection, as with the Minor Veils 
  effect of Glamours. Use your Discipline or 
  Deceit at +2 to oppose any efforts to discover 
  the veil. You may set aside this +2 bonus to 
  draw a veil over a whole zone.
  Seemings. As with the Glamours effect of 
  the same name (above). You may use your 
  Discipline or Deceit skill at +2 to oppose any 
  efforts to discover the seeming.
  True Seemings. You may create an object—and 
  with some difficulty, even ephemeral crea-
  tures—out of ectoplasm, the stuff of the 
  Nevernever. These are not casually detect-
  able as “unreal,” per se, save through magical 
  means of perception, so they are immune to 
  most efforts to discover the seeming. As far as 
  the effects of the object are concerned, simply 
  give it the same attributes a fully real object 
  of its type would have. You may only have 
  one object at a time via seeming—the act of 
  creating another dismisses the first. 
  Seelie Magic [–4]
  Description: Drawing on the power of the 
  Summer Court, you’re able to cast spells that 
  fit its essential nature: wildness, birth, growth, 
  renewal, fire. These magics are under the sway 
  and watch of the Queens of Summer (Lady, 
  Queen, and Mother), and inevitably making 
  use of them will catch their notice. While some 
  might think the Summer Court is all warmth 
  and light, they should pause to consider that 
  unbridled growth favors an ebola virus just as 
  much as it does a pear tree.
  Note: The cost is –4 refresh unless you 
  already practice another kind of true magic 
  (e.g.,  Evocation, page  180, or Thaumaturgy, 
  page 181), in which case the cost is reduced by 1 for 
  each ability you already possess.
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Conviction.
  Effects: 
  Summer Spellcasting. You are able to cast spells 
  of a deep and true nature, drawing upon 
  the magics of the Summer Court. Due to 
  the faerie nature of this power source, it is 
  less flexible in some areas than mortal spell-
  casting and is therefore subject to the limita-
  tions described in its entry under “Sponsored 
  Magic” in Spellcasting, page 287.
  Or perhaps 
  the size of a 
  VW Beetle…
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Items of Power)
  Unseelie Magic [–4]
  Description: Drawing on the power of the 
  Winter Court, you’re able to cast spells that fit its 
  essential nature: wildness, death, decay, slumber, 
  ice. These magics are under the sway and watch 
  of the Queens of Winter (Lady, Queen, and 
  Mother), and inevitably making use of them 
  will catch their notice. While some might think 
  the Winter Court is all frozen cruelty, they 
  should remember that without their balance to 
  Summer, the world of man would end, choked 
  off by unbridled nature.
  Notes: The cost is –4 refresh unless you 
  already practice another kind of true magic 
  (e.g.,  Evocation, page  180, or Thaumaturgy, 
  page 181), in which case the cost is reduced by 1 
  for each ability you already possess.
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Conviction.
  Effects: 
  Winter Spellcasting. You are able to cast spells 
  of a deep and true nature, drawing upon the 
  magics of the Winter Court. Due to the faerie 
  nature of this power source, it is less flexible 
  in some areas than mortal spellcasting and is 
  therefore subject to the limitations described 
  in its entry under “Sponsored Magic” in 
  Spellcasting, page 287. 
  Items of Power
  “Items of Power” is a catch-all category for abili-
  ties that are derived not from the person himself, 
  but from the magical equipment he brings to the 
  table. Champions of the supernatural heavy-
  weights (OW28), including the Champions of 
  God (page 73), Knights of the Faerie Courts 
  (page  78), and other Emissaries of Power 
  (page 75), might carry such artifacts to battle, as 
  protection or weaponry.
  Item of Power [-Varies]
  Description: You have an item of great power—
  an artifact that goes beyond the ephemeral items 
  created by spellcasters and alchemists. This is 
  an artifact with an ancient story, often drawing 
  its power from some vast supernatural entity 
  of old.
  Musts: An aspect directly referencing the Item 
  of Power is required. The Item of Power ability 
  may not be taken multiple times—even if the 
  character has multiple items of power. A single 
  instance of the Item of Power ability covers all 
  such items that the character carries.
  Options: Plenty! An Item of Power is a way 
  to take Minor Abilities, Strength, Toughness, 
  Speed, or some other abilities (subject to 
  approval) at a small discount, gaining back a 
  point or two of refresh based on the nature of 
  the item (see below). 
  Skills Affected: Varies.
  Effects: 
  One-Time Discount [+1 or +2]. You regain 
  two points of refresh for “externalizing” some 
  of your abilities in the form of the Item of 
  Power. This assumes that the Item of Power 
  is reasonably obvious and easy to detect, 
  like a sword. If the item is difficult to detect, 
  allowing concealment, you only regain one 
  point of refresh. This discount only happens 
  once, even if you have multiple separate Items 
  of Power.
  The refresh cost of the any abilities 
  “attached” in this way must be at least –3 in 
  the case of the +2 option, or at least –2 in the 
  case of the +1 option. In effect, this says that 
  the net result of taking the Item of Power 
  ability should still decrease your refresh—
  just less so.
  It Is What It Is. The item is often based on a 
  mundane template—a sword, a shield, a 
  suit of armor—and as such may have some 
  armor or damage values completely indepen-
  dent of its supernatural nature. Swords will 
  have damage bonuses like swords, armor will 
  protect like armor. All the same, the item 
  should be obvious as something unusual.
  Unbreakable. As an Item of Power, it cannot be 
  broken, save through dedicated magical ritual 
  predicated upon perverting its purpose. How 
  this manifests may vary; the item may be 
  breakable but able to repair itself, or it may 
  simply refuse to be fractured.
  Imparted Abilities. Choose a set of abilities 
  that are imbued within and imparted by the 
  Item of Power. Take these abilities normally, 
  recording their refresh cost and noting that 
  they’re part of the Item. Abilities outside of 
  the Minor Abilities, Strength, Toughness, 
  and Speed categories must be examined 
  closely by the GM and may be disallowed. 
  Simply possessing the Item of Power is not 
  enough to use the abilities. Rules must be 
  followed, bargains must be made. Work out 
  the particulars with the GM. 
  While the item may be “loaned” once in a 
  while for a specific single task, it is not an easy 
  What the 
  hell is that 
  athame that 
  Lea got her 
  hands on?  
  Still need 
  to figure 
  that out...
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Items of Power)
  thing to do: the owner of the item must pay a 
  fate point for every scene in which he allows 
  another to enjoy its benefits, or the item fails 
  to work for the recipient. The recipient must 
  still obey the rules associated with the Item 
  of Power. 
  Sword of the Cross [–3]
  Description: You possess one of the three 
  Swords of the Cross, their hilts reportedly 
  forged from the nails that fixed Christ to the 
  Cross. Those bearing the Swords are called the 
  Knights of the Cross.
  Musts: You must have a destiny or calling to 
  inherit the Sword, represented as a high concept 
  or template. 
  Skills Affected: Weapons, others.
  Effects: 
  All Creatures Are Equal Before God. This is the 
  truest purpose of the Swords of the Cross, 
  the ability that makes even ancient dragons 
  take pause when facing a Knight. When 
  facing an opponent, the Knight may spend a 
  fate point to ignore that opponent’s defensive 
  abilities (Toughness based ones, primarily), 
  as well as any mundane armor the foe has, for 
  the duration of the scene. In essence, a Sword 
  of the Cross may take the place of whatever it 
  is that a creature has a weakness to (whatever 
  “the Catch” is on their Toughness powers, see 
  page 185), on demand, so long as the Knight 
  can spend that fate point—particularly 
  handy when facing ultra-tough Denarians or 
  true dragons. Whatever abilities a creature 
  may have, the job of a Sword of the Cross 
  is creating a mostly even playing field—
  or something very much like it—between 
  mortal and monster.
  Divine Purpose. A Sword of the Cross may 
  only be swung with true selfless purpose in 
  mind and heart; if this is not the case, the 
  bond between the Knight and the Sword is 
  broken and may only be restored by under-
  going some sort of trial of faith. When swung 
  without such purpose in mind and heart, the 
  blow does not land (any attack roll automati-
  cally fails), the bond is immediately broken, 
  and the sword falls from the wielder’s hand.
  Basically, the GM and player should look 
  at the description above as a guideline for 
  how to compel the high concept attached to 
  the sword—your character might be tempted 
  to use the sword for selfish reasons, and could 
  either receive a fate point to stay his hand 
  or succumb to the temptation and lose the 
  sword temporarily. If another takes up the 
  sword and swings it selfishly, your Knight is 
  still responsible for how the sword is used, 
  with similar repercussions.
  Holy. This weapon is a powerful holy symbol in 
  its own right. Its very touch is like holy water 
  or that of a cross or other symbol of faith 
  backed by the belief of the possessor.
  It’s a Sword. A Sword of the Cross always takes 
  the form of a sword, though the precise 
  type of sword may change through the ages. 
  There are only three in existence (OW74). As 
  a sword, it possesses the damage and other 
  attributes of any sword (page 202).
  True Aim. When swung in keeping with its 
  purpose, a Sword of the Cross grants a +1 to 
  the wielder’s Weapons skill.
  Unbreakable. As an Item of Power, it cannot be 
  broken, save through dedicated magical ritual 
  predicated upon perverting its purpose.
  Discount Already Applied. As an Item of Power, 
  the sword already includes the one-time 
  discount (page 167). This means that if the  
  character possesses more than one Item of 
  Power, the one-time discount will not apply 
  on that second item. If the Sword of the 
  Cross is the second or subsequent artifact the 
  character gains, the refresh cost is –5.
  So the guy 
  getting the 
  loaned Item 
  of Power 
  doesn’t have 
  to spend any 
  refresh or 
  fate points?
  that’s right, 
  so long as the 
  possessor of the 
  Item is living and 
  able to spend. 
  otherwise you’ll 
  have to use 
  the temporary 
  Powers rules 
  (page 92) to 
  handle the 
  situation. 
  (If murphy picked 
  up Shiro’s sword 
  for a short 
  time, there’s 
  no Shiro to 
  foot the bill.)
  the fate point isn’t needed when a 
  Knight is fighting something that’s 
  already vulnerable to Holy objects.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (minor Abilities)
  Minor Abilities
  The minor supernatural abilities that exist in the 
  world are too numerous to be categorized easily. 
  All the same, you’ll find some in the “Psychic 
  Abilities” section starting on page 172, and a few 
  more are listed here. Usually these abilities offer 
  some small advantage, but in many cases they 
  also come with a disadvantage or a price.
  Cloak of Shadows [–1]
  Description: You and the shadows are as one. 
  You’re able to melt into the shadows with ease; 
  the cover of night offers easy concealment. 
  Skills Affected: Stealth, perception skills.
  Effects: 
  See in the Dark. Perception skill rolls are not 
  penalized by darkness.
  Melt into the Shadows. You’re more effective 
  than most at hiding in a reasonably sized 
  area of darkness or shadow. Under the cover 
  of darkness, you get a +2 bonus to your 
  Stealth rolls.
  Ghost Speaker [–1]
  Description: You see dead people. All the time. 
  Some people mistakenly refer to you as an ecto-
  mancer (a kind of Focused Practitioner—see 
  page 76), but your ability is more instinctual and 
  you are not technically a spellcaster (although 
  this ability can be added on top of an existing 
  spellcaster if the character template allows for it).
  Skills Affected: Social and perception skills.
  Effects: 
  See the Dead. You have no problems perceiving 
  the presence of spirits and ghosts, unless 
  they are deliberately trying to conceal them-
  selves—in which case it’s Investigation (or 
  Alertness) vs. Stealth.
  Seen by the Dead. Spirits and ghosts have no 
  problem perceiving you as well, regard-
  less of how tenuous their manifestation is 
  (page 170)—they recognize you as a conduit 
  to the mortal world and will readily come 
  forward to contact you. This means such 
  creatures will see and find you more easily 
  than other people, when all other factors are 
  equal. Spirits get a +2 when trying to perceive 
  or locate you.
  Speak to the Dead. You can speak and otherwise 
  communicate directly with ghosts and other 
  invisible or incorporeal spirits, without any 
  need to perform thaumaturgy.
  Seek the Dead. The dead seek you out, and it 
  goes the other way as well—enough so that 
  you may use Contacts to seek out informa-
  tion and specific individuals among the dead.
  Mana Static [–1]
  Description: Despite not being a mortal prac-
  titioner of magic, you have a tendency to cause 
  technology to short out the way a wizard or 
  other mortal spellcaster does. 
  Musts: If the character ever takes a spellcasting 
  ability, it replaces this one.
  Skills Affected: Varies.
  Note: While we don’t have documentation of 
  this sort of ability in our casefiles, it’s pretty 
  well supported by theory. There are plenty of 
  folks out there with undeveloped magical talent, 
  and it’s easy to see how they might first—and 
  perhaps only—manifest the hexing aspect of 
  their abilities.
  Effects: 
  Hexing. You can hex technology deliberately, 
  as described on page 228. You may need to roll 
  your Discipline skill occasionally to keep 
  your emotions in check and avoid accidentally 
  hexing technology, but you make these rolls 
  at +2 due to the relative weakness of your 
  “talent.”
  Marked by Power [–1]
  Description: You’ve been marked by something 
  powerful, in a way recognizable to those with a 
  magical affinity. Such people and creatures will 
  think twice about acting against you, but they’ll 
  also see you as a representative of the thing that’s 
  marked you.
  Musts: Your high concept must reflect the crea-
  ture or person who has marked you.
  Skills Affected: Varies.
  Effects: 
  Aegis of Respect. A magical mark is upon you, 
  placed by a creature or person of signifi-
  cant power. It’s not that the mark provides 
  any actual protection, but magically aware 
  people and creatures can perceive this mark 
  upon you and word tends to get around that 
  you’ve been “claimed.” Whenever dealing with 
  someone in the magical community, all of 
  your social skill rolls operate at a +1 bonus. 
  The downside, of course, is that people tend 
  to see you as a representative of the thing 
  that marked you, which can lead to some 
  WHOSE 
  theory?
  Bob’s.
  At your suggestion!
  my mom 
  seems to hex 
  every bit of 
  technology 
  she comes in 
  contact with 
  and as far 
  as I know 
  she doesn’t 
  have any 
  spellcasting 
  abilities, so 
  it makes 
  sense to me.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Nevernever Powers)
  uncomfortable entanglements and assump-
  tions. If you absolutely must conceal this 
  mark, you can, but it takes some concentra-
  tion—use any appropriate skill (Stealth or 
  Deceit, usually) restricted by Discipline to do 
  so, but you can’t do anything stressful (like 
  combat) without dropping the concealment.
  Wizard’s Constitution [–0]
  Description: You are a wizard, or are like a 
  wizard—incredibly long lived for a human, able 
  to recover from injuries just a little better than 
  the next guy.
  Note: This ability is replaced by any Inhuman 
  or better Recovery or Toughness ability, if any 
  such abilities are taken. In terms of game effects, 
  the uses of this ability are so minor that they’re 
  really almost cosmetic; hence the zero cost.
  Skills Affected: Endurance.
  Effects: 
  Total Recovery. You’re able to recover from phys-
  ical harm that would leave a normal person 
  permanently damaged. You can recover 
  totally from any consequence—excluding 
  extreme physical ones—with no other excuse 
  besides time; simply waiting long enough 
  will eventually heal you completely. (Many 
  wizards use this ability to avoid hospitals, 
  where their tendency to disrupt technology 
  can put others in serious danger.)
  Long Life. As a side-effect of your improved 
  ability to recover from injury, your lifespan 
  is significantly extended. In game terms this 
  will rarely have relevance, but it’s why the 
  Senior Council of the White Council of 
  wizards can talk at length about the events of 
  the American Civil War (many of them were 
  there) and several can go back even further 
  than that.
  Nevernever Powers
  This category of powers is for those creatures 
  other than Faeries that are strongly rooted in the 
  Nevernever—like spirits and ghosts—as well 
  as the ability to affect or reach the Nevernever 
  easily.
  Demesne [–1]
  Description: As a spirit that has been linked 
  to the mortal world, you naturally create a 
  space within the Nevernever tied to that place 
  or concept. This space reflects the landscape of 
  your “mind.”
  Skills Affected: Discipline.
  Effects: 
  Home Turf. You have an immense amount of 
  control over the features of your demesne; the 
  “local reality” bends to your will. You auto-
  matically succeed at any declarations about 
  the physical form of your demesne, and in 
  combat you can roll Discipline to place scene 
  aspects in the demesne. You can even roll 
  your Discipline as a physical attack against 
  intruders, using the nature of the Nevernever 
  to harm opponents.
  Spirit Form [–3]
  Description: You are an incorporeal spirit form, 
  able to pass through walls and other barriers in 
  the mortal world (thresholds still have an almost 
  physical reality to you, however). 
  Skills Affected: Many.
  Effects: 
  Insubstantial. You are incorporeal, able to 
  pass through walls, reducing most borders 
  (page 212) to zero. Thresholds (page 230), 
  however, will act as physical barriers to you. 
  Without also taking Physical Immunity 
  (page 186) to a broad range of effects, you can 
  still be harmed by physical attacks.
  Variable Manifestation. You must manifest 
  visibly to truly perceive anything “useful” 
  about the world around you. Even when 
  largely separated from the world, your pres-
  ence may be felt by those with a high Lore or 
  other means of magical sensitivity. 
  Variable Visage. As a spirit, your form may 
  change somewhat in response to your mood 
  or idea of self, causing you to appear more 
  fearsome or beautiful, granting a +2 to 
  appropriate social actions based on appear-
  ance (Intimidation for a fearsome appear-
  ance, Rapport or Deceit for a beautiful one). 
  Usually this is as an exaggeration of your 
  “normal” appearance in some way.
  Poltergeist [–2]. If you take this upgrade, your 
  manifestation is reinforced with solid ecto-
  plasm and able to manipulate objects in the 
  mortal world. When doing so, you may use 
  your Conviction instead of your Might to 
  move heavy things. You may use physical 
  combat skills to affect the world as well. 
  Being able 
  to keep my 
  left hand 
  isn’t “minor.”
  Yeah, in real 
  life, that’s 
  huge. But in 
  gAme termS, 
  the amount of 
  time required 
  for your hand 
  to heal makes 
  it less of an 
  advantage. 
  Same thing 
  goes for an 
  abnormally long 
  lifespan—that’s 
  awesome for 
  people, but has 
  little day to 
  day impact in 
  terms of game 
  mechanics.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Nevernever Powers)
  Swift Transition [–2]
  Description: Most supernatural creatures may 
  cross over into the Nevernever naturally, so 
  long as they are in a place that particularly reso-
  nates with their nature (White Court vampires, 
  for example, tend to disappear mysteriously in 
  the backs of strip clubs). With this ability, a 
  spirit or other creature may cross over into the 
  Nevernever from nearly anywhere at all.
  Skills Affected: Many.
  Effects: 
  Everywhere is a Portal. You may transition to 
  the Nevernever from nearly any location 
  in the mortal world, so long as you are not 
  forcibly restrained by some magical or ritual 
  means.
  No Mortal Home [+1]. If it suits your 
  concept—such as with ghosts—you are so 
  native to the Nevernever that you are pulled 
  to it if given no strong reason to remain in the 
  mortal realm. If you make this choice, then 
  under high stress or magical assault, you may 
  need to make Discipline rolls (against a diffi-
  culty in line with the strength of an attack, 
  etc.) in order to remain in the mortal world. 
  If knocked unconscious or otherwise wholly 
  incapacitated, you immediately transition to 
  the Nevernever, for better or for worse.
  Worldwalker [–2]
  Description: You have a natural ability to cross 
  into and out of the Nevernever by opening a 
  gateway. Others in close proximity to you may 
  pass through this opening as well—and things 
  within the Nevernever may use it to get out. 
  You’re also adept at finding places where the 
  barrier between this world and the Nevernever 
  is weak and permeable, bypassing the need to 
  open a rift yourself.
  Skills Affected: Investigation, Lore, and 
  Survival.
  Notes: This is another “extrapolated” ability, 
  not documented in Harry’s casefiles, but pretty 
  well supported by theory. It’s already true that 
  many supernatural creatures can cross over into 
  the Nevernever in places that share an affinity 
  with their kind (such as the White Court ability 
  to step into and out of the Nevernever at strip 
  clubs and brothels), so it seems reasonable that 
  someone with a little bit of latent magic ability 
  would be able to manifest a similar kind of 
  affinity. 
  It’s also worth observing that spellcasters 
  usually needn’t worry about this ability—their 
  spellcraft abilities already provide the ability to 
  detect and open rifts between the mortal realm 
  and the Nevernever.
  Effects: 
  Rift Sense. You’re able to sense places where the 
  fabric of reality is weak, allowing easy passage 
  into or out of the Nevernever. You may use 
  Investigation or Lore to find such places.
  Rift Maker. You are able to tear a temporary hole 
  between this world and the next, allowing 
  people and things to pass into or out of the 
  Nevernever for a few seconds (it takes a true 
  spellcaster to hold a rift open for longer). You 
  may only do this once per scene (or per hour, 
  if more appropriate). Some supernatural 
  power-players will get a bit agitated or excited 
  about this, however, since this inevitably 
  weakens the fabric between the Nevernever 
  and our own world in a given location.
  Strange Worlds. By dint of using this ability 
  and not, y’know, dying or getting enslaved in 
  Faerie or the like, you’ve had enough exposure 
  to the Nevernever to have a degree of famil-
  iarity with it. All Lore and Survival checks 
  regarding the geography of the Nevernever 
  and other trivia involving it are made at +2, 
  and you may use Lore instead of Survival 
  while there.
  Do various 
  creatures 
  need to take 
  World-
  walker in  
  order to 
  cross over 
  into the 
  Nevernever?
  Not really, 
  so long as 
  they stick to 
  crossing over 
  only where 
  the have an 
  “affinity”. 
  lust-vampires 
  can cross over 
  in brothels, 
  Fetches can 
  pass through 
  mirrors, etc, 
  without 
  Worldwalker.
  
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  172
  Supernatural Powers (Psychic Abilities)
  Psychic Abilities
  Psychic abilities seem to divide into two types—
  ones which are more trouble than they’re worth 
  (using the Sight can drive you mad; Cassandra’s 
  Tears is more a source of sorrow than solace), 
  and those which break the hell out of the Laws 
  of Magic (Domination being a good example).
  Cassandra’s Tears [–0]
  Description: You are afflicted by the condition 
  known as Cassandra’s Tears—you have a limited 
  ability to see the future and predict the shape 
  of things to come. But there’s a big downside: 
  most people simply ignore or won’t believe your 
  warnings.
  Musts: You must take Cassandra’s Tears or 
  some similar variant as an aspect (because it’s 
  going to get compelled—lots).
  Skills Affected: Social skills.
  Effects: 
  Unbelievable Predictions. You are able to make 
  precognitive predictions or receive them from 
  the GM. This places an aspect on the “world” 
  related to the prediction that remains until it 
  comes true or is otherwise resolved. See the 
  guidelines on page 324 for more details about 
  predictions. Whenever trying to warn people 
  about what you foresee, you are at a –2 to any 
  attempts to convince them that what you’re 
  saying is correct. 
  Domination [–2]
  Description: This ability is most commonly 
  seen among a segment of Black Court vampires. 
  Given a captive victim, a skilled Black Court 
  vampire or other creature with this ability can 
  break down the target’s will through direct 
  psychic assault. It’s not subtle, and it’s not pretty, 
  and it usually leaves a wreck of a mind in its 
  wake.
  Skills Affected: Discipline.
  Effects: 
  Psychic Domination. Given a helpless captive, 
  you may use your Discipline skill as an 
  overt psychic attack, dealing mental stress 
  and consequences until the victim’s mind is 
  entirely under your sway. While the victim 
  may defend with his own Discipline, he 
  usually can’t counter-attack, and eventu-
  ally he’ll just be whittled down—especially 
  if you get creative with the “preparation” of 
  your victim. 
  Create Renfield. If you manage to take out a 
  victim using this method, you have the option 
  of turning the character into a “Renfield” 
  (OW86): a horribly broken individual, with 
  nothing left to do except foam at the mouth 
  and fanatically execute on your instructions. 
  It takes a day to create a Renfield in this 
  fashion.
  Master Dominator [–2]. If you take this 
  upgrade, increase your psychic attacks to +2 
  stress on a successful hit and you can create 
  enhanced Renfields with Inhuman Strength 
  (page 183), Inhuman Recovery (page 185),  
  and  lifespans of no longer than a month. 
  It takes three days to create an enhanced 
  Renfield.
  Possession [–3]. This variant is seen most 
  commonly among demons; with this upgrade, 
  you may fully possess your victim once you’ve 
  taken him out with your domination attack. 
  Your domination attacks inflict +2 stress on 
  successful hits. This upgrade is possible only 
  when combining this power with another 
  that allows you to become insubstantial. 
  Gaseous Form (page 175) could allow you to 
  possess a victim by way of inhalation, while 
  Spirit Form (page 170) would allow you to 
  simply “step into” the victim’s body. Once 
  you’ve taken possession, you may control 
  your victim completely—without any easy 
  telltales of mind control—and gain access to 
  all of their physical abilities and many of their 
  mental ones. Once someone has a reason to 
  be suspicious, you must use your Deceit to 
  defend against discovery.
  Incite Emotion [–1]
  Description: You are able to incite certain 
  strong emotions in a target—usually emotions 
  of passion or pain. Dark or morally “corrupt” 
  emotions (lust, wrath, despair, and others) are 
  the usual ones available. Emotions created by 
  this ability are real, but not True, so True Love, 
  Courage, Hope, and so forth are off the table.
  Options: This ability costs 1 refresh to start 
  and requires you to pick a single emotion you 
  can incite, be it rage, lust, fear, protectiveness, 
  or the like. More potent versions (see below) 
  may be purchased by increasing the refresh cost. 
  The emotion this ability incites may be changed 
  under special circumstances, as part of character 
  development.
  Skills Affected: Deceit, Intimidation.
  How does 
  this ability 
  reconcile 
  with the 
  precognition 
  of Abby?
  I'm not sure.
  For the benefit 
  of foresight 
  without epileptic 
  seizures, those 
  with Cassandra's 
  Tears suffer an 
  infuriating social 
  consequence.
  Hmm. I’ll have 
  to see what 
  I can cook up 
  for Abby on 
  her sheet... 
  maybe it’s 
  a different 
  ability, or 
  the same one 
  with different 
  conditions 
  for penalty. 
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Psychic Abilities)
  Effects: 
  Emotion-Touch. If you can touch someone, you 
  can make him feel something. You’re able 
  to do maneuvers at +2 to your roll (using 
  Intimidation for anger or fear and Deceit for 
  every other emotion) that force an emotion 
  on a target (as a temporary aspect), so long 
  as you’re in the same zone as he is and you 
  can physically touch him. The victim defends 
  with his Discipline. You may be able to 
  prevent the victim from taking other actions 
  as well if you do this as a block (page 210) 
  instead of as a maneuver.
  Additional Emotion [–1 or more]. For every 
  point of refresh spent on this upgrade, you 
  can choose another emotion to use with your 
  Incite Emotion ability. All other upgrades 
  apply to any emotions you can incite.
  At Range [–1]. You may use this ability on 
  targets up to one zone away without touching 
  them.
  Lasting Emotion [–1]. If you increase the 
  refresh cost of this ability by 1, you gain the 
  ability to do Emotion-Touch as a mental attack 
  instead of a mere maneuver or block. If such 
  an attack hits, you gain a +2 stress bonus on a 
  successful hit (as though it were Weapon:2), 
  increasing the chances of inflicting a mental 
  consequence (and thus, a more lasting 
  emotional state). The victim defends with his 
  Discipline.
  Potent Emotion [–1]. The Lasting Emotion 
  upgrade is a prerequisite to this one. You get 
  another +2 stress bonus on successful attacks 
  as per Lasting Emotion, as though you had 
  Weapon:4. 
  Psychometry [–1]
  Description: You have a semi-magical 
  (“psychic”) talent for catching glimpses of the 
  past when you touch objects. 
  Skills Affected: Investigation.
  Effects: 
  Echoes of the Past. You can perform an assess-
  ment action on the history of a given object 
  that you are able to touch and contemplate. 
  This is a standard Investigation roll, but 
  instead of searching a physical location, 
  you are rifling through the situations that 
  the object has been exposed to in the past, 
  looking for glimpses of something significant. 
  Psychometry assessments are more difficult 
  than normal (Good or higher), so even with 
  a high roll, you may only get one aspect or 
  fact, and you may not receive any additional 
  context to help you make sense of it. 
  For example, a knife used as a murder 
  weapon might only give you fleeting images 
  from the scene, not enough to make a positive 
  ID on the killer; but you might see something 
  like A Butterfly Necklace that you can 
  tag later as a clue on a future roll. 
  
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  174
  Supernatural Powers (Shapeshifting)
  The Sight [–1]
  Description: Wizards and others have learned 
  to open their third eye, perceiving the magical 
  world in great detail. The downside here is that 
  the often phantasmagorical images are burned 
  into their brains—never forgotten, always vivid.
  Musts: You must have a high concept that 
  shows either that you are a spellcaster or that 
  you have received training of some kind to open 
  your third eye.
  Skills Affected: Lore, Discipline.
  Effects: 
  Arcane Senses. Even with your third eye closed 
  you have heightened arcane senses. You may 
  use Lore as if it were an arcane Investigation 
  skill as well as an arcane Alertness skill. You 
  also gain +1 to Lore when using it in this 
  fashion.
  Wizard’s Touch. As another aspect of your 
  arcane senses, when you touch another being 
  who has some magic potential, the GM may 
  ask you to roll Lore to catch just a hint of a 
  “spark”—indicating their nature as some-
  thing other than mundanely mortal. Even on 
  a failed roll, you might experience some sort 
  of sense that something is “off,” without being 
  able to pin it down.
  Opening the Third Eye. You may use the Sight 
  to fully open your third eye, with all of the 
  risks and rewards that come with it. See 
  page 223 for details on how the Sight works.
  Soulgaze [–1]
  Description: Wizards (and a rare few others) 
  have the ability to gaze upon another’s soul 
  directly—but only the first time they make more 
  than a moment of eye contact, and only if the 
  one they gaze upon actually has a mortal soul. 
  When it doesn’t happen, that in and of itself is 
  an interesting piece of information! 
  Skills Affected: Conviction, Discipline.
  Effects: 
  Soulgaze. You are subject to the uses and effects 
  of Soulgaze as described on page 226.
  Application of the Sight [+1]. If you have the 
  Sight, above, you may take Soulgaze for free 
  if you so choose. It’s not mandatory.
  Shapeshifting
  Shapeshifting can happen solely in the mind, 
  but more often it is an alteration of the body. 
  The changed form may be greater or smaller in 
  size than the original. 
  The True Shapeshifting ability (below, 
  page 177) is rarely possible for a mortal mind to 
  bear—the stress and strain placed on the sense 
  of self inevitably leads to a psychotic break of 
  some sort. (This may be why those mortals who 
  do learn how to shapeshift rarely enjoy more 
  than a single, fixed alternate form—such as 
  werewolves of the Alpha style.)
  Whatever the case, this is very much a case of 
  (mental) function follows form—changing the 
  body may well be the easiest part. What to do 
  with the mind when this happens—that’s para-
  mount, at least as far as mortal shapeshifters are 
  concerned. Most supernatural creatures already 
  have it covered—or aren’t particularly bothered 
  by petty things like psychosis. Others conquer 
  this problem with a variety of limitations, 
  magical “cheats,” or just good hard training.
  Unless explicitly noted otherwise, shape-
  shifting may be done as a supplemental action.
  Beast Change [–1]
  Description: You’re able to take on the form of a 
  beast, rearranging the priorities of your skill list.
  Musts: You must define the particular kind of 
  beast that you change into.
  Skills Affected: Many.
  Effects: 
  Beast Form. You take on the shape and appear-
  ance of the beast you specified at the time you 
  took this ability. This only covers a cosmetic 
  change of form and does not convey addi-
  tional abilities like Claws (page 162) or any 
  supernatural Strength, Speed, or Toughness 
  abilities—you will need to take those sepa-
  rately to get the appropriate benefit.
  Skill Shuffle. You may shuffle around your skills 
  for a different configuration while changed 
  (using the same number of skill points and 
  following the same rules as during character 
  creation, page 65), so long as any knowledge 
  or social skills are not given a higher value 
  by the change. In other words, you can’t 
  suddenly know more about Shakespeare just 
  because you’re a wolf (or whatever). Physical 
  and perception skills, however, may (and 
  perhaps should) be increased in this way.
  Wizards tend not to meet people 
  eye-to-eye. This makes some 
  folks think we're liars, or shifty.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Shapeshifting)
  Demonic Co-Pilot [–1]
  Description: Running around in a body that 
  isn’t yours is hard, so you contract out the hard 
  work to a spirit. Usually an evil, angry one.  
  Musts: You should have an aspect referencing 
  this pact in some way. The GM is going to be 
  compelling it. The GM should think about what 
  the co-pilot’s agenda is.
  Skills Affected: Ones used by the shapeshifted 
  form.
  Effects: 
  Demon’s Agenda. You gain a +1 on any skill roll 
  that’s in keeping with your shapeshifted form 
  or demonic co-pilot’s agenda (often having 
  to do with gleeful murder). When doing so, 
  you must roll Discipline against the result, 
  as if you were defending against an attack. 
  Failure to defend results in mental stress as 
  if from an attack; psychological consequences 
  that result are set by the GM, in line with the 
  demon’s agenda.
  Flesh Mask [–1]
  Description: This is a variant on Human Guise 
  (page 176) that offers a few extra benefits. Most 
  commonly used by Red Court vampires, a Flesh 
  Mask is a real-seeming outer layer of ecto-
  plasmic flesh, usually embodying an idealized 
  human form. But the creature beneath can move 
  around inside, sometimes able to perform small 
  actions underneath its very “skin,” likely unno-
  ticed by those around it.
  Skills Affected: Social skills, Stealth.
  Effects: 
  Flesh Mask. The flesh mask is a pliable outer 
  shell of false flesh, made of ectoplasm. The 
  true creature beneath can tear through this 
  mask with ease, discarding it to take its true 
  form. Similarly, the flesh mask may be ripped 
  away from the creature by particularly vicious 
  attacks—any physical attack that inflicts 
  a consequence of any size is sure to pierce 
  the mask, at least a little. It takes only a few 
  minutes for a flesh mask to be restored after it 
  has been removed, whatever the means.
  Idealized Appearance. Your flesh mask has a 
  single appearance—usually a stunningly 
  attractive version of the human you were 
  before you became a vampire. Any social 
  action where appearance is a primary factor 
  gains a +2 on the roll, so long as the target 
  of your action is not aware of the horror that 
  lies beneath the outer veneer.
  What Lies Beneath. You may move around 
  within your flesh mask, so long as the motions 
  are small and subtle—such as pulling your 
  real arm out of the mask-arm and pointing a 
  small gun at your opponent. Keeping such an 
  action concealed is done with a simple Deceit 
  or Stealth roll.
  Gaseous Form [–3]
  Description: Certain Black Court vampires 
  may have the ability to turn into a cloud of 
  gas, seeping under door cracks, traveling great 
  distances undetected, and so on. Other creatures 
  may do this as well.
  Skills Affected: Various.
  Effects: 
  Gaseous Transformation. You may trans-
  form into a gaseous cloud. In gas form, 
  you set aside all ability to act in exchange 
  for the Physical Immunity ability (page 186) 
  with a Catch of any of your normal weak-
  nesses, if you have any, plus the vulnerabili-
  ties a cloud of gas might have; the ability to 
  fly à la the Wings ability (page 165); and the 
  Insubstantial effect of Spirit Form (page 170). 
  The only real actions  available to you are 
  movement and maneuvers—you cannot 
  attack or block while in this form. It takes a 
  whole exchange to make the transformation.
  While in this form, you’re potentially 
  vulnerable to things that can affect a gaseous 
  cloud: someone could bottle up part of you 
  if he got off a good enough “attack;” a strong 
  head-wind could impede travel, adding 
  borders to zones if you are trying to float into 
  the face of it. However, you may be able to 
  ignore other border values entirely by seeping 
  through cracks under doors or windows, 
  traveling through ventilation systems, and 
  so forth. You’ll still be stopped by something 
  airtight and slowed down by something that’s 
  mostly airtight.
  Did someone cut the cheese, 
  or is Mavra in the house?
  Why the 
  hell would 
  someone want 
  a Demonic 
  Co-Pilot in 
  his head?
  I sure don’t. 
  But it’s a 
  hexenwulf thing, 
  so it’s in here.
  I repeat my 
  question!
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Shapeshifting)
  Human Form [+1]
  Description: You’re a shapeshifter, but when 
  you haven’t shapeshifted, you’re just a normal 
  person.
  Skills Affected: Varies.
  Effects: 
  Regular Joe/Regular Jane. Specify which of 
  your supernatural abilities (usually most 
  or all of them) are unavailable to you when 
  you’re not shapeshifted into your “powered” 
  form. As long as you specify at least 2 points 
  worth of supernatural powers, you gain back 
  1 point of refresh for making this choice. If 
  you only have 1 point of supernatural powers 
  affected by this, Human Form is not worth 
  any refresh.
  Rare or Involuntary Change [+1]. If you are 
  only rarely able to take your powered form 
  (due to involuntary change, rare times of 
  the day or month or year, etc.), you regain 
  two points of refresh for taking this ability, 
  instead of one. The total cost of the abilities 
  affected by the Human Form must be greater 
  than the amount of refresh points paid back 
  by this effect. So to get this version of Human 
  Form, it must affect at least 3 refresh points’ 
  worth of powers.
  Human Guise [–0]
  Description: Congratulations, you pretty much 
  look like everyone else. 
  Skills Affected: Discipline.
  Notes: The effects of this ability are so minor 
  that they’re really considered to be almost 
  cosmetic, at least in terms of the impact on the 
  game mechanics; hence the zero cost. Ghouls are 
  one example of a creature with this ability, as are 
  White Court vampires.
  Effects: 
  Normal Appearance. You have a number of 
  supernatural abilities (often from “Creature 
  Features” on page  162, though others may 
  apply)  that give you an appearance that’s 
  noticeably, often horrifically, different from 
  normal folks. With this ability, you are able 
  to take on a human guise that conceals 
  your supernatural nature from mundane 
  senses. Supernaturally gifted individuals 
  may still sense your unusual nature using 
  Investigation, Alertness, or Lore.
  Your other abilities are still technically 
  available to you while you’re looking normal, 
  unlike with Human Form (see this page). 
  The moment you choose to use your powers, 
  however, the human guise drops away. So 
  long as you do not use your abilities, you 
  don’t give away your nature to mundane 
  senses—though under times of great stress or 
  high emotion, you may be called on to make a 
  Discipline roll to keep the guise in place. 
  Mimic Abilities [-Varies]
  Description: You are able to mimic the abilities 
  of another individual, at least to an extent.
  Musts: You must set aside a number of points of 
  your refresh equal to the maximum total refresh 
  value of any mortal stunts and supernatural abil-
  ities you wish to copy from a target. These are 
  called your mimic points.
  Skills Affected: Many.
  Effects: 
  Eat Power. You may clone the supernatural 
  powers of your target (see below) under 
  particular circumstances. This cloning is only 
  possible if you lay hands on a significant part 
  of the victim—such as his brain, his heart, 
  or a large portion of his magic power. If the 
  victim is not dead from this, then he is at 
  least diminished while you access his abilities 
  (reflected by a consequence resulting from 
  the attack that allowed you to steal from him, 
  the terms arrived at when taking him out, 
  etc.). This is what gave the Nightmare not 
  only Harry’s form but also his advanced spell-
  crafting abilities in the Grave Peril casefile. 
  The cloning may be undone if the victim 
  is able to turn tables on you and reclaim what 
  you’ve stolen from him. Usually this requires 
  winning some sort of supernatural or magical 
  conflict with you, though it probably goes 
  without saying that killing you will restore 
  the victim’s power.
  You can keep your mimic points config-
  ured in a certain way indefinitely. If you 
  switch out your current set of powers for a 
  new one, however, you can’t go back to your 
  previous “settings”—you’d have to eat those 
  powers again to have access to them. 
  Mimic Stunt. You are able to clone any of your 
  target’s mortal stunts. You must clone these 
  abilities by temporarily paying for them out 
  of your mimic points (above).
  Bob, concerning 
  the highlighted 
  text to the 
  right—this 
  is because 
  Kravos was 
  just a sorcerer 
  before, right?
  Yes.
  What happens 
  if you 
  shapeshift 
  out of a 
  form that 
  has a power 
  ability with 
  extra stress 
  boxes? And 
  what if those 
  boxes are 
  checked off?
  You lose access 
  to those 
  boxes, but the 
  checkmarks 
  don’t go away. 
  You aren’t 
  instantly 
  taken out, 
  but if you 
  later bring 
  those boxes 
  BAcK, they’ll 
  still have 
  those check 
  marks unless 
  enough time 
  has passed.
  For Mimic Abilities, can a PC mimic more 
  than one person at a time? Or someone 
  from before the first session?
  I’d say no. It’s a bit of an “evil people eater” power, 
  so it should be treated very strictly when in Pc hands.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Shapeshifting)
  Mimic Skill. Allocate one mimic point to copy 
  any one of your target’s skills. This replaces 
  your actual rating with that skill while the 
  allocation remains in place.
  Mimic Form [–2]
  Description: You are able to mimic the appear-
  ance of another, given the right materials to 
  work with: ideally a piece of their flesh, some 
  strands of hair, a patch of skin, or a vial of blood. 
  (Mortal monster-hunters, take heed!)
  Skills Affected: Deceit, others.
  Effects: 
  Take Form. You may take on the form, voice, 
  and other seemings of another individual, 
  provided you have possession of something 
  significant of theirs—the better the object, 
  the more convincing the copy. You roll Deceit 
  at +4 to fool others if your mimicked appear-
  ance is close to perfect; the bonus decreases 
  significantly if you don’t have the right “fuel.”
  You fleshy types leave so much detritus 
  around, it’s a shock that more creatures don’t 
  take advantage of it.
  Modular Abilities [-Varies]
  Description: You can improve your physique, 
  taking on a variety of abilities as you change 
  your form.
  Musts: You must “pre-pay” a number of refresh 
  points equal to the maximum total value of the 
  abilities you want to be able to change around at 
  will, plus a surcharge of two refresh (so a pool 
  of 7 points would cost 9 refresh: the base of 7, 
  plus 2). These are called your form points.
  Options: None.
  Skills Affected: Varies.
  Effects: 
  Function Follows Form. You may shapeshift 
  your form to take on a variety of abilities, 
  taking a full action to change them around. 
  When making such a change, you may real-
  locate some or all of your form points (see 
  above) to purchase new abilities, focusing 
  on those available as Creature Features 
  (page 162), certain Minor Abilities (page 169), 
  Speed (page 178), Strength (page 183), and  
  Toughness (page 184).
  True Shapeshifting [–4]
  Description: You are able to shapeshift into 
  a variety of human and non-human (usually 
  animate) forms.
  Options: None, but the Modular Abilities 
  power (above) is recommended.
  Skills Affected: Varies.
  Effects: 
  Multi-Form. You may take on nearly any 
  humanoid or beastly form as a supplemental 
  action. Changing into something else—say, 
  a tree, a vacuum cleaner, a water bed—takes 
  a longer amount of time, usually several 
  actions, or even minutes, depending on how 
  different. Concealing your true nature while 
  in these forms is casually easy, but if you 
  do something to call it into suspicion, your 
  attempts to evade detection are at +4 on your 
  Deceit or Stealth rolls.
  Skill Shuffle. As with the skill-shuffling effect 
  of the same name under the Beast Change 
  power (page 174), only with multiple different 
  configurations to suit the form you take.
  A waterbed? Waveless or free flow?
  Okay, how 
  about if you 
  shapeshift 
  into a form 
  that has a 
  Recovery 
  power. Is 
  that... uh, 
  legal?
  Yep. my 
  reasoning is 
  that really 
  potent shape-
  shifters are 
  probably able 
  to focus their 
  power on healing 
  when it’s not 
  focused on 
  doing something 
  else. A gm can 
  decide it’s Not 
  legal though—
  it’s her game 
  to arbitrate 
  after all. And 
  If you want 
  reliable access 
  to healing, buy 
  it separately.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Speed)
  Speed
  When it comes right down to it in the battle 
  between mankind and creatures of darkness, the 
  creatures have the upper hand when it comes 
  to physical capability. One such area is speed—
  simply, most of them have the ability to move 
  faster than we can. 
  Like any of the physical “building block” 
  categories (see also Strength on page 183, and 
  Toughness on page 184), Speed is divided first 
  and foremost into three levels—Inhuman, 
  Supernatural, and Mythic. You must have a high 
  concept that fits taking one of these abilities. 
  The Mythic level is nearly always reserved for 
  potent NPCs.
  Inhuman Speed [–2]
  Description: You are very fast, just past the edge 
  of human capability.
  Skills Affected: Athletics, Alertness, and some 
  other physical skills.
  Effects: 
  Improved Initiative. Your Alertness is at +4 for 
  the purpose of determining initiative.
  Athletic Ability. All your Athletics checks 
  are made at +1, including dodging. 
  When sprinting (see page 212), this bonus is 
  increased to +2.
  Casual Movement. Whenever moving as part 
  of another physical activity, you may move 
  one zone without taking the –1 penalty for a 
  supplemental action (page 213). 
  Almost Too Fast To See. Difficulty factors due 
  to moving are reduced by two when rolling 
  Stealth.
  Supernatural Speed [–4]
  Description: You’re able to move far faster 
  than the eye can see—or at least so fast that 
  what’s seen is only a blur. You can cross physical 
  distances easily and quickly; acting before ordi-
  nary mortals do is trivial.
  Notes: This ability replaces Inhuman Speed if 
  taken. 
  Skills Affected: Athletics, Alertness, Stealth, 
  and some other physical skills.
  Effects: 
  Supreme Initiative. You always go first in initia-
  tive order in a conflict, regardless of your 
  Alertness rating. If there are other enti-
  ties present who share this ability, you must 
  then use Alertness to resolve initiative order 
  among yourselves. If someone has Mythic 
  Speed (below), it trumps this ability.
  Superior Athletic Ability. All your Athletics 
  checks are made at +2, including dodging. 
  When sprinting (see page 212), this bonus is 
  increased to +4.
  Effortless Movement. Whenever moving as part 
  of another physical activity, you may move 
  two zones without taking the –1 penalty for a 
  supplemental action (page 213). 
  Faster Than the Eye. Difficulty factors due to 
  moving are reduced by four when rolling 
  Stealth.
  Mythic Speed [–6]
  Description: You are a rare supernatural crea-
  ture whose very essence is tied to the notion of 
  speed. You’re like the wind itself. Hell, you may 
  be the wind itself.
  Musts: This ability replaces Inhuman or 
  Supernatural Speed if taken.
  Skills Affected: Athletics, Alertness, Stealth, 
  and some other physical skills.
  Effects: 
  Super Supreme Initiative. You always go first 
  in initiative order in a conflict, regardless of 
  your Alertness rating. If there are other enti-
  ties present who share Mythic Speed, you 
  must then use Alertness to resolve initiative 
  order among yourselves. 
  Extra Superior Athletic Ability. All your 
  Athletics checks are made at +3, including 
  dodging. When sprinting, this bonus is 
  increased to +6. You may set aside this bonus 
  to simply declare that you have no problem 
  keeping up with a moving vehicle.
  Instant Movement. Whenever moving as part of 
  another physical activity, you may move up to 
  three zones without taking the –1 penalty for 
  a supplemental action (page 213). 
  Like the Wind. No one ever gets a bonus to spot 
  you when you’re using Stealth, no matter how 
  fast you’re moving.
  Which is why 
  I practice 
  sprinting, 
  to narrow 
  that edge 
  of theirs.
  So what are 
  all these 
  “difficulty 
  factors due 
  to moving”, 
  Billy? I’ve 
  looked at 
  skulking on 
  page 143 and 
  modifying 
  difficulties 
  for movement 
  on page 312 
  and I’m still 
  confused!
  Well, the 
  difficulty 
  modification 
  stuff is 
  mostly about 
  looking at 
  the situation 
  and adding 
  +2 for each 
  factor that 
  works against 
  the stealthy 
  individual. 
  So here, each 
  “reduced by 
  two” amounts 
  to “ignore one 
  factor”.
  So to get into a specific example. let’s say 
  you want to move quickly across several zones, some of which are covered in crunchy-
  sounding gravel.  those are two factors, each adding +2 to whatever the gm decided the 
  basic difficulty was. Inhuman Speed ignores one of those. Supernatural ignores both.
  
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  179
  Supernatural Powers (Spellcraft)
  Spellcraft
  Though certainly not exclusive to mankind, 
  spellcraft is one of the few ways that mortal 
  man can compete with the creatures of the 
  Nevernever. True practitioners such as wizards 
  are few and far between (and often come out of 
  specific human bloodlines), but there are lesser 
  practitioners out there as well, able to deliver in 
  less refined and more specific ways.
  Regardless how you pursue it, if you’re a 
  mortal spellcaster, you can cause technology 
  to short out around you (see the principles of 
  hexing on page 228).
  Blind Spots
  Some spellcasters have blind spots in their 
  magic that aren’t simply a lack of specialization 
  and practice—there are particular kinds of 
  spells or methods of arcane practice that they 
  just can’t do well. By and large, this is because 
  the only magic that you can do as a practi-
  tioner is the magic that you believe you can do, 
  because that’s who you are. Self image plays into 
  this a lot; as such, a spellcaster’s blind spots 
  are usually an expression of the kind of person 
  he is. And that means that aspects play a key 
  role in determining what spells a wizard just 
  sucks at.
  Harry Dresden isn’t much for subtlety, and 
  his aspects (such as Not So Subtle, Still 
  Quick To Anger) are a reflection of that. 
  This in turn affects his magic. When it comes 
  to spirit evocation, Harry’s on good terms 
  with using it for force effects—throwing up a 
  shield, constructing rings that unleash teleki-
  netic fury, that sort of thing—but he’s a mess 
  when it comes to using evocation (or thau-
  maturgy for that matter) to create veils. Veils 
  are a subtle art, and Harry is not so subtle. 
  Similarly, Molly Carpenter is a highly sensi-
  tive individual (tough exterior to the contrary), 
  and her magic reflects this. She’s a mess with 
  most combat magic. Her issues with combat 
  magic come from her aspects (Subtlety Is 
  Its Own Power).
  In both Harry’s and Molly’s case, when they 
  need to use magic they’re not good at, some-
  thing inevitably goes wrong—no matter what 
  the die rolls might say. Harry might cast a veil, 
  but it’ll look like a smudge rather than flawless 
  invisibility from the outside, and from inside 
  the veil everything looks like it’s viewed from 
  inside a glass of Mac’s finest dark ale. When 
  the gruffs attacked her house, Molly could fend 
  them off with a blast of force or fire—if only 
  that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she has no 
  aptitude for. 
  From a character standpoint, that stinks; 
  from a system standpoint, it’s a good thing. In 
  both cases, the failures these wizards experi-
  ence are due to taking compels on a relevant 
  aspect (see page 100), reflecting a blind spot in 
  their spellcraft that has nothing to do with 
  what they’ve specialized in. They might not be 
  able to cast the spell they need, or they might 
  cast it but only get some of the benefit they’re 
  after—in either case, they’re getting some 
  much-needed fate points for suffering from the 
  restriction. This can create an incentive for the 
  player to get his wizard embroiled in situations 
  where he needs to use a kind of magic he just 
  isn’t good at, as a way to mine some fate points 
  he’ll need for later when he’s doing stuff he is 
  good at. In other words, being bad at some 
  kinds of magic can make you a better wizard! 
  Or at least give you a wildly entertaining life… 
  Building a Spellcaster
  If you’re building a spellcaster character, 
  realize that you have a lot of flexibility to play 
  around with here, despite it looking like you’re 
  taking one or two powers that eat most of 
  your refresh. Once you’ve taken these powers, 
  you’re definitely not done—it’s time to flip 
  over to Spellcasting (page 248) and read up on 
  building spells. It’s a good idea to construct a 
  few spells before you start play so you can get 
  your handy arsenal established. And in case 
  it’s not obvious, several modes of spellcasting 
  will let you create many effects that at least 
  approximately duplicate some of the powers 
  you’ll find elsewhere in this chapter. That 
  means there’s no need to take those other 
  powers. For example, there’s no need to take 
  Worldwalker (page 171) if you’re already able to 
  cast spells that open up portals into and out of 
  the Nevernever.
  If you have any questions about what 
  powers you should be considering, make sure 
  to check out the character template you chose 
  from Types & Templates on page 72.
  Hey, I CAN 
  be subtle. 
  Given enough 
  time. And 
  planning. 
  And luck.
  Quit 
  laughing!
  
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  180
  Supernatural Powers (Spellcraft)
  Evocation [–3]
  Description: Evocation is the “thug” side 
  of spellcasting, from some perspectives. It’s 
  all about pushing energy from one place to 
  another, quickly—and subtlety isn’t, truly, part 
  of its vocabulary. Worse, it runs a real risk of 
  spiraling out of the caster’s control. Those who 
  have mastered Evocation are among the most 
  feared spellcasters around. It’s not because they 
  can create widespread destruction (although of 
  course they can); it’s because they’re able to do 
  potent spellcasting at a moment’s notice. Those 
  who haven’t quite mastered evocation are usually 
  dangerous as well—but only until they acciden-
  tally engineer their own demise. For more on 
  Evocation, see page 249.
  Options: Casters whose template allows for 
  it  should consider the Refinement ability 
  (page 182).
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Conviction, others.
  Effects: 
  Evocation. You’re able to use evocation in all of 
  its forms, as described on page 249.
  You Know What You Know. While Evocation 
  allows the use of a broad range of elements 
  (fire, air, water, earth, and spirit/force, clas-
  sically speaking), the practitioner doesn’t 
  start out familiarized with all of them. When 
  you take Evocation, you must specify three 
  elements you do know. You cannot cast spells 
  using the other elements (which should 
  number two, if using the classical model). 
  Specialization. Full Evocation grants the ability 
  to specialize in one form of Evocation magic, 
  usually by focusing on a particular known 
  element (such as Harry’s predilection for 
  fire). This specialization can take one of two 
  forms—either a power bonus, increasing the 
  caster’s Conviction score by one for any spell 
  of that element, or a control bonus, increasing 
  the caster’s Discipline roll to control the spell 
  by one. One or the other must be chosen, 
  though the specialization does not need to 
  be defined at the time the ability is taken. 
  Additional specializations covering different 
  areas of Evocation may be taken by use of the 
  Refinement ability (page 182).
  Item Slots. Evocation comes with two free 
  Focus Item Slots (page 278). You can design 
  the items that fit into these slots now, or later 
  on during play. A single Focus Item Slot may 
  be traded in for two Enchanted Item Slots 
  (page 279). You may gain more Item Slots as 
  one of the options on the Refinement ability 
  (page 182).
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Spellcraft)
  Thaumaturgy [–3]
  Description: Thaumaturgy is a subtle art—and 
  slow. It was created by mortal spellcasters due to 
  their need to produce great power but to keep 
  that power under control better than Evocation 
  ever could. This is done through careful prepa-
  ration and ritual: Thaumaturgy can’t ever be 
  used quickly enough to be much use in a fight. 
  However, given enough time, preparation, 
  materials, and the right caster, it’s more than 
  a match for supernatural forces. For more on 
  Thaumaturgy, see page 261. 
  Options: Casters whose template allows for 
  it  should consider the Refinement ability 
  (page 182).
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Conviction, Lore.
  Effects: 
  Thaumaturgy. You’re able to use Thaumaturgy 
  in all of its forms, as described on page 261.
  Specialization. Full Thaumaturgy grants the 
  ability to specialize in one form of thau-
  maturgical magic, usually by focusing on a 
  particular application (such as ectomancy, 
  crafting, or divination—see page 272). This 
  specialization can take one of two forms—
  either a complexity bonus, increasing the 
  level of complexity you can manage without 
  preparation by one for spells of a particular 
  type, or a control bonus, increasing your 
  rolls to control the specified ritual by one 
  (crafting uses different bonus types—see 
  page 280). One or the other must be chosen, 
  though the specialization does not need to 
  be defined at the time the ability is taken. 
  Additional specializations covering different 
  areas of Thaumaturgy may be taken by use of 
  the Refinement ability (page 182).
  Item Slots. Thaumaturgy comes with two free 
  Focus Item Slots (page 278). You can design 
  the items that fit into these slots now, or later 
  on during play. A single Focus Item Slot may 
  be traded in for two Enchanted Item Slots 
  (page 279). You may gain more Item Slots as 
  one of the options on the Refinement ability 
  (page 182).
  Channeling [–2]
  Description: “Channeling” is one of the many 
  general names given to a lesser form of Evocation 
  that is only able to use one particular element. 
  But more often such abilities are referred to by 
  names such as pyromancy (fire evocation) and 
  kinetomancy (kinetic force evocation).
  Musts: You must define the element which your 
  spellcasting is restricted to when you take this 
  ability.
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Conviction.
  Effects: 
  Channeling. You are able to use Evocation 
  as described on page  249, but your use is 
  restricted to one particular element, which 
  you must define when you take this ability.
  Item Slots. Channeling comes with two free 
  Focus Item Slots (page 278). You can design 
  the items that fit into these slots now, or later 
  on during play. A single Focus Item Slot may 
  be traded in for two Enchanted Item Slots 
  (page 279). You may gain more Item Slots as 
  one of the options on the Refinement 
  ability (page 182)—but you may only buy 
  Refinement for that purpose. All items 
  created for those slots must be in keeping 
  with the elemental theme you’ve chosen for 
  your power.
  Ritual [–2]
  Description: “Ritual” covers the ability to do one 
  particular application of thaumaturgy—such 
  as crafting or wards—to the exclusion of any 
  others. The application isn’t always a technique 
  so much as a subject matter: for example, some 
  ectomancers have this ability, giving them a wide 
  range of thaumaturgic abilities, but restricted 
  only to spirits and ghosts.
  Musts: You must define which single application 
  of Thaumaturgy your spellcasting is limited to 
  at the time you take this ability.
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Conviction, Lore.
  Effects: 
  Ritual. You are able to use Thaumaturgy 
  as described on page  261, but your use is 
  restricted  to one particular application or 
  thematic subject matter. You must define this 
  limit when you take the ability. For an idea of 
  the options, see page 272.
  What about 
  re-directing 
  the power of 
  a thunder-
  storm?
  As a special-
  ized form of 
  channeling, you 
  mean? eh, I 
  don’t see it. I 
  mean, how would 
  you practice 
  at lesser kinds 
  of spell-work 
  to get good 
  enough not to 
  kill yourself? 
  It’d be like 
  learning to be 
  an electrician 
  but only by 
  working on 
  nuclear power 
  plants.
  See, Harry? 
  William has been 
  paying attention!
  Can someone “upgrade” 
  Ritual to Thaumaturgy, or 
  Channeling to Evocation?
  Yep, that’s the idea.  the lesser abilities 
  go away, since they become just one more 
  specialty in what’s now a broader arsenal.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Spellcraft)
  Item Slots. Ritual comes with two free Focus 
  Item Slots (page 278). You can design the 
  items that fit into these slots now, or later 
  on during play. A single Focus Item Slot 
  may be traded in for two Enchanted Item 
  Slots (page 279). You may gain more Item Slots 
  as one of the options on the Refinement 
  ability (page 182)—but you may only buy 
  Refinement  for that purpose. All items 
  created for those slots must be in keeping 
  with the single application you’ve chosen for 
  your power.
  Lawbreaker [-Varies]
  Musts: This ability must be taken immedi-
  ately upon breaking one of the Laws of Magic 
  (page 232). You must specify the Law broken at 
  the time you take the ability. This ability must 
  be taken separately for each Law of Magic 
  broken—noted like so: Lawbreaker (First), 
  Lawbreaker (Fourth), etc.
  Description: You’ve broken one of the Laws of 
  Magic:
    First: You’ve taken a life with the use 
  of magic, turning a little bit of your 
  soul dark.
    Second: You’ve transformed someone 
  with the use of magic, destroying your 
  victim’s original body and, quite prob-
  ably, mind.
    Third: You’ve invaded someone’s 
  thoughts with the use of magic, violating 
  the privacy of your victim’s mind.
    Fourth: You’ve enthralled or otherwise 
  laid a compulsion upon another being 
  with magic, likely causing long-term 
  psychological trauma to your victim.
    Fifth: You’ve reached beyond the borders 
  of life and death with your magic, upset-
  ting the natural order of the universe.
    Sixth: You’ve swum against the flow of 
  time, upsetting the natural order of the 
  universe.
    Seventh: You’ve sought knowledge 
  from beyond the Outer Gates, or other-
  wise drawn power from that forbidden 
  source, upsetting the natural order of the 
  universe.
  For more on the Laws of Magic and the 
  consequences of breaking them, see page 232.
  Effects:
  Slippery Slope. Gain a +1 bonus to any spell-
  casting roll whenever using magic in a way 
  which would break the specified Law of 
  Magic. Increase this spellcasting bonus to +2 
  if you’ve broken this Law three or more times; 
  additionally, the refresh cost of this ability 
  increases from –1 to –2 and requires that 
  you change one of your existing aspects into 
  a version twisted by the violation of the Law. 
  Every three times that you break this law past 
  that point, another (different) aspect must be 
  changed, though the refresh cost and spell-
  casting bonus do not further increase. You 
  cannot stack bonuses if you break multiple 
  Laws with one spell—use the highest bonus.
  Trouble Comes in Threes. Increase the spell-
  casting bonus by one if you have three or 
  more Lawbreaker abilities in any combina-
  tion (i.e., if you’ve broken three or more Laws 
  of Magic, sporting a Lawbreaker ability for 
  each one), making the maximum possible 
  bonus +3.
  Refinement [–1]
  Description: Experienced spellcasters learn 
  in time how to refine and focus their abilities, 
  gaining greater strength and diversity.
  Skills Affected: Discipline, Conviction, Lore.
  Effects: 
  Refined Spellcraft. Refinement is a tool for 
  improving your spellcasting over time. Each 
  time Refinement is taken, choose one option 
  from the following:
  Add a new element to your Evocation famil-
  iarity list. You also get one specialization for 
  that new element.
  Or, gain two additional specialization 
  bonuses for Evocation and/or Thaumaturgy. 
  You have to structure your specialization 
  bonuses for each ability according to the same 
  “column” limits for skills (see page 65).
  For example, you can’t have a +2 power 
  bonus for water evocation until after you’ve 
  taken +1 in something else, either a control 
  bonus for water or power/control in another 
  element. You can’t have a +3 bonus until you 
  also have a +2 and a +1. If you have two 
  bonuses at +2, you must have two more at 
  +1, etc. 
  So, basically, 
  the more evil 
  you are, the 
  more powerful 
  that makes 
  you, and 
  the more it 
  changes you 
  into a monster.
  Yeah, that’s 
  about the 
  size of it.
  Don’t you mean 
  “been there, 
  done that,” boss?
  Shut up, Bob.
  Can you split up the Refinement benefits? 
  Like, 1 specialization + 1 focus item for 1 point?
  Sure, seems reasonable to me.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Strength)
  The same goes for thaumaturgic types 
  and complexity/control bonuses, but when 
  you’re calculating, look at Evocation and 
  Thaumaturgy separately—if you have a +1 
  complexity bonus to divinations and you 
  want a +2, having a +1 power bonus in water 
  evocation isn’t going to help you. You need 
  to take another thaumaturgic specialization 
  at +1.
  In addition, you cannot have any special-
  ization bonuses higher than your Lore skill. 
  If your Lore is only Fair (+2), you can’t have 
  a higher bonus than +2 in any specialization.
  Or, gain two additional Focus Item Slots (or 
  four additional Enchanted Item Slots). For 
  more details on focus items and enchanted 
  items, see page 278.
  Sponsored Magic [-Varies]
  Description: Some varieties of magic draw 
  on power sources external to the practitioner. 
  Invariably, these sources of power have some 
  kind of agenda of their own. See Spellcasting, 
  page 287, for details about the various kinds of 
  Sponsored Magic.
  Notes: The cost of Sponsored Magic changes 
  depending on whether or not you already 
  have Evocation or Thaumaturgy. This also 
  affects whether or not Sponsored Magic gives 
  you any additional focus item slots.  If you’re 
  paying full price, you get four focus item slots 
  with this ability. If you have either Evocation 
  or Thaumaturgy, thus reducing the cost of 
  Sponsored Magic, you only get two additional 
  focus item slots.  If you have both, reducing the 
  cost more, you don’t get any additional focus 
  item slots.
  Strength
  Nothing matches supernatural strength for 
  putting a hurt on an opponent quickly and deci-
  sively. Sadly for humanity, usually that opponent 
  is…humanity.
  Like any of the physical “building block” cate-
  gories (see also Speed on page 178, and Toughness 
  on page 184), Strength is divided first and fore-
  most into three levels—Inhuman, Supernatural, 
  and Mythic. You must have a high concept that 
  fits taking one of these abilities. The Mythic level 
  is nearly always reserved for potent NPCs, but 
  even the Inhuman level can change the nature of 
  the battlefield.
  Inhuman Strength [–2]
  Description: You are able to lift more and hit 
  harder than the average human can, due to your 
  supernatural heritage.
  Skills Affected: Might, other physical skills.
  Effects: 
  Improved Lifting. Whenever lifting or breaking 
  inanimate things, you gain a +3 to your 
  Might score.
  Bruising Strength. Roll Might at +1 whenever 
  using that skill in conjunction with grap-
  pling (page 211). This also allows you to inflict 
  a 2-stress hit on an opponent as a supple-
  mental action during a grapple.
  Superior Strength. Whenever using your 
  Might to modify (page 214) another skill, it 
  always provides a +1 regardless of the actual 
  comparison of your Might score to the skill 
  in question.
  Hammer Blows. With attacks that depend on 
  muscular force (Fists, thrown Weapons, etc.), 
  you are at +2 to damage, increasing the stress 
  dealt by two on a successful hit.
  Supernatural Strength [–4]
  Description: You have supernatural strength—
  you’re able to lift and break things you shouldn’t 
  be able to, and people who get in your way tend 
  to be very, very sorry.
  Musts: Supernatural Strength replaces 
  Inhuman Strength if taken.
  Skills Affected: Might, other physical skills.
  Effects: 
  Superior Lifting. Whenever lifting or breaking 
  inanimate things, you gain a +6 to your 
  Might score.
  Bludgeoning Strength. Roll Might at +2 when-
  ever using that skill in conjunction with 
  grappling (see page 211). This also allows you 
  to inflict a 3-stress hit on an opponent as a 
  supplemental action during a grapple.
  Superlative Strength. Whenever using your 
  Might to modify (page 214) another skill, it 
  always provides a +2 regardless of the actual 
  comparison of your Might score to the skill 
  in question.
  Lethal Blows. With attacks that depend on 
  muscular force (Fists, thrown Weapons, etc.), 
  you are at +4 to damage, increasing the stress 
  dealt by four on a successful hit. Be careful; 
  it’s casually easy to kill someone with a simple 
  punch at this level.
  Super-
  strength is no 
  joke. In the 
  comic books 
  someone can 
  get tossed 
  around or 
  battered by a 
  guy who can 
  bench press 
  a car and 
  not end up 
  in traction. 
  The truth is, 
  if something 
  super-
  naturally 
  strong gets 
  its hands 
  on you — 
  you’re dead.
  Does the 
  strength 
  damage bonus 
  stack on top 
  of “normal” 
  muscle-
  powered 
  weapons 
  the wielder 
  might use?
  Yep. that’s 
  why they’re 
  not phrased 
  as Weapon:x 
  style bonuses.  
  that said, 
  most weapons 
  of that sort 
  are not made 
  to stand up to 
  that kind of 
  punishment for 
  long. expect 
  breakage (and 
  maybe a fate 
  point when 
  that happens.)
  
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  Supernatural Powers (toughness)
  Mythic Strength [–6]
  Description: Your strength is a thing out of 
  legend—legends that feature you. This ability is 
  usually only available to NPCs.
  Musts: Mythic Strength replaces Inhuman or 
  Supernatural Strength if taken.
  Skills Affected: Might, other physical skills.
  Effects:
  Supreme Lifting. Whenever lifting or breaking 
  inanimate things, you gain a +12 to your 
  Might score.
  Unstoppable Strength. Roll Might at +3 when-
  ever using that skill in conjunction with 
  grappling (see page 211). This also allows you 
  to inflict a 4-stress hit on an opponent as a 
  supplemental action during a grapple.
  Supreme Strength. Whenever using your 
  Might to modify (page 214) another skill, it 
  always provides a +3 regardless of the actual 
  comparison of your Might score to the skill 
  in question.
  Devastating Blows. With attacks that depend on 
  muscular force (Fists, thrown Weapons, etc.), 
  you are at +6 to damage, increasing the stress 
  dealt by six on a successful hit.
  Toughness
  Supernatural creatures are difficult to kill. 
  Sometimes they’re just impossible to damage 
  without a specialized means, like magic or a 
  weapon made of inherited silver. But more often, 
  they can simply take more punishment than a 
  normal person can.
  Like any of the physical “building block” cate-
  gories (see also Speed on page 178, and Strength 
  on page 183), Toughness is divided first and fore-
  most into three levels—Inhuman, Supernatural, 
  and Mythic. You must have a high concept that 
  fits taking one of these abilities. The Mythic 
  level is nearly always reserved for potent NPCs, 
  as is the special Physical Immunity ability.
  Toughness abilities require you to define the 
  circumstances under which the ability is effec-
  tive—this is represented by a stunt attached 
  to your toughness abilities called the Catch, 
  defined below.
  Lots of defenses have some sort of 
  way to get around them. It’s just 
  a matter of figuring out how.
  Yeah. that’s the point of “the catch”, below.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (toughness)
  The Catch [+varies]
  Description: Your Toughness abilities are 
  limited in some way.
  Skills Affected: None.
  Effects:
   The Catch. You must specify something that 
  bypasses your Toughness abilities. This will 
  give you a discount on the total cost of any 
  and all Toughness category powers that you 
  take, based on how likely it is that the Catch 
  will be met in play. Add all the relevant 
  discounts from the list below:
    If your abilities only protect you 
  against something specific, you get a +2 
  discount. If they protect you against 
  everything except something specific, you 
  get nothing.
    If the Catch is bypassed by something 
  that anyone could reasonably get access 
  to, but usually doesn’t carry on them 
  (like cold iron), you get a +2. If it is 
  bypassed by something only a rare class 
  of people in the world have (like True 
  Magic), you get a +1. If it is bypassed by 
  something only one or two people in the 
  world have access to or could produce 
  (like a Sword of the Cross), you get 
  nothing. Even the mere presence of the 
  thing that satisfies your Catch will cause 
  you discomfort (and may be grounds for 
  a compel or something similar).
    If almost anyone with an awareness of 
  the supernatural knows about the Catch 
  or could easily find out (like from the 
  Paranet, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula if 
  you’re a Black Court vampire), you get a 
  +2. If knowledge of the Catch requires 
  access to specific research material 
  that could be restricted (like a wizard’s 
  library), you get a +1. If knowledge of 
  the Catch requires knowing you person-
  ally to learn about it (like the effect of 
  Judas’ Noose on Nicodemus), you get 
  nothing.
    Any Recovery powers you have are 
  affected by the Catch, and so will not 
  speed up the recovery of an injury caused 
  by something that bypasses the Catch.
  Catches cannot reduce the total cost of 
  your Toughness powers below –1. You 
  may specify more than one Catch if you so 
  choose, but you can only receive the discount 
  once; take the best one. 
  Inhuman Recovery [–2]
  Description: You have an incredible fortitude, 
  able to exert yourself longer and heal faster than 
  a normal human can.
  Musts: You must attach this power to a Catch 
  (see this page).
  Skills Affected: Endurance, other physical skills.
  Effects: 
  Total Recovery. You’re able to recover from phys-
  ical harm that would leave a normal person 
  permanently damaged. You can recover 
  totally from any consequence (excluding 
  extreme ones) with no other excuse besides 
  time; simply waiting long enough will eventu-
  ally heal you completely. 
  Fast Recovery. Out of combat, you may recover 
  from physical consequences as if they were 
  one level lower in severity. So, you recover 
  from moderate consequences as though they 
  were mild, etc. Consequences reduced below 
  mild are always removed by the beginning of 
  a subsequent scene.
  Vigorous. Endurance never restricts (page 214) 
  other skills due to a lack of rest. You may skip 
  a night of sleep with no ill effects.
  Shrug It Off. In combat, once per scene, you 
  may clear away a mild physical conse-
  quence (page 203) as a supplemental action  
  (page 213).
  Inhuman Toughness [–2]
  Description: You’re unusually tough and have 
  incredible fortitude. You’re able to take more 
  punishment than a normal human can.
  Musts: You must attach this power to a Catch 
  (see this page).
  Skills Affected: Endurance, other physical 
  skills.
  Effects: 
  Hard to Hurt. You naturally have Armor:1 
  against all physical stress.
  Hard to Kill. You have two additional boxes of 
  physical stress capacity (page 201).
  Are Catches 
  a “must” for 
  Recovery 
  powers? 
  I see why 
  they’re 
  necessary 
  for Toughness 
  and Immunity 
  powers, but 
  most of 
  Recovery’s 
  benefits 
  work out 
  of combat.
  Yeah, you 
  could probably 
  skip a catch 
  for recovery 
  powers that 
  you don’t have 
  consistent 
  access to, like 
  lycanthropes 
  who need the 
  full moon. But 
  in general I’d 
  consider it a 
  “must.” Just 
  because You 
  never manage 
  it, Harry, don’t 
  underestimate 
  the advantage 
  of showing up 
  to a new fight 
  completely 
  (or almost 
  completely) 
  fresh and 
  free of many 
  consequences!
  Man, that’d 
  be nice.
  If you shapeshift a toughness 
  ability onto yourself, does it get 
  the cost benefits of a Catch?
  I’d say yes only if the catch is always the same—if a shapeshifter can change its 
  vulnerabilities on-the-fly, then the catch isn’t knowable. that’s a +0 benefit.
  This is a pretty good model, Billy. Secrets 
  have power, and the less secret your 
  weakness is, the less powerful your defense.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (toughness)
  Supernatural Recovery [–4]
  Description: You can exert yourself constantly 
  without issue and, given just a little downtime, 
  you can recover from particularly nasty wounds.
  Musts: This ability replaces Inhuman Recovery. 
  You must attach this power to a Catch (see 
  page 185).
  Skills Affected: Endurance, other physical 
  skills.
  Effects:
  Total Recovery. As with Inhuman Recovery. 
  Faster Recovery. Out of combat, you may 
  recover from physical consequences as if they 
  were two levels lower in severity. So, you 
  recover from severe consequences as though 
  they were mild, etc. Consequences reduced 
  below mild are always removed by the begin-
  ning of a subsequent scene.
  Unfaltering. Endurance never restricts (page 214) 
  other skills due to a lack of rest. You may 
  skip a week of sleep with no ill effects.
  It’s Nothing. Twice per scene, you may clear away 
  a mild physical consequence (page 203) as a 
  supplemental action (page 213).
  Supernatural 
  Toughness [–4]
  Description: Your body can take punishments 
  that would easily kill a normal man.
  Musts: This ability replaces Inhuman 
  Toughness. You must attach this power to a 
  Catch (see page 185).
  Skills Affected: Endurance, other physical 
  skills.
  Effects: 
  Harder to Hurt. You naturally have Armor:2 
  against all physical stress.
  Harder to Kill. You have four additional boxes 
  of physical stress capacity (page 201).
  Mythic Recovery [–6]
  Description: You heal faster than anyone should 
  be able to. Prometheus’ liver has fits of jealousy.
  Musts: This ability replaces Inhuman or 
  Supernatural Recovery. You must attach this 
  power to a Catch (see page 185).
  Options: None.
  Skills Affected: Endurance and other physical 
  skills.
  Effects:
  Total Recovery. As with Inhuman Recovery. 
  Really Amazingly Fast Recovery. Out of 
  combat, you may recover from all physical 
  consequences before the beginning of the 
  next scene after you receive them!
  Indefatigable. Endurance never restricts 
  (page 214) other skills due to a lack of rest. You 
  never need to sleep.
  Ha! You Call That a Hit? Three times per scene, 
  you may clear away a mild physical conse-
  quence (page 203) as a supplemental action 
  (page 213).
  Mythic Toughness [–6]
  Description: Issues of the flesh rarely trouble 
  you. Your body has, to a great extent, tran-
  scended the petty concerns of mortality.
  Musts: This ability replaces Inhuman or 
  Supernatural Toughness. You must attach this 
  power to a Catch (see page 185).
  Options: None.
  Skills Affected: Endurance, other physical 
  skills.
  Effects: 
  Nearly Impossible to Hurt. You naturally have 
  Armor:3 against all physical stress.
  Nearly Impossible to Kill. You have six addi-
  tional boxes of physical stress capacity 
  (page 201).
  Physical Immunity [–8]
  Description: You simply can’t take physical 
  damage from anything normal. 
  Musts: You must attach this power to a Catch 
  (see page 185).
  Skills Affected: Endurance, other physical 
  skills.
  Effects:
  Physical Immunity. You take no stress and no 
  consequences from physical attacks and other 
  harms, unless someone satisfies your Catch. 
  This does not make you unusually tough to 
  such attacks; if you want to be tough in all 
  cases, even when your Physical Immunity is 
  compromised, take Inhuman, Supernatural, 
  or Mythic Toughness as well with a less 
  susceptible Catch—or one of the Recovery 
  abilities if you merely want to heal quickly 
  when your invulnerability is pierced. If a 
  character spends more than one fate point 
  These powers 
  seem pretty 
  badass. You 
  sure that’s 
  balanced?
  the toughness 
  abilities are 
  one-trick ponies. 
  they're good 
  at making 
  sure you don't 
  take physical 
  punishment, 
  and that's 
  about it.
  the thing 
  is, smart 
  opponents 
  (like wizards 
  or Special 
  Investigations 
  detectives) will 
  recognize that 
  pretty fast. 
  then a little 
  research will 
  show them a 
  way around it. 
  maybe they'll 
  suss out your 
  catch, or 
  they'll just 
  take a non-
  physical route 
  to do you in. 
  And besides all 
  that, point 
  for point, an 
  equivalent 
  Strength 
  ability will 
  still make 
  you bleed.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (true Faith)
  on a successful attack only to discover you 
  are completely immune to it, that character 
  should be refunded all but one point. 
  Stacked Catch [+varies]. Normally, all your 
  Toughness powers can only receive the 
  refresh rebate effect of one Catch, so you 
  line them all up and choose the best one. 
  If you take Physical Immunity, and have 
  other Toughness abilities already covered 
  by a Catch, you may also receive the refresh 
  rebate of a second Catch. This second Catch 
  may only affect how the Physical Immunity 
  works, and it’s called a Stacked Catch. If you 
  take a Stacked Catch, the first Catch covering 
  the other Toughness powers does not include 
  the Physical Immunity as one of the abilities 
  covered. 
  For example, let’s say a fire demon has 
  Supernatural Toughness with the Catch that 
  he’s vulnerable to cold. Normally, this would 
  give him a refresh rebate of +3: +2 because 
  cold is easy to come by, and +1 because 
  research would normally uncover it. 
  In addition, he has physical immunity 
  to damage from any kind of fire. The Catch 
  is that it only applies to attacks with fire. 
  Normally, this would give a rebate of +5: 
  +2 for protecting against only one specific 
  thing, +2 because “not fire” is easy to come 
  by, and +1 because research would normally 
  uncover it.
  Because you can stack these two refresh 
  benefits, the demon gets a total of +8 
  toward his Toughness powers, so his total 
  refresh cost is only –4 (–4 for Supernatural 
  Toughness, –8 for Physical Immunity, +8 for 
  the stacked benefit).
  A character with a Stacked Catch that 
  that inverts the conditions of the first Catch 
  is strongly discouraged. A Physical Immunity 
  to Fire layered on top of Supernatural 
  Toughness that can only be pierced by Fire 
  just never happens in reality, and if it did, one 
  or both Catches would be rightly valued as 
  worth zero.
  True Faith
  The power of belief is very real and very palpable 
  in the Dresdenverse. This means that unshake-
  able faith in a higher power—faith that the 
  higher power will protect and guide you—has 
  a potent magical effect when focused. These 
  abilities don’t arise through training or innate 
  talent; they’re the result of a life of strong faith, 
  elevating the act of belief into a power of its own. 
  As such, these powers are usually seen in seem-
  ingly ordinary people—but their power of belief 
  has made them extraordinary and supernatural.
  Bless This House [–1]
  Description: Your faith is proof against the 
  invasion of the supernatural, enabling you to 
  improve the strength of a threshold in a place 
  where you reside.
  Skills Affected: Conviction.
  Effects: 
  Bless This House. By your very presence in 
  a place, you may increase the strength of 
  its threshold (page 230)—assuming you have 
  anything to work with (a place without a 
  threshold can’t get one). If your Conviction is 
  higher than the threshold rating of a partic-
  ular place, the threshold gets a +2 bonus 
  while you are there. Multiple individuals who 
  have this power can stack the effects, making 
  a den of the faithful potentially very safe from 
  supernatural incursion—unless someone’s so 
  foolish as to invite a powerful supernatural 
  creature in.
  Guide My Hand [–1]
  Description: By giving yourself over to your 
  faith, you may sense the purpose the higher 
  powers have in mind for you, guiding your 
  hands (and your feet) to take you to where you 
  are most needed.
  Skills Affected: Conviction, others.
  Effects: 
  Faith Manages. Given the time to pray for guid-
  ance and provided that your goals are pure 
  and your actions are selfless, you may spend a 
  fate point to use your Conviction skill instead 
  of any other skill for one roll. This effect 
  cannot be used for any attacks or maneuvers, 
  but it can be used to bypass other kinds of 
  obstacles.
  Spiritual Guidance. You have a semi-conscious 
  awareness of where you are needed most. 
  Usually, this simply means you are guided to 
  the right place at the right time. If the GM 
  agrees that such a circumstance is in effect, 
  you need not spend a fate point to stage a 
  fortuitous arrival (page 20). Sometimes this 
  might work in reverse, allowing an ally to 
  show up where you already are.
  Outsiders 
  MIGHT have 
  a Physical 
  Immunity 
  against magic.
  More 
  research is 
  needed, but 
  that smacks 
  up against 
  a Law.
  
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  Supernatural Powers (Vampirism)
  Holy Touch [–1]
  Description: When acting with a pure heart 
  and selfless purpose, your very touch is harmful 
  to creatures vulnerable to such things.
  Musts: You must have taken Righteousness 
  (below) in order to take this ability.
  Skills Affected: Many.
  Effects: 
  Holy Touch. If you act in keeping with your 
  calling, keeping a pure heart and self-
  less purpose, your touch can be imbued 
  with a holy power. This could qualify your 
  touch as satisfying a Catch (page 185) for the 
  Toughness powers of some creatures. Even 
  if not, creatures that would be an offense 
  to your faith take a 1-stress hit from being 
  touched by you. You could use this with a 
  Fists attack, to have your hands act effectively 
  as Weapon:1 against such creatures.
  In lieu of this benefit, you may have your 
  touch justify a compel on the high concept of 
  any creature that would be offensive to your 
  faith. This way, you might be able to hold 
  them at bay temporarily or otherwise keep 
  them from attacking you.
  For example, suppose your character 
  with this ability is attacked by a Black Court 
  vampire—you might look at the GM and say, 
  “Hm. I want to have this confrontation, but 
  I don’t want to fight—what if I hit it with 
  my Holy Touch, spend a Fate point, and you 
  compel its Black Courtier aspect to force 
  it to deal with me a different way?”
  The GM says, “Okay, your touch burns 
  the vampire and it jumps back, eyeing you 
  cautiously. You still look like dinner, you can 
  tell, but it’s listening—for now.”
  Righteousness [–2]
  Description: Your prayers have a profound 
  effect.
  Skills Affected: Conviction, others.
  Effects: 
  Potent Prayer. When pursuing your calling, 
  you may make a prayer (page 324) to guide 
  your actions righteously—spend a fate point 
  to invoke your high concept and define a 
  Divinely-inspired purpose you’re aiming 
  at. While in effect, use your Conviction to 
  complement (page 214) any action that directly 
  addresses your purpose. If you either achieve 
  your purpose, take any compels that would 
  threaten to derail you from your pursuits, or 
  refuse any compels that are meant to keep 
  you true to your purpose, the effect immedi-
  ately ends.
  Desperate Hour. In times of most desperate 
  need, you may call out a prayer for aid from 
  the Divine. Any time you are hit by an attack 
  that requires you to take a severe or extreme 
  consequence to avoid being taken out, you 
  may make such a prayer. You may also call 
  upon this prayer in any scene where a friend, 
  ally, or innocent victim is taken out, forced to 
  concede, or otherwise suffer a lasting, terrible 
  fate (like being crippled, kidnapped, etc.).
  Roll your Conviction as an attack against 
  every non-allied, supernatural creature in 
  the same zone as you, which can be resisted 
  by their Discipline. This attack does holy, 
  physical damage that cannot be offset by any 
  supernatural abilities (it automatically satis-
  fies the Catch on any Toughness powers). 
  You can only make one such prayer per scene.
  Vampirism
  Vampirism abilities cover the need to feed, 
  affecting creatures that feed on blood or 
  emotions to gain their power. Not every creature 
  with these abilities could be called a “vampire,” 
  but the mechanism is much the same.
  Blood Drinker [–1]
  Description: You can (and, with Feeding 
  Dependency on page 190, must) drink blood. 
  Feeding on lifeblood sustains you more fully 
  than any other food might, and you’re particu-
  larly good at it. Anything short of freshly-spilled 
  blood is less vital and, thus, less fulfilling; a fresh 
  kill is like a three-course meal, while a bag from 
  the blood bank is like an hors d’oeuvre—small 
  and tasty, but ultimately leaving you hungry for 
  the main course. You have no need to eat regular 
  food (though you might still enjoy it).
  Skills Affected: Fists, others.
  Effects:
  Drink Blood. Any time you draw blood in close 
  personal combat—with your claws or your 
  teeth—you can ingest some of it to gain 
  sustenance. Roll Fists or another appropriate 
  skill (Weapons, etc.) to make your victim 
  bleed. Once you’ve done this successfully, gain 
  Works great 
  on Red Court  
  vampires too!
  
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  Supernatural Powers
  a +1 to your attack on subsequent exchanges 
  against the same target. In a grapple, you may 
  inflict an extra point of stress on a target as a 
  supplemental action. 
  The Taste of Death. Once per scene, if you inflict 
  enough stress and consequences to kill a 
  victim from feeding, you may take an imme-
  diate “free” recovery period equal to an extra 
  scene. This will clear your stress track and 
  mild physical consequences (page 220), and 
  possibly larger consequences if you have an 
  ability that lets you heal quickly (page 184).
  Blood Frenzy. When in the presence of fresh 
  blood, you feel a nearly uncontrollable urge 
  to attack. The GM is within her rights to call 
  for Discipline rolls to resist the urge. In some 
  cases, the urge may take the form of a compel 
  against your high concept.
  Emotional Vampire [–1]
  Description: You can (and, with Feeding 
  Dependency on page  190, must) “eat” strong 
  emotions—often lustful and passionate or 
  otherwise dark ones. Purely positive emotions, 
  such as love, are not an option. This very much 
  follows the law of “you are what you eat”: those 
  who feed on fear and despair tend to be fear-
  some creatures (or at least control freaks), while 
  those who feed on lust tend to be consummate 
  seducers and very sexually active. 
  As a baseline, whenever you’re near an 
  “eligible” strong emotion, you may draw in mild 
  sustenance from it. This just grazes the surface 
  of the victim’s life force, maybe making them just 
  a shade less vital in the long term, but it doesn’t 
  have much of an immediate effect. Being in the 
  presence of many people experiencing strong 
  emotions—a mob during a panicked riot or an 
  orgy at a “swingers” convention, for example—
  has a multiplicative effect; as such, emotional 
  vampires are nearly always drawn to such events.
  Musts: You must choose the emotion associated 
  with this power when you take it.
  Skills Affected: Deceit, Intimidation.
  Effects:
  Feeding Touch. Physical contact is where it’s 
  at for a satisfying, long-term meal. When a 
  victim is in the throes of an eligible emotion 
  (usually easy for a White Court vampire 
  using his Incite Emotion ability, page 172), you 
  may draw some of his life force out of him 
  to sustain you. This is done as a psycholog-
  ical attack with an appropriate skill (usually 
  Deceit or Intimidation). If you have the 
  Incite Emotion ability, inciting the emotion 
  and feeding on it may be done as a single 
  action, based on a single roll. On subsequent 
  exchanges, if the emotion is still in place you 
  may continue to feed, gaining a +1 on the roll.
  The Taste of Death. Once per scene, if you inflict 
  enough stress and consequences to kill a 
  victim from feeding, you may take an imme-
  diate “free” recovery period equal to an extra 
  scene. This will clear your stress track and 
  mild physical consequences  (page 220), and 
  possibly larger consequences if you have an 
  ability that lets you heal quickly (page 184).
  Feeding Frenzy. When in the presence of height-
  ened emotions and willing victims, you feel a 
  nearly uncontrollable urge to feed. The GM 
  is within her rights to call for Discipline rolls 
  to resist the urge. In some cases, the urge may 
  take the form of a compel against your high 
  concept.
  
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  Supernatural Powers
  Feeding Dependency [+1]
  Description: You gain some of your super-
  natural abilities by feeding on blood (page 188), 
  emotions (page 189), or something else (in the 
  case of ghouls, massive quantities of meat). If 
  you take this ability, it “attaches” to most if not 
  all of your supernatural powers except for those 
  from this category (at least 2 points’ worth).
  Skills Affected: Discipline.
  Effects:
  Hunger Is Stressful. You have an additional 
  stress track called hunger. The length of the 
  track works like those of other stress tracks 
  from Endurance, Conviction, etc., only using 
  Discipline as the base skill. Unlike other 
  stress tracks, you may not clear this out at the 
  end of a scene (see below).
  Limited Reserves. At the end of a scene when-
  ever you have heavily exerted your affected 
  powers, you must check to see if you expe-
  rience feeding failure. This manifests as 
  an attack with a strength equal to the total 
  refresh cost of the abilities you used; you roll 
  Discipline to defend. For example, if you used 
  Inhuman Strength and Inhuman Toughness 
  in the scene, that’s a total of 4 refresh, so you’d 
  be rolling your Discipline to meet or beat a 
  target of 4.
    If you succeed, you may clear out your 
  hunger stress track.
    If you fail, you take hunger stress as 
  though you’d suffered an attack. If you 
  have physical or mental consequence 
  slots open, you may use them to buy 
  off the stress as per the normal rules 
  (page 203). If you cannot or do not wish 
  to spare consequences, then you must 
  lose access to a number of your powers, 
  up to a refresh cost equal to the amount 
  of stress taken. These options can be 
  combined however you choose.
    If you have no powers left to lose and are 
  taken out by a feeding failure, you are 
  actually taken out (resulting in complete 
  incapacitation, extreme emaciation, and 
  other nasty fates).
  Highly stressful or emotional situations 
  can still trigger your need to feed, even if 
  you’ve already lost some or all of your abili-
  ties. In such situations (often as the result of 
  a compel), the strength of the attack is equal 
  to half of the refresh value of your affected 
  abilities, rounded up.
  Failure Recovery. You can recover your lost abil-
  ities at the rate of up to one point per scene 
  so long as you opt out of the scene, essentially 
  because you are spending it feeding. You can 
  regain all of your lost abilities in one scene 
  if you feed so forcefully as to kill a victim 
  outright. In either case, your hunger stress 
  clears out completely, and any consequences 
  that resulted from feeding failure vanish 
  regardless of the usual recovery time.
  Tattoos of St. Giles [–2]
  Description: You’ve enlisted or allied with the 
  Fellowship of St. Giles (OW89) to keep your 
  Red Court vampirism in check. They’ve covered 
  you in normally invisible tattoos that carry a 
  magic potency, enabling you to better fight off 
  the dark urges rising within you—and letting 
  others know when you’re in jeopardy of giving 
  in to your hunger.
  Musts: The tattoos are only available to 
  someone infected, but not yet turned, by Red 
  Court vampirism. You lose this ability imme-
  diately if you ever turn and become a full Red 
  Court vampire.
  Skills Affected: Discipline.
  Effects:
  A Warning to Others. Whenever you take 
  hunger stress, your tattoos become visible, 
  darkening into a black ink, then turning red 
  when you’re at high risk of taking conse-
  quences; this gives others a bonus to any 
  perception checks to realize your situation. 
  The bonus is equal to the amount of hunger 
  stress you take from the attack (see above).
  Biofeedback. The tattoos give you a boost when 
  exercising your self-control. Whenever 
  your tattoos are visible, you gain +1 to your 
  Discipline when using it defensively.
  Deeper Reserves. You can run longer and harder 
  before really losing it. Add two boxes to the 
  length of your hunger stress track. 
  Supernatural Player. The tattoos mark you as 
  a member of the Fellowship when those “in 
  the know” see them on you. If your tattoos 
  are showing, gain a +1 to your Intimidation 
  when dealing with such individuals.
  Fellowship Training. The tattoos come with the 
  Fellowship’s training program. Gain +1 to 
  Lore when using it to identify supernatural 
  threats. Increase this bonus to +2 when 
  using Lore to identify signs of the Red Court 
  at work.
  “Other nasty 
  fates” like 
  becoming 
  a mindless 
  monster 
  driven only 
  by hunger.  
  It’s ugly.
  Some gms might 
  allow certain 
  abilities to 
  “downgrade” as they 
  absorb hunger stress, 
  so Supernatural 
  toughness might 
  become Inhuman with 
  a 2-stress hit.
  
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  Playing 
  the game
  
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  Taking Action
  The characters in your games are going to do a 
  lot. For most things they do, there’s no real need 
  for rules. Characters can stand, walk, talk, and 
  otherwise do normal things without needing 
  to roll dice. They can even take actions that 
  use their skills, like driving to work, without 
  worrying about the dice. The dice only come 
  out when there is an interesting challenge with 
  meaningful consequences.
  There are several different kinds of actions 
  in the game, but on a basic level, they all work 
  pretty much the same way—when you roll the 
  dice, if you match or exceed the difficulty, your char-
  acter succeeds; if you don’t, your character fails. 
  When the issue is simple, this may be all that’s 
  necessary; but sometimes you also need to know 
  how well a character did. Clearly, if a roll is three 
  higher than the difficulty, that’s better than 
  rolling only one higher.
  The result of the roll is called the effort. Each 
  point of effort over the difficulty is a shift. The 
  number of shifts generated by a roll is referred 
  to as the effect.
    If the effort is below the target difficulty, 
  it’s a failure and it generates no shifts. 
  There are no “negative” shifts. 
    If the effort matches the target difficulty, 
  it’s a success—but it generates no shifts. 
    If the effort beats the target difficulty by 
  one, it generates one shift; if it beats it by 
  two, it generates two shifts, and so on. 
  Actions that use dice in The Dresden Files 
  RPG fall into two main categories: non-conflict 
  actions and conflict actions. Use non-conflict 
  actions when your character is involved in a situ-
  ation that can easily be resolved or when the 
  group doesn’t want to drag it out too far—the 
  obstacles in your character’s way are not complex, 
  there is little conflict of interest between charac-
  ters, or there isn’t any real opposition for your 
  character except for how well he performs the 
  action. Use conflict actions when your character’s 
  situation cannot easily be resolved or when the 
  group wants to resolve a conflict in finer detail—
  usually when your character’s goals are diametri-
  cally opposed to the goals of another character. 
  Non-conflict 
  Actions
  The basic types of non-conflict actions are: 
  Simple Actions: Your character tries to do 
  something basic, but challenging. Roll against a 
  fixed difficulty. 
  Contests: Your character’s actions are opposed 
  by an NPC or another PC. Roll against the 
  opponent’s player and the high roll wins.
  Assessments: You want to reveal a target’s 
  aspects. Roll against a fixed difficulty or roll 
  against the opponent’s player and the high roll 
  wins.
  Declarations: You want to create aspects for an 
  NPC or another PC. Roll against a fixed diffi-
  culty or roll against the opponent’s player and 
  the high roll wins. 
  Simple Actions
  Simple actions are rolled against a difficulty 
  set by the GM and are used to see if your 
  character can do something and, possibly, how 
  well he can do it. The GM describes the situ-
  ation. You choose a skill to apply to it and roll 
  against a difficulty determined by the GM (see 
  “A Measure of Difficulty” for guidelines). Some 
  simple actions include:
    Climbing a wall into a cultist compound
    Looking up an obscure fact about 
  Chicago history
    Searching a crime scene for fingerprints
    Shooting a target—provided it isn’t a 
  character, creature, or anything that can 
  move intelligently
  By the way, 
  Harry, that 
  last sentence 
  is really 
  important 
  because it 
  took awhile 
  for it to 
  sink in for 
  me. rolling 
  dice for 
  normal stuff 
  is boring. do 
  you think it 
  stands out 
  enough? Should 
  I make it a 
  different font 
  or something?
  Um, I’m not 
  a game 
  designer…
  exAmPle
  dIFFIcultY:  Fair (+2)
  SKIll:  
  good (+3)
  roll: 
  +1 (4dF = +, –, blank, +)
  eFFort: 
  Skill + roll
   
   = 3+1 = great (+4)
  eFFect:  
  effort – difficulty
   
   = 4–2 = 2 shifts
  |—|—|
  0      1     2     3     4
  ( Skill )( roll )
  ( effort ) 
  ( difficulty )( effect )
  ( 2 shifts )
  
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  Matching the difficulty on a simple action is 
  sufficient to succeed; beating the difficulty and 
  getting shifts allows you to affect the outcome 
  of the action in different ways. Basic uses for a 
  shift include:
    Reducing the time required, either on 
  a relative scale or according to the time 
  increments chart (page 315)
    Increasing the subtlety of the outcome, 
  making it harder to detect
    Increasing the quality of the action’s 
  outcome
  Usually, the quality of a simple action matters 
  when the results of that action are going to be 
  referenced later—if you roll Great (+4) so that 
  your character can hide something, the person 
  who comes looking for it will have to roll 
  Great (+4) or better to find it. 
  A Measure of Difficulty
  Average difficulty represents an action 
  that someone with only basic training or 
  talents would find difficult. Fair and Good 
  actions are typically the province of profes-
  sionals, journeymen, and the very talented. 
  Great and Superb actions are typically the 
  province of veterans, masters, and those 
  who combine natural talent with training. 
  Beyond Superb, only those who surpass 
  human capability succeed on a regular basis. 
  Use this as a guideline for setting difficul-
  ties and judging the relative meaning of 
  skill levels. For tons more information, see 
  “Setting Difficulties” in Running the Game 
  (page 310).
  Contests
  Contests are much like simple actions, except the 
  action is directly opposed by someone else and is 
  easily resolved one way or another. Rather than 
  setting a difficulty, each party rolls the appro-
  priate skill, and the outcome is resolved as if the 
  high roll had beaten a difficulty equal to the low 
  roll. This is called an opposed roll. A tie means 
  both succeed, but the outcome could be a tie or it 
  could be left up in the air, requiring another roll 
  to resolve it. Some sample contests include:
    An arm wrestling match
    A footrace
    A game of chance
  Normally, getting shifts on a contest does 
  not impart any additional benefit besides 
  victory—although the margin certainly gives 
  an idea of how close or lopsided the contest 
  was, which can help describe how it happened. 
  In some situations, however, when the outcome 
  of the contest influences a future roll, the GM 
  may offer a bonus to the winning player for the 
  second roll, or even place a temporary aspect 
  that the winning player can tag (page 106) or 
  invoke (page 98). In such an event, you could look 
  at the contest as an isolated maneuver action  
  (page 207).
  Consequential Contests
  Sometimes, the GM wants the result of a contest 
  to have some real impact besides just winning 
  and losing, but she doesn’t want to extend the 
  moment out into a full conflict—either it 
  doesn’t feel right for pacing and description, or 
  the outcome is still simple despite the impact 
  of the action. If this is the case, she may want 
  to consider having the loser take a consequence 
  (page 203) in addition to his loss, depending on 
  how much he was beaten by in the contest: mild 
  for a two-shift loss, moderate for a four-shift 
  loss, and severe for a six-shift loss or greater 
  (round down in the case of in-between values). 
  If the group agrees, a loss of 8 shifts or more 
  could confer an extreme consequence, but it has 
  to be justified as per the usual rules (page 205).
  Extended Contests
  Sometimes, the GM (or one of the players) 
  wants to do something that takes a bit longer 
  than a single roll, but doesn’t want to engage the 
  detail of the conflict system (below, page 197) to 
  do it. That’s a good time to think about running 
  an extended contest—a short series of rolls that 
  add up to a final result.
  Drawing out a contest like this can create 
  some additional drama, since “what happens?” 
  isn’t answered in a single decisive stroke—a 
  long footrace over a few hours (Athletics), a 
  desperate car chase of a few minutes (Driving), 
  or an investigative game of cat and mouse over 
  a few days (Burglary and Investigation) can 
  all fit the bill here. However you slice it, there 
  should always be an element of time pressure 
  to an extended contest. Whether we’re talking 
  about someone winning the marathon or the art 
  thief getting away (or not) with the painting, an 
  extended contest is headed somewhere and has a 
  
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  winner, with interesting results proceeding from 
  each possible outcome.
  There are two ways to set your time limit 
  with an extended contest: The Race and Cat & 
  Mouse.
  The Race
  This version of an extended contest handles 
  multiple competitors well. A base difficulty is set 
  for everyone—often simply Mediocre (+0)—
  and each competitor rolls an appropriate skill 
  against that target, keeping a running tally of 
  the number of shifts won (or lost, in the case of 
  a failure). If a competitor chooses to use a less 
  appropriate skill, the difficulty should increase 
  minimally (1 to 2 steps harder).
  The time pressure here comes from how long 
  it takes to get to the finish line—a number of 
  shifts (usually somewhere between six and 
  fifteen)—set by the GM or the group. To figure 
  out where the finish line should be, take a look 
  how many rolls it would take someone with 
  Good skill, rolling the average (+0 on the dice), 
  to hit it. Good vs. Mediocre is 3 shifts, so if you 
  want a race that will resolve in 3 rolls or so, the 
  finish line should be about 9 shifts. Someone 
  might roll phenomenally and sew it up in fewer, 
  or a run of bad luck might make it take a few 
  rolls longer, but the feeling of time running out 
  will be present throughout the race.
  The first person whose total number of shifts 
  hits or exceeds the finish line is the winner. We 
  call this a race because plenty of people can get 
  involved, and there’s a way to rank the results at 
  the end—you can look at everyone else’s tally 
  once a winner is determined to see who comes 
  in second, third, and so forth. Sometimes a race 
  may be more about who comes in last—since 
  he’s inevitably the one lagging behind as the 
  monster closes in.
  Because you’re adding up shifts from many 
  successive rolls, a race generally should not 
  be combined with a consequential contest 
  (see above) unless the finish line is close (low 
  number of shifts). If combined, the difference 
  between the winner’s and the losers’ totals would 
  indicate the consequences inflicted. Given that 
  it wouldn’t be unheard of to see differences of 
  six shifts or more after rolling enough times, you 
  might end up with a consequence that seems 
  excessive for an action that wasn’t worth a full 
  blown conflict. Keeping that in mind, if you like 
  the idea of those kinds of results, by all means, 
  have at.
  Example: Evan Montrose and a rogue practi-
  tioner he’s been chasing are running away from 
  a mutual enemy—a demon that the practi-
  tioner summoned and promptly lost control of. 
  The GM tells Rob, Evan’s player, that the 
  demon’s going to get to one of them…it just 
  depends on who’s in second place. This is a race, 
  with a base difficulty of Mediocre (+0), and she 
  says the first person to get to 6 shifts wins. The 
  loser will have to deal with the demon.
  In the first round, Evan’s Athletics roll 
  comes up a Fair, giving him two shifts, but the 
  practitioner rolls really well and gets a Great! 
  The GM describes the rogue spellslinger as 
  being highly, highly motivated by fear, scurrying 
  away at top speed. 
  In the second round, Evan gets another Fair, 
  putting him at four shifts total. Fortunately for 
  him, the practitioner rolls horrifically and gets 
  a Mediocre, making no further progress that 
  turn. Rob decides to invoke Evan’s In Over 
  My Head aspect, saying that he’s definitely 
  used to this kind of panicked flight, giving him 
  the final two shifts he needs to get six. He gets 
  away, and the rogue…well, the GM just looks 
  at Rob and makes crunching noises. Ewww.
  Cat & Mouse
  Unlike a race, this version of an extended contest 
  is best used between two competitors (or two 
  distinct groups). One party plays the mouse (or 
  leader), and the other plays the cat (or follower), 
  and the results of each opposed roll are added to 
  a running total.
  A hard limit is set on the number of opposed 
  rolls that will be made before the winner is 
  determined—usually three to five opposed rolls. 
  Shifts won by the leader add to the total, and 
  shifts won by the follower subtract from the 
  total.
  Once the hard limit on opposed rolls is met, 
  the total is examined. If the total is a zero, the 
  contest is a draw, indicating an unsatisfying reso-
  lution for both parties. If the total is positive, 
  the mouse won; if it’s negative, the cat did. In 
  the case of the mouse being an art thief rolling 
  Burglary and Deceit, and the cat being a detec-
  tive rolling Investigation and Empathy, a win for 
  the mouse suggests the thief got away with the 
  painting, a win for the cat suggests the detective 
  caught the thief, while a draw suggests the detec-
  tive prevented the theft but the thief got away.
  
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  This method of extended contest can be 
  combined with a consequential contest (see 
  above) so long as there aren’t a great number 
  of rolls to be made, with the winning tally indi-
  cating the severity of consequence. In some 
  cases, the competitors may want to set arbitrary 
  rules of engagement, such as “you can’t roll the 
  same skill twice in a row,” or, if the competitors 
  are groups rather than individuals, saying “each 
  member of a team gets to make one roll.” 
  Example: Harry Dresden is engaged in a 
  high-speed car chase with a Red Court vampire 
  through the middle of downtown Chicago. The 
  GM decides this is definitely a “cat & mouse” 
  kind of situation. She sets the number of 
  required rolls at three.
  In the first round, the vampire rolls a 
  Great, and Harry unfortunately only gets a 
  Good. That’s one shift to the vampire, putting 
  him in the lead. They both careen around cars 
  and create general chaos as they go, speeding 
  along on a chorus of honking horns.
  In the second round, Harry gets a massive 
  Fantastic! The vampire manages another 
  Great, giving Harry two shifts. This puts the 
  total for the chase at –1 (two shifts for the 
  cat, one for the mouse), meaning that Harry’s 
  gained on the vampire. The GM describes the 
  vampire getting slowed while going through an 
  intersection, giving Harry the chance to get 
  closer.
  In the final round, Harry doesn’t roll all 
  that well—a Fair, and he’s low on fate points, 
  so he decides not to invoke any aspects. The 
  vampire does a bit better, getting a Good, giving 
  him a shift and tying up the score back at zero.
  The chase is ultimately ruled as a draw—
  the GM decides that they end up getting so 
  tangled in traffic that there’s no way to avoid 
  an accident…both of them end up in a fender 
  bender with other cars, and the vampire is 
  forced onto the street. Now that he’s cornered, 
  he’s on the prowl for prey, and they’re in a 
  crowded, clogged street full of people. Harry 
  tightens his grip on his staff and prepares to 
  do battle with the creature as he steps out of 
  his car…
  Assessments
  Assessments are a special kind of simple action 
  used for determining a target’s aspects. This 
  target could be another character (PC or NPC), 
  a particular scene or location, an object—basi-
  cally, anything that could potentially have an 
  aspect on it. Most of the time, you use an assess-
  ment in order to set up some kind of future 
  advantage to exploit later, such as using Burglary 
  to case an establishment for vulnerabilities 
  before breaking into it, or using Empathy to 
  figure out a good tactic to make a good impres-
  sion on a dignitary at a Red Court ball. The 
  skill descriptions mention which skills are most 
  suited for assessment actions, but a creative 
  player could probably think of a few more (“Oh, 
  I have Weapons. Can I assess his fencing style 
  and look for weaknesses in his form?”).
  When making an assessment, state what kind 
  of information you want to assess, and the GM 
  assigns a difficulty to the attempt. If the target 
  is a character, she might decide the difficulty is 
  equal to one of the character’s skills, like using 
  the dignitary’s Presence as the difficulty for the 
  I’m not sure 
  the Blue 
  Beetle could 
  really 
  handle a 
  “high-speed” 
  chase.
  maybe murph 
  let you borrow 
  her car.
  Ha! You’re 
  funny.
  
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  Empathy roll mentioned above. If the target is a 
  location, the GM assigns whatever difficulty she 
  feels is appropriate (page 310), with a default diffi-
  culty of Average. If the target is somehow aware 
  of the assessment attempt, the GM might even 
  treat the assessment like a contest and have the 
  target roll his skill against the assessing player.
  When you succeed at an assessment, the GM 
  reveals an aspect of the target, allowing your 
  character to interact with it as per the rules in 
  “Interacting with Other Aspects” on page 105.
  Guessing Aspects
  Sometimes, because of the way the GM role-
  plays an NPC or due to some other factor, you 
  might be able to make a specific guess as to what 
  aspects a character might have. (You might 
  correctly guess that a Mafia bodyguard has a 
  Hot Temper, for example, because the GM is 
  playing up that NPC’s impulsiveness.) 
  The GM can skip the assessment roll if 
  you’re right—it means you’re paying attention 
  and keying in, and that’s always a good thing. 
  Also, don’t worry about being too exact about 
  phrasing—say you guessed Quick to Anger 
  instead; that’s in the ballpark, so it should work. 
  Of course, sometimes you’d rather save your 
  action and spend a fate point to make a guess 
  about a character’s aspects, and that’s okay too. 
  See Aspects, page 113, for more details on guessing 
  aspects.
  Declarations
  Declarations are a special kind of assessment. 
  What sets a declaration apart from other assess-
  ments is that, while an assessment allows you to 
  discover aspects on a target that are already there, 
  declarations allow you to create new aspects that 
  a target didn’t have before and then take advan-
  tage of them. Declarations allow players some 
  serious narrative power, because you can effec-
  tively introduce new facts into play and then act 
  on them, defining things about the setting and 
  the characters that the GM didn’t already have 
  planned out.
  At first blush, this may seem a bit strange; 
  however, when making assessments, it’s pretty 
  common for players to suggest something that 
  the GM either didn’t plan for or doesn’t have 
  detailed. If you’re casing someone’s house using 
  Burglary, maybe she doesn’t have scene aspects 
  for that house. So when you ask, “Hey, is there 
  some kind of vent access to the outside I could 
  easily pry open to help me get in undetected?” 
  she might not have an immediate answer. 
  Declarations are a way for the GM to have that 
  answer, by having you come up with it.
  To make a declaration, state the aspect you 
  wish to create or take advantage of. The GM 
  assigns an appropriate difficulty, and you roll 
  the appropriate skill. If you succeed, the fact is 
  true and the aspect is immediately assigned to 
  the target so that you can use it just as if you’d 
  succeeded on an assessment roll. Like other 
  assessments, an aspect created by a declaration 
  can be tagged (page 106) in the same scene.
  If your roll fails, the fact is not true. This 
  might mean the vent isn’t there, but it can 
  also mean that your character is mistaken and 
  believes the declaration to be true when it isn’t. 
  It can be fun to play around with the results of 
  failed declarations, especially when doing so will 
  create a humorous or ironic situation. Maybe 
  that thing that looks like a vent is actually the 
  grille for a wall-mounted air conditioning unit…
  which noisily falls to the ground after you 
  unscrew the wall mounting! 
  Declarations and “Canon”
  In the Dresdenverse, many details about 
  supernatural entities are “set”—their weak-
  nesses, habits, tactics, and so on. There are 
  some situations where a declaration isn’t 
  appropriate, and the GM actually does 
  have things charted out and “set in stone.” 
  You’ll have to stick to assessment in those 
  cases. Still, it’s a good idea for GMs to be 
  as flexible as possible when players want to 
  make declarations—it gives them a sense 
  of contributing to the game and offers a lot 
  of options for using knowledge skills that 
  might otherwise be sidelined.
  Aspect or Detail?
  Technically, assessments and declarations 
  can be used to suss out useful details as 
  well as aspects. Not every bit of informa-
  tion you might want to discover or create 
  can be summarized as an aspect. As a rule of 
  thumb, if the detail is something that indi-
  cates a direct benefit to a future skill roll, it 
  should be expressed as an aspect. Otherwise, 
  if the information is important but the 
  benefit isn’t so direct, noting the detail is 
  just fine.
  
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  Or imagine that you use Lore to declare that 
  the magical cult your group is seeking assistance 
  from appreciates direct displays of strength as 
  part of their customs. You fail the declaration 
  roll and then say, “Yeah, they seriously won’t 
  respect us unless we walk up and punch the 
  leader right in the face. Cults, man, you know 
  how they are.” Of course, when your group 
  encounters that coven later, that scene has the 
  potential to be very entertaining, indeed. 
  The GM has the final call on the effect of 
  a failed declaration, but you’re encouraged to 
  propose failures you think are interesting.
  Conflicts
  Conflicts happen when two or more charac-
  ters are in opposition in a fashion that cannot 
  be quickly and cleanly resolved. A conflict is 
  broken down into a number of exchanges—
  acting in turns, each party attempts to achieve 
  their goal. Anyone affected by that attempt 
  may be called upon to roll a response, such as 
  defending against an attack. Each party accumu-
  lates gradual success, affecting their opponents 
  in a momentary (resulting in stress) or lasting 
  (resulting in a consequence) way. Eventually, 
  one of the parties will take enough stress or 
  suffer enough consequences to be taken out; 
  alternatively, opponents may preemptively offer 
  a concession to mitigate their loss.
  Conflicts involve the most complex game 
  actions, and an entire scene may revolve around 
  a single conflict. Examples of conflicts include:
    Any kind of fight scene
    A political debate
    A long, tense stare-down
    Trying to talk your way past a bouncer 
  as he tries to scare you off
  Conflicts are complex, and they merit 
  an  entire section detailing how you should 
  handle them.
  Running Conflicts
  Once a conflict begins, follow this regular 
  pattern.
  1. Frame the scene.
  2. Establish the groups in the conflict.
  3. Establish initiative.
  4. Begin the exchange.
  a. Take actions.
  b. Resolve actions.
  c. Repeat step 4, beginning a new 
  exchange.
  Step 1: Framing the Scene
  The GM first needs to set up the basic details 
  of the scene. When and where does the conflict 
  take place? What are the particular qualities of 
  that “arena”? What are the primary things that 
  could influence the conflict in that arena? You 
  don’t need an encyclopedic amount of detail—
  just enough to get the group on the same page 
  about what the overall situation is when the 
  conflict starts.
  The GM’s primary tools for framing the 
  scene are zones and scene aspects. A zone is 
  an abstract region of the space the conflict takes 
  place in, loosely defined as an area in which 
  two characters are close enough to interact 
  directly (which is a nice way of saying “can talk 
  to or punch each other in the face”). Placement 
  in zones affects things such as whether or not 
  characters have to use ranged weapons to attack 
  each other. As a rule of thumb, characters in 
  the same zone can touch each other, characters 
  one zone away can throw things at each other, 
  and characters two zones away can shoot at 
  each other (some guns can shoot three or more 
  zones away).
  In general, any given conflict should not 
  involve more than a handful of zones, although 
  folks looking for a more tactical experience may 
  want to increase that number. Considering that 
  guns operate easily two zones away, two to four 
  zones are sufficient for most scenes. Don’t feel 
  pressured to include more zones than the area 
  naturally seems to support, though—if it’s a 
  small space, it’s perfectly fine to say that every-
  one’s in the same zone. 
  Social, Mental, & Physical
  Keep in mind that while most of the text 
  below uses physical conflict as an example—
  because, frankly, it’s just easiest to explain 
  that way—the conflict system works just 
  as well to model several kinds of social and 
  mental conflicts, such as lengthy negotia-
  tions, resistance against mental conditioning, 
  and interrogation. Additional guidelines for 
  using the system for non-physical conflicts 
  start on page 215, and there will be some  
  discussion along the way as well.
  
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  Don’t ignore zones, even if they’re just repre-
  sented by a hastily scribbled map on a napkin. 
  Even a little bit of a map to interact with goes 
  a long way toward making a conflict more 
  interesting. 
  Example: The GM knows that a particular 
  conflict is going to take place in an industrial 
  warehouse. She decides that the warehouse is 
  big enough to be two zones and the parking lot 
  outside is big enough to be two zones. So a char-
  acter on the far side of the parking lot is three 
  zones away from a character on the far side of 
  the warehouse.
  The GM also needs to set aspects for the 
  scene—basically anything about the scene that 
  could give advantage or disadvantage in the 
  conflict. These aspects are available for anyone 
  in the scene to invoke. Normally, these aspects 
  aren’t available for tagging unless a player has 
  to discover the aspect through assessment, or 
  if he’s put the aspect on the scene before the 
  conflict starts (like in an ambush, for example; 
  see page 142). On the other hand, some GMs may 
  want to encourage players to interact with the 
  scene aspects right away by treating each aspect 
  as having one “open” tag available to those players 
  fast enough to incorporate them.
  Example: The GM thinks about what might 
  be used for advantage and disadvantage in the 
  conflict, and she decides the warehouse needs 
  scene aspects of Dark and Cramped, as well 
  as Crates, which might be used as cover or 
  knocked over on top of someone. The parking 
  lot is pretty barren, but she decides it has a few 
  Cars out front which could get used creatively. 
  And just to spice things up, she decides that 
  there’s a Gas Main nearby as well (though she 
  might decide to keep that one a secret, to wait 
  for a clever player’s assessment).
  Generally, the more scene aspects there are, 
  the livelier the environment is. GMs should 
  therefore be pretty liberal about throwing scene 
  aspects out there, giving the players a very tactile 
  way of interacting with the environment and 
  incorporating those details into their action 
  descriptions. Five scene aspects, give or take a 
  couple, is usually a good number.
  Step 2: Establish Groups
  It’s important to have a clear idea about who is 
  going to attempt to take on whom in a conflict, 
  even if it’s every man for himself. Normally, the 
  standard division of groups is the PCs vs. an 
  opposing group of NPCs run by the GM, but 
  this isn’t always the case. Maybe two PCs have 
  vastly different goals in the conflict or even 
  opposing ones, and maybe some of the NPCs 
  are allied with the PCs. 
  Make sure everyone agrees on the general 
  goals of each “side,” who’s on which side, and 
  where everyone is situated in the scene (like 
  who’s occupying which zone) when it begins. 
  Once you’ve done that, you need to break down 
  how those groups are going to “divvy up” to face 
  one another—is one character going to get 
  mobbed by the bad guy’s henchmen, or is the 
  opposition going to spread itself around equally 
  among the PCs?
  Usually this is pretty self-explanatory, but 
  it can be an important step in more complex 
  scenes, such as those involving three or more 
  groups with opposing goals.
  Example: The GM knows that the PCs are 
  coming to stop a smuggling ring that’s been 
  transporting mystical stolen goods—arcane 
  texts and rare ritual items—out of the city. 
  She decides that there’ll be a shipment in prog-
  ress when they bust in. Four bad guys are on 
  the scene—a Mafia lieutenant she introduced 
  earlier in the session, the lieutenant’s body-
  guard, and two armed thugs who are handling 
  the main labor.
  There are three PCs, so the GM decides 
  that the bad guys will split into three groups. 
  The lieutenant and the bodyguard will take on 
  one PC, while each thug takes on one of the 
  remaining PCs.
  Parking Lot
  CARS
  DARK & CRAMPED
  GAS MAIN?
  CRATES
  Parking Lot
  Warehouse
  Warehouse
  
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  Step 3: Establish 
  Initiative
  The next step is to decide the order in which 
  the characters act. This is referred to as the 
  order of initiative (as in, “X takes the initiative 
  to do Y”)—most often, people just say “initia-
  tive.” The skill used for determining initiative 
  in a physical conflict is Alertness. Whenever a 
  conflict starts, the character with the highest 
  Alertness gets the first turn, followed by the 
  second highest, etc. Every character gets one 
  turn per exchange. Some powers and stunts can 
  modify the initiative order; otherwise, the same 
  initiative order is used from one exchange to 
  the next.
  Empathy might determine initiative in a 
  social conflict, whereas Discipline might work 
  for a mental conflict. 
  In the case of a tie, call upon some other rele-
  vant skill to resolve things. In physical conflicts, 
  ties would probably resolve with Athletics. 
  You may opt to delay your action until a 
  future point in the exchange, allowing you to 
  interrupt someone else’s action later in the 
  initiative order. Once this happens, your initia-
  tive is set at that point for the rest of the conflict, 
  unless you delay again.
  Example: Harry, Murphy, and Mouse are 
  being attacked by ghouls in a parking garage. 
  Mouse ends up with the highest initiative, but 
  he wants to delay his action to see what the 
  ghouls are going to do. On their turn, two of the 
  ghouls try to knock over a car onto Harry and 
  Murphy, and Mouse interrupts them, getting 
  in an attack before they get to do anything. For 
  the rest of the conflict, Mouse will take action 
  just before the ghouls do.
  Options for Initiative
  Some groups may feel like skill-based initia-
  tive is a little too technical and rigid, preferring 
  a greater variance for turn order in conflicts. 
  That’s fine—if you want, you can do it in a more 
  context-based fashion: simply allow the person 
  who initiates the conflict to go first, and then 
  have the turns go clockwise around the table. In 
  the next exchange, let the next person go first, 
  so that the “spotlight” of going first gets passed 
  around during the conflict. 
  Keep in mind, however, that GMs may need 
  to adjust some other rules to make skills like 
  Alertness and abilities like Speed feel signifi-
  cant, as a large part of their function in the game 
  has to do with keeping initiative. If your group 
  is making the switch, make sure that players 
  who have these on their character sheet aren’t 
  screwed over by it.
  Step 4: Take Action!
  When your character’s turn comes up in the 
  exchange, describe what your character is doing 
  in terms of one of the basic conflict actions. The 
  basic conflict actions are:
  Attack: Roll against an opponent to try to inflict 
  stress or consequences on him directly (page 200).
  Maneuver: Roll against an opponent or against 
  a fixed difficulty to try to place an aspect on the 
  opponent or the scene (page 207).
  Block: Roll to set up a preemptive defense 
  against a specified future action; anyone 
  committing that named action will have to roll 
  against the block to succeed (page 210).
  Sprint: Roll to change zones, with a higher roll 
  allowing a greater degree of movement (page 212).
  Each character gets one basic action per turn, 
  but under certain circumstances your char-
  acter can take a supplemental action and/or 
  a free action in addition to that main action 
  (see page 213 for more details). Of course, in lieu 
  of anything else, a character may choose to just 
  duck and cover:
  Full Defense: You can always choose to do 
  nothing active in the exchange at all; your char-
  acter is assumed to be concentrating entirely on 
  defense. As such, any defense rolls you make to 
  avoid attacks or maneuvers are done at +2.
  So, all the critters who 
  seem to get the drop 
  on me have more than 
  human alertness?
  Or you’re just dense.
  Shut up, Bob.
  If we’re 
  talking real-
  world, I try 
  to maneuver 
  (and sprint, 
  and block) 
  more than 
  I try to 
  attack. 
  Attacking 
  really only 
  works if 
  you’ve got a 
  solid chance 
  of taking 
  the target 
  down. But 
  sometimes 
  you’ve got 
  to attack—
  there are 
  things 
  out there 
  that won’t 
  understand 
  how serious 
  you are 
  otherwise.
  Actually, the 
  truth of that 
  is not much 
  different in 
  the game.
  Why not 
  let people 
  roll their 
  Alertness for 
  initiative?
  good idea on 
  paper, but in 
  practice it 
  ends up being a 
  real time-sink. 
  that’s why I 
  left it out.
  
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  Attacks
  An attack is a direct assault that causes momen-
  tary or lasting harm to an opponent in the form 
  of stress and consequences. An attack is always 
  rolled as a contest between the character (the 
  attacker) and the opponent (the defender). 
  There is no limit to the number of times 
  someone can roll to defend against attacks in an 
  exchange, even against multiple attackers.
  The skill used for an attack depends on the 
  attacker’s agenda and preferred methods; Fists, 
  Guns, and Weapons are most often used for 
  physical conflicts. The skill used for an attack 
  also determines which skills are allowed to 
  defend against the attack—Athletics is the 
  catch-all defense skill for physical conflicts, but 
  Fists can be used to defend against other Fists 
  attacks, and Weapons can be used to defend 
  against both Weapons and Fists attacks. The 
  skill descriptions starting on page 120 indicate 
  which skills are usable for defense and which 
  skills they can defend against.
  If the attacker wins the roll, the shifts he 
  acquires translate into a stress value he can 
  inflict on the defender (see “Resolving Attacks” 
  below). If the defender wins, the attack fails. 
  If the attacker and defender tie, the attacker 
  “connects” with the defender, but without a 
  weapon (page 202) or some other stress-booster, 
  the margin  of zero means no stress will be 
  inflicted.
  What if the attack 
  connects, but inflicts 
  no stress? It seems 
  like SOME THING 
  should happen when a 
  hit connects, even if it 
  doesn’t do damage.
  You could treat it as 
  a maneuver, dropping 
  a temporary aspect 
  on the defender. 
  look at you, getting all 
  rulesy. It makes me proud!
  
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  Social Attacks: Keep in mind that not all 
  attacks are necessarily physically violent—a 
  particularly persuasive argument, lie, or distrac-
  tion can be considered an attack if it directly 
  affects the opponent. Social attacks are appro-
  priate in situations where the action contributes 
  directly to removing the opponent as a factor in 
  the conflict. Social attacks usually use Deceit, 
  Intimidation, or Rapport against the opponent’s 
  Empathy or Discipline. See “Social Conflicts” 
  and “Mental Conflicts” starting on page 215 for 
  further details.
  Resolving Attacks
  When an attack succeeds, it inflicts stress on the 
  target. Stress is an abstract representation of the 
  difficulties that threaten to take someone out of 
  a conflict. In a physical fight, stress can be minor 
  cuts, bruises, fatigue, and the like. In a social or 
  mental conflict, it might be loss of willpower, 
  composure, or emotional control—when Harry 
  insults a Denarian and can see the anger flare 
  up in its eyes, that’s stress. Of course, when the 
  Denarian pops Harry in the snoot for pissing 
  him off, that’s stress, too. Stress is not lasting 
  (lasting effects are represented by consequences, 
  which we’ll cover shortly) and can usually be 
  shaken off between scenes or whenever the char-
  acter takes a moment to compose himself.
  The best way to look at stress is that it’s 
  the closest of close calls. That left hook might 
  not take your character out of the fight, but 
  his knees wobble a bit. Your character might 
  have parried that sword blow, but he’s losing 
  momentum and getting tired. That bullet might 
  not have hit your character, but he’s agitated, and 
  one of these times he just isn’t going to be able to 
  hit the deck quickly enough. This outlook can 
  help you represent stress in the face of different 
  sources of harm.
  By default, a character has three types of 
  stress that he can take, based on the kind of 
  attack used against him. The physical stress track 
  is used for stress such as wounds and fatigue. 
  The mental stress track represents psychological 
  and emotional trauma. The social stress track 
  represents the gradual loss of personal compo-
  sure in the face of social pressure.
  
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  When your character takes stress, mark off 
  that box (and only that box) on the appropriate 
  stress track. For instance, if your character takes 
  a two-point physical hit, you should mark off the 
  second box (and only the second box) from the 
  left on the physical stress track. If your character 
  takes a hit and finds that box already marked off, 
  you should “roll up” to the next empty box on the 
  right and check that off. If there are no empty 
  boxes to the right (in other words, the hit would 
  “roll off ” the end of the stress track), the char-
  acter is either taken out (page 203) or needs to 
  take consequences to absorb the hit (page 203). 
  Each stress track defaults to 2 boxes, but 
  certain skills can increase them: Endurance can 
  increase the physical stress track, Conviction can 
  increase the mental stress track, and Presence 
  can increase the social stress track. 
  See the skill descriptions on page 130, 124, 
  and 136 respectively for more details.
  Example: Evan Montrose is tussling with 
  a demon, accidentally released by the careless 
  actions of a rogue practitioner. The demon 
  takes a swing at Evan, rolling a total of 
  Fantastic (+6) with his Fists skill. Evan didn’t 
  have the opportunity to bring up a shield, so he 
  tries to dodge, rolling his Fair (+2) Athletics 
  and only getting a Good (+3). This means that 
  the demon inflicts 3 points of physical stress 
  on Evan. Evan marks off the third box on his 
  stress track.
  Later in the fight, the demon hits him 
  again for three stress, but because that box is 
  already filled, the damage “rolls up” to the next 
  available box. Unfortunately, Evan only has 
  three stress boxes on his track, which means he 
  has to take a consequence to absorb that hit or 
  he’ll be taken out. 
  Weapons and Armor
  A weapon can inflict additional stress on a target 
  when you succeed on an attack and, likewise, 
  armor can mitigate stress. Weapons and armor 
  are given numerical ratings, usually from 1 to 4. 
  Any successful attack adds the weapon value to 
  the stress inflicted, but subtracts any relevant 
  armor value. Keep in mind that a tie on an attack 
  roll does connect—if you have a weapon rating, 
  you would add the rating to the zero-shift attack 
  for a final stress total.
  The rating of a weapon is essentially based on 
  how nasty it is under the circumstances—the 
  degree to which is it likely to help get a character 
  dead. Deciding nastiness is kind of a subjective 
  measure, but the default guideline of escalating 
  size or power isn’t a bad one. That would give us 
  something like this:
  Small pocket weapons, 
  knives, saps, and “belly 
  guns”
  Weapon:1
  Swords, baseball bats, 
  batons, most pistols
  Weapon:2
  Two-handed weapons, 
  oversized pistols (Desert 
  Eagle and company), rifles 
  and shotguns, most fully-
  automatic weapons
  Weapon:3
  “Battlefield” weaponry, 
  explosives
  Weapon:4+
  Armor essentially works the same way as 
  weapons—the rating is based on what it’s ideally 
  supposed to be protecting the wearer from. 
  Resist the temptation to bog down the game 
  with creating extensive examples of armor types; 
  the better approach is to color it appropriately 
  to the weapon ratings. So, Armor:2 is intended 
  to protect completely against most pistols—it’s 
  probably a reinforced Kevlar vest or something. 
  That said, armor does tend to lag behind weap-
  onry in terms of availability. Many bulletproof 
  vests are only Armor:1—a heavy pistol round 
  can still crack a rib if it hits you. Armor:4 is 
  not really something you find on a personal 
  scale, except maybe in a magical or supernatural 
  context.
     Skill Points Spent 
  Total Available
     Power Level 
  Skill Cap
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Sheet
  Character
  Player
  The Ladder
  Legendary +8
  Epic 
  +7
  Fantastic 
  +6
  Superb 
  +5
  Great 
  +4o
  Aspects
  Skills
  Stunts & Powers
  Stress
  Consequences
  High Concept
  Trouble
  Other Aspects
  Superb (+5)
  # of Slots:
  Great (+4)
  # of Slots:
  Good (+3)
  # of Slots:
  Fair (+2)
  # of Slots:
  Average (+1)
  # of Slots:
   
  1 
  2 
  3 
  4 
  5 
  6 
  7 
  8
  Physical 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Endurance)
  Mental 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Conviction)
  Social 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Presence)
  Armor, Etc: 
  Cost Ability
  Type 
  P/m/S Stress Used? 
  Aspect
  Mild 
  ANY 
  -2 
  Moderate ANY 
  -4 
  Severe 
  ANY 
  -6 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  Extreme 
  ANY 
  -8 
   Replace Permanent
  SUBMERGED
  Superb (+5)
  35
  35
  WIZARD PRIVATE EYE
  HARRY DRESDEN
  JIM B.
  THE TEMPTATION OF POWER
  MY MOTHER’S SIlVER PENTAclE
  cHIVAlRY IS NOT DEAD, DAMMIT
  NOT SO SUBTlE,  
         STIll qUIck TO ANGER
  EPIc WISEASS
  PERPETUAllY BROkE
  conviction
  1
  2
  3
  4
  5
  Endurance, Intimidation
  Alertness, Discipline, lore
  Athletics, contacts, 
  Investigation, Rapport
  +1 Mild
  Mental
  -2
  Fists, Presence, Scholarship, 
  Stealth, Weapons
   -1 
  listening (Investigation) – +4 to 
  hear things, but Alertness drops 
  to Terrible while listening.
   -3 
  Evocation
   -3 
  Thaumaturgy
   -1 
  The Sight
   +0 
  Soulgaze
   +0 
  Wizard’s constitution
   -1 
  lawbreaker (First) — One strike?
  SPEcIAlIZATIONS
  Evocation 
  Elements (Fire, Air, Spirit) 
  Power (Fire +1)
  Thaumaturgy 
  control (Divination +1)
  FOcUS ITEMS
  Staff  (+1 Spirit Offense con.)
  Blasting Rod  
  (+1 Fire Off. control)
  XXXXXXXXXX
  ########
  @@@@@@@@
  XXXXXXXXXX
  ########
  @@@@@@@@
  X
  X
  XXXXXXXXXX
  ########
  @@@@@@@@
  XXXXXXXXXX
  ########
  @@@@@@@@
  Gah! You’re 
  saying “boxes” 
  again when 
  they’re 
  freakin’ 
  circles!
  ever seen 
  a hat box, 
  Harry?
  I don’t 
  do hats.
  But you’d look 
  cool in a hat!
  No, they don’t (unless a power says otherwise). You take the highest rating. that 
  said, not all armor protects against all types of damage, so multiple forms may 
  get you BroAder coverage without providing a numerically higher armor rating.
  Do weapon 
  ratings 
  stack? 
  How about 
  armor?
  
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  Getting Taken Out
  If the damage exceeds the character’s stress track, 
  or occupied boxes “push” the stress off the right 
  side of the stress track, the character is taken 
  out, meaning the character has decisively lost 
  the conflict. His fate is in the hands of the oppo-
  nent, who may decide how the character loses. 
  The outcome must remain within the realm of 
  reason—very few people truly die from shame, 
  so having someone die as a result of a duel of 
  wits is unlikely, but having him embarrass 
  himself and flee in disgrace is not unreasonable.
  Generally speaking, getting taken out applies 
  only to the venue of the attack in question. For 
  instance, getting taken out socially means a char-
  acter has lost his cool and is totally flustered, but 
  he may still be able to punch someone or run 
  away. Getting taken out physically might mean 
  the character is physically incapacitated, but he 
  may still interact socially in some way (though 
  unconsciousness and death do tend to put a 
  small crimp in such things).
  Given that a character has a maximum of 
  4 stress boxes, it’s pretty obvious that taking 
  someone out isn’t all that difficult. There are a 
  couple of ways to mitigate this pain, though: 
  consequences and concessions.
  Consequences
  Stress is a transitory thing, but sometimes 
  conflicts will have lasting effects on a char-
  acter—serious injuries, embarrassments, 
  phobias, and the like. These effects are collec-
  tively called consequences, and they are a special 
  kind of aspect. 
  Any time a character takes stress, he may opt 
  to take a consequence to reduce the amount of 
  stress received from the attack. The exact nature 
  of the consequence depends upon the conflict—
  an injury might be appropriate for a physical 
  struggle, but an emotional state might be apt 
  for a social one. Whatever the consequence, it is 
  written down under the stress track. 
  Normally, the player taking the consequence 
  gets to describe what it is, so long as it’s compat-
  ible with the nature of the attack that inflicted 
  the harm. The GM arbitrates the appropriate-
  ness of a consequence and there may be some 
  Dictating Outcomes
  While the player of the attacker that takes 
  out an opponent gets to decide the manner 
  in which his victim loses, this does not mean 
  that the attacker has the authority to dictate 
  specifics that are completely out of character 
  for the loser. The loser still controls his own 
  character in an essential way and is allowed 
  to modify whatever the winner states to 
  make sure that whatever happens stays true 
  to form.
  To build on an example given here, if 
  someone wins a duel of wits by taking out 
  his opponent, he can say “you embarrass 
  yourself and flee in disgrace,” but he can’t 
  add in embellishments like “…and so you run 
  out of the hall, arms flapping, screaming like 
  a child.” That sort of thing is a color detail 
  that the loser still controls. So if the loser 
  was, say, John Marcone, he might simply 
  fold up his napkin and walk stiffly out of the 
  room. That’s much more in character, but 
  still fills the spirit of the defeat described by 
  the winner.
  Note that this also means that when 
  someone uses her taken out privilege to 
  decide that her opponent dies, the opponent 
  still owns his death scene and can describe 
  his dying words however he wishes.
  So, since characters always 
  “own” their death scenes in the 
  game, all wizards have a chance 
  to give their death curse?
  If the situation allows it, sure.
  Cool.
  
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  back and forth conversation before settling on 
  one. The GM is the final authority on whether a 
  player’s suggested consequence is reasonable for 
  the circumstances and severity.
  There are four levels of consequence severity, 
  each of which cancels out a greater amount 
  of stress from an attack. Consequences may 
  not be taken after the fact to cancel stress 
  already recorded on a character’s stress track. 
  Consequences linger for varying lengths of time 
  after appropriate justification is established 
  to begin recovery (see page 220 for more details 
  on that): 
    Mild consequences cancel out 2 stress. 
  They last for one scene after recovery 
  starts. Think of things that are bad 
  enough to make you say “Walk it off/
  rub some dirt in it!” (Examples: Bruised 
  Hand, Nasty Shiner, Winded, 
  Flustered, Distracted.)
    Moderate consequences cancel out 
  4 stress. They last until the end of the 
  next session after recovery starts. Think of 
  things that are bad enough to make you 
  say, “Man, you really should go take care 
  of that/get some rest.” (Examples: Belly 
  Slash, Bad First Degree Burn, 
  Twisted Ankle, Exhausted, Drunk.)
    Severe consequences cancel out 6 stress. 
  They last for the next scenario (or two to 
  three sessions, whichever is longer) after 
  recovery starts. Think of things that are 
  bad enough to make you say, “Man, you 
  really need to go to the ER/get serious 
  help.” (Examples: Broken Leg, Bad 
  Second-Degree Burn, Crippling 
  Shame, Trauma-Induced Phobia.)
  Each character may take one of each severity 
  (though some stunts and very high skills may 
  increase the number of consequences that can be 
  taken at a certain severity); once the consequence 
  slot is used, it cannot be used again until the 
  current consequence is removed. Multiple conse-
  quences can be “stacked” at a time, combining 
  their rating for the purposes of absorbing an 
  attack. So instead of taking a severe consequence 
  to cancel 6 stress, a player might take a mild (2 
  stress) and a moderate (4 stress) which would 
  add up to cancel 6 stress.
  When your character takes a consequence, 
  remove the appropriate amount of stress from 
  the attack. If that reduces the stress to zero or 
  below, you absorb the hit completely. If there is 
  any stress left over, you need to mark it on your 
  stress track. So, if your character gets hit for 5 
  stress and you decide to take a moderate conse-
  quence, you’re left with a 1 stress hit. Keep in 
  mind that the normal rules for taking stress apply 
  for this—empty boxes get filled in, filled boxes 
  “roll up” to the right. That means that, even if you 
  take a consequence, the leftover stress might take 
  you out anyway…be careful about this!
  Example: Suppose your stress track has the 
  second and fourth boxes filled in, and you only 
  have a track length of 4.  That means that if you 
  take a stress hit of 4 or worse, you’ll be taken out.
  1   2   3   4
     
  So suppose you take a 6-stress hit. That 
  blasts right past your whole track.  You could 
  take a mild consequence to reduce that to a 
  4-stress hit, but the 4-stress hit would still land 
  on your filled-in 4, and roll up off the end of 
  your track—so you’d still be taken out.  
  That means you’ll have to take at least a 
  moderate consequence instead. If you did, you’d 
  only take a 2-stress hit (which would roll up to 
  mark off your 3, since your 2 is already filled in). 
  If you took a severe consequence, that would 
  reduce the 6-stress hit to zero, so it wouldn’t land 
  on your track at all.
  Also keep in mind that, because a conse-
  quence is an aspect, it can be tagged, invoked, and 
  compelled like any other aspect. Opponents with 
  fate points will take advantage of this, because 
  invoking a consequence to help win a fight is very 
  easy to justify. Further, the attacker that inflicted 
  the consequence gets one tag on it (which he 
  may give to an ally), just like aspects placed by a 
  maneuver.
  Example: Harry Dresden has taken the 
  moderate consequence of Bruised Ribs in a 
  fight with a rogue practitioner of black magic. 
  In the next exchange, the practitioner can tag 
  that aspect, taking advantage of the injury to 
  gain a bonus to land another hit on Harry. As 
  long as he has fate points left, the practitioner 
  can continue to invoke Harry’s Bruised Ribs, 
  getting a bonus as he pounds away on Harry.
  Some skills (like Scholarship) and some 
  supernatural powers (like Inhuman Recovery) 
  can provide easy justification to start the recovery 
  process (for skills) or reduce recovery times for 
  consequences (for powers). See the appropriate 
  skill or power descriptions for details.
  So you can 
  just take 
  consequences to 
  avoid stress?
  Yeah, but 
  consequences are a 
  really big deal in 
  conflicts. People 
  should exercise a 
  healthy fear of 
  them. A moderate 
  consequence, which 
  isn’t that hard to 
  come by, is going 
  to be with you for 
  a Full SeSSIoN. 
  think about 
  that! concessions 
  are your friend.
  
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  Playing the game
  Extreme Consequences: 
  The Last Resort
  If your character is in extremely dire straits, and 
  it’s really, really important to stay in the fight, 
  there is one last-ditch option you have available. 
  This is called an extreme consequence, but it’s 
  set apart from the others because it operates as 
  more of a plot device than a normal consequence 
  and isn’t affected by any of the normal rules for 
  recovery. You can only have one extreme conse-
  quence at a time, and the slot will only ever clear 
  with a major milestone or every three scenarios, 
  as you prefer (see Advancement, page 88).
  When you use this option, you can cancel 
  out 8 stress from any attack. In exchange, you 
  must delete one of the seven aspects from your 
  character sheet and replace it with an aspect that 
  reflects the outcome of the attack. That’s right—
  taking this level of consequence changes who 
  your character is on a fundamental level. Because 
  of this, you should reserve it for the greatest of 
  sacrifices or the most heinous of traumas—for 
  those times when you absolutely must push to 
  the bitter end and have no other choice. 
  There are a few other limitations to extreme 
  consequences:
  Your high concept cannot be changed as a 
  result of an extreme consequence, unless the 
  attack in question is deliberately targeting 
  that aspect. In other words, you can’t change 
  Wizard of the White Council unless the 
  attack is specifically trying to permanently strip 
  you of magical ability.
  You cannot change your trouble aspect as a 
  result of an extreme consequence.
  No amount of supernatural healing or other 
  abilities can speed up the recovery of an 
  extreme consequence, and you cannot take 
  another extreme consequence until after the 
  next major milestone in the game, regardless of 
  your powers.
  The new aspect is effectively treated as one 
  of your permanent aspects. Even when your 
  extreme consequence slot resets, the conse-
  quence aspect remains on your sheet—it doesn’t 
  just go away or reset your old one. You might 
  rename the aspect during a subsequent minor 
  milestone (see Advancement, page 88), but you’d 
  have to justify the renaming as something that 
  reflects how the experience changed your char-
  acter. You can’t just say, “Well, it’s been three 
  scenarios, so I want my old aspect back.”
  exactly. that’s 
  why it’s in there.
  Oh. 
  Stars and 
  stones, Billy. 
  That’s really 
  messed up.
  You know, the only time I 
  can say something like that’s 
  happened to me is when Mavra 
  and her minions incinerated 
  my hand. Beyond just the 
  recovery process, I was 
  afraid to use fire magic for 
  a while…it stuck with me.
  
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  Playing the game
  Concessions
  Sometimes, pursuing a goal in a conflict comes 
  at too high a price. Heaven knows what might 
  happen to your character if he gets taken out and 
  has a bunch of consequences to deal with later. 
  Losing can be a very daunting thing—possibly 
  more than you want to deal with at the moment. 
  If loss seems to be inevitable, you can offer a 
  concession instead of continuing the conflict.
  A concession is basically a special form of 
  being taken out—you lose the conflict, but you 
  get to decide your character’s fate on your own 
  terms instead of your opponent’s. That way, 
  your character doesn’t have to take any conse-
  quences you’re not willing to take and can avoid 
  fates that might arise from being taken out by 
  the opponent, such as getting captured, killed, 
  humiliated, etc. 
  A concession has to pass muster with the 
  group before it is accepted—the conditions of 
  the loss still have to represent a clear and deci-
  sive disadvantage for your character. If the group 
  (note that your opponent is part of the group 
  for this!) feels like your character is getting off 
  easy, you’ll need to rework the concession until 
  it’s acceptable.
  Here are some guidelines for determining 
  what constitutes a “clear and decisive disadvan-
  tage.” These may also be used to represent defeat 
  conditions if the character is taken out:
    The character has at least one moderate 
  or worse consequence as a result of the 
  conflict.
    The outcome creates significant difficulty 
  for the character in the future. The char-
  acter might offer a concession to avoid 
  getting maimed, but maybe that means 
  an artifact he was protecting gets stolen, 
  or something along those lines.
    The outcome creates a situation that 
  restricts the character’s behavior in some 
  significant way, like owing a large debt 
  to someone. This may require adding an 
  additional, long-term, temporary aspect 
  to the character, separate from his conse-
  quence track, so that the defeat can be 
  enforced via compels.
  Finally, a character cannot be saved from a 
  roll that takes him out by offering a concession. 
  You have to offer the concession before the roll 
  that takes out your character. Otherwise, it’s 
  cheating the opponent out of victory.
  Cashing Out: 
  The Bright Side of Defeat
  Losing a conflict, either by concession or by 
  being taken out, grants the player one fate point 
  per consequence taken in the conflict. This is called 
  cashing out of the conflict. You can think of this 
  as a compel of each aspect taken in the conflict, 
  because the assumption is that those conse-
  quences directly contributed to the character’s 
  defeat.
  Taken Out, Concession, 
  and Character Death
  So, inevitably, characters are going to get into 
  conflicts where getting taken out means they 
  could die. By a strict reading of the rules, a phys-
  ical conflict that’s severe enough and takes you 
  out could result in your opponent going, “And 
  you die from your wounds.” This is something 
  you’re going to want to talk about as a group 
  out-of-game, to see where everyone is on the 
  subject…some people have a very “come what 
  may” attitude about it and feel that if that’s what 
  happens and it’s by the rules, then that’s what 
  happens. Others don’t want to see the protago-
  nists that they’ve invested time in get killed by 
  something as potentially insignificant as a bad 
  die roll, or by something as lopsided as heavy 
  fate point spending on the opponent’s part.
  If your group does permit calling for char-
  acter death in certain physical conflicts, expect 
  players to use concessions a lot to avoid that final 
  fate. This is, in fact, exactly what you want—it 
  ensures that when a player does decide to fight 
  to the end, it will be over a conflict that has a lot 
  of meaning for the character, and if he dies, the 
  death will resonate in the emerging story.
  As a rule of thumb, when death is on the line, 
  announce it in advance, preferably at the start of 
  the conflict—e.g., “This guy’s playing for keeps. 
  If he can kill you, he will. You can see it in his 
  eyes.” or “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. 
  You killed my father. Prepare to die.” That way 
  everyone has plenty of time to see utter defeat 
  coming and can keep an itchy finger on the 
  concession trigger.
  STOP SAYING THAT!
  And that's why 
  today I live in a 
  skull rather than 
  Faerie or the 
  Nevernever.
  What?
  What?
  How about  
  them Cubs?
  
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  Playing the game
  Maneuvers
  You can use maneuvers to gain momentary, 
  situational advantages in a conflict. A maneuver 
  can change the environment in some way or it 
  can directly affect the opponent your character 
  is facing. It’s different from an attack in that it 
  doesn’t have a lasting effect on an opponent, but 
  it sets up a condition that will make a future 
  attack more effective. Here are some examples of 
  maneuvers: 
    Knocking an opponent off-balance for a 
  moment 
    Disarming an opponent
    Kicking over a table for cover
    Setting a fire as distraction
    Taking careful aim at a target 
  Against an opponent, a maneuver is 
  performed much like an attack—you roll an 
  appropriate skill against the opponent and try to 
  beat the opponent’s defense roll. In an exchange, 
  characters can defend against as many maneu-
  vers as they want as a free action. 
  Against the environment, the maneuver is 
  performed as a simple action against a fixed 
  difficulty set by the GM, which is usually very 
  context-dependent. For instance, knocking over 
  a table in a bar would probably be Average, 
  but finding cover in a barren desert could be 
  Great or more. Athletics and Might are used 
  most often to perform maneuvers in physical 
  conflicts, but nearly any skill might apply. If you 
  can clearly demonstrate to the satisfaction of the 
  group how the skill’s use can create the advan-
  tage, then it’s a legal move.
  In either case, succeeding on the roll allows 
  you to place an aspect on the target or on the 
  scene temporarily, representing your situational 
  advantage. You can then tag that aspect once 
  on a subsequent roll against that target while 
  the maneuver is in effect, saving the fate point 
  you would normally need to spend to invoke 
  the aspect. (If you want, and it makes sense to 
  the group, you can pass the tag to someone else 
  instead.) 
  Exact success on a maneuver (as in, one that 
  garners no shifts) creates a one-shot temporary 
  aspect (also called a fragile aspect) that fades 
  after it is tagged. If you generate one or more 
  shifts on the maneuver, the aspect created is 
  sticky and lasts longer, allowing it to be used 
  more than once (see “Resolving Maneuvers” on 
  page 208 for more details). Of course, after you 
  have tagged a sticky aspect, subsequent invoca-
  tions require a fate point.
  You can also maneuver to remove a temporary 
  aspect from yourself or the scene. The aspect 
  removed can’t be a consequence; it must be a 
  scene aspect or a temporary aspect that resulted 
  from a maneuver. More information about this 
  can be found in “Resolving Maneuvers” on page 208.
  Maneuvers and the Death 
  of Situational Modifiers
  So, if you’ve played other roleplaying games 
  before, you might be used to seeing some large 
  chart in the conflict rules covering situational 
  modifiers: target is moving faster than such-
  and-such, target is prone, target is flanked, target 
  has cover over X percentage of its body, etc. 
  You’re not going to find that here because, 
  for all practical intents and purposes, maneuvers 
  and temporary aspects have replaced all of those. 
  This allows for maximum freedom in developing 
  the scene and makes the conflict system more 
  adaptable to social conflicts. But if you’re finding 
  it hard to decide what would make a good 
  maneuver, crib one of those charts from other 
  games and use it as inspiration.
  Navel-Gazing Maneuvers
  When a character acts on the environment or an 
  opponent to change circumstances and gain an 
  advantage, it can be a pretty exciting moment—
  something about the situation changes, at least 
  for a few moments, and everyone can see it 
  happen. 
  Players can also perform maneuvers on them-
  selves, though, to create more “internal” changes. 
  Most of the time, this is going to happen because 
  they want to establish a situational modifier—
  they want to go for cover or find an ideal posi-
  tion in a room, take the high ground, or some-
  thing else of that nature. It might also represent 
  an attempt to make sure their efforts are opti-
  mized. Someone trying to pick a lock during a 
  firefight might use Discipline to put a Deep in 
  Concentration aspect on himself so he get 
  can get it done more quickly.
  This shouldn’t really be an issue most of the 
  time—an unopposed maneuver roll is pretty easy 
  anyway, and keep in mind that another character 
  in the scene might be in a position to “defend” 
  against the maneuver attempt or take advantage 
  of the aspect somehow. If you’re trying to put 
  yourself Deep in Concentration so you can 
  pick a lock, an opponent might “defend” against 
  that by rolling Guns to send some hot lead your 
  way, keeping you distracted. Or, even better, an 
  The problem 
  with a fire 
  is that it 
  can end up 
  distracting 
  YOU.
  double-edged 
  aspects for 
  the win!
  
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  Playing the game
  opponent might invoke the aspect during the 
  next exchange, claiming that you’re so deep in 
  concentration that it’s easier to shoot you.
  Teamwork
  You can also use maneuvers (even outside of 
  conflict) to coordinate on an action with several 
  people. To do this, one main character is chosen 
  to make the final action roll (usually the one 
  with the highest skill), and everyone else makes a 
  maneuver roll with a skill that could potentially 
  be used to assist. The difficulty for the assisting 
  roll should be one or two less than the difficulty 
  for the main action. Each helper who makes the 
  maneuver roll places an aspect on the main char-
  acter, something like Assistance from X. The 
  main character can then tag all of those aspects 
  when he actually makes his action roll (so he can 
  take advantage of the help without spending a 
  bucket load of fate points). Enough people coor-
  dinating can often lead to herculean success—
  many hands, after all, make light work.
  Resolving Maneuvers
  A successful maneuver places an aspect on the 
  target—be that a person or the environment—
  representing the outcome of the maneuver. 
  Anyone who wants to remove the maneuver 
  aspect must take a maneuver action of his own 
  to roll against it, taking up his main action for 
  the turn. (Obviously, if you established the 
  maneuver aspect, you can end it whenever you 
  want without a roll.)
  When you roll to remove a maneuver, it’s 
  treated like a normal maneuver roll. You roll 
  against either an opponent or a fixed difficulty 
  dictated by the GM and, if your roll succeeds, 
  the maneuver aspect is removed. If an oppo-
  nent is in a position to keep you from trying 
  to remove the maneuver, he can defend against 
  your attempt. 
  Example: Karrin Murphy is in hand-to-hand 
  combat with a perp she’s cornered in an alley 
  after a brief pursuit on foot. She wants to give 
  her first attack some extra oomph, so she decides 
  to do a maneuver to put the aspect Cornered 
  on the target. She rolls her Fists and beats the 
  perp’s defense roll handily. The perp now has a 
  temporary aspect called Cornered “stuck” to 
  him, described as Murphy forcing him into the 
  corner between the alley wall and a dumpster, 
  making it harder for him to avoid attacks.
  During his turn, the perp tries to use 
  Athletics to remove the aspect (get himself 
  out of the corner); he makes his roll and gets 
  a Fair  (+2). Murphy doesn’t want that to 
  happen, so she rolls Fists as a defense to keep 
  the thug there. She gets a Superb, and the 
  aspect remains.
  If an opponent places a maneuver on your 
  character and the opponent’s attention changes 
  (to another target, or if he changes zones, etc.), 
  the roll against the maneuver is assumed to be a 
  Mediocre (+0) difficulty. 
  Maneuver Examples
  This is by no means a comprehensive list, but 
  the examples provided below should convey the 
  general idea behind establishing and dealing 
  with maneuvers in play.
  Blinding: Your character does something that 
  temporarily blinds the target, such as throwing 
  sand or salt in his face, smearing a chemical 
  across his eyes, etc. This could be done with 
  Athletics, Fists, or Weapons, and would prob-
  ably be opposed by Athletics. If successful, this 
  puts a Blinded aspect on the target which you 
  can tag or invoke to make attacks easier and to 
  boost defense against the blinded character’s 
  attacks. It’s possible this aspect could also be 
  compelled to make the target accidentally attack 
  the wrong guy or change direction or something 
  like that, or even to stumble headlong off a cliff 
  if the group is open to it. 
  Disarming: A successful maneuver knocks the 
  target’s weapon away and places it some nebu-
  lous distance away from the target, as well as 
  putting a Disarmed aspect on the target. Any 
  attack skill could be used to do this (except 
  maybe Guns, because that’s a bit silly). Invoking 
  this represents the target’s disadvantage for 
  having no weapon; the GM is well within her 
  Billy, you are dissing the Lone 
  Ranger here. He can totally 
  shoot guns out of bad guys’ hands.
  But it never happens!
  It happens in movies all the time.
  tHIS IS Not A moVIe!
  Man, I wish it was.
  
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  rights to rule that only a character with a weapon 
  could invoke this to justify having an advantage 
  over the unarmed target. It could be compelled 
  (page 100) in situations where a weapon is abso-
  lutely necessary to be effective at all, like if the 
  affected character is trying to get at someone 
  who is in a car, for instance.
  Indirect Attacks: Sometimes you might want 
  to do something like push a bookcase down on 
  an opponent or scatter marbles across the floor 
  to trip him up. While this can potentially be an 
  attack, it’s usually meant as an inconvenience. If 
  it’s an attack, it’s treated like any other attack—
  roll the appropriate skill and deal stress as appro-
  priate. If it’s an inconvenience, you have two 
  options. The first option is to make an opposed 
  roll (such as Might to knock over the bookcase 
  versus Athletics to dodge) and generate at least 
  one shift, allowing a temporary aspect (such as 
  Pinned) to be placed on the target. The other 
  option is to create a block (such as using Might 
  to knock over the bookcase, with the value of 
  the roll representing the block strength created 
  by the scattered books, causing an opponent to 
  have to roll Athletics in order to move through 
  the mess).
  Cover: Given the wide availability of guns to the 
  kinds of people who are frequently unfriendly 
  to PCs, perhaps one of the most frequent uses 
  of maneuvers is diving for cover—a simple 
  Athletics (or Fists, if the group allows) roll. 
  You will be rolling against a fixed difficulty 
  depending on the availability of cover (Average 
  for most locales, Great or Superb in an abso-
  lutely barren place). Success allows you to put 
  a Behind Cover aspect on your character, 
  which you can tag or invoke to help defend 
  against attacks. It is up to the group to decide if 
  circumstances should allow someone to “defend” 
  against the character’s maneuver (by pinning 
  him in place with gunfire, for instance) or not.
  Aiming or Painting a Target: Sometimes, 
  characters take the time to set a target up for 
  a future shot that hits with greater effective-
  ness. This isn’t always the classic “aim, then fire” 
  thing—there are tons of ways to set someone up 
  for serious hurt. This is a classic way for PCs to 
  cooperate in combat: one person uses Fists to 
  put Dazed or something like that on a target, 
  and his friend tags it immediately for +2 to his 
  own Fists attack. Usually, the set-up action is 
  done with the attack skill, and the target can roll 
  appropriately to avoid the maneuver.
  
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  Called Shots: Maneuvers can be used to repre-
  sent the effects of special, targeted attacks made 
  on a target. Kicking someone’s knee could 
  place a Hurt Knee aspect on them, which the 
  attacker could tag or invoke in a subsequent 
  round. These aspects can never be as severe as 
  consequences which might reflect similar condi-
  tions—the target can roll Endurance in order 
  to shake off the disadvantage. Still, it’s a good 
  option for a fighter who prefers to use pinpoint 
  strikes to wear an opponent down, and then 
  hit for a ton of stress in a later round when he 
  brings all those maneuvers to bear.
  Blocks
  Sometimes, your character might want to keep 
  something from happening rather than make 
  something happen—to do something more 
  preventative than proactive. This type of action 
  is called a block. Examples include:
    Shooting covering fire at an open 
  doorway to prevent someone from 
  escaping
    Protecting someone else from attacks
    Making sure no one gets their hands on 
  an object your character is guarding
  To perform a block, declare what specific type 
  of action the block is intended to prevent and 
  roll an appropriate skill. The total of that roll is 
  called the block strength. During the exchange, 
  any time a character wants to perform the action 
  that’s covered by the block, he must roll against 
  the block and meet or exceed the block strength 
  to be able to perform that action. If he fails, he 
  cannot perform the action in question. If he 
  meets or exceeds the block strength, the action 
  resolves normally, with benefits for extra shifts if 
  the roll beats the block strength by a wide margin.
  Typically, a block action lasts until the player 
  who initiated the block takes his next turn. At 
  that point, he must choose whether he wants to 
  take another action or if he wants to maintain 
  the block. There are no special rules for main-
  taining blocks. Just roll the action again and take 
  the new result as the block strength for the next 
  exchange.
  One advantage of a block is that it allows 
  two players to “stack” rolls to prevent something 
  from happening. If your character is protecting 
  someone from attacks, that person technically 
  gets two chances to resist an attack—their own 
  automatic defense roll and the block strength. 
  If either one manages to beat the attack, that 
  person suffers no stress. If neither roll beats the 
  attack, the higher of the two totals may mitigate 
  the effects somewhat.
  Example: Molly Carpenter and Harry 
  Dresden are running away from some hired 
  goons who are intent on filling them full of 
  bullet holes. Harry uses spirit evocation to 
  throw a kinetic shield around Molly as she’s 
  running away, declaring it as a block against 
  attacks. He makes his evocation roll and gets a 
  block strength of Fantastic (+6).
  When Molly is attacked by one of the 
  goons, she rolls her own Athletics as a defense 
  and gets a Good (+3) dodge. The goon gets 
  really lucky and rolls an Epic (+7) gun shot, 
  but because she can use Harry’s block for 
  defense, she only takes a three-stress hit (1 
  shift for beating the block, plus 2 more for the 
  damage value of the gun). 
  If Harry hadn’t performed the block, she’d 
  have taken a six-stress hit instead (4 for beating 
  the defense roll, plus 2 for the gun). Ouch! 
  Grapples—a particular type of block that 
  you might end up using a great deal—work just 
  a little differently than other block actions. See 
  page 211 for more. 
  Resolving Blocks
  Sometimes blocks are a little trickier to resolve 
  than other actions because they seek to prevent 
  an effect rather than create one. When you create 
  a block, the block has to be specific and clear in 
  two ways: who it’s intended to affect, and what 
  types of action (attack, block, maneuver, move) 
  it’s trying to prevent. Generally speaking, if the 
  block can affect more than one person, it can 
  only prevent one type of action. If the block only 
  affects one person, it can prevent several types of 
  action—up to all of them—as context permits. 
  You can’t use a block to prevent someone from 
  making a defense roll.
  For example, if your character is in a gunfight 
  against a group of goons, you could say, “I want 
  to pepper the exit door with gunfire and make 
  sure no one leaves.” That is a block against 
  multiple characters, so it can only prevent one 
  type of action, which in context is any move 
  action—no one can leave without running up 
  against the block.
  On the other hand, suppose your character 
  is in a gunfight with a single, determined oppo-
  nent. You could say, “I want to keep this guy 
  busy while my friend gets away.” The block is 
  Ah, goons with guns. In other words, it’s a normal Tuesday. 
   Is there 
  any way 
  we can 
  make these 
  examples a 
  little less 
  depressing?
  
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  focused on a single person, so nearly anything 
  that person might do has a chance of running 
  up against the block, except perhaps for attacks 
  against the blocking character.
  If this sounds powerful, that’s because it 
  is—you can effectively paralyze a target in 
  place using blocks. The thing to keep in mind, 
  though, is that a block action is your character’s 
  action for the exchange. You don’t get to attack 
  anyone, change position, perform a maneuver, 
  or anything else. And it’s never a sure thing—
  it’s still possible for the intended target to roll 
  higher than the block and perform an action 
  anyway. Also, a block must be rerolled from 
  exchange to exchange, which means its effective-
  ness doesn’t remain consistent over time.
  Keep in mind that there are some blocks that 
  just won’t work in some situations. (Trying the 
  “keep them pinned down with gunfire” trick on 
  a loup-garou isn’t going to really help you much, 
  given that they’re immune to bullets.)
  Grapples
  One of the most common applications of the 
  block is to perform a grapple, essentially a close 
  combat action which involves restraining the 
  opponent more than causing damage. Because 
  the main intent of the grapple is to prevent the 
  opponent from doing something, it’s regarded as 
  a block action in the game. However, there are 
  some additional guidelines applied to grappling 
  that help make it a more effective combat tactic 
  in its own right.
  In order to do a grapple, you have to:
    Tag or invoke an appropriate aspect on 
  the target to justify the grapple. This can 
  come from a maneuver to get you into 
  position, a consequence you’ve inflicted, 
  or even an aspect you’ve assessed. As 
  long as it clearly communicates some 
  combat advantage that would allow you 
  to try a grapple, it’s fine.
    Roll your Might skill (unless you have 
  a stunt that allows you to use another 
  skill).  The result establishes the block 
  strength of the grapple.
  When you successfully grapple a target, you 
  establish a block against all actions he might 
  take in the exchange. The target is also prohib-
  ited from sprinting (page 212) or supplemental 
  movement (page 213) until the grapple is broken. 
  You must reroll every exchange in order to 
  maintain the grapple on your opponent, as per 
  the normal rules for blocks. However, you get 
  some additional options in every subsequent 
  round you’re still holding onto your opponent: 
  if you so choose, you can freely make an unopposed 
  attack, movement, or maneuver on your opponent 
  as a supplemental action, which has a value of 
  1 shift. 
  In other words, whenever your turn to roll 
  the grapple comes up again, you can auto-
  matically choose to inflict a one-shift hit to the 
  target, drag the target with you one zone, or 
  inflict a maneuver (like Tangled Up), and then 
  you must roll the grapple at –1 (the other action 
  you take is considered supplementary because it 
  doesn’t require a roll).
  Finally, you can also release the grapple if 
  you want to roll a standard action instead, like 
  making a full attack, performing a maneuver, or 
  throwing the opponent (basically forced move-
  ment, to a maximum of one zone). The target 
  gets a defense roll, as usual.
  In this way, an effective grappler can eventu-
  ally whittle someone down to “taken out” status 
  in a series of subsequent exchanges. 
  However, the target is not lacking in options 
  when he gets grappled—he can still roll to 
  attempt any action. If the target cannot beat 
  the block strength of the grapple, it’s assumed 
  that the grappler is still holding onto him, 
  giving the grappler his entire set of supplemen-
  tary options next round. If the target beats the 
  grapple strength, however, the action succeeds. 
  Additionally, if the action is something that 
  could reasonably break the grapple—an attack, 
  a spell, even a threatening look—the grapple is 
  automatically “released.”  
  The GM might rule that someone who is 
  grappled cannot perform any actions that require 
  a great deal of clearance (such as swinging a 
  sword) or complex articulation (such as lock-
  picking or spellcasting). She might also rule that 
  some actions aren’t blocked at all by a grapple 
  (such as perception rolls, academic insights, and 
  What about 
  critters that 
  are much 
  stronger 
  than us 
  mortals?
  Beings with 
  Inhuman 
  Strength can 
  move a target 
  two zones 
  with grappling. 
  Beings with 
  Supernatural 
  Strength 
  can move a 
  target three 
  zones. mythic 
  Strength? 
  Four zones.
  Same thing’s 
  true with 
  the stress 
  that can be 
  inflicted as a 
  supplemental 
  action: 
  2 stress 
  for Inhuman, 
  3 stress for 
  Supernatural, 
  4 stress for 
  mythic. ouch!
  Expanding the Grapple’s Definition
  So, it’s possible that a lot of different situations in different 
  types of conflict might fit the mechanical ebb and flow of the 
  grapple procedure: laying down suppressive machine gun fire, 
  “locking” blades with someone, etc. If you want to play around 
  with that so that Might doesn’t necessarily get all the fun, go for 
  it. Just recognize that you’re taking away some of the uniqueness 
  of Might’s combat options, especially since you still get normal 
  blocks while using other attack skills. If you’re cool with that, 
  and your group is cool with that, then we’re cool with it, too.
  
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  Playing the game
  so on).  The group should talk about its expecta-
  tions here before engaging the grapple rules. 
  Example: One of John Marcone’s thugs, 
  surprised by an unexpected Harry Dresden, 
  decides to express his boss’ displeasure in the 
  old-fashioned way—by beating Harry sense-
  less. Before Harry can get a move in edgewise, 
  the thug is on him. 
  In the first exchange, the thug uses Fists to 
  perform a maneuver on Harry, succeeds, and 
  places Off-Balance on him.  Harry’s first 
  counterattack meets with an unfazed wall of 
  muscle. 
  In the second exchange, the thug tags 
  Off-Balance so he can go for a grapple. The 
  thug’s Might is Good (+3), and he rolls a +2 
  on the dice for a Superb (+5) grapple. Harry 
  is held. He decides that casting a spell while 
  grappled is too chancy, since the Superb grapple 
  blocks his target roll to control even a minor 
  evocation.  Harry instead opts for the straight-
  forward approach: headbutting the thug.  He 
  rolls Fists for this attack, but the outcome is less 
  than Superb.  Harry remains held.
  In the third exchange, the thug decides to 
  go for a Pinned maneuver, pushing Harry 
  down to the floor. He uses his supplemental 
  action to give Harry Pinned, the thug’s knee 
  pushing down on Harry’s back. The thug rolls 
  the grapple again, at a –1 for the supplemental 
  action, but this time he only gets a Fair (+2) 
  result, and Harry sees his chance. He tries to 
  use Athletics to undo the grapple and wriggle 
  free. He makes a Great (+4) Athletics roll, 
  giving him two shifts over the block; he cancels 
  out the maneuver and gets free of the grapple.
  Sprint
  You perform a sprint action in order to change 
  from zone to zone within a conflict. Normally, 
  movement is pretty self-explanatory—there’s a 
  door to go through or simply open ground, and 
  it’s pretty easy to justify moving from one area 
  to another. As a result, most movement rolls 
  are pretty easy, having an effective difficulty of 
  Mediocre (+0)—in other words, unless you roll 
  a negative result, you can always move one zone 
  and every shift beyond that lets you move an 
  additional zone.
  Sometimes, however, it’s complicated to 
  move directly from one zone to another. For 
  instance, something like a fence, wall, or other 
  difficult terrain might obstruct your path, or 
  you might need to move up or down quickly 
  (like getting to the roof of a locked building 
  from the street, or vice versa). This complication 
  is called a border, and the GM gives it a diffi-
  culty rating (page 310). Rough terrain is usually 
  an Average  (+1) border; fences and other 
  such barriers are usually considered Fair (+2) 
  borders. Extremely high walls, barbed wire, and 
  other fortifications might be Good (+3) borders 
  or above.
  If there is a border, you must roll against the 
  border difficulty to accomplish movement. As 
  with a normal sprint roll, meeting the difficulty 
  allows you to move one zone, and any shifts let 
  you move an additional zone per shift. 
  Example: Harry Dresden has been chasing a 
  pickpocket through the streets of Chicago and 
  tracked him to an industrial park, where he’s 
  about to hand Harry’s wallet over to a myste-
  rious, dark-robed figure.
  Harry wants to jump the pickpocket, but 
  there’s a tall fence between him and the indus-
  trial park. The GM has decided these are two 
  different zones, separated by a border (the 
  fence). She gives the border a rating of 2 shifts. 
  In this exchange, Harry needs a Fair  (+2) 
  jump or better to get over the fence and into 
  the same zone as the pickpocket. His Athletics 
  is Good (+3), and he makes the roll handily, 
  vaulting over the fence and getting there before 
  the hand-off.
  In the next exchange, the pickpocket decides 
  to get as far away from Harry as possible—
  he drops the wallet and makes a break for it. 
  He rolls his Athletics and gets a Good (+3) 
  jump—enough to jump the fence again and get 
  one more zone away, which the GM proposes is 
  the far end of the parking lot. 
  Harry snatches up his wallet and decides to 
  let the pickpocket go. Harry turns his attention 
  to the robed figure instead…
  Industrial 
  Area
  Fence (Border 2)
  I really, 
  really hate 
  you right 
  now, Billy.
  So why 
  would the 
  thug go for 
  hitting me 
  with a Pinned 
  maneuver 
  here instead 
  of that one 
  point of 
  stress you 
  mentioned 
  earlier?
  racking up a 
  few taggable 
  aspects can help 
  you prolong a 
  grapple when you 
  roll poorly. the 
  stress option is 
  mainly useful 
  when you can 
  do it several 
  times in a row.
  So even if I 
  was trying to 
  cast a, uh, Fair 
  spell, it’d be 
  as difficult as 
  trying to cast 
  a Superb one 
  when the block’s 
  that big?
  exactly right.
  Reminds me 
  of that time 
  MacFinn put me 
  in a headlock.
  
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  Playing the game
  In situations where there’s no border to worry 
  about, you can also just move one zone as a 
  supplemental action (see below) at a –1 penalty 
  to your main action for the exchange. Within 
  the same zone, movement isn’t considered an 
  issue—you can always go wherever you need 
  to within the same zone in order to perform an 
  action.
  Free and Supplemental 
  Actions
  You may be able to take a minor action in addi-
  tion to your main action during a turn. Often it 
  will be assumed that you succeed in taking the 
  action, but some free or supplemental actions 
  might involve a skill roll of their own, made 
  before or after the main action, as is appropriate. 
  Defending always requires rolling the dice.
  You might want your character to do some-
  thing very simple during an exchange. Some 
  kinds of actions are free actions—they don’t 
  count as your character’s action during an 
  exchange, whether or not a roll of the dice is 
  involved. Rolling for defense against an attack is 
  a free action. So are minor actions like casting a 
  quick glance at a doorway, flipping a switch right 
  next to your character, starting a car, listening 
  for voices, or shouting a short warning. It’s up to 
  the GM to approve a minor action as free. If it 
  isn’t free, it’s a supplemental action.
  There is no limit on the number of free 
  actions your character may take during an 
  exchange; the group simply has to agree that 
  each action is free and should only impose limits 
  if it seems like someone is taking undue advan-
  tage of this rule. 
  Sometimes, your character needs to do some-
  thing more complicated than a single, basic 
  action allows. Moving one zone in addition to 
  another action is the most common example. 
  Several others are possible, such as drawing 
  a gun before shooting it, opening a door and 
  then intimidating the occupants of the room 
  beyond, using a cell phone while shooting a gun, 
  or snatching up a nearby vase to smash over 
  the head of a burglar. These actions are called 
  supplemental actions, and they impose a –1 
  penalty on the roll for the main action. When 
  you’re not sure which is the primary action and 
  which is the supplemental one, remember that 
  the supplemental action is the one that normally 
  requires no die roll. 
  Combining Skills
  Sometimes your character will need to perform a 
  task that really requires using two or more skills 
  at once. You never know when your character 
  is going to need to throw a knife (Weapons) 
  while balancing on a spinning log (Athletics), 
  when he’s going to need to explain germ theory 
  (Scholarship) to a dragon (Discipline), or 
  when he’s going to need to hold up a falling 
  gate (Might) just long enough for his friends to 
  escape (Endurance).
  In situations like these, you roll based on the 
  main skill your character is using (the primary 
  thrust of the action), but the roll is modified 
  by a second skill. If the second skill rating is 
  of greater value than the first, it grants a +1 
  bonus to the roll; if the second skill rating is 
  of a lesser value, it applies a –1 penalty to the 
  roll. Sometimes, it’ll only make sense for a skill 
  to help or hinder another skill, but not both; in 
  that case, ignore the value that makes no sense. 
  In other words, the GM might decide that, while 
  having a low Athletics could hinder a char-
  acter in the Weapons/Athletics example above, 
  having a high Athletics won’t necessarily make it 
  any easier. In that case, she just won’t grant the 
  bonus if the character’s Athletics skill is higher. 
  Keep in mind that this should not be used 
  to allow a character to complete two full actions 
  in one turn; that should require two exchanges. 
  When skills are used in combination, one skill 
  is almost always going to serve a passive role, as 
  the thing the character needs to be able to do so 
  that he can perform the other skill. If a character 
  is trying to throw a knife while balancing on a 
  spinning log, Weapons is the main skill rolled, 
  but Athletics restricts the skill, because without 
  it the character falls off the log and his throw 
  is moot. Similarly, if the character is too busy 
  gibbering before an ancient horror, his knowl-
  edge simply is not going to help him.
  Sometimes it can be difficult to determine 
  when something is a supplemental action and 
  when something calls for combined skills. The 
  best rule of thumb is to ask whether or not a roll 
  would be required for each “part” of a compli-
  cated action if the parts were separated. Would 
  the character have to roll Athletics to balance on 
  the log if he weren’t also throwing the knife? If 
  so, then combine skills. If not, then treat it like a 
  supplemental action.
  These 
  situations 
  come up more 
  often than 
  you’d think.
  Billy, I 
  think having 
  a kickass 
  Athletics 
  WOULD 
  make it 
  easier.
  Sure, some 
  groups might 
  do that.
  
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  Playing the game
  In practice, this rule mainly allows the GM 
  to condense rolls in complicated situations in 
  order to keep play moving at a brisk pace. It’s 
  possible to handle these situations by requiring 
  one roll for each “part.” The GM could say, “Yeah, 
  roll your Athletics to see if you fall off the log, 
  and then roll Weapons to see if you can hit 
  the target.” But in a complicated conflict scene, 
  those rolls can add up and really bog down 
  play. Sometimes it’s just simpler and faster to 
  combine skills and take care of it all in one roll.
  Keep It Simple, Silly
  It’s pretty easy to get carried away with supple-
  mental actions and combining skills, so you end 
  up with a situation where a character needs to 
  climb a wall (Athletics as primary), but is tired 
  (Endurance hinders), but the wall’s part of a 
  building the character has been studying in 
  order to burglarize (Burglary helps). In general, 
  try to avoid this kind of minutia, because it can 
  turn into a zero-sum game pretty fast, where 
  there really isn’t any significant benefit once you 
  bring in all the attendant factors. Still, if you’re 
  fond of that kind of complexity, the system does 
  technically allow for some of that.
  Isn’t that “Keep it simple, stupid?”
  georgia…encouraged me not to 
  address the reader as “stupid.”
  Did she encourage you in the sack?
  Aaaaand you’re done.
  Overflow
  (What to do with a surplus)
  Sometimes you will get lucky and end up with 
  spare shifts that don’t get spent on anything 
  during an exchange—you succeed far more 
  than anticipated and simply don’t need those 
  extra shifts to complete the action you declared. 
  When that happens, the extra shifts are called 
  overflow, and you are allowed to spend them to 
  take an additional, after-the-roll action if you 
  so choose. The action is resolved at the value of 
  the overflow, so two shifts of overflow might be 
  taken as a Fair (+2) action. 
  The main restriction is that this action cannot 
  be an offensive action and must be consistent 
  with the sort of activity that generated the 
  overflow; movement is fine, and so is any other 
  action that the GM allows as supplemental. 
  Optional Rule: Spin
  Some groups may find it strange that high 
  defense rolls don’t really give you any return 
  when every other game action does. This is 
  because they aren’t really a declared action; 
  you can take as many of them as you want for 
  free, regardless of your situation. However, 
  if you’re bummed that you roll these epic 
  defense rolls all the time and nothing else 
  comes of it, consider using the spin rule: any 
  defense roll that beats the attack by three 
  or more confers a +1 or –1 to the very next 
  action taken in the exchange.
  If you make spin, figure out who is going 
  next and see if there’s an immediate way for a 
  +1 or –1 to apply to the roll so that it favors 
  you. Is your friend going next, attacking the 
  same foe you are? Give your friend the +1. 
  Is your opponent going next, trying to rend 
  you limb from limb? Give his attack a –1 (or 
  a +1 to your own defense roll). If nothing 
  obvious comes to mind, don’t worry about 
  it; the special effect is mostly just color.
  This can be a way of introducing some 
  liveliness and uncertainty into conflict 
  scenes, but with everything else going on, it 
  can be hard to remember and keep track of 
  when you get spin. If you find that to be the 
  case, don’t worry about this optional rule. 
  Your conflict scenes are probably dynamic 
  enough as it is.
  Useful Terms
  To make it easy to talk about combining 
  skills in a compact way, you can use the 
  following lingo:
    If a secondary skill could either add 
  to or subtract from the primary skill, 
  say it modifies that skill.
    If a secondary skill could only add to 
  the primary skill, say it complements 
  that skill.
    If a secondary skill could only 
  subtract from the primary skill, say it 
  restricts that skill.
  There’s no rule saying you have to use 
  these special terms in your own game, but 
  we use them elsewhere in the book. Just a 
  heads up, so you’re not lost when you see 
  them.
  
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  Playing the game
  Specifically, this is a good way to fit non-conflict 
  actions into the middle of a conflict scene.
  Overflow can only legitimately happen by 
  chance—most often by a really good roll of the 
  dice. So if you know you need 2 shifts to accom-
  plish something, invoking additional aspects to 
  get 6 shifts so you can have overflow doesn’t cut 
  it. Also, no matter how many shifts you have 
  of overflow, you can only take one additional 
  action, and you have to commit all your shifts 
  to that action.
  Example: Michael Carpenter cleaves through 
  the demonic guardian of a dark god’s temple at 
  the end of a pitched battle, breaking its power 
  once and for all. His player, Ryan, rolls an 
  attack and gets six shifts on it, but looking at 
  the damage Michael’s already inflicted on the 
  beast, he and the GM realize that he only needs 
  a three-shift hit to take it out. The GM grants 
  Ryan an overflow action worth three shifts, the 
  difference between his actual roll and what he 
  needed to take out the demon. 
  With the three remaining shifts, he calls for 
  a sprint of three zones (i.e., equal to the number 
  of overflow shifts) as the temple begins to 
  collapse around him, high-tailing it out of there 
  without the need for a separate Athletics roll.
  Social Conflicts
  Not every conflict that the characters engage 
  in is going to be about beating up or killing 
  someone. People have conflicts all the time in 
  a more nebulous, but often more common, 
  realm—the facedown at the bar, the aggres-
  sive dare, the guilt-fueled suggestion; conflicts 
  of interest are played out on the social level all 
  the time. Words and other types of influence 
  are used as weapons to further the agenda of 
  one person over another person or over whole 
  groups of people, and those who are most skilled 
  at it can sometimes be far more damaging than a 
  thug with a gun.
  Social conflicts occur when the opposing 
  agendas of two or more characters are resolved 
  without physical violence, calling upon a 
  different set of skills and trappings to resolve 
  them. The damage done by these conflicts can be 
  highly variable, ranging from simply instilling a 
  false sense of security in the loser to ruining his 
  public reputation and hurting his relationships. 
  The skills mainly used to attack in a social 
  conflict are Deceit, Intimidation, and Rapport; 
  those three and Empathy could all be used to 
  make social maneuvers. Empathy and Rapport 
  are most commonly used to defend. This list is 
  not exhaustive, however, and depending on the 
  context of the interaction, there might be situa-
  tions where another skill (such as Conviction or 
  Contacts) may seem a better fit. 
  The social stress track is modified by the 
  Presence skill, representing the resilience of a 
  character’s persona to hostile influence.
  Zones and Movement
  In many situations, the use of zones and move-
  ment won’t be very important to social conflict, 
  given that most social conflict requires that the 
  characters be able to interact with one another 
  socially. Measuring that can be fairly abstract—
  can someone seduce someone else over a cell 
  phone? How do you measure their “distance” in 
  that regard? In these cases, it’s okay to ignore 
  issues of movement; just assume everyone is in 
  the same zone for every exchange and can affect 
  everyone else equally.
  Of course, sometimes the social conflict will 
  be taking place within the context of a physical 
  space, such as a large party or ball, where being 
  gathered in certain places at certain times can 
  influence who has the ability to affect whom. 
  In these cases, physical movement can be used 
  normally—just keep in mind that, in a social 
  context, different things can take on the function 
  of barriers with just as much reality as physical 
  ones. High society gatherings (and the supernat-
  ural gatherings that also contain their trappings) 
  are famous for this kind of thing—you just 
  can’t walk across the room until you’ve politely 
  extricated yourself from a lengthy conversation 
  with the gossipy socialite by the punch bowl 
  or get a word in edgewise with the lord of the 
  manor until you’ve spoken with all his influen-
  tial hangers-on.
  The White Court and the 
  Mafia are best at this.
  Barriers 
  or borders, 
  Billy?
  Barriers in the 
  story sense, 
  borders in the 
  system sense!
  Social conflicts 
  should be fluid, 
  with frequent 
  skill switching.
  Intimidation isn’t 
  getting any 
  traction? change 
  gears and go 
  for rapport 
  or deceit. unlike 
  physical combat, 
  attacking over 
  and over again 
  with one skill 
  isn’t going to be 
  satisfying. And 
  while discipline 
  can be used to 
  defend against 
  some actions, 
  minimize its use; 
  social conflicts 
  are more about 
  information 
  flow than 
  poker faces.
  
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  Playing the game
  Attacks, Maneuvers, 
  and Blocks
  Social conflicts tend to vary more than phys-
  ical conflicts do in terms of what constitutes 
  the nature of an attack or maneuver, and they 
  require that the participants be very clear about 
  the nature of the conflict and what the conflict 
  is intended to do. Intimidation has little place 
  in a conflict about trashing an opponent’s repu-
  tation, but a conflict about winning the favor 
  of a particular patron might open up several 
  avenues of attack depending on the resources 
  of each participant. Likewise, someone trying 
  to provoke an opponent into hostility probably 
  won’t use Rapport. 
  Ultimately, a good guideline is that an attack 
  is any action meant to directly take someone 
  out of the conflict in one way or another, and a 
  maneuver is any action meant to provide a situ-
  ational advantage to make those attacks more 
  effective. Taken together with a clear picture of 
  what the conflict is about, this can help provide 
  a guide for what kinds of skills can be used.
  Take the simple example of a facedown in 
  a bar between two potential combatants. Each 
  individual is interested in forcing the other to 
  back away from the fight. It’s pretty clear, then, 
  that Intimidation is the primary skill that’s 
  going to be used here for attacks, and either 
  Conviction or Presence is going to be used to 
  defend. One possible maneuver is for one of 
  them to use Rapport to get some of the other 
  bar patrons on his side, allowing him to place 
  an Outnumbered aspect on his opponent—
  this makes future Intimidation attacks more 
  effective, forcing the opponent to deal with the 
  reality that, if he presses forward, it’s going to be 
  an uneven and dirty fight.
  Something more abstract, like damaging 
  someone’s reputation with a certain person or 
  group, might involve attacks of Contacts and 
  Deceit from all parties involved, with Presence 
  or Rapport acting as a defensive skill to measure 
  how well someone is still liked in the face of 
  accusation. Maneuvers would contribute to 
  whatever might help make the false reputation 
  seem true—Contacts to spread rumors extra-
  wide, Resources to bribe people to lie, and so on.
  The use of blocks may not be appropriate in 
  all conflicts—as an action type, they’re meant 
  as a preemptive measure against certain actions 
  and, as such, can be slightly more difficult to 
  incorporate into a social conflict scene. It’s easy 
  to picture spraying gunfire at a door to keep 
  someone from walking out, but what “blocks” 
  do you put up against a seduction attempt at 
  Club Zero? 
  Still, clever players might find ways of estab-
  lishing an extra layer of defense via a block based 
  on the situation, such as using Rapport when 
  first meeting the Club Zero bartender: “Hey, 
  I’m designated driver for my friends tonight, 
  so don’t let anyone buy me any drinks, okay?” 
  The potential seducer is going to have to find 
  another tactic in order to proceed there, or risk 
  an awkward moment.
  Stress and Consequences
  As with parsing out the combat actions, figuring 
  out what stress and consequences mean in a 
  particular social conflict can take some wran-
  gling and, as before, looking at the nature of 
  the conflict is the best place to start. Remember 
  that consequences are meant to represent the 
  outcomes of a conflict that “stick” to the partici-
  pants—as soon as the scene’s over, anything 
  recorded as stress is really just narrative color. 
  In terms of consequences, the easiest way 
  to represent the effects of social conflict is 
  through negative emotional fallout—aspects 
  like Stressed Out, Crappy Mood, Nervous, 
  Edgy, and Guilt-Ridden can all come into 
  play later in dynamic and colorful ways. Another 
  potential option is to let the consequences reflect 
  changes in how other people perceive the char-
  acter after the conflict shakes out. If a charac-
  ter’s reputation is ruined, representing that with 
  a Smeared Name aspect can lend mechan-
  ical weight to what might otherwise be just a 
  narrated effect.
  Sometimes, the most important effect of 
  a social conflict comes from the new circum-
  stances the event brings into the character’s 
  life—if a character has a significant other, 
  falling for a seduction attempt could create 
  Relationship Doubts or something similar. 
  Play around with any and all of these types of 
  consequences to give your social conflicts a far-
  reaching impact on play.
  The Role of Assessment
  Assessment actions have a unique place in social 
  conflict as compared to physical conflict—they 
  allow you to learn your opponent’s aspects, which 
  I've never 
  been to 
  Club Zero. 
  Heck, I 
  don't even 
  know where 
  it IS.
  HEY!
  Are seduction 
  attempts going 
  on there often? 
  Do they need 
  to be blocked? Is 
  Harry’s sparkling 
  personality 
  block enough?
  You know, 
  I’ve seen 
  Thomas “kill 
  them with 
  kindness” 
  before. Could 
  you do that 
  in the system, 
  or is all of 
  this social 
  conflict stuff 
  aggressive and 
  negative?
  Yeah! You could 
  conceivably use 
  rapport for a 
  “soft” attack 
  to convince 
  someone to 
  meet with you 
  later, removing 
  them from the 
  scene. that’s 
  “taken out” 
  too, after all.
  
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  Playing the game
  can often mean the difference between victory 
  and defeat in social conflict. It’s one thing for a 
  stranger to try to get your blood up with random 
  insults, but a stranger who is able to attack 
  the ideas that you most hold dear represents a 
  clear and present danger. Normally speaking, 
  you use Empathy to “read” an opponent in this 
  way, and such attempts are commonly resisted 
  by Rapport. See the respective skill descrip-
  tions on pages 129 and 138 for more details. Any 
  aspects revealed by this process can be tagged 
  and invoked in social combat actions; as such, 
  they act sort of like “permanent” maneuvers (in 
  that, once revealed, they can’t be “un-revealed”) 
  and are very potent tools. 
  Keep in mind, also, that certain social 
  conflicts will open up the potential to use other 
  skills for assessment as well. If you are trying to 
  woo an investor away from a potential compet-
  itor, for example, you would do well to use 
  Investigation or Resources to uncover any finan-
  cial woes the competitor might be having and to 
  use that information at the bargaining table.
  Mental Conflicts
  There is another kind of interpersonal conflict 
  that goes beyond just a social scope. Most of 
  the time, the effects of losing a social conflict 
  are transient, in the sense that they don’t really 
  transform a person utterly. Someone can make 
  you lose your temper, but he can’t turn you into 
  a sociopath. Someone can damage your reputa-
  tion, but he can’t make you hate yourself utterly.
  In some cases, however, people do inflict 
  that kind of deep-seated harm to one another, 
  crossing the line from mere social consequence 
  into deep and abiding psychological trauma. 
  When this kind of damage is accessible in a 
  conflict, it marks a transition from social into 
  mental territory and puts perhaps the direst 
  stakes of all on the line—the individual’s mind, 
  soul, or sense of self. These are mental conflicts, 
  probably the rarest (or at least most potentially 
  profound) examples of conflict you’ll see in 
  your game.
  The mental stress track is modified by the 
  Conviction skill, representing the resistance of 
  the character’s inner self to abuse. The Discipline 
  skill is almost always called on to defend against 
  mental attacks, though magic can also help 
  protect someone in this kind of conflict. 
  Being able to attack the mental stress track 
  is no small feat. The kind of abuse necessary to 
  inflict this kind of damage on another person 
  usually takes a great deal of time and energy, the 
  result of established relationships going horribly 
  awry. Shortcuts exist—certain triggers in the 
  character’s history might allow access to deeper 
  recesses of the mind. Perhaps the most terri-
  fying example of this is the mind magic avail-
  able to wizards or the mental powers of other 
  supernatural creatures. Even as total strangers, 
  these people can instantly strike at the heart 
  of what makes people who they are, forcing 
  them to be temporary thralls to the creature’s 
  will—or worse.
  Between mortals, some sort of prior connec-
  tion or justification must exist to inflict mental 
  stress and consequences. An aspect that defines 
  a relationship rife with abandonment, emotional 
  degradation, violence, rape, or other potential 
  triggers would qualify for this, as it’s assumed 
  that the relationship has been going on long 
  enough to justify being vulnerable to this kind 
  of severe effect. When this is the case, many 
  actions that qualify as social attacks can affect 
  the mental stress track.
  Certain individuals might also have the 
  training to accomplish this sort of thing, going 
  beyond the usual trappings of Intimidation 
  and into torture, represented by an appropriate 
  stunt.
  Zones and Movement
  Zones and movement are even more potentially 
  insignificant in a mental conflict than a social 
  one—they tend to take place entirely within the 
  mind, especially in the cases where supernat-
  ural powers are used. The only situation where 
  zones and movement might matter is if there’s 
  a mental conflict taking place as part of a larger, 
  physical one. If a demon is trying to possess your 
  friend, it might become important to know how 
  That Warning Thing
  Just in case it needs saying—having mental 
  conflicts occur routinely in your games can 
  lead you into some pretty dark places. These 
  places exist in Harry’s casefiles and are the 
  source of some nasty, nasty stuff. You’re not 
  required to go there if you don’t want to—
  having most mental conflicts take place “off-
  camera” is a perfectly fine way to handle it, or 
  even not going there much at all, depending 
  on the preferences of your group.
  Your 
  mother was a 
  hamster and 
  your father 
  smelt of 
  elderberries!
  StoP! 
  these notes 
  are getting 
  too silly!
  On second 
  thought, let’s not 
  go to Chicago. ’Tis 
  a silly place.
  
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  Playing the game
  hard it will be for you to get to him. In this case, 
  you’d use physical movement as appropriate 
  and just assume it doesn’t matter for the mental 
  combatants.
  Attacks, Maneuvers, 
  and Blocks
  The context of a mental attack is a little more 
  strictly defined when it comes to supernatural 
  abilities—the rules for the powers are given in 
  either Supernatural Powers (for White Court 
  vampires and their ilk) or Spellcraft (for wizards 
  and sorcerers), and the targets of those abilities 
  can use Discipline to defend against the attacks. 
  Strictly speaking, these kinds of encounters 
  seldom last long enough to be considered full 
  conflicts—failing to defend against thauma-
  turgy usually results in directly suffering some 
  level of consequence, but some powers like 
  Incite Emotion (page 172) will take more effort 
  on the part of the attacker. 
  Between mortals who have established the 
  ability to affect each other in that way, either 
  due to the relationship between them or thanks 
  to training in inflicting mental anguish, most 
  mental attacks look like social attacks. The rela-
  tionship or training adds context to the narra-
  tion and the outcome, rather than to the act 
  itself—when a person who has savagely beaten 
  you since childhood stares you down with 
  Intimidation, it’s a whole different ball game than 
  when some guy on the other end of the bar does 
  it. This is reflected mainly in what consequences 
  a person stands to take from the conflict.
  A mental maneuver is basically the difference 
  between manipulation and force. Think about 
  the inherently deceptive things someone could 
  attempt to get another person to believe in order 
  to do serious damage to him. Again, these are 
  more than likely going to look a great deal like 
  social maneuvers, but mental conflict changes 
  the effect in the scene somewhat. Where a 
  person might use Deceit in a social conflict to 
  make you wonder if he’s killed your friend, in a 
  mental conflict he could make you temporarily 
  believe it.
  Blocks in mental conflict are also difficult to 
  parse out—most people are wholly unable to 
  prepare for those who can push their deepest 
  buttons. Between mortals, without therapy 
  or conditioning to draw on (which could also 
  be represented by an aspect), a block prob-
  ably wouldn’t be possible. Against supernatural 
  incursion, blocks are meaningless, save for those 
  established by a threshold or other supernatural 
  defense. 
  Stress and Consequences
  The stress and consequences suffered by mental 
  conflicts are the deepest of the deep—forays 
  into suicidal thoughts, emotional dependen-
  cies, deep compulsions, and other behaviors and 
  thoughts typically classified as dysfunctional 
  in some way or another. Mental damage is the 
  kind of damage that changes or erodes a person’s 
  sense of self; suffering enough of these conse-
  quences over time tends to presage a trip to the 
  mental ward, or at least to permanent coun-
  seling. That’s one of the things that makes mind 
  magic so dangerous—even when used with 
  good intention, it can completely scar a person’s 
  mind beyond repair.
  One important thing to keep in mind about 
  mental conflicts is that often the combatants are 
  not equally matched in terms of their ability to 
  affect one another. Usually, people don’t engage 
  in mental conflict unless they’re operating from a 
  Kravos was 
  a jerk. I may 
  have already 
  mentioned 
  that. Bears 
  repeating.
  Mind magic 
  could also 
  result in 
  slavery to 
  a powerful 
  White Court 
  vampire. 
  Or a Faerie Queen.
  
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  Playing the game
  position of power; this is routine for supernatu-
  rals, where the best strong-willed mortal victims 
  can hope for is to simply force the assailant 
  from their minds. Even among mortals, mental 
  combat usually springs from an unequal power 
  dynamic.
  In a mental conflict, the character in the infe-
  rior position will probably not be able to attack 
  his opponent—he can still defend and maneuver, 
  but unless he can come up with a really good 
  rationale for being able to strike back, defen-
  sive options are all he has. The disadvantaged 
  character will have to change the circumstances 
  to put himself on more equal footing, or (more 
  than likely) switch the conflict to the physical or 
  social arena so that he can be effective. Someone 
  who’s being tortured, for example, usually 
  doesn’t have the means to turn the tables on his 
  torturer unless he can get free. Fighting back 
  against supernatural or magical mental attackers 
  requires having mojo of your own, be that innate 
  power or assistance from an item.
  Additional Advice 
  for Social and 
  Mental Conflicts
  Many players are more worried about the poten-
  tial outcome of social and mental conflicts 
  than physical ones, because they don’t want 
  to feel bullied into playing their character a 
  certain way. If you imagine your character as a 
  really courageous guardian type, for example, 
  it can seem strange to have that character lose 
  an Intimidation conflict with someone and be 
  forced to back down from a fight. There are a 
  few elements for the group to consider when 
  you’re deciding about the degree to which you 
  want to incorporate social and mental conflicts 
  into your games.
  The first, and probably most important, 
  is that the concession rules give you consid-
  erable leeway to interpret the outcome of a 
  conflict. As with a physical conflict, you should 
  consider conceding the conflict if you see things 
  not going your way. If an incredibly chaste char-
  acter (perhaps a Champion of God) is getting 
  wrecked in a seduction attempt, concession 
  allows you to offer an alternative to actually 
  sleeping with the seductress—maybe taking on 
  a consequence of Doubting My Own Purity 
  for a time, while you work out the issues that the 
  conflict engendered.
  The second thing to keep in mind is that no 
  conflict results are really permanent, with the 
  potential exception of an extreme consequence. 
  Almost no one has a personality that’s 100% 
  consistent all the time—the most courageous 
  people are sometimes afraid, the most positive 
  people get depressed, and the most determined 
  people sometimes waver in purpose. Losing a 
  social conflict doesn’t necessarily mean that your 
  character has suddenly, permanently changed. 
  In fact, roleplaying through the outcomes of the 
  conflict gives you the opportunity to develop 
  your character as a more complex individual, 
  even if the ultimate end result is that he doesn’t 
  change much.
  Let’s consider an Intimidation conflict for 
  a second. Your character came into this bar to 
  rescue a friend who’s being held in the back 
  room. Not wanting to just bust heads, your 
  character goes in, gets a drink, and starts asking 
  around. This leads to an Intimidation conflict 
  with a thug there, which your character handily 
  loses and gets taken out. You’ve taken a moderate 
  consequence of Shaken Resolve during the 
  conflict. The GM, controlling the thug, suggests 
  that your character leaves the bar because he’s 
  afraid of getting into a fight with the thug and 
  his friends.
  This doesn’t have to mean that your char-
  acter runs screaming from the bar or anything 
  like that. People often play off their emotional 
  responses as being less significant than they 
  really are. It’s not out of scope to take the GM’s 
  suggestion and reply with, “Okay, well…if I leave 
  the bar, I’m not giving them the satisfaction of 
  knowing that my character is that scared. I’ll 
  keep eye contact with the thug and simply reply, 
  ‘Don’t get comfortable and think that this is 
  over. It’s not. Not by a long shot.’ I’ll throw some 
  cash on the bar and back out slowly.”
  See? Your character didn’t turn into a 
  screaming ninny, but still fulfilled the dictates of 
  the conflict result. So, now what? Is your friend 
  totally screwed?
  Absolutely not. It just means your character 
  is worried about getting into a fight with all 
  those people, so the frontal approach is out of 
  the question. That doesn’t mean your character 
  can’t suddenly change tactics and try to sneak in 
  the back of the bar to do the rescuing. If your 
  character tends to solve problems with his fists 
  and has a low Stealth, it makes the scene a little 
  tenser and potentially challenging.
  So it could 
  be that my 
  character 
  is “afraid” 
  to get into 
  a fight with 
  these chumps 
  because they 
  are TOO 
  STUPID 
  to realize 
  that they’d 
  all end up 
  dead and the 
  building would 
  be on fire?
  Works for me.
  
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  Playing the game
  The consequence of Shaken Resolve also 
  provides opportunities for roleplay. The rescued 
  friend might ask about the change in tactics 
  (“Dude, I expected you’d trash the place with a 
  smile. What gives?”) or there might be a scene 
  later where your character reflects on what 
  happened (“You know, for the first time in…hell, 
  maybe ever…I think those guys actually got to 
  me. Man, I must be losing my touch.”). 
  And finally, the consequence is going to go 
  away at some point, leaving your character ready 
  to turn the tables on that thug if you should 
  confront him again. At the end of it all, your 
  character is even more the courageous badass, 
  because he got hit with serious adversity and 
  came out swinging on the other side. This can be 
  especially poignant with mental conflicts, where 
  the consequences are more deep-seated and have 
  the potential to be transformative to the self.
  Recovering 
  from Conflicts
  After the end of a conflict—whether physical, 
  social, or mental—your character will have 
  amassed stress and consequences, and you may 
  have received some fate points for your trouble. 
  But your troubles are largely just beginning—
  those consequences aren’t going to go away 
  immediately; while they’re still attached to your 
  character, they’re available for invocations and 
  compels just like any other aspect. 
  Any stress that your character takes during 
  a conflict goes away immediately after the 
  conflict—stress represents the close scrapes and 
  glancing blows that your character can shrug off, 
  so it doesn’t last after the end of that conflict 
  scene. In rare instances, it might be appropriate 
  for stress to remain if your character goes imme-
  diately from one conflict to another or to some 
  other appropriate scene (like a fight that turns 
  into a car chase), but for the most part, once the 
  conflict is done, the stress is gone.
  Recovering from consequences is a bit more 
  involved. It basically requires two things—
  some in-game circumstance that justifies that 
  the character can start the recovery process and 
  a certain amount of time in scenes or sessions 
  before the consequence in question goes away. 
  An appropriate in-game circumstance depends 
  largely on the consequence that’s been taken—
  most physical consequences require medical 
  attention or rest, while mental consequences 
  might require therapy, counseling, or extended 
  time spent in the healing presence of a loved 
  one. Social consequences can vary widely and 
  are situational; a consequence like Frazzled 
  might only need a night at the bar and a chance 
  to unwind, while a consequence like Bad 
  Reputation might require your character to 
  spend time doing very public acts of charity to 
  rebuild the good faith he’s lost.
  Once this circumstance is established, the 
  recovery time can begin. As stated before, mild 
  consequences last until the end of the next 
  scene after recovery begins, moderate conse-
  quences last until the end of the next session 
  after recovery begins, and severe consequences 
  last until the end of the next scenario (or few 
  sessions, as you prefer) after recovery begins. 
  Extreme consequences are, of course, their own 
  special kind of beast (page 205). In certain cases, 
  it’d be more appropriate to measure recovery 
  with in-game time, like days or weeks—see 
  page 314 in Running the Game for more details 
  on that.
  Some powers affect either recovery time or 
  the establishment of an appropriate circum-
  stance (like Inhuman Recovery, Wizard’s 
  Constitution, et al.). See those individual 
  descriptions for details.
  Recovery and Skills
  Some characters may have skills that lend them-
  selves appropriately to initiating recovery; for 
  instance, a character with Scholarship and the 
  Doctor stunt (page 155) could start a character 
  on the road to recovery from a moderate phys-
  ical consequence. This is handled via declaration, 
  and most of the time no roll is required—but 
  if there’s some kind of pressure on the healer 
  character, a roll might be called for. In those 
  cases, the difficulty is equal to the stress value 
  of the consequence: Fair for mild, Great for 
  moderate, Fantastic (!) for severe. Success means 
  the recovery process can begin as normal; failure 
  means the injured character has to wait. 
  What kind 
  of crazy 
  person goes 
  right into 
  another 
  conflict 
  before 
  recovering 
  from the 
  last one? 
  I mean, 
  besides me?
   
  Sometimes 
  you’re not 
  given a 
  choice in the 
  matter, if 
  the badguys 
  come to you.
  
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  - cHAPter tWelVe -
  living 
  With magic
  
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  living With magic
  I, Spellslinger
  So, you have phenomenal power at your finger-
  tips. But being a conduit of magic isn’t just about 
  blasting architecture or finding lost dogs with a 
  tuft of hair and a bit of string. Magic changes 
  you, gets inside you, opens you up to seeing the 
  world in a new way, and increases the impact 
  you have on the world around you. 
  Here, we’ll talk about how.
  Wizard Biology
  Wizards—and perhaps other types of spell-
  casters and magical folk—tend to have unusu-
  ally long lifespans, lasting several centuries (and 
  a few wizards are rumored to be even older than 
  that). Why is this? Well, no one’s certain—
  wizardry and scientific study don’t often mix—
  but some of the Council think it’s an effect of 
  channeling magical energies through a physical 
  body. As to whether strong magic comes from a 
  strong life force, or a strong life force comes from 
  strong magic, well…that’s the sort of chicken 
  and egg thing that the Council has absolutely no 
  time for when there’s a Vampire War going on. 
  However you slice it, magic and life force are 
  inextricably linked within the body of a wizard. 
  The big benefits here are that wizards heal a 
  little faster than non-magical folks, and their 
  bodies continue to heal until the injuries are 
  gone—meaning wizards can eventually recover 
  from injuries that would permanently cripple 
  a mortal. 
  How It Works
  As far as the longevity bit goes, that’s largely a 
  case of color in game terms—being able to live a 
  few centuries longer than your mundane human 
  friends certainly means some dramatic things 
  from a story perspective, but it doesn’t need 
  much in the way of rules to support it. Are you 
  unusually long-lived? Yes? Okay, then—you are! 
  That’s all that need be said.
  When it comes to healing, wizards get a 
  minor leg up. Due to their extraordinary consti-
  tution, wizards do not need any kind of external 
  justification besides receiving basic first aid for 
  recovering from injury—time will do the job 
  all on its own. Extreme consequences (like, say, 
  a completely immolated hand) are an exception 
  to this; there is a limit even to the hardiness of 
  wizards. For more on recovery, see page 220.
  Wizard Senses
  Humans have a “third eye” which can be opened 
  to behold the world in a different, mystical 
  light. That ability is called the Sight, and we’ll 
  talk about it shortly—usually only wizards 
  and other spellcasters can access it consciously. 
  Also, wizards and other practitioners have some 
  secondary senses that they’ve learned to use.
  Almost everyone has some degree of aware-
  ness of the supernatural, whether or not you 
  realize that’s what is at work. Chills down your 
  spine, a subtle feeling that something is simply 
  wrong about a place, the hairs on your arm 
  standing up for no apparent reason, something 
  tickling at the edges of your vision—these are 
  your primal awareness of something nasty and 
  supernatural treading nearby.
  Magical practitioners have sharpened this 
  heightened awareness, due to their arcane 
  studies and natural aptitudes.
  While spellcrafters’ secondary senses may 
  not offer a lot of information to go on, they 
  can make the half-second difference between 
  a narrow escape and ending up spiked on a 
  vampire’s fangs.
  How It Works
  Everyone can roll the Lore skill as a substitution  
  for Alertness (page 121) to detect the presence  
  of the supernatural—it’s just that Lore is usually 
  Mediocre, unless someone’s spent some time in 
  dedicated study of the arcane.
  Wizards and other trained spellcrafters can 
  go a few steps further. First, they may use Lore 
  more deliberately: they can get more detail than 
  they might otherwise, as if it were an arcane 
  Investigation (page 133) roll instead of “merely” 
  Alertness. 
  GMs should also call for a Lore roll when-
  ever the practitioner comes into physical contact 
  with a supernatural entity passing as a normal 
  human, or an environment that a potent entity 
  has recently passed through. This roll might be 
  opposed by any number of difficulty factors on 
  the part of the entity—the Deceit skill, the effi-
  cacy of a concealing glamour ability, etc.—but all 
  that a success indicates here is a hunch that the 
  supernatural world is present and active. 
  Butters has 
  put some of 
  me under a 
  microscope 
  and says it’s 
  something to 
  do with my 
  cells not 
  breaking up 
  when they 
  divide, or 
  something 
  like that. 
  I think it’s 
  easier to 
  say “it’s 
  magic,” 
  but that’s 
  just me.
  Thanks for 
  depressing 
  me, Billy.
  Don’t worry: 
  the way you’re 
  going, outliving 
  your friends is 
  probably not 
  going to be an 
  issue. 
  Can mundane humans get this Lore 
  roll if they’re, say, touched by a 
  Seelie? Or is it just practitioners?
  gm’s call, tho it’s more fun if everyone can.
  
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  living With magic
  The Sight
  For a wizard (or other practitioner), the third 
  eye isn’t merely a metaphysical concept. It’s a 
  very real thing, a part of his ability to look at the 
  world and see what’s really there, gliding beneath 
  the surface. In our world, perceived by our 
  mundane senses, the supernatural can hide in 
  plain sight, a shadow rippling beneath the ocean 
  of reality—unseen, perhaps felt, but rarely fully 
  revealed. With training, people can open their 
  third eye—using what is called the Sight—and 
  dip below to see full force what is really there, no 
  matter what it is.
  There’s just one problem: the human mind 
  isn’t all that good at handling what it sees when 
  the third eye is open. What exactly does it see? 
  Simply, the world—but at a level most of us 
  are insulated from. When someone looks at the 
  magical world with the Sight, the trickle of infor-
  mation the mind normally takes in via the other 
  five senses suddenly becomes a great crashing 
  wave drowning the third eye. The metaphorical 
  and phantasmagorical become visual. Emotions 
  and relationships shine like webs. Energy pulses. 
  Dreams and nightmares boil into the air. The 
  past, present, and future have a little hoedown 
  right in front of you. It’s hard to make any sense 
  of it. 
  And these images get burned into the 
  memory of the beholder—never forgotten, 
  always vivid. This can be a problem (i.e., conse-
  quences; see “Defending Against the Sight” 
  page 224). 
  Worse, it can be pretty hard to shut your 
  third eye once you’ve opened it—imagine trying 
  to close a door against an invading tidal wave, 
  and you’ll have some understanding of why this 
  is the case.
  So why use the Sight at all? Well, some things 
  simply cannot be perceived without it. Horrors 
  that walk the mundane world with little more 
  than a chill down someone’s spine may be seen 
  clearly (though that’s always unpleasant). Other 
  times, it’s the shortest path between mystery and 
  truth—with a price, certainly, but if the stakes 
  are high, it may be the only way to get a handle 
  on what’s really going on. The effects of spells laid 
  upon a victim can be seen as well as visions of 
  the past and the future, the true nature of things, 
  lingering psychic stains, troubled shades…
  Assuming, of course, that you can figure out 
  how to make sense of what you’re seeing and 
  avoid going mad in the process.
  How It Works
  When you open your third eye, you perceive 
  everything about the world visually. Everything, 
  all at once. This may give you strange and 
  twisted versions of future possibilities, hint at 
  past evils, reveal the presence of magical and 
  psychic wounds, all sorts of ongoing glories and 
  horrors, beneficent and malevolent spells and 
  enchantments, and so on. However, the price 
  for this arcane knowledge comes from exposing 
  your mind to the Sight’s awesome force.
  The game procedure to open your third eye 
  is as follows:
  1. Take an action to open the Sight and get 
  the description of what you’re Seeing.
  2. Make an assessment action to try to learn 
  about what you’re Seeing.
  3. Defend against the mental strain of using 
  the Sight.
  4. Close the Sight (if you can) before you 
  suffer too much of that strain.
  Opening the Sight
  Opening the third eye to use the Sight takes 
  a full action, after which you may behold the 
  target of your arcane curiosity. 
  Once you begin using the Sight, you get 
  at least some metaphorical expression of the 
  truth of what you’re beholding. Someone who 
  committed a murder might be Seen to have 
  blood on his hands, ever-flowing, and staining 
  his clothes—however, the blood might be 
  symbolic of a different kind of guilt or regret. 
  Or it could be the result of a spell convincing 
  him that he has done something undefined but 
  horrible—maybe he’s broken the Fourth Law 
  (page 240) and done it “for his own good…” So 
  while the things seen might be true, what truth 
  they represent can be interpreted (or misinter-
  preted) in a variety of ways. Perception does not 
  equal comprehension.
  Understanding What You See
  In game terms, using the Sight most closely 
  resembles a mystical assessment action 
  (page 115)—you’re looking to discover some-
  thing important about the target, which could 
  manifest as an aspect or simply as a detail. After 
  describing the metaphorical truth, the GM 
  determines the intensity of what you behold. 
  The intensity is a difficulty described using an 
  adjective from the ladder (page 16). 
  I consider 
  using the 
  Sight to be 
  a deliberate, 
  focused act 
  of tempor-
  arily induced 
  insanity. 
  In many respects, 
  that perspective 
  is exactly correct.
  People who 
  are trained 
  to open their 
  third eye 
  are, under-
  stand ably, 
  reluctant 
  to do it for 
  more than a 
  few moments. 
  For us, it’s 
  dangerous 
  enough. 
  Unprepared 
  people—such 
  as those 
  affected 
  by the 
  ThreeEye 
  drug during 
  the STORM 
  FRONT 
  case—can’t 
  manage to 
  hold their 
  psyches 
  together for 
  very long.
  
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  Most Sights significant enough to mention 
  should be in the neighborhood of a Good inten-
  sity—by default, most things you focus on 
  using the Sight are vibrantly beautiful or retch-
  ingly hideous in some way. This intensity can 
  be mitigated or increased based on the scope 
  of your inquiry, using the guidelines for setting 
  difficulties in Running the Game (page 310). You 
  can make things a step or two easier by keeping 
  your eyes focused intently on something small, 
  effectively avoiding a look at the wider picture 
  of your location—but that also means the infor-
  mation you get will be more limited. You could 
  also widen the focus, taking in something bigger 
  than you originally intended for more informa-
  tion—but expect the intensity to go up a step or 
  two in response to that.
  Once the intensity is determined, you make 
  a Lore roll against the intensity to make sense 
  of what you’re Seeing—basically, to see if you 
  succeed at the assessment. The more shifts you 
  get, the more the GM can explain the metaphor-
  ical reality revealed through the Sight, providing 
  additional aspects and/or details as per the 
  normal guidelines for assessment (page 115). Any 
  aspects you get will probably have  a broad 
  scope and require interpretation, rather than 
  providing concrete specifics (for example, you’d 
  see Hidden Guilt instead of Betrayed a 
  Lover). If the Lore roll fails, you still get the 
  general feel of the metaphor, but that’s it—no 
  help in interpreting it or mechanical benefit 
  from discovered aspects. 
  Defending Against the Sight
  After resolving your attempt to understand 
  what you’re seeing, you must also resolve how 
  well your mind is handling the strain. Having 
  the Sight open starts a mental conflict (page 217) 
  against the vision, which lasts as long as you 
  have the Sight open or until you are taken out. 
  Each exchange you have the Sight open, the 
  GM makes a mental attack roll (page 200) against 
  you, using the intensity of what you’re Seeing 
  as if it were a skill. You defend with Discipline 
  (page 127). As with any conflict, you may suffer 
  consequences (page 203) or be taken out (where 
  “taken out” may mean total collapse, insanity, 
  heart attack…take your pick, as appropriate to 
  the vision. See page 203). 
  Closing the Sight
  After your first defense that succeeds, you may 
  choose whether you want to close your third eye 
  or keep it open to learn more (thus prolonging 
  your contact—and conflict—with the vision). If 
  you decide to keep it open, then you may make 
  another Lore roll to understand the vision and 
  you must continue for another exchange against 
  it. Should your defense not succeed, however, 
  your third eye will not close and you must 
  continue for another exchange. Beholding some-
  thing more intense than you bargained for may 
  lock you into a deadly psychic struggle for the 
  sanctity of your own mind with no easy escape!
  Other Actions While 
  Using the Sight
  While the Sight is active, you may take actions 
  other than perception, but these actions will 
  all face a block (page 210) with strength equal to 
  the intensity—unless they “cooperate” with the 
  Sight in some way. For example, you might try 
  to remove a nasty spell effect from a target with 
  the Sight active, in which case the Sight acts 
  kind of like a surgeon’s camera, allowing you to 
  focus on what you need to work on (the spell) 
  without facing the block. For unrelated actions, 
  such as shooting a gun, driving a car, or drawing 
  a picture, the Sight is more of a distraction than 
  a helpful tool. 
  In either case, when you take an action that 
  is not just perception, you skip the Lore roll to 
  understand what you’re Seeing—you’re too busy 
  with whatever you’re doing to perceive anything 
  more than a simple description.
  On the other 
  hand, some-
  thing could 
  grab your 
  attention at 
  an inopportune 
  moment—or 
  you could 
  simply be 
  forced to 
  look at 
  something you 
  didn’t intend—
  thus increasing 
  the intensity. 
  Sounds like a 
  great compel 
  to me.
  If I’m reading this right, the 
  action taken when opening 
  the Sight DOESN’T 
  count as an exchange for 
  defending against it, right? 
  So, it’s Open, Assess, Defend, 
  Attempt to Close...?
  Yup! though you might have 
  multiple assess/defend cycles 
  depending on how long you look, 
  and you can’t attempt to close 
  until you’ve successfully defended.
  
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  Example: Harry is using the Sight to take a 
  look at someone who’s in inarticulate pain and 
  fear—likely the result of a nasty spell. He opens 
  his third eye. It turns out he’s right. Someone 
  seems to have wrapped glowing purple psychic 
  barbed wire around this guy, ravaging him 
  and leaving him psychologically brutalized and 
  bleeding. 
  That’s what he sees. How do the dice play 
  out? The GM sets the intensity at Good to 
  start—it’s pretty nasty, but Harry’s seen nasty 
  before, and he’s keeping his attention focused on 
  this one guy.
  First up, Harry makes his Lore roll against 
  a Good difficulty and hits it straight on. He’s 
  fine with that—he’s pretty sure of his interpre-
  tation of what he’s seeing here anyway, so there’s 
  no real need to ask questions.
  Next, the GM rolls the Good intensity as a 
  psychic attack on Harry. Looking at something 
  like this is going to affect him. The roll comes 
  out at +1, for a Great attack—ugh. Harry 
  rolls his Discipline to defend and lucks out with 
  a Superb, beating the attack—no psychic stress 
  for now.
  But Harry realizes he needs to keep the 
  Sight up in order to get a grip on this nasty spell 
  effect and pull it off of its victim. As he contends 
  with the spell, he gets a little “bruised,” taking a 
  point of stress from the intensity “attack” in the 
  following exchange.
  When he eventually gets his hands around 
  the spell fully, it turns on him and successfully 
  attacks him. He falls to the floor, and the GM 
  hits him with the temporary aspect: Lost 
  Control of Where I’m Looking.
  Murphy bursts in the door, and Harry 
  looks at her, seeing her truly. The GM decides 
  to boost the intensity here, taking it up to 
  Great—Murphy is an emotionally intense 
  person and central to the story, so the intensity 
  of her appearance in the Sight should be higher 
  than the typical Good. Harry must struggle to 
  close his third eye against the terrible beauty of 
  what he beholds…
  The Sight Sucks!
  So, you may be reading through this and 
  wondering why anyone in his right mind would 
  use the Sight, given its ability to shatter your 
  mind into a thousand pieces if you look at the 
  wrong thing for longer than a second. Setting 
  aside questions of sanity, there’s still plenty of 
  reason to use the Sight.
  Foremost is the idea that the Sight lets you 
  see something it would be impossible to see 
  otherwise. That’s a big deal. Sure, you might end 
  up finding some of the same information out via 
  other means, over a longer period of time, but as 
  with all elements of magic, it’s less about doing 
  something you just plain couldn’t do under any 
  circumstances eventually, and much more about 
  getting at what you need to know right now. 
  It’s a short-cut. And like many a short-cut, 
  sometimes it takes you through a bad part of 
  town.
  This is true. Magic doesn’t 
  solve anything… It just makes 
  things more complex.
  
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  Soulgazing
  The first time (and first time only) someone 
  with the Soulgaze ability (page 174) meets the 
  gaze  of  someone else with a mortal soul for 
  more than a few moments, they enter a state 
  called soulgazing. Generally, this can’t happen 
  unless both parties want to make eye contact. 
  However, one might trick the other into 
  holding the gaze (see “And Then Our Eyes Met,” 
  page 228). All soulgazing must be done in person 
  (no soulgazes via webcam!). 
  When it comes right down to it, a soulgaze 
  is a narrow, focused, specific application of the 
  Sight—using the Sight to See one person, with 
  the dials turned up to eleven. This is a once-in-
  a-lifetime chance to look past the outer surface 
  and into the very heart of who a person is, what’s 
  going on with him, and who he might become. 
  Unfortunately, the target of a soulgaze also gains 
  this sort of insight into the gazer—even if that 
  target is a vanilla mortal.
  Of course, it’s not as simple as all that. 
  Because soulgazes are a facet of the Sight, meta-
  phor jumbles up the results for each party. You’re 
  barking up the wrong tree if you think a soul-
  gaze is “asking a question” about another person. 
  The “answer” is going to make as much nonsense 
  as it makes sense.
  Beyond that, a soulgaze is tough on both 
  parties. It’s a lot like opening up your third eye 
  without the filters in place to keep you from 
  getting knocked flat. Because a soulgaze is so 
  focused, and because it goes deep into the core 
  of who each person is, it’s very potent. It’s not 
  uncommon for untrained people to pass out 
  when they’re hit with a glimpse of someone else’s 
  soul—even trained wizards can walk away with 
  a hell of a headache and a disquieted mind.
  How It Works
  When a soulgaze happens, the two people 
  involved enter into an immediate, one-round 
  psychic contest that takes no time in the “outside” 
  world. To everyone else, the soulgaze begins and 
  ends in an instant. 
  The contest has two components. The first is 
  a mutual psychic attack. Each participant rolls his 
  Conviction as an attack, defended by the other’s 
  Discipline, dealing mental stress if successful. 
  At each player’s option, the attack may serve as 
  a maneuver instead, landing a temporary aspect 
  on the other person if successful.
  Example: Harry Dresden and John Marcone 
  lock eyes for the first time, and a soulgaze 
  happens. Marcone, an NPC, is set for this 
  encounter—he knows what a soulgaze is, 
  he’s expecting it, and he has a few fate points 
  in hand to make sure his rolls go the way he 
  wants. Harry’s just started investigating a 
  mystery and can’t afford to spend fate points on 
  the exchange—he knows he’ll need them when 
  things get nasty later on. 
  Marcone makes his Conviction roll first 
  and does reasonably well, getting a Great 
  result. He’s just looking to get Harry’s atten-
  tion, so he decides to call this a maneuver. 
  Harry’s Discipline roll is solid, leaving him 
  with a Great result—but since Marcone went 
  for a maneuver, that’s still Marcone’s success. 
  The GM takes a few moments to think about 
  what sort of an aspect she’s going to drop on 
  Harry’s head, and she talks it out a bit with 
  Jim, Harry’s player. She and Jim agree to deter-
  mine the aspect after the rest of the soulgaze 
  is resolved.
  On the other side of the soulgaze, Harry 
  has no patience for the intrusion of a mob 
  boss and goes for an outright attack. He rolls 
  a Conviction attack—usually a strong suit 
  for him—but his roll stinks, leaving him with 
  a Fair. Marcone’s Discipline roll exceeds Fair 
  with little difficulty, leaving Harry’s angry 
  indignation sliding off him like it’s nothing.
  The second component is information; each 
  gazer gets an involved, metaphorical glimpse of 
  the other’s soul which is described by the GM. 
  The essential nature of each participant is made 
  plain to the other; while some details may be 
  hidden, it is crystal clear who each person is. 
  This might result in a character aspect (as in, 
  one from the sheet) being revealed to one or 
  both participants—if you took stress or conse-
  quences in the first part, it’s safe to say the other 
  person knows an aspect of yours. (If you want to 
  use your soulgaze roll as a maneuver, the aspect 
  you place still has to say something about your 
  essential nature, even if you’re using it to your 
  advantage.)
  Example (Continued): Since Harry is a PC 
  and Marcone is an NPC, there’s no strong 
  reason for them to get into the details of what 
  Marcone sees. The GM describes Marcone 
  simply nodding, as if he’s filing away a piece 
  of information in some big mental Rolodex. 
  Harry knows he’s been weighed and measured. 
  Not that 
  a wizard 
  could USE 
  a webcam.
  
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  But then the GM gets into a description of 
  what Marcone is like inside and it’s unsettling: 
  he’s a pure predator, motivated by something 
  dark and secret, and practically fearless. This is 
  not someone Harry wants to piss off. With that 
  done, the GM concludes the soulgaze with the 
  results of Marcone’s maneuver, dropping the 
  temporary aspect Marcone Has a Tiger’s 
  Soul on Harry, giving Gentleman Johnny a 
  free tag in the conversation that follows.
  Once the rolls and the revelations are done, 
  the soulgaze ends and “real time” resumes.
  Who and What Can 
  You Soulgaze?
  It’s not as clear-cut as “human” or “not human.” 
  We know that Harry has avoided making eye-
  contact with Kincaid, who’s a half-man, half-
  something, apparently. Given the example of 
  Thomas Raith, wizards should be able to enter 
  into a soulgaze with a White Court vampire. 
  But other vampires seem not to trigger a soul-
  gaze, and faeries—never having been human to 
  begin with—aren’t any kind of a problem.
  The question here might simply be how 
  close to human the target is, or how far from 
  humanity the target of the soulgaze has turned. 
  This doesn’t have a clean, game-rule answer—
  but you can certainly use a character’s refresh 
  (page 20) as one indication of whether or not 
  it’s an option. Those with zero or less are more 
  likely to have turned away from humanity—if 
  indeed they were ever human—than those with 
  a bit of free will still in the cards. 
  Beyond even this—since we’re talking about 
  eye contact here—there are plenty of bad things 
  that could happen even if a soulgaze isn’t on the 
  table. Lock eyes with a Black Court vampire and 
  you might find yourself under sudden psychic 
  assault (and if you’re particularly unlucky, that’s 
  merely a prelude to your new job description as 
  a Renfield). Plenty of Nevernever nasties are 
  happy to crawl right into your head through 
  the open windows of your eyes—a fact that 
  most of the knowledgeable folks in the super-
  natural community keep in mind at all times. 
  Sure, it might mean they look like a bunch of 
  antisocial, shifty-eyed skulkers, but they had 
  that image going for them already. At least not 
  making eye contact has the advantage of being a 
  survival skill.
  So, the word “soul” is getting thrown around 
  a lot here. What’s a soul? Mortals’ concept of 
  a singular, discrete, unchanging “soul” is pretty 
  off the mark. 
  Here’s the deal: the mortal soul can be in 
  several places at the same time and is more 
  than one thing at a time. It dwindles and it 
  grows. It can be given, taken, shared, burned. It 
  can glow with light or throb with darkness. It 
  is the essence of an individual. It is the cream 
  floating atop the milk of your fleshy existence. 
  It partakes of nature and supernature.
  William, for your “game” purposes in this 
  chapter, whenever you say “soul,” I think 
  you should be talking about that idea as it 
  manifests for an individual. It’s a convenient 
  (if fuzzy, vague, and limited) shorthand—
  much like any concept that magic touches 
  upon. It’s an imprecise effort by mortals to 
  sum up something more vast and complicated 
  than they can understand with a simple word.
  
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  And Then Our Eyes Met
  Accidental eye contact is the stuff of good soul-
  gazes. So how do you make it happen in your 
  game? Do you, both the GM and players, want 
  it to be a “story-driven” event or a “this could be 
  fun, let’s see what happens” event? In either case, 
  accidental eye contact should be dirt-simple.
  For story-driven soulgazes—where it just 
  seems like it’s the right moment for one to 
  happen—GMs should consider compelling a 
  wizard’s wizardly aspects; if the PC in question 
  isn’t the wizard, compel an aspect that might 
  drive the character to hesitate in looking away. If 
  the player accepts the compel—bam! The soul-
  gaze happens, and the player gets some extra 
  fate points.
  If there’s no strong story reason for the eye 
  contact to happen, but it would be fun if it did, 
  GMs have another option (though compels are 
  still a great, simple way to drive things even in 
  this case): make a skill roll out of it. A number 
  of skills are appropriate here, but Discipline is 
  a good fallback; it represents concentration, and 
  one certainly has to be mindful to avoid acci-
  dental contact. If a player makes an argument 
  for using another skill (e.g., Alertness represents 
  reaction time), that works just as well. The GM 
  should set a difficulty that seems appropriate—
  lower if she doesn’t mind it not happening, 
  higher (but not unattainable) if it’s something 
  she’d like to see happen. In this case, failure 
  means the character makes eye contact. As 
  always, no fair calling for a skill roll if a compel 
  has already come onto the table; it’s one or the 
  other, not both.
  It’s also possible that eye contact may not 
  be entirely accidental, at least for one party. If 
  someone’s trying to trick a wizard (or vice-versa) 
  into a soulgaze, that’s a straight-up contest of 
  skills—the tricker’s Deceit against the trickee’s 
  Empathy, perhaps—with the trick working on 
  a tie or better (it’s a maneuver). This method 
  works best when the PC is the one doing the 
  trickery, but particularly sneaky NPCs (like the 
  city’s big mafia boss) may try it on occasion, too.
  Hexing
  Mortal spellcasters and technology just don’t 
  get along. When the spells start flying, the tech 
  starts frying.
  This effect is called hexing and it’s a basic 
  thing that nearly every practitioner of the arts 
  must contend with when living in the modern 
  world. Here, we’ll talk about what causes hexing, 
  and how to make it work for (and against) you 
  in your game.
  First up: why does hexing happen for a mortal 
  spellcaster? Why don’t the immortal creatures of 
  the Nevernever cause city-wide blackouts when-
  ever they go for a jog around Chicago?
  When it comes down to it, magic is a 
  powerful force that can be directed like a laser 
  in the hands of an unconflicted being. Creatures 
  from the Nevernever usually fit this bill. Their 
  nature and their will are in unity—in other 
  words, they don’t have a “free will” or conscious-
  ness that’s separate from their nature. Look at 
  Mab, the Faerie Queen of the Winter Court: she 
  is who she is, through and through. If Mab turns 
  you into a newt, she’s doing that because her 
  nature dictates that she turns you into a newt, 
  and she has no doubts about it.
  I don’t understand mortal “free will” all that 
  much. Doesn’t make any sense.
  On the other hand, look at a mortal spell-
  caster—he has his nature as a human being, and 
  he also has free will. These things are sometimes 
  at odds. He has mixed emotions and doubts and 
  so forth.
  When he throws magic around, he has to have 
  99.9% of his mind in line with what he’s doing—
  he has to believe that he can do it, through and 
  through—but it’s not perfect. Unlike the uncon-
  flicted beings of the Nevernever, a mortal spell-
  caster has pesky things like self-doubt, late rent, 
  emotions, a twitch in that hand that got burned 
  by a flamethrower—you know, the usual cornu-
  copia of errant thoughts that plague normal 
  folks. So that leaves us with a tiny fraction of his 
  mind not entirely on the task at hand, and that 
  means there’s a smidge of magic that’s not being 
  guided by his will. Not to mention that a prac-
  titioner is always at least a little magically active, 
  so even when spellcraft isn’t at work, particularly 
  powerful emotions can call up a modicum of 
  magical energy without the guy realizing it—or 
  having much control over it.
  My hand got better. 
  You don’t have to keep 
  bringing it up! Honest!
  
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  However it happens, that mote of uncon-
  trolled magic ends up “leaking” out of the spell-
  caster, and somehow gets inside of advanced 
  technology and screws it up. That’s why the 
  hexing effect happens for mortal spellcasters—
  they aren’t perfectly unconflicted, so stuff shorts 
  out. The more delicate the tech, the more likely 
  a wizard’s mere presence will muck up its works.
  Part of what plays into the likelihood that 
  spellcraft will short out technology accidentally 
  is, simply, power. Consider the 0.1% concept 
  from earlier. If we’re talking about just a small 
  amount of power going through the “conduit” of 
  the spellcaster (say, a weak ectomancer), 0.1% of 
  it isn’t very much at all—barely enough to give a 
  toaster a hiccup. But higher up the scale (say, a 
  White Council wizard), the “oomph” is definitely 
  there to give even non-electric machinery some 
  trouble. However, this is mitigated somewhat, 
  since higher power in a spellcaster usually dove-
  tails with higher efficiency due to training—the 
  mage’s power is used more effectively, so less 
  goes to waste, and thus less stray magic leaks out 
  into the world.
  Yeah, But Why?
  We could theorize all day as to why “stray 
  magic” causes technology to fry. Perhaps the 
  magical power coursing through the cells of a 
  wizard affects the energy state of electrons in 
  his vicinity? (This would definitely screw up any 
  technology that includes a transistor or silicon 
  chip.)
  Maybe the root cause is magic’s bending of 
  probability. That’s certainly supported by the 
  facts; after all it’s very improbable that when 
  some lady points at an insolent minion, fire 
  will leap from her hand and burn his face off. 
  That’s assuming probability enters into it at all. 
  A scientist looking at this might say quantum 
  mechanical effects rely on probability, and magic 
  messes up the math.
  Maybe it’s more a question of what’s going on 
  in the back of the caster’s mind and how he was 
  raised. If he believes something technological is 
  complex, then maybe that’s where his subcon-
  scious sends those stray bits of magic first. This 
  would certainly explain why some wizards can 
  get along with 1950’s era technology, while 
  others need to stay closer to the beginning of the 
  Twentieth Century in order to get anything to 
  work reliably. 
  Or maybe it’s just a case of technology being 
  too new and magic attacking the thing that’s 
  newest, most different, and least rooted in the 
  collective mind of man. After all, a computer 
  is a pretty new concept to someone who’s been 
  running around for several hundred years. The 
  idea of computers is not as powerful as, say, the 
  idea of a simple combustion engine and so on, 
  because it’s not as old—it hasn’t had the chance 
  to accrete “significance.” So maybe the strength 
  of the conceptual reality resists the stray magic 
  and keeps older technology safe. 
  Considering that magic is a force guided by 
  belief, there’s definitely at least some of that 
  playing into what technology a wizard or other 
  practitioner will short out when he blows a 
  gasket. Stray magic is very likely “spun” by a prac-
  titioner’s core beliefs. For many mages, you could 
  fairly say that, while their spells are defined by 
  what they believe will happen, the side effects are 
  what they don’t believe will happen. So, if they 
  don’t trust cars, phones, or elevators, their stray 
  magic tends to reinforce that mistrust.
  In the end, nobody really knows for certain 
  what causes hexing—just that it happens, and 
  usually in the most inconvenient of ways.
  How It Works
  We know that hexing happens in two main 
  ways: purposefully, by the focused application of 
  the spellcaster’s will, and accidentally, either as 
  a side-effect of spellcasting or from a burst of 
  strong emotion on the part of a practitioner. The 
  accidental case is unique to mortal spellcasters. 
  Most magic-capable creatures of the Nevernever 
  don’t have unintentional side-effects on tech-
  nology; they can use their talent to deliberately 
  affect technology if they want to, but it’s pretty 
  much beneath their notice. 
  Accidental hexing is handled as a function of 
  compels, usually of the wizard’s high concept 
  (or any appropriately emotional aspect)—some-
  thing gets hexed, it puts the wizard in a bind, 
  and that means the wizard’s player gets some 
  fate points. Otherwise, you can just describe it 
  as colorful special effects—the lights spark, the 
  radio picks up static, and so on. You don’t need 
  to worry about any other fiddly bits for this, 
  really—just keep it in mind as something that 
  can happen whenever the wizard has a sudden 
  emotional reaction or is distracted or under 
  stress. 
  Butters 
  certainly 
  has a few 
  theories. 
  Something 
  about 
  electro-
  magnetism 
  gone wild.
  Not that 
  many of them 
  would agree 
  with you. 
  Still, the 
  perspective 
  does have 
  some merit…
  
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  living With magic
  Remember, if the GM offers the compel 
  and the player buys it off, she shouldn’t push it. 
  Because the player bought out of the compel, the 
  hexing doesn’t happen, or the fact that the hexing 
  occurs doesn’t inconvenience the wizard in the 
  proposed way.
  Purposeful (or deliberate) hexing is resolved as 
  an evocation effect (page 249), though any practi-
  tioner can do it—even ones who don’t normally 
  have access to the Evocation power. Any “stray” 
  mortal magic messes up technology, even if 
  the spellcaster isn’t adept at channeling other 
  magical energy directly. For more details on 
  how to resolve this, see “Deliberate Hexing” in 
  Spellcasting (page 258). That section also contains 
  guidelines on how to appropriately scale a 
  hexing-related compel when you narrate it.
  Thresholds
  Commonly, the word threshold is used to 
  describe the barrier that is formed around a 
  home by the simple act of people living in it 
  and regarding it as a place of safety, shelter, and 
  family. The stronger the sense of “home,” the 
  greater the threshold. (Unfortunately, inviting 
  someone in dispels its protective benefits.)
  Building a strong threshold is difficult. 
  Spellcasters can (and often need to) build 
  theirs up with a series of wards, but there’s no 
  real substitute for “organically” grown ones that 
  come naturally from the ideas of shelter, privacy, 
  family, sanctity, and so on. In short, without 
  a strong sense of home, thresholds are pretty 
  flimsy. Bachelors have a hard time making strong 
  thresholds (it’s a pity certain wizards aren’t very 
  good at long-term relationships), and public 
  spaces—even those with private compartments, 
  like corporate offices or hotel rooms—simply 
  cannot naturally grow thresholds. 
  But other things serve as thresholds as well. 
  In the broadest sense, the term “threshold” 
  may be given to any metaphysical barrier that 
  impedes or blocks supernatural power from 
  passing from point A to point B. A significant 
  source of running water is a prime example, as 
  it “shorts out” magical energies that try to cross 
  over or through it. Thresholds can even be 
  conceptual: the transition from night to day has 
  a weakening effect on magic precisely because it 
  is a sort of threshold.
  Some beings—especially those of pure 
  spirit—cannot cross a threshold, since they’re 
  usually using their magical power to hold their 
  material world body together. If they cross a 
  threshold without counteracting it, they just…
  melt. Some powerful creatures (such as demons) 
  manage to get around this with a physical mani-
  festation that they aren’t personally maintaining. 
  Even so, when an entity crosses a threshold in a 
  mystically manufactured body, most of the enti-
  ty’s power goes toward holding it all together, 
  limiting it to what its body can physically do.
  Spellcasters, by dint of having supernatural 
  powers, are affected by thresholds to some 
  degree. Being fleshy sorts that have a place in our 
  reality, they lack many weaknesses of pure spirit 
  beings (i.e., crossing a threshold doesn’t make the 
  wizard melt back into the Nevernever). All the 
  same, a wizard crossing a threshold uninvited 
  leaves a large amount of his supernatural power 
  at the door—not all of it, but certainly enough 
  to make him think twice. Even a spell that tries 
  to cross a threshold may be diminished.
  How It Works
  A threshold can operate in four different modes: 
  as a block, a target, a suppressor, or a source of 
  harm.
  As a block: In the most basic form, a threshold 
  acts as a free-standing block (page 210) that 
  usually doesn’t need to be maintained by a char-
  acter. The threshold has a strength level (adjec-
  tive difficulty as determined below) that opposes 
  any affected supernatural actions. As a block, it 
  sets a minimum difficulty level for the success of 
  those actions.
  As a target: Some creatures affected by the 
  block will be unable to do anything to bypass 
  it or weaken it. Other more powerful creatures 
  may be able to assail a threshold (usually only an 
  artificially created one) or tear it down. In such 
  a case, the threshold’s strength may be treated 
  as a stress track (one box per level, with conse-
  quences a possibility). The threshold’s strength 
  drops as it takes stress hits.
  As a suppressor: Many spell effects and some 
  supernatural abilities will erode or completely 
  disappear if they are carried across a threshold, 
  unless specially exempted (such as by invita-
  tion). In this case, all affected abilities and spell 
  effects lose a number of shifts of effectiveness 
  equal to the strength of the threshold. If the 
  spell affected has multiple parts to it, how the 
  All I know 
  is that this 
  effect doesn’t 
  allow me to 
  have a DVD 
  player for 
  very long.
  That ticks 
  me off.
  Seriously, 
  Billy, how 
  many times 
  are we 
  going to 
  come back 
  to this?
  By this definition, 
  magical circles 
  could be consid-
  ered thresholds, 
  but I don’t think 
  you really need 
  to worry about 
  that for the 
  purposes of the 
  game.
  
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  living With magic
  shifts are spread around may be determined 
  (and changed) on a case-by-case basis as decided 
  by the GM (though this should be done with 
  plenty of input from the affected player). In the 
  case of attack abilities, this most often manifests 
  as a reduction of the damage bonus provided, 
  acting as a penalty to the actual attack roll only 
  after the damage bonus has been reduced to 
  zero. If it isn’t clear how to “reduce” an ability, 
  then these reduction shifts might be spent on 
  improving opposing effects and efforts. 
  As a source of harm: Creatures of pure spirit 
  and other such entities are particularly vulner-
  able to crossing thresholds. They may actu-
  ally take damage from crossing one, facing an 
  attack from the threshold’s strength during 
  every exchange. The GM may choose either to 
  consider the threshold’s attack to be equal to 
  its strength, or to roll and treat the strength as 
  an attack skill. Few creatures manage to hang 
  around long in the face of such conditions, 
  especially when their defensive abilities offer 
  no protection whatsoever against this attack. 
  Depending on the nature of the vulnerability, 
  they may end up rolling a Mediocre default in 
  defense against the attack. While some might 
  be allowed to use a Conviction defense, even 
  weaker thresholds will force such a creature to 
  retreat or dissolve, if given enough time.
  Determining Strength
  Most thresholds or other things that ground 
  out magical energy (like a source of running 
  water) have a base strength of Fair (+2). 
  Most public places or places used primarily 
  for the conducting of business have a strength 
  of Mediocre (+0). Sanctified or consecrated 
  grounds (such as places of worship) are an 
  exception to this, carrying a base threshold 
  strength of Good (+3) even if they are used by 
  the public, because of the energies of faith that 
  are directed into them.
  From these guidelines, you can further 
  modify the strength of the threshold depending 
  on the circumstances of the location in ques-
  tion. Running the Game has suggestions about 
  modifying difficulties (page 311); basically, every  
  mitigating or contributing circumstance should 
  add or subtract 2 from this base total. In the case 
  of thresholds, the circumstances you’re looking 
  for are things that make them “more of ” or “less 
  of ” what they are.
  So a home where a whole family lives has a 
  stronger threshold than one where a bachelor 
  lives; this makes it “more” home-like, so the 
  strength is at a base of Great (+4). A manse 
  that houses a whole family, has been with the 
  same family for generations, and has been 
  happily occupied by the current residents for 
  most of their lives has a deep sense of “lived-in” 
  energy, so the threshold strength there would 
  be Legendary (+8)—most Nevernever nasties 
  would need assistance to enter under their 
  own power.
  Likewise, a home mostly occupied by tran-
  sients, or one in which the residents spend 
  almost no time, barely qualifies as a home at all; 
  it would have a Mediocre (+0) threshold and 
  require other supernatural protection against 
  incursion.
  That looks like Victor Sells’ lakehouse, 
  as seen through my Sight.
  Yeah, it’s meant to be!
  Thankfully no threshold there to speak of.
  
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  living With magic
  Example: Evan Montrose and company are 
  directing a group of people they rescued from 
  an angry spirit into a cathedral in the middle 
  of Baltimore called Our Lady of the Blessed 
  Lily. It was previously established in the session 
  that this cathedral is one of the city’s oldest 
  and that it pretty much forms the bedrock for 
  the Catholic community in Baltimore. That’s 
  two circumstances that “enhance” its status as 
  sacred ground, so the GM decides that it has a 
  base threshold of Epic (+7)—4 levels up from 
  Good (+3).
  Later, those same people try to take shelter 
  in another church after Our Lady of the Blessed 
  Lily is bombed by the spirit’s summoner (yeah, 
  it was a really bad day for them). The only 
  church they manage to find is very new and 
  located in a strip mall; the GM decides that this 
  diminishes it as sacred ground, and rules that it 
  only has a base threshold of Average (+1).
  The 
  Laws of Magic
  The White Council’s Wardens are the main law 
  enforcement body of the supernatural world—
  at least as far as mortals go. For the Wardens, 
  the Laws of Magic are sacrosanct. The Laws of 
  Magic are clear, concise, and offer little in the 
  way of “wiggle room”—at least in the views of 
  some Wardens—but are very much written to 
  communicate the spirit of the law, which is the 
  mode in which they are enforced. (This stands 
  in contrast to the other major body of super-
  natural legalese, the Unseelie Accords, where 
  there is no spirit of the law—only the letter of 
  it. See OW15.) 
  Here, we’ll discuss what it actually means to 
  break one of the Laws of Magic and look at each 
  Law in depth, finding the grey areas in this code 
  that separates black magic from white.
  In practice, the Accords and the Laws are 
  polar opposites. The Laws are clearly spelled 
  out, but there are some grey areas where 
  flexible standards of enforcement are seen. 
  The Accords, meanwhile, are incredibly 
  Byzantine, but absolutely iron-clad when 
  enforced—often to a fault.
  Breaking the 
  Laws of Magic
  While the Laws of Magic may seem more like a 
  guide for living right as a spellcaster, they exist 
  for a very serious, very palpable reason: when-
  ever you make use of true black magic—using 
  your talent in spellcraft in a way that breaks one 
  of the Laws—you change yourself, darkening 
  your soul. 
  Whenever you choose to break one of the 
  Laws of Magic, you’re crossing a very real line. 
  By taking such an action, you’ve altered your 
  self-image and your beliefs—the very basis of 
  you—to be the sort of person who breaks that 
  Law. Often, once you do that, there’s no turning 
  back. (Does white magic change you back 
  once you’ve gone over the line? Maybe. See “Is 
  Redemption Possible?” on page 246 for more.) 
  Are you the kind of person who reads 
  thoughts, twists minds, and kills with magic? 
  There are many who believe that if you cross that 
  line even once, you will be. Inevitably. Forever.
  In this way, the Laws aren’t a legal entity 
  at all; they’re a set of magical principles that, 
  when broken, lead to a fundamental change in 
  the nature of the person who broke them. The 
  White Council also enforces them as laws, but 
  that’s in addition to this fundamental change. 
  You could say that the Laws exist as two sepa-
  rate concepts with 99% overlap—the Wardens 
  of the White Council enforce one concept (law), 
  while reality metaphysically enforces the other 
  (nature).
  Non-People Don’t 
  Count... Or Do They?
  The White Council has made clear that their 
  Laws don’t apply to entities that aren’t people. 
  The Laws of Magic are strongly oriented on 
  protecting the lives and rights of mortals. 
  Creatures and folks that the Council might clas-
  sify as “monsters” are fair game.
  With that said, this is a rule of thumb where 
  it’s easy to stumble into the grey area, with 
  things open to interpretation by the Warden on 
  the scene—and given that Wardens have a lot 
  of latitude regarding the whole “judge, jury, and 
  executioner” bit, it’s a grey area that you want to 
  avoid stepping into as a spellcaster. 
  Trust me. 
  The impact 
  of breaking a 
  Law is real. 
  And I fight it 
  every day.
  
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  living With magic
  When Harry captured Toot-toot, a faerie, 
  during the Storm Front case, he had to 
  defend his actions to Warden Morgan. This 
  suggests that the even-more-than-usually-hard-
  assed Morgan was inclined to look at Toot as a 
  person, insofar as violating the Fourth Law goes. 
  Harry made the case that he wasn’t enthralling 
  Toot-toot, since no compulsion was over-
  riding Toot’s ability to choose—the little faerie 
  still could have said “no.” Luckily, Harry made 
  it past that encounter with Morgan with his 
  head intact.
  When a victim is involved (though some of 
  the Laws are victimless), one standard for judg-
  ment is whether or not the victim has a soul. 
  Most of the Laws amount to actions which 
  violate the sanctity of life and break the bonds 
  that tether a soul to a mortal being, whether 
  by destroying the body or destroying the mind. 
  This is certainly the most straightforward way of 
  looking at things: first and foremost, if a soul is 
  involved, the stakes are high and the Laws are 
  sitting up and paying attention. 
  Beyond that standard, there’s a fuzzy border 
  dividing people from monsters. Faeries don’t 
  have souls, but they might still be seen as people, 
  at least judging by Morgan’s reaction to Harry 
  and Toot. In game terms, one way to identify 
  whether or not a creature might count as a 
  person is to look at his refresh level (page 20). If 
  it’s positive—allowing the creature to exercise 
  at least something like free will through the use 
  of fate points—then there’s a decent chance this 
  creature might be seen as a person, even without 
  a soul. That said, when dealing with a zero-
  or-less refresh human, he (arguably) still has a 
  soul—so the Laws still apply, however far gone 
  he might be.
  Ultimately, this decision should be made to 
  suit your own sensibilities for your own game. 
  The best interpretation is the one you feel will 
  work for you instinctively, the one that will 
  generate the kinds of stories you’re looking 
  to tell.
  Enforcement
  The Laws are generally understood to apply only 
  to humans when it comes to actions taken by 
  the Wardens; however, the Laws aren’t worded 
  that way. This is deliberate vagueness; it gives 
  the Wardens the “spirit of the law” latitude to 
  investigate would-be warlocks before they go 
  over the edge. 
  The attitude here is based on the same 
  thinking that recognizes that serial killers often 
  start their careers by torturing animals (which 
  isn’t, say, as illegal as doing the same to a person) 
  before eventually moving up to humans. 
  In practice, this attitude gets mixed results, 
  including the persecution of folks who aren’t 
  actually breaking any Laws or taking that 
  short trip to Warlocktown. Still, a Warden 
  has never actually executed someone for any 
  kind of “pseudo-breaking” of the Laws (that we 
  know of)—though they are fond of calling for 
  in-depth investigations on the wizards in ques-
  tion. Once the Wardens start poking around, 
  such investigations often find that a Law actually 
  has been broken.
  What Happens When 
  You Break the Laws
  In game terms, whenever your character crosses 
  the line for the first time—breaking a Law that 
  he has not broken before—he must immediately 
  take a new Lawbreaker ability. A Lawbreaker 
  ability is a supernatural power (page 158) that 
  reduces your refresh by one—you should sit 
  up and take notice here. (Remember, if a char-
  acter’s refresh ever drops to zero or below, he 
  stops being a viable PC. He loses his free will, 
  becoming a creature subservient to his nature, 
  always acting in accordance with what he is 
  rather than who he could be. Break enough of 
  the Laws of Magic, and the cost of these abilities 
  will eat you alive.)
  Every Lawbreaker ability offers the same 
  “benefits.” You gain +1 on your skill rolls when 
  using magic to break that Law again. If you’re 
  looking to dye your wool darker, the bonus 
  increases by one if you have three or more 
  Lawbreaker abilities in total. Similarly, if you 
  break the same Law on three or more occasions, 
  your bonus on that ability increases by one, 
  increasing its refresh cost to –2. 
  The effects of being a Lawbreaker go beyond 
  the simple application of these abilities, however. 
  Once a character has chosen to cross the line and 
  break a Law of Magic, that decision is a part of 
  him however you look at it. Consider replacing 
  or rephrasing one or more of his aspects to show 
  this. Even without such an alteration, that choice 
  to step a little bit into the world of black magic 
  becomes an important lens to view the charac-
  ter’s aspects through, and the GM and player 
  should start pursuing story elements that bring 
  the issue front and center.
  Wizards and 
  sorcerers 
  usually have 
  a really 
  low refresh 
  to begin with, 
  don’t they? 
  Yeah. 
  the costs on 
  the lawbreaker 
  abilities will 
  have an impact 
  pretty quick.
  With great 
  power comes 
  great liability.
  
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  Some changes of aspect are mandatory. Once 
  your character breaks a particular Law three 
  times, you must replace one of his aspects with 
  a new version that is twisted by the violation 
  of that Law of Magic (it’s a lot like taking an 
  extreme consequence—which isn’t coincidental; 
  see page 205). Keep a running tally of the viola-
  tions; for every three occasions a Law is broken, 
  replace another different aspect until all of your 
  character’s aspects have been subverted by his 
  descent into dark magic.
  The Lawbreaker ability set is found in 
  Supernatural Powers, page 182.
  So Who’s to Judge?
  Who determines that a character has crossed 
  the line? This is something that a gaming group 
  should decide on as a policy for their specific 
  game. Many groups will want the GM to be the 
  arbiter of such things, and that’s fine. Others 
  might go for a majority consensus of the people 
  at the table. 
  Regardless of who has authority, one thing 
  you’ll want to discuss in advance—unless 
  you’re okay with breaking out into a debate in 
  the middle of play—is whether or not “grey 
  area” violations of the Laws of Magic count 
  just as much as the black-and-white violations 
  do. Our default assumption is that grey area 
  violations are just as bad, forcing the acquisi-
  tion of a Lawbreaker stunt. At the same time, 
  we are happy to recommend a “getting off with 
  a warning” stance on such things if you find it 
  more entertaining to have characters skirting 
  the edge.
  One thing you may want to consider when 
  thinking about whether or not a Law of Magic 
  has been broken is the question of intent. 
  Consider the inferno Harry set off at the 
  masquerade ball during the Grave Peril case. 
  He set out to destroy all of the vampires there, 
  expecting to incinerate nothing but evil in that 
  gathering; but human bodies were found after-
  wards. Sure, they were probably already dead at 
  the hands of the Red Court—but were they, for 
  certain? 
  Whether or not the Wardens would call it a 
  violation of the First Law, does Harry’s fire break 
  that Law for the purposes of Harry’s soul (and 
  thus, would it affect his stunts and aspects), since 
  Harry did not intend to kill anyone other than a 
  murderous bunch of Red Court vampires? The 
  answer can, and indeed should, be different from 
  game to game, from group to group. As such, 
  we don’t have an official answer to this question 
  either way. 
  It comes down to this: how much intent 
  matters is up to you.
  Breaking Laws Prior to Play
  It’s certainly possible to come up with a char-
  acter concept based on someone who broke 
  a Law of Magic prior to the beginning of play. 
  Take the appropriate Lawbreaker ability and 
  explain why the Wardens haven’t come along 
  and done their vorpal best to snicker-snack your 
  head from your shoulders (starting out under 
  the Doom of Damocles is one way to do that). 
  Any Lawbreaker ability taken during character 
  creation will knock off its usual refresh cost, like 
  any other stunt. Take care to avoid creating a 
  character who cannot be played!
  This kind of stuff haunts 
  me. Thanks for rubbing 
  salt in the wound, Billy.
  
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  The Doom of Damocles
  The ostentatiously-named Doom of Damocles 
  is the White Council’s idea of “going easy” on 
  someone who has broken one of the Laws 
  of Magic and gotten caught in the act. The 
  Doom, once pronounced upon an errant prac-
  titioner, operates as a probationary period with 
  no specified end date and with a “one screw-up 
  and you’re dead” policy. It can only be granted 
  as a reprieve from a death sentence by a vote of 
  the Senior Council, the White Council’s ruling 
  body. A similar vote is required to lift the Doom.
  Even if a good case of extenuating circum-
  stances is placed before the Senior Council, 
  the Doom is rarely exercised as an option. This 
  is due to the Council’s attitude that a death 
  sentence is a surer, safer, and swifter way to 
  get to the same result that will be happening 
  anyway. 
  But that’s not the whole of it. Even if there 
  are some sympathetic ears on the Council, 
  no one is allowed to stand under the Doom 
  without a sponsor—and that sponsor’s fate 
  is linked to that of the Doomed. If the Doom 
  ends, as it often can, with the death sentence 
  carried out, the sentence applies to the sponsor 
  as well. Some sponsors have been able to avoid 
  this fate by acting preemptively to stop (i.e., 
  kill) their Doomed apprentices at the first sign 
  of risk, but often it’s just better to stand back, 
  ditch the idea of sponsorship, and let the blade 
  fall. In recent memory, only Ebenezar McCoy 
  and Harry Dresden (formerly under the Doom 
  himself) have been brave—or stupid—enough 
  to step up to the job.
  Characters under the Doom of Damocles, 
  whether as an offender or as a sponsor, should 
  take the Doom as an aspect. It’s certainly going 
  to have a strong (even constant) effect on the 
  character’s life, and it would be a shame not to 
  milk that for every fate point it’s worth. (For one 
  story idea centered on the Doom, see the note 
  on redemption at the end of the discussion of 
  the Laws—page 246.)
  The First Law
  Never Take a Life.
  Whenever magic is used to kill, some of the 
  positive force of life that mankind is able to 
  bring into the universe is truly destroyed—
  removed from the universal equation. Kill with 
  magic, and the darker things inside and outside 
  of creation grow just a bit stronger. Whether 
  you’re using magic directly to rip the life out of 
  someone, summoning up force or flame to kill, 
  or even murdering someone without magic and 
  then using the energy created by the death to 
  power a spell, you are breaking the First Law 
  of Magic. 
  In First Law violations, even the grey areas 
  are pretty bad. If you summon up a gust of wind 
  to knock someone off a building, you definitely 
  broke the First Law, even if it’s “just” the fall that 
  killed him.
  This is one of the easiest laws to break by 
  accident, and that’s why the White Council 
  is vigilant about keeping an eye out for any 
  dangerous magical talents in the making. They 
  may be an elitist, stodgy, Old World artifact of 
  an organization, but in the end, it’s often the 
  intervention of the White Council that prevents 
  someone’s burgeoning pyrokinetic ability from 
  burning down his house (and his family with it). 
  Accidental or not, such an incident—if people 
  die—might plant the seeds that could grow into 
  another murder-warlock on the loose.
  Luckily for the Wardens, it’s easy to root out 
  the offenders of this Law. Bodies are hard to 
  hide (especially to investigators gifted with the 
  Sight), and when magic is involved, murder can 
  be even messier than usual. If the mortal author-
  ities don’t know what to make of a bizarrely 
  mangled body, the Council does, and their ear is 
  to the ground whenever an unusual case shows 
  up at the morgue. 
  All the same, it’s important to realize here 
  that fighting is not the same as killing. Magic can 
  be used carefully, indirectly, or subtly to affect 
  a fight. Accidental deaths can happen, and in 
  those cases killing with magic still counts as 
  killing when it comes to the Lawbreaker stunt. 
  The grey area exists on the political, enforce-
  ment side: if you kill by accident, your soul is 
  still stained, but you might keep your head—
  albeit under the Doom of Damocles.
  I wonder why there aren’t more 
  sponsorships. Do the other 
  wizards LIKE this status quo?
  I think it has more to do with them liking 
  their heads attached to their necks.  But 
  I quite like being just a head at times!
  The Faerie 
  Mothers seem 
  to disagree 
  that magic 
  can destroy 
  things and 
  remove them 
  from the 
  universal 
  equation; 
  one of them 
  mentioned 
  Einstein to 
  support this!
  Before the 
  Vampire War 
  hit, it was 
  pretty much 
  a standard 
  practice for 
  the Wardens 
  to come 
  poking around 
  whenever 
  someone died 
  strangely or 
  suddenly in 
  the general 
  vicinity of a 
  spellcaster. 
  These days, 
  with the 
  Wardens 
  stretched 
  thin, that 
  can be a lot 
  rarer.
  
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  It’s also important to remember the “with 
  magic” part of the Law. This may seem like split-
  ting hairs—and some people believe that it is—
  but the First Law doesn’t apply if you, say, pull 
  out a gun and shoot someone in the back of the 
  head. There’s a reason why the Wardens carry 
  swords. Killing is part of their job description, 
  but, as defenders of the Laws, the Wardens must 
  never use magic as the means to that end.
  In your game: Your group should discuss how 
  important they want the First Law to be in play. 
  Many roleplaying games have a fairly casual atti-
  tude towards characters using their special abili-
  ties to kill others—but that should not usually 
  be the case in this game. 
  Since the Laws apply primarily to people, not 
  monsters, First Law issues can be bypassed by 
  focusing on bad guys who aren’t people. Bathe a 
  Black Court vampire in disintegrating flame and 
  you’ll get a pat on the head, not a sword to the 
  neck. To come at it another way, if you’re playing 
  the sort of game where you don’t have any spell-
  casters, you’re also liable to be free and clear of 
  the Laws. 
  If you’re looking to make the First Law a 
  part of your game, you could spend some time 
  playing around in the grey areas here, kicking 
  off a kind of supernatural legal thriller. For 
  example, consider the Knights of the Courts of 
  Faerie. They’re mortal, but bound to the Courts; 
  are they people, or has their office taken them 
  out of that particular equation? And what 
  about magical murders committed by them—
  do the Accords protect them from, at least, the 
  enforcement of the Laws by the Wardens of the 
  Council?
  Ultimately, the GM needs to be careful 
  and conscious about putting life-and-death 
  human adversaries in front of the players. We 
  certainly think a better game is had when this 
  is the case, but that’s because we like giving the 
  First Law a strong and palpable presence in the 
  game. A number of players might enjoy this as 
  well, welcoming compels directed at, say, their 
  Wizard of the White Council aspects to 
  remind them that the First Law is an obstacle to 
  their actions when a life is on the line. 
  Technically, the Laws 
  of Magic only apply to 
  mortal spellcasters. 
  I haven’t seen either 
  of the Sidhe Knights 
  at the meetings or 
  ice cream socials.
  But I think this could be a 
  fertile ground for stories in 
  someone’s game. like one of the 
  Knights whacks a council-allied 
  mortal, and there’s a movement 
  inside the council to apply the 
  laws to the situation, but the 
  Accords get in the way…Sort of 
  the reverse of what happened 
  in the deAtH mASKS case.
  Stars and stones, 
  Billy, my life is 
  complicated enough 
  here without pulling 
  more politics into it!
  
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  The Second Law
  Never Transform Another.
  The image of a witch turning someone into a 
  newt is a popular and even amusing notion, but 
  in the eyes of the White Council, it’s a deadly 
  serious matter—emphasis on deadly. The 
  Council views such transformations as tanta-
  mount to murder, and they’re pretty much right 
  on the money for one simple reason: human 
  minds like to live in human brains. Transform 
  someone into a newt, and you’ve just tried to 
  cram a human mind into a newt’s brain. Such 
  an effort (if you’re even bothering to attempt 
  it) usually ends in near-total destruction of the 
  target’s self. Even if you could manage such a 
  feat, the psychological shock the victim under-
  goes is bad enough that it would make no actual 
  difference. 
  Not to mention a lot of transformations 
  are pretty ham-handed by necessity. Warlocks 
  attempting such a change usually aren’t well-
  versed in the ins and outs of human and animal 
  biology, so they have to “fake it” with the new 
  body, putting it together based on an intuitive 
  understanding of how it all fits together. As 
  a result, the new body doesn’t have much of a 
  shelf life once the sustaining magic gives out, as 
  improvised organs rapidly fail.
  To take it a step further, let’s suppose you 
  could manage creating the physiology of a tiger, 
  but wanted to keep your target’s brain intact—
  transforming him into a big-brained jungle 
  cat. So how’d that work, exactly? Know of any 
  successful human-brain-into-tiger-body trans-
  plantations in modern science? Very simply, it 
  doesn’t work—as bad as a spellcaster might be 
  at creating a known different body type out of 
  someone’s flesh, creating an unknown body is 
  even more trouble.
  Suppose, however, that you’re able to pull 
  it off—build a designer body, keep the mind 
  intact, and keep the mind from freaking out and 
  ripping itself apart inside its brand-new noggin. 
  To an extent, you should be congratulated: 
  you’ve managed to avoid actually destroying 
  someone in order to accomplish your goal. But 
  you’ve still stuck this hapless soul inside a new 
  body without an operator’s manual. The learning 
  curve for basic survival tasks can be pretty steep, 
  and, without preparation or training, these tasks 
  might not be mastered before they become abso-
  lutely crucial. In the end, your victim is in a bad 
  way however it shakes out—death in a variety 
  of sudden messy ways, or at best, life imprison-
  ment in a body that is not his own.
  In your game: Unless one of the players has a 
  seriously strong desire to turn someone into a 
  newt, the Second Law won’t make much of an 
  appearance in the game except in the hands of a 
  bad guy. The Second Law isn’t the sort of thing 
  you can break accidentally, unlike the First. It 
  takes careful planning and a significant amount 
  of supernatural mojo (not to mention ritual time 
  investment) to pull off such a thing.
  As magical murder methods go, however, 
  a Second Law violation is pretty “clean”—the 
  body disappears, and who knows? Maybe that 
  stray cat your victim got turned into gets put to 
  sleep down at the pound (assuming the body 
  doesn’t just break down in a few days as it is)—
  though maybe it would be more entertaining 
  to have it end up as some character’s house pet. 
  Still, it’s a great twist to put on the usual “missing 
  persons” case…
  GMs should be careful about actually 
  targeting such a spell at the PCs. The threat 
  can certainly hang over their heads, but this is 
  a lot like mind control. It rips away character 
  ownership in a way that can feel pretty un-fun 
  to a player. It’s much better to go after someone 
  the PCs care about to make a palpable Second 
  Law threat.
  Fake Flesh
  Those looking for grey areas and loopholes 
  will be quick to point out that ectoplasm—real-
  seeming stuff of the Nevernever given a tempo-
  rary form and reality by magic—can be used 
  to build something that works a lot like flesh 
  (after all, the Red Court uses it to make their 
  outer fleshmasks, and some practitioners use 
  nothing but ectoplasm to create constructs to 
  house summoned spirits). You can certainly pull 
  off a number of nifty effects that way, so long as 
  you’re building on top of an otherwise unmodi-
  fied human chassis. There are still some “opera-
  tor’s manual” difficulties that can come from 
  such a change, but there are plenty of ways to 
  get around that. Unfortunately, several of them 
  involve turning over part of the transformed 
  person’s body functions over to a variety of 
  nasty spirits to take care of autopilot duties. You 
  run the risk of subverting the individual’s will 
  however you look at it—the most you’ll manage 
  is to shift the violation to another law (such as 
  the Fourth).
  Exceptions 
  do exist—
  there are 
  at least a 
  few spell-
  casters out 
  there who 
  are adept 
  at changing 
  themselves 
  into a form 
  that’s much 
  smaller than 
  a human. 
  That said, 
  I try not 
  to think 
  too hard 
  about where 
  they store 
  their minds 
  during such a 
  trans form-
  ation. The 
  Never never, 
  perhaps? 
  And if that’s 
  the case, 
  what can 
  prey on their 
  mind while 
  it’s there?
  It’s a little more 
  esoteric than 
  that, but also 
  beside the point. 
  Wizards are free 
  to transform 
  themselves under 
  the Laws; it’s the 
  transformation 
  of other people 
  that is at issue 
  here. 
  Point.
  
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  living With magic
  Shapeshifters
  So why’s transforming someone else so tough, 
  when a number of supernatural creatures 
  transform themselves into other forms with no 
  trouble at all? Like many things from the case-
  files, that question has several answers.
  First, a number of the creatures that you’re 
  thinking about—ghosts, demons, faeries, and 
  others—are straight out of the Nevernever. 
  Shapeshifting isn’t much of a problem for these 
  guys; their physical form is sort of optional to 
  begin with, so reconfiguration is, relatively 
  speaking, a breeze.
  By and large, that leaves us with humans 
  who are able to take on alternate forms of some 
  sort, and usually some nasty bit of loophole is 
  in effect. The cursed shapeshifters called loup-
  garou (OW94) change their shape—involun-
  tarily—by  getting possessed by a ravenous 
  demonic spirit, and others such as the hexen-
  wulf (OW93) form a pact (usually brokered by 
  someone with real power) with a kind of hunter-
  spirit that knows how to keep the human mind 
  “safe” and can drive the new body according to the 
  host’s instincts. Sadly, the hunter-spirit’s nature 
  tends to start bleeding into the human’s mind, 
  whittling away its sense of self and replacing 
  it by inches. In most of these cases, the trans-
  formation these people undergo is the result of 
  someone else making it possible through a viola-
  tion of the Second Law. Sure, their minds might 
  not be destroyed by it—initially. But the long-
  term effects on their minds are still pretty toxic.
  That leaves us with the margin case: natural 
  talents like the guys and gals in the Alphas 
  (OW92) and the change-the-mind-not-the-
  body lycanthropes (OW94). These folks have a 
  natural gift for taking on another form without 
  wrecking their own minds in the process. It’s 
  easy to see these as learned abilities—some 
  shapeshifters may have the aptitude, but still 
  need training to access it. 
  Regardless of the origin, “natural talents” 
  break down into two kinds. When the body 
  actually changes (as with straight-up were-
  wolves like the Alphas), the new form usually 
  hews close to nature, too—actual wolves, for 
  example, instead of some super-steroidal mega-
  wolf like a hexenwulf or loup-garou. And while 
  there’s an initial learning curve to overcome 
  with “piloting” the new body, it’s very much a 
  case of practice making perfect. Lycanthropes 
  (and others like them) leave the body out of the 
  equation entirely; they connect their minds with 
  the nature of the beast without taking its form, 
  but still benefit from some beastly attributes.
  However you slice it, such natural talents 
  never transform someone other than themselves, 
  so the Second Law doesn’t enter into it. 
  The Third Law
  Never Invade the 
  Thoughts of Another.
  The Third Law, though it might seem to be 
  about a relatively harmless act, recognizes a 
  single, simple principle: a violation of the mind 
  is as much a crime as violation of the body—by 
  some lights, it’s worse. 
  To read someone else’s thoughts, you have to 
  cross one of the most fundamental borders in 
  all of creation: the line that divides one person 
  from another. When you break into someone 
  else’s mind to listen to his thoughts, you’re 
  disrupting the natural order of things. Think of 
  the mind as a locked house and think of yourself 
  as someone lacking a key. Sure, you might need 
  to get in there for the very best of reasons, but 
  once you’ve done it there’s a picked lock, broken 
  window, or busted hinge somewhere. In short, 
  the act is always a violent intrusion, no matter 
  how “gentle” you are with it.
  Even beyond breaking the sanctity of anoth-
  er’s thoughts, there are problems with what 
  you find when you invade someone’s mind. 
  Knowledge is power, after all, and when you 
  get inside someone’s head, you take a posi-
  tion of profound power over him. And in this 
  case, we’re definitely talking the kind of power 
  that corrupts. Not to mention, it’s sort of the 
  cognitive equivalent of seeing how sausage gets 
  made—best left as something you don’t see and 
  don’t think about too much.
  Furthermore, there are plenty of secrets in 
  the world that are meant to be kept. If there’s an 
  institutional reason behind the White Council’s 
  establishment of the Third Law, it’s all about the 
  secrets. Plenty of wizards keep secrets they don’t 
  want others hearing about, and discovered secrets 
  have a way of getting out. Discover enough 
  secrets, and you end up destroying a lot of what 
  keeps the world a civilized place—and civiliza-
  tion is one of those little innovations that helps 
  keep most of mankind safe from the darkness 
  lurking around the edges.
  though being 
  a mega-wolf 
  would be 
  kinda cool.
  mega-wolf 
  assemble!
  ...And I’ll 
  form the 
  head!
  Wouldn’t that 
  be Bob?
  
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  living With magic
  Finally, reading someone’s thoughts means 
  you have to open your mind up to “receive” the 
  signal. The problem here is that you can’t always 
  be sure what else you’ll pick up when you do 
  that. Who knows what sort of nastiness could be 
  “broadcasting,” hoping you’ll pick them up? And 
  what will happen to you when you do? (In game 
  terms, reading someone’s thoughts always makes 
  you a viable target for mental attacks from both 
  your victim and whatever supernatural nastiness 
  might be in the area.)
  In your game: While it’s hard to break the 
  Third Law accidentally, it’s very easy to want to 
  break it. A “justified” violation of the Third Law 
  can shortcut plenty of mysteries if you rummage 
  around in the minds of the suspects and find out 
  what they know. 
  If a player is particularly committed to that 
  course of action, and he understands what it 
  means to break the Third Law, by all means 
  allow him to do so. But if that happens, every 
  effort should be made to throw the book at 
  him—in as entertaining a way as possible. The 
  moment a player decides to break a mystery 
  by peeking inside the heads of those involved, 
  the story stops being about that mystery—and 
  starts being instead about that choice and its 
  consequences. Go nuts with it! The secret is now 
  out, but others’ reactions to it may be worse than 
  if it had come out naturally; everything starts 
  proceeding towards greater chaos, right on the 
  Lawbreaker’s doorstep (and as that hits a high 
  point, the Wardens can show up). 
  Of course, all of this assumes that the 
  character chose the right folks to go thought-
  peeking with. It’s a sad, sad day to discover that 
  you’ve broken the Third Law to get what you 
  thought would be the final, incriminating piece 
  of evidence from a suspected killer—only to 
  discover that his worst crime is thinking you’re 
  being a jerk.
  Do Soulgazes Break 
  the Third Law?
  On the surface of it, a soulgaze might look a lot 
  like a violation of the Third Law. You’ve locked 
  eyes with someone, and suddenly you’re seeing 
  all of their darkest, deepest thoughts—right?
  Well, no. A soulgaze doesn’t work that way. 
  Remember first that the eyes are the windows to 
  the soul, not to the mind. There’s a very distinct 
  difference—someone’s soul is more about who 
  they are and who they could be and less about 
  what they’re thinking. Even beyond this, you can’t 
  really control what you find out when you soul-
  gaze someone, and what you do get is distorted 
  by metaphor and strange imagery. Furthermore, 
  all of it comes at a price—they get to see you, 
  however dark or uncomfortably revealing that 
  may be. When it comes down to it, reading 
  someone’s mind and looking at his soul are 
  vastly different experiences, each with its own 
  perils and risks—but only one of them brings 
  the weight of the Laws down on your head.
  Dead Brains
  Some spells exist out there which let you relive 
  the last few experiences of the recently dead. 
  It’s pretty nasty stuff to live through—while 
  you don’t (usually) die from shock or anything 
  by doing it, it’s an experience that no one enters 
  into lightly (even if they have a shot at living 
  through the last few moments of a White Court 
  vampire’s recent victim).
  Is this a case of violating the Third Law? Not 
  really; the dead person doesn’t have any active, 
  present thoughts for you to invade. The soul 
  and the mind have moved on. You’re essentially 
  reading data from a dead hard drive. Not to 
  mention, last experience is at least a little different 
  from current thoughts.
  However, doing this sort of thing on a regular 
  basis might bring you close to violating the Fifth 
  Law (page 241). Caveat magus! 
  Inhuman Thoughts
  So, if the Laws of Magic are only supposed to 
  apply to humans, why not run around and peer 
  into the minds of all the nonhuman problems 
  you’re facing? Well, aside from the risk you’ll run 
  afoul of a Warden troubled by your “grey area” 
  activities, there’s not much stopping you—just 
  give us a moment to call the pleasant brawny 
  men with the white vans and straitjackets before 
  you give it a try.
  I’ve been tempted before, 
  it’s true. But the nightmare 
  scenario you’re laying 
  out here is a pretty good 
  reminder why it’s such a 
  bad idea—beyond the whole 
  slippery slope thing.
  …and who 
  they’ve been, 
  at that precise 
  point in time. 
  You mortals 
  never stay the 
  same for long. It’s 
  why your True 
  Names have an 
  expiration date.
  molly used 
  one during the 
  WHIte NIgHt 
  case, right?
   Yes.
  
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  living With magic
  The real problem is this: as a human spell-
  caster, you only really have the faculties for 
  understanding human thoughts. Try to tap into 
  the mind of a faerie and you could find yourself 
  a few minutes later rocking in the corner and 
  laughing at how everything is made of rainbows. 
  It only gets worse, the nastier or more powerful 
  your target is. Try to read the thoughts of a Red 
  Court vampire and it’s even odds that you’ll 
  shatter your psyche before you learn anything 
  useful—assuming you can even understand 
  whatever strange language their internal mono-
  logue is using. Try to read the thoughts of some-
  thing ancient, and you’ll probably find yourself a 
  mind-wiped puppet in short order.
  It’s kind of a disappointment, in the end, for 
  the would-be mind-reader. All the minds he 
  might be allowed to read, he can’t, because he 
  doesn’t speak the language, and all the minds he 
  isn’t allowed to read, he could—at the peril of 
  breaking the Third Law.
  The Fourth Law
  Never Enthrall Another.
   A close cousin of the Third, the Fourth Law goes 
  beyond the simple invasion of another’s mind to 
  outright mastery over it. Here, enthralling is any 
  effort made to change the natural inclinations, 
  choices, and behaviors of another person. And 
  due to its cousin Law, it’s pretty easy to see the 
  Fourth as an extension of the concepts there—a 
  case of more equals worse.
  It’s easy to see someone who uses mind magic 
  to turn a handful of free-thinking people into 
  his sex slaves as a bad guy, but this is definitely 
  one of those situations where the paving stones 
  of good intentions are particularly slick. Much 
  like the Third Law, the Fourth is an easy one to 
  want to break for all the best of reasons. Plenty 
  of people out in the world—possibly even your 
  friends—make bad choices. Magic could give 
  you the power to change those choices. Know 
  people who are tearing their lives apart with 
  drugs? A simple compulsion to make them 
  afraid of touching the stuff could set them on 
  the straight and narrow.
  Of course, the problems here are substan-
  tial. You have to hit someone with some pretty 
  vicious psychological trauma in order to change 
  his mind enough to force a different course of 
  behavior. Worse, you may not even realize you’re 
  doing it at the time. It might sound relatively 
  harmless to implant an aversion to, say, fatty 
  foods to help someone lose weight, but the effect 
  is a lot like wrapping someone’s legs in barbed 
  wire in order to keep him from walking to 
  the fridge.
  Why so violent? A lot of it comes down to 
  the principles of free will. The thing that makes 
  people fundamentally human is free will; when 
  you enthrall someone, overriding his will with 
  your own, you’ve robbed him of his essential 
  ability to be and act human. You’re making a 
  monster.
  Hence what happens when a Black Court 
  vampire gets a hold of someone and turns 
  him into a Renfield. Granted, the vampire 
  has no compunction about pushing its victim 
  extra-hard, but really it’s just a matter of 
  degree.
  And frankly, 
  you fleshy types 
  barely have the 
  faculties for that.
  Faerie minds? 
  Ha! If you’re 
  extremely 
  lucky, it’ll be 
  rainbows. 
  EXTREMELY. 
  LUCKY.
  
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  living With magic
  This is where another of the Fourth Law’s 
  cousins—the Second—comes into play. 
  Changing someone’s behavior is a lot like 
  changing someone’s body. In both cases, the 
  victim you’re changing is a lot more complex 
  than your understanding of it can manage. If 
  there’s one conceptual thread that runs particu-
  larly strongly through the first four Laws, it’s 
  that the mind is more or less equivalent to the 
  body in terms of what should and should not be 
  done with it. Like the body, the mind is vast and 
  intricately complex. When you decide to take on 
  that complexity with something as crude and 
  simple as a compulsion, psychological trauma is 
  inevitable. It’s much like trying to fix a comput-
  er’s motherboard with a hammer. Even if you get 
  it working the way you want, chances are you’ve 
  messed up something else pretty bad along the 
  way, or opened it up to some worse consequence 
  down the line.
  In your game: Like the Third Law, the Fourth 
  works nicely as a temptation to do something 
  bad for all the right reasons. Interestingly, 
  though, the Fourth is more effective as a source 
  of story. While a violation of the Third Law can 
  “wreck” a good mystery by drilling right into 
  the thoughts of the suspects, the Fourth doesn’t 
  run as much of a risk there. If anything, it will 
  muddle the situation rather than magically solve 
  it (literally).
  One good way to look at the Fourth Law 
  (and others) in action is to treat it like a wish 
  granted by a particularly mischievous genie. 
  Compulsions created in violation of the Fourth 
  Law should be kept simple—remember, this 
  sort of mind magic is brute-force and ham-
  handed. And any simple request is ripe for 
  misinterpretation and other loopholes in terms 
  of how it gets carried out.
  If someone’s operating under a magically 
  induced fear-based aversion to drugs, think 
  about what sort of irrationality that might intro-
  duce into his life, especially if he has a hard time 
  finding somewhere away from the drugs entirely. 
  At every turn, there’s something to be word-
  lessly, absurdly terrified of. Even if the magic was 
  applied with a certain amount of finesse, this 
  victim is on a short trip to some pretty crippling 
  post-traumatic stress disorders. What sorts of 
  things would such a person do to deal with that 
  constant fear? And what sorts of nasty things 
  might catch a taste of that fear and come looking 
  for a snack? And even if the surface problem 
  (the drugs) is solved, how does the underlying 
  behavior (addictive personality) surface now?
  Non-Spellcasting 
  Enthrallment 
  As enforced, the Laws of Magic are applied 
  where human victims are involved, but simi-
  larly, they’re primarily applied where human 
  spellcasters are the ones doing the deeds. This 
  means that a White Court vampire laying her 
  sex mojo on a tasty little morsel is not technically 
  breaking the Fourth Law. This doesn’t mean that 
  the White Council has to like it, but usually this 
  is a case where the Accords trump the Laws, at 
  least as far as the politics and legal maneuverings 
  are involved.
  For the purposes of game rules, such powers 
  are already assumed to have assessed the costs 
  for holding such sway over another’s mind. No 
  Red Court vampire is going to get slapped with 
  a Lawbreaker stunt for addicting someone to his 
  narcotic saliva. To be frank, with all the other 
  abilities that come along for the ride, he’s already 
  made himself inhuman enough.
  The Fifth Law
  Never Reach Beyond 
  the Borders of Life.
  Necromancy has all sorts of applications, from 
  keeping someone from crossing over death’s 
  door (or pulling him back from just stepping 
  across the threshold), to reanimating a host of 
  corpses as your bodyguards, waking the ghosts 
  of the Civil War for one last assault, or wrapping 
  ectoplasmic flesh around the bones of a dinosaur 
  and taking it for a ride to save the city. It’s all bad 
  news, and most of it clearly breaks the Fifth Law.
  This is all about preserving the natural order 
  of things. To everything there is a season, right? 
  When magic is used to confound death, the 
  cosmos sits up and takes notice. The things 
  out in the world that want the natural order 
  disrupted are sure to come knocking and bring 
  all the baggage that comes along for that ride; 
  after all, when nature is confounded, the reality 
  mortals call home gets just a bit weaker, and 
  what’s not to love about that?
  The Fifth Law marks the beginning of the 
  section of the Laws of Magic that addresses 
  the mortal desire to confound the conditions of 
  mortality itself. In a word, death sucks, even if it 
  Worse, like 
  flushing a 
  gaggle of 
  phobophages 
  out of the 
  woodwork.
  Sue the 
  Dinosaur 
  might not be 
  a violation, 
  thanks to the 
  humans-only 
  technicality 
  of the Laws, 
  but Captain 
  Luccio 
  wasn’t wrong 
  when she 
  called such 
  an act an 
  abomination.
  But, still —it was 
  REALLY COOL.
  
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  is a part of the natural order—ironically, it’s only 
  natural to want to do whatever you can to avoid 
  it. While the first four Laws essentially address 
  the rights of the victim, the Fifth Law and the 
  ones beyond it are basic “that’s just wrong” 
  principles.
  Undeniably, death itself contains an incred-
  ible amount of power thanks to the signifi-
  cance of the ending of a life (the bigger the life, 
  the more power it offers—dead wizards make 
  powerful ghosts). But ultimately it’s power 
  that belongs to the dead. While it’s true that, in 
  general, “you can’t take it with you,” the power of 
  your own death is something you can take with 
  you into the afterlife. And when some upstart 
  necromancer like Kravos (or worse, an experi-
  enced one like Kemmler) comes along to snag 
  some or all of that power for himself, what does 
  that mean for you, the dead guy? No one really 
  knows for sure, but clearly when the big nasties 
  of the supernatural world get all excited and 
  positive about mortal spellcasters trying such a 
  thing, it’s probably a phenomenally bad idea. Call 
  it a hunch.
  And like breaking any other Law of Magic, 
  breaking the Fifth puts a stain on your soul, 
  changing you for the worse. This could be 
  anything from taking on an exaggerated arro-
  gance about your power over life and death 
  (think of it as a medical doctor’s God complex 
  with the dial turned up to eleven) to taking on 
  the belief that death is a better state of things 
  than life (with the side benefit that the more 
  death you soak in, the more power you can draw 
  from it). Necromancers’ opinions on the power 
  and value of death energies run the gamut of 
  possibility. Unfortunately, they have proven to 
  be some of the White Council’s most dire and 
  tenacious adversaries.
  In your game: Death is serious business—even 
  if the PCs aren’t the ones dropping, that doesn’t 
  mean that they won’t see loved ones fall victim 
  to the battle with the darkness. Such moments 
  are ripe for temptation, and if the players are 
  game for the consequences, don’t fear an effort 
  on their part to bring someone back from the 
  dead. Even if they don’t ultimately attempt it, 
  such a plotline can raise some meaty themes 
  to explore. But if they do attempt it and they 
  succeed, the consequences should come into 
  play in full force. Necromancy is hard to hide, 
  and there will be plenty of forces both pro- and 
  anti-White Council that will be set in motion by 
  such an act. Have fun with it, but be ready for 
  the characters involved to have a more personal 
  close encounter with death in short order.
  There can be plenty of grey-area matters to 
  explore without getting into outright viola-
  tions of the Fifth Law. (A few of Harry’s actions 
  during the Dead Beat case tread close.) 
  Staying grey can be a much safer way to touch 
  upon the themes of life and death without 
  calling the Wardens down. Conversations with 
  ghosts, peering into the last moments of the 
  life of a corpse, and trying to explore the influ-
  ences of the dead upon the Nevernever are all 
  entertaining ways to go for an “I see dead people” 
  vibe in your game in a relatively safe and (more 
  importantly) magically legal way.
  Dead Brains Part Two
  Earlier, we talked about reliving the last 
  moments of someone’s life in order to get an idea 
  of how she was killed. Was that a violation of 
  the Fifth Law?
  It certainly might be argued that way. By 
  reaching into the echoes of that final experience, 
  lifting the sensory information out of the victim’s 
  brain and circumstance, it could certainly be 
  phrased as “reaching beyond the borders of life.”
  But for most purposes of the application of 
  the Fifth Law, this is not a violation. Death itself 
  is not being undone; at the end of the day, the 
  victim in question remains an inanimate, inert 
  corpse. No mind, no soul. If the victim’s last 
  experience was gotten at by making her sit up 
  and have a conversation with the spellcaster, 
  that is a case of violating the Fifth Law, not to 
  mention pretty damn likely to be no use whatso-
  ever. While you might be able to pull out enough 
  information about the victim’s last experience 
  in order to relive it yourself, actual reanimated 
  dead brain meat isn’t likely to be very good at the 
  whole remembering thing.
  The Fifth Law and Ghosts
  Another area that might seem ripe for Fifth Law 
  violations would be reaching out to talk to the 
  ghosts of the departed. But in the end, that’s just 
  the appearance of reaching beyond the borders 
  of life in order to contact the dead. Ghosts aren’t 
  actually the dead themselves—they’re imper-
  fect echoes of a life that once was, creatures of 
  ectoplasm and random spiritual energies that 
  coalesced at the moment of a potent personal-
  ity’s passing. While ghosts may be evidence of 
  the power of death in action, they are merely 
  —
  Thirteen.
  Why don’t 
  you just make 
  eleven more 
  arrogant and 
  make eleven be 
  the top number 
  and make that 
  a little more 
  arrogant?.
  …these go to 
  THIRTEEN.
  
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  living With magic
  a side effect of the process; as such they only 
  touch on matters of true death tangentially. As 
  a result, the Fifth Law doesn’t even come close 
  to this matter—a potential source of relief for 
  many a nervous ectomancer.
  So as long as you’re just talking and inter-
  acting with ghosts, you’re probably okay. 
  Consuming ghosts for their power—that’s a 
  grey area.
  The Sixth Law
  Never Swim Against 
  the Currents of Time.
  So far in the casefiles, we’ve seen precious little 
  of this Law in action, in great part because if 
  someone is breaking it, he’s doing so in a way 
  that fits right into Harry Dresden’s non-time-
  traveling investigations. Time travel is hard to 
  spot or confirm if you aren’t doing it yourself.
  Still, it’s clear that mucking about with time 
  is another one of those “don’t mess with the 
  natural order” things. We just don’t know what 
  the consequences are likely to be, even though 
  we can speculate. There are the classics, straight 
  out of science fiction: paradoxes, traveling back 
  in time to stop someone bad from coming into 
  power, altering the course of human history 
  for better or worse, questions about alternate 
  universes, the “elasticity” of time, all of that. Due 
  to the nature of this sort of magic, it’s difficult to 
  find concrete conclusions.
  Similarly, we can reasonably anticipate what 
  breaking this Law would do to the practitioner 
  who broke it. We know what holding power over 
  life and death can do to a necromancer; imagine 
  the effect it would have on the personality of a 
  chronomancer (for lack of a better term), who 
  can skip right past killing and go straight for 
  the “cause something to wink out of existence” 
  trump card. 
  It’s bad news, and it’s the kind of dark cloud 
  that has an even darker lining. How do you 
  catch someone in the act of time travel? How do 
  you enforce the Sixth Law in a way that’s mean-
  ingful? How do you prove the crime so you can 
  prosecute the criminal? Are the Wardens even 
  equipped to take on a threat like this? And how 
  much of our present day is already formed by 
  the meddlesome acts of a wizard who thought 
  he knew what he was doing? We’ve already 
  talked about how the body and the mind are 
  too complex to alter successfully, without 
  trauma—now take that up several orders of 
  magnitude to contemplate the complexity of 
  time itself, and what a single, blundering human 
  agent might do if he had the power to change 
  its flow. What sorts of cracks might form in the 
  universe at such an unnatural strain?
  When it comes down to it, only a very small 
  number of White Council members truly have 
  the authority to do something about the Sixth 
  Law (many more might have the power, but this 
  is explicitly a case of authority). The Blackstaff, 
  a quasi-secret agent of the Council, is empow-
  ered to break all seven of the Laws should he 
  see fit (page 246), but when it comes right down 
  to it he’s essentially just a heavy brought in to 
  fix the largest of problems by any means neces-
  sary. The real guardian of time is the Gatekeeper 
  (OW150), the member of the Senior Council 
  entrusted with watching over the Outer Gates 
  (we’ll talk more about those in the Seventh Law, 
  page 244). As far as we know, he doesn’t have the 
  blanket authority to break the Laws of Magic 
  that the Blackstaff enjoys, but he does seem to 
  peer deep into the flow of time, foreseeing events 
  that are yet to come—or even receiving commu-
  nications from his future self. Such communica-
  tions are always very indirect and unspecific. The 
  Gatekeeper can’t pass much real, factual infor-
  mation back from the future, assumedly because 
  doing so would introduce a paradox, or at least 
  cause events to unfold that shouldn’t. All he can 
  really do is subtly nudge people who might be 
  able to do something about those future circum-
  stances in the right direction, and then let things 
  unfold without his guiding hand upon them. In 
  the end, we have to pray that’s enough.
  Heck, it might not even be possible to do 
  time travel via the magical arts. Maybe even the 
  attempts to do so lead to really bad things.
  In your game: Right now, we don’t have a lot 
  to go on as far as what it means to try to swim 
  against the flow of time. This means, for the 
  purposes of your own game, that you and the 
  folks sitting at your table get to decide what 
  time travel means and what sorts of problems it 
  introduces. 
  Of course, the easiest decision is to avoid 
  time travel capers entirely. And that’s a pretty 
  good one to make; a lot of games can get 
  completely derailed by time travel if it’s not a 
  part of the core mission of the game. And the 
  Sixth Law at least exists to discourage the char-
  acters from attempting it themselves, so you can 
  do these sorts 
  of actions by 
  the gatekeeper 
  break the Sixth 
  law, or merely 
  skirt it?
   
  Well, they’re 
  probably just 
  fine, since he’s 
  not “swimming 
  against” the 
  flow of time 
  so much as 
  observing it 
  and warning 
  about what 
  he sees ahead. 
  Regardless, 
  it’s clear 
  he has the 
  authority to 
  do it, even if 
  the rest of 
  us might not.
  
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  living With magic
  still bring in a time-meddling wizard from the 
  future (or the past) as an antagonist. If this is 
  your comfort zone, try to keep time antics pretty 
  simple. Even one single incidence of it can be a 
  big spider’s web—difficult to escape and liable 
  to cause everything to shake about once you 
  start to twitch.
  But for some games it might be fun to move 
  the Sixth Law front and center. Maybe your 
  game is all about a secret elite team of wizards 
  who answer only to the Gatekeeper, acting as his 
  Time Wardens, charged with the job of taking 
  on the threats that no one else can—all while 
  operating under a prohibition against breaking 
  the Sixth Law themselves. How do you fight fire 
  with fire when you don’t even have a match?
  If you’re looking for a grey area to explore, 
  here’s one: the Sixth Law prohibits swimming 
  against the flow of time. What about swim-
  ming with it? It might be entirely kosher to jump 
  forward in time (assuming you can figure out 
  how to do it). But will your local Warden see it 
  that way? And how badly will you want to head 
  back once you get there? (Some information in 
  the Proven Guilty case suggests that it’s not 
  a violation, but how you play it in your game is 
  up to you.)
  Whenever someone in your game wants 
  to break this Law, they should do it with the 
  group’s consensus. Time travel has the power 
  to wreck storylines more thoroughly than even 
  a Third Law violation does, especially if you 
  decide to bring in notions of alternate realities 
  that need to be invented on the fly and in the 
  moment. If you’re the one looking to break the 
  Sixth Law, you should be ready to step up and 
  shoulder some of the responsibility to make this 
  work without wrecking anyone else’s fun.
  Slowing Down, Speeding Up
  If a wizard uses magic to speed time up or slow 
  time down, is he swimming against the flow? 
  Probably not. Most magic that works this way 
  is achieved by messing around with percep-
  tions, rather than actually laying hold of time 
  itself and pressing the fast forward or slow-mo 
  button. Mages have gotten short bursts of speed 
  in the past by speeding up their own percep-
  tions and then channeling some extra juice into 
  their body to get it to move and react faster than 
  usual. While that isn’t a violation of the Sixth 
  Law, it’s definitely tough on the spellcaster who 
  tries it—there’s plenty of risk of fried synapses 
  or physical trauma from pushing the body and 
  brain too hard, too fast.
  Ultimately, grabbing hold of the entire space-
  time continuum and trying to bend it to your 
  will is probably in that “wizardly hubris” area.
  The Seventh Law
  Never Seek Knowledge 
  and Power from Beyond 
  the Outer Gates.
  The universe is infinite, and contains within it 
  multitudes. The world. The Nevernever. Hell, 
  and perhaps even Heaven. Every being and 
  thing within those bounds has its place, even if 
  that place may be horrible beyond mention. But 
  there are Things outside of this universe. To say 
  that they hate the world would be to assume 
  that we can even conceptualize their attitudes. It 
  is more accurate to say that they are antithetical 
  to the world. They do not want to destroy the 
  universe any more than a ball you drop wants to 
  fall—it is simply the outcome.
  The Outer Gates are what keeps the world 
  safe from such things, what locks them outside, 
  and thus, such things are called Outsiders. 
  They are so alien, so not of this reality, that few 
  methods of assault stand a chance of giving them 
  more than a moment’s pause. Furthermore, the 
  Outside’s intentions are so dark, so dire, that the 
  Seventh Law is the only one on the books that 
  isn’t conditioned upon casting a spell. Even doing 
  research on the Outside and its inhabitants is 
  verboten, let alone actually pulling power from 
  there. 
  The Gates are never fully closed. It’s through 
  the tiniest of cracks that the darkest of things 
  enter our world (like He Who Walks Behind, 
  OW76). And when someone does pull power 
  from there—forging a bond with a malevolent 
  Outsider—one of those cracks widens, just a 
  touch. The human race is lucky that few have 
  ever managed such an effort for long, thanks to 
  the efforts of the White Council and particularly 
  zealous enforcement of the Seventh Law.
  In your game: Actually drawing down power 
  from beyond the Outer Gates, with full inten-
  tion and knowledge about what that means, is a 
  pretty villainous thing to do. Even if you aren’t 
  fully apprised of what you’re doing, this is the 
  kind of ink-black magic that will stain your soul 
  right quick.
  this is 
  all very 
  doctor WHo. 
  I caught a 
  few of the 
  new ones. 
  I still like 
  Tom Baker 
  best.
  If anyone knows 
  how the Outer 
  Gates came to 
  be in the first 
  place, they’re not 
  talking. 
  Hey, Bob, 
  thanks for 
  giving me the 
  quick run-down 
  on what needed 
  to be said here.
  Sure thing! 
  Uh…boss, are 
  we going to be 
  in trouble for 
  sharing even this 
  information with 
  the world?
  I’ll look 
  into it. 
  Discreetly.
  
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  living With magic
  This doesn’t mean that the Seventh Law 
  can’t be relevant for players. The biggest villains 
  of Harry Dresden’s cases seem to be tapped 
  into some kind of Outsider mojo. While the 
  Gatekeeper is our cosmic First Responder for 
  matters involving the Outside, he has been 
  known to tap others when things are particu-
  larly bad.
  Characters can also stumble across the 
  Seventh Law, thanks to the particulars of its 
  wording: namely, the prohibition against even 
  researching the Outside. A GM looking to put a 
  particularly nasty choice in front of her players 
  could easily “hide” a piece of knowledge within a 
  forbidden tome of Outsider lore. And if a life is 
  on the line, isn’t it worth the risk? (The Outsiders 
  of your game would certainly hope so.)
  The Gatekeeper’s 
  Job Description
  As much as the Gatekeeper watches over the 
  flow of time and those who would meddle with 
  it, these actions are really a side project, related 
  but separate from his main duties (as you might 
  guess from his title). 
  The Gatekeeper is our first line of defense 
  against the Outsiders, performing perhaps 
  the most important job in all of Creation. At 
  the very least, he maintains the alarm spells 
  that shriek when the Gates budge, spends the 
  lion’s share of his time walking the Nevernever 
  looking for signs and portents, and perhaps 
  even acts as an “off the books” emissary for the 
  White Council with the major realms of the 
  Nevernever. While the Merlin leads the White 
  Council, to many supernatural creatures it’s the 
  Gatekeeper who truly speaks on the Council’s 
  behalf and commands the greatest respect.
  Does Demon Summoning 
  Break the Seventh Law?
  The answer is: usually not. Compared to the 
  Outsiders, most demons a wizard might 
  summon are “locals,” though some might have 
  notions about how it would be a grand thing 
  to hoof it on over to the Outer Gates and kick 
  them open with a big welcoming party.
  It’s still risky. Many times, Outsiders have 
  masqueraded as standard spirits and demons, 
  so the White Council tends to frown on 
  summoning demons, unless they are quite 
  confident in the wizard’s competence and judg-
  ment (and how often does that happen, really?). 
  As  a rule of thumb, the Council sees it as a 
  privilege—a slim privilege—allowed to its own 
  members, but off-limits for the rest of the super-
  natural practitioners out there. So, even though 
  demon summoning isn’t directly in violation of 
  the Seventh Law (or any other), the Wardens get 
  real antsy about amateurs messing around with 
  it. Even non-Outsider demons are dangerous in 
  their own right.
  Think of this like licensing on explosive 
  compounds. If you know what you’re doing, 
  have a legitimate reason for their use (construc-
  tion, demolition, mining, etc.), and you know 
  how to be cautious, you can get them and you’ll 
  have official and limited (occasionally super-
  vised) approval to use them. If, on the other 
  hand, you’re just some guy who likes storing a 
  few kilos of plastique in his garage, the authori-
  ties will not be at all amused to find out about 
  your hobby.
  Demons are “locals” in the sense they’re natives 
  of the Nevernever, which is a part of our reality.
  
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  living With magic
  Is Redemption Possible? 
  Depending on the tone of your game, you may 
  want Lawbreaking to be a point of no return, 
  where any who break the Laws of Magic are 
  thoroughly—and permanently!—stained 
  by the violation. If your players are big angst 
  addicts, it can definitely be a fun “descent into 
  darkness” way to go. 
  But for many players, this is just not a fun 
  way to go. For these people, it’s wise to offer 
  the possibility of real redemption, to turn back 
  from the pull of Lawbreaking, to set dark things 
  aside, to get a clean slate.
  Consider this: what does it take to recover 
  from transgressions against the Laws of Magic? 
  Is there a “point of no return” at which point any 
  redemption that doesn’t end in the character’s 
  destruction just isn’t possible? You’ll need to 
  answer these questions to your satisfaction in 
  order to make it work for your game.
  Purely from a rules standpoint, two things 
  need to happen in order to walk a path of 
  redemption: Lawbreaker stunts need to be 
  removed, and the character aspects twisted by 
  violating the Laws must be restored. This can 
  happen in any order, usually as part of a mile-
  stone (page 88), but it definitely must be rooted 
  in real honest effort by the character and 
  story development along redemptive lines. For 
  example, Harry started the Storm Front case 
  under the Doom of Damocles, and it dogged 
  him (in the form of Morgan) for the entire case. 
  He’d been under the Doom since his teens. It 
  took the resolution of Storm Front and some 
  tough-but-right choices throughout the case 
  to finally get free of the Doom. At that point 
  it may also have been appropriate for Harry to 
  set aside his Lawbreaker (First) stunt—he’d 
  certainly paid his dues on that score.
  Once a Lawbreaker stunt is removed, the 
  character’s refresh should increase by the 
  appropriate amount, as in any other case of a 
  stunt or power’s removal. Such removals should 
  be allowed only once per major milestone. 
  Similarly, each “twisted” aspect should be front 
  and center and get its own screen time as the 
  character works against it and ultimately over-
  comes it.
  In the end, redemption is possible, but it 
  always should be the harder road to walk. Done 
  right, it will also be the more rewarding.
  The Blackstaff
  The Blackstaff is the nigh-secret office filled 
  by an experienced member of the White 
  Council (sometimes, but not usually, a 
  member of the Senior Council). Alone out 
  of all others, the Blackstaff is given leave to 
  break any and all Laws of Magic in order to 
  take down the Council’s most dangerous 
  enemies. No higher position of trust is 
  accorded anyone in the White Council 
  (though the Gatekeeper may come close). 
  Unknown to many, the current Blackstaff is, 
  not coincidentally, Harry Dresden’s mentor 
  and surrogate father-figure, Ebenezar McCoy.
  But how the Blackstaff resists—or is 
  protected from—becoming a Lawbreaker 
  himself is a mystery.
  Uh, Billy, it won’t be 
  nigh-secret anymore 
  if you publish that 
  Ebenezar’s the 
  Blackstaff. Take this 
  out in the next draft.
  
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  - cHAPter tHIrteeN -
  Spellcasting
  
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  Spellcasting (the Art of the Spell)
  The Art 
  of the Spell
  Now, we’re finally down to the nitty-gritty—you 
  know what it’s like to be a wizard, you know 
  what basic tools are at your disposal, and you 
  know what things you’ll have to deal with in 
  the supernatural world. Most importantly, you 
  know what not to do with your magic, and the 
  potential penalties associated with doing them.
  It is time to learn about spellcraft.
  While there are many different systems 
  of magic in use, certain rules underlie almost 
  all methodologies understood by the White 
  Council. For instance, needing a token from a 
  particular target in order to focus certain magic 
  against it holds true in almost every school of 
  spell-slinging, though the particular ritual or the 
  type of token used can vary widely. 
  Some terms have come into general use 
  so that practitioners of different paths can 
  understand what others are talking about. 
  Standardization of terminology is largely due 
  to the White Council, who have had to develop 
  ways of coping with problems of communica-
  tion across cultural lines. If you have to compare 
  skills and spells in order to root out a Black 
  Court infestation, you need to explain to your 
  allies what you can do, understand what they 
  can do, and work out a mutual plan that will—
  with luck—let you all survive the assault.
  How Does It Work?
  Basically, magic is the focus of will to create 
  effect, often with trappings and tools to make it 
  easier or direct it precisely. Physical trappings, 
  while not always strictly necessary, help to focus 
  the thoughts of the spellcaster—until they’ve 
  reached a high level of experience, concentra-
  tion, and power, most mortals have problems 
  holding all the distinct elements completely in 
  their minds.
  Spellcraft is different from innate powers, 
  such as speaking with the dead, precognition, 
  empathy, etc. Think of spellcraft as a toolset, 
  rather than as a single tool. When crafting the 
  spell you need for the job, you’re accessing what 
  you need from the toolset and giving it power 
  from a wide variety of sources. An innate power, 
  on the other hand, is a single tool used for only 
  a small sub-set of tasks and it draws its power 
  from a single source that never changes. It’s the 
  difference between a carpenter’s workshop and 
  a hammer.
  There are various sources that a wizard can 
  draw on to power his spells:
    Himself. Every wizard has a degree of 
  personal strength—some more and some 
  less—representing the strength of his 
  belief in himself and the magic he can 
  work. Typically, this is represented by the 
  wizard’s Conviction skill.
    Willing creatures such as spirits, 
  demons, fae, or other magical creatures 
  who can lend their power. 
    Unwilling magical creatures; the delib-
  erate sacrifice of humans or animals. 
    Objects that store power that can be 
  tapped for later use; items that are very 
  potent in some way, like religious relics.
    The environment, drawn from natural 
  sources such as the elements which make 
  up reality (fire, air, earth, water) or actual 
  raw power in nature (storms, earth-
  quakes, volcanoes, etc.). 
    Outside reality. This is invariably dark, 
  corrupt, and likely to utterly taint and 
  destroy the wizard using it; the White 
  Council orders immediate execution for 
  any wizard found tapping it.
  Most spellcasters have some sort of spoken 
  component to their magic—activating words, 
  ritual chants, and so on. These words are always 
  in a language that isn’t their native one. If a 
  wizard casts spells using words he commonly 
  uses or hears in a context other than casting 
  spells, there’s too much risk of his magical power 
  finding expression every single time he says 
  something, potentially creating a nasty side-
  effect. Putting the spells in a different language 
  acts as a form of mental insulation, making 
  sure that he doesn’t accidentally loose power 
  at a target (or fry his own mind) every time 
  he swears. 
  Billy, as I read 
  through this 
  chapter, you 
  don’t really 
  mention other 
  spell casters 
  besides wizards.
  Most of this 
  would hold 
  true for 
  sorcerers 
  and other 
  spellcasters, 
  you know.
  Yeah, that’s 
  mainly because 
  we have the 
  most data on 
  you wizardly 
  types! But 
  really, you 
  could swap 
  in the more 
  general “spell-
  caster” or 
  “practitioner” 
  almost every 
  time we say 
  “wizard.” ditto 
  “sorcerer” and 
  so on. the point 
  is that this 
  lingo shouldn’t 
  imply “this 
  stuff is oNlY 
  possible for 
  wizards.”
  Harry, do you worry 
  that your words 
  reshape reality?
  Every day.
  
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  Spellcasting (evocation)
  Tools and Trappings
  The tools and trappings of magic vary with 
  the system of magic that the wizard is using. 
  Someone who works with potions and magical 
  items may have a lab full of strange toxins, 
  mysterious things in jars, and mystical tomes 
  of instructions, all propped up on shelves from 
  Wal-Mart. A voodoo practitioner will have the 
  usual stocks of graveyard dust, John-the-High-
  Conqueror root, harvested hair and nails, flour, 
  rum, live chickens, a machete, and so on. A 
  Native American wizard will use sage, peyote, 
  totems, feathers, and other things appropriate to 
  his tradition.
  Generally speaking, a wizard’s magic-related 
  possessions usually include raw materials for use 
  in rituals or for producing magical tools, items 
  which are actually magic, and objects or clothing 
  or furniture which the wizard uses simply 
  because it fits his personal style. A traditional 
  Japanese onmyouji will want the proper paper 
  and ink for his fuda (written spells), the proper 
  enchanted tools for exorcism, the proper silk 
  clothing to wear, and the proper sort of house 
  to live in. Some trappings are vital, some are 
  helpful, and some just get the wizard in the right 
  frame of mind.
  Typically speaking, the arrangement of these 
  trappings and tools during spellcasting is called 
  a construct, a sort of “container” for holding 
  and helping control the release of spell energies. 
  This can refer to the physical objects and rituals 
  incorporated into a spell, as well as simply the 
  image that the wizard has in his mind at the 
  time he casts the spell. 
  Construct can also refer to the body 
  created from ectoplasm that entities of the 
  Nevernever use when in the mortal world.
  Evocation
  Evocation is the quick-and-dirty method of 
  using power; it’s basically the art of slinging 
  magical energy around more-or-less directly. If 
  the wizard has a high level of control, evocation 
  can be efficient and deadly. If he can’t control 
  it, then it’s inefficient, but still very possibly 
  deadly—to himself and everyone around him.
  In evocation, you gather your power, then 
  shove it into a temporary construct of will to 
  control its direction and effect. This covers 
  magic such as the simple point-and-blast (or, 
  in the case of higher skill, point-and-laser). It is 
  quicker but less certain than thaumaturgy, and 
  it doesn’t need any physical constructs to assist 
  it (though certain tools—like staves, rods, and 
  wands—can help direct the energy). If you try 
  to draw too much power or can’t focus sharply 
  enough on your virtual construct, then the 
  release of energy shatters the construct inside 
  your mind (resulting in unconsciousness, if 
  you’re lucky) or breaks loose on the physical 
  plane, expending more power and creating a 
  much more dramatic effect than planned. This 
  is why you don’t want to use evocation to call fire 
  inside an old house unless you’re good at it. The 
  arrival of a fire brigade tends to be very disrup-
  tive to arcane investigations.
  While evocation doesn’t actually require 
  physical aids or focusing items, many evocators 
  do use focusing tools for an added bit of assis-
  tance. This may range from a chalk line quickly 
  drawn to help visualize a boundary, to a trusted 
  sword used as the directing point for a stroke 
  of lightning, to a blasting rod spelled to make 
  fire easier to control once conjured. Wizardly 
  purists may hold that the true evocator needs 
  only his will, but actual practitioners in the field 
  have a high regard for their skin and tend to err 
  of the side of caution.
  Wizards are not always rich. 
  In fact, wizards are rarely 
  rich, and those shelves from 
  Wal-Mart can make all 
  the difference when it comes 
  to organizing important 
  magical sup plies. And all 
  that money you save can be 
  put toward other necessities, 
  like paying off police fines. 
  …or because 
  he thinks 
  it’s cool.
  A down-
  at-his-heels 
  wizard may 
  end up with 
  a basement 
  lab, an old 
  bathrobe, 
  a blasting 
  rod, and a 
  cool leather 
  trenchcoat. 
  Not 
  complaining.
  Using Specializations
  Specializations, whether the free ones that come 
  with the spellcasting ability or the ones you get via 
  the Refinement power (page 182), are used to increase 
  the effective skill (Lore, Discipline, or Conviction) 
  during casting. Specializations can’t be stacked; if 
  you have two “overlapping” specializations (possible 
  with Thaumaturgy, at least) that boost the same skill 
  for the same purpose, choose the bigger bonus of 
  the two and use that. (If you want to stack another 
  bonus on top of this, you need a focus item, page 278.)
  
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  Spellcasting (evocation)
  Inherent 
  Limitations
  Because of its quick and dirty nature, evocation 
  has two practical limitations. 
  First, you can’t use evocation to affect 
  anything beyond your line of sight. It’s hard 
  enough to concentrate on holding the mental 
  construct for the spell together; if you have to 
  concentrate on a second spell to find your target, 
  it’s just too much. Therefore, you cannot attack 
  a target that you see through scrying or some 
  other effect. Also, magical energy can only travel 
  a certain distance before you need a more perma-
  nent construct to direct it accurately, and that’s 
  the kind of thing you need thaumaturgy for.
  The other limit is that anything you do with 
  evocation has a very short duration, usually 
  limited to an instant (in game terms, one round 
  of combat). While it’s possible to keep certain 
  evocation effects working for a little while by 
  continuing to feed them power, even this will 
  only work for a limited time. Long-lasting magic 
  is the province of thaumaturgy.
  How to Do It
  1. Determine the effect you want to achieve 
  (see “What You Can Do With It” below). This 
  includes describing the element (such as one 
  of the Classical elements of water, fire, air, 
  earth, or spirit; see page 253 for more details) 
  you want to use.
  2. Describe the effect in terms of one of the 
  following basic conflict actions: attack, 
  block, maneuver, or counterspell.
  3. Decide how many shifts of power you want 
  to put into the spell. You take mental stress 
  for calling up power—the minimum is one 
  point of mental stress. The cost increases 
  if you reach for power greater than your 
  Conviction, inflicting additional mental 
  stress equal to the difference (so a spell with 
  power three higher than your Conviction 
  would inflict 4 points of mental stress). 
  4. Make a Discipline roll to cast the spell. The 
  difficulty is equal to the amount of power 
  you’ve called on.  The roll is modified by the 
  presence of any focus items you may have, 
  and whatever aspects you want to invoke. 
  Not normally, 
  but Cowl did 
  attack me in 
  Undertown 
  during the 
  WHITE 
  NIGHT case, 
  and that was 
  – arguably 
  – through 
  two scrying 
  devices.
  But, hey. 
  That’s Cowl 
  for you.
  Hey, Billy, 
  can you 
  take a stunt 
  or cast a 
  spell or 
  make an item 
  of some kind 
  that gives 
  you armor 
  against 
  the mental 
  stress 
  caused by 
  casting a 
  spell?
  good question! 
  And no, you 
  can’t. Armor 
  just doesn’t 
  help against 
  stress you 
  inflict on 
  yourself.
  
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  Spellcasting (evocation)
  If you meet or beat the difficulty, the spell 
  is successful. If not, your margin of failure has 
  to get soaked up. You can opt to take shifts 
  of backlash (bad things happening to you, 
  page 256) to get the spell to work as intended, or 
  let it hit the environment as fallout (unintended 
  consequences for your surroundings and the 
  people and things in it, page 256) which will reduce 
  the effectiveness of the spell.
  What You Can 
  Do With It
  Evocation is the magic of conflicts. Its effects 
  are ultimately very simple, and can only do 
  one of a few things: attack, block, maneuver, or 
  counterspell. 
  Attack
  This is the most basic and straightforward use of 
  evocation, and maybe the best known; the image 
  of the wizard tossing around fire and lightning is 
  deeply entrenched in popular culture. 
  The Discipline roll to control an attack spell 
  also counts as the attack roll; to avoid the spell, 
  the target can roll a defense roll as per the usual 
  options from Playing the Game (page 200). 
  The shifts of power allocated to the spell may 
  be split up as follows:
  1 shift of power increases the Weapon rating 
  by 1. So if you allocate 4 shifts of power to this, 
  your spell is treated as a Weapon:4 attack.
  Example: Harry Dresden is beset by a 
  charging Red Court vampire intent on taking 
  his fool head off. He’s not really happy about 
  that, so he chooses to blast it off the planet with 
  a fire evocation.
  Harry has a Conviction of Superb (+5) 
  and a Discipline of Good (+3). His player—
  Jim—decides he doesn’t want to mess around 
  with this thing too much, so he chooses to 
  summon up 8 shifts of power for the spell. 
  Harry has a power specialization in fire magic, 
  so his Conviction is treated as Fantastic (+6) 
  for the purposes of the spell. That means that 
  casting this spell will give him a 3-stress mental 
  hit—one stress for everything up to 6, and then 
  two more to get to 8. 
  The difficulty to cast the spell is 
  Legendary  (+8). That’s high, but fortu-
  nately Harry’s blasting rod gives him a +1 to 
  control, so Jim starts by rolling his Discipline 
  at Great (+4). He gets a +2, for a total of 
  Fantastic (+6), and invokes Harry’s Wizard 
  Private Eye aspect to give him +2 more. 
  This controls all the power necessary for the 
  spell, and aims the spell at his target at +8.
  Harry yells “Fuego!” as he points his 
  blasting rod, sending a column of flame at 
  the vampire, an attack at Legendary rated 
  at Weapon:8. The vampire rolls to defend 
  against Harry’s roll of Legendary and gets a 
  Great (+4), which means the blast strikes home 
  and inflicts a 12-stress hit on him (4 for the 
  attack, 8 for the weapon value). The vampire’s 
  Inhuman Toughness reduces this to 11 stress, 
  and the vampire takes a severe consequence of 
  Extra Crispy and a 5-stress physical hit. 
  2 shifts of power let you affect every target 
  in one particular zone you can see (filling the 
  zone with fire, for example, instead of shooting 
  fire at one monster). You can go after more than 
  one zone at a time by buying this effect multiple 
  times, so four shifts of power allows you to affect 
  all targets in two zones. You can’t be selective 
  when using this option; if you have friends in 
  that zone, they’re targets, too—the same is true 
  if you’re in that zone. Be careful not to melt your 
  own face!
  Instead of attacking zones, you can attack 
  individual targets by splitting up your shifts of 
  power. So if you’ve controlled 5 shifts of power, 
  you can attack one target with a power 3 attack 
  (at Weapon:3) and one target with a power 2 
  attack (at Weapon:2). Since you can’t make a 
  power 0 attack, the power of the spell deter-
  mines how many targets you can hit: at most, 
  a power 3 spell can be split into three power 1 
  attacks. 
  The targeting result is also split up, and 
  not necessarily in the same portions. If you 
  rolled a Fantastic (+6) result to target your 
  5 shifts of power, you might split the power as 
  detailed above, but make the Weapon:2 attack 
  a Great (+4) for targeting and the Weapon:3 
  attack a Fair (+2). 
  This is essentially a spray attack (page 326) 
  using magic instead of conventional weapons. 
  “Mundane” spray attacks don’t have to split up 
  their Weapon ratings, but they’re much less flex-
  ible than the wizardly equivalent.
  Now here’s an example 
  I can get into!
  Well... 
  Yeah, you 
  could use an 
  evocation 
  to push 
  you along 
  somehow, 
  like a super-
  powerful 
  gust of wind, 
  but it would 
  just push 
  you there in 
  a straight 
  line since 
  evocation 
  is so direct. 
  Things like 
  walls would 
  mess you up 
  en route; 
  you’d hit 
  them at full 
  speed. So, 
  doable. But 
  foolish.
  Should I include 
  move actions, 
  Harry?
  
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  Spellcasting (evocation)
  Block
  Shielding effects are another very common 
  application of evocation; the next best thing to 
  causing damage to others is avoiding it yourself. 
  In game terms, this is a block action. Shifts of 
  power on the spell can be allocated as follows:
  1 shift of power adds 1 to the block strength 
  of the block action. Three shifts of power create 
  a block strength of Good (+3). Any attack that 
  bypasses the block cancels it out.
  Optionally, instead of block strength, you can 
  opt to have the effect work as Armor or as a 
  zone border instead. If you choose the Armor 
  effect, the armor rating is equal to half (rounded 
  down) the shifts put into the spell. The advan-
  tage to doing this is that the Armor effect only 
  ends when the spell duration ends—the armor 
  survives a bypassing attack.
  1 shift of power adds 1 additional exchange 
  of persistence (duration). Two shifts of power 
  create a block that lasts for 3 exchanges total 
  (allowing the shield to continue to work while 
  you do other things—like throw fire back at the 
  enemy). This won’t prevent a block from getting 
  cancelled by a bypassing attack.
  2 shifts of power allow the effect to cover 
  multiple allies within the same zone (typically 
  the same zone the wizard occupies). Covering 
  multiple zones requires 2 additional shifts 
  per zone.
  Example: Harry Dresden is fighting a spirit 
  in the Nevernever called Agatha Hagglethorn, 
  who is haunting the nursery at Cook County 
  Hospital, sucking the life out of babies. During 
  the fight, she charges at Harry, who uses spirit 
  magic to raise a magical shield to deflect her. 
  He wants a fairly powerful block, but he also 
  wants to conserve his resources, so he decides 
  on 5 shifts of power, which will give the block 
  a Superb (+5) strength. He gets a lucky +3 on 
  the Discipline roll—a roll of Fantastic (+6), so 
  he easily controls the spell.
  Pointing one end of his staff at her, he 
  chants the word, “Reflettum!” and a quarter 
  dome of energy springs into being as she 
  charges. Unfortunately, the spirit is quite 
  powerful and in her native demesne (page 170); 
  she rolls an attack at Epic (+7), beating both 
  Harry’s block and his normal defense. He takes 
  a 2-shift hit as the shield falls apart, knocking 
  him back to the ground.
  Blocks are usually set up as a defense against 
  damage—particularly if the wizard is especially 
  focused on combat. But not all wizards are, and 
  in such cases a blocking spell can be used as 
  something other than a shield—an evocation-
  based veil, for example, is often done as a block, 
  but what it blocks isn’t damage, it’s perception 
  (for more, see Spirit on page 255). 
  A Block Is a Block Is a Block
  Magic is an insanely flexible thing. Any 
  wizard specializing in an element learns 
  how to use it in a wide variety of defensive 
  situations. Because of this, you shouldn’t 
  be too nitpicky when you’re comparing 
  the element used in a block to the type of 
  attack—a water shield can block bullets 
  just as well as a spirit shield can, just using a 
  different methodology. Depending on how 
  you describe a shield, other people at the 
  table may come up with cool attacks that 
  would be effective against it, but you should 
  play this up for fun rather than trying to 
  define a huge list of shield subtypes.
  When you want to differentiate between 
  shield types, assessments and declarations 
  are your friend, typically done with Lore. 
  For example, if you’re attacking a wizard 
  whose shield is described as deflecting 
  objects away with kinetic force, you might 
  use Lore to declare that it’s weaker against 
  pure forms of energy, like heat and light. 
  This could give you a temporary aspect to 
  tag to support a particular kind of attack or 
  maneuver against that shield.
  Maneuver
  As with normal skills, evocation maneuvers 
  cover a broad variety of potential effects, mainly 
  geared toward creating a momentary advantage 
  for you or removing one from your opponents. 
  More often than not, this places a temporary 
  aspect on a target or on the scene, or removes 
  a temporary aspect from a target or from the 
  scene.
  Performing maneuvers is a little trickier than 
  attacking and blocking. By default, pulling off 
  most maneuvers requires 3 shifts of power, but if 
  the target has an appropriate resisting skill rated 
  higher than Good (+3), that skill total deter-
  mines the required number of shifts.
  Molly is particularly good at 
  this alternative approach.
  Hey Billy, 
  would you 
  use a “block” 
  effect to 
  hold a target 
  in place, 
  sorta like 
  Elaine did 
  to me in the 
  SUMMER 
  KNIGHT 
  case?
  Probably, yeah. 
  the thing to 
  remember with 
  any “how would 
  I” question is 
  that there 
  are probably 
  multiple answers.  
  You could model 
  an entangle 
  spell as a 
  maneuver (the 
  aspect used to 
  slow you down), 
  a block (against 
  movement), or 
  that special 
  sub-type of 
  a block, the 
  grapple 
  (page 211).
  Intent precedes 
  mechanics; figure 
  out what you 
  want to do 
  first, then 
  find a system 
  concept that 
  matches it.
  
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  Spellcasting (evocation)
  As with other effects, you can pay an addi-
  tional shift to make the effect persistent at the 
  rate of 1 shift per additional exchange.
  Example: Evan Montrose wants to make an 
  impression on some local practitioners who are 
  getting a bit out of hand. When he goes to meet 
  them, he decides to whip up some special effects 
  to make sure they know he means business.
  When he confronts them, he performs a 
  wind evocation as a maneuver to send strong 
  gusts of wind through the area to blow things 
  around and keep people off balance. This is 
  a maneuver on the scene, so the GM decides 
  he needs the basic 3 shifts of power to pull it 
  off. Evan decides to bring 6 shifts of power to 
  make the winds last for an additional three 
  exchanges, figuring he can use the distraction to 
  his advantage if things get dicey.
  He succeeds at performing the spell, and the 
  GM places an aspect of Hideously Strong 
  Winds on the scene.
  Counterspell
  If a wizard is in the presence of a magical effect, 
  he can attempt to nullify it with the power of 
  his will alone. Even though counterspells are 
  an evocation effect, they can be used to disrupt 
  thaumaturgy. While such an attempt may only 
  be temporary, it can buy the wizard precious 
  time. 
  Counterspelling is basically an attack against 
  the energy of the spell itself—you summon up 
  energy of your own to disrupt or redirect the 
  energy holding the spell together. Mechanically, 
  this is pretty straightforward. You need to equal 
  or surpass the power of the effect you want to 
  disrupt, and you roll it just like you would roll 
  an attack spell. 
  The tricky part is sussing out precisely how 
  much power the spell is using, so that you know 
  at least how much power you need to bring. 
  You can try to guess—but if you don’t bring 
  enough, the counterspell won’t work; if you 
  bring too much, you run the risk of not being 
  able to control it all. Figuring this out requires 
  an assessment action (which is a free action, so 
  you can do it just before you intend to counter-
  spell) using Lore.
  Example: Harry Dresden is battling Saluriel, 
  a Denarian of considerable power, in the 
  laundry room of a Marriott hotel alongside his 
  ally and lover, Susan Rodriguez. Saluriel has 
  unleashed a particularly wicked spell—a cloud 
  of snakes that engulfs Susan and has her in 
  a panic. She is tearing the biting snakes from 
  her skin in a desperate attempt to rid herself 
  of them. Harry knows she’s going to rip herself 
  apart if she keeps doing that, so he decides he 
  has to try a counterspell.
  First Jim—Harry’s player—must make a 
  Lore roll to see if he can determine how much 
  power Harry needs for the counterspell. The 
  GM says that the difficulty of the Lore roll 
  is Superb  (+5), reasoning that it should be 
  based on Saluriel’s Discipline. Jim rolls Harry’s 
  Great (+4) Lore and succeeds, and the GM 
  explains that he needs 5 shifts of power for the 
  spell. His Conviction is Superb (+5), so he can 
  safely summon that much power, and he gets 
  the +2 he needs on his Discipline roll to control 
  it. Poof! The snakes pop out of existence.
  Elements
  One of the ways in which evocation effects are 
  defined is by elements, basic aspects (no pun 
  intended) of reality that have different affinities 
  for certain types of effects. These associations 
  are based on tradition and folk belief rather 
  than on science, and exist mainly to help wizards 
  focus their effects more clearly. If a wizard can 
  think of a blast as “fire” rather than “the ramifica-
  tions of thermonuclear force,” he’s more likely to 
  pull it off successfully. 
  The most common elemental system within 
  the White Council comes from medieval 
  Europe: the “Classical” one, consisting of fire, air, 
  earth, and water (modern wizards also include 
  “spirit”). When a wizard casts an evocation, he 
  chooses one of these elements to be the basis of 
  the effect.
  A Map of the World
  Wizards with different ancient tradi-
  tions may construct their evocations out 
  of different elements than the traditional 
  Western ones—Ancient Mai probably prac-
  tices an evocation system that uses metal, 
  water, wood, earth, fire, and spirit as its base 
  elements, befitting her Chinese heritage. 
  If your wizard comes from a non-Clas-
  sical tradition, you’ll need to construct a 
  basic idea of what each element does; look 
  to the examples below for guidelines.
  Do you REALLY want to model 
  Ancient Mai’s mind? Good luck to you.  
  She’s another tiny, scary lady in my life.
  Billy, about the snakes — I thought my Lore was just Good (+3)?
  By this point in the casefiles, your lore has improved. 
  did you even read your own advancement sidebar? 
  Billy, 
  Can you 
  do Block 
  evocations 
  instead of 
  rolling to 
  defend? 
  How about 
  counter-
  spells? 
  As written, 
  no—although 
  your group 
  could decide 
  differently. 
  But keep in 
  mind that, when 
  you forgo your 
  defense roll, 
  your attacker 
  only has to 
  overcome your 
  blocking spell—
  no defense 
  roll means no 
  defense aside 
  from that. 
  If the block 
  isn’t broken, it 
  persists until 
  the end of the 
  next exchange. 
  And it would 
  have to be an 
  actual block; 
  no use-as-
  armor option.
  By contrast, 
  I don’t think 
  counterspells 
  can be done 
  reactively, 
  due to the 
  assessment 
  requirement. 
  
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  Spellcasting (evocation)
  Air
  Air is the element of motion and freedom, 
  and most of its key effects are motion-based: 
  powerful gales to knock over foes or throw 
  objects around, the movement of objects to the 
  wizard’s hand, or shields of swirling air currents 
  that push harm away. 
  On the nastier end, it’s possible to make 
  pockets of vacuum to suffocate or implode 
  targets. It also can affect the quality of air around 
  the wizard—keeping smoke clouds localized, 
  purifying the air in a room, or even calling up 
  fog to conceal an escape. Movement can involve 
  fine manipulation, which is why air magic is 
  often called upon to pick locks and pull apart 
  devices. Also, air is the primary medium for the 
  transfer of sound, allowing for the creation of 
  distractions by throwing loud sounds around, or 
  creating “bubbles” where sound doesn’t travel for 
  the purposes of privacy or stealth.
  Maneuvers that rely on movement, like 
  pushing and pulling stuff around, are the strong 
  suit of air magic. Air magic is most commonly 
  used to put aspects such as Buffeted, Dust in 
  Eyes, and such on targets, as well as Hard to 
  Maneuver on scenes. 
  Earth
  Earth is the element of stability, gravity, and 
  grounding. Ultimately, everything rests on the 
  earth, and its practitioners take advantage of 
  this fact by calling up protective walls of stone, 
  shaking the ground underfoot, and keeping 
  themselves stable regardless of the surrounding 
  circumstances. Earth is also the element that 
  governs magnetism; earth mages often use this 
  to their advantage, strengthening or dampening 
  magnetic fields to achieve various effects.
  Earth’s strong points are in doing damage 
  to—or reinforcing—ordered structures like 
  buildings. Earth can put aspects like Unsure 
  Footing and Shaken on targets, and Weak 
  Foundations or Tremors on scenes. It can 
  also put strong gravitational effects on targets, 
  flattening them directly or pinning them down 
  with something like Three Times as Heavy.
  I prefer “pure force” to “air” 
  for these purposes, but that’s 
  just the way I roll.
  Mommy, Where Does 
  Lightning Come From?
  So, suppose you want to make lightning or 
  deal with lightning somehow in an evoca-
  tion. Would you use air or earth? You could 
  argue that air seems the most logical choice, 
  but you could also argue that earth gives you 
  access to electromagnetism, which would let 
  you direct and divert electricity. So which 
  is it?
  The answer is both. Figuring out how 
  to creatively apply your command of the 
  elements is one of the most fun parts of 
  being a spellcaster—while an earth wizard 
  might not be able to just summon light-
  ning from the air to strike someone down, 
  he might be able to channel it up from 
  the ground and out of his body. Thinking 
  about the relationship of each element to 
  a particular effect can often help you come 
  up with good maneuvers and suggest what 
  might happen with any backlash or fallout 
  (page 256) that occurs.
  
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  Spellcasting (evocation)
  Fire
  Fire is the element of consumption and destruc-
  tion, and it is the first resort of those who wish 
  to deal massive carnage to their foes. Besides the 
  classic image of the fireball-throwing wizard, 
  this element allows for a more subtle range of 
  effects, allowing a wizard to apply or remove 
  heat from an object or area and to melt small 
  objects like locks or other barriers. 
  Fire maneuvers normally call upon the ubiq-
  uitous On Fire aspect, which can be placed on 
  targets or scenes. 
  Water
  Water is the element of entropy and change. 
  Its chief power is changing the state of things, 
  as water tends to do: eroding, dissolving, 
  disrupting, decaying, dispersing, disintegrating. 
  While many people wouldn’t consider water to 
  be a very damaging element, you have to think 
  about the kind of insidious damage water does: 
  dissolving stone, rusting metal, warping wood—
  even pummeling or slicing if it’s a high-pressure 
  jet of water. It can also flood, suffocate, assist in 
  chemical reactions, and so on. Water is often 
  lethal to many different kinds of machines, 
  shorting them out or causing them to jam (like 
  firearms). Plenty of dangerous substances—
  battery acid, quicksand, drain cleanser—have 
  liquid properties that a water evocation might 
  manipulate (perhaps with a little extra difficulty 
  for using something unusual).
  Wizards tend to use water maneuvers to 
  break down matter in various ways. Water can 
  place aspects like Drenched and Hard to 
  Breathe (water strategically moved to suffo-
  cate) on a target, as well as Slick and Partly 
  Dissolved on a scene. 
  Spirit
  Spirit is the element of the soul, the purest 
  expression of will. In a way, it’s the most basic 
  of the elements—the translation of the wizard’s 
  raw desire into energy—and its presence tends 
  to transcend different traditions of magic, 
  being a core element in every one. Spirit effects 
  tend to manifest as raw kinetic force and light, 
  allowing the wizard to create or snuff light in an 
  area, summon shields of force, strike a foe with 
  raw kinetic power, and even bend the energies 
  around people and objects to make them appear 
  invisible. 
  A special kind of block called a veil is the 
  special province of spirit magic. Unlike a normal 
  block, the power invested in a veil serves as 
  the difficulty for using skills or other magic 
  to detect anything that’s concealed by the veil 
  (see Veils on page 276 for a deeper treatment of 
  the topic). Beyond that, spirit maneuvers tend 
  to be oriented around light (Blinding Light 
  on a scene or Lit Up for targeting someone), 
  but kinetic strikes can also knock enemies off-
  balance and create physical havoc. 
  Depending on a wizard’s temperament, he 
  often tends to be good at the “blunt, direct” side 
  of spirit evocations (force effects) or good at 
  the “sensitive, subtle” side (veils and other soft 
  effects). This is really true of any element, but 
  it’s particularly strongly expressed in the case of 
  spirit—the element most closely tied to thought.
  Gathering Power
  To do an evocation, your wizard must gather 
  power for the spell. The stronger his belief in 
  magic, the more powerful his magic can be; 
  this is represented by your Conviction skill. 
  Most of the time, this is all you’ll have to go 
  on—evocation is too quick and dirty to use 
  other power sources the way a thaumaturgical 
  spell can (page 267). 
  You can channel a number of shifts in power 
  equal to your Conviction with a minimum of 
  impact—just one point of mental stress. 
  Theoretically, you can call up as much 
  power as you wish, but the dangers increase 
  dramatically. Past the limit of your Conviction, 
  that power starts to take a severe toll on your 
  wizard’s mind, forcing him to exhaustion. As 
  stated above, if a wizard is casting a spell at all, 
  he takes a minimum of one point of mental 
  stress. That cost goes up if he reaches beyond his 
  basic capacity.
  Spirit also 
  covers mental 
  magic, emotions, 
  ghosts – that 
  sort of stuff.
  Most of that’s 
  beyond me, 
  though—I’m 
  all about the 
  force effects 
  end of things.
  Why don’t water evocators 
  short out their own magic? 
  Isn’t that running water?
  I’ve often wondered 
  that myself.
  And I’ve tried to explain it to you, but 
  you’re the sort of wizard who just doesn’t 
  get magic that doesn’t involve shoving a 
  ton of fire or force at something.
  Gets the job done. I’ll have to 
  ask Carlos one of these days.
  Stuff like 
  hellfire can 
  be brought to 
  bear pretty 
  quickly for 
  evocation.
  We included 
  that in 
  Sponsored 
  magic. check 
  out the end of 
  the chapter.
  Subtlety with fire is rare, but those who can combine 
  the two take advantage of its purifying properties.
  duration with 
  evocation veils 
  is largely a 
  matter of gm 
  judgment call. 
  Personally I 
  wouldn’t go for 
  “1 shift gets 
  you one extra 
  exchange” 
  with a veil; 
  I’d just let it 
  hang around 
  until something 
  pierces it, or 
  until the end 
  of the scene. I 
  see them simply 
  as reAllY 
  good magical 
  Stealth rolls.
  
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  Every shift of power you summon past your 
  Conviction costs one additional point of mental 
  stress during casting; so a spell with a power 
  rating three higher than your Conviction would 
  inflict four points of mental stress when cast 
  (one for summoning up to Conviction, plus one 
  for each additional step on the ladder). Just like 
  any other type of stress, this could force your 
  wizard to take consequences in order to keep 
  himself upright.
  Of course, sometimes the wizard is willing 
  to take the consequences up front, depending 
  on the circumstances. However, this leaves 
  some of the deepest parts of the wizard’s psyche 
  vulnerable; while it is definitely the key to the 
  most powerful evocations, it will leave its mark 
  indelibly. If someone has killed a wizard’s friend, 
  he might take an extreme consequence of 
  Unshakable Vengeful Rage so he can make 
  a horrifically powerful fire blast…but you can 
  bet that rage will unbalance him in many future 
  conflicts to come.
  Keep in mind that doing this carelessly can 
  be dangerous. Drawing in more power doesn’t 
  necessarily guarantee that you’re going to be able 
  to control that power (not to mention the prob-
  lems the consequence itself will bring). Many an 
  errant wizard has opened himself to his most 
  primal feelings, only to be consumed by magic 
  he could not control.
  Controlling Power
  Casting an evocation spell ultimately boils 
  down to controlling the release of the magical 
  power that the wizard gathers so that it takes 
  the shape of the spell in his mind. For every-
  thing to go smoothly, his Discipline roll must 
  match or exceed the number of power shifts 
  that have been gathered. The Discipline roll also 
  controls spell targeting and sets the difficulty for 
  defending against it. 
  You get to make this roll only once, at the 
  instant that the spell energy is released. 
  If you fail the Discipline roll, the excess shifts 
  are released as uncontrolled power, which mani-
  fests as either backlash or fallout (see this page). 
  Fortunately, you have a number of tools available 
  to keep that from happening. You can invoke 
  aspects to raise the Discipline roll and can also 
  take backlash as mental or physical stress (and 
  thus possibly incur consequences) to try to cover 
  the margin of failure.
  Focus Items
  Finally, there are focus items, the most common 
  tools of the evocator’s trade. Most wizards rely 
  on focus items to reduce the risks inherent 
  to evocation. These vary widely in terms of 
  what they can be, and they depend highly on 
  the wizard’s particular paradigm of magic. For 
  example, Harry Dresden has a lot of the tradi-
  tional, medieval English wizard thing going on, 
  so he has a rune-carved staff and wand (blasting 
  rod) as his primary focus items. A wizard with 
  a Far Eastern bent might have prepared scrolls 
  with mystical calligraphy on them. A wizard 
  of a religious bent might brandish a symbol of 
  his faith. 
  The main purpose of a focus item is to make 
  it easier to control the release of energy in an 
  evocation. In a way, it’s a method to add extra 
  control to the construct in the wizard’s mind. If 
  he can envision the energy traveling down his 
  arm into a rod and the rod is an actual object, 
  it’s easier than if the construct is entirely mental.
  Using a focus item may give you a +1 bonus 
  either to Conviction (making it safer to summon 
  one more shift of power) or Discipline (making 
  it easier to control the spell) for a specific appli-
  cation. See “Crafting” on page 278 for more infor-
  mation about the types of bonuses focus item 
  provide as well as how to build them. 
  Typically (and traditionally), a focus item 
  is used only for one element. However, it is 
  possible for a focus item to be more powerful, 
  adding a bigger bonus or being useful for various 
  types of evocation. A highly personal focus 
  item may also be one of your aspects and could 
  provide additional bonuses via invocation. 
  Backlash & Fallout
  When your Discipline roll does not match the 
  amount of power put into the spell, bad things 
  happen. The excess energy goes wild, causing 
  havoc. 
  There are basically two kinds of trouble: 
  backlash and fallout. Backlash affects the 
  wizard; fallout affects the environment or other 
  nearby targets. Like everything else, backlash 
  and fallout are measured in shifts—in this case, 
  the difference between your failed Discipline roll 
  and the gathered power. The worse the failure, 
  the more the spell’s energy goes haywire, and the 
  worse the effects get.
  You get to choose how much backlash you 
  absorb, with the rest going to the GM as fallout. 
  So, if you’re 
  willing to go 
  insane, you 
  can make 
  a really 
  big boom.
  Gender can 
  come into 
  your choice 
  of foci too. 
  Elaine’s foci 
  are all rings 
  and jewelry. 
  My own have 
  a sort of, um, 
  “boyish” lack 
  of subtlety. 
  Phallic, Harry! All 
  of your tools are 
  phallic! Just say it!
  You guys, 
  keep down 
  the rampant 
  sexism there. 
  (What about 
  your force 
  rINgS, Harry? 
  eh? eh?)
  
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  Particularly self-sacrificing wizards may choose 
  to take some or all the excess as backlash—espe-
  cially if there are allies nearby who might bear 
  the brunt of the fallout of the failed spell. 
  Any uncontrolled power taken as backlash 
  remains a part of the spell and does not reduce 
  its effect.  Fallout is different: every shift of 
  fallout reduces the effect of the spell.
  Backlash means that the spell energies run 
  through the wizard, causing injury or other 
  problems. This manifests as shifts of stress, 
  which could require the taking of consequences 
  in the usual way. Fortunately, you can choose to 
  take the backlash as either physical or mental 
  stress (but not split between both), which means 
  your wizard can keep his mental stress track 
  open for more spellcasting if he needs to.
  Example: Harry must cast a spell with a 
  Superb (+5) control target without using 
  incantations or focus items. Without these 
  benefits, he fails the Discipline roll by 5. He 
  doesn’t want to hurt anyone around him or 
  cause any unintended environmental effects, 
  and he needs the spell to succeed in full, so he 
  chooses to take a 5-stress physical backlash. He’s 
  already taken some physical stress during this 
  scene, so he ends up having to take a moderate 
  consequence of Utterly Exhausted in 
  addition to a 1-stress physical hit. Ouch. But at 
  least the spell is still cast at full power.
  Fallout means that the spell energies flow 
  into the environment, causing unintended 
  consequences. This can manifest in a number 
  of different ways. The GM may place aspects on 
  the environment or on targets that the wizard 
  didn’t intend to hit (like his friends and inno-
  cent bystanders), or she may assign stress and 
  consequences directly. The GM is encouraged 
  to think of the worst applications of Murphy’s 
  Law possible and enact them. Remember, the 
  wizard was arrogant enough to try to control 
  the forces of the universe—and failed. When 
  fallout happens, it’s the universe putting that 
  wizard in his place, and it’s the GM’s job to take 
  the universe’s side. Greek tragedies have been 
  written about this sort of thing.
  As we hinted above, it should be noted that 
  backlash is a kind of safety mechanism for the 
  wizard—if he chooses to absorb it all himself, 
  his spell should still go off as intended because 
  he was willing to pay the extra cost. Fallout is 
  another story entirely, because the wizard has 
  just released the energy into the world and let 
  it run wild. When determining the effect of the 
  spell that caused the fallout, the GM should 
  determine how the shifts of fallout behave.
  Example: Harry Dresden is trying to cast 
  a spirit (force) attack of Epic (+7) difficulty, 
  defined as a Weapon:5 attack against an entire 
  zone containing two bad guys. But Harry 
  mucks it up, rolling a Fair (+2) and missing 
  the target by 5. He’s drained of resources at this 
  point—he’s taken consequences, spent most of 
  his fate points, and has both stress tracks at 
  least partially full. Jim, his player, decides to let 
  the five shifts go out as fallout and deal with a 
  weaker spell.
  Because Harry lost 5 shifts to fallout, the 
  GM rules that Harry’s attack is only a single 
  target Weapon:2 attack at Fair. The one oppo-
  nent Harry is still able to target dodges that 
  easily.
  As to the effect of the fallout, the GM 
  rules that Harry blew out a support wall in 
  the building, putting an aspect of Crumbling 
  Building on the scene. Now, not only is he on 
  his last legs in this fight, but he has to deal with 
  the whole building falling down around him…
  Rote Spells
  Over time, a wizard uses a particular evocation 
  often enough that it settles into mental “muscle 
  memory,” and its use becomes reflexive. When 
  this happens, the spell is considered to be a rote 
  spell. Your wizard may know a number of evoca-
  tion rotes equal to the numeric rating of his Lore 
  skill. So, a wizard with Great (+4) Lore knows 
  up to four evocation rotes.
  A rote spell is defined as one specific applica-
  tion of evocation in a single element, such as a 
  fire attack, a particular air maneuver, or a spirit 
  block. It always manifests in exactly the same 
  way each time, has the same power level, places 
  the exact same aspect, etc. Any change in the 
  parameters of the spell disqualifies it from being 
  a rote. 
  The big benefit of knowing a rote spell is that 
  you don’t have to roll Discipline to control it. It’s 
  assumed that you can control the spell energy at 
  a level equal to your Discipline score, allowing 
  you to act as if you’d rolled a zero on the dice 
  every time. You still need to make a Discipline 
  roll to target the spell, however; there’s just no 
  chance of accidental failure. Focus items add 
  their bonuses automatically if they are tied in to 
  Not Karrin. The other one.    Lisa?
   Do you 
  think maybe 
  you could use 
  that Evan 
  Montrose 
  guy as your 
  example for 
  all of the 
  spectacular 
  failures?
  This is a solid expression of failure, William. Particularly spectacular 
  spell failures can fry the wizard and destroy his house—or worse.
  Hey, at least 
  the building’s 
  not on fire.
  
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  the rote, but there’s a caveat: if the wizard does 
  the rote with the focus item, then that item is a 
  requirement for the rote every time he wants to 
  use it. (This is why Harry gets so nervous about 
  entering combat without his staff and blasting 
  rod—he loses the benefits of the rote spell and 
  has to roll each spell as a normal evocation.) 
  Aspect invocations and other such trickery may 
  be used after the fact, just as if you had rolled a 
  zero and then wanted to invoke something.
  Example: Harry Dresden has his “Fuego!” 
  spell as a rote. He can choose not to make a 
  control roll when he attacks a single target with 
  fire magic. His blasting rod is tied into the rote, 
  giving him an effective Great (+4) Discipline 
  controlling the spell. With his Conviction, he 
  has no problem producing four shifts of power 
  for the spell, so that’s where he sets the power 
  dial. Therefore, the rote spell is a Weapon:4 fire 
  spell automatically.
  Finally, keep in mind that you can have a rote 
  that’s more powerful than you can control with 
  a Discipline roll of zero, which would basically 
  cause automatic fallout or backlash when used 
  unless you can invoke some aspects to make up 
  the difference. This is clearly not for the faint-
  hearted, but it might be useful as a sort of “last 
  resort plan,” making sure you can put the heavy 
  damage out there in a moment of dire need.
  Other Parameters
  There are some uses of evocation and a few other 
  considerations that don’t fit into our discussions 
  thus far. So here’s “everything else.”
  Deliberate Hexing
  While a spellcaster normally hexes technology 
  as an accident of being a wizard (page 228), he 
  can also do it on purpose, focusing his energies 
  to disrupt electronics and other devices. This 
  is significantly less taxing than performing 
  other forms of evocation—you don’t even need 
  access to the Evocation power (page 180) to do 
  it, so long as you are some sort of practitioner, 
  because  it doesn’t require command of any 
  particular element or force. In addition, the 
  normal 1-stress cost for summoning power up 
  to your Conviction is waived, giving you a “free 
  shot” at most forms of technology.
  Nearly any type of technological device, going 
  all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, 
  can be hexed if it has moving parts of some 
  Deliberate Hexing Table
  Power 
  Cost
  Technology Potentially Affected
  1
  Highly sensitive, complex comput-
  erized technology—the sort that a 
  good swift bump might break. Very 
  new, cutting-edge technologies and 
  prototypes.
  2
  Complex (or simple-but-sensitive) 
  computerized tech. Specialized, 
  new, and probably expensive 
  technologies. 
  3
  Simple electronic equipment. 
  Desktop, laptop, other “house-
  hold” computers. Most current, 
  modern cars.
  4
  Conceptually complicated, more 
  modern guns (automatic weapons, 
  etc.). Most cars, including older 
  cars from the last few decades. The 
  exciting technologies 1967 had 
  to offer.
  5
  Even cars without electronics 
  under the hood start to have 
  problems—if it was on the road 
  starting in 1950, there may be some 
  trouble, with a few notable excep-
  tions. Some smaller firearms may 
  be affected, though conceptually 
  simple ones still work pretty well, 
  at least for a time. Older automatic 
  weapons may malfunction.
  6
  You can’t wear a watch for long 
  without killing it. Even the Model 
  T looks a little scared when you get 
  near it. Electricity is right out.
  7
  If it’s from the Twentieth Century, 
  it’s probably broken. The late 
  Nineteenth Century’s tech is also 
  prone to troubles. Simple guns 
  may stop working at inopportune 
  moments. Even steam-powered 
  stuff may experience sudden failure.
  8+
  Nearly anything with moving parts 
  from the Industrial Revolution 
  (late-Eighteenth to early-Nine-
  teenth Century) forward, and even 
  some things further back than that. 
  It’s open season on technology.
  I hate it when you reduce my insecurities to game mechanics.
  
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  kind. Generally speaking, the more complex 
  the device, the easier it is to disrupt, so more 
  modern technologies (especially computerized 
  stuff) tend to succumb easily, while older tech-
  nologies (non-electric stuff) are harder to sabo-
  tage. Use the table shown here as a guideline for 
  the power requirements of a hexing spell.
  The normal modifiers for attacking targets 
  apply here—consider one device to be a single 
  target. This means that if you want to disable 
  a whole group’s worth of guns, you’ll have to 
  pay extra shifts to disable all the guns in your 
  zone, or bring enough power to split the effect 
  among the guns, as per the rules for attacks on  
  page 251.
  Hexing cannot be used to manipulate 
  technology—only destroy it. You cannot use 
  hexing to do maneuvers unless destroying the 
  device is precisely what justifies the maneuver. 
  So if there’s an advanced filtration system in a 
  building keeping gas out of a room, you could 
  hex the control panel to put the aspect Filled 
  With Gas on the room, but you couldn’t selec-
  tively control the gas flow in any way.
  Very old wizards get a bonus to hexing simply 
  from their age, which is why Harry can routinely 
  drive a Volkswagon Beetle while some members 
  of the Senior Council still have their sanctums 
  decked out like it’s 1599. This chart assumes 
  that the wizard is around fifty years old or 
  younger—as a guideline, set the “1 Power” cate-
  gory wherever the wizard would start finding 
  the technology truly alien (so that special wizard 
  who was actually born in 1599 could probably 
  hex everything on the chart at 1 power).
  Mundane Effects
  Sometimes, you might want to produce an effect 
  that doesn’t really do anything but add color to 
  a scene. The most common example of this is 
  a light spell, which very seldom does anything 
  but provide the fact that there is light to see 
  by and then fades neatly into the background. 
  Minor effects like these are usually assumed to 
  be within the scope of evocation maneuvers; 
  however, they rarely require a roll or cost any 
  stress, especially when incorporating a focus like 
  the wizard’s pentacle or staff. You might consider 
  them “pre-school magic”—what wizard appren-
  tices would learn as their very first spells. Any 
  minor effect like this can be cast without a roll 
  and will last for a scene for free. At most, a fate 
  point might be required if the minor effect coun-
  ters a scene aspect that might be inconvenient.
  Prolonging Spells
  Sometimes, it behooves a wizard to maintain a 
  spell effect for an indefinite length of time, espe-
  cially when the effect is a block or maneuver. 
  Normally, you’d assign shifts of power to make 
  the spell persist longer than an exchange. 
  However, this makes the lifespan of very 
  powerful effects depressingly short. 
  Alternately, you can actively funnel more 
  energy into an evocation to maintain it, but this 
  takes up your standard action for the round. 
  This is functionally equivalent to rolling another 
  spell. Summon one shift of power per additional 
  exchange you want the spell to last, and make 
  another Discipline roll to control it. This takes 
  up your action and deals mental stress as per the 
  usual rules for a normal evocation; the advan-
  tage is that you don’t have to sacrifice the efficacy 
  of the original spell—it keeps the rating of the 
  original roll. If successful, the spell effect stays 
  active for that length of time.
  Example: Harry gets ambushed by 
  SMG-wielding thugs and throws up his shield 
  on short notice—neglecting to assign any shifts 
  to duration—so he can make sure he survives 
  the ambush in the first exchange.
  In the next exchange, Harry realizes he’s 
  going to need a long-term shield. He takes 
  one point of mental stress and summons up a 
  4-shift effect, giving him four more potential 
  rounds of shield protection he doesn’t have to 
  concentrate on. He rolls his Discipline and gets 
  the Great he needs to prolong the spell.  The 
  shield will stay in place for this exchange and 
  the next three exchanges after that.
  So something 
  like my 
  “flickum 
  bicus” spell 
  is a “mundane 
  effect”  — it 
  lights candles, 
  but doesn’t 
  burn the 
  house down.
  Yep, that’s 
  about the size 
  of it. But if 
  you used it in a 
  fight to gain 
  advantage — 
  that’s when 
  it counts as a 
  “real” spell.
  
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  Property Damage 
  Without Fallout
  Often, a wizard will fling around spell energies 
  that inevitably have an unintended side-effect on 
  the surroundings, even if he’s keeping the spell 
  energies under control with solid Discipline 
  rolls. To get specific, when you fling a gout of 
  fire at a monster and miss, there’s a solid chance 
  that some part of the scenery will catch on fire. 
  There’s no fallout there as far as the system 
  is concerned (page 256), but there is the real and 
  present danger of fire on hand—you can look 
  at the wizard’s choice of element as an “ambient” 
  scene aspect, potentially creating opportunities 
  for compels or more easily justifying certain 
  kinds of scene aspects. 
  It’s the GM’s job to decide whether or not 
  this matters for a scene (and to make it cut both 
  ways if it does). Look to the elements getting 
  thrown around as guidelines and inspiration for 
  what might happen, either to add an aspect to 
  the scene or just a little extra chaos to the events 
  as they unfold. It’s probably best not to create 
  the scene aspect right away (after all, the player 
  did succeed on the Discipline roll), but waive the 
  roll if someone wants to use it as justification to 
  create a scene aspect later, such as, “He’s been 
  throwing around a lot of fire magic; can I kick 
  this oil drum over and start a regular fire?”
  Some thoughts for ways to damage property:
    Flames can catch on flammable materials 
  and spread.
    Water can short out circuitry even when 
  magic doesn’t; ice can widen existing 
  cracks and make surfaces slippery.
    Wind can knock loose objects around, 
  obscure vision by kicking up clouds of 
  dust or fog, or feed fresh oxygen into an 
  existing fire.
    Tremors can damage the foundation of 
  a building; magnetism can do all sorts of 
  nasty things with metal objects and elec-
  tronic systems.
    Force effects can crack supporting struc-
  tures and knock things over; effects 
  acting on the spirit world might attract 
  the attention of minor spirits of the 
  Nevernever, making things get a little 
  creepier and unsettling.
  Redirecting 
  Spell Energy
  Sometimes, you might commit energy to an 
  evocation, only to discover that circumstances 
  warrant a different effect than the one you 
  originally chose. This happens most often with 
  blocks—you put up a shield of some sort that 
  you’re maintaining, only to find out that what 
  you really need to do is attack or maneuver. It’s 
  true that you could simply cast another spell, but 
  there are times when a wizard needs to econo-
  mize his resources—like when a demon is about 
  to eat his face.
  In those circumstances, you have an option—
  you can reuse the spell energy from an effect 
  you currently have active, spending the shifts on 
  another evocation without having to roll another 
  spell. This is subject to some limitations:
    The spell must have been maintained 
  from a previous exchange into the 
  current one.
    The spell must not have been used 
  already for its original function in the 
  current exchange.
    You must be able to describe how the 
  energy could plausibly be redirected.
  Presuming these things are the case, you can 
  use the current power value of the spell to act 
  as a different kind of spell. If the new kind of 
  spell requires a roll for targeting (like with an 
  attack or maneuver), you may roll Discipline. 
  This immediately cancels out the previous effect, 
  as the spell energy can no longer be used for that 
  purpose.
  Example: Wardens Carlos Ramirez and 
  Harry Dresden have been fighting with 
  White Court vampires in an insane duel to 
  the death gone horribly wrong. Ghouls have 
  also crashed the party, throwing the entire 
  fight into disarray. Carlos has had his water 
  shield rote (page 293) up for most of the fight; 
  its current strength is four shifts. He still has 
  another exchange of maintenance.
  In the next exchange, the GM describes a 
  ghoul advancing on the two of them, and it’s 
  Carlos’ turn. JJ, Carlos’ player, says, “Hey, so 
  my water shield is entropic, right? It disinte-
  grates whatever touches it? Can I just use it to 
  intercept the nasty and chew him up, making it 
  into an attack?”
  William, I’m sure 
  Harry could help 
  you think up 
  many more ways 
  that magic can 
  destroy property.
  Shut up, Bob.
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  JJ’s explanation seems plausible, and 
  Carlos hasn’t used the shield to block this 
  exchange. The GM considers this, and she 
  says, “Okay, but obviously that’s going to use 
  the spell energy, so you’ll be shieldless the rest 
  of the exchange.” JJ says he’s fine with that; the 
  GM tells him to roll his Discipline (because 
  he’s turning the block into an attack and needs 
  a targeting roll), and allows him to attack the 
  ghoul with a Weapon:4 water attack. He rolls 
  incredibly well, and the GM describes the ghoul 
  being utterly disintegrated as it smashes into 
  the shield.
  Thaumaturgy
  Thaumaturgy is the safest, most reliable method 
  of doing magic—pretty much the polar opposite 
  of evocation. The primary differences between 
  the two are matters of preparation, time, and 
  mindset. 
  In evocation, you summon up your power, 
  envision the result you desire, and attempt 
  to control the energy on the fly. Because the 
  construct is made up only from the caster’s will 
  and the elements are held solely as concepts in 
  the caster’s mind, evocation can achieve only 
  simple effects, with a very good chance of some-
  thing going wrong.
  By contrast, thaumaturgy sets up the 
  construct physically and allows the elements 
  to act as a lens through which the wizard then 
  focuses his power. Because the spellcaster 
  doesn’t have to concentrate to keep the construct 
  in mind (it’s right there in front of him), he 
  creates a much stronger and more stable effect—
  meaning he can focus on achieving effects of 
  much greater complexity and subtlety. He can 
  also direct power into the spell gradually, making 
  it far less likely that something will go awry. 
  Thaumaturgy also allows the wizard the 
  luxury of drawing power from sources other 
  than himself—such as bound spirits, forces of 
  nature, or the assistance of others. Over time, 
  the effects of thaumaturgy are more powerful 
  than those of evocation. While a blast of fire 
  may injure, a ritual curse can leave you and your 
  offspring crippled for generations.
  Most of the spells in traditional tomes, 
  or the ones passed down through schools of 
  sorcery, are basically thaumaturgy. They can 
  be described in physical terms—if you follow 
  the recipe of the spell correctly, feeding in the 
  power that it requires, the spell/ritual will work. 
  Particularly effective thaumaturgical rituals 
  require elaborate physical preparations (such 
  as rare items, multiple casters, unusual times of 
  year, or outside influence such as storms) and 
  may also require a minimal influx of power; this 
  makes them usable by people who, otherwise, 
  would never be regarded as wizards. This can 
  be useful, or it can be very dangerous. (Sadly, it’s 
  usually both.)
  Inherent 
  Limitations
  Thaumaturgy lets you make the most of time, 
  preparation, and materials—without those, 
  it just can’t be done. Therefore, there are two 
  primary practical limitations.
  The first is a matter of time. Thaumaturgy 
  is a slow art, with the fastest of spells taking a 
  minute or more, and many taking much longer 
  than that. Patience is necessary; speed is being 
  traded for versatility and potency.
  The second is a matter of symbols. In order to 
  affect a target at great range (whether in phys-
  ical distance or some other dimension), some 
  sort of link must be established to that target 
  via symbolic representations, the incorporation 
  of recently-separated bits of the target (blood, 
  hair, a family keepsake), and so on. Without 
  these physical materials on hand to represent 
  the target in absentia—as well as for anchoring 
  the purpose of the spell to the ritual—a thau-
  maturgic spell simply has nowhere to go and 
  nothing to do.
  
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  How to Do It
  1. Determine the desired spell effect. This 
  will determine the complexity of the spell 
  in shifts.
  2. If the complexity of the spell is equal to or 
  less than your Lore, assume you have every-
  thing you need to cast the spell and you 
  require no additional effort for preparation. 
  If the complexity of the spell is greater than 
  your Lore, your wizard must enter a prepa-
  ration stage during which he researches the 
  spell further, assembles the necessary compo-
  nents, acquires additional sources of power, 
  and finishes the spell construct. You must 
  make up the deficit between your Lore and 
  the total complexity of the spell. There are 
  multiple techniques for doing this at the table.
    Invoke aspects: Every aspect you can 
  invoke to narrate a part of preparation 
  adds two shifts toward the deficit.
    Make declarations: You can declare 
  a mini-scene relevant to preparation, 
  where you use a skill and create a tempo-
  rary aspect to tag. When successful, this 
  is worth two shifts toward the deficit. If 
  the effort fails, the spell isn’t automati-
  cally a bust, but no forward progress is 
  made, either.
    Accept or inflict consequences: For every 
  consequence you are willing to take or 
  inflict on others for the sake of prepara-
  tion, add the value of the consequence 
  in shifts toward the deficit: so, a mild 
  consequence would add two shifts. (Blood 
  sacrifice is a dark but very potent path 
  many a black magic practitioner can take.)
    Skip a scene – For every scene you 
  can participate in during a session and 
  choose to skip in favor of preparing the 
  spell, you can add one shift toward the 
  deficit.
  3. When the complexity deficit is met, you can 
  move into actually casting the ritual. The 
  casting process is identical to the process 
  for evocation. Choose an amount of power 
  to funnel into the spell and roll Discipline 
  to control that energy, with any uncon-
  trolled shifts potentially becoming backlash 
  or fallout. Unlike evocation, so long as you 
  continue to make your Discipline rolls, you 
  can continue to funnel power into the spell 
  in successive rounds of casting. When the 
  power in the spell equals the complexity, 
  you’ve successfully cast it.
  What You Can 
  Do With It
  Thaumaturgy carries an extremely broad range 
  of effects under its banner: summoning and 
  binding supernatural entities like spirits or 
  demons, divination and detection, wards, curses, 
  temporary and permanent enchantments on 
  people and things…the list is potentially endless. 
  Fortunately, most of what thaumaturgy does 
  can be broken down into some basic principles 
  that make different spells relatively easy to parse 
  out in game terms—namely, how to determine 
  the complexity of the spell. 
  Thaumaturgy can:
    Solve improbable or impossible problems
    Create lasting changes in people and 
  things
    Provide inaccessible knowledge
    Allow interaction with the supernatural
    Shape magical energies into physical 
  forms
  Below, we’ll get into each of these in depth.
  Billy, are you really suggesting 
  the player just not play for part 
  of the session with the “skip” option 
  above? That sounds horribly dull.
  So it’s an 
  “opportunity” 
  to make me get 
  the pizza next 
  time. GOT IT.
  It’s just an option, and if groups don’t want 
  to use it, they can just take it off the list. 
  that said, it’s a cool way for a player to say, 
  “Hey, I’m gonna run out to the ’Spress and pick 
  up some pizzas for us. let’s say I’m working 
  on that spell while I’m gone.” or, heck, just as 
  something to use when you need to hit the head. 
  At any rate, this option isn’t intended as a 
  PeNAltY—it’s meant to be an oPPortuNItY. 
  
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  Solve Improbable or 
  Impossible Problems
  The most general effect of thaumaturgy allows 
  the wizard to do something that he wouldn’t 
  normally be able to do. In that sense, a ritual 
  spell is a simple action on steroids. The wizard 
  tries to accomplish something basic, but safely 
  ignores any limitations that might thwart a 
  normal person from trying to accomplish the 
  same thing by mundane means. Prohibitions of 
  time, distance, and personal effort mean abso-
  lutely nothing to the wizard armed with the 
  appropriate ritual.
  The best example of this principle is Harry 
  Dresden’s tracking spell. Technically speaking, 
  it is possible to achieve what the tracking spell 
  does by lots of investigation, figuring out the last 
  known whereabouts of whoever he’s trying to 
  find, figuring out their normal hangouts, inter-
  viewing acquaintances—essentially, detective 
  work that would call for an Investigation roll. 
  Most of the time, though, Harry doesn’t have 
  the hours or days he’d need to travel around the 
  city and do all that stuff. Either he’s on a dead-
  line or some other kind of pressure, or he just 
  doesn’t have the info to even start such a search. 
  With magic, he doesn’t have to worry about any 
  of that.
  In game terms, this type of spell is equivalent 
  to a simple action when determining complexity 
  (page 264). If a spell effect doesn’t seem to fall 
  easily into one of the other categories, go with 
  this one.
  Create Lasting Changes 
  in People and Things
  Many effects in thaumaturgy are transforma-
  tive—they force a change of state in a person, 
  entity, or object. This includes curses (which 
  change a victim’s fortunes for the worse) and 
  mental binding (which makes a victim into the 
  wizard’s thrall). There are more subtle examples 
  as well, such as planting a suggestion in a target’s 
  mind, making a subject ill, and so on. At its most 
  extreme, thaumaturgy used this way can perma-
  nently cripple or kill victims, leave them insane 
  or brain-dead, or utterly change their form from 
  one thing to another (turning a human being 
  into an animal). Most of these applications of 
  thaumaturgy are considered a violation of the 
  Laws of Magic (namely the Second, Third, 
  and Fourth Laws) when the victim is human. 
  However, some wizards do use it positively, 
  specializing in healing the body and mind (sadly, 
  they are either very rare or very secretive about 
  their techniques).
  In game terms, inflicting change on a victim 
  is usually done with aspects; therefore, the 
  complexity depends largely on the type of 
  change you want to inflict and the duration of 
  the change. At its weakest, this is the equiva-
  lent of performing a maneuver when deter-
  mining complexity; inflicting something more 
  like a consequence would require more shifts 
  depending on the severity. Inflicting a perma-
  nent, transformative change on someone is 
  perhaps the most complicated spell of this type. 
  Essentially, it is equivalent to winning a conflict 
  in one roll.
  Provide Inaccessible 
  Knowledge
  Sort of a subset of the first principle, thauma-
  turgy allows a wizard to learn things in circum-
  stances where he normally could not. Scrying 
  and remote viewing are classic clichés of the 
  wizard, but there are several other applications 
  as well. Seeing into the future, object reading 
  (i.e., psychometry), telepathic sensing, and 
  others can provide the wizard with a potentially 
  intimate glance into the hearts and minds of 
  others or into the details of a mysterious event.
  In game terms, you can use thaumaturgy 
  to perform the equivalent of an assessment 
  action (page 115), using the requirements for an 
  assessment as the guideline for determining 
  complexity. Successfully casting such a spell 
  allows you access to facts and aspects related to 
  the target.
  Allow Interaction 
  with the Supernatural
  Thaumaturgy is the main way that a mortal 
  wizard makes contact and interacts with super-
  natural beings. Sorcerers routinely consult with 
  demons and spirits and sometimes bind them 
  to service with magic. But even a wizard has 
  the occasional use for a summoned being, be it 
  a minor faerie or the shade of a mortal enemy. 
  Likewise, thaumaturgy allows the wizard to 
  affect supernatural beings in ways he couldn’t 
  otherwise, such as forcing demons or spirits out 
  of an area or person (i.e., exorcism), coercing 
  them to calm or rage, or simply restricting their 
  access to an area or keeping them bound in a 
  summoning circle.
  Maybe you 
  should make 
  it more 
  explicit that 
  death is a 
  “permanent, 
  trans form-
  ative change” 
  on someone. 
  I’ve got 
  a Warden 
  looking over 
  my shoulder. I 
  figured the less 
  I talk about 
  death magic, 
  the better.
  A Warden? 
  Where?
  See what I have 
  to put up with?
  
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  Generally, these applications of thaumaturgy 
  require you to overcome the entity’s Conviction 
  to do anything, requiring enough shifts in 
  complexity to beat that entity in a contest 
  of wills. (See “Summoning and Binding” on 
  page 272.)
  Shape Magical Energies 
  into Physical Forms
  Like evocation, thaumaturgy ultimately directs 
  and releases magical energy, but in a more struc-
  tured way. It can be used for some of the same 
  basic effects as evocation, but the results are 
  more elaborate and lasting. For example, while a 
  wizard might hastily raise a kinetic shield in the 
  middle of a fight using evocation, thaumaturgy 
  allows him to set up a ward—a lasting barrier 
  that blocks magical and physical intrusion to his 
  home, office, or anything else of value. A wizard 
  could use evocation to produce a magical trap 
  with, say, a burst of fire magic waiting to explode 
  at the first sign of disturbance, but only thauma-
  turgy will allow the energies to remain contained 
  until triggering.
  The complexity of one of these spells is 
  similar to the shift requirements for an equiva-
  lent evocation (block for wards, attack for 
  magical traps, etc.) with additional shifts added 
  for duration as discussed on page 265. 
  Determining 
  Complexity
  Given the guidelines above, it’s fairly easy to 
  determine the specific complexity of a spell in 
  shifts. This number represents the investment 
  of both preparation and gathered power. You 
  can move straight into the casting stage if the 
  spell’s complexity is equal to or less than your 
  Lore (after it’s adjusted by focus items—see  
  page  278). This indicates that your wizard’s 
  personal collection of knowledge and accoutre-
  ments suffices for the spell. If the complexity 
  exceeds this limit—or under other circum-
  stances dictated by logic—additional effort is 
  required to set up the spell and you go into the 
  preparation stage, detailed on page 266.
  Simple Actions
  For a spell that’s equivalent to a simple action, 
  the complexity is the difficulty of what that 
  action would be “normally.” So, if tracking 
  someone down would normally require a 
  Great (+4) Investigation roll, the tracking spell 
  to do the same would have complexity 4. 
  Note that some difficulty factors won’t apply 
  in this situation—in our tracking spell example, 
  it’s implicit that by “normally” we mean what the 
  difficulty would be if it were normally possible. 
  Thaumaturgy solves improbable and impossible 
  problems (page 263); so, when setting the diffi-
  culty for a spell of this style, you can assume 
  most improbable or impossible factors to be 
  the norm—essentially removing their role 
  in consideration. As an example, it’s practi-
  cally impossible to track someone’s physical trail 
  through the streets of Chicago an hour after 
  their passing—but if it were “normally” possible 
  to track a person in those circumstances, period, 
  what would the difficulty be? That’s the sort of 
  thing we’re getting at here.
  One of the most common uses for a “simple 
  action” spell is to make an assessment. The 
  complexity simply matches the assessment diffi-
  culty or opposing skill of the target. Keep in 
  mind that, because a target is usually unaware 
  of the wizard’s assessment action, there will be 
  no opposed roll; hence, use the resisting skill as 
  a base difficulty. 
  You might also use a spell to make a declara-
  tion, putting some sort of a mystical aspect on 
  an environment, with the complexity matching 
  the potential difficulty for such a declaration. 
  This cannot be done to put aspects onto sentient 
  beings—whenever you use magic on someone, 
  you inevitably contest with their will. For that, 
  see “Contests and Conflicts” below.
  Maneuvers
  For a spell that’s meant to inflict the equivalent 
  of a maneuver (like a short-term entropy curse 
  or minor glamour), the complexity depends on 
  whether or not it’s affecting an environment or a 
  sentient target. With an environment, it’s much 
  the same as a simple action—the base difficulty 
  equals the complexity. With a target, it varies, 
  because it’s a matter of beating whichever skill 
  the target would use to “defend” against the spell. 
  Technically, you can set a complexity of your 
  choosing, with the understanding that the target 
  is going to roll something to resist. So if the 
  target has Good (+3) Conviction, the minimum 
  complexity for the spell is 3—enough shifts to 
  successfully land a maneuver against a roll of +0 
  on the dice. If you want a sure thing, go for a 
  complexity of at least 8, which is one more than 
  the target would get with a max roll of +4. Also 
  Billy: this 
  should read 
  “short term 
  magical 
  trap” and 
  “allow the 
  energies to 
  last and 
  remain”.  
  Persistence 
  w/evocation 
  is HARD. 
  You need 
  to devote 
  at least a 
  little bit 
  of your 
  concen tra-
  tion every 
  moment 
  that sort of 
  construct 
  stays active.
  
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  consider that the target may be hiding behind a 
  ward, a threshold, or some other form of super-
  natural protection, so the spell might also need 
  more shifts to get past those.
  Because temporary aspects from maneuvers 
  are transient, these sorts of spells tend to be 
  very carefully timed or triggered so the aspect 
  or effect manifests when it’s needed (e.g., “I’ll 
  arrange it so he Can’t Think Straight right 
  at the moment he steps on stage”). For a more 
  lasting effect, it’s time to look at contests and 
  conflicts.
  If the intent is to create a temporary aspect 
  that can be tagged more than once (remember 
  that normally you’d only get the benefit of the 
  tag once and have to invoke after that), simply 
  chain two or more maneuvers together in the 
  same spell, each inflicting the same aspect or a 
  similar variant. In other words, if you want to 
  take advantage of two tags against a target of 
  Good Conviction, you’ll need to set up two 
  maneuvers, for a minimum complexity of 6 (3 
  for each, as per above). As wizards are usually 
  low on fate points, this option allows you a little 
  more mileage without having to worry about 
  impacting your fate point budget.
  Contests and Conflicts
  For a spell that’s equivalent to a contest, you 
  need to put enough shifts of complexity into 
  the spell to make sure that you come out on 
  top against whatever resisting skill the target 
  may use. This is like the maneuver-equivalent 
  spells above, except that, where maneuvers place 
  an aspect on the target, contests typically elicit 
  some temporary concession from the target. 
  This is the default application for summoning 
  spells—the wizard is effectively “forcing” the 
  demon or spirit to go somewhere temporarily 
  against its will—but it could also apply to many 
  forms of magical coercion.
  Thaumaturgical spells that are equivalent 
  to conflicts inflict a lasting mental or phys-
  ical change to the target that does not go away 
  when the magic fades. A mild curse might place 
  an aspect on a target, but once the magic runs 
  its course, the victim is left largely as he was. 
  In contrast, a spell that burns out a victim’s 
  emotional capacity may also last for months, but 
  not because there’s any magic left behind. Players 
  and GMs should keep this dividing line in mind 
  when deciding whether to express a spell’s effect 
  as a temporary aspect (like a maneuver) versus a 
  consequence or permanent change.
  If a consequence or 
  permanent change is appro-
  priate, the complexity of 
  the spell must account 
  for the target’s ability to 
  resist, his stress track, and 
  the level of desired conse-
  quence. This can lead to 
  very large numbers if you 
  want a sure thing. Inflicting 
  a mild disease on a fairly 
  hale target—say, Good (+3) 
  Endurance—would be a 
  13 complexity spell: 7 to 
  match the best Endurance 
  roll possible, 4 for the target’s 
  stress track, and 2 more for 
  the mild consequence. Spells 
  will work their way around 
  most kinds of mundane 
  armor, but supernatural abil-
  ities may make the job even 
  harder.
  The most complex spells 
  outright kill people, leave 
  them permanently insane, 
  or transform them forever. 
  These require enough shifts 
  to bypass the resisting skill and all levels of 
  consequence, including extreme. Victor Sells’ 
  killing spell from the Storm Front casefile 
  needs 32 shifts of complexity to do the job: 
  enough to beat Harry’s Endurance, stress track, 
  mild, moderate, severe, and extreme conse-
  quences, and an extra shift to take him out! 
  Usually, spells of this magnitude require a lot of 
  preparation and help from outside sources. This 
  is covered on page 266.
  Duration and 
  Enhanced Evocation
  Some effects of thaumaturgy seem to be 
  enhanced examples of evocation effects: wards 
  instead of blocks, long-lasting veils to hide a 
  sacred site, magical traps waiting to be sprung, 
  etc. The complexity of these spells usually equals 
  the power you would need to cast the spell as an 
  evocation, but keep in mind that thaumaturgy 
  allows for much greater strength in effect. It’s not 
  uncommon for a wizard to push the complexity 
  up to get a 10-shift ward.
  Yeah, Sells 
  was a total 
  rules-
  munchkin.
  
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  Another thing to consider is duration. Many 
  of the effects of thaumaturgy are expressed in 
  system terms that already have a set duration—
  maneuvers and stress don’t last beyond a scene, 
  and consequences remain until enough time has 
  passed that recovery is possible. 
  It is possible to set up spells that last a great 
  deal longer by adding complexity. You can choose 
  to move the spell’s duration up one step on the 
  time chart (page 315) starting from an appro-
  priate default and adding one to the complexity 
  for every step up you want to go. So a curse that 
  acts as a maneuver to put Bad Luck on a target 
  might start from “15 minutes” (about the length 
  of that particular scene), and you could make it 
  last all day by adding five shifts of complexity to 
  the spell. Duration can be applied to a spell in a 
  flexible sense—how long the energies will hang 
  around until triggered, how long a particular 
  effect will last, and so on. 
  If the default duration is not clear (such as 
  curses that are cast on a location, or a ward that 
  doesn’t express its effects in terms of aspects) 
  use this guideline: thaumaturgic spells typically 
  last until the next sunrise, as this cycle weakens 
  magical energies. So increasing from there 
  would start at “an afternoon” or “a day” on the 
  time chart.
  Again, this “until sunrise” default doesn’t apply 
  in the case of spells that inflict consequences or 
  temporary aspects on a living target—in those 
  cases the duration of the effect behaves normally. 
  Also, consider that the consequences and other 
  aspects in those situations are often the result of 
  the spell, but they aren’t sustained by the spell. 
  Attacks of that kind don’t really have an intrinsic 
  duration—they just happen, and they’re done. 
  If you set off an explosive fire trap, the burns 
  you sustain remain for months because they’re 
  burns, not because you have magic in you.
  Preparation
  (Creating a Spell Construct)
  If you don’t have a Lore rating high enough to 
  cover the complexity of the spell (page 264), then 
  you need to spend time in preparation before 
  you can cast it. Preparation time is normally 
  divided into three broad categories: researching 
  the ritual, obtaining stronger symbolic links, 
  or acquiring additional power sources. Taken 
  as a whole, the collection of ritual elements, 
  symbolic links, and power sources is called a spell 
  construct. The construct is a physical container 
  for the energies of the spell, and the container 
  helps your wizard focus his power like a lens and 
  direct it with more stability and safety. The more 
  elaborate the construct, the more power it can 
  hold. This allows for more complicated effects.
  If your Lore covers the complexity and allows 
  you to skip the preparation work, these three 
  things are still happening in the spell—it’s just 
  assumed that they’re done fast enough and well 
  enough that there’s no need to spend additional 
  preparation time on it. In other words, small 
  spells can be whipped up quickly—like Harry 
  Dresden does with a few of his quick tracking 
  spells, using some chalk, a bit of hair, and a 
  few murmured words of power. Regardless, the 
  symbolic links are key here—if you don’t have 
  them, with or without the preparation phase, you 
  just can’t cast the spell.
  Ritual
  A ritual includes the casting space as well as 
  any special components the wizard uses as part 
  of the procedure of casting the spell. Chanting, 
  dance, inscription, certain ritual movements, 
  sexual rites, and physical implements such as 
  an athame (ceremonial knife) are all examples 
  of ritual components. The casting space is an 
  area set aside to contain magical energies—most 
  wizards of the White Council begin with an 
  unbroken circle in which the wizard can stand 
  and arrange the other components, with the 
  circle serving as the boundary that keeps the 
  spell energy hemmed in until released. This can 
  be as elaborate as a personal sanctum with a 
  metal circle bolted into the ground or as hasty 
  as a circle drawn in chalk on the sidewalk, but 
  a functional casting space and some basic ritual 
  Short-Term Spells
  As an optional rule, some GMs may choose 
  to allow a wizard to create a deliberately 
  short-term effect with a spell, essentially 
  reducing the complexity by one for each 
  step down the time chart, starting from “an 
  afternoon.” This can’t ever reduce a spell’s 
  complexity below 1, however. The GM 
  should also make it clear how short is too 
  short—if the effect is shorter than a scene, 
  why isn’t the wizard doing it with evocation? 
  Note, this option should only be available 
  on spells that have a duration. Attacks and 
  maneuvers tend not to count.
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  procedure are absolute minimum requirements 
  for any working of thaumaturgy.
  Rituals are largely a matter of research and 
  consultation. The wizard learns the steps and 
  tools he needs from a book, scroll, or some other 
  source of knowledge such as a mentor or contact. 
  Magical knowledge is often very closely guarded. 
  Many wizards do not wish to share the secrets 
  they have learned, so they keep their sanctums 
  warded against intrusion. Likewise, many spirits 
  and supernatural beings (especially demons) 
  traffic heavily in magical lore—a powerful 
  currency when bargaining with magical practi-
  tioners. Some rituals also simply require tools 
  and components that are difficult to fashion 
  or acquire, like a spike of pure diamond or the 
  blood of a White Court vampire.
  Symbolic Links
  The other minimum requirement is one or 
  more symbolic links—objects that are included 
  in the ritual process that metaphorically repre-
  sent where the spell energies are being sent. 
  The voodoo doll is probably the most popular 
  example from folklore, but a specific target 
  can be represented in many different ways: a 
  personal possession that has emotional reso-
  nance, a sculpture or model of the target, a 
  sample of the target’s writing, actual hair or 
  blood from the target, the target’s True Name, 
  etc. Places can be represented through models, 
  depictions of the place (like a photograph), or 
  things taken from the site itself. Using more of 
  these links in the construct and using links that 
  are “close” to their source increase the connection 
  and make it more likely that the spell energies 
  will go where they’re supposed to when they’re 
  released.
  Gathering symbolic links to an individual can 
  be a tricky prospect, as the best ones literally 
  involve taking a piece of the target itself, whether 
  physically or emotionally. For maximum effec-
  tiveness, you may need to break into a prospec-
  tive target’s house for a prized possession, or 
  stalk the target to find a stray strand of hair. 
  Some wizards even resort to violence or have 
  an independent party commit violence for 
  them. Linking to a supernatural creature is even 
  trickier. They are much harder to “sneak up on” 
  in every sense—you will likely be required to 
  risk resources, work through proxies, and make 
  bargains with other entities.
  Even getting a link to a place can be diffi-
  cult at times. The best links are to-scale 
  representations, requiring certain detail. Some 
  areas might be guarded, warded, or restricted in 
  access somehow, requiring you to be very clever 
  to bypass those restrictions.
  Power Sources
  Finally, many wizards attempt to boost their 
  effectiveness with contributions of power 
  outside themselves. This allows the wizard to 
  cast very potent and complicated spells, with the 
  external power sources doing most of the heavy 
  lifting. This power can come from a variety of 
  sources, listed on page 248.
  Acquiring power from entities is a matter 
  of convincing them to contribute their power 
  willingly, or forcing them to do so via magical 
  binding, kidnapping, bargaining, or other coer-
  cion. Taking the power from an artifact or site 
  requires either researching a means to access the 
  power that is in accordance with its nature, or 
  deliberately desecrating it—which could result 
  in its destruction. Harnessing the power from 
  a natural event (storms, earthquakes) requires 
  precise timing to incorporate the event into the 
  casting, as nature can be rather fickle. And then 
  there’s dealing with plain old mortals—either 
  they’re actively willing to assist in the casting, or 
  they aren’t, and the wizard has to decide if he’s 
  willing to kidnap, torture, and sacrifice lives in 
  the pursuit of his goals. 
  Compared to the other two components of 
  spell preparation, power sources are by far the 
  riskiest. Depending on outside assistance for a 
  spell is perhaps the most vulnerable position a 
  wizard can be in, prone to betrayal and the fickle 
  nature of supernatural debt (see “Sponsored 
  Magic,” page 287). Anyone capable of contrib-
  uting power to a wizard’s spell is going to want 
  an equal measure of assistance in return, and the 
  kind of energy they contribute will bias some 
  behaviors of the spell once cast. Many a wizard 
  has found himself forced to further the agenda 
  of a Winter Court faerie or foul demon in these 
  (sometimes literally) Faustian bargains. 
  Anyone not willing to assist can be forced, but 
  that requires coercive magic, the threat of harm, 
  and the making of enemies—and supernatural 
  creatures are almost universally slow to forget a 
  slight. You can always find willing assistance in 
  the form of Outsiders, but those costs are too 
  high to contemplate. Even researching the topic 
  breaches the Seventh Law, inviting swift retribu-
  tion from the White Council.
  Sharing 
  lore is a sign 
  of strong 
  friendship 
  among wizards 
  of roughly 
  equal age/
  power, but 
  a fantastic 
  sign of trust 
  (or concern!) 
  when an 
  older wizard 
  offers it to 
  a youngster.  
  I’ve had my 
  share of both. 
  Sometimes 
  the trust is 
  earned the 
  old fashioned 
  way — 
  sometimes it 
  comes from 
  an exchange 
  of magical 
  value, such 
  as divulging 
  your True 
  Name or 
  soulgazing 
  one another.
  I’m not sure 
  I’d call giving 
  someone your 
  True Name an 
  act of trust. 
  Maybe more an 
  act of stupid.
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  Adjudicating 
  Preparation
  It’s not the most fun thing in the world to actu-
  ally catalog all the different steps a wizard might 
  take in preparation for a spell. Hours in the 
  sanctum poring through tomes and researching 
  chants, consulting other practitioners, rifling 
  through component collections, shopping for 
  other components at Wal-Mart, waiting around 
  for that next full moon—the potential list of 
  steps for setting up a given spell is infinitely 
  long and often tedious. That’s why, under most 
  circumstances, a wizard can just go straight to 
  casting if the complexity falls within the wizard’s 
  Lore. In that case, assume you have all the tools 
  you need to cast the spell on hand, or they are at 
  least within easy reach, and don’t interrupt play 
  to deal with preparation.
  When the complexity of a spell exceeds your 
  Lore, you must invest more time and energy to 
  gather what your wizard needs for the casting. 
  His own resources are not sufficient for the 
  task. This additional investment may involve 
  extended research in his own library or someone 
  else’s, consultation with spirits or other entities 
  capable of providing knowledge, rare compo-
  nents or specially crafted tools, strong symbolic 
  links, arrangements for contributions of power, 
  and so on. 
  However, nobody wants to protract this 
  process and drag down play. If you have to detail 
  every step of preparation for a ritual, you’ll take 
  the majority of session time away from the other 
  PCs. Therefore, “right-size” the pacing in order 
  to mesh with the flow of play. Sometimes it’s 
  good to build up gradually to casting a ritual in 
  a climactic moment, but sometimes you want to 
  make a few quick calls and get into casting right 
  away—without the sense that you’re just hand-
  waving it away.
  The basic idea behind running preparation 
  is that you’re making a kind of über-declaration 
  (page 116)—namely, that the wizard is set to cast 
  the spell. Unlike a normal declaration, it’s a little 
  more involved than just stating something and 
  making a skill roll against a difficulty. You make 
  the usual proposals to the GM about significant 
  steps your wizard is taking to prepare, but you 
  also need to pool enough resources to “make up” 
  the deficit between your character’s Lore and 
  the actual complexity of the spell to justify the 
  declaration. This can be done in a number of 
  different ways, which can be combined however 
  you choose.
  Invoke Aspects
  An easy way to ease spellcasting is to invoke 
  aspects and describe the invocations as being 
  tied to a part of the preparation process. This 
  gives you two shifts toward the deficit for every 
  aspect invoked. The wizard takes advantage of 
  special connections and resources he has avail-
  able. For example, an aspect such as Friend of 
  the Summer Fae might get invoked to say the 
  wizard calls in a favor for some arcane consulta-
  tion, while an aspect like Black Market Ties 
  might be used to have a rare ritual component 
  smuggled in. If you have enough fate points 
  and are willing to spend them to make up the 
  entire deficit with invocation, then you can move 
  straight to casting with a solid montage that 
  Just imagine 
  all the time 
  and effort 
  I’d save if 
  life really 
  worked 
  this way!
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  gives a sense of what work your wizard did to 
  prepare.
  These aspects may come from any relevant 
  source: personal aspects the wizard already 
  has, temporary aspects that are in place, or even 
  previously taken consequences that the wizard 
  might be able to use in a clever way.
  Make Declarations 
  As part of preparation, you can use your skills 
  to declare you have access to some resource or 
  advantage that will help you cast the spell. This 
  generally works like a normal declaration. You 
  describe what kind of advantage or resource 
  you’re trying to garner, the GM sets a difficulty, 
  and you roll the appropriate skill. 
  If the roll is successful, put a temporary 
  aspect on the spell. You can tag that temporary 
  aspect to subtract from the deficit, again at the 
  rate of two shifts for every aspect. As above, this 
  provides a montage of events that the wizard 
  goes through, but they’re covered quickly by skill 
  rolls. This isn’t as fast as just invoking, but it still 
  allows some parts of preparation to clip by at a 
  decent rate and not bog down play.
  There are several ways you can use your 
  skills in this fashion. Besides the stand-bys of 
  Lore, Discipline, and Conviction, many other 
  skills can be extremely useful for spell prepara-
  tion. Perhaps the most important of these are 
  social skills like Contacts, Deceit, Empathy, 
  Intimidation, and Rapport—all useful in their 
  own way to acquire (or coerce) information and 
  aid from NPCs; you call upon these skills when 
  making all those bargains mentioned above. 
  Investigation and Scholarship have unique 
  research applications and enable your wizard to 
  decipher ancient texts, track a target, or obtain 
  other information that could lead to a vital 
  component for the spell. Stealth and Burglary 
  help with more “direct” methods of acquisition. 
  With Resources you can buy your way out of 
  a problem.
  Accept or Inflict 
  Consequences
  Perhaps the most potent contribution that a 
  wizard can make to a spell comes from sacrifice. 
  A wizard who wants a particular spell to happen 
  badly enough, who is extremely passionate and 
  devoted to it, will sacrifice the utmost energy 
  to see it through, even to the point of adding 
  his own life energy to the spell. A wizard who 
  doesn’t practice restraint can end up with serious 
  emotional trauma and health issues, but the 
  immense return is often considered to be worth 
  the trouble. This sacrifice often takes other 
  forms, as well. The power of oaths (page 274) can 
  be a very powerful thing to contribute to a 
  working, especially if the deal is for the wizard’s 
  soul.
  Of course, truly desperate or sociopathic 
  wizards go beyond just self-sacrifice, harnessing 
  the power that comes from the physical and 
  emotional sacrifice of others. The torture or 
  murder of another sentient being is perhaps 
  one of the most heinous acts that a wizard can 
  commit in the pursuit of magic, even (or espe-
  cially) if the victim surrenders to it willingly. As 
  with self-sacrifice, this doesn’t necessarily have 
  to take a direct form. The Oath taken can power 
  a spell just as surely as the Oath given.
  In game terms, inflicting a consequence on a 
  person or entity, or taking one yourself, contrib-
  utes the shift value of the consequence to the 
  preparation deficit. This does not have to be 
  direct injury, as stated above; any consequence 
  will work for this, as long as you can justify the 
  steps taken to inflict the consequence as contrib-
  uting to the spell’s preparation. This sacrifice 
  essentially represents that the wizard is willing 
  to go to greater extremes. He enters that terri-
  tory where, in order to get what he wants, he’s 
  willing to enter a conflict with someone, put his 
  own emotions and health on the line, or compli-
  cate his life and the lives of others. 
  Actually committing murder on a sentient 
  being as part of a spell grants the wizard all of 
  the shifts for all levels of consequence toward 
  the spell deficit—a total of 20 shifts, which is 
  often more than enough to cast any spell. This is, 
  of course, a violation of the First Law, but most 
  wizards willing to go to this extreme probably 
  don’t care about that.
  Tell the Story of the Spell
  Keep in mind that the montages you create 
  during prep don’t always have to be about 
  poring over old tomes or whatnot. Magic is 
  life, and when Harry goes to the convenience 
  store to find hardcore porn for Bob to get 
  some choice incantations out of him, that’s just 
  as much preparing for the spell as anything 
  else. Try to discover unique avenues to express 
  what the wizard’s willing to do in order to 
  cast the spell, and make the wizard’s feelings, 
  motives, and relationships part of that.
  And here I 
  thought he 
  was just being 
  a mensch. 
  This section 
  right here 
  is really 
  the key to 
  under standing 
  how Victor 
  Sells was 
  able to do 
  what he did 
  with so little 
  experience. 
  He allowed 
  pre paring 
  for the spell 
  to consume 
  his life. 
  Not only 
  did he let 
  himself go 
  completely 
  insane, but 
  he brought 
  additional 
  hollowness 
  and misery 
  into the 
  lives of the 
  Beckitts, 
  entered into 
  a bargain 
  with a demon, 
  and became 
  completely 
  beholden to 
  the schedule 
  of the storm 
  he needed to 
  help power 
  his magic.
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  Skip Scenes
  There is one final method of getting shifts, 
  included for completeness’ sake and for the rare 
  time a group might find it useful. Most people 
  aren’t going to want to do this for obvious 
  reasons, but the option remains for those who 
  want something like this.
  The most straightforward and simultane-
  ously most boring method is a simple tradeoff. 
  During the game session, at any time there’s a 
  scene that the wizard’s player could and wants to 
  participate in, he can choose not to participate 
  and instead describe something else he’s doing 
  (hitting the books, practicing ritual movements). 
  For giving up a scene, you earn a shift toward 
  the spell deficit, using the assumption that any 
  spell can be cast given enough time and research. 
  You may do this as many times per session as 
  you wish. If you really feel like sitting around the 
  living room while everyone else runs around and 
  does interesting stuff the whole night, you may 
  rack up four or five shifts toward the spell. 
  The benefit of this is that no additional roll 
  is required to gain the shifts. It’s assumed that 
  the invested time allows the wizard to do every-
  thing he needs. The drawbacks should be fairly 
  obvious. It’s pretty boring to do it this way, the 
  return isn’t all that great, and you’re giving up 
  the chance to play in scenes. An immensely 
  complex spell might require multiple sessions’ 
  worth of scenes to prepare this way, while you 
  twiddle your thumbs. Not very fun.
  Casting the Spell
  Once preparation is complete, the wizard can 
  actually cast the spell. The circle or casting space 
  is set up, the links and other ritual elements are 
  arranged like they’re supposed to be, and the 
  wizard’s other power sources are available. All 
  that’s left is for the wizard to complete the ritual 
  steps, contribute his own power to the spell, and 
  send the energies on their way. If all goes well, 
  the spell will happen as planned, and the wizard 
  will get precisely the desired effect. If anything 
  goes wrong, improperly controlled energies 
  could wreak havoc on him and his surroundings. 
  In a low-pressure situation, you can go ahead 
  and cast the spell without making any rolls. It’ll 
  all happen within the space of time it would take 
  to run a single scene of conflict—often less—
  as it’s just a matter of a few exchanges to cast a 
  spell. (See “When Not to Bother” on this page for 
  the skinny on this.)
  In your game, most PC wizards won’t always 
  have that luxury, though—low-pressure situ-
  ations don’t exactly lend themselves to exciting 
  game sessions. When under pressure, you have 
  to make a few rolls to get the spell cast. Pressure 
  might mean anything from “People are shooting 
  guns at me!” to “My date has shown up early 
  and is ringing the doorbell while I’m still in the 
  middle of casting!” At that point, you have two 
  choices—release the spell safely (which drops 
  you back to square one; this attempt is a botch), 
  or try to push power into the spell quickly and 
  hopefully safely.
  Casting a ritual spell is similar, mechanically 
  speaking, to casting an evocation spell. (See 
  “For Quick Reference” below if you need clari-
  fication.) Choose how much power you want 
  to bring to bear and roll Discipline to control 
  that amount of power. Eventually, you have to 
  control a number of shifts in power equal to the 
  complexity of the spell. 
  Obviously, it’s pretty much impossible to 
  control all the necessary shifts in one round of 
  casting for all but the simplest of spells; so in 
  thaumaturgy, you can divide the casting into 
  small pieces, “carrying” the shifts you control 
  from one round to the next until you have 
  Note to SelF
  Add some 
  stuff to the 
  text about 
  “opportunity 
  vs. penalty” 
  based on notes 
  from Harry 
  on page 262
  When Not to Bother
  There will be many occasions when you want to cast a spell 
  under no particular sense of duress or constraint—in other 
  words, times when it would be thoroughly undramatic to go 
  through the mechanical process of doing a casting roll. Like 
  any situation where the outcome would provide nothing 
  interesting, don’t bother rolling. Just assume that, after 
  a reasonable period of time, the spell is cast. The system’s 
  basic guideline is that spellcasting should be neither too 
  boring nor too glossed over. Use the preparation stuff to 
  tease out the most entertaining moments and move to the 
  casting if that is also an entertaining moment.
  By the same token, look out for opportunities to make 
  sure the casting roll itself is surrounded by interesting 
  circumstances. It’s way more fun to try to throw that ward 
  together when the big baddie is coming right now, and it’s 
  ”Holy crap! Roll your Discipline!” than it is to do it on a lazy 
  afternoon. The presence of bystanders and the potential for 
  backlash always provide tension, as does the knowledge that 
  the spell will be opposed by some force when it’s released. 
  Just don’t feel obligated to stall play for casting if nothing 
  dramatic will come of it.
  
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  enough. Invoking aspects can increase the 
  power you produce or boost your control roll, 
  and certain focus items might be able to help in 
  either category. If you want to play it particu-
  larly safe, make sure you have a focus item or 
  two, some lingering fate points, or unused tags 
  available.
  As with evocation, there’s a limit to how 
  much ritual energy you can safely direct at one 
  time. Going past that limit is possible, but it’s 
  very taxing. You can produce shifts of power 
  equal to your Conviction per roll; every shift past 
  your Conviction inflicts a point of stress on your 
  wizard, which can eventually roll up to conse-
  quences. Unlike evocation, so long as you stay 
  equal to or below your Conviction, your wizard 
  takes no stress from channeling this power (this 
  is another case of speed being exchanged for less 
  risk in casting). 
  Once you amass enough shifts to equal the 
  spell’s complexity, the spell is cast, and whatever 
  effect you and GM agreed on occurs.
  Example: Harry is ready to cast a spell with 
  a complexity of 10. With his Conviction of 
  Superb he can produce 5 shifts of power per 
  exchange easily, but with a Discipline of Good 
  he’ll only manage to control 3 shifts on average 
  (on a roll of +0). Jim, Harry’s player, knows he 
  could play it particularly safe and divide this up 
  into 10 separate rolls, each time only bringing 
  in 1 shift of power, but that’s 10 exchanges and 
  with the thing that’s hammering at the door he’s 
  just not sure Harry has that kind of time.
  Jim decides to try to wrap this up in three 
  exchanges. If he’s going to goof it up, he’d better 
  do it early when there’s less power to release. 
  On the first exchange he’ll bring in 4 shifts of 
  power, and the next two he’ll do at 3 shifts, for 
  a total of 10.
  Jim lucks out and rolls a +3 on his 
  first exchange, getting a control roll of 
  Fantastic (+6). 6 isn’t less than 4, so he has 
  managed to control his first, biggest chunk of 
  power for the spell. 
  On the second exchange, Jim rolls a –1. 
  Disaster! His Discipline roll is only Fair (+2), 
  which falls under the Good (+3) roll he needed 
  to control 3 shifts. Luckily, Harry’s casting this 
  spell inside of a metal circle in his lab, which 
  Jim previously established as an aspect of his 
  home. After a quick invocation of that aspect, 
  Jim’s boosted his control roll enough to keep the 
  casting effort going... (cont’d)
  Backlash and Fallout
  There is a chance, however, that things can go 
  horribly wrong. Whenever the wizard fails to 
  control all the power that he has summoned, the 
  excess shifts of power spill back onto the wizard 
  or out onto the nearby environment. This works 
  exactly as explained in the Evocation section 
  above, with one minor (yet significant) differ-
  ence: a failed casting roll hits the wizard with all 
  the shifts of power stored up for the spell to that 
  point. So if the wizard’s been casting for a few 
  rounds now and gets a bit overzealous in a rush 
  to finish the spell, he could suddenly be dealing 
  with 10 or more shifts that he either has to 
  absorb as backlash, or let go as fallout.  If any of 
  it is released as fallout, the spell construct breaks 
  open and the spell fails.  If all of it is absorbed as 
  backlash, the wizard can keep going.
  Example (Continued): On the third 
  exchange, Jim only needs a +0 on the dice to 
  control the last 3 shifts of power. His luck being 
  what it is, he rolls a –2, bringing him two short 
  of the roll he needs. 
  With no aspects or tags handy, wham! He’s 
  facing a 10 shift hit. He needs the spell to go 
  off, so he has to take all of that in backlash. He 
  takes a mild and moderate consequence and 
  checks off his fourth mental stress box. Ouch.
  GMs are encouraged to be as nasty as 
  possible when determining fallout consequences 
  for thaumaturgy—this is the most powerful 
  kind of magic, and when it goes awry, it should 
  be impressive. That is the price of wielding that 
  kind of power.
  For Quick Reference
  Every turn you devote to casting a thaumaturgical spell, you:
  Decide how much power you want to bring. You take a mental 
  stress hit equal to the amount you go past your Conviction skill; 
  if you don’t go past your Conviction, you don’t take any stress.
  Roll your Discipline. If the roll equals or exceeds the amount 
  of power you brought, you successfully channel all the shifts of 
  power you brought into the spell.
  If you’ve channeled enough shifts to equal the complexity of 
  the spell, you’ve successfully cast it. If you haven’t, repeat the 
  process for another turn until you have.
  If you fail a Discipline roll at any point, the total number 
  of shifts channeled into the spell turn into backlash and/or 
  fallout. You can choose to take them as backlash to keep the 
  energies from escaping, or release them as fallout into the envi-
  ronment. If you release the energies, the spell fails.
  Consequence 
  suggestions 
  from my 
  experience:
  “I can hear 
  purple” 
  “Seeing 
  Double”
  “Forgot 
  How To Use 
  Fire Magic”
  Fallout is a 
  bit different 
  here as well. 
  In evocation, 
  you can take a 
  little fallout 
  and it just 
  reduces the 
  effect of the 
  spell.  Here, 
  fallout breaks 
  the whole thing 
  apart. Bob, is 
  that accurate?
  It is indeed. 
  Well done!
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  Using Help
  There are a couple of main ways that people 
  can help with a spell—they can aid prepara-
  tion efforts, and they can contribute power 
  to the casting itself. Many wizards (especially 
  cult leaders) have a group of lackeys they keep 
  around specifically to ease the burden of larger 
  workings.
  Technically, anyone who wants to use their 
  skills and abilities to help a wizard with prepara-
  tion can do so—carrying out an obscure bit of 
  research, seeking out a component, even sacri-
  ficing themselves (or being sacrificed) for the 
  sake of making the spell possible. Assuming 
  he has the appropriate skills, a surrogate can 
  accomplish any of the categories of preparation 
  except for Skip Scenes—simply add the shifts 
  he garners to the preparation deficit.
  During the casting, an individual can directly 
  contribute controlled power to the spell if he 
  possesses Thaumaturgy or Ritual with the 
  appropriate emphasis (page 181). The assistant 
  caster summons power with Conviction and 
  controls it with Discipline, just like a normal 
  casting roll. Any shifts successfully controlled 
  add directly to the stored power for the spell, just 
  as if the main caster did it. The danger here is 
  that if any participating caster fails a Discipline 
  roll during the process, the spell energies are 
  released as described above. The participants can 
  determine how to divide backlash among them 
  if they wish.
  Finally, those without overt spellcasting gifts 
  can contribute in yet another way besides prepa-
  ration—they can absorb backlash in place of the 
  caster to keep the spell going during the casting. 
  Instead of taking the harm to himself, the caster 
  can direct it to a surrogate, who would then 
  take the full brunt of the damage. Obviously, 
  there are potential Lawbreaking issues that 
  come with this practice, so it should not be 
  undertaken lightly.
  Types of 
  Thaumaturgy
  While the breadth of effect available to thauma-
  turgy is really too wide to record in one place, 
  there are several areas of ritual magic that have 
  become commonplace over time. These form the 
  known core of White Council magic and are the 
  most commonly recorded material for study and 
  practice. Wizards usually find that they have a 
  talent or affinity for certain branches of thau-
  maturgy during training. Also, some areas of 
  thaumaturgy have some unique permutations 
  that you need to take into account—those will 
  be explained below.
  This list is not exhaustive—these are meant 
  to serve as examples. If you play a wizard, feel 
  free to expand on this list if you see an area of 
  specialty that seems more appealing.
  Summoning and Binding
  Dealing with spirits and other supernatural enti-
  ties (such as demons) from a “safe” distance is 
  one of the hallmarks of ritual magic. The tradi-
  tional sorcerer from folklore relies entirely on 
  summoning and binding demons to accomplish 
  his aims—and typically pays a terrible price in 
  the process. It is wise for a budding wizard to 
  heed these cautionary tales. Dealing with spirits 
  and demons is no simple task. 
  There are three parts for summoning a spirit, 
  each of which can (and often should) be done as 
  its own spell—though a very ambitious wizard 
  can always try to build a spell that incorporates 
  two or more of these parts:
    Create a container to hold the entity.
    Summon the entity.
    Control the entity (binding).
  Containing the entity requires you to 
  create a container, much like crafting a ward 
  (page 276) with a very specific purpose and the 
  intent to keep things in rather than out. As with 
  a ward, the complexity of the containment spell 
  should depend on a combination of duration 
  and the strength of the block. Use the rules for 
  wards when creating a spell of this type. Focused 
  practitioners specializing in summoning and 
  binding can always cast containment spells for 
  use with their work, even if they have no facility 
  for creating wards in general.
  If you’re planning on summoning something 
  particularly powerful, AIM HIGH on those 
  containment spells, people. Mucking up 
  your summoning spell while succeeding on 
  your containment spell is nowhere near as 
  bad as mucking up your containment spell 
  while succeeding on your summoning. 
  Things get out. Bad things.
  Some prac-
  titioners can 
  summon crea-
  tures without 
  containing them, 
  right, Bob?
  I’m sorry, I think 
  I heard you say 
  something about 
  crazy soon-to-be-
  dead people ?
  I distrust 
  bringing the 
  clueless into 
  any sort 
  of magical 
  working, 
  unless it’s 
  necessary. 
  (Having 
  Rawlins and 
  Murph carry 
  candles 
  on the 
  PROVEN 
  GUILTY 
  case was 
  one of those 
  exceptions.)
  murph hardly 
  qualifies as 
  clueless these 
  days, Harry.
  Point. Uh... 
  don’t tell 
  her I said 
  that. I like 
  my shins.
  
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  Summoning a supernatural entity is a matter 
  of willing it to your presence and having a place 
  to contain the entity when it arrives—typically 
  a casting circle. This usually requires enough 
  shifts of complexity to beat the entity in a 
  contest of Conviction, so you’re wise to shoot for 
  five or more shifts above the being’s Conviction. 
  Ten is about the minimum number to make 
  safety probable, as that’s sized to beat a Superb 
  Conviction. Therefore, most summoning 
  requires a bit of preparation beforehand. Usually, 
  this time is spent sussing out the entity’s True 
  Name. Once your wizard successfully casts the 
  spell, the entity appears in the designated space.
  This is all well and good for entities of the 
  Nevernever, but you’re not covering the much 
  more difficult topic of summoning corporeal 
  entities.
  Wait, that’s even possible?
  …Uh, forget I said anything.
  There is no guarantee the summoned entity 
  will behave how you want it to. You will have to 
  bargain with the entity to achieve your desires. 
  There’s nothing technically magical about this 
  part of the interaction, and a wizard who expects 
  to do this regularly should make sure he’s well-
  versed in Rapport, Deceit, or Intimidation.
  Even when contained strongly, an entity may 
  try to break the bonds of the summoning circle 
  via trickery (a broken container loses all its 
  strength, instantly) or by main force (launching 
  attacks through the block, usually with its 
  Conviction as the attacking skill). In the latter 
  case, this is a direct conflict of will against will, 
  inflicting mental stress when successful. The 
  wizard must win in order to maintain his circle 
  and keep the entity trapped (a victory can also 
  be used as an opportunity to banish it). If the 
  entity wins, it escapes the wizard’s grasp, and 
  then it’s free to do as it wishes. This is usually 
  a bad thing. Luckily, with a strong container 
  established, the wizard usually has the upper 
  hand and may be able to inflict some harm on 
  the entity in return (see below). 
  Binding the entity is a third, optional step. 
  You exert your will over the entity, forcing it 
  into your service. Done as another spell, this 
  is considered a fully transformative effect and 
  therefore requires enough shifts to take out the 
  demon as if it were a full conflict. 
  A more haphazard and dangerous approach 
  is using the entity’s True Name to assault the 
  being directly, trying to wear it down in an actual 
  exchange-by-exchange conflict. In such a case, 
  you can use your Discipline as the attacking 
  skill, inflicting mental stress on the creature, 
  or you can step it up to genuine spellcraft and 
  assault the creature with spirit evocations. 
  That True Name must be guarded carefully. 
  Any skilled practitioner that learns a creature’s 
  True Name can make similar attacks to wrest 
  control of the creature away from its original 
  master. (Without the True Name, evocations 
  directed at the creature simply work to disrupt 
  its manifestation and send it away.) Regardless, 
  bindings formed in this way are imperfect and 
  decay more rapidly than those achieved by way 
  of ritual.
  Once the entity is bound, you must work to 
  keep the bond reinforced—after the entity has 
  recovered from the consequences it sustained in 
  the initial conflict, it will likely attempt to escape 
  and the spell will probably need to be recast. In 
  time, this cycle of need can become a problem 
  of its own. Also keep in mind that most enti-
  ties really don’t appreciate being controlled in 
  such a one-sided way; a bound entity will likely 
  do everything it can to subtly undermine your 
  control until it can make a bid to break away.
  Harry, I didn’t 
  put guidelines 
  here for stats 
  of summoned 
  creatures. It 
  seems to me 
  that on the low 
  end, summoning 
  is just about 
  using your 
  spellcraft to 
  make a really 
  good contacts 
  roll.  up from 
  that, it’s about 
  extending an 
  invitation and 
  seeing what 
  comes knocking. 
  And the thing 
  that knocks 
  could be all 
  over the map 
  in terms of 
  power level.
  
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  Conjuration
  Conjuration is the art of creating objects of 
  seeming substance out of nothing. When it 
  comes down to it, though, this is a shell game. 
  None of the things that conjuration creates are 
  actually real; they’re made of ectoplasm, the 
  nothing-stuff of the Nevernever, and once the 
  energy that’s telling that ectoplasm to be some-
  thing leaches out, it dissolves—first into goo, 
  then into nothing at all. 
  Here, the complexity of the conjuration is 
  a matter of detail and scale (both quantity and 
  size), as well as the believability of the creation. 
  Detail primarily addresses the intricacy of 
  function (i.e., moving parts). A simple, one-part 
  object such as a small coin or a piece of paper is 
  complexity 1, with things going up from there. 
  Typical handheld weapons and things with one 
  or two moving parts can be conjured around a 
  complexity of 3. Larger, more complicated things 
  and minor animate things—such as a frog that 
  hops around and ribbits—are a 5. (These items 
  still look “a little off ” or “unreal.”)
  Quantity and size add +2 for each identifi-
  able factor. Creating a (nonfunctioning) car 
  would be about a 7, starting at 5 and getting a 
  +2 due to its size; creating enough faux frogs to 
  overrun a city park could be 11 or more—5 for 
  the basic frog, +2 several times over for quantity. 
  Functioning objects of real technology are pretty 
  much impossible (or more accurately, too much 
  work to be worth it). 
  In terms of believability, if the wizard wants 
  to pass the conjured object off as real, he must 
  Oaths, Bonds, and Bargains
  Powerful supernatural entities—summoned, 
  bound, or otherwise—are fond of extracting 
  oaths from mortals who dare to wield power 
  of their own. Inevitably these oaths include 
  phrases like “I swear, upon my power…” 
  That’s a mighty dangerous thing to do, but it’s 
  also often the only way that the entity you’re 
  entreating will pay you any mind. 
  Because a wizard’s power is based in his 
  belief of what he can do and who he truly is, 
  magically sworn oaths have serious substance. 
  This can extend to non-wizard characters as 
  well—a binding oath of this sort entwines 
  itself around the very nature of those who 
  make it. (Faeries and those who swear oaths 
  to faeries in particular experience this binding 
  effect, but many other creatures—perhaps all, 
  given the right circumstances—may be suscep-
  tible to it.)
  As such, breaking a binding oath is an 
  act of utter violence against who you are. It 
  will often be appropriate to reflect this as 
  an extreme consequence (page 205) that actu-
  ally changes who you are permanently; on the 
  other hand, you may decide the broken oath is 
  part and parcel of your current high concept. 
  Either way, you are now open to frequent 
  compels as the oath-holder collects its due. 
  When you break an oath, these compels might 
  leave you unable to use any magic against the 
  entity, or even experience an outright disrup-
  tion of your ability to cast any magic—after 
  all, magic comes from what you believe you are 
  capable of, and the broken oath has profoundly 
  changed that self image.
  Whatever form the compels take, you’ll 
  soon find yourself in the situation where you 
  must either spend many of your fate points 
  to wiggle out of doing things you don’t want 
  to do or bend to the will of the oath-holder. 
  This also gives the entity ample justification for 
  launching direct mental attacks against you, at 
  any time, usually as a Discipline vs. Discipline 
  attack. No special power is necessary to do this 
  beyond the broken oath; it’s the oath that gives 
  them such an ability.
  What’s worse, some oaths don’t even need 
  to be broken to give an entity this sort of 
  power over you—breaking the oath will just 
  encourage the entity to more immediately exer-
  cise that power. So, if the terms of your magi-
  cally binding compact with the entity make it 
  clear that it owns you and your actions, then it 
  does. Agreeing to do three favors for the Queen 
  of Air and Darkness tends to rip away your 
  options awfully fast—provided that the Queen 
  herself abides by her part of the oath. 
  You can also look at oaths as a form of 
  sponsor debt (page  288), rated as a certain 
  number of compels the oathbound must accept 
  with no fate point payout. In this case, if the 
  oath is broken, the debt automatically resets 
  to the original amount (triggering a “do-over,” 
  essentially)—or worse, it turns the oath into a 
  bottomless pit of debt that the character may 
  never be able to pay off.
  The principles 
  here are simple. 
  Don’t make 
  promises you 
  can’t keep. Don’t 
  break promises 
  once you make 
  them. Binding 
  a promise 
  with magic 
  takes it out 
  of pure meta-
  phor (which 
  for someone 
  like me is real 
  enough already) 
  and into reality.
  
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  commit more shifts of complexity to the spell—
  basic conjured objects have a Mediocre believ-
  ability. You might create a swarm of frogs at 
  complexity 11, but they’re still not necessarily 
  going to look quite right. Every additional shift 
  adds one to the difficulty of any roll to notice 
  that the conjured object isn’t real. So a wizard 
  only needs 1 shift of complexity to make a coin, 
  but if he wants a coin that’s detailed enough to 
  require a Great (+4) roll to notice as fake, his 
  total spell complexity is five shifts.
  A wizard can use the Sight or other means of 
  divination to figure out that something’s made 
  of ectoplasm, though, so the chances of avoiding 
  supernatural detection are fairly slim.
  Often, ectoplasm is used to create a body for 
  a summoned spirit to inhabit so it can physically 
  interact with the world. Usually this ectoplasm 
  is generated by the summoned creature, not the 
  summoner, but in some cases a body must be 
  constructed deliberately in advance.
  Can I Conjure a Sword?
  Sure! You can conjure a sword, using thauma-
  turgy. But…why? It’ll take you at least a few 
  minutes to conjure the thing, since this is thau-
  maturgy in action, and unless you toss some 
  extra power into it to outlast the sunrise, it’ll 
  dissolve in less than a day. That, and most fencers 
  don’t like to rely on a sword that can be dispelled 
  mid-fight. When it comes down to it, it’s a lot 
  of work for something ephemeral, and when you 
  need a sword, you tend to need a sword right 
  now—so go out and buy one already.
  Divination
  Divination can take several forms, all basically 
  falling under the general header of “gathering 
  information.” The most common example from 
  Harry’s casefiles is his tracking spell, but there 
  are several other forms that fall within the 
  scope of divination: direct scrying, forecasting 
  and prophecy, telepathy and psychometry, and 
  various other kinds of sensory magic. 
  With divination spells, the main things to 
  consider are how much information you want 
  and how hard it would normally be to get that 
  information. That’s why Harry’s tracking spell 
  is ultimately pretty easy to pull off—all he gets 
  is a general sense of the target’s location, but no 
  other information. This makes it a simple action 
  which nearly always has a low complexity.
  Things become more complicated when you 
  actively monitor the target in some way. First, 
  if the target is behind a threshold or any other 
  kind of supernatural protection, you have to 
  overcome that. Second, even unaware targets 
  have a natural defense against being “read” or 
  seen against their will—basically a defense 
  roll, just like targets get if you take a swing at 
  them in a fight. This commonly defaults to 
  Conviction or Presence, depending on the 
  context of the scrying. So you will want to beef 
  up the complexity fairly high to overcome these 
  obstacles, naturally leading to some prep scenes 
  devoted to finding good links to the target and 
  whatnot.
  Ultimately, the product of divination usually 
  takes the form of an aspect or significant fact, 
  just as if you had successfully performed an 
  assessment action on the target. Particularly 
  complex spells might reveal multiple aspects 
  or facts by simulating a very high roll on the 
  assessment action (say, equal to the target diffi-
  culty + 4 or + 5), or by adding the complexities 
  of two or more divinations together in the same 
  spell. See assessments on page 115 for guidelines 
  on this.
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  Veils
  Veils are spirit evocations (page 255) that bend 
  attention, light, and energy away from prying 
  eyes. They typically require ongoing concentra-
  tion to remain in place. Evocation’s veils also 
  tend to be fairly personal in scale—covering the 
  caster himself and maybe a few of his allies. 
  However, it is possible to use thaumaturgy 
  to set up a long-term veil, concealing something 
  for days without ongoing concentration. Large 
  White Council convocations, if they occur in 
  public places, usually have a large-scale thau-
  maturgic veil covering the entire venue to keep 
  normal mortals from getting too curious about 
  the proceedings.
  The complexity of a large veil is equal to 
  whatever difficulty the wizard wants others to 
  beat in order to detect whatever’s behind the 
  veil; as usual, more is better. As with evocation, 
  this is a block action with a base complexity 
  equal to its strength.
  Veils often block detection in both directions. 
  Perceiving things outside a veil while you are 
  within it faces a similar block, at half the veil’s 
  strength. Increase the complexity of a veil by 2 in 
  order to create a veil that doesn’t impede looking 
  out at all. (For an evocation veil, this increases 
  the power requirement of the spell by 2.)
  In addition, bigger veils mean a higher 
  complexity. Concealing the caster himself or a 
  small group is within the scope of an evocation 
  veil and requires no adjustment (think of it as 
  limited to around the size of a Volkswagen Bug). 
  Thaumaturgical veils are not usually mobile and 
  are constrained by thresholds and other barriers 
  that scatter magical energies (such as a river). 
  Count up the number of zones a larger veil 
  covers, and add that to the complexity of the veil.
  Casting a veil as a ritual means the wizard 
  doesn’t really have to worry about maintaining 
  it; if he wants it to last past the next sunrise, he’ll 
  need extra duration shifts as noted in “Duration 
  and Enhanced Evocation” (page 265).
  Wards
  A ward is basically a very potent version of a 
  block using thaumaturgy instead of evocation. 
  It’s intended to protect an area—usually a home 
  or sanctum—from physical or magical intru-
  sion. Wards are similar to thresholds (page 230), 
  except they’re quite a bit more potent. Most 
  wizards need stronger protection against occu-
  pational hazards such as hostile demons, mali-
  cious magic, and hungry monsters.
  A ward’s basic function is reflecting energies 
  back onto their source. Someone who collides 
  with a ward at a brisk walk might experience 
  something equivalent to a hard shove, while 
  someone running full tilt into a ward would 
  most certainly get knocked to the ground. 
  Magical force gets the same treatment—a 
  powerful spell cast on a good ward usually ends 
  up being very bad for the intruder.
  In addition to this basic function, wards can 
  be rigged to contain other magic that gets trig-
  gered when the ward encounters significant 
  force. The most common of these is a magical 
  “landmine,” where a large evocation effect (such 
  as a fire burst) is encased in a sigil behind the 
  ward. The ward releases its energy when the 
  containment provided by the ward is breached. 
  Other effects are possible, though; the enchant-
  ment known as a wardflame can be attached to 
  a ward as an early detection system, showing the 
  wizard when something is coming his way by 
  causing nearby candles to burn bright blue (or 
  some other light-show).
  The base complexity of a ward is directly 
  related to its desired strength, so you should aim 
  for this to be pretty high: 8 shifts (Legendary) is 
  a pretty good target to shoot for if you’re moder-
  ately good. This represents the ward’s capacity 
  for reflecting attacks. 
  When something hits the ward, compare 
  the shift values. If the ward prevails, hit the 
  attacker with an effect of the appropriate type 
  for equal shifts. So if someone rolls a Great (+4) 
  attack against a ward, he has to try to avoid a 
  Great (+4) attack from the rebounding force. If 
  someone hits it with a 6-shift evocation, he has 
  to dodge a 6-shift evocation.
  If the attack surpasses the block strength 
  of the ward, then the ward is breached; apply 
  whatever shifts get through to the target just 
  like bypassing a block (page 210). Alternatively, 
  the  attacker may apply those shifts directly 
  toward getting rid of the ward itself; each shift 
  will reduce the value of the ward by one until it’s 
  gone. While a ward is technically still around at 
  Mediocre (+0) strength, most lack the energy to 
  hold themselves together at that point; a ward 
  needs to be reduced to –4 to be completely 
  nullified.
  By default, a ward lasts until the next sunrise 
  unless you add complexity to make it last longer, 
  which is explained in “Duration and Enhanced 
  Evocation” (page 265). In addition, any spells you 
  Molly is 
  particularly 
  good at cre-
  ating veils 
  you can see 
  through. Mine 
  always come 
  off like I’m 
  immersed 
  in a glass 
  of soda. 
  As men tioned 
  elsewhere, bach­
  elor wizards 
  tend to have 
  pretty weak 
  natural thresh-
  olds.
  
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  wish to include as part of the ward construct 
  add their complexity values directly onto the 
  ward. It must all be cast as one spell. If you want 
  a layered defense, you’ll have to spend a bit of 
  time setting it up.
  Wards don’t have a “scale” concern, the way 
  that veils do, and they cannot move. They are 
  almost always tied to a particular place’s natural 
  thresholds—think of them as a super-boosted 
  immune system—so they are limited by the size 
  of that threshold. Without a threshold they can 
  only be set up to cover a small area at most—
  usually a point of transition such as a doorway 
  or intersection.
  Warning systems, such as a wardflame, add 2 
  to the complexity of the spell and set off an 
  alarm of some sort when someone is actively 
  testing the ward’s defense. Tying a symbolic link 
  to some item you carry increases the complexity 
  by another 2, but may warn you of intrusions 
  even when far from home (though the message 
  may get delayed or blocked by intervening 
  thresholds).
  Landmines—nasty, damaging spells that are 
  triggered on a breach—add complexity equal to 
  the power of the evocation spell stored within 
  the ward. The effective targeting roll will be 
  equal to the power of the evocation, though the 
  spell’s complexity may be increased on a one for 
  one basis to add to the targeting roll (wizards 
  heedful of the First Law may well want to 
  avoid inflicting undiscriminating, lethal force). 
  Thaumaturgic spells might be done as land-
  mines as well—simply add their complexity to 
  the base complexity of the ward.
  Specialized practitioners focused on wards 
  are able to embed other effects in their wards—
  such as wardflames or landmines—even if they 
  cannot create those spell effects independent of 
  a ward.
  Getting Selective 
  with Conditions
  Wards (and possibly veils) normally manifest 
  broad effects that target everything. To make a 
  ward or veil more selective, you can add simple 
  conditions to the spell, increasing its complexity 
  by 2 for each simple condition added. 
  Make no mistake—a ward spell can’t “think” 
  for itself, but it can be taught to recognize 
  something incorporated into its symbolic links. 
  You might establish a condition that allows 
  someone to pass through unaffected so long as 
  he’s wearing one of five amulets; you might add 
  a drop of your blood to the ritual components 
  to ensure that you can pass through. Regardless, 
  conditions must be based on something observ-
  able, without any element of decision-making: 
  wearing an amulet, living beings, people who say 
  “open sesame,” that sort of thing. These aren’t 
  detection systems—though a divination spell 
  could be combined with a ward to create a more 
  actively discerning ward. 
  With all of this, the ability to produce a 
  relevant symbolic link is key for each condition. 
  A vial of White Court vampire blood could be 
  used to create a ward that only repels those of 
  the sexy-deadly persuasion (or create a veil that 
  masks one’s presence from their kind alone). 
  Without it, such selectivity just couldn’t be 
  achieved.
  Winging It With Wards 
  and Landmines
  These rules are pretty intricate, giving you a lot 
  of options for how you can set up wards and 
  defenses. But it’s a pretty safe bet that any ward-
  capable spellcaster worth his salt will have his 
  base of operations protected by at least a basic 
  ward. 
  If it hasn’t been explicitly declared otherwise, 
  assume a wizard’s ward strength to be equal to 
  the highest of Conviction, Discipline, or Lore. In 
  fact, that’s a reasonable assumption for any kind 
  of “preset” magical effect if the GM or player 
  needs to establish one in the course of play. Just 
  assume the caster’s highest magical stat is what 
  you’re dealing with, and use aspects to bolster 
  the totals as appropriate.
  So if the PCs are breaking into an NPC 
  wizard’s sanctum, and the NPC wizard has a 
  Superb (+5) Conviction, you can safely assume 
  that the fire trap he has set up is a 5-shift evoca-
  tion. Tick a couple of fate points off that NPC, 
  invoke a couple of aspects (say, Meticulous 
  and Paranoid), and now it’s a 9-shift evocation. 
  And so on.
  Good luck 
  getting one 
  of those, 
  unless you 
  have an in 
  with the 
  WCVs 
  or are a 
  complete 
  PSYCHO.
  Bob, do I have it right that wards are usually immobile, so if 
  you want a big, long-lasting spell of protection it has to be 
  rooted to one location? So if someone wants mobile protection, 
  it’s all short term evocation and things like enchanted items?
  Very good, William! Your conclusions are 
  generally correct. With magic, there are always 
  exceptions—but they’re rare and 
  tied to specific circumstances.
  
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  Crafting 
  (Items and Potions)
  While crafting things like focus items and 
  potions is considered a type of thaumaturgy, it 
  isn’t something that has a very active presence in 
  these game mechanics. Crafting magical items is, 
  by and large, a very boring process that quickly 
  lends itself to bean-counting, resource manage-
  ment mini-games. Even the simplest focus item 
  requires weeks or months of the wizard sitting 
  in his study, gradually aligning the item with the 
  proper energies through repetitive motion and 
  thought—not really stuff you want to spend 
  time describing or talking about.
  To avoid that boring repetition, the game 
  handles crafting through the application of 
  stunts. Wizard characters get a number of 
  “slots” for different kinds of items, under the 
  assumption that there is a practical maximum 
  of items that a wizard can make and main-
  tain at one time. That number rises via char-
  acter advancement (and the purchase of the 
  Refinement ability—see page 182), allowing the 
  wizard to either possess more items or create 
  stronger ones.
  There are two basic kinds of magical items: 
  focus items and enchanted items. Focus items 
  enhance and facilitate the magic of the user in 
  a particular way, while enchanted items store 
  energy and release it again in some predeter-
  mined manner, sort of like a “spell in a box.” 
  Harry Dresden’s usual kit of magic items 
  includes three focus items (staff, blasting rod, 
  and shield bracelet) and a few enchanted items 
  (his duster, the kinetic force rings, and the occa-
  sional potion). 
  Potions and their ilk are a kind of fire-and-
  forget enchanted item. They store energy, but 
  once consumed, the energy is used up and the 
  item is effectively destroyed.
  Focus Items
  Focus items are very straightforward. They 
  enhance a wizard’s spellcasting in a particular 
  fashion by providing a bonus to one part of the 
  spellcasting effort. Typically hand-crafted by the 
  wizard, focus items are bound to the particular 
  magic they’re intended to work with through 
  a monotonous process of ritual attunement, 
  where the wizard sits with the item in a casting 
  circle or similar ritual space and visualizes its 
  use for hours on end. After a period of weeks or 
  months, the item is ready.
  A single focus item slot, as granted by various 
  Spellcraft powers (page 179), grants a +1 bonus. 
  For  evocation focuses, this bonus may be 
  applied to either the wizard’s offensive power 
  (Conviction) or offensive control (Discipline) 
  or defensive power (Conviction) or defensive 
  control (Discipline). 
  For thaumaturgy focuses, this bonus may 
  be applied to the wizard’s upper bound on 
  “no-prep” complexity (Lore) for thaumaturgy 
  or to the wizard’s control (Discipline) rolls for 
  casting. The type of bonus must be determined 
  and locked down at the time the item is created.
  In addition, you must specify which type of 
  evocation or thaumaturgy is enhanced by the 
  item’s bonus. An evocation focus is  specified to 
  work with a particular kind of element (e.g., fire, 
  spirit). A thamaturgy focus is specified by any 
  of the thaumaturgic types listed in this section, 
  whether by function (e.g., summoning, veils, 
  wards) or theme (e.g., biomancy, ectomancy, 
  necromancy). 
  Subsequent focus item slots allow you to 
  create new focus items. Alternatively, one or 
  more slots may be spent to add greater capacity 
  to an existing focus item.  
  The total number of slots a focus item uses is 
  equal to the number of elements or types multi-
  plied by the total of the bonuses.  So an item 
  that offered +1 offensive power and +1 offen-
  sive control to fire and earth evocations would 
  take up 4 slots.  All bonuses of an item always 
  apply to all of the types on the item: you can’t 
  have +2 complexity for necromancy and +1 
  complexity for wards in the same focus item, 
  because the +2 complexity should apply to both 
  necromancy and wards.  This makes for narrow, 
  potent focus items (one element or type with a 
  large bonus) and broad, less potent focus items 
  (many elements or types with a small bonus). 
  Broad, potent focus items are very rare.  As a 
  result, most wizards tend to have many small 
  bonus items for specific jobs, like a craftsman’s 
  toolbox.
  The one restriction on the bonuses provided 
  is that they may not total to a number greater 
  than your Lore.  So if your Lore is Good (+3), 
  you can have an evocation focus item that 
  provides +3 to offensive control, offensive power, 
  defensive power, or defensive control, or a focus 
  item that provides +1 to three of those, or +2 to 
  one and +1 to another, but you can’t construct 
  one that provides bonuses totaling 4 or more.
  This is a 
  good cursory 
  breakdown, 
  William, and 
  it’s probably 
  good enough 
  for the layman, 
  but there are 
  things that fall 
  between the 
  cracks. My skull, 
  for example, 
  is technically 
  an enchanted 
  item—it’s just 
  meant to store 
  my energy, 
  instead of a spell. 
  And then there 
  are the Swords 
  of the Cross, 
  which are—
  conceptually 
  speaking—just 
  very powerful 
  foci.
  I thought 
  the Swords 
  were like an 
  artifact or 
  something?
  Well, consider 
  what you can 
  channel when 
  your power 
  source is the 
  faith of all 
  Christians—and 
  possibly other 
  faiths as well—
  on the face of the 
  earth.
  uh… I think 
  you just broke 
  my brain.
  
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  The number of elements or types is not 
  restricted, so long as you have enough slots to 
  accommodate them.
  If you are willing to lock the item down to 
  only ever being useful for one specific spell—
  such as an established evocation rote or a divi-
  nation spell that always looks for the same 
  thing—then you get a single free “slot upgrade” 
  (as described below) to add an extra +1 bonus.
  You can’t benefit from the same type of bonus 
  (e.g., a control bonus) from two or more items 
  at the same time—so if you had two items, one 
  with a +2 control bonus and another with a +1 
  control bonus, the total effect is a +2 to control.
  Example: Evan Montrose has three focus 
  item slots. He could make a single wand that 
  takes up all three slots, giving him +3 offensive 
  power for wind evocation only, or he could split 
  the bonuses up, for +2 offensive power and 
  +1 offensive control. He could also make it 
  more multi-purpose, taking just a +1 offensive 
  power bonus, but applying it to wind, water, 
  and earth evocations.
  Enchanted Items
  Enchanted items are intended to hold a single, 
  pre-generated effect that is stored until released, 
  after which the energy in the item must be 
  recharged. The construction process is very 
  similar to the process for creating a focus item, 
  except that the wizard also imbues the item 
  with minute amounts of spell energy as he 
  goes through the attunement process, gradually 
  shaping it to hold the energy it’s designed for. 
  Making an enchanted item requires one 
  enchanted item slot, which can be acquired by 
  trading in a focus item slot for two enchanted 
  item slots.
  When you create an enchanted item, you 
  must specify the effect that the item performs. 
  Nearly any effect within the range of thauma-
  turgy or evocation is allowed (though evoca-
  tion tends to be easier because the amount of 
  power involved is usually comparatively small), 
  subject to two limitations: the effect has a 
  strength equal to your Lore, and it may only be 
  used once per game session. After it’s used, the 
  item requires time to recharge by some means 
  that you determine; this is assumed to take long 
  enough to reach into the next session. 
  You may increase the number of uses per 
  session by one by reducing the base strength 
  of the item by one.  So if you have Good (+3) 
  Lore, you could create an enchanted item with 
  an effect strength of Good (+3) that you can 
  use once per session, or an item with an effect 
  strength of Average (+1) that you can use three 
  times per session. When doing this, the base 
  strength of the item may not go below 1.
  The strength of an enchanted item may be 
  reduced by one to make it usable by someone 
  other than the caster, such as a magically 
  armored coat that anyone can wear.
  It’s possible that using an enchanted item will 
  require some kind of skill roll, particularly if it 
  needs to be targeted in some way; discuss this 
  Heh heh, Evan’s “wind” has a lot of “offensive power.”         Are you twelve?
  Billy, I think 
  you should 
  be able to 
  “recycle” your 
  enchanted item 
  slots into new 
  applications 
  at certain 
  times. Maybe 
  as a part of an 
  advancement 
  milestone?
  Absolutely.  
  Probably at 
  Significant 
  milestones. 
  crafting isn’t 
  something you 
  can do quickly, 
  but given 
  enough time, 
  swapping one 
  thing out 
  for another 
  makes sense.
  
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  with the GM and follow whatever course seems 
  logical. Defensive items (ones that provide armor 
  or a block, for example) often consume a use at 
  the time of defense and don’t require a separate 
  action to activate. If an enchanted item runs out 
  of uses in a session, if wielded by a practitioner, 
  he may make additional uses anyway by taking 
  one point of mental stress per use.
  Subsequent enchanted item slots allow you to:
    Create a new enchanted item with a new 
  effect
    Add +1 to the strength of the default 
  effect on an existing enchanted item
    Add 2 to the uses per session for an 
  existing enchanted item
  Regardless, an item’s casting strength after 
  all bonuses are totaled should never exceed 
  two times the crafter’s Lore rating—at least 
  not without a very good rationale and a ton of 
  baggage.
  Example: Harry has three available enchanted 
  item slots. He wants to make a ring that shoots 
  a blast of kinetic energy (spirit evocation) at 
  a target, which recharges by absorbing kinetic 
  energy from the slight movements of his hand. 
  Harry’s player, Jim, puts his one additional 
  slots beyond the first into effect strength, and 
  his Lore is Good (+3), so Harry gets a spirit 
  evocation attack of 4 power (a Weapon:4 
  attack using a skill roll) once per session without 
  rolling. The GM and Jim decide it would make 
  the most sense if he still has to make a roll to see 
  if he can aim it accurately. There are a couple 
  of skills Jim could use for this roll—such as 
  Guns—but Harry’s Discipline is higher, so Jim 
  opts for that.
  Crafting Specializations
  Crafting specializations for items and potions 
  aren’t used for control or complexity; they 
  usually affect frequency or strength without 
  making you spend an extra slot to do it. A 
  frequency specialization allows you one more use 
  per session. A strength specialization increases 
  the effect strength of your basic enchanted items 
  by 1 (this strength specialization bonus can’t 
  be traded in for an additional per-session use). 
  In the case of potions, this can create stronger 
  potions, or ones that you can get two uses out 
  of. Alternatively, a crafting specialization may 
  be applied to increase the limit on how many 
  bonuses may be placed on a single focus item (a 
  focus specialization).
  You can create focus items which are used 
  to provide frequency and strength bonuses for 
  crafting when making other items and potions. 
  That said, you can’t create a focus item that helps 
  you create other focus items. It’s... uh, it’s a magic 
  thing. Just doesn’t work.
  Potions
  Potions are created through a fairly complex 
  process that involves combining ingredients into 
  some sort of base liquid and using it as the focus 
  of a thaumaturgical ritual to put power into the 
  potion. Many wizards have workspaces that 
  they use for this purpose, complete with shelves 
  full of odd ingredients from diamond dust to eye 
  of newt. The ingredients that go into a potion 
  metaphorically signify its effects. In addition to 
  the base liquid, each potion requires one ingre-
  dient for each of the five senses (touch, taste, 
  smell, sight, and sound), one ingredient for the 
  mind, and one for the heart. These ingredients 
  don’t have to be consumable; the magic that 
  creates the potion makes a potable substance.
  Potions are very similar to enchanted items 
  in terms of function (and, in fact, even use 
  enchanted item slots to make), but are both 
  more limited and more flexible. To be able to 
  make a potion, you must commit an existing 
  open enchanted item slot to be a potion slot. 
  When you’re outfitting your wizard, consider 
  leaving some enchanted item slots unallocated 
  so you can create potions as you need them.
  At the beginning of each session, you may 
  declare what potions you have on hand to fill 
  those slots, or otherwise leave them open. If you 
  have an open slot and a successful Lore roll or a 
  fate point to spend, you may later declare that 
  you coincidentally have an appropriate potion. 
  A given potion can only be used once, period, 
  but it doesn’t face a surcharge for being usable by 
  someone else.
  The effect strength of a potion, like enchanted 
  items, is equal to the wizard’s Lore. Multiple 
  slots devoted to potions allow the wizard to 
  either:
    Have multiple potions at one time; or,
    Add +1 to the strength of any potion
  Unlike a normal enchanted item, the effect 
  strength of the potion may be boosted on the fly 
  or at the time it is created with the invocation 
  of aspects. Each invocation allows the potion’s 
  strength to be increased by 2. You may choose 
  to take a compel in order to get this bonus for 
  Let’s talk potions 
  ingredients! 
  One of my most 
  favored topics. 
  For a well-stocked 
  lab, or a single 
  major entropy-
  curse-esque 
  potion, make sure 
  you have: Fillet 
  of a fenny snake, 
  newt’s eye, frog 
  toe, bat’s wool, 
  dog’s tongue, 
  adder’s fork, 
  blind-worm’s 
  sting, lizard’s leg, 
  mummified witch, 
  intestines of a 
  shark, hemlock 
  root (night-
  harvested)—
  THIS 
  ENDS 
  NOW,  
  BOB!
  I think he got 
  that list from 
  Shakespeare...?
  man, who did 
  Billy Shakes 
  KNoW back in 
  the day? And 
  did Bob once 
  play the role 
  of Yorick?
  Oh yeah? 
  Well, that’s 
  better, at 
  least. If 
  those have 
  been published, 
  they may 
  have been 
  robbed of 
  their power.
  “... a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy ...”
  
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  free, but that means the GM can introduce 
  that compel at any time later without giving 
  you the opportunity to refuse—you’ve already 
  agreed to it by taking the additional strength 
  for the potion. In general, only one such “pay-it-
  forward” compel should be allowed at a time.
  Example: Bob convinces Harry to create a 
  love potion in exchange for assistance with the 
  more useful escape potion. Harry’s player, Jim, 
  only sets one slot set aside for the love potion, 
  so the potion strength is going to be 3 shifts for 
  Harry’s Lore of Good. 
  Jim and the GM agree that it seems logical 
  for Bob’s coercion to function as a compel on 
  Harry’s Perpetually Broke aspect—Harry 
  needs the escape potion for the case he’s working 
  on and he can’t afford to drop the case, so he 
  has to accept Bob’s terms.  The GM adds the 
  caveat that, because Bob’s helping, it’ll probably 
  end up working more like a lust potion than a 
  love potion. Jim sighs and agrees. He gets a fate 
  point for his troubles.
  Jim decides to spend that fate point imme-
  diately for the escape potion, giving that potion 
  a bonus of +2. This ups the strength of the 
  potion to five shifts (3, +2 for the bonus from 
  the compel).  The thaumaturgical effect on 
  this potion will provide 5 shifts of “sprinting” 
  in a single exchange—including the ability to 
  pass through normally impassible barriers, like 
  walls.
  For the love potion, the GM and Jim 
  decide that it will plant the temporary aspect 
  of Seized by Lust if the target can’t beat a 
  Good (+3) Discipline roll. Of course, Susan 
  drank the wrong potion by accident…and 
  didn’t make that roll.
  Hidden Power
  Power is hard to squirrel away without it being 
  noticed. This is particularly true where items are 
  concerned, both in terms of their physical and 
  supernatural dimensions. First, the physical. 
  Use this chart as a guideline, counting up the 
  number of slots spent on a single item.
  And so on. The size of an item will play into 
  how hard it is to physically detect. Fortunately, 
  even when a magic item is physically obvious, 
  it’s not always obvious what it’s for. A beat cop 
  might not look at a staff as much more than a 
  funky walking-stick, even though such a thing is 
  as lethal as a machine-gun in the hands of the 
  right wizard.
  That’s where the supernatural dimension 
  comes in. Those who are in the know (gener-
  ally, those with actual occult training) can use 
  their Lore skill to pick up on the presence of an 
  item of magical potency, getting a +1 to the roll 
  for every two enchantment slots or one focus 
  slot spent in the item’s construction. A staff 
  composed of 4 focus item slots provides a whop-
  ping +4 bonus to that roll—so while it might 
  look like a funky walking-stick, a trained pro 
  will recognize right away that it’s an object of 
  absolutely lethal potency. This isn’t the same as 
  knowing what the staff does, mind you—it only 
  identifies it as an item of supernatural power.
  Aren’t you glad I convinced you to make that love potion?
  Shut up, Bob. 
  Focus Item Slots 
  Enchanted Item Slots
  No smaller than…
  1-2
  1-4
  Ring (ear or finger)
  3-4
  5-8
  Fist or rod
  5-6
  9-12
  Basketball or staff
  Hey, Billy, 
  why does the 
  chart stop 
  here? What 
  if someone 
  wants to 
  craft an item 
  out of even 
  more slots?
  Well, if you go 
  beyond the end 
  of the chart, 
  you’re doubling 
  or tripling 
  the dimensions 
  each step, so 
  at best you’re 
  talking about 
  something which 
  is vehicular, if 
  not completely 
  stationary. 
  So what’s 
  shown is 
  what you 
  can actually 
  carry. And it 
  seems to me 
  that wizards 
  do better 
  when they can 
  actually bring 
  their items to 
  where they need 
  to use them.
  Good point. 
  There’s 
  no Little 
  Chicago in 
  my pocket.
  
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  Few supernatural types take kindly to 
  someone walking into their establishment while 
  loaded down with big, nasty enchanted and 
  focus items—the same as anyone wouldn’t react 
  well to someone showing up toting two assault 
  rifles and a bandolier of grenades. This is why 
  many wizards go for multiple small items, rather 
  than a single, multi-functional whopper of a 
  thing (this also helps spread out the risk of loss).
  Transformation 
  and Disruption
  Thaumaturgy that fundamentally, lastingly 
  changes the target—whether it’s the target’s 
  body, mind, emotions, or even luck—falls into 
  the category of transformation and disruption. 
  Often, this is dark stuff—curses, mind control, 
  destructive shapeshifting, and death magic. 
  Of all the methods available through thauma-
  turgy, these are the ones most prone to run afoul 
  of the Laws of Magic (page 232). Regardless of 
  what the spell changes, this is a violent act to the 
  target: people and things are very good at being 
  what they are, and this sort of magic forces them 
  to be what they aren’t. 
  As such, these forms of thaumaturgy rely on 
  the same mechanical principle—most of them 
  inflict consequences or temporary aspects on a 
  target. Entropic curses inflict aspects that reflect 
  bad luck and other kinds of misfortune. Emotion 
  magic inflicts aspects related to emotional states 
  (lust, anger, fear, etc.) that the victim can fall 
  prey to. Mind control is just that—the aspect, 
  when compelled, forces the victim to act in a 
  certain way. In rarer cases, a curse might actu-
  ally be fully transformative, changing the shape 
  or nature of a being permanently.
  Because these forms of thaumaturgy func-
  tion via consequences, a wizard needs to make 
  sure that the spell is complex enough to over-
  come any resistance the target might be able to 
  raise (defense rolls, stress tracks, etc.), as well as 
  add enough shifts for the desired level of conse-
  quence (0 for a temporary aspect, 2 for mild, 
  4 for moderate, 6 for severe, 8 for extreme). 
  Anything that is fully transformative must be 
  powerful enough to achieve a “taken out” result 
  on the target, which can be extremely complex 
  (see “Contests and Conflicts,” page 265)—which 
  isn’t to say there aren’t sorcerers out there prac-
  ticing that kind of black magic. Sadly, there 
  are plenty. 
  Transportation and 
  Worldwalking
  Transportation magics are all about getting the 
  wizard (or someone—or something—else) from 
  one place to another. Teleportation is rare if not 
  completely absent—though a clever wizard can 
  certainly make it seem like that’s what he’s done. 
  Instead, there are spells which impart speed or 
  other kinds of motion, and those which rip holes 
  into or out of the Nevernever.
  Spells (including potions and enchanted 
  items) that impart speed focus on the idea of 
  creating a simple action effect of a high Athletics 
  roll used to sprint (page 212), allowing the wizard 
  to cover a great amount of distance in a short 
  amount of time. Milder, longer-term speed 
  benefits can be imparted as maneuvers, giving a 
  target an Unexpectedly Fast aspect that he 
  can tag and invoke to boost needed rolls, but this 
  sort of subtle magic is less often used—when 
  there’s a need for speed, there’s a need for speed.
  Running so fast can be hard on the body—
  steering isn’t always easy at that speed, and some 
  bodies aren’t designed to move that fast without 
  something giving. Mild and moderate physical 
  consequences may be an appropriate part of 
  using a spell or potion to boost speed, repre-
  senting the body pushing past safe limits. 
  While it’s theoretically possible to create a 
  spell which would allow one to fly, the ability 
  to fly (whether on a broomstick, a carpet, or 
  some other conveyance) does not come with 
  an instruction manual, and thus does not come 
  with the expertise to control the ability once it’s 
  The Wizard’s Death Curse
  The wizard’s death curse is actually very 
  easy to model. It’s a ritual, but with all of the 
  preparation ready to go. The components 
  of preparation are the circumstances of the 
  wizard’s death—all of the consequences he 
  has can be tagged, and he can inflict more 
  upon himself if he’s got the space, since he’s 
  not going to be around afterward. He can 
  cast it all in one round, because elements 
  of fallout and backlash are of no concern to 
  him, either. The wizard throws everything he 
  has into this one spell, this one final moment 
  of his life, and the effects of it can be incred-
  ibly devastating, whether they play out short 
  term or, as is the preference, long term—
  often by transforming the very nature of the 
  target’s fate.
  While it’s “fun” 
  to consider 
  possible death 
  curses, it’s 
  likely that 
  the details of 
  the actual 
  casting will 
  be mostly 
  improv.
  But your mom's 
  was so complex...
  BOB. Stop. 
  Talking. Now. 
  Or I bury 
  you in a hole 
  for several 
  years. 
  You already did 
  that, Harry.
  AGAIN!
  Hey, why aren’t 
  there more 
  death curses 
  messing everyone 
  up given the 
  council’s history 
  of taking down 
  rogue sorcerers?
  Two things 
  prevent that. 
  One, the Wardens 
  have gotten 
  very good at 
  preventing them. 
  Two, most bad 
  guys are too 
  arrogant to 
  assume anyone 
  will ever manage 
  to kill them. 
  No foresight, 
  no planning, 
  no curse.
  
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  available. Most wizards avoid trying, and those 
  who do usually quickly discover what the human 
  body was not meant to do.
  Finally, teleportation-like effects can be 
  achieved, but these are even trickier to guide 
  than flight. With flying, at least you still have 
  eyeballs to see where you’re going; when you’re a 
  flowing stream of energy looking for somewhere 
  else to be, where you end up is where you end up. 
  For instance, Harry Dresden’s quasi-teleporta-
  tion escape potion from the Storm Front case 
  worked, but it wasn’t exactly what he wanted—
  it turned him into the wind for a few seconds, 
  only got him to outside his apartment door, 
  and left him a bit nauseated to boot. While the 
  destination might be somewhat random (unless 
  a specific destination has been symbolically 
  linked into the spell’s construction), thankfully 
  the chances of ending up inside a solid object 
  are fairly slim—energy likes to head toward the 
  place of least resistance, and that’s usually in an 
  open space. 
  When building a teleportation spell, think 
  small; the complexity should be based on the 
  number of zones and borders you want to 
  be able to cross, and you won’t ever be able to 
  cross into a place that has a threshold of any real 
  strength (Good or better). Beyond the mystical 
  barrier of a threshold, physical barriers are a 
  problem, too—the GM should rate solid walls 
  anywhere between 4 and 8 for their border value 
  here. At the end of the day, the question to ask 
  about teleportation is this: given all the effort 
  necessary to build a good teleportation spell that 
  only transports you a short distance, why aren’t 
  you just walking?
  All this said, many wizards regard the above 
  methods of transportation to be crude methods, 
  used for short-term purposes. Real transpor-
  tation is done by way of worldwalking—the 
  practice of opening portals into and out of 
  the Nevernever. Things are connected more 
  by conceptual distance than by physical in the 
  Nevernever, so a well-trained worldwalker can 
  make it from New York to Shanghai much faster 
  than any jet. The problem, of course, is that the 
  geography of the Nevernever is fluid—not to 
  mention chock full of dangerous things. Someone 
  with a good guide or training can make it 
  through relatively quickly and safely—use Lore 
  as the skill of navigation in the Nevernever.
  Opening a way into or out of the Nevernever 
  depends almost entirely on the strength of the 
  barrier between the Nevernever and our world 
  in a given place. Opening the way is a simple 
  action against the target strength—it must 
  meet or exceed the strength in order to open up. 
  Typically, the strength of the barrier between 
  the Nevernever and our world is Superb (or 
  better)—evidence to the contrary, things from 
  the other side don’t leak through to our world 
  every day. At least, not in general, not in most 
  places. 
  But our world (and the Nevernever) is rife 
  with soft spots, places where the barrier is 
  thinner and weaker. In these places, many super-
  natural creatures can cross into and out of the 
  Nevernever as a casual effort—as simply as you 
  might walk from one room to the next—so long 
  as the place has a strong affinity for the creature 
  in question (plenty of White Court vampires 
  use strip clubs and the like). These places are 
  home to such soft spots—as are places where 
  ways have been opened frequently or recently—
  dropping the strength of the barrier to Great, 
  Good, or even below. The overall barrier ebbs 
  and flows as well; while the default strength is 
  typically Superb, it can sometimes be weakened 
  overall, as seen in the Grave Peril casefile. 
  Some cities—such as Las Vegas—simply have a 
  weak barrier no matter where you go.
  Closing a way you’ve opened is a simple 
  matter of will. Keeping it open is where things 
  get interesting. Most ways will close themselves 
  naturally within a few minutes—often much 
  faster. Reality likes to heal those holes. If a way 
  has been opened in the middle of a conflict (or 
  just prior to one), the way faces an attack by the 
  Populating the 
  Nevernever
  A GM should feel free to stuff her own 
  personal Nevernever to the gills with what-
  ever strangeness suits the chunk of the 
  Dresdenverse she has carved off and made 
  her own. A game situated in Baltimore might 
  populate the “local” Nevernever with all sorts 
  of spirits of decay, for example. 
  Also, remember that a huge swath of 
  the “near” Nevernever (the parts of it found 
  closest to the mortal realm) is made up 
  entirely of Faerie, so travelers should find 
  plenty of faerie-kind haunting their paths. 
  In Baltimore’s case, those faeries are likely 
  to hail from the Winter Court, given that 
  court’s affinity for decay and decline.
  Billy, I’m 
  thinking 
  about the 
  transforming 
  stuff on the 
  previous page. 
  What does 
  it take to 
  transform 
  yourself into 
  a form with 
  new powers? 
  Or someone 
  else for that 
  matter?
  the simplest 
  answer is that 
  transforming a 
  target is like 
  killing a target, 
  with the taken 
  out result being 
  that they 
  come back in a 
  new form with 
  different powers 
  (that they have 
  to pay refresh 
  points for). 
  transforming 
  yourself is 
  either about 
  producing a 
  temporary, 
  short-term, 
  specific spell-
  effect with an 
  obvious shift 
  cost, or it’s 
  about acquiring 
  new powers with 
  spent refresh (or 
  temporarily—see 
  page 92—using 
  fate points 
  and tags).
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  barrier’s strength at the end of every exchange: 
  the GM rolls, using the barrier’s strength as 
  a skill, with a target difficulty of the spell’s 
  strength. 
  If the result exceeds the spell’s strength, the 
  way closes. The surest way to keep a way open 
  for the maximum number of minutes is with a 
  spell strength equal to the barrier’s strength plus 
  4 or 5. Keeping a way open longer takes real 
  effort—you can move the duration up the time 
  chart (starting from a few minutes) one step for 
  every additional point of complexity you add 
  to the spell. That said, it’s often better to let the 
  natural order reassert itself as soon as possible. 
  As with our world, there’s a bad element out 
  there that will see an open door as an invitation 
  to go where it’s not welcome.
  Thematic Thaumaturgy
  All the types of thaumaturgy listed so far are 
  divided along functional lines. Plenty of spell-
  casters focus their specializations by func-
  tion—you have divinators, wardsmen, crafters, 
  summoners, and the like. But just as often, thau-
  maturgists specialize not along functional lines, 
  but instead along thematic lines. A thematic 
  specialization looks at the subject matter in 
  which all the various functions of thauma-
  turgy are applied—an ectomancer will be 
  particularly effective with summoning, binding, 
  divining, veiling, warding, crafting, transforming, 
  disrupting, and transporting ghosts and other 
  non-demonic spirits, for example. 
  Following this paragraph are a few thematic 
  specializations, but the possibilities are as varied 
  as spellcasters themselves. If you want to intro-
  duce a new specialization for your character, 
  that’s totally fine. The main thing the GM needs 
  to watch out for here is ensuring that the theme 
  is both strongly expressed and limited in scope; 
  a theme which really amounts to “everything” in 
  application is no theme at all—it’s a cheat.
  Many thematic approaches to thauma-
  turgy run some sort of risk of skirting—if not 
  outright violating—the Laws of Magic. Nearly 
  all of them can be used to kill. Biomancy can be 
  used to transform another; necromancy often 
  reaches beyond the borders of life; psychomancy 
  might be used to invade the thoughts of another. 
  Tread lightly!
  Biomancy
  Biomancy is a term used for those who work 
  magics upon the body. Shapeshifting is an 
  extreme application of this art, whether in part 
  or in full (see “Transformation and Disruption,” 
  page 282), but it’s hardly the only application. 
  Healing magics fall under this specializa-
  tion. The main problem with healing magic is 
  that it can’t do much more than modern science 
  can—and it requires just as much real, mundane 
  knowledge of biology as a surgeon to wield 
  well. Still, biomancy can be used to lessen pain, 
  provide first aid type treatment and other forms 
  of physical therapy, and examine the physical 
  conditions of someone’s body (that’s a biomantic 
  divination, right there) including nifty Star 
  Trek style tricks like “scanning for life-forms.”
  The main advantage of healing magic in 
  the game is in providing justification to begin 
  the recovery process (page  220) without any 
  other effort. Use the shift value of the conse-
  quence (which you can stack together for 
  multiple consequences) as the spell complexity. 
  Remember, the recovery time can’t be shortened 
  with these kinds of magics—the target still has 
  to go through the healing naturally. 
  Biomancy can also be used for short-
  term supercharging. Look to the early part of 
  “Transportation and Worldwalking” on page 282 
  for  some possible applications (e.g., boosted 
  running speed, etc.). Biomantic rituals, items, 
  and potions can be used to boost strength, speed, 
  perception, and other functions of biology—
  provided that the body being boosted can with-
  stand the stresses of such an effort. Just because 
  muscles have been supercharged to lift a small 
  car doesn’t mean they’re built to withstand the 
  damage that would do; inflicting consequences 
  on the beneficiary to boost spell effectiveness is 
  not uncommon (Torn Muscle Tissue, etc.).
  Diabolism
  Diabolism refers to spellcraft involving a 
  demonic component. This is usually very bad 
  news, but a specialization in demonic thau-
  maturgy can also be used to effectively combat 
  the influences of demons—locating demons, 
  purging the possessed, constructing wards that 
  are especially potent against demons, binding 
  and banishing demons that have gotten loose. 
  But it’s just as easy to cross the line and 
  start using demons for your needs. Demons 
  can be consulted for information via divination 
  (though this invariably produces hazy, vague 
  So what's my 
  thaumaturgic 
  theme?
  I'd say, hmm, 
  tracking? But 
  you’re more of 
  a functional 
  specialist than 
  a thematic 
  specialist. I’d 
  just stat you 
  with divination 
  bonuses and 
  call it a day.
  
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  Spellcasting (thaumaturgy)
  results—demons would rather be summoned), 
  or by summoning them and entering negotia-
  tion for the particulars. They can be bound into 
  service and sent out as infernal attack dogs. 
  While information gathering is something of a 
  grey practice, summoning a demon and putting 
  it into service to kill is a clear-cut case of black 
  magic (there’s a straight line of connection 
  between the intent to kill and the summoning of 
  the demon; cue the First Law).
  Ectomancy
  Ectomancy is the practice of spellcraft involving 
  (generally non-demonic) spirits, focused espe-
  cially upon ghosts. Conceptually, ectomancy has 
  much in common with diabolism and necro-
  mancy, but it mostly stays within the safe zone 
  in between. It manages to neatly dodge the Fifth 
  Law thanks to the nature of ghosts themselves; 
  ghosts aren’t actual dead people—they’re the 
  supernatural “echoes” of the dead. That said, 
  ghosts can put on quite a convincing show, often 
  possessing some or most of the knowledge and 
  skills of the person that cast the echo, and this 
  makes them potentially useful to a talented 
  ectomancer. 
  Ectomancers tend to get noticed by ghosts 
  and often find themselves haunted by those 
  who are looking for a way to speak to the living. 
  Many ectomancers develop a natural ability to 
  see—or at least acutely sense—the presence of 
  ghosts, simply using Lore as the perception skill.
  In application, ectomancy can access all of 
  the functions of thaumaturgy as applied to (or 
  by) ghosts and spirits. Ghosts can be summoned 
  and bound into service, sent away or used to 
  kill via disruption, used as a ritual component 
  to enchant items or divine information, and so 
  on. Ectomantic spells can be constructed that 
  specifically target ghosts as well, whether it’s 
  a ward against spirits or a scrying attempt to 
  divine their presence. Some ectomancers may 
  even be able to access a skill from a ghost’s skill-
  set, in an act somewhat like voluntary posses-
  sion; here, the skill acquired is limited by the 
  level of skill the ghost possesses, and the value 
  of the skill rating is added to the complexity for 
  the binding spell.
  Entropomancy
  Entropomancy goes by a variety of names—
  malocchio, maladicto, katadesmoi—and in all 
  cases it amounts to essentially the same thing: 
  the refined art of inflicting curses on targets, 
  driving their lives toward greater disarray (and at 
  its extreme, death). So long as the magic follows 
  the principle of “things fall apart,” entropomancy 
  has an affinity for it.
  This sort of magic doesn’t have to kill its 
  target—it can just make things suck for them. 
  At its weakest, the curses inflicted by a malocchio 
  are transitory: maneuver-equivalent, inflicting 
  temporary aspects ranging from Bad Luck to 
  Two Left Feet to Comes Off Like A Jerk. 
  Curses might carry a little bit of deliberate 
  hexing with them (page 258), causing technology 
  to fail around a target even though he isn’t a 
  practitioner himself. It’s entirely possible to play 
  a low-level entropomancer in this way, focused 
  not on death but on mischief.
  The problem, of course, is that magic is tied 
  closely to what you believe you are, what you 
  believe you’re capable of doing. Entropomancers 
  face regular temptation to make the next curse 
  a little worse, because they already believe in 
  their hearts that they’re the sort of people that 
  make sure other folks have a bad day. Sure, you 
  could hit someone with a curse that makes him 
  
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  stumble at just the wrong moment…but why 
  not have him stumble in front of a car?
  Eventually, cursing tends to become more 
  vicious and direct; giving someone a heart attack 
  is entirely possible and—while it takes a lot 
  of energy to do it—can be done in such a way 
  as to be nearly undetectable as foul play (our 
  example of Victor Sells set aside). The classic 
  is the full-on entropy curse that gives entropo-
  mancy its name. This is a dark seething invisible 
  force that follows the victim around and encour-
  ages the environment to kill him a lot—falling 
  power-lines, cars full of bees, frozen turkeys 
  plummeting from an empty sky. It’s not a very 
  precise or very quick way to do it, but dire 
  entropy curses do tend to get the job done, often 
  as bizarrely as circumstances will allow. 
  Necromancy
  Ah, necromancy. The art of death magic barely 
  needs an introduction, and nearly all of it is in 
  violation of the Fifth Law. Whether used with 
  good intentions or bad, reaching beyond the 
  borders of life is bad news, no matter if it’s reani-
  mating a dead body as a zombie, calling back a 
  departed soul moments after death, or engaging 
  in human sacrifice to harness the power of death. 
  Zombies and the like are a case of 
  summoning and binding an animating spirit—
  usually a really stupid one that just knows how 
  to follow instructions—into the flesh of a dead 
  man, then convincing that flesh to get up and 
  start walking again (this typically requires the 
  inclusion of something to stand in for a heart-
  beat, like a drum or a bitchin’ set of subwoofers 
  and the latest gangsta rap on loop). Where the 
  flesh is weak, ectoplasm suffices, conjured in 
  sufficient quantities to give the body the muscu-
  lature it needs to move.
  The dark grey area here—deepest, darkest 
  grey—involves the manipulation of ghosts 
  (usually by doing something unspeakable with 
  their physical remains as part of the spell) and 
  the reanimation of dead creatures that never 
  had a soul in the first place (say, a dinosaur). 
  Such necromancers exist, but rarely without 
  sanction. The Wardens of the White Council 
  like to exercise a fairly broad interpretation of 
  the Fifth Law, given half the chance. And with 
  reason; those who practice necromancy inevi-
  tably seem to seek out the lost and hidden lore 
  of the great necromancer Kemmler, engaging in 
  Kemmlerian Necromancy (page 291), becoming 
  even more powerful than before. It’s all bad.
  Photomancy
  Photomancy is the art of manipulating light and 
  imagery with magic. The most obvious applica-
  tion here is with veils, but disguise and illusion 
  are also along for the ride. Focused light can also 
  produce heat-based effects; on the evocation 
  side, photomancy tends to manifest as a manip-
  ulation of fire.
  Disguises and illusions created by photo-
  mancy operate much like veils, save that they’re 
  oriented on fooling someone rather than simply 
  hiding from them. This is a block action against 
  visual detection of the disguise, though if an 
  illusion or disguised individual behaves in a way 
  obviously out of character, the block isn’t going 
  to be much help.
  Less obvious applications of photomancy 
  include bending light away from an area (a 
  maneuver, to place a Shadowed aspect on a 
  location, for example) and divinations that seek 
  out a particular image and/or cause something 
  you’re seeking to glow.
  Focused practitioners that use photomancy 
  exclusively seem to have no aptitude for manipu-
  lating ectoplasm—meaning their illusions never 
  have any physical substance to back them up 
  unless they’re wrapped around an actual phys-
  ical object. More broadly talented wizards often 
  incorporate a little bit of ectoplasm into their 
  photomantic efforts, creating illusions that can 
  actually interact with the environment.
  Psychomancy
  Practitioners that read and manipulate minds 
  are called psychomancers (or sometimes neuro-
  mancers). Given that these acts violate the 
  Third and Fourth Laws of Magic, they may also 
  be called headless, thanks to the action of the 
  Wardens. Psychomancy is neither well docu-
  mented nor condoned, though it seems every 
  now and again some new wizard comes along 
  with a talent for it, trained or not. The Council 
  does its best to intercede as quickly as possible 
  in such cases.
  There are some grey areas that can be 
  explored, mostly safely. Psychomancy might be 
  used to draw the thoughts out of the brain of a 
  dead man—no living person nor active mind is 
  violated in such a case, and the borders of life are 
  not crossed. Empathically reading the emotional 
  state of someone isn’t a violation of his thoughts 
  so much as an application of psychomancy to 
  boost your ability to perceive such information 
  (done as a divination). 
  Man, I could 
  not have done 
  that turkey-
  redirection 
  thing better 
  if I’d planned 
  it. Better a 
  Black Court 
  vamp than an 
  ally, or me.
  I really need to talk to Molly about some of this stuff.
  
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  Spellcasting (Sponsored magic)
  And then there’s the legal but dangerous 
  area of wielding psychomancy against your-
  self—supercharging your brain for an all-nighter 
  or to improve your reaction time, digging into 
  your own memories to pull out information you 
  didn’t realize was there, removing your ability 
  to feel fear, and so on. But synapses and minds 
  are fragile—when you can plug right into your 
  brain’s pleasure-center and press the big red 
  MORE button, or accidentally destroy your 
  ability to feel inhibition, it’s not long before 
  you’re indistinguishable from a meth-head. Just 
  because you’re doing it to yourself doesn’t make 
  the act any less violent. See the “supercharging” 
  discussions about transportation (page  282) 
  and biomancy (page 284) for guidelines on the 
  dangers of this.
  Some alternative forms of psychomancy 
  specialize in a particular range of thought—
  phobomancy focuses entirely on fear, for 
  example. These variants are encountered almost 
  as often as psychomancy itself.
  Whither Pyromancy 
  and Kinetomancy?
  There are a number of spellcasting names out 
  there of the –mancy variety that you don’t 
  see listed in this section. There’s a reason for 
  that: not all of them have a thaumaturgic 
  component. For instance, pyromancy and 
  kinetomancy (command of fire and force) 
  are usually expressions of focused evocation. 
  Sponsored Magic
  Sponsored magic is the name we’re giving to 
  spellcasting that draws on power sources other 
  than the caster himself (he can still draw on his 
  own power; it’s just not an exclusive arrange-
  ment). These power sources, called sponsors, 
  are at least semi-aware, if not fully-aware, enti-
  ties. Ancient and strange and potent, they have 
  agendas of their own, and they view those to 
  whom they grant a modicum of their own power 
  as their agents throughout Creation. 
  Sponsored magic, then, is the result of 
  a contract, pact, or other binding arrange-
  ment, implicit or explicit. Some part of your 
  soul is in hock. Seelie and Unseelie Magic (see 
  the abilities on page 290) are examples of this 
  concept, drawing on the ancient powers of the 
  Summer and Winter Courts of Faerie. 
  In practice, this is essentially equivalent to 
  taking the Channeling and Ritual abilities priced 
  at 2 refresh apiece, with the sponsored source 
  of power replacing the usual specialized focus 
  (this is why Seelie Magic is priced as a 4 refresh 
  ability). If the character is already a practitioner 
  of evocation and/or thaumaturgy, the source 
  gets “tacked on” to his existing spellcasting abili-
  ties as an extra area of focus, reducing the cost 
  by 1 refresh apiece. 
  This can be mix and match: if the character 
  knows evocation but not thaumaturgy, the price 
  would be a total of 3 refresh—1 to tack the 
  sponsored source onto evocation, 2 to pick up 
  “Ritual” for the sponsored magic. Some power 
  sources may come with additional potent bene-
  fits, increasing the cost. Specific power sources 
  may have other special rules regarding refresh 
  cost; see the list starting on page 290.
  Inherent 
  Limitations
  Sponsored magic is subject to the limitations of 
  evocation and thaumaturgy, which it emulates 
  (or supplements). In order to gain the benefits 
  of sponsored magic, the spell you’re casting 
  must align with the agenda of the sponsor 
  (page 289) and fit into the theme and scope of the 
  sponsor’s particular “flavor” of power (see the 
  types of sponsored magic, page 290). As a result, 
  sponsored magic is narrower in its focus and 
  has a sort of implicit approval component, in 
  exchange for the extra bit of potency and flex-
  ibility it offers.
  When aspects result from the casting 
  effort—whether inflicted on yourself or others 
  as consequences or temporary aspects, or as 
  part of the preparation phase—they’re always 
  colored, at least a touch, by the sponsor’s influ-
  ence and agenda. If you take a consequence 
  from sponsored magic, whether from backlash 
  or just because, it gives the sponsor a window 
  to compel you in various ways. For example, 
  hellfire is a vicious sponsored source and wants 
  to push you towards a greater commitment to 
  black magic and the influence of those Down 
  Below—aspects brought on by your casting will 
  reflect that.
  Before we 
  leave the 
  thaumaturgy 
  section, 
  I’ve got a 
  question for 
  you... What 
  makes an 
  appropriate- 
  sized “theme”, 
  if you’re 
  trying to 
  come up with 
  new ones?
  Hmm. Well, 
  there are 
  two kinds. 
  one is a wide 
  theme with 
  a narrow 
  application in 
  terms of the 
  functions it 
  can access, like 
  biomancy—you 
  can affect 
  lots of things 
  under the “bio” 
  theme, but 
  mainly only 
  for divination, 
  transform-
  ation and 
  disruption, and 
  transportation.
  the other is a 
  narrow theme 
  with a wide 
  application, like 
  ectomancy—
  which lets 
  you do all 
  the kinds of 
  thaumaturgy, 
  but only 
  with ghosts.
  
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  Spellcasting (Sponsored magic)
  How To Do It
  Sponsored magic spells are put together exactly 
  like evocation and thaumaturgy. Use the proce-
  dures described in those sections (starting on 
  page 249 and page 261 respectively).
  What You 
  Can Do With It
  Sponsored magic provides a few major benefits. 
  The first is the “extra oomph” the source 
  provides in keeping with its agenda. This may 
  provide special potency against a portion of 
  supernaturally tough creatures, partially satis-
  fying the Catch on their Toughness abilities; 
  this allows you to treat them as one level less 
  potent—only Inhumanly Tough instead of 
  Supernaturally Tough, for example. Summer 
  magic is especially nasty to the scions of Winter, 
  and vice-versa. 
  But this isn’t always about finding the weak 
  spot in an enemy’s armor. Sometimes the power 
  source is instead more potent (or at least faster) 
  when directed against certain types of problems, 
  such as Summer’s ability to do more potent 
  healing effects (the sponsor takes care of all that 
  pesky biological know-how) and the ability to 
  do certain things with the effects of thauma-
  turgy, but at the speed of evocation. 
  When these benefits are particularly broad, 
  the refresh cost of the sponsored magic may 
  increase. These situations will be sketched out in 
  each sponsored magic’s description (starting on 
  page 290).
  In addition, if you already practice evoca-
  tion, you may use a sponsored power source to 
  “supercharge” an element you’ve already special-
  ized in. So Summer magic might combine with 
  the air element to give a “breath of life” effect; 
  hellfire might combine with fire to produce, 
  well, hell-fire; and Kemmlerian necromancy 
  might combine with the spirit element to inflict 
  potent visions of death upon a victim. This sort 
  of combination allows the spellcaster to use his 
  existing evocation specialization bonuses with 
  the new power source.
  Finally, another broader benefit offered by 
  all types of sponsored magic is the ability of 
  the sponsor to cover you when you can’t make 
  your expenses. Once per roll, you may invoke 
  an aspect without spending a fate point. Doing 
  so adds one to the debt between you and your 
  sponsor. The sponsor may collect on this debt 
  later, trading in compels on you for that debt on 
  a one-for-one basis—compels that get you no 
  fate points if you accept, and which you must 
  accept unless you have an actual fate point to 
  spend to refuse it. Invariably these compels run 
  along the lines of pushing you to act in accor-
  dance with the sponsor’s agenda.
  “With Evocation’s 
  Methods and Speed”
  When you see this phrase in the power 
  sources listed starting on page 290, here’s 
  what it means:
    The spell is still limited to line of 
  sight, like evocation.
    The spell is cast like evocation: 
  power first, control later, all done in 
  one exchange.
    Thaumaturgy’s set of effects are 
  broader-reaching, not constricted 
  by the straight-line force principles 
  of evocation. With the power 
  source, you get access to the listed 
  set of thaumaturgic effects (often a 
  thematic grouping of some sort) as a 
  viable effect of an evocation spell. So 
  you might be able to throw together 
  a small ward quickly, summon a 
  minor creature extra-quick, or cast 
  a curse of decay with the flick of a 
  wrist. In these cases, use what would 
  have been the complexity of the 
  thaumaturgic effect as a guideline for 
  the power of the evocation.
  This may seem like a bit of a shell game, 
  since the sets of mechanical effects available 
  to thaumaturgy and evocation are pretty 
  similar, with only a few areas of non-overlap. 
  You’d be mostly right, but for this point: 
  getting a broad range of effects out of evoca-
  tion is an exercise in creative rationalization. 
  What the power source is offering in this 
  specific case, then, is a broadening of what 
  you don’t have to rationalize. It’s just quickly, 
  easily available to your spellcaster. Combine 
  this with a few mechanical benefits available 
  with each source and it’s a definite upgrade 
  to a character’s arcane options.
  When you 
  spend a 
  fate point 
  to resist a 
  sponsor’s 
  debt compel, 
  does your 
  debt still 
  go down?
  No, it doesn’t. 
  But the 
  sponsor can’t 
  force that 
  same issue 
  again, either.  
  You get to 
  refuse that 
  specific compel. 
  But another 
  one — and 
  granted, a 
  different one 
  — is headed 
  your way later.
  
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  The Sponsor’s 
  Agenda
  Every type of sponsored magic comes with an 
  agenda of some sort. Winter wants to see the 
  world grow colder and decay; Summer wants to 
  see the world overrun with warmth, wildness, 
  and growth. Hellfire serves the agenda of Down 
  Below, while soulfire…well, honestly, we aren’t 
  sure what soulfire’s (God’s?) agenda is, though 
  Michael Carpenter might have a few choice 
  words on the subject. Other sources of power, 
  such as those associated with particular places 
  or ancient creatures, align with purposes of their 
  own—some ineffable, some…more effable.
  The only thing eff-able around here is your 
  apprentice, boss.
  …did you REALLY 
  just say that?!?
  Whenever a character comes onto the scene 
  and practices sponsored magic, there’s an agenda 
  at work—whether the character is a willing 
  agent of it or not, he’ll be serving it eventually. 
  The GM should know what that agenda is, 
  whether or not she chooses to share some or all 
  of it with the character in question. An agenda 
  that doesn’t force the character to make regular, 
  tough choices—especially when he’s accumu-
  lated some debt—is no agenda at all. Go for the 
  throat.
  For example, draw on enough soulfire and 
  God might push you to destroy that demon at 
  all costs, rather than taking the time to recover 
  from consequences while you allow the demon 
  to escape. Or maybe He’ll just demand that you 
  find it in your heart to forgive a bitter enemy. 
  Draw on enough hellfire and you might find 
  yourself destroying more than just monsters 
  and the occasional architecture—those destruc-
  tive tendencies could creep into your life and 
  relationships as well, or even drive you toward 
  murder.
  I’ve only 
  used 
  “sponsored” 
  Summer 
  Magic once 
  before, and 
  that was 
  on loan.  
  It’s why I 
  got the 
  light show 
  in Arctis 
  Tor when 
  I unleashed 
  the power 
  in the mote 
  of flame 
  that Lily 
  gave me.
  The Dark Powers Are 
  Always Willing To Help
  Sometimes the sponsored practitioner can 
  dig deep and draw more than a single invo-
  cation from his sponsor on a single roll. This 
  can help pay any cost associated with casting a 
  spell, at the rate of 1 debt for every 2 shifts of 
  effect. So if you need to take a 4-stress mental 
  hit to cast a big evocation and can’t (or maybe 
  just don’t want to take the consequence you’d 
  have to), the sponsor will gladly take the hit 
  for you, in exchange for increasing your debt 
  by 2.  
  Some GMs might want to restrict the 
  amount of times this can be done during a 
  single scene or session, but on the other hand, 
  the dark powers are always willing to help...
  Bad Credit
  The GM should decide what level of debt 
  the sponsor is comfortable with before 
  calling in a marker. If a sponsored spellcaster 
  keeps racking up the debt but never gets 
  compelled, the debt has no teeth. Similarly, 
  there may be an upper bound of debt at 
  which point the sponsor cuts him off from 
  any more power. Every credit card has its 
  limits; but like a credit card company, a 
  sponsor is often willing to negotiate, if the 
  practitioner can figure out how to make an 
  appropriate petition.
  Temporary Access
  Sometimes what you’re looking for is a 
  temporary fling with power, rather than a 
  committed relationship. If the sponsor is 
  willing, and you have the ability to nego-
  tiate with it in some way (whether by ritual 
  or through an empowered representative), 
  you may gain use of that sponsored power 
  and all of its benefits for a single spell. All it 
  takes is the acquisition of one point of debt 
  per spell. Though sometimes, the first one’s 
  free…
  Our best example of this is in the 
  Proven Guilty casefile, when Harry was 
  able to draw on the power of Summer briefly 
  by using a mote of Summer flame that the 
  Summer Lady, Lily, had sent along with him 
  as he investigated Arctis Tor. This is also a 
  common method used with places of power 
  (page 292), where the spellcaster temporarily 
  draws on the ambient power of the location 
  without making a deeper, long-term binding 
  effort. In all such cases, the use of the spell 
  has to fit the agenda of the source—the 
  opportunity just isn’t there otherwise.
  
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  Spellcasting (Sponsored magic)
  Types of 
  Sponsored Magic
  GMs are welcome to create types of sponsored 
  magic to suit their own game (in such a case, 
  opening up some of the types to those playing 
  Emissaries of Power is practically a mandate). 
  The following are examples drawn from the 
  sometimes-scant information in Harry’s 
  casefiles.
  Seelie (Summer) Magic
  Drawing on the power of the Summer Court, 
  you’re able to cast spells that fit its essential 
  nature: wildness, birth, growth, renewal, fire. 
  These magics are under the sway and watch 
  of the Queens of Summer (Lady, Queen, and 
  Mother); making use of it will inevitably catch 
  their notice. If you think the Summer Court is 
  all warmth and light, consider that unbridled 
  growth favors an ebola virus just as much as it 
  does a pear tree.
  Cost: 4 refresh for the package, not to mention 
  approval from one of the greater powers of 
  the Summer Court, such as Queen Titania or 
  Mother Summer. Reduce this cost by 1 if you 
  have Evocation or Thaumaturgy; reduce the cost 
  by 2 if you have both.
  Benefits: Standard sponsored magic benefits 
  (page 288). Summer magic is particularly effec-
  tive against faeries of the Winter Court; down-
  grade the effectiveness of any Toughness ability 
  the target has by one step (Mythic Toughness 
  becomes Supernatural, Supernatural becomes 
  Inhuman, Inhuman goes away) when using this 
  magic against a Winter Court enemy.
  In addition, Summer magic may be used as 
  an element for evocation, allowing evocation 
  spell effects that encourage wildness, birth, 
  growth, renewal, and warmth. This includes 
  the ability to produce effects along the lines of 
  biomancy (page 284) with less of a requirement 
  for biological expertise in the spellcaster—the 
  powers of Summer already understand biology 
  pretty well and will do the heavy lifting for the 
  caster—but with an evocation spell’s methods 
  and speed. Summer evocations always include 
  warmth and life in some way: summer flames 
  burn hotter, summer earth carries the warmth 
  of just-baked clay, summer spirit warms the 
  heart, and summer spells in general cause nearby 
  flowers to bloom and the ambient temperature 
  to rise.
  Unseelie (Winter) Magic
  Drawing on the power of the Winter Court, 
  you’re able to cast spells that fit its essential 
  nature: wildness, death, decay, slumber, ice. 
  These magics are under the sway and watch 
  of the Queens of Winter (Lady, Queen, and 
  Mother); making use of it will inevitably catch 
  their notice. If you think the Winter Court is 
  all frozen cruelty, remember that without their 
  balance to Summer, the world of man would 
  end, choked off by unbridled nature.
  Cost: 4 refresh for the package, not to mention 
  approval from one of the greater powers of the 
  Winter Court, such as Queen Mab or Mother 
  Winter. Reduce this cost by 1 if you have 
  Evocation or Thaumaturgy; reduce the cost by 
  2 if you have both.
  Benefits: Standard sponsored magic benefits 
  (page 288). Winter magic is particularly effective 
  against faeries of the Summer Court; down-
  grade the effectiveness of any Toughness ability 
  Common Rituals
  A handful of ritual spells exist out there 
  that anyone can make use of—even if he 
  isn’t a spellcaster. These common rituals 
  are powerful and usable only when they 
  are kept secret and used by a very small 
  number—there just isn’t enough power to 
  spread around if they become more widely 
  available. This is why the White Council’s 
  principal weapon against such things is their 
  publishing arm, regularly churning books 
  full of such rituals into your local book-
  store’s new age shelf.
  In practice, an “undiminished” ritual 
  operates just like the temporary access 
  scenario (see above), only without requiring 
  the ritualist to know any kind of real magic 
  at all. The point (or points) of debt is accu-
  mulated, and the ritual is cast. (The details 
  of “diminished” rituals are left up to the 
  GM’s whim.)
  Always, this is a single, specific spell with 
  pretty much everything other than the target 
  predetermined. The ritualist must still go 
  through the steps of preparation, and skills 
  such as Lore, Discipline, and Conviction do 
  come into play. But that and the step-by-
  step ritual instructions are all that’s needed; 
  these rituals often bring about something 
  pretty nasty when successful.
  Does someone 
  get a discount 
  on these if 
  they have 
  Channeling 
  instead of 
  Evocation, 
  or Ritual 
  instead of 
  Thau ma-
  turgy?
  Nope! 
  evocation and 
  thaumaturgy 
  grant a 
  discount here 
  because they 
  are already 
  versatile forms 
  of magic. 
  channeling and 
  ritual are too 
  narrowly defined 
  to have room 
  to take on 
  another method.
  
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  Spellcasting (Sponsored magic)
  the target has by one step (Mythic Toughness 
  becomes Supernatural, Supernatural becomes 
  Inhuman, Inhuman goes away) when using this 
  magic against a Summer Court enemy.
  In addition, Winter magic may be used as an 
  element for evocation, allowing evocation spell 
  effects that encourage wildness, decay, slumber, 
  death, and cold. This includes the ability to 
  produce effects along the lines of entropomancy 
  (page 285), but with an evocation spell’s methods 
  and speed. Winter evocations always include 
  cold in some way: winter ice is of the bitterest 
  cold, winter winds bring the chill of a blizzard, 
  winter flames shed light but not heat, and winter 
  spells in general cause plants to wither and 
  breath to mist.
  Kemmlerian Necromancy
  “Kemmlerian” necromancy owes its name to 
  the great necromancer Kemmler, who terror-
  ized Europe during the era of the World Wars 
  before being taken down by a concerted effort 
  of the White Council. Kemmlerites draw on the 
  power of death itself to fuel their dark magics—
  whether it’s animating graveyards of corpses, 
  calling up ghosts of the Confederate dead, or 
  ripping souls out of their bodies. Worse, they 
  make it all look easy.
  Cost: Kemmlerites must already be wizards 
  or sorcerers of some stripe, well-versed in 
  Evocation and Thaumaturgy (with at least 
  some specialization in necromancy), and have 
  access to some portion of Kemmler’s lore (or its 
  equivalent). Therefore this is available only as an 
  upgrade to those abilities, for a refresh cost of 2.
  Benefits: Standard sponsored magic bene-
  fits (page 288). Kemmlerian necromancy comes 
  with  automatic, additional specializations in 
  necromancy: +1 to control, +1 to complexity, 
  stacking on top of any existing specializa-
  tions. In addition, Kemmlerites have shown 
  varying amounts of ability to exercise necro-
  mantic (page 286) and psychomantic (page 286) 
  spell effects with evocation’s speed and methods, 
  coloring such evocations with the alien chill of 
  death itself. A Kemmlerite may choose to use 
  his control bonus from necromancy instead of 
  the control bonus he would normally use with 
  evocation, so long as the casting incorporates 
  some element of death.
  Hellfire
  Hellfire draws on the infernal powers of Down 
  Below. This is the power source that Denarians 
  (OW22) are only too happy to provide to 
  their “hosts,” if their hosts happen to be of the 
  spellcasting persuasion. But demons and fallen 
  angels are a very flexible lot when it comes to 
  offering power—it’s entirely possible sorcerers 
  exist out there that are making use of the power 
  of hellfire simply by way of a standard sell-your-
  soul pact. When employed, hellfire (really, hell-
  anything, but “hellwater,” “hellspirit,” etc., don’t 
  sound as good) is especially vicious, inflicting an 
  extra helping of pain whenever possible.
  Cost: Standard costs, though hellfire is espe-
  cially useful for someone using evocation.
  Benefits: Standard sponsored magic bene-
  fits (page 288). Hellfire likes to inflict pain and 
  harm,  but isn’t particularly concerned about 
  being controlled; gain a +1 to the power or 
  complexity threshold on any spell intended 
  to inflict stress or consequences. In the hands 
  of a focused practitioner, treat it like fire for 
  Channeling (page 181) and like diabolism, entro-
  pomancy, or disruption for Ritual (page 181).
  
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  Spellcasting (Sponsored magic)
  Depending on the nature of the practitio-
  ner’s “contract” (implicit or explicit) with his 
  particular hellfire power broker, many thauma-
  turgic spells may be used with evocation’s speed 
  and methods—all that’s required is the broker’s 
  consent and an extra point of debt on a case by 
  case basis.
  Soulfire
  Soulfire appears to involve drawing on the 
  “fires of Creation.” Brilliant and pure, it seems 
  able to pierce otherwise unassailable defenses, 
  causing even ancient beings of power to take 
  notice. It appears to have an agenda in line with 
  that of Heaven (or whatever you might choose 
  to call it), but due to a general lack of informa-
  tion on the topic we aren’t quite sure what that 
  means yet.
  Cost: Due to the extra potency of soulfire, the 
  base cost is 1 higher (5 total, instead of 4—
  reduced to 3 if you have both Evocation and 
  Thaumaturgy).
  Benefits: Standard sponsored magic bene-
  fits (page 288), with a potentially gentler agenda 
  (though this may come with a tighter credit limit 
  on the matter of debt). Soulfire downgrades the 
  Toughness ability of any supernatural creature 
  by one step when employed (Mythic Toughness 
  becomes Supernatural, Supernatural becomes 
  Inhuman, Inhuman goes away), and it may fully 
  satisfy the Catch (page 185) for some creatures 
  vulnerable to “holy” sources of damage. With 
  some creatures (even those that operate on a 
  “plot device” level), it’s still potent enough to get 
  their attention.
  The full scope of what soulfire can do is not 
  clear to us at this time. In evocation, soulfire 
  functions most like the element of fire (though 
  it’s possible other element equivalents may 
  exist), and in thaumaturgic application…well, 
  we don’t know really, so for our current purposes 
  consider it to provide the full range of thauma-
  turgy spells (those which are agenda-compat-
  ible, at any rate).
  Places of Power
  Not all kinds of sponsored power are available 
  in a broad, always-on-everywhere sense. Some 
  sponsored sources are available only in a partic-
  ular place, or at least require that you journey to 
  that place and perform a ritual there to bind a 
  portion of its power to you (and pledge yourself 
  to it, for that matter). Such a source might be 
  called a genius loci (“spirit of the place”), but 
  other times they aren’t as overtly-identified—
  they might simply manifest as a particularly 
  potent ley line, for example. No two places of 
  power are the same, with each tying into some 
  entity’s agenda. These entities are often abstract, 
  suffusing the place, but they may manifest a 
  transient physical form when the attunement 
  and binding rituals are performed. The geog-
  raphy of such places tends to be limited—a 
  small isolated island, the five city blocks and one 
  street wide area of a ley line, etc. There are no 
  city-scale places of power. While places of power 
  are rare, the idea practically calls out for use in 
  whatever city or location you’ve set your game!
  Cost: If the power drawn from a place is only 
  usable while you’re physically located there, the 
  base cost is 1 lower (3 total instead of 4). The 
  cost is standard (4) if you can take the power 
  with you, away from that place, once you have 
  attuned to it.
  Benefits: Standard sponsored magic benefits 
  (page 288). What particular flavor these benefits 
  take depends on the nature of the place. For 
  example, a ley-line might draw on an ancient 
  Spirit of Decay lurking beneath the fabric of 
  the local Nevernever, allowing entropomantic 
  effects with evocation’s speed and methods. It 
  might offer a +1 to control and complexity for 
  any entropomancy as well (and it’d have a pretty 
  nasty agenda too, I’d think—always driving the 
  spellcaster’s life into a greater state of disarray if 
  he doesn’t purge the build-up by inflicting it on 
  others through curses and the like).
  In some cases, when sponsored by a strong 
  place of power, the practitioner’s senses become 
  keenly aligned to that place while he’s there. 
  This is intellectus. Someone attuned to the place 
  will know his way around instantly and easily 
  (any navigation difficulties would be treated as 
  Mediocre). Further, he may use his Lore skill 
  to sort out useful information from his inti-
  mate, natural knowledge of the place, perceiving 
  anything that happens anywhere within the 
  bounds of that geography. This doesn’t extend 
  more than a hair’s breadth away from that place, 
  however. It’s not vision or any normal sense; 
  it’s just knowledge of what the place itself can 
  perceive—two clawed feet just stepped onto the 
  road ahead; there are 247 birds in the trees on 
  this island; and so on.
  The best 
  concept I’ve 
  gotten so 
  far is that 
  soulfire is 
  “mystical 
  rebar” – using 
  the substance 
  of a soul to 
  reinforce and 
  strengthen 
  a magical 
  effect.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Examples 
  of Magic
  During play, the way magic will typically come 
  up is when a player or GM says “I want to cast 
  a spell to achieve Effect Blah. How do I do 
  that?” You won’t typically say “I think I’ll cast an 
  evocation—now what kind do I want to cast?” 
  Problem is, knowing the effect you want to 
  achieve before you’ve considered how to achieve 
  it makes it pretty hard to look up how to do it in 
  this chapter.
  Fear not, intrepid spellcaster, this section is 
  for you!
  If you don’t know how to achieve a particular 
  effect, create a particular type of focus item, or 
  brew a particular potion, simply look on this 
  list for something similar—then go forth and 
  do the same. Hopefully you can find something 
  similar—if you can’t, then you might have to 
  read through the chapter.
  Example 
  Evocation Spells
  Carlos Ramirez’s 
  Entropy Shield
  Warden Carlos Ramirez uses a heavy leather 
  gauntlet (page 301) as a focus item to help him 
  cast  his famous water-based entropy shield, 
  which does not attempt to stop attacks but 
  rather disintegrate them. 
  Type: Water (entropy) evocation, defensive 
  block
  Power: 6 shifts
  Control: Roll Discipline plus appropriate 
  specializations and focus items
  Duration: One exchange 
  Effect: A weird-looking hemisphere of entropy 
  appears in front of the caster, partially disin-
  tegrating attacks. Carlos may decide whether 
  he wishes to use the block as a standard 
  6-shift block, or as Armor:3. 
  Variations: Carlos sometimes attempts more 
  shifts of power to extend the duration. 
  Notes: Carlos may occasionally figure out a 
  clever way to use the shield as an attack, by 
  forcing a creature to dive through the effect—
  see page 260 for guidelines on how to attack 
  with a defensive spell.
  Earth Stomp 
  Donald Morgan isn’t the subtlest guy in the 
  world—this spell has the ground itself swallow 
  up the target and crush it.
  Type: Earth evocation, offensive attack
  Power: Varies; 6 shifts is typical, this example 
  assumes 8
  Control: Roll Discipline plus appropriate 
  specializations and focus items
  Target: One or more creature in a single zone; 
  this example assumes 4 targets
  Opposed by: Target’s Might
  Effect: Let’s assume the Discipline roll is 
  Legendary+1 (+9). Morgan splits the 8 shifts 
  of power into four Weapon:2 attacks. On 
  the targeting side, per the split-attack rules 
  (page 251), he splits his targeting result into a 
  Good (+3) attack against the guy closest to 
  him and a Fair (+2) attack against the three 
  others.  Each target that fails to defend with 
  Might suffers a 2-shift hit plus any increase 
  from the attack’s margin of success.
  Variations: A caster could extend this to the 
  entire zone if he found a way to protect 
  himself from it.
  Entanglement
  This spell causes a band of force to entangle the 
  target’s ankles, effectively binding him in place.
  Type: Spirit (force) evocation, offensive 
  maneuver
  Power: Varies; typical is 4 shifts—3 for effect 
  plus 1 for additional duration
  Control: Roll Discipline plus appropriate 
  specializations and focus items
  Duration: One scene
  Opposed by: Target’s Athletics
  Effect: If the spell hits, the target has the sticky 
  Bound in Place temporary aspect applied. 
  Variations: Power levels may of course be 
  changed based on the target’s ability to 
  oppose the spell. This spell is non-lethal; a 
  damaging variant—adjudicated as a magical 
  grapple—could be created based on the 
  Orbius spell (page 294).
  Horror of horrors.
  Reading!
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Fuego!
  This is Harry’s standard fire attack spell—one 
  of his favorites when he decides subtlety is 
  inappropriate. It sends a blazingly hot beam of 
  flame toward a single target. He usually uses his 
  blasting rod to aid his control roll.
  Type: Fire evocation, attack 
  Power: Variable (unless rote), usually 4 to 8 
  shifts
  Control: Roll Discipline, plus specializations 
  and focus items, to control and as attack roll
  Target: One target in line-of-sight, inflicting 
  physical stress 
  Duration: One action
  Opposed by: Target’s Athletics skill, magical 
  blocks, or some other skill as determined in 
  play
  Variations: A caster could divide the shifts of 
  effect among two or more targets, rolling to 
  hit each separately.
  Notes: Many direct attack evocations work 
  this way (Forzare, for example)—change the 
  power and elements to suit your needs.
  Grasping Branches
  Yoshimo used this tremendously powerful 
  evocation to destroy a zombie by animating a 
  nearby tree.
  Type: Water evocation, offensive maneuver/
  attack
  Power: 7 shifts
  Control: Roll Discipline plus 2 for an aspect 
  invocation (see Notes)
  Opposed by: Target’s Athletics
  Effect: Mechanically, it boils down to a 
  straightforward Weapon:7 attack vs. target’s 
  Athletics, but one that makes use of a invo-
  cation or tag in order to work at its level of 
  potency.
  Variations: Use a similar idea to get a couple of 
  extra shifts of power from scene details that 
  you can’t figure out what to do with.
  Notes: This requires invoking a scene aspect like 
  Nearby Tree to pull off. The caster casts the 
  spell to briefly animate the tree, applying the 
  temporary aspect Arboreal Servant to 
  himself, which the caster immediately tags, 
  adding two to his Discipline roll. This tree 
  immediately makes an attack vs. the target 
  using the caster’s original Discipline roll (plus 
  the two for the aspect tag.)
  Hyperawareness
  This spell increases the caster’s awareness, 
  allowing him to react to danger much more 
  quickly.
  Type: Spirit evocation, defensive (sort of ) 
  maneuver
  Type: Spirit or Air evocation, defensive block
  Power: Dependent on caster ability. For Elaine 
  Mallory and this example, 5 shifts.
  Control: Roll Discipline plus appropriate 
  specializations and focus items
  Target: A caster typically casts this spell on 
  herself.
  Duration: 3 exchanges
  Effect: This is actually a defensive block, but one 
  that works by amping up the wizard’s aware-
  ness of her surroundings—subtle move-
  ments of air, surges of hostile intent, that 
  sort of thing.  Two shifts are put into dura-
  tion, leaving a Good (+3) effect, effectively a 
  persistent dodge of incoming attacks.
  Variations: Longer or shorter duration yields a 
  lesser or greater block effect. Clever wizards 
  might redirect this spell energy to use the 
  block as a substitute skill roll result for 
  Alertness or Investigation. Some GMs might 
  be okay with setting aside the block and 
  instead using the effect strength as an indi-
  cator of initiative.
  Orbius
  This is the spell Madge Shelly used to suffo-
  cate Trixie Vixen in the Blood Rites casefile. 
  It creates a mass of glop (Harry described it as 
  looking vaguely like a cow patty) over the target’s 
  windpipe, suffocating him over the course of 
  several exchanges.
  Type: Spirit evocation, offensive block; adjudi-
  cated as a grapple
  Power: 8 shifts—3 for effect, 5 for duration
  Wow… the 
  Grasping 
  Branches 
  spell seems 
  like a long 
  way to go for 
  the result. 
  What’s the 
  advantage?
  It gives you a 
  Weapon:7 attack 
  by invoking 
  the otherwise 
  useless NeArBY 
  tree aspect. 
  that’ll ruin 
  your whole day. 
  It does cost the 
  caster a fate 
  point, though.
  The wizard 
  could make 
  a weaker 
  spell without 
  incorporating 
  the Nearby 
  Tree aspect 
  though, yes?
  Absolutely.
  Or if the 
  Nearby 
  Tree aspect 
  is freshly 
  introduced, 
  maybe save a 
  fate point by 
  “tagging” it?
  Sniff. I am like 
  the proud papa 
  right now.
  Subtle Evocations
  The example above is worth calling atten-
  tion to. In most cases a “subtle” evocation is 
  a simple, reframed perspective on something 
  evocations already do. In rarer, cleverer cases, 
  the GM may take a few cues from thauma-
  turgy and allow the player to do something 
  evocation normally just can’t.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Control: On the first round, roll Discipline plus 
  applicable specializations and focus items 
  Target: One target in line-of-sight, inflicting 
  physical stress 
  Duration: Six exchanges total
  Opposed by: Target’s Endurance skill. Magical 
  blocks might be effective in the first round; 
  armor is ineffective.
  Effect: The first round establishes the grapple. 
  Each round thereafter, the target rolls 
  Endurance. If the roll fails to beat the spell’s 
  effect (Good +3), the target suffers one shift 
  of physical stress as he suffocates. Armor is 
  ineffective. This spell does not affect creatures 
  that do not need to breathe.
  Variations: The caster could change the power 
  or duration, tailoring it to a given target’s 
  toughness. A caster could instead use the 
  spell to bind (and damage!) a creature’s legs 
  or hands—in that case, the spell would be a 
  block opposed by Might.
  Quick Veil
  Molly Carpenter is especially good at these 
  spells; typically she uses no focus items for them.
  Type: Spirit evocation, defensive block
  Power: Varies; 3 shifts is typical for a simple 
  casting
  Control: Roll Discipline plus appropriate 
  specializations and focus items
  Duration: One exchange
  Opposed by: An observer’s Alertness skill
  Effect: Renders the caster invisible
  Variations: The caster could add additional 
  shifts of power to make the veil stronger, 
  to veil additional people or big objects, to 
  “throw” the veil over an object from a distance, 
  or to gain additional exchanges of duration 
  without needing to concentrate and re-roll. 
  Rifflitum and Other 
  Shield Spells
  Harry uses this spell to create a magical shield, 
  mitigating the blow of an incoming attack. 
  Type: Spirit evocation, defensive block
  Power: 5 shifts
  Control: Roll Discipline plus applicable special-
  izations and focus items
  Duration: One exchange
  Effect: Deflects an incoming attack. If overcome, 
  it vanishes.
  Variations: The caster could change the power 
  of the block (invoking aspects as necessary 
  for additional help on power or control), 
  or declare it as armor, which allows it to 
  remain even if overcome (at the cost of it 
  only providing two points of armor—half the 
  shifts of effect, rounded down). The caster 
  could add shifts of power to increase the 
  duration. Another variation is to use a focus 
  item, such as a shield bracelet, to enhance 
  the power of the block or to gain additional 
  exchanges of duration essentially for free. A 
  GM might—might—allow the caster to make 
  the shield selectively permeable, specifying 
  one or more elements that can pass through 
  the shield, at the cost of one or two additional 
  shifts of power per element.
  Whirlwind
  This spell calls up a whirlwind, tossing people 
  around like the proverbial rag dolls.
  Type: Air evocation, offensive maneuver
  Power: Varies; 6 shifts in this case (3 for effect, 1 
  for extended duration, 2 for wide effect)
  Control: Roll Discipline plus appropriate 
  specializations and focus items
  Target: Every person within a single zone
  Opposed by: Target’s Athletics
  Effect: The target has the sticky aspect 
  Knocked Prone applied to him.
  Variations: With an invocation of a scene 
  aspect—Loose Objects or something like 
  it—you could rebuild this as an outright 
  attack.
  Notes: This one takes a bit of oomph to pull off. 
  Elaine Mallory did this, but she probably had 
  to accept either some consequences or back-
  lash to do it.
  Molly is 
  really good 
  at the quick 
  veil thing.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Example 
  Thaumaturgy Spells
  Dreamless Sleep 
  (Easy Version)
  This is a simple spell to protect someone from 
  run-of-the-mill unpleasant dreams when his 
  body just needs a decent night’s sleep.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, transformation
  Complexity: 4-6 shifts, depending on duration
  Duration: Usually, enough time to get a night’s 
  worth of rest, from 6 to 10 hours
  Effect: Applies the temporary aspect 
  Dreamless Sleep to the subject, tempo-
  rarily canceling out the effects of any I Have 
  Nightmares type of aspect.
  Variations: Attempting this as an attack will be 
  opposed by the target’s Discipline. 
  Notes: The power level assumes the subject 
  does not resist, and this is only truly effec-
  tive against mundane dreams. Also, note that 
  many nights in a row of dreamless sleep will 
  start to drive people a little batty—dreams 
  are necessary for processing memories, among 
  other things. So don’t do this too often.
  Dreamless Sleep  
  (Weapons-Grade Version)
  This is a spell used to protect people from inva-
  sive psychic attacks made while they’re asleep.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, wards
  Complexity: Varies, usually 6-12 shifts, 
  depending on duration
  Duration: Usually, until sunrise
  Effect: Provides a block against mental attacks 
  equal to the complexity of the spell, while the 
  subject is asleep.
  Variations: This can be applied as either armor 
  or a straight block. For one more shift of 
  power, it might be daisy-chained to a mild 
  “wake up” type of alarm, assuming that being 
  awake would aid the subject in resisting the 
  mental attack.
  Notes: This spell doesn’t guarantee a night free 
  from mundane nightmares, but it provides an 
  extra defense against the mental attacks of 
  supernatural Nightmares.
  Entropy Curse (Mild)
  Want to give someone a case of bad luck? Here 
  ya go. This sort of spell has been a favorite of 
  hedge witches and traveling fortune tellers for a 
  thousand years.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, entropomancy
  Complexity: Varies; 9 shifts in this case, based 
  on conflict vs. the target’s Discipline
  Duration: One scene
  Effect: Target has the Bad Luck temporary—
  but sticky—aspect applied to him. 
  Variations: Call up a bit more power to make 
  the bad luck last longer. Call up a lot more 
  power to have the bad luck extend across 
  multiple generations…
  Notes: Bad Luck is so very, very easy to invoke. 
  Entropy Curse 
  (Weapons-Grade)
  Entropy curses are nasty even when they’re 
  NOT designed to kill. This version is just 
  plain evil. It also treads on both First Law and 
  Seventh Law territory, so watch your step.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, entropomancy
  Complexity: Varies, but always high; 26 shifts 
  in this case
  Effect: Target gains the Deadly Luck aspect. 
  The aspect is compelled at an appropriate 
  time by springing an accident or other misfor-
  tune on the target—an incident that presents 
  a challenge equal in shifts to the power of 
  the spell. In this example, avoiding slipping 
  in the shower requires an Athletics check of 
  26 shifts. Good luck with that. The damage 
  caused will almost certainly kill the target.
  Variations: More power is necessary for tougher 
  targets.
  Notes: This spell is extremely complex, but 
  extremely deadly. In the Blood Rites case-
  file, the Evil Eye cult pulled it off through 
  a combination of sponsorship and special 
  circumstances. They had a sponsor (He Who 
  Walks Behind, OW76) contribute shifts of 
  power (+2); they had several cultists assist 
  in the ritual, each invoking one or two of 
  their own aspects (total of +8 to power); the 
  spell is pegged at a certain time of day (+2 
  to power); each caster accepted moderate 
  consequences (In Debt to Power, or some-
  thing along those lines +12); and, finally, 
  Madge—the lead caster—took on the mild 
  consequence of Sloppy Spellcasting for 
  an additional +2.
  A generational curse is NOT mild!
  So when 
  that “Sloppy 
  Spellcasting” 
  consequence 
  landed, Harry, 
  you got a 
  tag on it 
  — probably 
  after a quick 
  assessment 
  action. But 
  here’s the cool 
  part – instead 
  of using it to 
  try to defeat 
  the spell, you 
  redirected it 
  at a nearby 
  target.
  The first 
  and last 
  time I killed 
  a vampire 
  with a frozen 
  turkey. 
  Fun, but not 
  repeatable.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Come to think of it, a lesser 
  version of that sort of 
  via-divination counterattack 
  is what I threw at Victor 
  Sells when he was playing 
  peeping tom to my supposed 
  demise during the STORM 
  FRONT case. Vic had 
  no idea what I was doing.
  Extended Divination
  Lots of spellcasters like to do this sort of thing. 
  It helps to have a really strong focus item.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, divination
  Complexity: Varies; typically at least 8 or 9, 
  sometimes up to 16 or more
  Duration: Varies by spell complexity; default is 
  one scene
  Effect: The caster can not only observe the 
  target, but monitor the target (audio and 
  visual) for an extended period of time.
  Variations: Casters could up defenses against 
  counterattacks, try to make their projec-
  tions more difficult to detect, or use different 
  focus items. All these things, of course, add 
  complexity.
  Notes: The spell’s base complexity needs to be 
  the target’s Conviction+4, plus any thresh-
  olds, wards, or other defenses the target is 
  behind. Duration beyond one scene requires 
  one additional shift of complexity for each 
  step up the time ladder, as discussed in 
  “Duration and Enhanced Evocation” (page 265). 
  A symbolic link to the target is necessary, and 
  a powerful focus item (like Little Chicago) 
  really helps. Unless the caster takes great 
  pains to avoid it, a mostly-invisible, spectral 
  projection of the caster appears in the loca-
  tion of the monitoring’s point of view—this 
  can tip off an unaware but observant target, 
  allowing him to take steps to stop it.
  Faerie-Trapping Spell
  This is a relatively straightforward containment 
  spell—the trick is to first lure the target into 
  your containment construct, and then convince 
  it to help you once it’s trapped.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, binding
  Complexity: It’s hard to imagine a pixie 
  breaking through a containment of strength 
  4, so aiming there is probably safe.
  Duration: About one scene
  Effect: The pixie is trapped in the contain-
  ment circle until the spell ends or the caster 
  dismisses the effect.
  Variations: Add a shift or two of power to 
  increase the duration. You can contain 
  stronger creatures in a similar way, but you’ll 
  probably want to crank up the power.
  Notes: Note that this spell simply contains the 
  pixie; luring it into the containment construct 
  to begin with might require a couple of Lore 
  and/or Deceit checks (a good deep dish pizza 
  is surprisingly good bait), and convincing it 
  to do as it’s asked once it’s contained might 
  require a social or mental conflict. (Note that 
  a contained pixie might have a taggable aspect 
  like Trapped in the Circle…)
  Or allowing him to launch a 
  counterattack through the link 
  that the divination is operating 
  over. Cowl would have killed 
  me but for the protection 
  Little Chicago offered.
  Pizza 
  isn’t just 
  “surprisingly 
  good bait” — 
  it’s the only 
  way to do it. 
  So sayeth 
  the Za Lord!
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Harry Blinds the 
  Loup-Garou
  Harry cast this spell on the loup-garou near the 
  end of the Fool Moon casefile.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, transformation (curse)
  Complexity: 9 shifts (based on conflict)
  Duration: One scene, ideally
  Opposed by: Target’s Discipline
  Effect: Applies the temporary aspect Blinded 
  to the target. The complexity is high enough 
  to make it highly likely that it generates at 
  least one shift, making it sticky (page 207).
  Variations: Power can vary based on the 
  expected strength of the target’s resistance. 
  Also, other aspects might be applied.
  Notes: Assumes the target has a Great (+4) 
  Discipline. Requires a symbolic link to the 
  target.
  Harry’s Tracking Spell
  This spell reveals the as-the-crow-flies direc-
  tion toward a particular person—and continues 
  to do so as the caster travels toward the target. 
  Scribe a circle, concentrate on a symbol, murmur 
  some words of power—and bingo, you have a 
  beacon leading you to your target. This is a very 
  handy thing for a private investigator to be able 
  to do.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, divination
  Complexity: Varies according to difficulty to 
  perform equivalent Investigation, usually 
  somewhere from 2 to 8
  Duration: About one scene 
  Effect: Caster is led toward target
  Variations: Add a shift or two of power to 
  increase the duration. The required power 
  might be increased, possibly significantly, 
  if the target has wards or some other anti-
  divination block in place. On the other hand, 
  particularly potent symbolic links can be 
  invoked as aspects to grant the caster a bonus. 
  Notes: This spell requires a symbolic link to the 
  target—a hair, a drop of blood, a signature, 
  a True Name, a valued personal possession, 
  etc. This is a pretty quick and basic spell for 
  a skilled caster; for low power levels, don’t 
  bother rolling—it just works.
  I hear the phone company can do 
  this with those cell phone gizmos all 
  you mundanes carry these days.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Illumina Magnus
  (or, Magically Dusting 
  for Prints)
  This spell reveals residual magical energies left 
  over from spellcasting and other supernatural 
  activity.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, divination
  Complexity: Varies; typically 3-8 (see Notes)
  Duration: One scene
  Effect: This spell operates much like an 
  assessment action (page 115), but instead of 
  aspects it reveals bits of information about 
  magical activity that’s happened recently in 
  the immediate area. The GM sets the base 
  complexity, usually equal to the original spell-
  caster’s Discipline score (of course, this spell’s 
  caster won’t know what that score is). If this 
  spell’s complexity matches or exceeds the 
  base difficulty, the GM reveals some tidbit of 
  useful information about the residual magic 
  in the area. For every 2 that the complexity 
  of this spell exceeds the base difficulty, the 
  GM should reveal additional or more specific 
  information.
  Variations: The GM might decide that the 
  original caster took steps to cover his tracks, 
  applying an aspect like The Prints Were 
  Wiped at the cost of an extra shift or two of 
  complexity. This aspect could be invoked to 
  increase the base difficulty of the divination. 
  For a completely different (and less complex) 
  way of constructing a spell like this, you could 
  treat it as a simple maneuver rather than an 
  assessment; apply an aspect to the scene like 
  Magical Energy Made Visible that the 
  caster can immediately tag to apply toward a 
  Lore roll to learn something about the scene. 
  Notes: This is a pretty simple spell—all you 
  really need is a ritual circle and some copper 
  filings and you’re golden. If the original caster 
  actually intends something to be found, any 
  successful casting of a spell like this will reveal 
  it immediately, regardless of complexity.
  Memorium, Memoratum, 
  Memoritus
  In the Grave Peril casefile, Harry defeated 
  Bianca by encouraging a mob of ghosts—
  victims of Bianca and the Red Court—to take 
  their revenge.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, transformation
  Complexity: 5 shifts (+3 for a maneuver, +2 to 
  hit all targets in a zone)
  Duration: One scene 
  Effect: Harry applies the aspect Revenge Is 
  Ours to the ghosts which Harry tags to indi-
  rectly attack Bianca.
  Notes: The ghosts were there already, so Harry 
  didn’t need to summon them—just nudge 
  them over the edge. 
  Mind Fog
  This is a powerful spell used to dull a large 
  number of people’s senses simultaneously. Elaine 
  cast this on the patrons of a large retail outlet.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, psychomancy
  Complexity: Varies; 12 shifts in this case (based 
  on conflict)
  Duration: One scene
  Effect: People in three zones have the Mind 
  Fog aspect applied to them
  Variations: A caster could adjust the power as 
  needed, or change the aspect placed on the 
  targets.
  Notes: This spell is pretty complex, but Elaine 
  whipped it up fast (and she probably dropped 
  at least three or four fate points to do it). The 
  power assumes the targets have a Discipline 
  of Average (+1) plus four more to guarantee 
  effect, one shift to make the effect “sticky,” and 
  6 shifts to affect all targets in three zones.
  Nevernever Crossover 
  Detection
  This is a fairly simple ward, but it can be 
  extremely useful. You can do it a few different 
  ways; see Variations for an alternate method.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, divination
  Complexity: 8
  Duration: Until the next sunrise
  Effect: The spell sets up a web across multiple 
  zones of a large building detecting the 
  passage of an entity across the veil between 
  the Nevernever and our world. When the 
  ward is breached, it sends an alert to the 
  caster via a mechanism like a wardflame.
  The copper filings and all are 
  just how I cast it, mind you. 
  There are lots of ways you 
  could do this sort of thing.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Variations: You could also build something 
  like this as a token zero-strength ward; this 
  would give you the advantage of it being 
  lower complexity, but as soon as something 
  breaches it, it goes away. In the Proven 
  Guilty casefile, this spell was combined 
  with the Phobophage Redirection (below).
  Notes: Harry pointed out that even a beginner 
  could pull this spell together with some basic 
  materials and twenty minutes. Take your 
  time, and any ritualist should be able to get 
  this one right.
  Phobophage Redirection
  Used to redirect an attack of phobophages (crea-
  tures that feed on fear) to the caster of the spell 
  summoning them, this spell ideally follows the 
  warning a wardflame gives from the Nevernever 
  Crossover Detection spell above. 
  Type: Thaumaturgy, transformation
  Complexity: 14, based on conflict
  Duration: Until the ward is breached; other-
  wise, standard consequence duration
  Effect: The spell hits the target hard with a 
  mental attack, applying the aspect Terrified 
  Beyond Reason to it as a consequence.
  Variations: Depending on how powerful the 
  target is, you might need to sink more power 
  into the spell. In the casefile, Harry had to 
  guess at how resistant the target might be 
  (mechanically, he passed a Lore check to get 
  an estimate of how many boxes it might have 
  in its stress track).
  Notes: The idea of this spell is to inflict a mild 
  mental consequence on the target. In the 
  Proven Guilty casefile, Harry accepted 
  the moderate mental consequence Fatigued 
  to help power the spell, as well as the mild 
  consequence I Might Fail (which was the 
  source of the fear that he then transferred 
  to the spell’s target). Note that a temporary 
  aspect just wouldn’t quite do it—everyone 
  else in the hall had a temporary fear aspect, 
  too. The target needs to get hammered pretty 
  hard to get the phobophages to go after him 
  above everyone else.
  Reading the Dead Eyes
  This spell gleans a person’s final emotions from 
  the eyes of his recently deceased body. Molly cast 
  something like this in the morgue in the White 
  Night casefile.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, divination/psychomancy
  Complexity: Varies; typically 4-10 (see Notes)
  Duration: A moment
  Effect: This spell operates much like an 
  assessment action (page 115), but instead of 
  aspects it reveals the final emotions, feelings, 
  and sometimes thoughts of the person whose 
  body the caster is examining—often by 
  forcing the caster to feel those same feelings. 
  The base complexity is 4 (assuming a Great 
  difficulty—they’re dead, for heaven’s sake), 
  plus one for every 12 hours post-mortem 
  the spell is cast. If the caster doubles the base 
  complexity, the GM should give additional or 
  more detailed or specific information.
  Variations: Waldo Butters says that taking the 
  final vision from a corpse’s retinas is impos-
  sible, but a GM might allow it at a very high 
  complexity. 
  Notes: This is a simple spell, but one that 
  requires a bit of subtlety. The information 
  learned is almost never all that specific, but it 
  can still be useful.
  Reiki Healing Spell
  This is a “Laying On Hands” ritual, where the 
  caster gives the subject a light massage, repeated 
  light touch, etc., moving energy around within 
  the subject’s body to promote healing. Done 
  right, it can be very pleasant, relaxing, and even 
  sensual for the subject. 
  Type: Thaumaturgy, biomancy
  Complexity: Typically 8-10 (4 base complexity, 
  plus 4 to represent the consequence reduced)
  Duration: Immediate
  Effect: The spell reduces a moderate physical 
  consequence to mild for the purposes of 
  recovery. The consequence still occupies its 
  original slot.
  Variations: It’s possible a caster could sink a lot 
  more power into this to reduce serious conse-
  quences to moderate, requiring at least 6 addi-
  tional shifts of complexity, but that might be 
  beyond the reach of this sort of magic. A GM 
  might allow removal of a mild consequence, 
  but they tend to go away quickly anyway.
  Notes: Elaine Mallory cast this spell on Harry 
  in the White Night casefile; it encourages 
  the movement of energy to enhance the body’s 
  own healing. One moderate consequence is 
  rewritten to a mild (but related) form—so 
  a Twisted Ankle might become Tender 
  Ankle, Bruised Ribs becomes Sore Ribs, 
  This one 
  didn’t quite 
  work for 
  me. One 
  phobophage 
  didn’t take 
  the bait, and 
  people died.
  um… You 
  want me to 
  leave this one 
  out, boss?
  No. It’s 
  a great 
  example 
  of thau-
  maturgy. It 
  just touches 
  a raw nerve 
  for me.
  I remember 
  Elaine’s reiki 
  healing spell 
  very fondly 
  indeed.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Exhausted becomes Winded, etc. The base 
  complexity reflects the fact that healing magic 
  is partially transformative, though not to the 
  degree of more hostile magic.
  Victor Sells’ Heart-
  Exploding Spell
  An all-too-familiar “death from afar” spell 
  crafted by a punk of a sorcerer with too much 
  power and too little sense.
  Type: Thaumaturgy, necromancy
  Complexity: 36 (based on conflict)
  Opposed By: Target’s Endurance, but it hardly 
  matters—there’s not much he can do to come 
  up with that many shifts of power to oppose it.
  Effect: The target dies instantly as his heart 
  explodes from his chest, assuming that a 
  36-stress attack does the trick—an extreme, 
  severe, moderate, and mild consequence for a 
  total of 20 shifts, plus 9 shifts to overcome a 
  best possible Endurance and a +4 roll, plus 
  two more shifts if the target has an extra mild 
  consequence, plus 5 shifts to ensure a “taken 
  out” result due to a hit that lands beyond the 
  end of a stress track of length 4.
  Variations: There are all kinds of terrible things 
  you could do with this—inflict more conse-
  quences on victims to crank up the power of 
  the spell, cast it on multiple people simulta-
  neously, aim for a complexity in the 40s to 
  make sure it overcomes magical defenses…
  Notes: Sells needed to do some significant 
  preparation to cast this. He took an extreme 
  consequence (Power Mad) for 8 shifts, 
  took a severe consequence (Bargain With 
  a Demon) for 6 shifts, took a moderate 
  consequence (Trapped by the Storm) 
  for 4 shifts, inflicted a severe consequence 
  (Emotional Trauma) on his wife and the 
  Beckitts for 12 more shifts, killed a rabbit 
  with a spoon (+2 shifts for the component), 
  and got the rest from other component 
  sources.  Nasty business.
  Zombie Animation
  Animating a zombie is a two-spell process: a 
  summoning and a binding. First, the caster must 
  summon a spirit to inhabit the corpse he wishes 
  to animate, and then the caster must bind the 
  spirit to his will. 
  Type: Thaumaturgy, summoning then binding
  Complexity: Varies for both; the summoning is 
  typically 6-10 (based on conflict against the 
  spirit’s Conviction), and the binding is even 
  higher, often 10-14 (again, based on conflict 
  against the spirit’s Conviction and desired 
  duration)
  Duration: The summoning is only for a scene, 
  but the binding is of variable duration. 
  Effect: One spirit is summoned and bound to 
  one corpse, animating it and binding it to the 
  caster’s will. 
  Variations: Call up additional shifts of power to 
  animate more zombies.
  Notes: The caster must provide an audible 
  “heartbeat” for the duration of the binding, 
  most frequently a drumbeat. If the drum-
  beat abates, the spirit has another chance to 
  break the binding and become unpredictable. 
  Maybe it will simply flee to wherever it came 
  from, or maybe the zombie will turn on its 
  animator, or maybe something in between. 
  Also, note that, the vast majority of the time, 
  doing this sort of thing is utterly against the 
  Fifth Law. Sometimes you can weasel your 
  way around the rules, but it’s wise not to push 
  your luck.
  Example Focus Items
  Carlos’s Gauntlet
  A leather glove with slender steel plates attached 
  (Harry says the plates are covered in Aztec or 
  Olmec glyphs), Carlos Ramirez uses this glove 
  to enhance his entropy spells—especially the 
  disintegration shield he used to great effect in 
  the White Night casefile.
  Bonus(es) provided: +1 defensive control, 
  +1  defensive power for water evocations 
  (2 focus item slots)
  Variations: Gloves seem ideally suited to 
  affecting defensive evocations, but you could 
  imagine using a glove to enhance force-based 
  spirit attacks as well.
  Stars and 
  stones, Billy, 
  stop giving 
  people ideas.
  these examples are for enter-
  tainment pur poses only. do not 
  attempt this at home. the authors, 
  editors, and publishers of this book, 
  and asso ciated spirits of know ledge 
  and intellect, are not responsible 
  for you getting your fool head 
  lopped off by a Warden if you do.
  Don’t forget 
  to have a 
  containment 
  circle, or 
  something 
  similar, ready 
  to go before 
  you summon 
  the spirit. 
  That might 
  be bad. 
  Is it wrong 
  that I have 
  “Kill the 
  wabbit, kill the 
  wabbit…” stuck 
  in my head now?
  
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  Carlos’s Staff
  Carlos uses his staff to gain extra oomph on his 
  offensive spells.
  Bonus(es) provided: +1 offensive control, 
  +1  offensive power to water evocations 
  (2 focus item slots)
  Variations: Staves come in all varieties, a mix of 
  offensive and defensive power, suited to the 
  wizard’s personal style. They are often held in 
  the left hand and used to draw in power—the 
  same property that makes the left hand well 
  suited for defensive implements.
  Harry’s Blasting Rod
  Rods and wands are typically used to enhance 
  the caster’s control of offensive evocations, and 
  Harry’s blasting rod is no different. This is 
  Harry’s blasting rod by the end of the Storm 
  Front casefile.
  Bonus(es) provided: +1 offensive control for 
  fire evocation (1 focus item slot)
  Variations: As Harry’s power grows, this rod’s 
  power likely grows as well, going to +2 for 
  offensive control and possibly +1 to offensive 
  power. Most offensive rods and wands work a 
  similar way; Elaine’s wand adds to the offen-
  sive power of air evocations.
  Harry’s Shield Bracelet
  Harry’s shield bracelet is made from a chain of 
  tiny medieval-style shields; he uses it to help 
  focus his potent force shield. This item took 
  some damage during one especially tough fight; 
  until Harry replaced it, it threw off a shower of 
  sparks when Harry threw up his shield.
  Bonus(es) provided: +1 defensive control to 
  spirit evocation (1 focus item slot)
  Variations: Needn’t be a bracelet; Elaine’s shield 
  ring works a very similar way (providing a 
  defensive power bonus to air evocations).
  Harry’s Staff
  Like his blasting rod, this is Harry’s staff by the 
  end of the Storm Front casefile. 
  Bonus(es) provided: +1 offensive control for 
  spirit evocation (1 focus item slot)
  Variations: Later in Harry’s career, the staff is 
  seen assisting with Hellfire-based fire evoca-
  tion, likely adding it as an “element”.
  Madge’s Ring
  Madge Shelly wore a ring granting power to 
  spells sponsored by her Outsider patron.
  Bonus(es) provided: +1 offensive power to 
  evocations cast with Sponsored Magic via He 
  Who Walks Behind. (1 focus item slot)
  Variations: Different sponsors, different 
  bonuses.
  Ah, crap. We’re about to get to the 
  potions. Look — I never actually 
  planned to use the love potion. Check 
  my ad. It was the price I had to pay 
  to get the escape potion. And Bob, 
  you can just keep your yap shut.
  Did I say anything?
  I generally 
  hold my 
  staff in my 
  left hand 
  when doing 
  something 
  defensive, and 
  use my right 
  (or both) 
  when doing 
  something 
  offensive.
  Billy, on the following 
  page you only list 
  one force ring, but I’ve 
  actually got several now.
  I know, but in game terms, 
  mainly that just means 
  that you added more uses per 
  session to the item later on.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Example 
  Enchanted Items
  Harry’s Duster
  Susan Rodriguez gave Harry his leather duster. 
  He stitched arcane patterns into the tough mate-
  rial, weaving defensive spells into the coat.
  Spell provided: At the time he crafts this (after 
  his first few casefiles), Harry’s Lore is effec-
  tively Great (+4). He puts two slots into it, 
  the extra one for frequency. An effect strength 
  of 4 becomes Armor:2, with 3 uses/session.
  Variations: Or maybe it’s a Great (+4) spirit 
  (force) block vs. physical attacks 3 times a 
  session. Later, Harry might spend another 
  slot to add 1 to the effect strength—then 
  immediately reduce it to make the coat loan-
  able to his friends when they’re in a pinch.
  Harry’s Force Ring
  Harry wears a silver ring that slowly collects 
  minute amounts of power, stealing a bit of 
  kinetic energy every time he moves his hand. 
  Once the energy is released, the ring must be 
  recharged over time.
  Spell provided: A Weapon:4 spirit (force) 
  attack, once per session, based on Harry’s 
  Lore of Good (+3). Harry gains +1 to the 
  strength by devoting one additional slot to 
  the item. Harry uses the Discipline skill to 
  aim this ranged attack. Uses two enchanted 
  slots total.
  Warden Sword
  The symbol of the authority of a Warden of the 
  White Council, Warden Swords were enchanted 
  by Captain Luccio to cut through both spells 
  and matter.  They are very limited in supply!
  A Warden Sword counts as a Weapon:3 
  sword at minimum in nearly all circumstances.
  Spell provided: A Warden Sword uses two 
  enchanted item slots. Built by Luccio’s 
  formerly impressive crafting, the Sword can 
  produce one of the following magical effects 
  3 times per session: 
    The Sword casts a counterspell of 
  Fantastic (+6) strength, provided the effect 
  being countered can be physically attacked 
  or touched by a sword (ethereal chains, 
  good; a mental binding, not so much).
    The Sword may be treated as a Weapon:6 
  item for one attack.
  Example Potions 
  Bob’s “Love” Potion
  Okay, so it’s a lust potion. It cranks the consum-
  er’s libido up to eleven.
  Duration: One scene
  Effect: A maneuver, three shifts for the 
  potion strength opposed by the consumer’s 
  Discipline skill. If the consumer fails to resist, 
  he is afflicted with the temporary aspect 
  Seized by Lust.
  Variations: A potion brewed with more delicacy 
  might apply a less sleazy aspect.
  Notes: The aspect should be immediately 
  compelled. Stand back and watch the hilarity.
  Escape
  Harry brews this one in the Storm Front 
  casefile.
  Duration: A moment, less if the potion is shared
  Effect: Allows the consumer to easily and 
  effortlessly move through almost any barrier. 
  Mechanically, the consumer may cross to a 
  nearby zone, passing through most mate-
  rial barriers to do so. Only a magical barrier 
  with more than five shifts of strength or a 
  very well-sealed mundane barrier can prevent 
  movement.
  Variations: The effects can vary widely; some 
  seem to slow down the passage of time, 
  allowing the potion’s consumer to simply 
  move vastly faster than the rest of the world. 
  Others might turn the consumer’s body 
  insubstantial. Some might work only against 
  magical barriers, or only against material 
  ones.
  Notes: Harry brewed this one with Bob’s help in 
  the Storm Front casefile. Harry said it felt 
  like he broke apart into a thousand pieces; 
  he was able to see the world as a collection 
  of energy patterns—which he could navi-
  gate around and through, finding holes and 
  gaps that didn’t exist in the world’s material 
  form. It only lasted a few seconds, though. 
  He shared the potion with Susan, partially 
  explaining why it lasted for such a short time.
  Harry, why is 
  the love potion 
  not a bottled 
  Fourth law 
  violation?
  It does walk 
  the line, but 
  the one I 
  made really 
  couldn’t make 
  some one do 
  some thing 
  they weren’t 
  inclined to do 
  anyway. It 
  just lowers 
  inhibitions. 
  A lot.
  And that makes 
  it okay? 
  No, but it 
  keeps it out of 
  Fourth Law 
  territory. 
  There’s a 
  difference.
  Dammit.
  The Warden 
  Sword 
  seems a bit 
  abusable, 
  doesn’t it? 
  A Fantastic 
  Lore item 
  even if 
  your Lore 
  is crap?
  comes with job 
  respon sibilities, 
  though. How 
  are those 
  treatin’ ya?
  Point. And 
  I don’t even 
  get a sword.
  
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  Spellcasting (examples of magic)
  Ghost Dust
  Made from depleted uranium and other heavy 
  particles, this is a densely, heavily “real” substance 
  that can be used effectively against incorporeal 
  spirits of the Nevernever.
  Duration: Instantaneous
  Effect: Acts as a Weapon:4 attack against incor-
  poreal creatures such as ghosts—when it 
  hits, it renders parts of them inert.  Can be 
  broken up into smaller doses by dividing up 
  the Weapon bonus: at most, four Weapon:1 
  attacks.
  Notes: It satisfies the Catch on a ghost’s Physical 
  Immunity; however, in order to work in the 
  mortal realm, the ghost must acknowledge 
  the wielder’s presence first. 
  Red Court Antivenom
  While this won’t make you completely immune 
  to a Red Court vampire’s addictive saliva, it sure 
  helps you resist its effects.
  Duration: One scene
  Effect: Grants a bonus to resisting the addictive 
  saliva of a Red Court vampire equal to the 
  potion’s strength in shifts. 
  Notes: Pretty straightforward—typically the 
  strength equals the Lore skill of the brewer.
  Scent Suppression
  This potion masks your scent from a predator.
  Duration: Several hours, or one scene if the 
  potion is shared among two or three people.
  Effect: Applies the aspect Scentless Trail to 
  the consumer.
  Variations: Adding more shifts of strength ups 
  the duration or allows it to be shared among 
  more consumers.
  Notes: This potion is pretty simple—relatively 
  long duration at only four shifts of strength.
  Stimulant
  This is a bit like taking an entire pot of really 
  strong coffee and pouring it into a vein all 
  at once.
  Duration: One scene
  Effect: Thaumaturgical transformation, makes 
  the consumer a little faster, a little more alert, 
  a little more able to resist the effects of fatigue. 
  Reduces the amount of mental stress casting 
  an evocation does to the consumer by one 
  (though this can’t reduce it below the one-
  stress minimum); temporarily suppresses up 
  to four shifts worth of fatigue-related mental 
  and/or physical consequences (the conse-
  quence is still there; it just can’t be tagged or 
  invoked while the potion is in effect).
  Variations: A stronger potion might let the 
  consumer ignore more consequences.
  Notes: The suppressed consequences assume 
  the potion is brewed with four shifts of 
  strength.
  Sunburst in a 
  Handkerchief
  Having a sunbeam safely folded up in a napkin 
  can be pretty handy in some situations—it is, as 
  they say, a light when all other lights go out. 
  Duration: Instantaneous
  Effect: A Weapon:3 attack (range of a thrown 
  weapon, but what skill is used to aim it is up 
  to you) using sunlight. This does no damage 
  to most targets but satisfies the Catch for a 
  number of supernatural creatures.
  Variations: Rather than a straight attack, you 
  could set this up as a maneuver to blind, 
  distract, or temporarily incapacitate the 
  targets.
  Notes: It’s not a potion, but it’s modeled as 
  one. This one’s tricky to make—you have to 
  be genuinely happy to craft it. That means 
  telling the story, declaring the happy aspect, 
  and tagging the aspect to declare and justify 
  the capture of a genuine beam of sunlight. 
  The effect strength is based on the Lore of 
  the caster.
  True Seeing Ointment
  Rashid, the Gatekeeper, gave Harry a vial of 
  ointment that allowed him to see through faerie 
  glamours without resorting to using the Sight.
  Duration: A few hours, shorter if shared among 
  two people
  Effect: A thaumaturgical effect granting +6 to 
  Alertness rolls to see through faerie glam-
  ours, veils, and other illusions.
  Variations: It’s conceivable that a similar oint-
  ment could be made to help see through 
  other types of illusion magic, but it should 
  be very specific—mortal magic, Outsider-
  sponsored magic, etc.
  Notes: This assumes the ointment’s maker has 
  a Lore of Fantastic (+6). It’s possible that the 
  Gatekeeper’s Lore is even higher than this.
  Hey, Billy, 
  why not 
  just write up 
  the sunburst 
  hankie as an 
  enchanted 
  item?
  that would 
  work, but you’d 
  have to pay 
  extra for it 
  to be useable 
  by other people. 
  Works better 
  as a “potion”.
  Ah, sunlight.
  Handy 
  against Red 
  Court vamps, 
  usefulness 
  with ancient 
  spider-demons 
  remains 
  untested. 
  Just don’t let 
  the cops catch 
  you with a bag 
  of depleted 
  uranium.
  Where the hell 
  do you even get... 
  nevermind, I don’t 
  want to know.
  Billy, axe this whole entry. Rashid 
  never gave me that ointment. Got it?
  
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  - cHAPter FourteeN -
  running 
  the game
  
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  running the game
  What the GM Does
  The GM has many different responsibilities in 
  a game of The Dresden Files RPG. In a 
  nutshell, they are:
    Running the process of city and char-
  acter creation
    Starting and ending scenes and 
  managing the pace of a game session
    Adjudicating the use of the rules
    Creating and managing the opposition 
  to the PCs
    Creating story material for each new 
  session of play (covered in Building 
  Scenarios, page 340)
  Generally speaking, the GM is “where the buck 
  stops” for any decisions about the game that 
  come up during play—questions of setting and 
  tone, the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of 
  a particular element introduced in the game, 
  the application of mechanics, etc., etc. In many 
  places throughout this book, the phrase “the 
  GM decides” is often used interchangeably with 
  “the group decides” regarding some of these 
  issues, because it emphatically isn’t the GM’s 
  job to run a dictatorship—every player should 
  always be allowed the chance to have a say in 
  those instances. The GM should act as more of 
  a moderator, synthesizing the group’s input with 
  her own in order to reach a final decision.
  Running City 
  and Character 
  Creation
  During city and character creation, both the 
  players and GM establish and express the foun-
  dation for the rest of the game, and it’s impor-
  tant for the GM to keep the lines of commu-
  nication going throughout the process. They’re 
  meant to be like focused brainstorming sessions, 
  with everyone throwing ideas out as quickly as 
  they think them up, with the rules providing 
  some structure to the conversation.
  Before getting things started, it’s important 
  to take a moment to ask the players about their 
  general expectations for the game—what kind of 
  content they want to see, what kinds of content 
  they definitely want to avoid, and what they’re 
  primarily interested in pursuing during play. If 
  you’ve already got some ideas for what you want 
  to do with the campaign, now is the time to 
  bring them up—“Hey, I was thinking that the 
  White Court would be prominent in this game, 
  so I want to concentrate on intrigue and political 
  backstabbing” or “I was thinking balls-out action 
  here, so I want to position the city as a sort of 
  battleground in the Vampire War,” and so on—
  and see what the players think. You don’t want 
  to find out in the middle of city creation that the 
  players have wildly divergent ideas for the game.
  If there are some severe clashes of expecta-
  tion, make sure you hammer that stuff out with 
  the players as quickly as possible. Most of the 
  time, people will be accommodating if you just 
  get things out in the open and talk them out. 
  The most important thing is to make sure that 
  everyone’s on the same page as much as they 
  can be.
  Choosing Aspects
  One of the most difficult problems a group of 
  players faces during this process is the choosing of 
  good, evocative aspects for the city and for their 
  characters. The Aspects chapter (page 98) provides 
  suggestions for what makes a good aspect—
  as GM, it’s your job to help focus a player’s 
  thoughts regarding an aspect and help narrow 
  it down into an ideal form that everyone under-
  stands and can use in the game. Ask probing 
  questions, offer some of your own suggestions, 
  and let the player articulate what he’s looking for 
  as many times as necessary.
  Remember, a good aspect suggests multiple, 
  clear uses for invocations and compels. If an 
  aspect choice seems to lack one of these things, 
  try to help the player reword the aspect or 
  expand on its meaning to cover all these bases. 
  It’s all right if a few of the aspects have primarily 
  “positive” or “negative” connotations, but you 
  don’t want the majority to be like that.
  Sometimes, a player will suffer from decision 
  paralysis when choosing an aspect. The breadth 
  of possibilities is so wide that no option seems 
  good enough, many options seem equally attrac-
  tive, or nothing comes to mind. This is why it’s 
  good to have an idea of people’s expectations 
  beforehand—knowing what they want to see, 
  you can sometimes help focus aspect choices 
  according to those guidelines.
  Perhaps the best way to help break this 
  mental block is to review the aspect categories 
  from Aspects (phrase, person/prop, story, and 
  situation) and see which ones aren’t being used 
  Man, Kirby 
  really 
  seemed off his 
  game when he 
  was running 
  last week’s 
  Arcanos 
  session.
  Yeah? I guess 
  so — he hadn’t 
  gotten much 
  sleep the two 
  nights before. 
  A well-rested 
  gm is a 
  better gm!
  
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  running the game
  as much. If a player’s character doesn’t have 
  many connections to other characters, suggest 
  he develop one and choose an aspect to fit—this 
  can be especially effective if the connection is 
  made to another PC or to an NPC established 
  as a face during city creation. If a character 
  doesn’t have any issues that suggest a reason 
  for him to be involved in stories, see if you can 
  help the player come up with a story aspect that 
  might fit. 
  If you just can’t break the block, don’t force 
  it—you can always come back and fill out that 
  aspect later, or leave it blank and let it develop 
  during play, as with the “On-the-Fly” rules 
  (page 69). Ultimately, it’s much better to leave an 
  aspect slot blank than to pick one that isn’t inspiring 
  and evocative to play. If the player is not invested 
  in his character’s aspects, or the group is not 
  invested in the city’s aspects, it will be a notice-
  able drag on the game.
  Starting and 
  Ending Scenes
  The basic “unit” of play in a Dresden Files 
  game is called the scene. A scene in the game is 
  similar to a scene in books, TV shows, or films. 
  You probably already have an intuitive grasp 
  of what one looks like—the PCs interact with 
  each other, interact with NPCs, and/or perform 
  a series of actions in a discrete but continuous 
  period of time. Ideally, there is some kind of goal 
  or interaction that the group intends to accom-
  plish or resolve in a scene; completion of this 
  signals a good time to transition to a new scene. 
  Taken as a whole, a collection of scenes strung 
  together composes most of a single session 
  of play. 
  As the GM, one of the most important parts 
  of your job is knowing when to start and when 
  to end a scene. This is one of your primary tools 
  for managing the pace of a session. When the 
  pace is flagging, it’s your responsibility to focus 
  everyone on the game and move on to the next 
  scene. The best analogy to make is that of a 
  good film editor—you “cut” a scene and start a 
  new one when necessary to make the story flow 
  smoothly. 
  This can be a rocky road to walk some-
  times—one (or all) of the players may truly 
  enjoy going through all the minute details 
  of their characters’ shopping trips for better 
  equipment. You’re going to have to cater to those 
  preferences if the whole group exhibits them. If 
  they don’t, however, you’ll need to be proactive 
  about transitioning between scenes. How will 
  you know when to move things along? Here are 
  some useful guidelines.
  Starting 
  Things Off
  When you begin a scene, you’re typically going to 
  start it just before an important piece of action 
  (not necessarily violence) is going to take place. 
  If the PCs are going to the villain’s hideout, you 
  don’t want to start describing events in the scene 
  from the moment they leave their apartment—
  unless something important is going to occur 
  then. If Harry is waiting for a contact to arrive at 
  a rendezvous, you don’t want to start the scene 
  two hours before the contact shows up. This may 
  seem like common sense advice, but it’s some-
  thing that can trip people up in play—it’s easy 
  to fall into a pattern of narrating every block of 
  time the PCs spend in play without realizing it, 
  chomping up game time with “Okay, so you leave 
  the store and start heading back home, walking 
  down Cermak Road…” stuff. Keep an eye out 
  for it and cut when necessary to save yourself 
  idle time.
  When a Scene 
  Isn’t a Scene
  How do you know when it’s time to move on? 
  Well, just about every scene you could envi-
  sion has a purpose—a moment where you can 
  definitively say that the point of the scene has 
  happened. Usually, this happens after the reso-
  lution of some kind of conflict, but that isn’t 
  always the case. The purpose of a scene can vary 
  widely, whether from in-game character deci-
  sions (“We want to investigate the lab and see 
  what’s hidden there”) or storytelling priorities 
  (“I want to reveal the motivation of this char-
  acter now”). 
  Going into a scene, you have to ask yourself: 
  What’s the point? Why is this scene happening? 
  When that point occurs, whatever it is, tie up 
  loose ends and move on.
  If the PCs are shopping for arcane research 
  materials, for example, the scene’s purpose is for 
  the characters to find out whether or not they 
  can acquire the books and documents they want. 
  
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  running the game
  If they can (or can’t), and they know it, the scene 
  is over—the bickering with the shopkeeper can 
  safely be glossed over. If the PCs are trying to 
  figure out the meaning behind an obscure puzzle 
  left at a crime scene, the scene is resolved when 
  they discover (or fail to discover) that clue. If the 
  PCs are in a fight, the scene is resolved when 
  that fight’s over and the aftermath is, at least for 
  the moment, addressed.
  Even in purely character-driven scenes—like 
  when Billy’s player wants a scene to confront 
  Harry Dresden about how isolated he’s been 
  lately—that time eventually comes. He’s said 
  what he’s needed to say, Harry’s had a chance to 
  respond, maybe they’ve milked some fate points 
  out of the GM for compels, shown their true 
  colors, and it’s done. 
  Making the 
  Transitions
  So, the time has come to change scenes, and 
  you’re trying not to ruffle feathers when doing 
  it. How do you transition without abusing your 
  power? How do you avoid harshing a player’s 
  buzz if he’s enjoying some good roleplay?
  The first rule of thumb: if it looks like your 
  players are getting into whatever’s at hand, let 
  them run with it. Unless you’re totally strapped 
  for time, letting the players revel in roleplaying 
  or in a particular aspect of the setting (no pun 
  intended) isn’t going to do your game any harm. 
  It may not be what you planned—but if they 
  enjoy it, your gaming session is a successful one. 
  And if the NPC interactions are interesting 
  enough, maybe that’s a cue to have one of those 
  NPCs initiate the next scene instead of the 
  NPC you’d planned to use. Your plans are the 
  ones that need to be flexible.
  The second rule of thumb: when you’re in 
  doubt, just ask. Your players know you aren’t 
  a mind reader, and no rule in this book can 
  substitute for honest, direct communication 
  with them. You may be strapped for time and 
  only have the length of one session to run your 
  adventure. If that’s the case, no one’s going to 
  begrudge you asking, “Hey, guys? Harry’s got 
  the books he wanted…can I go ahead and cut to 
  the next scene?” (If you have a player who would 
  begrudge you asking that, it might be time to 
  Have a Little Talk™.)
  The third rule of thumb: if you feel the 
  purpose of a scene has been fulfilled but you 
  don’t know what to transition to next, turn to 
  the players and ask them what they want to do. 
  If the players have a clear goal in mind, they’re 
  likely brimming with ideas about what they 
  want to do next. All you have to do is ask—
  instant wealth of scene ideas.
  The fourth rule of thumb: if there’s any dead 
  air, do something. Are the players not talking 
  anymore, looking at you expectantly or at 
  random details of the room? A scene’s gone off 
  its course. Do whatever you have to—bring in 
  a new NPC, move to a new scene, narrate two 
  guys bursting in the door with guns. Do not, 
  under any circumstances, let dead air dominate 
  your game time. Your time for making stories is 
  valuable; make it count.
  Adjudicating 
  the Rules
  During most of the scenes you run, the players 
  will probably have their characters do things 
  that require using the game mechanics—
  jumping a fence, getting into a fight, casting 
  spells, etc. Another part of your role as the GM 
  is to act as a referee and arbiter for the use of the 
  rules—deciding what rules to apply in a partic-
  ular instance, deciding what uses of the rules 
  are out of scope, and deciding how to interpret 
  the rules to fit a particular set of circumstances 
  during play. Again, while it’s important to give 
  players a chance to give input when a question of 
  rules application comes up, remember that the 
  buck stops with you; you don’t want your game 
  session to be bogged down by rules discussions. 
  It’s better to get some quick opinions, make a 
  decision, and move on, rather than stall a session 
  trying to work out the minutiae of a particular 
  throw of the dice. You can always discuss it 
  afterward, when you have a better opportunity 
  to examine things critically.
  The guiding principle for all uses of the rules 
  in this game is that intent precedes mechanics. 
  What this means is that you should always 
  start off by figuring out what the player wants 
  to accomplish, and then determine how to 
  model that using the rules. This might seem like 
  common sense, but it’s easy to get caught in the 
  trap of looking at the various game actions (like 
  attack, block, declaration, maneuver, etc.) as a 
  straightjacket that limits your available options, 
  rather than as a set of tools to express whatever 
  the player wants to try to do. 
  You’re 
  never going 
  to let me 
  live that 
  down, are 
  you?
  I can’t help it 
  if it’s a good 
  example for 
  the game, man.
  
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  Many actions map directly to one of the 
  mechanics already, so most of the time this isn’t 
  going to be very hard—a player says, “I want to 
  punch that dude in the face,” and you reply with, 
  “Okay, that’s an attack using Fists, and he’s going 
  to defend with Fists. Roll it.”
  Sometimes it isn’t going to be quite so simple, 
  and a player will say something like, “Well, I 
  want to push the table over the landing while he’s 
  charging me, so that he’ll smash into it before 
  he hits me.” You don’t want to refuse the player 
  just because that action doesn’t clearly fall into 
  one of the basic conflict action types (page 197)— 
  especially because that’s a pretty cool move. 
  In those cases, you’ll have to tease out a 
  more specific intent from the player, which will 
  allow you to make a decision. If the player says, 
  “Yeah, I want to hurt him with the table,” that 
  might be an attack with Might, and the NPC 
  rolls defense normally. If he says, “I just don’t 
  want to get bowled over by the bull charge,” the 
  NPC could get a defense roll with Athletics and 
  you might give the player credit for declaring 
  the table by letting him tag it as a scene aspect. 
  What matters is that you match the mechanics 
  to the player’s intent, not the other way around.
  When to Call 
  for a Roll
  Before you call for a die roll, it is critically impor-
  tant that you stop and do two things: 
  1. Imagine Success 
  2. Imagine Failure
  It sounds simple, but it makes a difference. 
  Success is usually the easy part; failure can 
  be trickier. You want to make sure that both 
  outcomes are interesting—though “interesting” 
  isn’t the same as “good.”
  It’s as simple as that, because there are few 
  things more frustrating to a player than making 
  a skill roll and getting told that it nets them no 
  new knowledge, no suggested course of action, 
  no new development for the story, and so on. So, 
  whenever you call for a roll, be absolutely certain 
  that this is a branching point in your story, and 
  consider what each of the branches entails. If 
  you cannot come up with a way to handle either 
  outcome, you need to rethink the situation. If 
  one or the other branch is boring, then calling 
  for a roll is probably a bad idea.
  Example: Harry Dresden is investigating a 
  suspect in a case and has been forced to engage 
  in a little breaking and entering to pursue his 
  goal. He finds a locked safe in the suspect’s 
  office, and Jim, his player, tells the GM he’d like 
  to crack it for information on the suspect.
  The GM imagines success and failure. Because 
  it’d be boring to have nothing incriminating 
  in the safe, she decides that if he succeeds at 
  breaking into the safe, he finds information on 
  shady financial deals the suspect is involved in, 
  allowing Harry to make important connec-
  tions. To make failure exciting, she decides that 
  Harry will set off a silent burglar alarm if he 
  fails—which means the cops will want a word 
  with him when he gets outside!
  That said, not every roll needs to have high 
  stakes. There should always be a consequence 
  to failure, but there are degrees of consequence. 
  If there is a large issue on the table, try not to 
  have it hinge entirely on one roll—spread it 
  out across the scene. The point of spreading 
  out consequences is to keep players engaged. It 
  makes rolls into something more meaningful 
  than just being lucky. The goal is to make all 
  rolls satisfying.
  the idea is 
  that it’s 
  the gm’s job 
  to work with 
  her players 
  to find “cool 
  moments” 
  for their 
  characters.  
  While we 
  don’t come 
  right out 
  and say 
  that here, 
  that’s the 
  idea we had 
  in mind with 
  this section.
  
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  Example: Biff Abernathy is attempting 
  to sneak into an office building for Evan 
  Montrose, trying to find the sanctum of a prac-
  titioner that Evan believes is stirring up trouble 
  in Baltimore. The GM informs Fred—Biff’s 
  player—that the place is Well-Guarded; if 
  Biff wants to sneak in, he’s looking at a diffi-
  culty of Good.
  Fred rolls his Stealth of Mediocre and 
  gets an Average—clearly a failure. The GM 
  ponders it a moment and decides she doesn’t 
  want to let the whole scene hinge on this roll. 
  She says, “Okay, well, you’re pacing around the 
  building, looking for a back entrance, and you 
  walk right into two armed guards! They point 
  pistols at you and one of them asks, ‘Hey, what 
  the hell are you doing here, kid?’”
  Fred frowns and says, “Crap. Well, I could 
  probably kick their asses, but guns suck, and 
  I’d probably make a lot of noise. I’ll pull out 
  a fat wad of cash and say, ‘Far as you know, 
  I’m from the gas company, checking the meters. 
  How ‘bout it?’”
  The GM grins and says, “Well, okay. 
  They’re pretty professional, but given your 
  Resources, you’re definitely able to flash 
  enough to make them pay attention. I’ll say 
  the difficulty’s at Good—they don’t have too 
  much Discipline, but they probably take their 
  Professional Obligation seriously.”
  Fred rolls and gets a Great, and the GM 
  describes how the two guards look wide-eyed at 
  the money, snatch it up, and leave, one of them 
  replying, “Sure, man. Meter’s around back, 
  next to the maintenance door.”
  Fred says, “Whew, close one.” A couple 
  of rolls later, each one giving the opportunity 
  for more consequences, Biff’s in the sanctum, 
  having gotten through a short but tense scene.
  Setting 
  Difficulties
  In addition to the above guidelines, you should 
  also keep in mind what the skill levels mean. 
  The adjective ladder corresponds to a certain 
  expectation of competence when you’re talking 
  about skills and action difficulties:
    Mediocre (+0) indicates a lack of either 
  talent or training. 
    Average (+1) indicates a novice level of 
  training, or a high degree of talent with 
  no formal training.
    Fair (+2) and Good (+3) indicate jour-
  neyman or “professional” capacity, or a 
  nearly inhuman degree of talent.
    Great (+4) and Superb (+5) indicate 
  veteran or masterful capacity, or the 
  combination of extreme talent and good 
  training.
    Fantastic (+6) and above skirt the 
  boundaries of natural human capacity.
  When setting difficulties, you should try 
  to respect the skill levels of the PCs and 
  create appropriate tension without being 
  Failure as “Success, but…”
  Sometimes, failure on a potential roll might 
  sound boring or halt the game—however, 
  you want to introduce tension at this partic-
  ular moment. When that’s the case, consider 
  this: a skill roll can also be about some-
  thing the players will succeed at no matter 
  what, but with potential complications they 
  want to avoid. We call this “Success, but…” 
  because it takes the form of “You succeed, 
  but here’s a complication you have to deal 
  with because you failed the roll.”
  One example would be chasing someone 
  who hops a fence. The player says his char-
  acter’s going to hop it, too. The GM thinks 
  failure in the form of “You don’t make it 
  over the fence” is boring, but she wants a 
  bit of tension. She decides failure will take 
  the form of “You succeed, but you wake the 
  sleeping dog nearby.” And now there’s a new 
  participant in the chase!
  The flipside of this idea is that failing a 
  roll could provide basic information while 
  actual success on the roll provides more 
  detail or an unexpected benefit. This is 
  particularly useful for research oriented skill 
  rolls, where failure can bring the game to 
  a halt.
  For instance, if the characters are using 
  Investigation to find someone, failure could 
  mean they find out where he’s hiding, and 
  success could mean they also find out that 
  he’s got some friends hiding with him. If 
  the players know they failed the roll, then 
  the fact that you’re telling them informa-
  tion anyway is a good way to bring in some 
  tension—they’ll wonder what you aren’t 
  telling them.
  
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  overwhelming. If a PC has a high rank in a 
  skill, it means that the player wants the oppor-
  tunity to demonstrate competence in that area. 
  You don’t want to set low difficulties constantly, 
  because it makes the player’s choice to have that 
  high skill seem insignificant. Likewise, you don’t 
  want every roll to be made at Superb—you want 
  the players to have a sense of accomplishment. 
  Also note that players will regularly invoke 
  aspects to improve the results of bad rolls or 
  to nudge them toward success—having to face 
  several high difficulty actions in a row will drain 
  their fate points away quickly. Deliberately 
  “stacking the deck” against the players to force 
  them into using fate points is a bad idea, because 
  the players will eventually notice that you’re 
  doing it.
  You can use the following guidelines to help 
  you determine where to set difficulties relative 
  to a character’s skill:
    A player will nearly always succeed against 
  a difficulty of 2 less than his character’s skill 
  without needing to invoke any aspects.
    A player will usually succeed against a 
  difficulty of 1 less than his character’s skill, 
  but might need to invoke an aspect on 
  occasion.
    A player has a relatively equal chance of 
  succeeding or needing to invoke an aspect 
  against a difficulty equal to his character’s 
  skill.
    A player will usually need to invoke an 
  aspect to succeed against a difficulty of 1 
  higher than his character’s skill, but has a 
  fair chance of making the roll as well.
    A player will almost always need to invoke 
  an aspect to succeed against a difficulty of 2 
  higher than his character’s skill.
  So if, for example, you have a PC in your 
  game with a skill at Superb (+5), you know that 
  you’re going to need at least a Great (+4) diffi-
  culty or above to put him in a position where he 
  might need aspects to succeed, and that actions 
  of Good (+3) difficulty or below can be over-
  come easily. You can use both ideas to spotlight 
  that character at appropriate times—either by 
  creating a situation that only that character can 
  succeed at dependably, or by creating a situation 
  that allows that character to succeed with style 
  (see “Extra Shifts” on the next page).
  Modifying Difficulties
  You should have a good reason for justifying 
  why a difficulty is high, beyond just a desire to 
  sufficiently challenge a character. It wouldn’t 
  make sense if every Investigation roll a character 
  makes is at Great (+4) or above just because he 
  has a skill at Superb (+5)—that strains your 
  credibility as a GM. 
  However, you can “turn up the volume” on 
  some actions that would otherwise be a breeze 
  if the situation warrants it. Almost no action 
  happens in a vacuum, and the environment and 
  circumstances under which an action occurs can 
  sometimes complicate matters dramatically. Easy 
  actions that become more complicated due to 
  circumstance can often seem livelier than diffi-
  cult actions that are otherwise straightforward.
  When you’re modifying difficulties, first look 
  at whatever aspects are on your scene—either 
  because you’ve already placed them there or 
  because it suddenly seems appropriate to intro-
  duce one. Aspects like Dark or Cramped or 
  Very Public Space can cause a host of prob-
  lems and they allow you to make the situa-
  tion more dynamic. (“Oh, you want to break 
  into the tool shed? Well, that’s probably an 
  Average roll on your Burglary, but this is a Very 
  Public Space—people everywhere, you know, 
  it’s a park…so if you want to do it and not get 
  Difficulty as Plot Device
  Sometimes, assigning an unexpectedly high 
  or low difficulty to an action can create an 
  interesting detail for your game. For example, 
  if the PCs are breaking into a small compa-
  ny’s office building, they probably expect 
  most of the locks to be Good difficulty or 
  lower. Finding one that’s Great or Superb 
  difficulty would be unexpected, and this will 
  serve as a flag to indicate that not all is what 
  it seems. Perhaps the small company is a 
  front for something larger, or the company 
  is dabbling in illegal activities and requires 
  better security to hide it.
  Likewise, if the same PCs are infiltrating 
  a Mafia don’s safehouse and all the locks are 
  Average difficulty, it should be an indicator 
  to them that something is wrong. Maybe the 
  don has thugs lying in wait for an ambush, or 
  has already called the cops and is just waiting 
  for them to show up. Maybe he just wants to 
  have a nice little chat with them…
  And what’s 
  actually 
  probably worse, 
  they’ll run 
  out of points, 
  your big finale 
  will pwn them 
  utterly, and 
  the adventure 
  will make 
  everybody sad.
  don’t make 
  everybody sad.
  “Pwn”? Is that 
  some sort of 
  assault on the 
  Celtic tongue?
  It’s... uh, it’s an 
  internet thing.
  Horrors.
  
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  spotted, you probably need a Good or better.”) 
  This is basically the equivalent of you tagging 
  the scene aspect on behalf of the opposition, 
  just like the players would do in order to turn a 
  circumstance into an advantage.
  Besides using scene aspects, there are some 
  circumstances that are borderline cases—they’re 
  almost always appropriate to modify a diffi-
  culty, but they aren’t often appropriate as a scene 
  aspect. Here’s a short list:
  Time or Quality Pressure: Sometimes, the 
  kinds of special effects a PC can get by getting 
  extra shifts on a roll (see “Extra Shifts” below) 
  are a prerequisite to succeeding at an action, 
  requiring the character to accomplish something 
  within a certain timeframe or produce a result of 
  a certain quality. You can modify the difficulty 
  by an appropriate amount to reflect this.
  Movement: Trying to do almost anything 
  while moving at a high speed is pretty difficult, 
  whether it’s shooting a gun in a highway-speed 
  chase or using Stealth at a full run. If the PC is 
  trying to take an action that would reasonably 
  be hampered by fast movement, the difficulty 
  should be increased by 2.
  Ill-Prepared: If, for whatever reason, a PC 
  doesn’t have the necessary tools or know-how 
  to accomplish something, the difficulty can be 
  increased by 2. As an example, if a character 
  is thrust into giving the keynote speech at a 
  conference because the scheduled speaker fell ill 
  minutes before, it could be reasonable to assume 
  that the character is ill-prepared.
  You might notice that these resemble the 
  kinds of aspects you might put on a character via 
  declaration or maneuver, except they don’t come 
  from a proactive NPC antagonist. Use that as a 
  guideline when you’re coming up with these, and 
  encourage players to make declarations to create 
  advantageous circumstances for their characters.
  Extra Shifts
  Sometimes a player will roll far greater than the 
  difficulty and generate extra shifts on an action. 
  Many actions during play will depend less on 
  whether or not a character succeeds, and depend 
  more on how much a character succeeds by and 
  what that success means. The number of shifts a 
  character generates on a roll can serve as a yard-
  stick for describing how a roll turns out:
  0 shifts = Minimal success:
  The character pulled it off. It’s neither pretty 
  nor graceful, but it works.
  1 shift = Notable success:
  This is a clear success. The character’s result 
  is solid and reliable; while it may not be 
  inspired, it is absolutely workmanlike.
  3 shifts = Significant success:
  The success is noticeably well done and of 
  fine quality, very reliable, and so on. If you 
  use the optional spin rules (page 214), this 
  level of success and higher on a defense roll 
  generates spin.
  5+ shifts = Potent success:
  Not only is the quality of the success 
  remarkable, it may have some unexpected, 
  secondary benefits, such as a deeper insight 
  into a problem at hand.
  You and the players can use this to color 
  your narration of an action appropriately—a 
  Craftsmanship roll to fix a car engine might be 
  described with a result like, “The car still sput-
  ters erratically and emits smoke, but at least it’s 
  running again,” if it barely succeeds. If the roll 
  produces 5 shifts, however, it might be described 
  with a result like, “You turn the key and the 
  engine comes to life, purring as smoothly as it 
  did when it was new.”
  
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  In addition to adding narrative color, getting 
  extra shifts on a roll can allow a player to add 
  some special effects to the result, reflecting 
  the benefits of his success. The most obvious 
  of these is inflicting stress with an attack in a 
  conflict (page 200)—the greater the margin of 
  success, the more stress inflicted by the attack. 
  The next most common option for using 
  extra shifts is to enhance the quality of an 
  effort—doing something better, more stylishly, 
  more stealthily, more just plain awesome than 
  other people do. While this is usually reflected 
  in narration, it can have a tangible effect on play 
  if the effort is something that someone else will 
  have to compete with later—the extra shifts add 
  to the difficulty of whatever rolls are made to 
  oppose it, +1 for each shift used in this manner. 
  Consider the example of a player making a 
  Craftsmanship roll to sabotage a money-coun-
  terfeiting machine. If there are no shifts on the 
  roll, it will probably be pretty easy (Fair or Good 
  difficulty) for someone to come by and repair 
  that machine later. If the roll gains 5 shifts, 
  though, it means that the player has so thor-
  oughly wrecked the machine that repairing it is 
  almost like rebuilding it from scratch (Epic or 
  Legendary difficulty).
  Sometimes, a player makes a roll explicitly to 
  set a difficulty for others trying to accomplish 
  something. In these cases, the difficulty of the 
  roll is assumed to be Mediocre (+0) plus the 
  number of shifts the player achieves—Mediocre 
  (+0) plus 3 shifts equals Good (+3).
  Finally, a player can use extra shifts to 
  decrease the default time it takes to perform 
  an action. If a character is trying to accomplish 
  goals by a deadline, extra shifts can be used to 
  accomplish an objective more quickly than usual, 
  with each shift reducing the time one step on 
  the time chart (see “Dealing with Time,” page 315). 
  In some situations, a player might be forced to 
  choose between speed and quality, designating a 
  number of extra shifts for each.
  Declarations
  In some situations, skills (knowledge skills like 
  Scholarship are the most obvious, but any could 
  apply) may allow a player to make a declaration. 
  A declaration is typically a player-driven asser-
  tion that there is a particular aspect on a partic-
  ular target (an individual character or scene). 
  Broadly, declarations allow a player to introduce 
  facts into the setting and storyline if he succeeds 
  in his declaration roll. If the roll fails, the fact is 
  not true—although the character might believe 
  it is and may act accordlingly.
  The difficulties for declarations should, 
  honestly, be based on how interesting the 
  proposed fact or aspect is. Ideas that would 
  disrupt the game or are just unreasonable should 
  simply be vetoed. These are the questions to ask 
  yourself when determining difficulty:
  1. Is the declaration interesting (or funny)?
  2. Will the declaration have interesting 
  consequences if it’s acted upon, whether 
  it’s right or wrong?
  3. Does the declaration propose a specific 
  and interesting course of action?
  Each “no” adds 2 to the base difficulty of 
  Mediocre. If the proposed fact is very amusing, 
  proposes an interesting course of action, and 
  has interesting consequences (three “yes”-es), a 
  Mediocre difficulty is appropriate—you want 
  to provide a good chance that the detail is true. 
  “Selling” Success
  One of your jobs as a GM is to make the 
  players feel like their successes and failures 
  matter. Usually, this isn’t a problem, but at 
  times it’s easy to get caught up in the moment 
  and move past a player’s successful roll into 
  a new conflict or moment of tension. Ideally, 
  with every successful roll there should be a 
  spotlight moment for the character.
  We call this idea “selling,” because you act 
  a little bit like a salesman—taking a moment 
  to highlight how great a moment is before 
  moving on. By embellishing or explaining 
  the positive effects of a roll, you are selling 
  that success to the group. When someone 
  succeeds big on an Investigation roll, don’t 
  just say, “Here’s what you learn.” Take a 
  moment to explain how that character 
  learns this information. When someone 
  lands a hit on a foe in a fight, don’t just mark 
  down stress on your NPC’s write-up—talk 
  about how they fall back and look dazed for 
  a moment.
  Of course, you can also offer this job to 
  your players, if they enjoy a more collabora-
  tive play style. Nothing sells a success like 
  hearing the person who succeeded telling 
  how it works. Maybe you won’t do this every 
  time, but on occasion try using the line: “You 
  succeed! Tell us how.”
  
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  By contrast, a boring fact with a dull course of 
  action and no possible consequences has a diffi-
  culty of Fantastic. If your players haven’t quite 
  grasped how much they can do with declara-
  tions, you may need to lower the difficulties 
  to suit—but you should let them know what 
  makes a declaration more likely to succeed.
  Declaration as Reward
  Sometimes a player suggests a detail that is 
  so reasonable from a common sense stand-
  point, or so funny/cool/whatever, that the 
  idea of having him roll dice to make the 
  detail true seems ludicrous. Follow your 
  gut when this happens and don’t make the 
  player roll—just assume the declaration is 
  true and note down the aspect. You can look 
  at this as rewarding the player for good or 
  clever narration—he’s making your game 
  world more dynamic; in return, he gets to 
  tag the aspect he just brought into play. 
  Assessments
  Assessment difficulties follow a slightly different 
  set of guidelines than declarations because a 
  player will usually use an assessment action to 
  uncover an aspect that is hidden on another 
  character. This suggests the need for an opposed 
  roll, using whatever skills would be appropriate 
  to the situation. If the assessment target is not 
  a character, assume that the default difficulty is 
  Mediocre unless there are circumstances that 
  would modify that difficulty (see “Modifying 
  Difficulties” on page 311). 
  For example, if there’s a well-hidden air duct 
  that would provide an entry point to a building 
  for someone using the Burglary skill, and the 
  building’s security manager is an NPC in 
  your game, you could make a quick roll on the 
  manager’s Stealth skill (perhaps modified by 
  Craftsmanship) to see how well he hid the duct. 
  This would consequently serve as the difficulty 
  for the player’s Burglary roll to case the building.
  At your discretion, extra shifts on an assess-
  ment roll might reveal more than one aspect—
  the character does so well that he notices details 
  beyond what he was looking for. A good rule 
  of thumb is to give an extra aspect or fact at 3 
  shifts, at 5 shifts, and every +2 shifts thereafter.
  Dealing with Time
  There are two categories of time in this game: 
  story time and game time. 
  Story time is the measure of how long some-
  thing takes from the perspective of being “in the 
  story”—in other words, it’s time as far as the 
  characters are concerned. Seconds, minutes, 
  hours, days, weeks…everything characters do is 
  expected to take some amount of time. Anytime 
  you’re talking about characters dealing with 
  time, whether it’s trying to speed up a research 
  attempt or deliberately drawing out their prepa-
  rations, you’re talking about story time. 
  Game time (or real time) is altogether 
  different—it’s time as far as the players are 
  concerned, who are sitting there playing the 
  game. Game time is measured in a certain set of 
  discrete units:
  Exchange (conflict only): The amount of time 
  it takes in a conflict for everyone to take one 
  action and defend against any actions that are 
  directed against them—usually not longer 
  than a few minutes.
  Scene: The amount of time it takes to resolve 
  a conflict or accomplish some other purpose 
  (see “Starting and Ending Scenes” on page 307) 
  through the actions and interactions of PCs 
  and NPCs. Scenes can take a hugely variable 
  amount of time—from a couple of minutes 
  to half an hour or more—depending on their 
  content.
  Session: The collection of scenes that comprise 
  one “evening” of play; when you and your 
  friends pack it up and go home, you’ve ended 
  that session. A typical session of play runs for 
  a number of hours, usually between two and 
  four.
  Scenario (or “Arc”): The collection of several 
  sessions of play, usually centering on a few 
  large-scale plotlines. Sometimes, the divi-
  sions between scenarios are clear-cut, some-
  times not; it largely depends on how the GM 
  structures the game (see Building Scenarios, 
  page 340). Scenarios are typically composed 
  of at least two or three sessions, but might 
  sometimes require a few more.
  
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  Campaign: The entire collection of related 
  scenarios played by a group. A campaign can 
  theoretically last indefinitely, but more practi-
  cally they tend to last for about four to ten 
  scenarios. As with scenarios, a campaign can 
  be set up to specifically resolve an overarching 
  plot that runs the length of the campaign, 
  or it can simply be comprised of the smaller 
  stories that resolve within scenarios.
  The relationship between story time and 
  game time is not consistent or clear-cut—large 
  swaths of story time might go by simply by 
  narrating that it passes (“Okay, so you meet 
  up three weeks later and…”). Likewise, a single 
  exchange in a multifaceted conflict might take 
  ten minutes to resolve in game time, but only 
  describe what happens over thirty seconds of 
  story time. Generally speaking, you’re usually 
  not going to have to worry about this relation-
  ship—story time is more often than not a narra-
  tive convenience, so your primary concern will 
  be managing the flow of game time.
  However, there are some instances when 
  tracking story time becomes far more important. 
  If you’ve established during play that certain 
  events are going to take place after a certain 
  amount of story time (“The meeting is in two 
  days, guys.”), players may be extremely inter-
  ested in accomplishing certain goals before that 
  event takes place. A deadline or time constraint 
  is a great way to introduce tension into a session 
  or scene, the most obvious example being the 
  ticking clock on a bomb. 
  The Time Chart
  You can use the following chart as a way of 
  tracking increments of story time in the game. 
  You can round off any in-between ranges 
  according to your judgment; when in doubt, go 
  a step higher.
  Whenever a PC is attempting an action 
  where time is important, choose a reasonable 
  increment on the ladder as the starting point 
  and inform the player of how much time the 
  action will take. Any extra shifts the player gets 
  on the roll can be used to “buy down” this dura-
  tion, moving down one increment per shift. 
  Keep in mind that shifts spent to reduce time 
  can’t be used to gauge the quality of the char-
  acter’s success, and be sure to help narrate the 
  results accordingly.
  As an example, suppose a character 
  is attempting to use Investigation to 
  find someone’s hangout. You tell the 
  player that this investigation will take 
  the rest of the day, starting at “an after-
  noon” on the ladder. The character 
  has an appointment with a client that 
  evening, so the player decides to try 
  to get it done faster. He rolls and gets 
  one shift on the roll, which he spends 
  to complete his investigation in “a few 
  hours” instead. 
  That means he only barely succeeded 
  on his Investigation roll—he’ll learn 
  where the hangout is, but not any of 
  the extra information you might have 
  given him if he’d used that shift for 
  quality instead (like the fact that nearly 
  all the regular clientele have a strange 
  habit of carrying concealed firearms).
  This chart can also work as a 
  difficulty modifier before the roll. 
  Continuing with the above example, 
  you might also have said, “Well, he’s a 
  pretty public figure, so it shouldn’t be 
  too hard to find out where he hangs 
  out—I’ll say it’s a Fair. However, you 
  have somewhere to be in a few hours, 
  and it’d normally take you all after-
  noon, so we’ll say Good.”
  Time & Consequence 
  Recovery
  In Playing the Game (page 204), durations for 
  recovering from consequences are listed in game 
  time. Most of the time this will be appropriate, 
  but sometimes you’ll end up in a situation where 
  the amount of story time that passes would 
  reasonably allow for a character to recover from 
  a consequence. If you know you have a three-
  month break in story time from the end of one 
  session to the start of the next, for example, it 
  wouldn’t make sense for someone with the 
  Moderate consequence of Bruised Ribs to 
  continue to suffer from it next session.
  In terms of story time, recovering from a mild 
  consequence takes about an hour. Recovering 
  from a moderate consequence takes anywhere 
  from a day to a week. Recovering from a severe 
  consequence takes several weeks to a couple of 
  months. Recovering from an extreme conse-
  quence is essentially not possible—though after 
  a major milestone (see Advancement, page 88), 
  Time 
  Increments
  instant
  a few moments
  half a minute
  a minute
  a few minutes
  15 minutes
  half an hour
  an hour
  a few hours
  an afternoon
  a day
  a few days
  a week
  a few weeks
  a month
  a few months
  a season
  half a year
  a year
  a few years
  a decade
  a generation
  a mortal lifetime
  several mortal lifetimes
  and so on
  
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  it might be possible to reword the new aspect 
  into something less egregious. Remember, 
  you should require ample justification for the 
  recovery process to begin before you allow a PC 
  to start marking off that time (Playing the Game, 
  page 220).
  If you aren’t sure whether or not you should 
  use story time for recovery from a certain conse-
  quence, consider that the primary purpose of a 
  consequence is to be felt—if you haven’t had the 
  chance to bring the consequence back into play 
  somehow, use whichever method gives you the 
  most opportunities to do so before the PC heals. 
  However, if the recovery process has started, 
  don’t change your mind if the PC heals before 
  you can get around to using the consequence—
  there will more than likely be a next time.
  Adjudicating 
  Aspects
  Aspects (page 98) has most of the guidelines 
  you’re going to need regarding the use of aspects, 
  whether for invocation or for compel. For the 
  most part, consult that chapter.
  The primary mechanical function of aspects, 
  from the GM’s point of view, is to help funnel 
  fate points back to the players so that they can 
  handle larger or more important conflicts. If a 
  player is sitting there with over half his charac-
  ter’s base refresh in fate points (i.e., 5 or more 
  for an 8-refresh game), you should probably 
  be compelling other players more than him. 
  Likewise, if a player is sitting there nearly devoid 
  of fate points, you should focus your attention 
  on coming up with compels to help fill up his 
  stock. 
  Constructing a cheat sheet for yourself with 
  all the PCs’ current aspects on it is really useful. 
  Canny players will look for their own opportu-
  nities to take compels and cash out of certain 
  conflicts (page 206), so you don’t have to worry 
  about being 100% responsible for this, but 
  consider that there are certain kinds of compels 
  that are exclusively your province (page 101). 
  You  should try to use those as much as possible 
  to help set up scenes and drive the story in unex-
  pected directions.
  Through the back-and-forth of players 
  spending fate points, getting compelled to 
  “recharge” their supply, and spending them again, 
  you end up with a rhythmic cycle that sets the 
  pace for your game—big conflicts happen when 
  there are a lot of fate points on the table, and big 
  twists and turns in the story happen when there 
  aren’t, which creates circumstances that drive 
  the PCs to more big conflicts. You’ll find more 
  advice about working with that cycle in Building 
  Scenarios (page 340). 
  Taking Extra Time
  A player might mitigate the results of a 
  failed roll by choosing to take extra time 
  to do it. Every increment on the time chart 
  greater than the default time it takes to 
  complete the action allows the player a +1 to 
  his result. This way, if it’s especially impor-
  tant to the player that he finds a certain clue 
  or achieves a certain goal, he can—it just 
  takes him much longer than he planned. 
  Here’s the important part, though: if 
  you offer this, it has to come at the cost of 
  some inconvenience. This isn’t a “get out of 
  failure free” card to succeed at any action. 
  The player failed the roll, and that means 
  there must be a complication. (For another 
  idea of how to handle this, look at “Failure as 
  ‘Success, but…’” on page 310.)
  Using the Investigation example from 
  this section, if the player failed the roll by 
  2, he could choose to move two increments 
  up the time chart and succeed at the roll. 
  That puts his total time at “a few days” and 
  introduces a complication. The GM decides 
  that the character learns where the hangout 
  is; however, the target of his inquiry learns 
  about the investigation. When he shows up 
  to his target’s favorite hangout, he’s going 
  to find out that his target is surrounded by 
  paid toughs who aren’t too enthused about 
  the PC’s snooping!
  In reverse, you can also use this to skip 
  having to roll when there’s no pressure of 
  time. If a character is trying to pick a Fair 
  difficulty lock that he could normally do in 
  a few minutes, it’s not out of bounds for a 
  player who’s not under time pressure to just 
  say his character is taking a half hour to do 
  it carefully and get automatic success.
  
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  Partial Refresh 
  (Optional Rule)
  You may want a more reliable and consistent 
  method of handling fate point distribution, 
  depending on how your group tends to handle 
  the presence of compels. It can be difficult to 
  think of worthy compels on the fly, and while 
  this book tries to provide you as many options 
  as possible, you might prefer to have something 
  steady that you can use as a backup.
  If that’s the case, you have the option of 
  including a partial refresh in your game—basi-
  cally, allowing the players to regain a portion of 
  the character’s refresh total at certain defined 
  points in the game session. This also allows 
  you to fine-tune the flow of fate points between 
  sessions depending on their length—if you had 
  a short session, it might not seem appropriate to 
  allow a full refresh before continuing on.
  If you want to use this method, then each 
  character has both a quarter- and half-refresh, 
  in addition to his full refresh, which should be 
  noted on the character sheet. Round up any .5 
  or higher. So, a character whose full refresh is 5 
  would have a half-refresh of 3 (2.5 rounded up) 
  and a quarter-refresh of 1 (1.25 rounded down). 
  You can then decide on a time interval after 
  which the players receive one of their partial 
  refreshes, adding that number of fate points to 
  their current total.
  For example, assuming a fairly normal session 
  length of approximately 4 hours, you could give 
  quarter-refreshes every hour, or half-refreshes 
  every two hours. Likewise, if you know your 
  whole game session is only going to last a couple 
  of hours, you might suggest that the players only 
  get a half-refresh going into the next session. 
  This allows you to lessen some of your depen-
  dency on compels to get fate points moving 
  around and introduces a more rigid sense of 
  structure to the session. Be aware that this could 
  make your sessions seem a bit more predictable, 
  which might be a negative for some groups. 
  Let your players know at character creation 
  if you’re using this optional rule, so they know 
  how taking that one last stunt or power impacts 
  their partial refreshes.
  Aspects and Narration
  To quote from the Aspects chapter, “The process 
  of using an aspect begins by declaring that one 
  is relevant.” Especially in a game that’s been 
  running for some time, it’s easy to get into a 
  habit of skipping over or glossing over the narra-
  tion of an aspect in play. Do not, under any 
  circumstances, allow this to occur. Aspects are 
  the primary source for colorful and interesting 
  narrative in a scene, and giving that part of the 
  process short shrift will ultimately make a lot of 
  your scenes boring and dull. Aspects shouldn’t 
  Carmichael and I 
  argued a ton, it’s 
  true. Still one of 
  the best cops the 
  force has had.
  
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  be perceived as general-use methods of point-
  spending; the object is to integrate them into 
  the scene. 
  With that said, you should give your players a 
  wide latitude regarding how to narrate the aspect 
  into the scene. All that matters is that the group 
  has a clear picture of why that aspect is both 
  relevant and important at that time. Sometimes 
  that’s as simple as a sentence that includes the 
  aspect (“I wheel him about and shove his face 
  into the nearby Deep Fryer!”), and some-
  times it’s a little more abstract, where the player 
  narrates his character’s thoughts or convictions 
  (“There’s no way I’m going to let some punk do 
  that to Biff’s Steady Girlfriend.”). 
  Both of these approaches are fine, as long 
  as they add something to the scene while 
  you’re playing. 
  Adjudicating Skills
  Most of the specific cases you’re going to run 
  into regarding skills have already been covered 
  earlier in this book, either in the Skills chapter 
  itself (page 120), in Playing the Game (page 192), 
  or in the guidelines given above. 
  Some players may try to use their skills in 
  ways that seem counterintuitive to you. A player 
  might ask you if he can use Fists to perform an 
  assessment action and learn something about 
  an opponent’s fighting style, or if he can use 
  Intimidation to defend against a physical attack 
  by creeping the opponent out so badly that he 
  misses. You don’t want to immediately refuse 
  these kinds of requests without some additional 
  consideration.
  First, you should ask the player to justify his 
  request in a little more detail. Often, a player 
  isn’t trying to “cheat” when he suggests an 
  unorthodox use for a skill—it’s just something 
  cool he thought of in the moment. If the skill use 
  would create a funny or entertaining moment 
  in the game, by all means, allow it to happen. 
  That said, if such a skill use stops being funny 
  or entertaining and becomes boring and rote, 
  feel free to make it more difficult or disallow it 
  altogether.
  If you feel the need to restrict that particular 
  use of a skill, keep in mind that stunts (Mortal 
  Stunts, page 146) are the primary means that the 
  game uses to add more trappings to skills. You 
  could decide that, while you’ll allow the partic-
  ular action one time, taking advantage of the 
  same action in the future requires the character 
  to take a stunt that allows it. To punctuate that 
  requirement, you could even have the player 
  make his initial attempt at a difficulty of +2, 
  reflecting the fact that the character isn’t accus-
  tomed to using his skill in such an unusual way. 
  Some skills can present a particular challenge 
  in determining how to deal with them in play. 
  Those special cases are discussed below.
  Athletics
  Climbing
  The biggest issue with climbing (and actu-
  ally, with most applications of Athletics) is the 
  temptation to overuse it even when it would be 
  boring or a waste of time to do so. Remember 
  that if you can’t think of a way to make failure 
  interesting, you shouldn’t call for a roll at all. If 
  there’s nothing significant pressuring the char-
  acter, and there are no time constraints, assume 
  that any climb the character tries to make is 
  eventually successful.
  If there is a time constraint of some kind, use 
  the guidelines given with the time chart above—
  pick a baseline amount of time it normally takes 
  to complete the climb, and let the player roll to 
  try to get shifts in order to get it done faster. If 
  you want that roll to be at a difficulty higher than 
  Mediocre, include some scene aspects that affect 
  the climbing surface, such as Few Handholds, 
  Slippery Surface, or Long Way Up (see 
  the guidelines for modifying difficulties on  
  page 311). 
  If there are other pressures that make it 
  worthwhile to play out the climb, another option 
  is to treat the climb as a challenge (page 324), 
  letting the player gradually accumulate shifts 
  toward success while whatever is creating the 
  pressure gets the chance to act. The guidelines 
  for modifying difficulty remain the same.
  In any case, climbing should usually be 
  binary—if the character can’t do it, he typi-
  cally figures that out near the bottom. So either 
  he succeeds or he doesn’t, rather than getting 
  partway up, slipping, and falling. However, if 
  you want to insert such a moment of tension, 
  halfway up a climb is an excellent time to compel 
  an aspect (environmental ones are good for this) 
  and, if the player accepts, demand a new roll as 
  soon as the effects of the compel have occurred.
  Finally, really long climbs might require 
  the character’s Athletics skill to be restricted 
  (page 214) by his Endurance skill—let your judg-
  ment be your guide for this.
  
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  Falling
  Gravity is an implacable foe, and falls are its 
  method of attack. The ground makes the attack 
  on the victim—and it never misses. It’s an espe-
  cially nasty weapon, its blows hitting particu-
  larly hard. 
  The hit is equal to 5 stress for every 10 full 
  feet a character falls, so a character falling from 
  the top of the third floor (or around 30 feet) will 
  face a 15-stress hit. 
  Most kinds of mundane protection simply 
  don’t work against stress taken from a fall. That 
  leaves stress boxes, consequences, and supernat-
  ural powers to absorb the effects. Armor from 
  supernatural toughness powers (page 184) applies 
  (unless the Catch says otherwise), as does armor 
  from shielding spells (page 252) constructed to 
  absorb falling impact.
  The player may roll Athletics to try to reduce 
  this somewhat, but usually only for short falls. 
  The target is Mediocre; for every two shifts 
  gained on the roll, gain one point of armor 
  against the falling damage. So a Great (+4) 
  Athletics roll would take 2 stress away from the 
  fall’s stress value.
  The falling rules are not an invitation for 
  super-strong characters and spellcasters to 
  start picking people up and tossing them to a 
  great height, only to fall down and take egre-
  gious falling damage. That’s an attack, and the 
  stress dealt by any falling component is already 
  included in the stress of the attack. If your 
  force-bolt “uppercuts” a guy so he flies up and 
  then falls back down with a crunch of bone, the 
  damage dealt by the attack itself accounts for the 
  “fall back down” part—essentially, in this case, 
  falling is a special effect, a detail of color.
  Additionally, knocking characters off of high 
  places should have plenty of escape clauses. The 
  victim should always have the opportunity to 
  concede in an entertaining fashion so he can 
  opt out of the otherwise merciless application 
  of the falling rules. Short of that, the victim 
  might have ways to simply prevent the fall from 
  happening—an Athletics roll to grab onto a 
  handhold right as he goes over the edge, a quick 
  evocation to create a cushion of air that slows 
  the fall to a gentle glide, and other such things.
  When it comes right down to it, the rules for 
  falls themselves should be applied rarely. We’re 
  supplying them for folks who like that sort of 
  thing, but their application should only occur 
  when all other avenues have been exhausted.
  Jumping
  Jumping is sort of an odd beast in games. 
  Consider the classic situation of characters 
  looking to jump over a bottomless pit—as 
  GM, you want the scene to have some tension, 
  but you don’t want anyone falling to his death 
  because of dumb luck. Aspects and fate points 
  can mitigate this to some extent, but this means 
  you don’t want to set the difficulty too high. 
  If you want to introduce the possibility of 
  failure here, consider the difficulty you set to be 
  the point where they barely make the jump. So 
  crossing a large pit might still only be a Fair, even 
  if you imagine the distance as being pretty far—
  getting that Fair exactly might mean the char-
  acter is hanging from the edge on the other end 
  of the pit. Even that small threat of failure will 
  cause players to respond strongly and feel the 
  incentive to use aspects and fate points.
  When not looking to introduce the chance 
  of failure, simply avoid calling for a roll to clear 
  the pit, and instead give it a high border value 
  (page 212) to increase the cost of crossing from 
  one zone (the near side of the pit) to another 
  (the far side). Another softer approach is letting 
  a failure be a realization that the character just 
  isn’t up to the task (“You missed the roll by two? 
  Well, it’s clear to you that it’s too far. You’ll have 
  to find another way around, or get someone to 
  throw you a rope.”). 
  That said, if it’s only an apparently bottom-
  less pit, and something interesting (rather than 
  something lethal) happens to people who fail…
  let the dice roll!
  Contacts
  Setting Contact Difficulties
  There are two factors to consider when you’re 
  setting the difficulty for a Contacts roll: how 
  familiar the character is with the area, and how 
  well-connected he is among the people he’s 
  seeking contact with. This will often be obvious 
  from common sense and/or the presence of 
  a relevant aspect—a character in his home 
  city who has an aspect mentioning a certain 
  group will not face any increased difficulties on 
  Contacts rolls, for instance. If either of these 
  things is missing, you should consider it a factor 
  to increase the difficulty (+2 for being unfa-
  miliar, +2 for lacking obvious connection). 
  A player can mitigate these penalties by 
  spending extra time to overcome them according 
  to the time chart. If he takes that route, those 
  This is so 
  Indiana 
  Jones.
  Ah, shielding 
  spells. I 
  might know 
  a thing or 
  two about 
  those.
  
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  penalties shouldn’t plague him again—assume 
  that he used that time to give him an inroad to 
  future Contacts efforts. However, if he took the 
  expedient way out and invoked some aspects to 
  help him succeed, you should continue to levy 
  those penalties on future attempts until he takes 
  the time to do something about it.
  Contacts rolls are also an excellent chance to 
  use the “Taking Extra Time” option on page 316. 
  Craftsmanship
  Building
  Most of the time, you’re not going to want to 
  roll for building things—it’s time-consuming 
  and boring, and there aren’t a lot of interesting 
  consequences for failure. As such, most appli-
  cations of building rely on declarations—the 
  player sets up the proper circumstances and 
  declares that he builds something, and voilà, 
  he does. Those circumstances revolve mainly 
  around three attendant factors: tools, materials, 
  and time.
  Having the proper tools and materials 
  essentially means having a workshop that has 
  a sufficient rating to work on the item in ques-
  tion. A character’s workshop is dependent on 
  his Resources skill; see the skill description on 
  page 139 for more information. The rating of the 
  workshop needed is based on the item’s quality 
  rating, which is equivalent to its place on the 
  cost ladder for Resources (see “Buying Things” 
  on page 322). If the character does not have an 
  appropriate workshop, he must either make 
  a Resources roll to acquire one as described 
  on page 139, or he must rely on the workshop or 
  Resources of someone else.
  Having adequate time is another issue. Most 
  things take a fairly long time to build from 
  scratch—assume that, under ideal circum-
  stances, an item takes a day to build, +1 step on 
  the time chart for every rank of quality above 
  Mediocre (so an item of Good quality would 
  take a few weeks to build). If the character’s 
  Craftsmanship skill is lower than the quality of 
  the item he is trying to build, that also requires a 
  compensation of time (assuming he doesn’t wish 
  to roll): add another +1 step for every point 
  of rank difference (so an Average craftsman 
  working on a Good quality item needs a few 
  months on it). 
  It should be the player’s choice whether he 
  wishes to roll against a difficulty equal to the 
  quality rating in order to speed this up, or if he’d 
  prefer to just take the extra time. 
  Fixing
  Like building, fixing a broken item is usually 
  more an issue of time and effort than anything 
  else—it’s not really the subject for a roll unless 
  there’s a deadline involved or the character is 
  working under bad conditions.
  If either is the case, the base difficulty to 
  repair a broken item is also equivalent to its base 
  quality rating. Default time is a half hour, +1 
  on the time chart for every step of quality above 
  Mediocre. Trying to attempt repairs outside an 
  appropriate workshop (see above) raises the 
  difficulty of the repair by 2.
  Jury-Rigging
  If the character isn’t in a workshop and the 
  player doesn’t want to deal with the problem 
  of increased difficulty, you can have the 
  player do a jury-rig instead—roll against 
  the item quality as usual, but the effect 
  of the repairs only lasts for a scene. If the 
  player gets shifts on the roll, he can extend 
  the duration for another scene per shift.  If 
  the player wants to do this a lot, he should 
  consider taking Jury-Rigger stunt from 
  page 150.
  Breaking
  Items can take stress like characters can; 
  assume that an item has 2 stress boxes, modi-
  fied by the item quality in the same way as the 
  Endurance skill (page 130). An item “defends” 
  against attempts  to break it using either its 
  quality rating or an appropriate skill used by 
  whoever is holding the item. Most items do not 
  suffer consequences; once their stress track is 
  bypassed, they are considered inoperable.
  Large or complex items, devices, or structures 
  (such as buildings or safes) are more accurately 
  treated as challenges and could take conse-
  quences depending on the situation. See page 324 
  for more information.
  
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  Might
  Lifting
  Use these as a difficulty guideline when someone 
  wants to use Might to lift something:
  Lifting
  Terrible (-2) A fully loaded back-
  pack or rucksack
  Poor (-1)
  A child
  Mediocre (+0)
   A heavy chair
  Average (+1)
  Most adults
  Fair (+2)
  Most furniture, most 
  heavy-set adults
  Good (+3)
  Large furniture, like 
  dressers or sofas
  Epic (+7)
  A motorcycle
  Legendary (+8)
  A small car
  Legendary+1 (+9)
  A midsized car
  And so on. Rolls are not usually required 
  unless the character is trying to exceed his usual 
  max limit. Keep in mind that each level repre-
  sents what a character can lift by expending all 
  of his effort; he isn’t really going to be able to 
  move much more than a zone carrying some-
  thing that’s equal to his base Might. A character 
  can carry something two levels below his Might 
  for a short distance (allowing him to make a 
  sprint roll restricted by Might, with the item’s 
  difficulty as a border value). He can carry some-
  thing four levels below his Might with no real 
  penalty or can toss it a distance of one zone. 
  Something six levels below his Might could be 
  used as a thrown weapon.
  Inhuman, Supernatural, and Mythic 
  Strength increase the effective Might rating for 
  the purposes of lifting. See the individual skill 
  descriptions for details.
  Breaking Through Things
  Use the difficulty guidelines shown here when 
  someone wants to use Might to break through 
  something.
  Remember that objects can have stress 
  tracks—in this case, use the difficulty both as 
  their “defense” and as the “quality” to modify 
  their stress track as per Breaking (page 320). 
  Inhuman, Supernatural, and Mythic Strength 
  increase a character’s effective Might rating for 
  the purposes of breaking through things.
  Breaking Through
  Terrible (-2) Window glass
  Poor (-1)
  Thin wood
  Fair (+2)
  Thick wood, like an 
  interior door
  Good (+3)
  Really heavy or 
  thick wood, like an 
  exterior door
  Fantastic (+6)
  Metal door (car 
  door, fire door), 
  weak interior wall
  Epic (+7)
  Interior wall
  Legendary (+8)
  Thin exterior wall
  Legendary+2 (+10)
  Brick or weak stone
  Legendary+4 (+12)
  Reinforced metal, 
  like a vault door.
  Why the 
  gaps after 
  Good in both 
  ladders?
  Some kinds 
  of lifting 
  and breaking 
  just aren’t 
  in the reach 
  of human 
  capability: 
  you need a 
  Strength power.
  
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  Resources
  Buying Things
  Sometimes during a session, a PC will want 
  to buy or acquire something he doesn’t already 
  have. Generally speaking, it isn’t recommended 
  that you spend a lot of time on a scene that’s 
  explicitly for the sake of shopping for some-
  thing, but if it becomes really important to deal 
  with for some reason, you have a few options for 
  handling it.
  Items and services have a cost rating that, like 
  everything else in the game, uses the adjective 
  ladder. You can use the chart above as a guideline 
  to determine what a player might need to roll to 
  acquire a particular item. This is not a compre-
  hensive list and prices change constantly—feel 
  free to do Internet research or browse a current 
  catalog to help determine the cost of items not 
  listed or which seem under- or overpriced.
  Your first option for handling the purchase of 
  an item or good is simply to go by declaration—
  a player can almost always declare that his char-
  acter has or can reasonably afford anything that’s 
  2 levels or more below the character’s Resources. 
  You may want to extend that to 1 level below 
  Resources as well, if the character has another 
  skill that might reasonably justify possessing a 
  certain item (for example, if the character has 
  high Craftsmanship and Fair Resources, you can 
  probably assume he has a professional toolkit of 
  some kind).
  For anything higher than Resources–2, or 
  in any case where the item in question is rare, 
  restricted in legality (like, only for military 
  or police use), or has to be acquired within a 
  certain timeframe, call for a skill roll. Item rarity 
  and legal restrictions are both factors that will 
  increase the difficulty as per the usual guide-
  lines—this chart only covers the basic value of 
  the item. 
  Buying Things
  Price
  Amount
  Can Buy
  Terrible
  Under $10
  A candy bar, cigarettes, a movie ticket, a paperback novel, a cheap 
  meal, a quick cab ride, over-the-counter drugs
  Poor
  Under $50
  A night in a cheap hotel, a basic cellular phone, most common hand 
  tools, basic first aid kit, common prescription medications, decent 
  clothes, backpack, common hand weapons (knives, batons, baseball 
  bats, etc.), alarm clock, a good flashlight, cab ride across town
  Mediocre
  Under $250
  Nice clothes, a good cellular phone, one night in an good hotel, 
  a very comprehensive first aid kit, 4-man tent, a digital camera, 
  most prescription medications, most shop tools, uncommon hand 
  weapons (swords, axes, maces), discount plane tickets
  Average
  Under $500
  Fancy clothes, rental of an office or small apartment for a month, 
  bicycle, basic professional toolkit (for a plumber, electrician, or the 
  like), most handguns and shotguns, a very basic personal computer, 
  video game console, a nice pair of binoculars, most plane tickets
  Fair
  Under $1,000
  Most hunting rifles and carbines, nice apartment for a month, basic 
  laptop computer, decent personal computer, decent LCD television, 
  an ATV or dirt bike
  Good
  Under $5,000
  Military gear (body armor, assault rifles, full-auto submachineguns), 
  a cheap scooter or moped, a tricked-out laptop or personal computer, 
  a large plasma television, a semester at a state college (in-state)
  Great
  Under $10,000
  A compact car, a motorcycle, basic surgical procedures, a small 
  motorboat, a semester at a state college (out-of-state)
  Superb
  Under $100,000
  A small and/or rural house, a luxury car or sports car, a personal 
  yacht, a motor home
  Fantastic
  Under $1 million
  A private jet, a small mansion or nice urban house, a local business
  Epic
  Under $10 million
  A small corporation, an office building
  Legendary
  Money is no object
  A personal island, a large corporation
  
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  In other words, while a military-grade assault 
  rifle might only be a Good on the chart, actually 
  acquiring one if the character isn’t in the military 
  will probably require a roll of Superb—the extra 
  money represents the palms he has to grease in 
  order to get the permits necessary to own it (or 
  to get someone to find it on the black market 
  for him). A player could try to use an addi-
  tional skill, such as Contacts, to remove these 
  difficulties.
  Also keep in mind that the items on the chart 
  are listed at their minimum quality—a player 
  can choose to spend more money on an item if 
  he wishes, which would give him a correspond-
  ingly higher cost rating. So if one of your PCs 
  is just burning to own a katana, he can certainly 
  acquire one at Mediocre cost, but it won’t be 
  anything special—if he wants to be a cool kid, 
  he’ll try to get one valued at Fair or Good, which 
  might make his sword an exceptionally well-
  made import with genuine folded steel, real 
  rayskin on the grip, and historically accurate 
  fittings.
  In practical terms, higher quality items 
  have more stress boxes and are more resistant 
  to being damaged (see “Breaking” under the 
  Craftsmanship section on page 320). 
  Adjudicating 
  Powers and Stunts
  Most of the guidelines that apply to skills also 
  apply to powers and stunts, given that their 
  main function is to enhance or expand the way 
  that skills work. Consult individual power and 
  stunt descriptions for further details, and refer 
  to the guidelines for skills when in doubt.
  That said, we do have a couple ideas for you 
  consider...
  Personified Powers
  Several powers that PCs might gain access to 
  tie to a thinking, potentially interactive entity 
  in some fashion. Sponsored Magic (page 287) is 
  the most prominent, but things like Demonic 
  Copilot (page 175) and even Feeding Depen-
  dency  (page  190) apply as well. When these 
  powers are in effect there’s an opportunity for 
  roleplay. 
  This could be the negotiation with a spon-
  sor’s agenda—the Winter Knight looking to call 
  on the Court’s power to serve his own needs, 
  only to find himself in a psychic conversation 
  with Queen Mab herself and having to justify 
  his request. 
  Or it could manifest as a White Court 
  vampire’s struggle with his inner demon as he 
  faces down a hunger check on the dice. 
  Ultimately this is simply a bit of color, 
  without weight in the rules, but giving a power 
  a face is a powerful tool for (forgive us) getting 
  inside a character’s head and making what 
  would normally be a simple use of a power into 
  an event, a scene all of its own. You’ll want to 
  use this technique lightly (the other players 
  around the table won’t get to participate in these 
  moments), but it can be a helpful addition to 
  your box of GM’s tools.
  I sense that 
  there’s 
  some wish 
  fulfillment 
  going on 
  here.
  You already 
  have a really 
  nice katana. 
  Hush.
  Um, it’s not 
  exactly 
  mine…
  Income Stability 
  and Social Class
  The Resources skill is a measure of dispos-
  able income, which means that it doesn’t 
  always match up with a character’s overall 
  wealth or social class. In general, Resources 
  of Average through Good represents the 
  range of the “middle class,” but it could also 
  represent someone who has unusual finan-
  cial acumen or lives far below his means. 
  In addition to the Resources rating 
  itself, a player can represent unusual facets 
  of his character’s wealth through the use 
  of aspects—a character with an aspect of 
  Constantly in Debt might be forced to 
  take compels to be “tapped out” suddenly, 
  even if he has a relatively high Resources. 
  Likewise, a character with Jet-Setting 
  Dilettante might only have an Average 
  or Fair Resources, but there are other 
  factors that afford him a high social status 
  regardless. 
  This also means that, when a character 
  is rolling his Resources skill at his level 
  or above, he’s trying to make a significant 
  purchase—in other words, one he can’t just 
  make over and over again. A character at 
  Good Resources can’t go buy six scooters 
  in six subsequent scenes; he can afford one 
  or maybe two with financing. Obviously, 
  you don’t want to get too detailed with this 
  kind of stuff—suffice it to say, you should 
  limit rolls for buying stuff to one or two per 
  session at most.
  
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  Predictions and Prayers
  Some powers may allow the character to make 
  a prediction or a prayer that will affect events to 
  come. Mechanically, these are one and the same 
  thing: they manifest as aspects that are placed 
  on the “world”—the campaign itself—and 
  remain in effect until the events they pertain to 
  have played out. As the GM it’s your job to take 
  ownership of an aspect like this and see that it 
  plays out. That means you’ll need to keep an eye 
  out for times when the aspect might be used 
  to compel characters (PCs and NPCs alike) to 
  guide events towards the outcome predicted or 
  prayed for, and alert the players when a tag is 
  available on these aspects so they can exercise 
  their own will to guide events along as well.
  Other Situations
  Here are a few other situations to consider that 
  don’t simply involve difficulties, skills, or powers.
  Challenges
  Sometimes when a PC is trying to accomplish a 
  complicated or involved goal, it’s appropriate to 
  track precisely how much progress he’s making 
  over time. Usually, you would do this in a 
  conflict scene—one PC is trying to accomplish 
  some goal in the middle of a fight while other 
  PCs are actually doing the fighting. You might 
  also have a scene where a PC is racing to get 
  something done quickly before something bad 
  happens or another character accomplishes a 
  goal—like hotwiring a car before zombies can 
  get across the parking lot to come eat him. Sure, 
  you can use the time chart for this if you want, 
  but “zooming in” the focus a bit can create a 
  dramatic and thrilling scene.
  When this happens, you want to set up the 
  goal as a challenge for the PC; determine a 
  base difficulty for rolling to overcome the chal-
  lenge, the amount of time each roll takes, and 
  a number of shifts the PC has to accumulate 
  before the goal is completed. The PC can roll 
  against the challenge every exchange (or unit of 
  time), adding up the shifts he gets on each roll 
  and counting them toward the total. Failure 
  on any roll means losing all of the accumulated 
  shifts to that point. When the PC has accumu-
  lated enough shifts, he accomplishes the goal.
  In a way, you can look at it as giving the chal-
  lenge a special kind of stress track. A character 
  can try to do maneuvers against a challenge 
  just like he could with an opponent, using the 
  aspects gained to help speed his progress.
  Example: In a scene straight out of a horror 
  movie, Will Borden is trying to get a car started 
  before a horde of ravenous zombies reaches him 
  and his friends on the far side of a parking lot.
  The GM decides this situation would be 
  best framed as a challenge, with each roll being 
  a minute as the zombies advance. The car is 
  Great quality, and the GM decides that Chad, 
  Will’s player, needs 5 shifts total to get the car 
  started. She also decides that the ghouls will 
  be there in about five minutes—Chad has five 
  rolls to get the car started if Will doesn’t want a 
  fight on his hands. 
  Chad’s first Craftsmanship roll comes up 
  a Fantastic—two shifts get added to his total. 
  He’s off to a good start. His second roll doesn’t 
  go so well, though—he gets a Good, and loses 
  his two previous shifts! The GM describes 
  smoke billowing from the car as Will works on 
  it, while the zombies get closer and closer.
  Chad decides to try to maneuver, so he 
  makes an Alertness roll to say that Will notices 
  an extra bottle of coolant under the seat (also 
  establishing that the car is having radiator 
  trouble)—he gets a Great on the roll and gets 
  to add the aspect Bottle of Coolant to the 
  scene. 
  In the fourth exchange, Chad rolls his 
  Craftsmanship and gets an incredible result of 
  Epic! He tags his declared aspect and increases 
  that result to Legendary+1, giving him the 
  5 shifts he needs to fix the car. Will and his 
  friends speed away just a minute before the 
  zombies get there…
  Billy, this seems 
  really similar to 
  some of your rules 
  for spellcasting.
  Yeah, this is basically a 
  simplified version of the 
  mechanics for casting a 
  thaumaturgical spell, except 
  for mundane situations.
  
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  Environmental Hazards
  Sometimes a character has to contend with 
  environmental hazards such as fire, extreme 
  cold, exposure to corrosive or toxic substances, 
  and other elements of that nature. By and large, 
  the best way to handle something like this is to 
  give the hazard a rating on the adjective ladder 
  that suggests its intensity, and allow it to “attack” 
  and “maneuver” against characters as though it’s 
  an actual opponent. PCs usually defend against 
  environmental conditions with Endurance, but 
  Athletics might apply in some cases (if the situ-
  ation is more about avoidance than resistance). 
  A failed defense inflicts stress and/or relevant 
  consequences as normal. An environment might 
  be able to affect a PC multiple times at a regular 
  interval—you could call for an “attack” every half 
  hour the PC is out walking around in a frozen 
  tundra, for instance.
  The rating for a hazard should be based on 
  what would reasonably be required to avoid the 
  effects: Mediocre or Average for a dangerous 
  but easily avoided threat (the early stages of 
  a burning building), Fair or Good for a threat 
  that’s fairly pervasive (a smoke-filled room), and 
  Great or higher for something that would be 
  almost impossible to avoid (being in the middle 
  of a bonfire). 
  For those instances when an environmental 
  hazard’s effects are particularly direct (like a 
  flamethrower) or are particularly potent (like 
  exposure to radiation), you should also assign 
  a Weapon rating. Most things that are this 
  dangerous should be Weapon:3 or higher. 
  Some hazards—like sunlight or holy 
  ground—only apply to creatures which are 
  vulnerable to the hazard, leaving others alone.
  Explosions and Whole-
  Zone Effects
  Grenades and other explosives are a vicious, 
  nasty business—not only are the lightest of 
  them rated at Weapon:4, but they have the 
  unique ability to affect everyone in an entire 
  zone (perhaps even multiple zones). Grenades 
  are thrown using the Weapons skill; take the 
  thrower’s roll as an attack against every single 
  person in that zone, friend or foe, and let the 
  chips fall where they may. If that seems nasty, it 
  should—only the hardiest of supernatural crea-
  tures come close to faring well when explosives 
  enter the picture, and that’s only because they 
  can survive the loss of most of their flesh. 
  If the explosive in question is stationary, like 
  a landmine or a set charge, the difficulty to avoid 
  it is based on how well the explosive was placed. 
  Craftsmanship (requiring a stunt for the appro-
  priate training) is the skill used to set this diffi-
  culty—either make a quick roll for the bomber, 
  or simply use his skill total, whichever is more 
  expedient.
  Other hazards might also affect a whole 
  zone or multiple zones—sonic weapons, 
  sudden floods, and earthquakes come imme-
  diately to mind. Consider whether the effect 
  of such hazards would be best expressed as an 
  attack, maneuver, or simply a scene aspect, and 
  roll according to the guidelines above under 
  “Environmental Hazards” if necessary.
  Wizards can turn an evocation attack into a 
  whole-zone effect by calling up an extra 2 shifts 
  of power (page 251).
  How does 
  sunlight 
  work with 
  a vampire’s 
  “Catch”?
  It’s an 
  environmental 
  hazard which 
  does damage 
  that satisfies 
  the catch 
  condition, and 
  counts as a 
  compel on the 
  vampire’s High 
  concept aspect.
  What a lovely visual, Billy. Thanks for that.
  
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  Spray Attacks
  Some weapons have the ability to affect multiple 
  targets in one attack, either because they have 
  full-auto firing capabilities (military SMGs and 
  assault rifles) or because there’s some kind of 
  consistency or spread in the shape of the attack 
  (flamethrowers or shotguns). This allows a char-
  acter to split his attack among multiple targets.
  To do this, the player rolls the attack as usual, 
  but then divides the attack up among the oppo-
  nents before they roll a defense. Each attack 
  must be at a minimum of Average (+1). So, if 
  the player rolls a Great (+4), he can attack four 
  targets at Average, two at Average and one at 
  Fair, two at Fair, or any combination thereof. 
  The weapon’s full rating applies to each attack.
  Example: The proverbial shit has hit the fan, 
  and Karrin Murphy finds herself mixing it 
  up with a group of three ghouls chasing her 
  across a parking lot. Fortunately, she acquired 
  a submachine gun (Weapon:2) from an over-
  turned SWAT truck in the previous scene, and 
  she decides to open up on the ghouls.
  Karrin’s player, Shannon, rolls her Guns 
  and comes up with a Fantastic (+6). She 
  knows she wants to spray them, but she also 
  knows they’re damn fast, so she invokes her 
  Champion Marksman aspect to bring the 
  roll up to Legendary (+8). That allows her to 
  split up her attack into two Great (+4) attacks.
  The GM rolls for each ghoul—one of them 
  defends at Great and takes a 2-stress physical 
  hit from the attack, and the other gets a horrible 
  roll and defends at Mediocre, taking a whop-
  ping 6-stress physical hit. These are name-
  less NPCs, so the GM decides that one of the 
  ghouls is taken out, and she describes the ghoul 
  scattering back across the pavement as a hail of 
  bullets hits it center mass. 
  The other two are still coming, though. 
  Murphy runs.
  Wizards can also do this with any evocation, 
  though there are some additional wrinkles. See 
  page 251 for the details.
  Impact Damage
  At some point, you may want to have one char-
  acter try to hit another character with a car or 
  other speeding object. This can be considered an 
  attack using Weapon:5(!) for the car. Generally, 
  most massive objects like that should be about 
  Weapon:4 or Weapon:5, like explosives—only 
  the hardiest of supernatural creatures should be 
  able to shrug them off.
  Special-Effect Attacks
  Some weapons (like tazers or some poisons) are 
  not necessarily intended to do direct damage as 
  much as incapacitate the target. These weapons 
  should still get ratings based on the guidelines 
  given in Playing the Game (page 202), but instead 
  of applying the Weapon rating as stress on an 
  attack, the attacker might instead opt to impose 
  a temporary aspect on the target (as though he’d 
  performed a maneuver) in addition to the stress 
  from the attack roll. Weapons used to bind or 
  capture, like nets, can have their ratings sacri-
  ficed to enter the target in a grapple (page 211) in 
  addition to the inflicted stress. 
  In either case, rolls to overcome these 
  secondary effects are made against the weapon’s 
  rating; use the rating as the basis for rolling the 
  opposition—i.e., Weapon:2 = Fair (+2).
  Creating the 
  Opposition
  One of your most important jobs as a GM is 
  to create and play the opposition that the PCs 
  will face throughout the sessions of your game. 
  Demons, vampire lords, rogue sorcerers, angry 
  Mafia dons, and a whole host of other things 
  that go bump in the night all stand ready to 
  run afoul of your PCs. The conflict engendered 
  by the PCs’ and NPCs’ opposing goals is what 
  provides the meat for your story.
  Right-sizing the opposition can be a tough 
  call, because often your PCs will have a wildly 
  diverse array and scope of abilities and talents. 
  Let’s use Harry Dresden as an example: sure, he’s 
  a wizard, but he enlists the aid of normal mortals 
  like Karrin Murphy of the CPD and forensic 
  examiner Waldo Butters on many of his cases. 
  You want the opposition to provide conflict 
  and give the PCs’ struggles a tangible sense of 
  tension, but you don’t want to overwhelm and 
  annihilate the whole group out of hand.
  I sense a theme here, 
  Billy. Do you often 
  get chased across 
  parking lots?
  
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  Types of NPCs
  Overall, there are two kinds of NPCs in this 
  world: those who are important enough to have 
  names, and those who aren’t. Of those who have 
  names, there is another division you can make: 
  those who are main characters in your story, and 
  those who are supporting characters. 
  Nameless NPCs
  Nameless NPCs are basically anyone the char-
  acters might casually encounter on the street—
  the lady at the streetlight, the librarian, the desk 
  clerk, the security guard, the hired guns. These 
  people walk in and out of the characters’ lives 
  like quicksilver, used only as a brief and fleeting 
  part of a scene, never to be encountered again. 
  They don’t have names because their interaction 
  with the PCs is so minimal that, even if you did 
  give them a name, you probably wouldn’t end up 
  uttering it during the scene anyway.
  You’ll mainly use nameless NPCs to help add 
  texture or verisimilitude to a scene, or to help 
  beef up the opposition during a conflict (the 
  angry Mafia don has to have his flunkies, right?). 
  Don’t worry about making this too conscious 
  of a process—most of the time, you’ll mention 
  them out of reflex when you’re describing a 
  scene (“So, you’re at the supermarket, and the 
  checkout guy looks like he’s bored. There’s an old 
  lady slowly flipping through her coupons, you 
  know, the normal stuff.”).
  Creating nameless NPCs is similarly a non-
  issue—at best, all you need is whatever stats 
  you think might come up during the scene or 
  might be noteworthy, and assume everything 
  else is Mediocre. Don’t worry about structuring 
  skill columns. Don’t worry about giving them 
  aspects unless something really vivid immedi-
  ately springs to mind. So, if you need some hired 
  thugs for the Mafia don, you’d just write down 
  something like this:
  doN’S tHugS
  Fists at Fair (+2), guns at Fair (+2)
  Physical oo each.
  And you’re done. Honestly, you don’t even 
  have to write it down that way if you don’t want 
  to and you’re comfortable enough winging rela-
  tive skill levels based on the guidelines at the 
  beginning of the chapter.
  In general, nameless NPCs should never 
  accept consequences—when they take stress 
  past their stress track, they’re taken out. Also, 
  you shouldn’t make a nameless NPC more 
  competent than Good at anything—if they’re at 
  that level, they should probably be a supporting 
  NPC instead. Same goes for stunts and super-
  natural powers, unless it’s a zombie horde or 
  something along those lines. If you need super-
  natural creatures as nameless NPCs, refer to 
  their entry in What Goes Bump (OW28), but 
  don’t add anything to it—they get the template 
  and nothing more.
  Supporting NPCs
  Supporting NPCs have names and some detail 
  about them, and they play a minor but signifi-
  cant role in your game. Supporting NPCs are 
  set apart from nameless ones by being special—
  whether it’s the fact that they’re very competent 
  at a certain skill, have a certain special ability, or 
  just tend to show up repeatedly in your stories. 
  Contacts and acquaintances the PCs routinely 
  see (like Mac, proprietor of McAnally’s Pub) 
  fall into this category, as well as any connections 
  that are suggested by the PCs’ aspects. Some 
  of the face NPCs from your city sheet (page 41) 
  will probably also fall into this category.
  Supporting NPCs should be used in scenes 
  or conflicts that are noteworthy for the story, 
  but not necessarily central to resolving it. They 
  provide more emotional bang for your buck 
  than nameless NPCs, because these are the PCs’ 
  friends, family, members of their community. 
  You can also use them for the opposition when 
  you want an opponent to leave an impression on 
  the PCs. Action movie buffs often refer to this 
  character as the villain’s “lieutenant”—worth 
  paying attention to, but not quite as deadly or 
  menacing as the actual villain.
  Creating a supporting NPC requires 
  more thought and care than creating a name-
  less one. Generally speaking, the same basic 
  rule applies—create only what you need and 
  don’t worry about the rest. Only this time, you 
  can let the character have skills at Great and 
  Superb, one or two stunts or powers, and even 
  a few aspects if they’re appropriate. Apply all 
  the appropriate rules for what they have (like 
  additional physical stress boxes if they have 
  Endurance, etc.)—these characters shouldn’t be 
  getting short shrift.
  That 
  sounds so 
  dehumanizing. 
  The lady at 
  the street-
  light is a 
  person too, 
  you know.
  then how come 
  you don’t name 
  every single 
  person you 
  meet in the 
  casefiles?
  Usually 
  they’re 
  trying to 
  kill me and 
  don’t take 
  the time to 
  introduce 
  themselves! 
  What’s your 
  excuse?
  
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  So, suppose our theoretical Mafia don has a 
  highly-trained sniper in his retinue, named Tim. 
  You know that Tim needs to have pretty good 
  combat skills in order to qualify, and you guess 
  that he might have some stunts for his Guns 
  skill. So you start with this:
  tIm tHe SNIPer
  Alertness: Fair (+2), Athletics: good (+3), 
  endurance: good (+3), guns: great (+4)
  Stunts: gun Nut, Pin them down
   Physical oooo
  often carries a Weapon:3 sniper rifle
  And that covers most of the bases. But, 
  because this is a supporting NPC, you might 
  want to consider giving him some aspects to 
  round out his personality and give some depth 
  to potential interactions he might have with 
  the PCs. When you’re trying to quickly come 
  up with aspects for a supporting NPC, try 
  answering any (or all) of the following questions:
    What is the NPC’s high concept?
    Is the NPC dealing with any personal 
  issues right now? What might they be? 
    Who or what might the NPC have a 
  relationship with, and how would you 
  describe that relationship?
    Does the NPC have a noticeable person-
  ality trait, shtick, or some other memo-
  rable detail?
  Let the answers to these questions give you 
  aspect ideas. So, looking at Tim, the obvious 
  high concept is Mafia Sniper. Just to make 
  things interesting, you say he has a slightly 
  adversarial relationship with his boss, and call it 
  “One Day, the Don Will Slip Up.” He also 
  has a terribly odd devotion to his rifle, which he 
  calls Misty. So the final writeup looks like this:
  tIm tHe SNIPer
  mAFIA SNIPer; mIStY tHe rIFle; 
  “oNe dAY, tHe doN WIll SlIP uP”
  Alertness: Fair (+2), Athletics: good (+3), 
  endurance: good (+3), guns: great (+4)
  Stunts: gun Nut, Pin them down
   Physical oooo
  often carries “misty”, 
  Weapon:3 sniper rifle
  Now you have a character that’s more than 
  just an ugly face in a crowd—depending on 
  the context of the situation, there are several 
  ways the PCs might approach this character, 
  and there are roleplaying opportunities if they 
  happen to find out that Tim and the Don are 
  not on the best of terms.
  For powered supporting characters, use the 
  templates provided in What Goes Bump (OW28), 
  or give them a certain amount of spent refresh 
  in powers as per the guidelines in “Scaling the 
  Opposition” (page 331). So, suppose you wanted 
  to make Tim the Sniper a Red Court vampire…
  tIm tHe SNIPer
  red court VAmPIre;
  mAFIA SNIPer; mIStY tHe rIFle; 
  “oNe dAY, tHe doN WIll SlIP uP”
  Alertness: Fair (+2), Athletics: good (+3), 
  endurance: good (+3), guns: great (+4)
  Stunts: gun Nut, Pin them down
  Powers: Addictive Saliva [-1],  
  Blood drinker [-1],  
  claws [-1], Flesh mask [-1].
  Feeding dependency [+1] affects:  
  cloak of Shadows [-1], 
  Inhuman Strength [-2], 
  Inhuman Speed [-2], 
  Inhuman recovery [-2], 
  Inhuman toughness [-2] 
  the catch [+2] for both is sunlight, 
  holy stuff; armor doesn’t protect belly. 
   Physical oooo(oo), Armor: 1
  carries “misty”, Weapon:3 sniper rifle
  Supporting NPCs should not fight to the 
  bitter, bitter end—the most determined of them 
  should fight to a moderate consequence at most 
  before you concede the conflict to the PCs.
  
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  Main NPCs
  Main NPCs are at the top of the heap—they’re 
  essentially just like PCs, except they’re played 
  by the GM instead of the players. Having all 
  the same breadth of options as the PCs (and 
  sometimes a great deal more), these are the most 
  significant people in the PCs’ lives, both as allies 
  and adversaries. They get all the same system 
  options as PCs; they often have extensive exper-
  tise and supernatural power, and whenever the 
  PCs are at odds with them, the throwdown is 
  almost always large in scale. They also offer the 
  broadest and deepest range of possibilities for 
  interaction, because they have a full measure of 
  aspects to draw from, and they fully participate 
  in the same process of invoking, compelling, and 
  being compelled.
  Examples of main NPCs abound through 
  Harry Dresden’s casefiles. First you have all 
  the names that have ever caused him serious 
  grief, all the people at the center of the dark 
  plots he investigates—Mavra, Victor Sells, 
  Leonid Kravos, Nicodemus…all these individ-
  uals have forced Harry to the absolute edge to 
  combat them and foil their schemes, and some 
  have forced him to pay heavy tolls in the good 
  fight. That’s the kind of conflict you should be 
  thinking about when you make a main NPC.
  A number of Harry’s allies would also qualify 
  as main NPCs by this standard. In fact, if you 
  look at the casefiles as “solo games” with Harry 
  Dresden as the only PC, nearly every one of 
  his friends and accomplices would count as a 
  main NPC—Will and Georgia Borden, Karrin 
  Murphy, Thomas Raith, Molly and Michael 
  Carpenter, and so on. It’s very unlikely that an 
  entire casefile will go by without a handful of 
  those names popping up and playing a major 
  role. If you have face NPCs from your city sheet 
  that seem to fall into that category, it’s a good bet 
  they qualify as main NPCs.
  Main NPCs are the only kind that will 
  require a decent amount of preparation time 
  to create. There are a few methods that you can 
  choose from.
  The PC Method
  The most obvious way to create a main NPC 
  is to run him through the character creation 
  process (page 52) just like a player would. Start 
  at the beginning, choose a high concept for the 
  character, choose a theme, do his phases, and 
  then stat out his skills, stunts, and powers as 
  though he were a PC. For the final two “guest 
  star” slots, refer back to the questions list for 
  supporting NPCs and fill in two aspects that 
  seem most appropriate. This gives you an 
  incredible amount of detail you can work with 
  right off the bat; it gives you a good insight into 
  what kinds of scenes you want to have with that 
  NPC, what kind of tactics he might use against 
  the PCs, and what weaknesses the NPC has 
  that you can potentially reveal to the PCs as the 
  session or scenario progresses.
  The main drawback of this method has 
  already been mentioned: it takes quite a bit of 
  time to pump out a full character, complete 
  with a backstory and a full set of aspects. And 
  what’s more, unless you’re going to use this 
  NPC in a number of scenarios, you might 
  not end up needing in play all the details that 
  you’ve just invented. Some people like to have 
  that, but remember, the game is not about your 
  main NPCs—details that aren’t really relevant 
  to the PCs are often more extraneous than 
  anything else.
  If you want to make a really powerful adver-
  sary, you may need to give the NPC addi-
  tional refresh and skill points, as per character 
  advancement (page 88).
  If my casefiles are solo games, 
  then my GM is a real jerk.
  Hey, you aren’t dead yet. I 
  wouldn’t complain too much!
  
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  The “On-the-Fly” Method
  This is essentially the same as using quick char-
  acter creation (page 69), except you’re doing it 
  for your main NPC. You start with the items 
  listed in that section and just play the NPC as 
  you go, filling out the sheet until it’s full.
  This can be useful if you have a strong idea of 
  what the main NPC wants and would do, but 
  don’t necessarily want to bog yourself down with 
  too many details. It also allows you to “fine-tune” 
  your NPC to your players, because the details 
  you make up on the fly are going to come directly 
  from their interaction. Even if the NPC is not 
  present, you can still use this to your advantage. 
  For example, if an NPC minion refuses 
  to buckle under the weight of interrogation 
  because of abject fear of his employer finding 
  out, you might fill in a Great (+4) Intimidation 
  skill for the NPC and an aspect of Eyes and 
  Ears Everywhere. In this way, you can turn a 
  whole scenario into that NPC’s creation, letting 
  each new piece of information the players find 
  help you fill in another section of the sheet.
  Obviously, this isn’t something you should do 
  if you’re not comfortable with quickly making 
  things up on the fly. Some players might also find 
  it a little too convenient that you’re adjusting the 
  bad guy as you go and might consider it a kind 
  of cheating. If you decide to try this method, 
  talk to your group about it.
  The Supporter 
  Upgrade Method
  This is sort of the middle option between the 
  first two—start by making the NPC like you’d 
  make any other supporting NPC. After you’re 
  done, you can start play with the details you 
  have, but add more skills, stunts, powers, and 
  aspects as you see fit until the supporting NPC 
  has the chops to be a main. This allows you to 
  start with a firm set of details without being 
  overwhelmed, and it allows you to refine the 
  character idea from there without having to 
  start almost entirely from scratch. It mitigates 
  both the advantages and disadvantages of either 
  method to some degree.
  Take Tim the Sniper from above as an 
  example. Suppose you actually want Tim to be a 
  main NPC instead of a supporting one, roughly 
  equivalent in stats to a PC (let’s say you’re 
  running a “Feet in the Water” game, page 53). 
  His writeup currently looks like:
  tIm tHe SNIPer
  mAFIA SNIPer; mIStY tHe rIFle; 
  “oNe dAY, tHe doN WIll SlIP uP”
  Alertness: Fair (+2), Athletics: good (+3), 
  endurance: good (+3), guns: great (+4)
  Stunts: gun Nut, Pin them down
   Physical oooo
  “misty”, Weapon:3 sniper rifle
  From here, you have the following open slots 
  on his character sheet:
    Four more aspects
    One Great, two Fair, and five Average 
  skills (to match one of the 25-point 
  column configurations on page 65)
    3 refresh in stunts or powers (6 default, 
  –2 for having two stunts, minimum 
  of 1), plus 2 more if he stays Pure Mortal
  So while you already have a strong idea of 
  the character, as reflected in what you’ve created 
  so far, you still have room to develop him in a 
  number of directions. Keep in mind that you 
  can do this with any level of NPC—if there’s a 
  nameless NPC that your players really end up 
  liking, you could theoretically transition him to 
  a main NPC over time.
  This is a bit like character advancement 
  (page 88) for NPCs. If you do upgrade an NPC, 
  consider if any of the aspects or other features 
  are out of date. With Tim the Sniper above, 
  maybe “One Day, the Don Will Slip Up” 
  doesn’t apply anymore, because the Don did and 
  that’s how Tim upgraded to a main NPC. Now 
  he changes that aspect to A New Crime Lord 
  In Town, and people call him Tim the Boss.
  Other Guest Star 
  Options for NPCs
  If you want to create a bit of backstory with the 
  PCs, you could use one of their adventures and 
  guest-star your main NPC in that one. This is 
  very appropriate if that NPC was the main foe 
  in the PC’s adventure.
  Alternatively, have your main NPCs guest 
  star in each other’s adventures. You can create a 
  web of political or social ties this way.
  
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  The Mirror Method
  In this method, you essentially take one or more 
  of the PCs and hold up the proverbial mirror to 
  them, constructing the NPC from either oppo-
  site traits or similar traits that are twisted. 
  Go through the aspects of the PC(s) in 
  question and look for ways to reverse or twist 
  the meaning, and give that modified aspect to 
  your main NPC. If your PC has an aspect like 
  Brains of the Family, consider Brutish 
  Thug for the NPC, or a more subtle contrast 
  like Nothing Is Ever Good Enough—
  whereas the PC stood out from other members 
  of his family, the NPC was just one brain among 
  many, developing exacting perfectionist stan-
  dards and an obsessive need to prove himself 
  because of it.
  Skills are easy—make the NPC good at the 
  same things the PC is good at, or good at every-
  thing the PC has a low rank in or didn’t take. 
  Matched sets allow for a more head-to-head 
  kind of pairing, whereas contrasting sets will 
  have the characters exploiting (or filling in for, 
  in the case of a team) each other’s weaknesses. 
  Follow the same idea for powers and stunts, and 
  whatever other elements of the character come 
  to mind. By the time you’re done, you’ll have an 
  NPC who is uniquely positioned to serve as a 
  foil for a particular PC or set of PCs. 
  Let’s do a quick run-through of this using a 
  favorite example character from throughout the 
  game—the wizard Harry Dresden.
  You’re looking to make an NPC antago-
  nist for Harry Dresden. Looking at Harry’s 
  character sheet, we see a few good aspects that 
  stand out—Epic Wiseass; Chivalry is Not 
  Dead, Dammit; and Perpetually Broke. 
  This suggests a foil in the upper crust of society, 
  exceedingly polite (but underneath it all, a 
  heartless, misogynistic bastard). You choose 
  Sugar Tongue, People are Objects, and 
  Rich Beyond the Dreams of Avarice as 
  your mirror aspects, going straight for the stark 
  contrast.       I already hate this guy.
  For skills, you know Harry is best at 
  Conviction and Investigation, and his highest 
  social skill is Intimidation at Great. The obvious 
  contrast here for social skill is Deceit, which 
  you put at Great. He will also take Discipline 
  at Great, to contrast Harry’s Conviction; for 
  a practical skill, you decide to peak him at 
  Superb Resources—not precisely a contrast 
  to Investigation, but the idea here is he doesn’t 
  do the legwork himself; he pays people to do it 
  for him.
  Stunts and powers? The direct contrast 
  triumphs again, and you decide that this enemy 
  is a necromancer of some considerable skill, 
  perhaps even a member of the dreaded Black 
  Council. He gets the standard power set for 
  wizards, and you’re good to go. One Harry-sized 
  villain, all ready for play.
  But suppose you want to make him a little 
  bigger than Harry-sized…
  Scaling the 
  Opposition
  There are basically four levels of opposition you 
  can send against a PC:
    Minor opposition is meant to provide 
  a distraction or add some vivid color to 
  a scene, but it won’t really tax the PC 
  too much beyond a minor expenditure 
  of fate points or other resources. By and 
  large, minor opposition means nameless 
  and supporting NPCs.
    Equal opposition is meant to provide a 
  significant, “it could go either way” kind 
  of challenge—both parties have a rela-
  tively good chance of taking each other 
  out, all other circumstances being equal. 
  To have equal opposition, you almost 
  always must have a main NPC.
    Challenging opposition is meant to 
  stack the deck against the PC—forcing 
  him to fight intelligently, using situ-
  ational advantage to its maximum 
  potential.
    Overwhelming opposition is a long-
  term opponent for the PC, requiring 
  several milestones of advancement 
  (page 88) for the PC to be able to confront 
  it on equal terms.
  This is the basic rule of thumb for scaling 
  opposition relevant to those categories: 
  spent refresh is the biggest thing to think about. 
  Remember that, as the GM, you don’t have to 
  worry about the same limitations the PCs do for 
  spending refresh. If you want, you can make an 
  absolute monster that has no refresh level (and 
  therefore no fate points) but a ton of power—
  that’s what makes the bad guys as dangerous as 
  they are. 
  Stars and 
  stones, 
  Billy. I’m 
  the example 
  again? 
  Come on!
  We aren’t 
  calling it tHe 
  BordeN FIleS 
  rPg, you know.
  
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  You can expect any two characters who’ve 
  spent the same amount on powers to be roughly 
  an equal match, provided they both have the 
  opportunity to use their abilities to the fullest 
  potential. Seven points of refresh spent on fae 
  abilities are fairly similar to seven points spent 
  on wizarding or seven points spent on shape-
  shifting—in their particular arenas, each will be 
  about as effective as the others.
  By contrast, even a small gap in spent refresh 
  can make a huge amount of difference power-
  wise. Consider that a character who has spent 
  6 refresh cannot be a full wizard—you need 
  to spend 7 refresh for that. A wizard who 
  has spent 10 refresh probably added a couple 
  points of Refinement (page 182) to his power 
  set, giving him additional permanent bonuses 
  that place him at a decisive advantage against his 
  7-refresh counterpart.
  This holds up for refresh points spent on 
  stunts—regardless of combination, five points 
  of stunts is five points of stunts. However, you 
  can’t compare points spent on stunts to points 
  spent on powers—the grouped advantages of 
  powers usually blow away the specific, focused 
  advantages of stunts whenever they’re compared 
  in play. There are more guidelines below for 
  dealing with that.
  These levels of opposition assume that all 
  other character resources are equal—if your 
  PCs have 8 base refresh and 30 skill points, 
  we’re assuming that you’re judging your NPC 
  builds on 8 base refresh and 30 skill points as 
  well. If you want to adjust this a bit, it’ll have 
  the effect of “nudging” that NPC between cate-
  gories in one direction or the other. (This is 
  why supporting NPCs usually qualify as minor 
  opposition automatically—they don’t typically 
  get the same resources PCs do, which shifts 
  them down a notch.)
  If you want to give an NPC a little extra 
  oomph, you can give him a refresh level on top 
  of whatever else he might have. This is appro-
  priate for any NPC that hasn’t fully given into 
  his monstrous nature, just like a PC. This gives 
  him some fate points to spend right off the bat. 
  While they don’t quite stack up against the 
  constant benefit provided by powers or stunts, 
  fate points do have the advantage of flexibility—
  you can use them to invoke for bonuses in a wide 
  variety of situations. Because of this, it isn’t wise 
  to underestimate a character with no powers 
  and a bucket load of fate points.
  You can also change the number of skill ranks 
  the NPC gets or fiddle with how many aspects 
  he has (though you can never exceed seven 
  permanent aspects). The benefits from this are 
  highly situational—if one character can’t roll 
  anything higher than Fair in a situation where 
  another character can roll Great and Superb, the 
  second has an advantage over the first. However, 
  keep in mind that the presence of scene aspects 
  
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  and the ability to tag temporary aspects can 
  mitigate the skill advantage and open up a lot of 
  options for even a supporting NPC to stack up 
  bonuses. 
  Likewise, the more aspects an NPC has, the 
  broader the variety of situations he can invoke 
  in. However, if he doesn’t have the fate points to 
  spend on those aspects (because of an extremely 
  high spent refresh or some other circumstance), 
  the advantage of having them is mitigated.
  Let’s get a little more specific now and look at 
  how to scale the levels of opposition for different 
  character types. Again, remember that NPCs 
  are permitted to go below a refresh level of 1.
  Individual Mortals
  Minor Opposition: Use a nameless or a 
  supporting NPC with no powers. 
  Equal Opposition: Use the same amount of 
  refresh, aspects, stunts, and skills as the char-
  acter you want to challenge—in other words, 
  a main NPC that’s effectively the equivalent of 
  the character. If you have a 6 refresh, 25 skill 
  point character with two stunts, then you want 
  to make a 6 refresh, 25 skill point character with 
  two stunts to challenge them. Don’t worry about 
  matching up the skill sets too precisely—in fact, 
  one good way to challenge a PC is to send him 
  up against an NPC whose peak skills are very 
  different from his own, forcing him into non-
  optimal situations.
  Challenging Opposition: As per Equal, but 
  exceed the PC’s base refresh by 2-3 points, 
  potentially spending them on additional stunts. 
  You might also assign between 5-10 additional 
  points in skills, if you want the NPC to come 
  across as experienced and canny, but not existing 
  in a wholly different “league” than the PC. You 
  might also assign a supernatural power to the 
  NPC at this stage, but should only spend a 
  maximum of –2 on a power.
  Overwhelming 
  Opposition: 
  As 
  per 
  Challenging, but let the NPC have 5+ points 
  more of base refresh; don’t exceed double the 
  PC’s base refresh. (You want to spend this on 
  stuff—an NPC with 20 fate points is a logis-
  tical nightmare!) If you want to assign powers, 
  you shouldn’t go past –4 or –5 refresh worth of 
  powers.
  Individual Supernatural 
  Characters
  Minor Opposition: Use a nameless or 
  supporting NPC without powers, or with 
  powers not exceeding half the PC’s spent refresh.
  Equal Opposition: Use a main NPC with 
  equivalent spent refresh in powers as the PC. 
  Again, don’t worry too much about matching 
  the context of those powers—two characters 
  with equally powerful, but wildly different, abili-
  ties make great opponents for each other, as they 
  have to figure out how to compensate for those 
  areas where the other is strong.
  Challenging Opposition: As per Equal, except 
  allow the NPC to have up to one and a half times 
  more refresh spent on powers than the PC does. 
  You might also assign between 5-10 additional 
  points in skills, if you want the NPC to come 
  across as experienced and canny, but not existing 
  in a wholly different “league” than the PC. 
  Overwhelming Opposition: As per Challenging, 
  but let the NPC have double the PC’s spent 
  refresh on powers. A supernatural nemesis on 
  this scale could potentially become the focus of a 
  campaign or several scenarios, allowing the PC to 
  amass resources and go through a few advance-
  ment cycles to gear up against the threat.
  Multiple NPCs vs. an Individual PC
  Generally speaking, groups of NPCs shouldn’t be brought 
  against a single PC unless they’re scaled down—a handful of 
  nameless or a couple of low-end supporting NPCs against a 
  single PC is probably as far as you want to go. A team of main 
  NPCs could make an interesting long-term opponent for a PC 
  if you want—going by the “double refresh means a long-term 
  opponent” guideline, you could have two characters with equiv-
  alent refresh to the PC working together and taking advantage 
  of the freedom to pursue multiple agendas at once. Or, if you 
  want to go for the whole “dark cabal” thing, you could even split 
  that refresh limit up three or four ways and end up with a gang 
  of opponents—people who would be very minor players by 
  themselves, but can do a lot of damage when they team up.
  What’s the Base?
  Base refresh for powered NPCs is largely irrelevant, especially 
  when you get into Challenging and Overwhelming categories. 
  Assume that any main NPC is going to have a base refresh 
  equal to a PC (accounting for milestones and the like). If you 
  spend over that, they have no fate points when they start play. If 
  you don't, they do, just like a PC would. 
  
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  The only reason you should pit a single 
  unpowered NPC against a powered PC is to 
  have a scene where the point of the scene is 
  demonstrating or calling attention to the PC’s 
  power. That doesn’t mean that unpowered 
  NPCs can’t provide any challenge; it just means 
  that the circumstances have to be set up just 
  so. Consider that it’s often unwise for a super-
  natural character to flaunt his powers in public 
  places; you can use that to your advantage when 
  you’re setting up those scenes. 
  If a werewolf is in a crowded bank during a 
  robbery, he can’t just transform and go hog wild 
  on the robber—the spectacle would bring way 
  too much trouble and attention into his life. He 
  has to deal with the situation as a normal mortal 
  until he can get into a place where it’s safe to use 
  his abilities—then you can expect the scene to 
  be over rather quickly. (Chomp chomp.)
  Don’t calculate any refresh the PC might 
  have spent on mortal stunts—just take the 
  powers and work with those. If you also want to 
  give the NPC a mortal stunt or two, that’s fine 
  at any level—those will primarily serve to round 
  out some detail about that NPC.
  PC Groups
  There are basically two ways to do opposition 
  for a whole group of PCs working together—
  either have the opposition be a group of NPCs, 
  or have one or two NPCs who are capable of 
  taking on the whole group by themselves. For 
  the former option, just refer to the guidelines 
  above, going PC by PC until you have enough 
  characters in the NPC group to match the PCs.
  The latter option requires a little more work, 
  depending on the type of characters you have in 
  the group. 
  All Supernatural Groups
  Minor Opposition: Use a nameless or 
  supporting NPC with no more than half the 
  spent refresh of the group in powers. In other 
  words, add up how many refresh all the PCs 
  have spent in powers and cut that number in 
  half. There are quite a few templates in What 
  Goes Bump (OW28) that can be used right off 
  the page for NPCs that will fit this category.
  Equal Opposition: Use a main NPC with 
  powers equal to the group’s total spent refresh 
  on powers.
  Challenging Opposition: As per Equal, but 
  increase the NPC’s refresh to one and a half 
  times the group’s total spent refresh on powers. 
  You might additionally add 5-10 more skill 
  ranks than what the PCs have.
  Overwhelming 
  Opposition: 
  As 
  per 
  Challenging, but use double the group’s total 
  spent refresh on powers. This gets you into the 
  realm of ancient vampire lords, crazy powerful 
  demons, millennia-old wizards, and other 
  creatures that skirt that line between powerful 
  monster and demigod. Monsters with that much 
  power will be able to battle whole groups of PCs 
  Wizards
  Wizard characters are some of the most 
  versatile of any of the supernatural charac-
  ters, because their access to thaumaturgy 
  and evocation can be used to mimic a lot of 
  the other supernatural powers. However, 
  they also have a few key limitations that you 
  should keep in mind when you’re designing 
  opposition for them.
  Keep in mind that thaumaturgy takes 
  time to put into practice, whereas a lot of 
  other supernatural powers can be used 
  instantly. Even a low-refresh supernatural 
  NPC could give a wizard a significant chal-
  lenge if he’s able to interrupt the wizard’s 
  spell preparations and put pressure on the 
  wizard’s use of ritual magic. 
  Second, evocation is extremely powerful, 
  perhaps offering some of the best pure 
  combat effectiveness among the entire spec-
  trum of supernatural ability. However, its 
  use is extremely taxing, resulting in stress 
  and eventually consequences—depending 
  on how far the wizard wants to push it. So 
  if your opposition NPC can manage to get 
  past those first exchanges of high-output 
  attacks, the wizard PC might end up being 
  a really easy target.
  Keeping all this in mind, the best oppo-
  sition for a wizard is another wizard. If 
  you want to pit a different kind of char-
  acter against the wizard, just make sure 
  the NPC can’t take undue advantage of all 
  these weaknesses—if they can always find 
  the wizard every time he’s preparing a ritual 
  and always outlast the wizard’s full barrage 
  of evocation, you’re probably bringing way 
  too much heat.
  Boss, you think that explains Cowl?
  I really don’t want to think about that.
  
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  running the game
  at once and hold their own. They make great 
  opponents for the kinds of climactic battles you 
  want to have at the end of a group of scenarios 
  or a campaign.
  Keep in mind that, at any level, you don’t have 
  to worry about going past the zero refresh limit, 
  because the thing that makes them good adver-
  saries in the first place is that they have given in 
  to their inhuman nature! 
  All Pure Mortal Groups
  This section is a bit more complicated, because 
  there’s a wider variety of ways to make a good 
  single-NPC challenge for mortal groups. Whole 
  groups of PCs without powers won’t be ratch-
  eting things up quite as epically as powered 
  characters. Groups of NPCs usually work best 
  as adversaries against a group of mortal PCs, but 
  if you want to roll it all up into a “boss” NPC of 
  some kind, you have a few options you can take:
  Scale the NPC based on the whole group’s 
  total refresh level: This gives you a bad guy 
  with a large amount of fate points—someone 
  who manages to always get away at the last 
  second, has fortune work in his favor a lot, and 
  always turns up because of an incredible series 
  of coincidences. Your group might find this kind 
  of character extremely annoying, so you might 
  want to let them in on your plan and see how 
  they feel.
    Minor Opposition: Use a supporting 
  NPC with a refresh level equal to one-
  quarter the group’s total refresh level.
    Equal Opposition: Use a main NPC 
  with a refresh level equal to one-half the 
  group’s total refresh level.
    Challenging Opposition: Use a main 
  NPC with a refresh level equal to three-
  quarters of the group’s total refresh level. 
  You may add skills at this point, as per 
  usual.
    Overwhelming Opposition: As per 
  Challenging, but give the NPC the 
  whole group’s total refresh level.
  Scale the NPC based on the whole group’s 
  spent refresh on stunts: This is the kind of 
  bad guy who always seems to have a trick up his 
  sleeve no matter the circumstance, displaying 
  the kind of competence normally only available 
  to specialists—but in a wide variety of fields. 
  This NPC will probably need to rely on at least 
  a little help to directly contend with a group of 
  PCs, but not too much—a few paid thugs to 
  provide distraction and whatnot.
    Minor Opposition: Use a supporting 
  NPC with spent refresh equal to one-
  half the group’s total refresh in stunts.
    Equal Opposition: Use a main NPC 
  with spent refresh equal to the group’s 
  total spent refresh in stunts.
    Challenging Opposition: Use a main 
  NPC with spent refresh equal to one and 
  a half times the group’s total refresh in 
  stunts. You may add skills at this point, 
  as per usual.
    Overwhelming Opposition: As per 
  Challenging, but give the NPC double 
  the group’s spent refresh in stunts.
  Yeah, the math 
  here can get out 
  of hand quickly.  
  If you find 
  yourself running 
  out of powers 
  to buy, if you're 
  ending up with a 
  Physically  
  Immune, mythi-
  cally Strong-
  Fast-tough- 
  recovering 
  badass with 32 
  refresh spent... 
  maybe you should 
  look long and 
  hard at divid-
  ing that single 
  NPc into two 
  or more. It’ll be 
  way more inter-
  esting that way.
  Yikes! Group 
  totals get 
  big really, 
  really fast, 
  Billy.
  
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  Give the NPC supernatural powers: Be careful 
  with this one—it’s pretty easy to make a super-
  natural character that can wipe out a whole 
  group of mortal PCs.
    Minor Opposition: Use a supporting 
  NPC with powers equal to one-quarter 
  the group’s total refresh in stunts.
    Equal Opposition: Use a main NPC 
  with powers equal to half the group’s 
  total spent refresh in stunts.
    Challenging Opposition: Use a main 
  NPC with powers equal to three-quar-
  ters of the group’s total refresh in stunts. 
  You may add skills at this point, as per 
  usual.
    Overwhelming Opposition: As per 
  Challenging, but give the NPC powers 
  equal to the group’s spent refresh in 
  stunts.
  Mixed Groups
  A group that has both mortal and supernatural 
  characters is the hardest to size for in terms of 
  creating a single NPC—it’s much easier to go 
  with multiple NPCs instead, including mortal 
  bad guys so that the PC mortals have someone 
  to fight. That can get predictable, though.
  To make an NPC for a mixed group, add up 
  the total refresh the PCs spent on powers, but 
  then subtract the total number of refresh they spent 
  on mortal stunts. If you’re going to double for 
  an epic baddie, do it after the subtraction, not 
  before.
  That gives you the base number to work with 
  when you’re scaling opposition to the group—
  use the general guidelines for supernatural 
  groups from there. For instance, if you have 
  a group with a total of –12 refresh in powers 
  and –2 in stunts, start from –10. So, a minor 
  challenge would be –5 refresh in powers, equal 
  would be –10, challenging would be –15, over-
  whelming would be –20. Doing the subtraction 
  might not seem like much, but it can often keep 
  the bad guy hemmed in just enough that the 
  mortal PCs have a little more of an edge.
  Adjusting Opposition 
  on the Fly
  No matter how much effort you put into it, on 
  occasion you’re going to find that either you 
  didn’t bring enough heat or you brought way 
  more than you wanted. PCs might blow through 
  an adversary you thought would last a while, or 
  they might be seriously getting their asses kicked 
  Dealing with Strength, 
  Speed, and Toughness
  Of all the supernatural powers, the three 
  basic “building block” powers are the ones 
  that most easily push a character up into 
  another weight class compared to other 
  characters. This can be a problem when 
  you’re dealing with mixed groups, because 
  mortal characters lose effectiveness against 
  these kinds of powers more readily than 
  other powers. You don’t want to end up in 
  too many situations where your group is 
  fighting a supernatural baddie and there’s 
  nothing for the mortal character to do—if 
  your campaign has a pure mortal PC in it, 
  consider that it obligates you to run a game that 
  privileges a mortal’s ability to act.
  Strength is probably the easiest of the 
  three to deal with—Inhuman Strength is 
  pretty similar to a normal character wielding 
  a decent weapon, so it’s still possible for 
  a mortal to hold his own if he’s peaked in 
  a combat skill with stunts to back it up. 
  Beyond that, it gets dicey.
  The biggest issue with Speed is being able 
  to land attacks. Again, most mortal char-
  acters can deal with the benefits provided 
  by Inhuman Speed, but with Supernatural 
  and Mythic, landing a hit can become diffi-
  cult even for skilled characters. The trick is 
  to find a way to keep the Speedy character 
  pinned down—high Might characters might 
  be able to do this with grappling, but the 
  clever application of certain maneuvers or 
  blocks to hamper movement can help out, 
  too.
  For Toughness powers, the major 
  balancing factor there is the Catch—if the 
  NPC’s Catch is really obscure, then the cost 
  of the Toughness powers is probably using 
  up a good chunk of his available refresh; if 
  it’s not, it’s likely that an enterprising PC will 
  eventually discover what it is. Smart mortal 
  characters in a mixed group should take it 
  upon themselves to have or gain access to 
  the Catch for any big supernatural baddies 
  that they come across. This can turn into a 
  large story of its own if the mortal PCs need 
  to quest for hidden or obscure knowledge to 
  figure out the Catch.
  Billy, you 
  talk a lot in 
  this chapter 
  about 
  setting up 
  an individual 
  encounter 
  for the PCs, 
  but you don’t 
  get into the 
  dynamics 
  of multiple 
  successive 
  encounters 
  much at all.
  Hmm, good 
  point. though 
  that one’s 
  tough, and in 
  my mind should 
  be done by 
  looking at the 
  state of the 
  group after 
  each encounter.  
  this game 
  cAN be pretty 
  hard on Pcs, 
  especially if 
  they don’t 
  carefully pick 
  their fights.  
  As consequences 
  pile up, 
  the margin 
  available for 
  error goes 
  down. A single 
  “even match” 
  is one thing; 
  multiple “even 
  matches” in 
  succession with 
  no chance of 
  recovery? 
  Bad news.
  
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  running the game
  by someone you figured they’d beat. It’s not 
  always a bad thing when this happens, because 
  the concession rules (page 206) allow anyone to 
  get something out of a conflict that isn’t going 
  the way they want it to go. If the PCs concede to 
  an adversary, they can get fate points for it, and 
  you have a new plot device you can bring in later. 
  Sometimes, though, you’re going to want 
  to adjust the level of opposition in the middle 
  of the scene. If you do this, make sure that the 
  main reason you’re doing it is to keep the scene 
  from being boring or frustrating to the players—
  you don’t want to change things often enough to 
  seem inconsistent as a GM or to be perceived as 
  cheating the players.
  The Role of Consequence 
  and Concession
  The main thing to keep in mind is this: taking a 
  consequence in a conflict is a choice, not a require-
  ment. One reason almost all nameless and 
  supporting NPCs qualify as minor opposition 
  is because they do not fight to the end—they 
  fight until their stress tracks get bypassed and 
  then either concede or are taken out. Even main 
  NPCs aren’t always prepared to go the distance; 
  you have to consider how badly they want to 
  achieve their goals and whether they’re willing 
  to risk sacrificing themselves for them. 
  You can use this to take the heat off of the 
  PCs—instead of taking a consequence when 
  the PC just barely goes over the bad guy’s stress 
  track, have the NPC get taken out or offer a 
  concession. This lets you have some wiggle 
  room in the refresh rules. For example, a Pure 
  Mortal vs. a normal ghoul is a pretty depressing 
  prospect if the ghoul goes through its whole 
  range of consequences; but if you declare that 
  the ghoul gets taken out when the mortal PC 
  finally lands his big hit, the odds are suddenly 
  not quite so daunting. The mortal will probably 
  still have suffered stress and consequences of his 
  own during the fight, and he still has a chance 
  of getting taken out (because he might never 
  land that big hit), but it allows him to go one-
  on-one with a high refresh character and have 
  some hope.
  If the NPC is really just murderating the PCs, 
  offer to let them concede in exchange for whatever 
  the NPC’s actual goals are. Most NPCs should 
  have a more complicated agenda than “obliterate 
  the PCs”—it’s perfectly valid to suggest that, as 
  long as they can get what they want, they won’t 
  continue the conflict.
  
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  running the game
  Making Things Easier
  Scaling back the opposition is pretty easy—just 
  start ignoring parts of the character sheet. Not 
  everyone fights at full blast all the time. Maybe 
  they’re overconfident. Maybe they tend to favor 
  one of their abilities (this might happen as the 
  result of a compel, if the NPC has an appro-
  priate aspect). Or, if there’s something on an 
  NPC’s sheet that hasn’t been brought up yet in 
  the conflict, maybe you just don’t bring it up at 
  all. When you’re doing this, the most important 
  thing is to keep your motives largely transparent 
  to the players—remember, the point is to coop-
  erate on making cool scenes and a good story, 
  not to get into a pissing match with one another.
  If, for some reason, the baddie has brought 
  henchmen or cohorts along, and the numbers 
  are starting to get overwhelming, you can create 
  a new circumstance in the scene that distracts 
  them or causes them to back off. Maybe the 
  baddie sends them away, maybe the cops show 
  up, maybe the storm finally breaks. This can 
  even help make your conflict scene a little more 
  dynamic, since it’s no longer just a straight-up 
  battle between the PCs and NPCs.
  Making Things Harder
  The easiest thing to do if the PCs are over-
  whelming the opposition is to add more name-
  less NPCs as participants in the conflict. Make 
  them on-the-fly (page 330); while they won’t  
  individually be much of a threat, they’ll still force 
  the PCs to divide their attention—and possibly 
  take a few more hits while trying to deal with 
  the main adversary. You shouldn’t do this with 
  anything more than nameless NPCs, though—
  that’s just bad form. 
  In the same way you might ignore parts of a 
  bad guy’s sheet to make him easier, you can also 
  upgrade the NPC mid-scene, adding things 
  to his sheet. You might give him an aspect he 
  can invoke or fill in a skill, stunt, or power to 
  help keep him in the fight. The justification is 
  the same as for on-the-fly PCs—not everyone 
  shows the full extent of his abilities right off 
  the bat. Make sure your players are okay with 
  this kind of fiddling and understand why you’re 
  doing it, though—it’s easy to perceive this kind 
  of behavior as a kind of cheating.
  Finally, keeping an NPC in the fight to the 
  bitter end is often a good way to make him 
  memorable—if you think he wants it bad 
  enough, let him go out in a blaze of glory—
  taking every level of consequence before he’s 
  taken out.
  
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  - cHAPter FIFteeN -
  Building 
  Scenarios
  
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  Building Scenarios
  The Nuts & Bolts 
  of Storytelling
  Okay, GMs, this chapter’s aimed squarely at 
  you. Players don’t have to go away (reading this 
  chapter might help them choose aspects) but 
  the nuts and bolts of scenario creation is pretty 
  much a GM’s work. You don’t have to create 
  scenarios this way—if you have your own tech-
  nique, go forth and be awesome. But the process 
  outlined here can help you make some cool 
  stories.
  GMs should create scenarios tailored to the 
  player characters, entangling them in the NPCs’ 
  motivations and machinations from the very 
  start. It’s about putting the PCs directly in the 
  way of the NPCs getting what they want, then 
  letting the PCs decide what to do about that. 
  The process goes like this:
    Assemble Aspects
    Choose Emphasis
    Make Connections
    Scenario Ideas
    Putting It All Together
    Scene Hooks
    Create Additional NPCs
  This method of scenario design is based on 
  aspects. Remember: aspects are the players’ way 
  of signaling to the GM “Here’s what’s important! 
  Here’s why I think my character is interesting!” 
  This is some of the most valuable information 
  you’ll ever get from the players. So—use it to 
  design stories that really grab them.
  The procedure is indeed very… uh… 
  procedural, but don’t let that worry you. It’s one 
  of those things that’s easier to do than explaining 
  it makes it seem, and once you do it a couple of 
  times it becomes second nature. 
  Assemble Aspects 
  Make a list of all of the PCs’ aspects, your city’s 
  themes and threats, location aspects (both 
  themes and threats), and the motivations of 
  faces and other key NPCs; alongside each 
  aspect, make sure you note the name of the char-
  acter or location it’s associated with. (You might 
  have this list already—compelling aspects is a 
  lot easier if you know what aspects to compel.)
  That’s it. You’re done with this step. 
  Example: Baltimore
  So, I’m trying to come up with a scenario for the 
  game I’m running set in Baltimore (see page 358). 
  The PCs are Evan Montrose (a wizard),  his 
  best  friend Biff Abernathy (a pure mortal), 
  and Biff ’s girlfriend Maya McKenzie (a minor 
  talent/shapeshifter). Here’s a list of the perti-
  nent aspects for the PCs and motivations for 
  selected NPCs (and whatever or whoever 
  they’re associated with):
    Young White Council Wizard; In 
  Over My Head; Heir to Montrose; 
  Precision Is Everything; Here’s 
  the Plan; Hail Hail the Gang’s 
  All Here; I’d Rather Not be a 
  Warden, Thanks (Evan Montrose)
    Trust Fund Jock; “Sorry, Mouse,” 
  Said Maya’s Steady Boyfriend; 
  Mortimer Louis Abernathy III; 
  Krav Maga; Hail Hail the Gang’s 
  All Here; Dumb Luck; Plays the 
  Dumb Jock (Biff Abernathy)
    Insatiably Curious Were-Mouse; 
  “Biff, You Jerk!” Said Biff’s Steady 
  Girlfriend; I Remember Where I 
  Is this the 
  method you 
  and Kirby 
  use to create 
  ARCANOS 
  scenarios?
  Similar idea, 
  yeah. 
  Haha! Now 
  I know your 
  secrets!
  In fact, I’ve done it so many 
  times that I had a hard 
  time quantifying it. Harry, 
  let me know if I make too 
  many unstated assumptions, 
  or if anything in this chapter 
  doesn’t make sense, will you?
  All Aboard the Plot
  We use the term “plot” a fair bit in this 
  chapter. What we mean by this term is the 
  ongoing narrative of PC and NPC interac-
  tions. We do not mean to imply that the GM 
  should have the major events of the entire 
  scenario planned out ahead of time. Quite 
  the contrary—this game works best when 
  the GM presents a conflict to the PCs, then 
  gets out of the way to let the PCs resolve 
  it without a preconceived notion of what that 
  resolution ought to be.
  In other words, just because we use the 
  term “plot” doesn’t mean the GM should be 
  railroading anyone.
  
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  Building Scenarios
  Came From; Locked or Unlocked, 
  It’s All the Same to Me; Hail Hail 
  the Gang’s All Here; Uncommon 
  Sense; Quiet as a Mouse 
  (Maya McKenzie)
    The power of the ley line will fuel our 
  clan’s glorious victory! (Gilgamesh)
    I will protect the standing of the Lagios 
  family at any cost. (Vasiliki Lagios)
    I will lead the Lagios family to triumph. 
  (Alexandra Lagios)
    Montrose WILL take me seriously. 
  (Damocles Ravenborn)
    I’m cleaning up the river. 
  (Sgt. Jim Flanagan)
    Lock and load—let’s get ‘em. (Officers 
  Vastolo and Mirabal)
    I don’t care if you do have supernatural 
  powers, don’t mess with my business. Or 
  the East Green. (Wallace Gibbs)
    I want my club to be a success, but I 
  don’t want to get caught doing anything 
  illegal. (Dave Gerard)
    I’m going to help Alexandra get to the 
  top. (Curt Gazo)
    I want to preserve knowledge. 
  (Paul Mackey)
    I want to stop the predators. 
  (John Vastolo)
    Decay and Corruption 
  (Baltimore Theme)
    Conflicting Identities 
  (Baltimore Theme)
  Choose Emphasis 
  Next, choose which of these aspects you’d like to 
  emphasize for this scenario.
  Something to keep strongly in mind here is 
  how big and complex you’d like this scenario to 
  be. A scenario, in this context, is not the same as 
  an evening’s game session (see the discussion of 
  scenarios, story arcs, etc. in Running the Game, 
  page 314). A single scenario could last several game 
  sessions—perhaps up to a half dozen or more 
  if it’s a big, complex story. To generate a shorter 
  scenario, pick just two or three from among the 
  PCs’ aspects and one or two from the city. For 
  really long scenarios, stretching over several 
  game sessions, pick up to two for each PC and 
  two or three from the city. 
  Instead of directly including the city’s threats 
  at this stage, you might want to let the faces 
  and NPCs that embody those threats do the 
  talking here. It’s their aspects that should come 
  to the fore. Use threats as backdrops for conflict 
  between characters, rather than as the source of 
  the conflict itself.
  Look these aspects over. These are what your 
  story, at least your initial one, is going to be based 
  on. Make sure you know what they mean—
  sometimes aspects can be interpreted differently 
  by different people, and it’s a good idea to make 
  sure that you’re on the same page as your players 
  regarding their characters’ aspects. (That’s not to 
  say that you can’t occasionally twist them in an 
  unexpected direction, but don’t outright subvert 
  the player’s intent.)
  Example: Baltimore
  We’ll grab six aspects, enough to make three 
  connections (‘cause we looked ahead and know 
  that’s the next step). This is a lot of connections 
  given the number of PCs (making for a long 
  scenario, which is cool, but just know that’s what 
  you’ll be getting into).
    Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here 
  (Evan, but all three PCs have it)
    I’d Rather not be a Warden, 
  Thanks (Evan)
    “Sorry, Mouse,” Said Maya’s Steady 
  Boyfriend (Biff)
    Mortimer Louis Abernathy III (Biff)
    Insatiably Curious Were-Mouse 
  (Maya)
    I Remember Where I Came From 
  (Maya)
  The aspect Hail Hail the Gang’s All 
  Here seems to sum up the relationship among 
  the three PCs very well—to the players, it 
  means that if one is in trouble the others will be 
  there, either bailing him out or at least in trouble 
  right alongside him. Evan’s player, Rob, says 
  that his character means well but feels neither 
  confident nor motivated enough to serve as a 
  Warden—I’d  Rather not be a Warden, 
  Thanks. 
  Biff is frequently putting his foot in his mouth 
  or otherwise hurting Maya’s feelings—“Sorry, 
  Mouse,” Said Maya’s Steady Boyfriend. 
  His player, Fred, made it clear that Biff isn’t ever 
  abusive or unfaithful to Maya, but he doesn’t 
  always think through how his actions might 
  affect her, and thus spends a lot of time apolo-
  gizing and making things up to her. Also, some-
  times he has to stop being “Biff ” and accept his 
  I’m telling 
  you, if 
  anything 
  majorly 
  supernatural 
  starts to 
  go down in 
  Baltimore, 
  Montrose 
  ain’t gonna 
  have a 
  choice: he’ll 
  be drafted. 
  (Happened 
  to me!)
  
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  Building Scenarios
  role as Mortimer Louis Abernathy III, of 
  the fabulously wealthy and prominent Baltimore 
  Abernathys, with all the privileges, obligations, 
  and expectations this implies. 
  Maya’s aspect Insatiably Curious Were-
  Mouse encapsulates, well, an insatiable curi-
  osity—a driving need she has to solve puzzles 
  and discover hidden information. Sometimes 
  this means she sticks her nose where it doesn’t 
  belong, which can be especially problematic 
  for her friends who have social obligations and 
  appearances to keep up. Further, her back-
  ground as a poor girl (I Remember Where I 
  Came From) sometimes puts her at odds with 
  Biff and his family.
  Make 
  Connections
  Now that you’ve picked the aspects that you’re 
  going to focus on, what do you do with them?
  Take aspects related to different PCs, or a PC 
  and an NPC, and start pairing them up. Look 
  for strong connections that leap out at you. Go 
  for the obvious when you find it—that’s what 
  will be easiest for your players to grab hold of 
  and run with. You’ll probably find your connec-
  tions line up into two broad categories (some-
  times a connection falls into both, and that’s 
  okay): connections focusing on tension, and 
  connections focusing on cooperation.
  Tension-Based 
  Connections
  Tension-based connections create a struggle or 
  complication for one, or both, characters. 
  One example of this is Harry Dresden’s 
  Warden of the White Council aspect, 
  and Thomas Raith’s Fallen Prince of the 
  White Court aspect. The potential for tension 
  is obvious—Harry is supposed to act in the 
  interest of the White Council at all times, but 
  his own brother is a Prince of the White Court. 
  Given the war, that’s a pretty big potential 
  conflict of interest. It’s best that information like 
  that not get out, right?
  Other examples of aspect pairs that create 
  tension might be Fix’s Geased by Titania 
  and Harry’s Faerie Debts. Harry’s Warden 
  of the White Council and Murphy’s SI 
  Lead Detective frequently put them at 
  odds on how to deal with supernatural crimes 
  in Chicago. Obvious though it is, Michael 
  Carpenter’s aspect of Knight of the Cross, 
  and Nicodemus’s That Soul Which Has the 
  Greatest Punishment put them in direct 
  tension—don’t discount these obvious ones just 
  because they’re obvious.
  “That Soul Which Has the Greatest Punishment” 
  — fun fact: Dante was roaring drunk when he 
  wrote that passage.
  Cooperation-Based 
  Connections
  Cooperation-based connections connect the 
  parties to an outside situation, usually by setting 
  up a situation of common cause or a common 
  opponent between the parties. Think of what 
  kinds of situations might draw both parties in 
  and why those might happen. 
  Harry provides yet another great example 
  here. His aspect Wizard Private Eye and 
  Murphy’s SI Lead Detective put them at the 
  same crime scene, working together to try to 
  figure out how—and why—Jennifer Stanton 
  died. (Notice the similarity between this one 
  and a pair mentioned in the previous section? 
  Yeah, a lot of these distinctions are very subtle, 
  and categorization can go either way. The good 
  news is there isn’t a “right” answer for how to 
  arrange them, as long as it works for you. In fact, 
  you might use the same pair of aspects to make 
  both kinds of connections for the same scenario, 
  and that’s awesome.)
  Here’s an obvious example: Harry’s I Trust 
  My Brother, and Thomas’s Loyal To My 
  Brother. Another example is Will Borden’s 
  aspect People Need to Wake Up, and Harry’s 
  Chivalry Is Not Dead, Dammit. Harry’s 
  sense of protecting the weak and Will’s need to 
  get involved in doing that could easily lead to the 
  two of them working together.
  So you’re 
  publishing it 
  in this book 
  WHY?
  oK, relax, I 
  can rewrite 
  this for the 
  next draft.
  Will Borden finds it odd 
  to be speaking of himself 
  in the third person.
  NOW it’s getting 
  to you?
  
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  Building Scenarios
  Example: Baltimore
  We have six aspects, which is three connections. 
  Let’s create one cooperation-based, and two 
  tension-based.
  For this scenario, a tension-based connection 
  can be drawn between I’d Rather not be a 
  Warden, Thanks from Evan and Insatiably 
  Curious Were-Mouse from Maya. Evan 
  doesn’t want to be Baltimore’s supernatural 
  sheriff, but there’s something Maya won’t let him 
  leave well enough alone. 
  A second tension-based connection is 
  obvious—Biff ’s Mortimer Louis Abernathy 
  III and Maya’s I Remember Where I Came 
  From. Their relationship must be filled with 
  moments when Biff ’s privileged childhood 
  clashes with Maya’s experience with poverty.
  A cooperation-based connection might 
  be found between Evan’s Hail Hail the 
  Gang’s All Here matched with Biff ’s “Sorry, 
  Mouse.” I’m imagining a situation where Maya 
  is in trouble—perhaps due to her curiosity 
  mentioned in the first connection—and Evan 
  and Biff need to dive in head first to help her 
  out, Evan to help a friend and Biff to make 
  up for a faux pas (real or imagined) that he 
  committed earlier.
  Create 
  Scenario Ideas
  You’ve made some connections that you’re going 
  to base your scenarios on. It’s almost certain 
  that you have some preliminary ideas for the 
  scenarios you’re going to generate from them; 
  now it’s time to flesh those ideas out.
  Each of those connections provides an 
  opportunity for conflict. For each connection, 
  look at all the NPC motivations you have—who 
  could benefit from or exploit this connection? 
  Who could use this tension to help achieve his 
  heart’s desire?
  Using Tension-
  Based Connections
  For your tension-based connections, the basic 
  idea is to find ways that an NPC would want to 
  exploit the connection. Who might want to take 
  advantage of this tension and would engineer a 
  situation to trigger it? Once you have the answer 
  to these questions, you can start to think about 
  the details of how they do it. 
  If you don’t have a face or key NPC who 
  could really take advantage of this connection, 
  you have two choices: you can ditch this connec-
  tion and create a new one, or you can generate 
  a new NPC to exploit it. There are advantages 
  and disadvantages to each, but keep in mind 
  that if you find yourself regularly creating new 
  NPCs at this stage of the game, it’s possible 
  that you’re not effectively using the ones you 
  and your players created together during city 
  creation. If you elect to go the New NPC route, 
  don’t stat them out yet—just start a list of new 
  NPCs you’ll need, and stat them all out at once 
  in the end.
  Building these sorts of connections tends to 
  give the GM lots of opportunities to compel 
  aspects. This is more than great story fuel—it’s 
  a way to funnel extra fate points to the players. 
  Keep in mind that an NPC doesn’t neces-
  sarily have to be exploiting this connection on 
  purpose every time—not every villain is going to 
  be making a beeline for your PCs’ heads every 
  story. You can make the connection indirect as 
  well. So if a rogue White Court vampire NPC 
  in Chicago kills a wizard traveling through the 
  city, that could put Harry and Thomas at odds 
  regardless of the NPC’s intentions, as each of 
  their respective “superiors” puts pressure on 
  them to deal with the situation a certain way.
  Example: Baltimore
  There are two tension-based connections that 
  could end up working out very well with the 
  same NPC bad guy. Damocles Ravenborn’s 
  motive of “Montrose WILL take me seri-
  ously” ties in nicely with any scenario that 
  involves Evan. What if Ravenborn could exploit 
  the Mortimer Louis Abernathy III—I 
  Remember Where I Came From connection 
  to gain an invitation to cross the threshold of 
  the Montrose house? Also, the tension between 
  I Don’t Want to be a Warden, Thanks and 
  Insatiably Curious Were-Mouse could 
  serve to separate Maya from Evan, leaving Maya 
  vulnerable to the Red Court vampires…
  Do we want to bring in any aspects of Evan 
  Montrose’s estate, or any other location? Maybe, 
  maybe not—let’s design the first scene and see 
  what comes up.
  So, how do 
  you FIX 
  aspects 
  that aren’t 
  getting used?
  A quick and 
  dirty fix, for 
  me, would be 
  changing—or 
  adding—aspects 
  to “Face” 
  NPcs that 
  directly address 
  any Pc-Pc 
  connections, 
  whether 
  tension-based 
  or cooperation-
  based ones. 
  like take the 
  second tension-
  based Baltimore 
  example—Biff 
  vs. maya. maybe 
  give damocles 
  ravenborn 
  an aspect 
  that connects 
  to maya's I 
  rememBer 
  WHere I cAme 
  From (maybe 
  they were 
  friends before 
  he went vamp?). 
  Also see the 
  different 
  example in the 
  maintext re: 
  this very same 
  connection.
  
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  Using Cooperation-
  Based Connections
  Cooperation-based connections are usually a 
  little easier to work with than tension-based 
  ones—just from looking at the connections, you 
  know what kind of situations would necessitate 
  both characters being involved, so you pretty 
  much already know what the NPC is going to 
  do. Then you just need to figure out why. 
  Again, if you can’t find someone from among 
  your face NPCs who would trigger such a situ-
  ation, you’ll have to make one up. In any case, 
  decide what the NPC has done to involve both 
  characters, and, if applicable, what that NPC 
  is going to do to get over, under, around, or 
  through the connection in order to get what he 
  wants.
  As with tension-based connections above, 
  you can associate the NPC’s plans directly or 
  indirectly. If the association is direct, it means 
  the NPC knows about the connection and is 
  intentionally drawing at least one of the PCs out 
  for some reason. If it’s indirect, it means that the 
  NPC doesn’t know what kind of opposition he’s 
  going to end up facing.
  Example: Baltimore
  If Evan and Biff have to come riding to 
  Maya’s rescue (or, at least, if they think they 
  do) using their connection of Hail Hail the 
  Gang’s All Here and “Sorry, Mouse,” who 
  would want to take advantage of that? Let’s see 
  if we can bring someone else into the mix here. 
  Alexandra Lagios and Gilgamesh both have a 
  reason to want Evan Montrose out of the way; 
  let’s go with the ghoul freehold, as we’ve already 
  touched on vampires with the other connections.
  A Web of Relationships
  When you start to get more comfortable 
  making scenarios up, keep in mind that 
  the NPCs can have relationships with each 
  other that are just as complicated as the 
  ones the PCs have. NPCs don’t always have 
  to be bosom buddies—many people make 
  alliances out of convenience or because they 
  think it’s in their best interest at the time. 
  You can set up a pretty rich series of 
  interactions for your scenario by compli-
  cating NPC relationships, which could lead 
  to them betraying each other in the future 
  or being persuaded by the PCs in various 
  ways. It’s even better if some of these NPCs 
  directly need or want something from the 
  PCs in order to achieve their goals.
  Loo-Tender! 
  REEE 
  PORT!
  
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  Putting It 
  All Together
  At this point you have several connections and 
  how they’re going to create conflict with some of 
  your NPCs. However, a collection of unrelated 
  conflicts will just result in confused players and 
  a scattered, muddled plot. You’ll need to pull 
  them all together to create a coherent scenario 
  out of them.
  Look at the opposition you’ve set up for your 
  PCs’ connections. Does the same bad guy keep 
  coming up in most of them? That NPC is the 
  mastermind of most of (or all of) the problems, 
  and all you have to do is figure out what his 
  overall intent is. Other NPCs might be allied 
  or somehow involved with the mastermind, as 
  “lieutenants” of some kind, or just co-conspira-
  tors with compatible goals.
  Remember that a motivation is just a moti-
  vation—it won’t get anywhere without goals. 
  Design short term goals for the NPC such that 
  all the connections are covered. All these goals 
  should, of course, work toward the NPC’s moti-
  vation. This shouldn’t be that hard—if it’s too 
  many to manage, go ahead and drop one or two. 
  The key is to focus on the strongest ideas; these 
  should be the core of your scenario. Focusing 
  on just one or two is usually good for a few 
  play sessions; aim for three or four for a longer 
  scenario.
  Example: Baltimore
  So we have Damocles Ravenborn trying to settle 
  a score with Evan Montrose, and Gilgamesh 
  trying to get Montrose out of the way. Let’s say 
  that Ravenborn, who’s a petty little coward, 
  is being used by Gilgamesh to draw Evan out 
  into the open and get him vulnerable. This fits 
  Gilgamesh’s personality as well—he’s a talented 
  schemer and sees the value of using catspaws 
  and leveraging other people’s motivation to 
  achieve his ends for him.
  Ravenborn just wants to be taken seriously, 
  so he might be fine with “sending a message” of 
  some sort, while he’s afraid of a direct confronta-
  tion. Gilgamesh, however, won’t be satisfied until 
  Evan Montrose is permanently dealt with.
  What to Do 
  With Outlying 
  Connections
  Of course, not all conflict in a scenario needs 
  to be part of the overarching plot. Throwing a 
  completely tangential conflict at your PCs—one 
  they can’t ignore without some repercussions—
  is a useful technique to mix things up. Doing 
  this can serve any of several purposes:
    It can serve as a useful red herring to 
  throw annoyingly clever players off the 
  trail in a mystery-oriented scenario. 
    It can create a B-plot or provide oppor-
  tunities for character development 
  parallel to the main conflict.
    You can use it as a segue to an upcoming 
  major plot by the next big bad.
    You can use the outlying connection to 
  indirectly lead the PCs to the core of the 
  scenario.
  The last one on that list is my personal 
  favorite. It’s a great use for an orphan connection 
  you don’t otherwise know what to do with—
  use it for the “misleading” opener. Lots of TV 
  shows work this way; in the first few minutes 
  of the show, the heroes pursue one plot thread 
  or source of conflict, only to uncover the real 
  core of the scenario later in the episode. If you 
  can time this big, cliffhanger-like reveal of the 
  scenario’s true core to happen at the end of the 
  scenario’s first game session, you’ve pulled off a 
  masterpiece of scenario design.
  Example: Baltimore
  So, right now, we have two strong connections 
  working here: one between Mortimer Louis 
  Abernathy III and I Remember Where I 
  Came From (that’s Ravenborn’s plan) and one 
  between Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here 
  and “Sorry, Mouse” (that’s Gilgamesh’s plan).
  That gives us some outliers, namely I 
  Don’t Want to be a Warden, Thanks 
  and Insatiably Curious Were-Mouse, on 
  Evan and Maya respectively. We talked about 
  this being a possible connection of tension, but 
  nothing concrete materialized like it did for the 
  other pairs. So let’s look at some possibilities for 
  these two aspects.
  We know that Evan has reluctance toward 
  acting in an enforcement capacity as a wizard—
  that suggests a character development B-plot. 
  Hell’s 
  Bells, Billy, 
  this whole 
  chapter is 
  freaking me 
  out. Stop 
  giving the bad 
  guys ideas.
  
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  What can we put in front of him? How about a 
  minor threat, a rogue practitioner who’s gotten 
  hold of some nasty magic and is doing some 
  careless Lawbreaking in the city? I know…the 
  guy got rejected by the Dupin Society and is 
  capriciously terrorizing its members as payback! 
  Unfortunately (and unbeknownst to him), his 
  magical “pranks” are doing real, lasting psychic 
  trauma to his victims. How will Evan deal with 
  this little spellslinger gone out of hand?
  With Maya, the most prudent thing to do is 
  to give her something to investigate right off the 
  bat. I’m not sure exactly what I want to do with 
  this yet, but I’ll keep it in mind as I go.
  Create Opening 
  Scene Hooks
  At this point, you should have a strong idea of 
  what the antagonists are trying to do and exactly 
  how the PCs are getting in their way. The next 
  step is to generate some scene hooks, especially 
  for the first scene. And as you do this, remember 
  that a scene hook is just a kickstart for a scene—
  the GM shouldn’t go into any of them with any 
  particular resolution in mind. Resolving the 
  scene is the players’ job.
  Begin at the 
  Beginning
  The first scene is often the hardest one to come 
  up with. How will you introduce the scenario 
  and conflict to the players without boring them 
  to tears? One of the most effective techniques in 
  your bag of tricks is beginning things in medias 
  res. Avoid all that pesky exposition by raising 
  the curtain with the PCs in a burning building 
  facing off against two Red Court vampires with 
  Uzis. Worry about how they got there later. This 
  technique works really well if you combine it 
  with an orphan connection from the previous 
  section—the PCs are there investigating some-
  thing they thought might be important, but in 
  the opening number they uncover the Really Big 
  Problem™.
  You could have an ordinary exposition scene, 
  too, but those are harder to pull off in an inter-
  esting way. You need to inject a sense of urgency 
  right off the bat. An NPC who shows up on the 
  PCs’ doorstep and asks them to be involved in 
  the plot isn’t very exciting, but a character who 
  shows up on the PCs’ doorstep bleeding from 
  several vicious claw wounds can be. If you have 
  to start the session with an information dump, 
  make sure there’s something else going on in 
  the scene that the PCs have to deal with as 
  well—demanding NPCs, some kind of immi-
  nent problem…anything that’ll kick up the 
  momentum and get them making decisions.
  Compels are a pretty effective tool to start 
  things off in any scenario—bringing the charac-
  ters’ aspects and a few interesting choices right 
  to the forefront is almost guaranteed to get you 
  moving in one direction or another. However, 
  make sure that you don’t have your scenario 
  depend on a particular response to a compel—
  after all, the player might refuse it entirely.
  Example: Baltimore
  An opening scene is probably taking at least 
  partial shape in your head about now—that’s 
  definitely where I usually am. In this case, I’m 
  thinking that Biff has been called in by his family 
  to go into Mortimer Louis Abernathy III 
  mode—their charitable organization (“The 
  Abernathy Foundation”) is doing a black tie 
  fundraiser, and Evan has volunteered his house 
  to host it. The scenario starts at this cocktail 
  party with everyone dressed to the nines and 
  holding up their little fingers. 
  Who’s there? Evan, Maya, and Biff, of course. 
  Biff ’s parents. Wellington. A few hundred of 
  Baltimore’s wealthy elite. Pick a few people—
  wealthy donors and hopeful beneficiaries—
  from the NPC list that might be there: Dave 
  Gerard, perhaps with date Dr. Alison Ralston, 
  and Paul Mackey and John Vastolo, ostensibly 
  representing the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, but 
  of course representing the Dupin Society. 
  I have a lot of stuff I can do in this scene to 
  get the ball rolling:
  Just for fun, I want to let the characters 
  play around a bit with the NPCs. I think Paul 
  Mackey is going to give Evan a hard time over 
  not giving to the Museum’s general fund last 
  year—this is basically a compel against Evan’s 
  In Over My Head aspect. Paul is trying to 
  pressure him into making some kind of firm 
  financial commitment to the Museum, but any 
  situation that puts Evan in over his head would 
  be appropriate here. I’ll remind him about the 
  tension between his family and the Society—
  on the one hand, he could acquiesce and hope 
  that the Museum doesn’t need too much from 
  him. On the other hand, he could tell the 
  But was 
  it their 
  fault? Such 
  details are 
  important.
  
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  money-grubbing Poe hound exactly where he 
  should stick it! Of course, whichever he chooses, 
  he needs to do it while still playing the gracious 
  host in a room full of people wondering how 
  well young Montrose will fill his father’s shoes.
  I want to put the tension between Biff and 
  Maya’s upbringing center stage, so I’ll have one 
  of Biff ’s parents (probably Mom) display a very 
  awkward disdain for the outfit Maya’s wearing… 
  she finds the two of them together and says to 
  Biff, “Shame on you, allowing this sweet girl 
  in here in thrift store fashions.” Then to Maya, 
  “A charming attempt, my girl, but seriously, 
  shouldn’t you have had something made for the 
  occasion?” This could act as a compel depending 
  on how it plays out—Biff and Maya could get 
  compelled on “Sorry, Mouse” and “Biff, you 
  Jerk!” simultaneously if Biff sides with Mom 
  and tries to laugh it off, or Maya’s I Remember 
  Where I Came From could cause her to say 
  exactly what she thinks about Mom’s privileged 
  comments, in flatly insulting terms. Fun for the 
  whole family!
  I want to make this Damocles’ first attempt 
  to get across the Montrose threshold. He’s 
  not going to come himself yet, so he’s going to 
  send some of his Red Court cronies to bust up 
  the place with some submachine gun-inspired 
  terrorism. They are going to show up in the 
  guise of tux-clad members from the Helping 
  Hand Mission, a homeless shelter and benefi-
  ciary of the Abernathy Foundation. They’d sure 
  like to hobnob with the money people, they say, 
  to lobby for additional funds for next year. 
  Maya or Biff (or, preferably, both) should 
  be on hand when the Helping Hand “reps” 
  arrive—one of the staff comes to get Biff, or 
  Maya notices them on the front porch when 
  she’s getting some air (even more appropriate, 
  depending on how the confrontation with Mom 
  goes). The doorman is about to rudely turn them 
  away, claiming that it’s invite-only, but can Maya 
  really let that go, given that she Remembers 
  Where She Came From? Does Biff want to 
  come across as the same kind of jerk his parents 
  and their friends seem to be? On the other hand, 
  Maya’s Uncommon Sense might tip her off 
  that something’s really, really wrong, and that 
  perhaps they should tread carefully. There are a 
  lot of compels I might suggest, but I know the 
  vampires will bust up the party anyway—albeit 
  with their powers greatly curtailed if they have 
  to cross the threshold.
  Planning Ahead
  In addition to these opening hooks, you’re 
  going to want a handful of hooks for other 
  scenes that will happen in the beginning parts 
  of the scenario. This is a great time to use those 
  outliers that you couldn’t pair up with a connec-
  tion before. Come up with a brief situation that’s 
  relevant to that aspect; it may or may not be 
  connected to the main plot, but it will give your 
  session a sense of depth and texture.
  The scenes that come after the opening hook 
  are usually going to revolve around two key 
  things: the PCs finding out important infor-
  mation about the bad guy and his plans, or the 
  PCs directly confronting the bad guy or his 
  resources (minions, hired guns, etc.) as the bad 
  guy pursues his plan.
  This is a really good place to tie in aspects 
  from the city. Find a few locations where it’d be 
  interesting for the PCs to directly intersect the 
  NPCs in pursuit of their motivations. If any of 
  these NPCs are faces for city locations, those are 
  great places to start your thinking.
  In particular, look at the locations’ themes 
  and threats. Does a location have an aspect 
  directly related to the scenario’s core conflict? If 
  so, you have an instant setting hook—look for 
  opportunities to guide the action there. This 
  shouldn’t be hard at all, if the location’s face or 
  any of its aspects fit in well. (If it’s hard, consider 
  that the location isn’t as good a fit as you first 
  thought it was.)
  You’re probably going to want to make some 
  hooks a little bit portable. GMs can try to antici-
  pate where the PCs will want to go, but good 
  luck being right more than about half the time. 
  If some of your scene hooks can be uprooted 
  and moved around when you need them to be, 
  you will be a lot less stressed and will also be less 
  subject to the temptation to railroad the PCs 
  to particular places. In addition, you’re going to 
  want to play your NPCs as being dynamic and 
  reactive during the scenario—once the PCs are 
  on to them, they’re going to respond to that, and 
  you can’t always guarantee when and where that 
  response might take place. 
  Don’t sweat this step too much. The example 
  is long, but really it’s just a matter of making a 
  laundry list of potential scenes in your head. 
  Your players will largely drive the progress of 
  the scenario, once the investigation gets rolling 
  or they make with the scheming and planning. 
  So they 
  could just 
  serve as red 
  herrings?
  Yeah, but I'd 
  be careful with 
  that: too many 
  false trails 
  or loose hooks 
  and gameplay 
  can get pretty 
  chaotic, in a 
  not-fun way.
  Hm. Some 
  very power-
  ful or set-
  in-their ways 
  supernatural 
  types might 
  be slow to 
  respond to 
  or dismissive 
  about quick-
  thinking PCs.
  that’s still 
  dynamic and 
  reactive, but 
  more in a 
  cHArActer-
  IzAtIoN way.
  
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  We included a lot of information here just for 
  the sake of example, but you probably only need 
  to have a few ideas. Just make sure you have a 
  few hooks up your sleeve and roll with what the 
  players throw at you.
  Example: Baltimore
  So, obviously there will be some kind of inves-
  tigation into the nature of the attack at the 
  Montrose estate. It’ll be obvious that the perpe-
  trators are Red Court vampires, so that gives a 
  good starting point for things. The players will 
  probably want to try to find out where the Red 
  Court vamps are hanging out these days, what 
  they’ve been up to, any clues as to why they 
  might have made such a brazen attack on the 
  cocktail party, etc. 
  I know I’m going to have some scenes where 
  the PCs do assessments, and I know the PCs 
  will probably hit up some contacts—maybe Dr. 
  Ralston for a post-mortem on the vamps’ bodies 
  (if any of them get killed instead of just running 
  away), maybe Luis Mirabal and Leslie Vastolo 
  for word on any unusual movements on the 
  streets, etc. 
  Evan might even do a tracking spell that 
  leads them right into the heart of the matter—
  I’ll have to remember to come up with some 
  kind of lair for Damocles or staging ground for 
  a large confrontation. The Inner Harbor, the 
  Aquarium, and the Key Bridge are all good loca-
  tions for a big set piece battle.
  I also want to make sure I get my B-plot 
  in, so during this investigation, I’ll drop the 
  tidbit that members of the Dupin Society are 
  also reporting terror attacks from an unknown 
  assailant. This seems like it could fit the M.O. of 
  the main hook, so there’s a chance that someone 
  will go investigate directly—potential conflict 
  here if the Insatiably Curious Maya insists 
  that the reluctant wizard do his damned job. 
  If no one investigates, I’ll just have the PCs 
  stumble upon the aftermath of an attack on Paul 
  Mackey in a future scene. 
  If Maya goes investigating on her own—
  worth a compel—I definitely want her to get 
  the chance to make the connection between 
  Ravenborn’s sudden boldness and Gilgamesh’s 
  ghouls. Maybe some of the Red Court vampires 
  are running about town with ghoul enforcers on 
  Gilgamesh’s whim…an encounter with a group 
  of them could be very untimely for her.
  
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  Either way, some likely confrontations are 
  going to happen here: 
    Damocles Ravenborn is going to gloat 
  whenever Evan and company encounter 
  him again; if things get violent, then 
  Gilgamesh’s ghouls will come out and 
  join the battle. Damocles might not need 
  to be fought, though; he’s a coward at 
  heart, and if he’s sufficiently intimidated, 
  he might even give up Gilgamesh’s plans. 
  This would definitely bring the ghouls 
  out to try to silence everyone.
    Gilgamesh is going to try to use any 
  situation where Evan is most disadvan-
  taged to get rid of him once and for all. 
  That may be when he’s dealing with the 
  rogue practitioner, or it may happen if 
  Gilgamesh manages to capture Maya and 
  ransom her for Evan. 
  Finally, anything from the first scene might 
  need an additional payoff; maybe Paul continues 
  to bug Evan about the Museum fund and applies 
  more guilt tactics, and maybe Biff has another 
  confrontation with his parents over his insis-
  tence on dating a lower-class girl. These kinds 
  of scenes can help ease up the pace between big 
  conflict scenes and offer a lot of opportunity for 
  roleplaying.
  Create 
  Additional 
  Details
  Every step of this process might have created 
  a new location or NPC. The last step of this 
  process is to stat those out just enough for you to 
  run with them during the game. As with NPCs 
  and locations generated during city creation, it’s 
  not always necessary to stat out NPCs with full 
  blocks; just get enough detail that you won’t be 
  stumbling around at the table during the game. 
  An aspect or two, a couple of relevant skills, a 
  stunt, and a basic description should suffice. 
  The key players in your scenario should prob-
  ably be created as main NPCs, or at least as 
  supporting NPCs with a good amount of infor-
  mation filled out. You want that level of detail 
  for your “mastermind” type characters, because 
  you want to have a good idea of what resources 
  they can bring to bear and what they can do. 
  Most of the time, an NPC mastermind will 
  have hired or somehow secured the assistance of 
  other characters in pursuit of his goal; the PCs 
  will no doubt encounter these henchmen and 
  accomplices in the course of their investigations 
  or attempts to stop the mastermind.
  And keep in mind that bad guys will want 
  to learn about and stop the PCs just like the 
  PCs will want to learn about and stop them! It’s 
  important to know what a particular master-
  mind’s investigative abilities are, how he might 
  go about doing assessments to suss out a PC’s 
  aspects, and how he’ll fight the PCs when the 
  confrontation inevitably comes.
  Once you have done all this, you should 
  have enough material to run your scenario. 
  Congratulations!
  Example: Baltimore
  Like I observed in the last installment of this 
  ongoing example, Ravenborn needs a lair. What 
  sort of character is he? Well, he’s a total poser, 
  a goth who did it all wrong, a real life vampire 
  who still acts like the poster boy for taking a 
  LARP too seriously. Where would a dweeb like 
  this live (heh)? An abandoned church basement, 
  of course. Saint Cyprian’s. I’ll put it in some 
  forgotten city neighborhood, give it the theme 
  Gothic Horror, and call it a day.
  Gilgamesh wouldn’t give up his lair so easily, 
  so if his scheme to capture Maya actually occurs, 
  he’d probably put her in an abandoned ware-
  house somewhere. I can come up with scene 
  aspects for that easily enough on the fly.
  I already have Gilgamesh and Damocles’ 
  statblocks (page 372 and 374 respectively), so 
  they’re good to go. I need to make the rogue 
  practitioner from my B-plot into a supporting 
  NPC—could use Russell Carson for this. And 
  finally, I need to have ready stats for the ghoul 
  minions as well as Damocles’ Red Court cronies.
  Just for your reference, 
  Harry, I’m guessing one of your 
  casefiles would lean toward the 
  longer end if I were to look at 
  them as scenarios. most of your 
  cases get pretty complicated.
  Occupational hazard.
  
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  The Scenario 
  in Play
  So you have your initial hooks, you have an idea 
  of what might happen after that, and you have a 
  laundry list of the most likely scenes you’ll have 
  to run. So, now you can be confident that every-
  thing is going to go according to plan, right?
  Wrong! Remember that nothing can force 
  the players to deal with every hook you put 
  out for them—sure, it’s likely that a lot of the 
  juicier hooks you throw out there are going to 
  get bites, but some may get left by the wayside 
  or get ignored. Players aren’t going to take every 
  compel you put in front of them, and they aren’t 
  obligated to. Remember, your scenario isn’t a 
  predefined plotline—it’s a dynamic situation 
  that won’t resolve until the PCs have decided 
  to deal with it one way or another. They’re also 
  not obligated to keep their focus where you 
  might think it should be—maybe they’re really 
  enjoying some character interactions and don’t 
  seem too interested in getting into the plot. So 
  how do you deal with that?
  The first and foremost thing to keep in mind 
  is that choices have consequences. If you’ve done 
  your opener right, you’ll have a bandolier of 
  choices the PCs have made in response to your 
  initial situation—maybe none of those choices 
  are ones that you planned for, but the material 
  you have prepared should give you a solid foun-
  dation for figuring out how the NPCs might 
  react. All you have to do is take a minute or 
  two, extrapolate some logical consequences to 
  the PCs’ actions, keep the NPCs’ goals in mind, 
  and work from there. Specifically, look at how 
  different NPCs might form alliances or have a 
  falling out as a result of PC actions—this can 
  easily spur new scene ideas.
  Eventually, you’ll either find a way to intro-
  duce the NPCs and their goals from your 
  scenario idea, or you’ll find a couple of other 
  major situations you can center the session 
  around. If you end up with a plot element that 
  emerges naturally from play, that’s fine—just 
  keep thinking of logical choices and conse-
  quences until the situation’s been resolved to the 
  satisfaction of the players. Remember the guide-
  lines about good scenes from Running the Game 
  (page 307)—make sure you’re not running a new 
  scene just to stall for time.
  Example: Baltimore
  So, I start running the session and the first scene 
  goes a little bit nuts—Evan has a sprawling 
  confrontation with Paul and totally alienates the 
  Dupin Society pretty much in one huge swoop; 
  the argument between Biff, Maya, and Biff ’s 
  mom likewise takes up center stage; and the 
  party comes to a terrible, crashing halt before I 
  even get the chance to introduce the vampires!
  Now what? I didn’t even get to present my 
  scenario hook! I take a deep breath and think for 
  a moment, pondering my notes. I know that the 
  most likely consequence for Biff ’s stuff is that his 
  parents are going to cut off his trust fund; he’s 
  going to find himself broke in a hurry. I’m sure 
  that bit of information will lead to a good scene.
  Evan’s stuff doesn’t suggest anything imme-
  diately, until I remember the rogue practitioner 
  who is terrorizing Dupin Society members—
  maybe the Society decides that Evan is the one 
  responsible. This puts them in a position where 
  they’re scared and maybe feel like they need to 
  strike back to protect themselves. This could 
  be where Damocles Ravenborn gets back into 
  things. Maybe he convinces John Vastolo or 
  someone else in the Society that he’s a lawyer 
  who can help them scare Evan off.
  So now I’ve got a direction I can go in—I tell 
  Biff that his trust fund’s been cut off and that 
  he’s being served with papers from his chari-
  table investments trying to figure out where 
  the money went, and I ask him what he wants 
  to do. He gets hopping mad and demands to go 
  confront his parents immediately, which gives 
  me a good next scene. 
  Then, I tell Evan that John Vastolo has 
  come to the house with his “legal team” (AKA 
  disguised Red Court vampires) in tow, to discuss 
  proper compensation for “services rendered” in 
  the past—in other words, payment for infor-
  mation the Society has previously provided his 
  family. This sets the stage for them to try “scare 
  tactics” on Evan to get him to leave the Society 
  alone, which lets me bring the info about my 
  rogue spellslinger into play.
  So, I still have my major elements in place—
  Damocles trying to send a message to Evan, a 
  rogue practitioner terrorizing the Dupin Society, 
  and Gilgamesh waiting in the wings. Now, 
  though, there’s a big character-driven element in 
  the tension between Biff and his parents, but I’m 
  okay to run with that wherever it might take me.
  Won't that 
  tick off the 
  players, that 
  something 
  they did inad-
  ver tently 
  helped their 
  bad guys 
  team-up?
  read the 
  first sentence 
  of that 
  paragraph 
  again.
  
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  Dynamic NPCs
  Another thing to keep in mind when you’re 
  running the scenario is that the NPCs shouldn’t 
  just sit and wait for the PCs to figure out what’s 
  going on. They aren’t videogame bosses—they 
  have goals and desires and they act on them. 
  Once the PCs start pushing off in a direction 
  that puts them at odds with the NPCs, the 
  NPCs are going to react just like a PC would—
  they’re going to want to start doing assessments 
  to learn the aspects of the PCs, figure out their 
  weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and figure out 
  how to stifle their investigation attempts.
  This can lead you to a host of good scenes 
  if you’re not sure what to do next. One way to 
  ratchet up the tension during the middle of a 
  session is to have an NPC investigate the PCs 
  while the PCs are investigating him. Not every 
  encounter with an NPC has to be violent—
  maybe they’re trying to get an advantage over 
  the PC (by, say, stealing his hair for a spell) or 
  suss out the PCs’ intentions more clearly. If the 
  web of relationships between NPCs is tangled, 
  that might allow the PCs to seek different kinds 
  of solutions to their problems, relying more on 
  interpersonal interaction and negotiation.
  To do this, it helps to have a good idea of 
  what a particular NPC doesn’t know about a 
  situation. That tells you what he might be inter-
  ested in finding out, which tells you what he 
  might try and, more importantly, why.
  Another way you can make NPCs dynamic 
  is by having them concede in conflicts and get 
  compelled, just like PCs do. An NPC isn’t 
  going to fight to the death every time—feel free 
  to concede if it’s not going his way. Likewise, 
  make sure you let the PCs take full advantage 
  of whatever aspects they’re able to assess when 
  they investigate an NPC—it’s a fun payoff for 
  them, and it’ll make your NPCs seem more 
  three-dimensional.
  NPCs and Fate Points
  As a GM, there are a few different ways to handle 
  the flow of fate points among your NPCs. 
  Generally speaking, all the main NPCs you 
  have should get their own individual supply 
  of fate points to use, because that effectively 
  balances them against the PCs. It would be 
  extremely lopsided if you assumed their supply 
  was unlimited. It also allows NPCs to take 
  compels, concede conflicts, and generally use all 
  the strategies of the fate point economy that a 
  PC uses. 
  This can help you set up a natural rhythm for 
  scenes in your game—when the PCs triumph, 
  the opposition gets fate points and vice versa. 
  This can also create a kind of nebulous “plot 
  advantage” for PCs, as truly monstrous oppo-
  nents will often start the game with no fate 
  points due to negative refresh and require 
  “on-camera” compels before receiving them. 
  Also, compels on allied NPCs can help add 
  drama to an interaction with a PC, or create a 
  difficult choice if the ally’s decisions become 
  questionable.
  This means that, for main NPCs, you should 
  be fairly transparent about the game actions 
  you’re going to take. If you want to compel an 
  NPC or send him fate points, the players need 
  to be made aware of what you’re doing. If your 
  NPC is doing an assessment or a declaration, 
  you need to make that clear to the players and 
  participate in the system just like they do. 
  In some ways, you might consider the players 
  to be the check and balance for your efforts just 
  Give Yourself a Break
  It’s probable that you’ll need frequent, small 
  breaks to collect your thoughts and figure 
  out what you want to introduce next. That’s 
  okay—the players shouldn’t expect you to 
  be able to spew out Shakespearean twists 
  on a dime. You might even get the players 
  to suggest a good followup scene to help 
  kickstart your ideas. Most of what you do 
  depends on their responses anyway, so this 
  shouldn’t seem unusual.
  Using Player Ideas
  So, sometimes, the direction that play is 
  going in will suggest a better, different 
  motivation for an NPC than what you 
  originally came up with. Maybe the players, 
  while investigating something, will make 
  some kind of speculation that strikes you 
  as brilliant.
  It’s totally okay to let them be right about 
  it—just alter whatever information you have 
  to in order to match up with the players’ 
  suspicions. It’ll be a great payoff when they 
  get to it, and the fact that you were on the 
  same page and took their suggestion will 
  give them a really satisfying sense of being 
  able to contribute to every part of the story 
  in progress.
  Doesn't that 
  have the 
  chance of 
  screwing up 
  continuity? 
  Like if 
  an NPC's 
  motivation 
  changes from 
  “Kill them!” 
  to “Capture 
  them!” 
  halfway 
  through the 
  scenario, 
  what about 
  all the times 
  he tried 
  to whack 
  the PCs 
  early on?
  coming up with 
  reasons for 
  these sorts of 
  changes is one 
  of the most 
  fun things 
  about being a 
  gm! All kinds 
  of story hooks 
  and char acter-
  ization stuff 
  in there!
  Yet more 
  of our 
  ARCANOS 
  game is 
  explained...
  
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  Building Scenarios
  as you are against theirs—they’ll tell you if they 
  think something is foul play, trust me. If they’re 
  smart, the players will already be looking for 
  opportunities to compel the NPCs—putting all 
  of that stuff out in the open will only enhance 
  the richness of the interactions between them.
  Each supporting NPC should start with no 
  fate points and receive one per scene they’re 
  involved in. They have fewer aspects than main 
  NPCs, so they can’t be compelled as much; plus, 
  considering their supporting roles in the story, 
  those NPCs are just much less likely to end up 
  being compelled. (Of course, if they are, give 
  them those points as well.)
  Nameless NPCs should only receive fate 
  points if someone invokes an aspect to their 
  disadvantage in a scene or uses a scene or 
  temporary aspect to compel them. Because they 
  normally have no aspects of their own, they 
  have to rely on scene aspects and maneuvers if 
  they want to invoke anything. If the nameless 
  NPCs are minions of a bigger bad guy, you have 
  the option of letting any fate points they’d get 
  from conceding or cashing out of a conflict (see 
  page 206) go to the main “boss” NPC instead.
  Example: Baltimore
  Damocles Ravenborn has a –10 refresh, so he 
  does not receive any fate points at the begin-
  ning of the session—he’s fully gone over to the 
  monster side. If he wants to have any fate points 
  when he faces the PCs, he’s going to have to take 
  some compels by getting in a position to have his 
  aspects taken advantage of.
  I can funnel him some fate points by letting 
  some of his henchmen concede after a pitched 
  battle in the opening scene. In addition, I can 
  make his aspects “public” to the PCs pretty 
  easily—he’s a very eccentric character and his 
  reputation is widely known, so any kind of 
  assessment the PCs want to make about him 
  are bound to put his aspects of Actually Red 
  Court, but Still a Poser and Folds Under 
  Pressure on the table. In fact, his Bone to 
  Pick with Montrose might already be well 
  known by the PCs if this isn’t the first scenario 
  where he’s shown up. 
  There are a lot of ways the PCs might use 
  these to influence Ravenborn in any kind of 
  interaction, and I’m definitely going to take 
  anything they offer—especially if I know there’s 
  going to be a throwdown later. If the players 
  aren’t forthcoming, I can always use Ravenborn’s 
  aspects to justify stupid or careless mistakes—
  in the first scene, for instance, if the Red Court 
  vamps in the opening scene decide to cross the 
  threshold anyway and have their powers severely 
  penalized, I can call it a compel of Bone to 
  Pick with Montrose…Ravenborn is just 
  PCs, Toughness Powers, 
  and “The Catch”
  One major concern when playing NPCs 
  occurs when you have PCs with Toughness 
  powers. The temptation is to let any NPC 
  you want to be a serious threat have access 
  to the PC’s Catch, but if that happens every 
  time, then it’s sort of meaningless for that 
  PC to have Toughness powers in the first 
  place. Likewise, if it never happens, then it’s 
  meaningless for that PC to have a Catch.
  The simple solution is to let the NPC do 
  what a PC would do when faced with the 
  same dilemma—make the NPC go through 
  the process of researching the PC, to what-
  ever level of obscurity is necessary. If you 
  can justify the NPC’s access to the Catch 
  by a skill roll or other game action, it’s far 
  more likely to go over well with the players. 
  There’s no real reason for you to privilege 
  your NPCs in this regard—if they can find 
  out, then they can find out; if they can’t, they 
  can’t. You might even be able to turn that into 
  a confrontation of its own, as the NPC tries 
  to find out about the PC’s weakness, and the 
  PCs have a chance to thwart the effort.
  Being Lazy: The 
  Fate Point Pool
  If it’s too much trouble or too complicated 
  to keep track of individual NPC fate points, 
  you can also collect all the fate points any 
  of your NPCs receive in a session into a 
  collective pool and spend them for which-
  ever character you choose. If you’re going 
  to use this method, don’t calculate NPC 
  starting refresh—just give yourself one fate 
  point per player, and only give yourself fate 
  points from compels and PC invocations 
  that disadvantage your NPCs.
  If at any time your fate point total 
  exceeds the total amount of fate points that 
  the players have, stop giving them to your-
  self even if your NPCs would normally 
  receive them.
  Isn't it just 
  fudging on 
  behalf of 
  the PCs 
  when you 
  deliberately 
  have a bad 
  guy screw 
  up?
  Not really, I'm 
  just compelling 
  on behalf of 
  the players.
  Against 
  yourself.
  As gm versus 
  an NPc, yes. 
  You gotta play 
  both sides!
  Weird.
  
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  Building Scenarios
  so desperate to get at Evan that it keeps him 
  from fighting smart.
  His ability to assess PC aspects and weak-
  nesses is pretty limited—he doesn’t have 
  anything in Lore or Investigation, so a lot of 
  what he notices is going to have to come from 
  his Alertness; he has the best chance at learning 
  something in direct contact. I might do some 
  suspenseful scenes where he trails the PCs so he 
  can try to assess some stuff.
  Ending a 
  Scenario
  You know that a scenario is complete when all of 
  the major situations that have arisen in play are 
  concluded. Whether they came from your initial 
  scenario idea and notes or emerged naturally 
  from the back-and-forth interactions between 
  you and the players, eventually the players will 
  effectively have dealt with everything on their 
  plate. How you define “dealing with” depends on 
  what kind of situation it was in the first place.
  If there’s a bad guy NPC with plans, that 
  situation’s resolved when he’s either succeeded 
  with his plan or the PCs have rendered events 
  such that the NPC can’t possibly succeed at this 
  time. This could mean that there was a final, epic 
  confrontation that left that NPC crippled or 
  dead; it could simply mean that some key part 
  of the plan was averted. If the situation is an 
  interpersonal issue between PCs and NPCs, it’s 
  resolved when no one can effect any more imme-
  diate change to the situation—in other words, 
  even if there’s more stuff that could potentially 
  develop, it’s not going to develop right now.
  At the end of a scenario, you should take 
  stock of what has changed in the city and 
  between the characters as a result of the scenar-
  io’s events. If your scenario is part of a larger 
  chain of scenarios (like you have an “archvillain” 
  you want to be secretly behind the scenes of 
  several different scenarios), then you’ll need to 
  think about how these events will affect future 
  ones. Those considerations might even lead you 
  directly into the next scenario idea—it’s possible 
  to just keep extrapolating a new scenario from a 
  previous one, like some TV shows do.
  Poor Will was so in 
  over her head with the 
  supernatural threats.
  The huge apes never 
  scared her, but that hag 
  was outside her scope of 
  experience. Moe’s affection 
  for Will matched hers 
  for him, in the end.
  
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  Example: Baltimore
  By default, our example scenario is complete 
  when Damocles either makes Evan take him 
  seriously or gets cowed, and when Gilgamesh 
  either gets Evan out of the way or is prohib-
  ited from making attempts on Evan’s life for the 
  immediate future. Evan will also have needed to 
  make some final decision about the rogue prac-
  titioner if he ended up being a significant part of 
  the scenario.
  Other interpersonal issues might also need to 
  be resolved before the scenario can truly end—
  things between Evan and the Dupin Society 
  might either be stable or definitively better/
  worse. Biff might have to either repair damaged 
  relationships or deal with the fact that perma-
  nent harm has been done (like between him and 
  his parents, or maybe even him and Maya). The 
  continuing conflict seems to center on Evan and 
  Biff, and Maya’s player has expressed concern 
  that her investigative character risks becoming 
  a sidekick (see “Sidekick Characters”). Maya has 
  strong connections with the other PCs, but it’s 
  a challenge for her to find useful things to do 
  during fights. I’ll make a note to try to give Maya 
  some spotlight time that doesn’t involve getting 
  rescued from ghouls.
  Supposing that the scenario ends with 
  Damocles and Gilgamesh both licking their 
  wounds, I might decide that this creates a 
  lopsided balance of power among the city’s 
  supernatural community—several factions 
  might be interested in claiming territory that 
  Gilgamesh once solidly controlled. It’s possible 
  that this little spat has touched off a hornet’s 
  nest of potential conflict between supernatural 
  powers, and I write that down in my notes for 
  next time…
  Alternate 
  Scenario 
  Creation 
  Methods
  Sometimes, the normal process might not work 
  for you—maybe you’re having trouble seeing 
  some of the connections, or maybe you’re just 
  having a mental block. Here are some other 
  ways to think about scenario creation.
  Sidekick Characters
  We’ve all seen it. A player has a cool char-
  acter concept, during character generation 
  it seems like it’s going to work great, but the 
  game starts and...nobody knows what to do 
  with him. He’s not tied to the main conflict 
  of the scenario, maybe he’s only strongly 
  tied to one of the other player characters, or 
  maybe the mechanics don’t work as well for 
  modeling the character as the player thought 
  they would.
  That sort of thing might fly in a “you all 
  meet in a tavern when a mysterious old man 
  offers you a job” type of game, but that doesn’t 
  happen much in the Dresdenverse. There’s 
  real danger here of this character being rele-
  gated to the sidekick role, or worse—just 
  being a plot device, serving as the kidnapee 
  that all the other “competent” characters 
  need to go rescue. For a player wanting to be 
  a dynamic force in the campaign this will be 
  really frustrating. What can you do?
  The first step is to make sure it’s not 
  intentional. Once in a while a player does 
  this on purpose (“I had a long work week. 
  Hand me someone with mighty thews and 
  don’t make me think too hard right now.”) 
  and is just fine if the spotlight shines else-
  where for an extended period.
  Assuming that’s not the case, the GM 
  should have a direct, out-of-game conversa-
  tion with the player about the direction he’d 
  like the character to go. Is there a specific 
  conflict or story arc the player would like to 
  see for his marginalized character? Are there 
  relationships with other characters that 
  could be developed that would make it easier 
  to get the character involved? Are there 
  mechanical changes that could be made to 
  the character to make him more effective in 
  situations where he’s currently ineffective? 
  Bend or break the advancement rules as 
  needed to make this happen.
  If all else fails, and the player is really 
  not having a good time, consider just scrap-
  ping the character and starting from scratch. 
  You’ll have to figure out how to write the 
  old character out of the story and introduce 
  the new one (having the player take over 
  an existing NPC is an ideal solution), but 
  you’ve probably seen enough TV to be able 
  to figure that out.
  
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  Building Scenarios
  Starting 
  with NPCs
  The normal process has you figure out what 
  the connections are between aspects and figure 
  out how to make those relevant to an NPC’s 
  desires. But, what if you already have an idea for 
  a villain, or want to base your scenario around a 
  really strong personality or set of personalities?
  You can also go into the scenario creation 
  process by picking out or generating your NPCs 
  first and working from there. You might take a 
  motivation from a face NPC in your city, or you 
  might be inspired to come up with some kind of 
  bad guy or set of bad guys. Whatever the case, 
  make sure you answer the following questions:
    Who is the NPC? 
    What does the NPC want?
    What is the NPC willing or planning to 
  do in order to get what he wants?
    What resources does the NPC have 
  to pursue his goals? (This question is 
  usually answered by simply statting 
  out the NPC using one of the methods 
  presented in Running the Game, page 326.)
    Are there any other NPCs involved? 
  How are they involved? (And if you 
  really want to make things complicated, 
  you can go through the first four ques-
  tions for each NPC you introduce here.)
  Once you have these, it’s time to figure out 
  how to put the PCs in the middle of things. 
  Now is when you should go and look at aspect 
  connections—as described in this chapter—
  and see where you can make things fit. Once 
  you have a good idea of how these NPCs will 
  interact with the PCs, you can make your 
  opening hooks and you’re good to go!
  Example: Baltimore
  In the example above, I could easily have started 
  by saying “Damocles Ravenborn…Let’s see how 
  the PCs react to this nitwit.” Then I’d figure out 
  how he could provoke conflict with the PCs 
  (sending lackeys to the party, who con their way 
  into the house and open fire) and see where it 
  went from there. Start with the bad guy in mind, 
  then find a way to put the PCs in his way.
  Improvising
  So, what do you do if you don’t have time 
  to prepare for a session at all? The methods 
  described above will take a little bit of time if you 
  actually go through all the steps, and you might 
  not always be able to prepare a whole scenario 
  before you have a mob of gamers knocking on 
  your door with pizza and fistfuls of dice.
  Fortunately, the PCs’ aspects are a flexible tool 
  for improvising a scenario from scratch. In this 
  case, you’re going to want to focus on creating 
  immediate hooks based on single aspects—situ-
  ations that are directly targeted at a particular 
  PC. If you can connect more than one to the 
  same hook, great, but don’t worry about it. Just 
  make something simple and obvious.
  We know that just about any scenario with 
  Michael Carpenter could start with him facing 
  down an unholy terror, because of his Knight 
  of the Cross aspect. So put one in the middle 
  of Hyde Park and have at. Harry’s a Warden of 
  the White Council, so any strange mystical 
  disturbance will get him out of his apartment 
  and onto the street. You might also use a PC’s 
  relationships to start off a scenario, introducing 
  an obligation that comes from that relationship. 
  Example: Biff’s aspects of Mortimer Louis 
  Abernathy III and Trust Fund Jock 
  suggest that family relations could come into 
  his life demanding something from him or 
  asking him to do things for the family. The 
  GM decides to start the scenario by saying that 
  Biff’s parents show up in town and ask Biff to 
  represent the family at this very stuffy, very 
  prestigious charity ball, and give a speech on 
  the merits of philanthropy. Oh, and to donate a 
  significant portion of his trust fund to the cause.
  When you do this, it works best if you 
  present the PCs with a real set of options to deal 
  with whatever you’ve introduced. If Biff ’s family 
  comes and asks him to attend the charity ball, 
  for example, keep in mind that he might decide 
  not to go. That’s fine—you shouldn’t worry 
  about the outcome, because that’s how you get 
  the fuel for the rest of the scenario.
  Not "any." 
  It better 
  be really 
  strange 
  and really 
  important.
  
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  Keeping It Going
  So now what? Well, remember what we said 
  above—choices have consequences, so look at 
  what decisions the PCs made in your opening 
  hooks and decide on a logical set of conse-
  quences that could result from those decisions. 
  Then come up with a new situation that takes 
  advantage of those consequences. Somewhere 
  along the way, you should find a way to introduce 
  foul play (especially of the supernatural kind) if 
  the circumstances are relatively innocent.
  Example: Biff’s player, Fred, really doesn’t 
  want to deal with a bunch of boring people in 
  suits, so Biff refuses his parents’ request in the 
  first scene. The GM decides that his parents 
  would then freeze his trust fund assets, but that 
  doesn’t have quite enough oomph on its own, 
  unless Biff finds himself in a situation where he 
  really needs money for something.
  A couple of scenes later, the GM introduces 
  another NPC—an old school friend of Biff’s 
  who has fallen on hard times. He explains that 
  he’s being blackmailed and threatened, and that 
  he really just wants to pay off the blackmailer 
  and get it over with, concerned that things 
  might escalate to physical harm as well. He asks 
  Biff for a small loan.
  Something you should notice in the above 
  example is that you’re not guaranteeing that Biff 
  is going to find out about his trust fund freeze—
  after all, he might take a proactive approach and 
  decide that he’s going to track down the black-
  mailers and deal with them. That’s the kind of 
  guy Biff is, after all. But that’s just fine, because 
  you’re improvising anyway—it’s the nature 
  of the beast that not every idea is going to get 
  explored to its fullest. Just go in the direction the 
  players take you. So if Biff decides to go get the 
  blackmailers, that pursuit is now your plot.
  If you do this enough, with all of the PCs, 
  you’ll eventually end up with a few major situa-
  tions that the PCs are dealing with. Don’t worry 
  too much if you can’t connect them together in 
  an overarching plotline—that’s not something 
  that you should expect of yourself, given that 
  you’re improvising.
  Once you have those major situations, you 
  can stop introducing new hooks and work on 
  getting those situations to a definitive conclu-
  sion—that’ll be plenty of stuff to take up the 
  rest of the evening’s play, and may even leak into 
  next session depending on how involved it gets. 
  If you do go more than one session, it might give 
  you the chance to make the next one that much 
  better; now you can take a little time to flesh out 
  some of the ideas that came out of the impro-
  vised session.
  NPCs
  You’re naturally going to be throwing in a lot 
  of NPCs with this method—in the above 
  examples alone, we brought in at least four 
  (Biff ’s parents, the school friend, and the 
  blackmailer). Just look at the guidelines for 
  On-the-Fly NPCs in Running the Game 
  (page 330) and make all of them that way, 
  filling in appropriate skills, powers, stunts, 
  and aspects as needed.
  So you could have an entire 
  session that doesn't link up 
  to any of the usual plot? 
  Like Biff and pals spend 
  that session hunting down 
  the mundane blackmailers 
  rather than dealing with 
  Gilgamesh or Ravenborn?
  Absolutely! (Harry, even you find 
  the odd lost dog or wedding ring, 
  right?) Plus, if you can connect 
  these side-stories to the city's 
  themes, it adds to the texture 
  of the main plot without being 
  dIrectlY connected to it.
  
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  - cHAPter SIxteeN -
  Nevermore
  Baltimore
  -
  -
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  Introduction
  This is Baltimore as I know it.
  I grew up in Baltimore, in the Middle East 
  neighborhood, which isn’t far from Johns 
  Hopkins. If you’re not from Baltimore and you 
  know where Johns Hopkins is, you have my 
  sympathy. I hope whoever it was made a full 
  recovery.
  Then again, maybe you know Baltimore as 
  well as I do. Maybe you live there. Maybe you 
  visit once in a while. Maybe you’re just a Ravens 
  fan. Whatever. What I’m describing here is my 
  Baltimore; you might know it differently. Cities 
  are a lot like people that way—different people 
  get to know them in different ways.
  Some of this stuff is true. Some of it’s made 
  up for the sake of a better game. I’m not about to 
  tell you which is which.
  We might as well get the encyclopedia stuff 
  out of the way now. You can look this up on the 
  Internet a lot easier than Billy could make space 
  for a ton of details here, so I’ll be brief.
  Baltimore: 
  Come for the Seafood, Stay 
  for the Mind-Shattering 
  Supernatural Terror
  Crab cakes and Old Bay. Sailboats and Camden 
  Yards. Natty Boh and Pink Flamingos. You 
  know the stereotypes.
  Economy: Baltimore used to be a big industrial 
  town. Steel, manufactured goods—heck, even 
  shipbuilding. Not so much any more. The city 
  still likes to think of itself as an industrial town, 
  but in reality that’s gone. It’s kind of a rust belt 
  town that way. While it’s still an important port, 
  the economy now relies mostly on the service 
  sector. Financial services, education, tourism, 
  and health services are dominating. Johns 
  Hopkins is currently the biggest employer (not 
  to mention a huge landowner), where it used 
  to be Bethlehem Steel. Unemployment is high. 
  Lots of folks are unhappy. 
  Climate: They don’t get much snow in 
  Baltimore—two, maybe three times a year we 
  get a couple of inches. When that happens, 
  the entire town goes freaking loco. Stay off the 
  roads. Even if you’re from up north or from 
  the mountains and you know how to drive in 
  snow, Baltimoreans don’t. They won’t mean to, 
  but they will kill you. In the summer, it’s hot. 
  It’s Africa hot. To make it worse, it’s cut-the-
  air-with-a-butter-knife humid. And even the 
  summer thunderstorms don’t help; they just 
  make it wet.
  Geography: East and west Baltimore have lots 
  of poor neighborhoods and public housing (I-83 
  is the big psychological dividing line between 
  east and west). The northern and southern parts 
  of town tend to be a bit more affluent. Those are 
  generalities, though; Baltimore is a city of neigh-
  borhoods. There are dozens of ‘em. Some are just 
  a couple of blocks; others stretch over a square 
  mile. Some that I’ll mention later are Fells Point 
  (night life and clubs), Downtown (the Inner 
  Harbor tourism and sports complexes), Mount 
  Vernon (a gentrified few blocks of schools, 
  shops, and expensive apartments), Little Italy 
  and Greektown (not quite as ethnic as they 
  sound, but close), Middle East (where I grew 
  up, lots of poverty but also Johns Hopkins), 
  and Rosemont (a former working-class, mostly 
  African-American neighborhood that’s fallen 
  on hard times). The nice neighborhoods are 
  pretty nice—they’re well-kept, you’re generally 
  safe from petty crime, and the corner bar is cozy 
  and inviting. The not-so-nice neighborhoods…
  well, yeah. It’s not so nice there. There are entire 
  websites devoted to Baltimore neighborhoods; 
  take a look online if you don’t find something 
  that works for you here.
  Who Am I?
  Hi. I’m Davian Campbell, a grad student 
  at the University of Chicago and one of the 
  Alphas. Billy asked me to write up some-
  thing about Baltimore for this game he’s 
  writing. I guess he figured since I grew up 
  there, I’d know it. I tried to tell him that 
  I haven’t lived there for years, and that 
  between patrolling, trying to finish my 
  thesis, and our weekly game session, I don’t 
  have time for this stuff. But Billy insisted, 
  and he can be pretty persuasive.
  translation: 
  I helped 
  davian move 
  last August. 
  50 boxes of 
  books = a 
  favor or two.
  Natty Boh 
  is a local 
  beer, right? 
  Probably 
  bottled some-
  where else now…
  Neighborhoods Aplenty
  There’s a pretty good map of Baltimore’s 
  neighborhoods online. You can find it here:
  http://www.baltimorecity.gov/Residents/
  Neighborhoods.aspx
  
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  Supernatural Presence: Like every city of any 
  size, there’s a supernatural presence in Baltimore. 
  Here, the most powerful factions are White 
  Court vampires and ghouls, but wizards and the 
  Faerie Courts also have a presence.
  I’ll get into more details in the following 
  three sections: “What’s What in Baltimore” 
  discusses some of the things that drive the action 
  forward in a Baltimore-set game; “Who’s Who 
  in Baltimore” mentions the important factions 
  and people in the city; finally, “What’s Where 
  in Baltimore” talks about locales that you’ll find 
  useful in your game.
  What’s What 
  in Baltimore
  Baltimore is a city going in about a dozen direc-
  tions at once. I guess you can say that about a lot 
  of modern cities, but it’s especially true here. 
  You have the old industrial town that died 
  along with the rest of the rust belt back in 
  the 1970s, but it limps along in a twisted sort 
  of unlife as if someone forgot to tell it that 
  American heavy manufacturing was supposed 
  to close down, pack up, and ship out for the 
  Eastern Hemisphere.
  You have the sea. The busy harbor, the 
  rhythm of the tides in the Patapsco estuary, and 
  the big ol’ Chesapeake Bay itself dominate a 
  lot of the city’s life. We might have lost a lot of 
  industry, but it’s still a busy harbor. And it’s not 
  just rich folks who go out on the bay or travel 
  over to the Eastern Shore; a lot of us poor city 
  kids like to go out on the water once in a while, 
  too.
  You have the tourist renaissance. The Inner 
  Harbor, Camden Yards, the National Aquarium, 
  that kind of stuff. That sort of thing never rang 
  true for me. I guess it’s good that people come 
  and spend a little money on the weekends, but 
  it’s a façade. It’s masking the nastiness at the core 
  of the city, the sort of creeping darkness—both 
  supernatural and mundane—that only gets held 
  in check by a few dedicated people willing to 
  face the way things really are.
  The Mundane 
  Community
  There are a bunch of different types of people 
  born and raised in Baltimore. The old money in 
  the old parts of town. The people who got the 
  short economic end in the projects and inner 
  city neighborhoods. The old ladies who call 
  everyone “Hon” and talk like they’re in a John 
  Waters movie. The working-class longshoremen, 
  factory workers, and railworkers (lots of Irish, 
  Eastern Europeans, and African-Americans—in 
  recent decades joined by new arrivals from Latin 
  America) who are either in terrible fear of losing 
  their jobs or have already been unemployed for 
  years now. And, of course, the people who wear 
  ties, have MBAs, carry Blackberries, and work in 
  the tall buildings downtown. 
  A lot of the locals, especially the folks in the 
  old neighborhoods, are friendly and open to 
  visitors, and they’ll talk your ear off given half 
  a chance (they’re also notorious tellers of tall 
  tales, so watch out). Local pride runs deep—as 
  friendly as some of the neighborhood folks are 
  to visitors, newcomers moving into gentrified 
  neighborhoods aren’t easily accepted by the 
  long timers. How long you’ve lived in Baltimore 
  counts for something.
  As far as people who migrate to Baltimore 
  or visit regularly, you get a lot of history 
  buffs, what with all the forts and the U.S.S. 
  Constellation around here. Given the 
  Constellation, the harbor, and the proximity 
  to Chesapeake Bay, you get people who like to 
  sail or are into old tall ships—everyone from 
  Horatio Hornblower wannabes to old salt Navy 
  retirees. You get football fans; the Ravens are 
  half decent most of the time. Doctors, nurses, 
  researchers, and staff at the hospitals; Johns 
  Hopkins is freaking enormous, and you get a lot 
  of people shuffling in and out, with the medical 
  students there and doctors doing rotations to 
  pad their resumes. Oh, and the Literati—biblio-
  philes and Poe fans love Baltimore. The Poe 
  fans can be really insufferable. Some are actually 
  really important (I’ll get to that later), but a lot 
  of them are just pretentious and annoying.
  Hey, I resent that. We’re not so bad.
  The man was a hack, Harry, admit it.
  Says the talking skull with a 
  copy of NO CONTROL on his 
  shelf. Besides, Poe was brilliant.
  
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  The Supernatural 
  Community
  But, of course, if you live in Baltimore, 
  mundane mortals aren’t the only people in your 
  neighborhood.
  In Baltimore, you have your typical collec-
  tion of minor supernatural players: clued-in 
  hippies and new-agers, devotees of nontradi-
  tional magic-aware religions, nosy academics, a 
  few knowledgeable cleric types, some cops who 
  have seen a bit too much to live in denial, some 
  hedge wizards and minor practitioners, and a 
  handful of honest-to-God creepy crawlies who 
  do, in fact, go bump in the night.
  Rising above all those are the four real heavy 
  hitters in town; these are the seriously powerful 
  factions that you don’t want to cross unless you 
  have plenty of friends willing to back you up. 
  The White Council had a strong presence under 
  the leadership of Old Man Montrose, but since 
  he passed on, the wizards’ presence in Baltimore 
  has been significantly weakened. A clan of White 
  Court vampires thrives here, House Lagios. The 
  Fey Courts have a strong interest in Baltimore 
  for reasons we’ll get to soon. And, finally, there is 
  a clan of ghouls (the Ereshkigal clan) led by the 
  powerful ghoul lord Gilgamesh, self-proclaimed 
  God-King of ghouls. He’s a Freeholding Lord, a 
  signatory to the Unseelie Accords.
  What’s at Stake: 
  Points of Conflict
  There’s a lot to fight over in Baltimore. ‘Course 
  there is. It wouldn’t be an interesting city to 
  game in if there wasn’t. We’ll go into more detail 
  about each of these later in the chapter.
  The Ley Line
  The single most important bone of contention 
  is probably a major ley line that runs south-
  west to northeast across the city. This ley line 
  follows the Fall Line, the boundary between 
  North America’s coastal plain and the Piedmont 
  region, which passes directly through Baltimore. 
  This ley line funnels considerable magical energy 
  through the city, but its focus is the large, vaguely 
  phallic-looking Washington Monument (yes, 
  there’s one in Baltimore, too, and it’s older than 
  the one in D.C.). Situated on the Fall Line, in the 
  Mount Vernon neighborhood not far from the 
  Inner Harbor, the Washington Monument acts 
  as both a focus and a distributor of the energy in 
  the ley line; three additional branches reach out 
  from that point. One reaches southeast, through 
  Federal Hill to Fort McHenry, then under the 
  Patapsco River to Fort Carroll. Another reaches 
  north, through Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill 
  into Druid Hill Park, where it dissipates. A 
  third runs more or less west-northwest, through 
  the greenway around Gwynns  Falls and out 
  of the city, eventually dissipating in the hills. 
  Magical power is enhanced all along the ley 
  lines, but it is particularly strong at a few points: 
  the Washington Monument, Druid Hill Park, 
  Heritage High School and Clifton Gate House, 
  and Fort Carroll. 
  The branch reaching through Federal Hill 
  is particularly strong and, together with the 
  Monument itself, is the focus of a very tense 
  stand-off among the four major supernatural 
  players in the city. I’ll talk more about this later, 
  both in “What’s Where in Baltimore” and “Who’s 
  Who in Baltimore.”
  Power Struggle Within 
  the White Court
  Vasiliki Lagios (page 373), a two hundred year old 
  vampire, has led House Lagios of the White 
  Court since soon after the U.S. Civil War. 
  Vasiliki is a politically wily and patient schemer, 
  excelling at using misdirection and subtlety to 
  exert his influence. However, there’s a faction 
  
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  within the family that wants to be a more active 
  presence in Baltimore; they’d like to actively 
  oppose the White Council, more aggressively 
  seek out prey, perhaps even make a play to claim 
  major points along the ley line. Led by the ruth-
  less and ambitious Alexandra Lagios (page 373), 
  niece of Vasiliki, they may soon make their move 
  to take control of the family. 
  Renegade Wizards
  A small cadre of wizards and minor talents who 
  have rejected the authority of the White Council 
  operate in Baltimore. They’re led by a wizard 
  named Russell Carson (page 387), a capable thau-
  maturgist and aspiring megalomaniac. Carson 
  hopes to turn his ragtag group into a faction 
  strong enough to stand up to Baltimore’s White 
  Council representatives and become a Freehold 
  under the Unseelie Accords.
  It is suspected that he has violated a variety 
  of the Laws of Magic, but Carson is a masterful 
  opportunist; with the Vampire War raging, he 
  knows that the White Council does not have the 
  strength to send Wardens after him. He hopes 
  to avoid attracting more attention until he has 
  built the strength of his followers.
  Black Aggie and the 
  Black Court Scourge
  Years ago, a statue called Grief was placed as a 
  monument in Druid Ridge Cemetery (not to be 
  confused with Druid Hill Park; Druid Ridge 
  Cemetery is just outside the city limits). “Creepy 
  as hell” is a completely insufficient description 
  of this statue. Known as “Black Aggie,” it was 
  downright sinister—grass wouldn’t grow in 
  front of the damned thing. All kinds of urban 
  legends grew up around it, about how it would 
  haunt people, how people caught alone in front 
  of it vanished, that sort of thing.
  A Black Court scourge started taking advan-
  tage of the situation. From time to time, one of 
  them would actually replace the statue, using 
  some glamour to take on its likeness (and believe 
  me, it wasn’t a real stretch for them). Of course, 
  whatever damn fool frat pledge or drunk teen-
  ager sat on that thing’s lap was never heard from 
  again. About forty years ago, in an uncharacter-
  istic fit of good sense, the cemetery’s caretakers 
  removed Black Aggie; the official reason was to 
  stop the “circus atmosphere” surrounding it. You 
  can believe that if it helps you sleep at night. 
  Their hunting patterns disrupted, the scourge 
  fractured and with it the Black Court presence 
  in Baltimore. 
  Currently, a scourge of at least three is 
  attempting to re-establish itself. Hoping to 
  draw upon the power of the ley line to enhance 
  minor magical talents that they picked up some-
  where, they have rooted themselves in a lair in 
  the water tunnels under the Clifton Gate House 
  (page 393), which is near the campus of Heritage 
  High School. The students’ safety is at terrible 
  risk. See “What’s Where in Baltimore” for more 
  information on the Clifton Gate House and the 
  vampires there.
  The Dupin Society
  The Dupin Society (page 365) is a small band of 
  Edgar Allan Poe scholars and fans, no more 
  than two dozen, who keep alive Poe’s knowledge 
  of the supernatural. Historically, they have been 
  observers only; as a matter of policy they never 
  interfere or intervene in supernatural events. 
  However, a few of the members want to get 
  more proactive, stepping in when events allow. 
  Unless they act with uncharacteristic finesse, 
  doing so will paint a huge target on their backs. 
  The White Council has warned them against 
  this, but some members seem to insist. As kids 
  on the Internet like to say, this will not end well. 
  I’ll go into more detail on the Dupin Society in 
  “Who’s Who in Baltimore.”
  Fae vs. Ghouls
  A Freehold of several dozen ghouls lives 
  in the tunnels under the ground between 
  Federal Hill Park (page 389) and Fort McHenry 
  (page 389). Because this lies along a particularly 
  powerful branch of the ley line, the ghoul “king,” 
  Gilgamesh (a real humble guy, that one is—see 
  page 371), has been able to open a portal to the 
  Nevernever—in particular, to the regions where 
  the Summer Court holds sway. Now, consider 
  that the Summer Court is locked in an ugly little 
  war with this band of ghouls, and you can see 
  why this situation gets interesting on a fairly 
  regular basis. 
  Let’s just say that mortals want to watch their 
  backs after dark in that part of the city. Not 
  only is there occasionally collateral damage, but 
  ghouls get hungry, and there are only so many 
  fish in the Patapsco River for them to munch on.
  to say the 
  least! Harry, 
  is the situation 
  at Heritage 
  High School 
  something we 
  should take on?
  Don’t we 
  already have 
  enough to 
  worry about? 
  Plus I’m 
  sure Davian 
  made this up. 
  Right?
  
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  Themes and Threats
  There are dozens, if not hundreds, of themes 
  and threats that could capture the flavor of 
  Baltimore. Here are the three that this writeup 
  will focus on.
  A City Battling Decay
  Theme: Decay and Corruption
  It’s not generally thought of as such, but 
  Baltimore is in many ways still one of those 
  cities where you can get yourself killed if you’re 
  not careful. Most American cities underwent 
  some serious cleanup since the 1970s; Baltimore 
  tried, but didn’t make it as far as most of us 
  would have liked.
  We have gangbangers and thugs ruling 
  some of the streets. We have corruption in the 
  city government and in the police force. We 
  have manufacturers laying off people by the 
  hundreds. We have abandoned buildings and 
  streets that never rebuilt after the ’68 riots. We 
  have unemployment that’s never going to go 
  away. You’ve seen The Wire? Homicide: Life 
  on the Street? Yeah. It’s like that.
  I’m not saying that other cities aren’t as bad, 
  or that Baltimore is an irredeemable hellhole. 
  Some people stand up and say “No.” There are 
  some good people doing good work in the bad 
  neighborhoods (hell, there are even some genu-
  inely nice neighborhoods). There are some good, 
  honest cops among the bad ones. There are some 
  politicians whose idealism hasn’t been beaten 
  out of them yet. There are people in the super-
  natural know down in the trenches pushing 
  back against the creeping darkness. They’re still 
  fighting the good fight—and Baltimore is a city 
  worth fighting for.
  A City with Multiple 
  Personalities
  Theme: Conflicting Identities
  Baltimore has never been able to decide 
  where it wants to be.  Is it a cosmopolitan and 
  sophisticated northern center of commerce, 
  vibrant and full of optimism for a bright future, 
  or is it a charming southern cultural gem where 
  the summers are hot and the lemonade is cold? 
  Does it want the hustle, bustle, and old wealth of 
  New York or Boston, or the slow-paced lifestyle 
  of (highly romanticized) antebellum Atlanta or 
  Charleston? Damn Yankee, or Southern Belle? 
  Often, the answer is “yes.”
  A City at the Edge 
  of the Abyss
  Threat: On The Brink
  The major supernatural players in Baltimore 
  stand on the brink of war. Wizards, vampires, 
  the fae, and terrible creatures of darkness stand 
  against one another, struggling over the city’s 
  most important magical resource: a node in the 
  powerful ley line which runs through the city. 
  This conflict has not yet become open warfare, 
  but it’s probably only a matter of time. The 
  storm is brewing. Even the city’s minor talents 
  can feel the tension.
  While there’s a lot to love about Baltimore, 
  there’s a lot of reason to be very, very afraid of it. 
  But as I’ve said, Baltimore is worth fighting for.
  Who’s Who 
  in Baltimore
  Baltimore’s conflicts, tensions, and situations 
  are nothing without the people that drive them. 
  There are four major supernatural factions in 
  the city. I’ll go over them first, then I’ll discuss 
  Baltimore’s other supernatural factions, promi-
  nent mortals, and important organizations. 
  Some organizations seem to represent particular 
  themes better than others, and I’ll mention that 
  as well.
  Vampires
  Vampires—everyone’s favorite bad guys. 
  Baltimore’s full of them. As far as I know, there 
  are no representatives of the Jade Court, but the 
  other three courts are all represented to some 
  degree. In Baltimore, the White Court is by far 
  the strongest.
  Black Court
  There’s only a small Black Court presence, but 
  they’re still dangerous. Once upon a time they 
  operated in the region surrounding Druid 
  Ridge, but since Black Aggie was taken out of 
  Druid Ridge Cemetery a few years back, they’ve 
  had a harder time finding victims out there 
  (more about this in the “Locales” section below).
  These days, they’re shadows of their former 
  selves. They’re disorganized and leaderless, 
  each individual more or less operating on its 
  own. Some still lurk around the Druid Ridge 
  Cemetery just north of town, but some have 
  Jeez, davian, 
  isn’t this your 
  home town? You’re 
  not exactly 
  dressing it up 
  as a place I’d 
  like to visit.
  
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  moved into the city proper. Here and there, indi-
  viduals have settled near urban housing projects 
  where they feed on the homeless, the junkies, the 
  prostitutes, and other people that polite society 
  won’t exactly bend over backwards looking for.
  A trio of Black Court monsters has formed 
  a proper scourge, taking up residence in the 
  water tunnels beneath the Clifton Gate House, 
  in the northeast part of town. It’s dark, dank, 
  and secluded. It’s also within spitting distance of 
  Heritage High School. Bad things are going to 
  happen, and soon.
  The downfall of the Black Court’s fortunes, 
  and the darkness that they represent, gives some 
  opportunity for exploring the city’s theme of 
  Decay and Corruption.
  Red Court
  The Red Court faction is small and weak. It’s 
  no larger than a half dozen individuals and was 
  kept in check effectively by Old Man Montrose. 
  That is, until he died. The leader of these Red 
  Court vamps is called Damocles Ravenborn 
  (yeah, I know; more about this loser on page 373). 
  This gang is insignificant in the grand scheme of 
  things; they may or may not get taken seriously 
  by the larger Red Court nation now that open 
  war is being waged in the rest of the world.
  White Court
  There’s a clan of White Court in town: House 
  Lagios and associated hangers-on. They came 
  over to North America from the eastern 
  Mediterranean in the mid 1700s. Most (but not 
  all) of them thrive on the emotion of despair, 
  and they’re bad news, often literally. 
  Over the past thousand years, members of the 
  Lagios family have been personally responsible 
  for a number of wars and genocides in the 
  Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean.  
  People?
  Once in North America, they settled in 
  Virginia and got into the slave trade, which is 
  a pretty smart move for creatures who feed on 
  despair. On a personal note, this also means that 
  these bastards probably not only preyed on but 
  actually owned some of my ancestors.
  But I digress.
  Once slavery was abolished in North America 
  (during a conflict in which they no doubt sold 
  arms to both sides), they settled in Baltimore 
  (in the east of the city, in a neighborhood now 
  called Greektown) and got into two businesses: 
  vice and initiating economic disasters. They’re 
  amazingly proficient at arranging for companies 
  to collapse then wallowing in the misery that 
  results. On top of that, some of the corner bars 
  in working-class neighborhoods are fronts for 
  the Lagios family, where they encourage people 
  (many newly out-of-work) to drown their 
  sorrows in booze and cigarettes; the resulting 
  addictions are more avenues of attack they take 
  advantage of.
  If that weren’t enough, some of the Lagios 
  are skilled in the sex trade. For those that feed 
  on lust (and there are a few), the connection is 
  obvious; however, they frequently specifically 
  target patrons with families. I’m told the misery 
  of a man who’s lost his family because of sex 
  addiction and frequenting prostitutes can keep 
  a Lagios well-fed for weeks.
  So, if you’re looking for a Lagios White 
  Court vampire, look at the bank that closes 
  down a sure-thing deal that would have saved 
  five hundred jobs, look at the neighborhood 
  bars where the out-of-work drink their unem-
  ployment checks and wonder what happened 
  to their dignity, look at the brothels where the 
  johns weep over photos of their wives and chil-
  dren after being serviced.
  The current head of House Lagios is Vasiliki 
  Lagios (see page 373). Born in Richmond in 1823, 
  he rose to leadership several years after the U.S. 
  Civil War. He guided the family through very 
  troubled times, establishing it in its new hunting 
  grounds in Baltimore.
  House Lagios claims that they had nothing 
  to do with Old Man Montrose’s recent demise. 
  And they are closely monitoring the tense 
  standoff over the ley line. They’re unlikely to do 
  anything rash; Lagios is nothing if not patient.
  Alexandra Lagios (see page 373), Vasiliki’s niece, 
  has other ideas. She wants to take much more 
  decisive action, whether it’s moving against the 
  White Council in its new weak state, aggres-
  sively seeking out prey by infiltrating the prison 
  system and other institutions, or even making an 
  overt play for the ley line. She’s growing impa-
  tient with Vasiliki’s leadership and is gathering 
  her strength.
  The city’s aspect of Conflicting 
  Identities is well defined by the different lead-
  ership styles of Vasiliki and Alexandra Lagios.
   lovely people.
  At least 
  it’s a step 
  up from the 
  slave trade. 
  Depends on 
  who you ask.
  Don’t get 
  distracted 
  playing misery 
  poker here; 
  they’re no less 
  the malignant 
  tumor in human 
  society now 
  than they were 
  in 1861.
  “Damocles 
  Ravenborn?” 
  You’re kidding, 
  right? OK, 
  I’ll read on, 
  but I’m not 
  buying it.
  
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  Of course, 
  while I’ll 
  always root 
  for anyone 
  fighting ghouls, 
  Summer’s 
  motives are 
  hardly pure 
  and altruistic. 
  They’re after 
  the power 
  of the ley 
  line, just like 
  everyone 
  else in town, 
  and it just 
  happens that 
  the ghouls 
  sit on one of 
  the important 
  branches of it.
  The Fae
  The Faerie Queens and Ladies themselves had 
  little personal interest in Baltimore until about a 
  year ago; Summer’s border-skirmishing with the 
  ghouls has become a war, and now both courts 
  are paying quite close attention.
  Baltimore is a city with big parks and lots 
  of access to the water. Consequently, the Little 
  Folk love this town. Hundreds of pixies, sprites, 
  brownies, minor water spirits, and others reside 
  all over the city. Once in a while, even a selkie or 
  two will show up, but they’re not crazy about the 
  warm water.
  Other than the Little Folk, there aren’t many 
  permanent fae residents of Baltimore. However, 
  as was mentioned earlier, Summer is currently 
  waging open, if limited, war against the Freehold 
  of Gilgamesh (see below). The reasons the war 
  started are unclear, but Summer claims to be 
  acting to defend the Little Folk wyldfae the 
  ghouls prey upon, and they (justifiably) accuse 
  Winter of quietly supporting the ghouls.
  This very low-intensity conflict went on for 
  years, as faerie beings met ghouls in combat 
  in lonely alleys and isolated greenways every 
  few months. Last year, things took a turn for 
  the more serious when two events occurred: 
  the founding of Gilgamesh’s Freehold, and the 
  discovery of a portal to the Nevernever. These 
  changed matters considerably.
  When Gilgamesh, the ghoul king in 
  Baltimore, signed the Unseelie Accords as a 
  Freeholding Lord, the Summer Court had to 
  dramatically change their stance. Now that he’s 
  a respectable citizen in the supernatural order 
  of things, Gilgamesh is getting subtle support 
  from Winter in his war against Summer. This 
  has made the ghouls’ raids into the Nevernever 
  far more threatening to Summer, and the ghouls 
  always seem to know when Summer is about to 
  strike them.
  The second game-changer was the discovery 
  of a portal to the Nevernever in the tunnels 
  between Federal Hill Park and Fort McHenry. 
  Now equipped with a means of striking directly 
  at each others’ home turf, the war has picked 
  up in intensity. The Summer Court uses the 
  portal to launch surprise attacks into the ghouls’ 
  tunnels, hoping to end their threat once and for 
  all; they rely mainly on companies of doughty 
  gnomes, experienced at underground warfare.
  The fae are yet another part of the city that’s 
  On the Brink.
  Ghoul Clan 
  Ereshkigal
  For two hundred years, Clan Ereshkigal has 
  lived in the tunnels running from Federal Hill 
  to Fort McHenry. As Baltimore grew, the ghouls 
  fed on sailors and drunks around the harbor, as 
  well as the abundant fish and crabs available in 
  the river and nearby Chesapeake Bay. Little Folk 
  wyldfae became some of their favorite snacks.
  Clan Ereshkigal is led by a nasty ghoul who 
  calls himself Gilgamesh (in a display of remark-
  able humility, he claims the title “God-King”—
  see page 371). As time passed, Gilgamesh real-
  ized that their prey were thinning out. Fish and 
  shellfish stocks were dwindling, the number of 
  sailors and poor and homeless was dropping as 
  commerce moved away from the harbor area, 
  and the fae courts were pushing back against 
  hunting the Little Folk; the battles against the 
  Summer fae were not going well. He needed 
  Who sponsored 
  Gilgamesh in 
  signing the 
  Accords?
  I’m sure Mab 
  would never 
  show anyone 
  the paperwork, 
  but she’d assure 
  anyone who 
  asks that it’s 
  all nice and 
  legal. I’d bet 
  good money 
  that Mab 
  herself signed, 
  and the weak 
  Red Court 
  presence may 
  have been 
  looking for 
  an ally. The 
  third—your 
  guess is as 
  good as mine.
  How many little Folk would a single ghoul have to eat in a day?  
  Think popcorn.  okay, ew. Just ... ew.
  Uh…Do you need a reason? 
  THEY’RE freaking 
  GHOULS. Kill them. 
  Kill them with fire.
  They signed the Unseelie Accords, Harry. 
  You don’t just go around incin erating 
  signatories to the Accords; you’ll cause…
  Oh, wait, it’s YOU. I keep forgetting.
  
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  to do something, or the ghouls under his thrall 
  would turn on each other. He consolidated his 
  power and his clan as much as he could (his 
  people being ruthlessly cruel eating machines, 
  they tend to resist leadership that isn’t based 
  on sheer might) and got himself sponsored to 
  sign the Unseelie Accords, formalizing his rule 
  as a Freeholding Lord. This caught the Summer 
  Court off-guard and gave the ghouls some 
  breathing room to regain a bit of their strength.
  The other coup Gilgamesh arranged was 
  opening the portal to the Nevernever (the 
  fae claim he merely discovered it, rather than 
  opened it; Gilgamesh claims to have used the 
  power of the ley line and his immense magical 
  talent to open it himself; nobody knows who to 
  believe.) This portal allows the ghouls to strike 
  directly at the Summer Court’s power base—
  although it also allows direct assaults into the 
  ghouls’ tunnels.
  I do. No ghoul could muster 
  enough magic to open a 
  portal to the Nevernever, 
  ley line or no ley line.
  I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
  Well, that’s what I keep 
  telling myself.
  If Gilgamesh is truthful, and he did really 
  open that portal himself, it would indicate 
  that he possesses growing magical ability; 
  combined with the power of the ley line in their 
  tunnels and the dozens of raging ghouls he can 
  summon to his cause, he is going to be extremely 
  dangerous.
  There are more details of Clan Ereshkigal’s 
  tunnels under the Federal Hill and Fort 
  McHenry entries in “What’s Where in Baltimore.”
  Like the fae, Clan Ereshkigal is most strongly 
  impacted by Baltimore’s threat of On The 
  Brink.
  Ereshkigal was the Sumerian deity of 
  the underworld.
  So the clan named themselves 
  after the lord of hell? cute.
  No, of course not. The clan named themselves 
  after the lady of hell. And I must say, she 
  doesn’t deserve her reputation; she’s rather 
  charming, really.
  The White Council
  Wizardry in Baltimore is represented mostly 
  by Evan Montrose (page 367); he holds this honor 
  purely by virtue of his old man having kicked off 
  very recently. He may or may not be up to the 
  task; he’s only in his mid-twenties, and he’s spent 
  the past couple of years in college in Europe and 
  sailing around the Mediterranean. When his 
  father died, he returned to his family’s manor in 
  northern Baltimore.
  Evan is a well-trained wizard, but highly 
  inexperienced, and he has found himself with a 
  whole lot more responsibility than he’d planned 
  on having at this point in his life. His father 
  was his only surviving blood relative and, as the 
  new head of the Montrose family, it’s assumed 
  that he will take on the role of representing the 
  White Council in Baltimore. Evan Montrose 
  has other plans, which may or may not involve 
  figuring out how to arrange all his new responsi-
  bilities such that he can return to sailing around 
  the Mediterranean and bumming around presti-
  gious European universities.
  With its sudden weakness in the city, the 
  White Council is impacted by Baltimore’s theme 
  of Decay and Corruption.
  Other Factions 
  and Organizations
  A wide variety of other groups are operating in 
  Baltimore; these may actually have more impact 
  on your game than the Big Four above.
  The Dupin Society
  In the late 19th century, Frederic Alcott—a fan 
  of Edgar Allan Poe who lived in Baltimore—
  purchased a trunk at an estate auction. The 
  trunk was full of old papers and assorted junk 
  from an obscure literature professor from 
  Franklin & Marshall College, a specialist in early 
  to mid-19th century American popular litera-
  ture. Alcott examined the papers and discovered 
  that many were written by Poe himself and were 
  as yet unknown to academia. However, they 
  were not the fiction, essays, or literary criticism 
  that Poe was known for; they were a catalogue 
  of real-world supernatural events and entities 
  around Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond. 
  Poe was clued-in, knew an awful lot, and had the 
  good sense not to publish any of it; who would 
  have believed him? The Dupin Society (named 
  Having the 
  White Council 
  be so weak in 
  a major city 
  could be a 
  very serious 
  problem.
  And if the 
  Vampire War 
  heats up again, 
  good luck 
  on avoiding 
  “recruitment,” 
  Montrose.
  These 
  armchair 
  Venatori 
  Umbrorum 
  have no idea 
  how far in 
  over their 
  heads they 
  are already. 
  If they start 
  gunning for 
  anything, 
  they’re going 
  to get their 
  teeth kicked 
  in, which 
  would be a 
  shame because 
  they’re a good 
  resource.
  
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  after the hero of Poe’s detective stories) dedi-
  cated itself to continuing to observe the super-
  natural around Baltimore. If you want to know 
  something about the supernatural community 
  in Baltimore, chances are the Dupin Society 
  knows it, or at least knows who you can contact 
  to find out.
  The Dupin Society learned a tough lesson 
  right around the turn of the 20th century. They 
  found out about a scourge of Black Court 
  vampires in northeast Baltimore and deter-
  mined to drive them out of the city. The society 
  was nearly wiped out; Alcott was killed, as were 
  half a dozen of his students and associates. 
  The survivors licked their wounds and decided 
  never to intervene actively again; they would do 
  nothing more than observe and record. They’re 
  good at this; if a person or event in Baltimore 
  has a supernatural angle to it, chances are the 
  Dupin Society knows about it.
  Currently, the Dupin Society consists of 
  around two dozen Baltimoreans from all walks 
  of life, and most—if not all—have no super-
  natural talents of their own. Its director is Paul 
  Mackey (page 384), who works as a curator at the 
  Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. The 
  society poses as a literary discussion group; its 
  true nature is kept secret. 
  Some members are questioning the soci-
  ety’s firm policy of nonintervention, the most 
  vocal of which is John Vastolo. They point to 
  the success of “Lizard” Gibbs and his cohorts 
  (see “Individuals,” below) in slaying a White 
  Court vampire, and they argue for taking a 
  more militant line against supernaturals that 
  prey on mortals. Others argue that they are 
  not trained or equipped to do so, and that they 
  should simply continue to observe and record. 
  The society clearly embodies the theme of 
  Conflicting Identities.
  The Dupin Society does not enjoy a terribly 
  warm relationship with Evan Montrose, the 
  Montrose family, or other Baltimore wizards. It’s 
  personal—we’ll discuss this more later.
  Russell Carson’s 
  Renegades
  The White Council is not universally respected 
  among wizarding and spellcasting circles. Most 
  wizards who defy it outright wind up dead or 
  repentant; Russell Carson is a talented thaumat-
  urgist who thinks he can beat the odds. 
  Carson is, not to put too fine a point on it, 
  an unrepentant and amoral megalomaniac. 
  He wants power, but—ironically—on a small 
  scale. He recruits followers from Baltimore’s 
  supernatural community, especially (though 
  not exclusively) attractive young women, and 
  teaches them spellcasting. He has quite a little 
  following of hedge wizards, kitchen witches, and 
  dangerously undertrained real talents around 
  Baltimore. A classic cult leader, the attraction 
  for him is the devotion these followers pay to 
  him, more than any practical trouble they can 
  make. But woe be to him, and to them all, when 
  someone (maybe Carson himself) gets a taste 
  for something bigger.
  He’s more or less stayed under the White 
  Council’s radar so far, but he’s violated a couple 
  of the Laws of Magic more than a few times; it’s 
  only a matter of time before a Warden needs to 
  deal with him. The only question is whether this 
  is before or after he gets any of his fellow rene-
  gades or innocent bystanders killed.
  The Baltimore Police 
  Department
  The Baltimore City Police are pretty typical for a 
  big city police department with high crime rates. 
  Baltimore cops are smart, tough customers—
  people you’d definitely rather have on your side 
  than working against you.
  Unfortunately, when you’re clued-in to the 
  supernatural world and engage in activities that 
  get exciting, you’re bound to come up against 
  them from time to time. There are a lot of 
  reasons for this.
  First, people like the Alphas and Harry 
  Dresdens of the world tend to get into their 
  share of scrapes against the bad guys. Keep in 
  mind that knowing a spell or two or being able 
  to change into a wolf doesn’t mean that vigilan-
  tism is suddenly legal. If you bust some bad guy 
  heads in a dark alley, you’re a likely bad guy, 
  too—at least according to the law.
  Next, given that cops are fallible human 
  beings, some give in to the temptation of corrup-
  tion. That’s not to excuse it; it’s just the way it 
  is. Some of this corrupting influence comes from 
  Baltimore’s supernatural community (although, 
  of course, the cops on the take don’t know that.) 
  The bars that Lagios run never get audited or 
  inspected too hard. Funny how that works.
  Third, there are some cops who are either 
  under the control of supernatural powers 
  I really want 
  to form a band 
  called “russell 
  carson and the 
  renegades.” 
  With a name 
  like that, we’d 
  cover a lot of 
  Allman Brothers 
  material …
  If this is true, 
  it’s serious 
  stuff, Billy. 
  Don’t make 
  light of it.
  Incidentally, 
  the members 
  of the group 
  pronounce 
  it “DOO-pin” 
  rather than 
  affect a French 
  pronunciation; 
  apparently 
  they’re following 
  the old theater 
  tradition of 
  pronouncing 
  names in the 
  native language 
  of the author.
  that’s kind 
  of dumb.
  Philistine.
  
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  outright, or are themselves supernatural enti-
  ties. Over the past hundred years, more than 
  one prison guard at the city lockup (yeah, 
  they’re not cops, but go with me here) has been 
  a White Court vampire, feasting on the despair 
  of the prisoners. In fact, a faction within House 
  Lagios has recently pushed to pursue this avenue 
  of attack much more aggressively, advocating 
  attempting a complete takeover of entire divi-
  sions within the department and the prison 
  system.
  The vast majority of cops are completely 
  unaware of the supernatural beyond their own 
  religious beliefs, and they would actively scoff at 
  the notion. A handful, however, have seen a bit 
  too much to continue ignoring it.
  Sgt. Jim Flanagan (page  376) is a patrol 
  commander of the BPD Marine Unit. He pilots 
  a small patrol boat (crew of three, total) on the 
  Patapsco River. He’s seen weird stuff at Fort 
  Carroll, knows there’s something out there, but 
  has the good sense not to raise too much of a 
  fuss about it. 
  Officer Leslie Vastolo and her partner Officer 
  Luis Mirabal (page 376) have been on the beat 
  in East Baltimore for several years and have 
  managed to survive, and even win, a few encoun-
  ters with ghouls and vampires. Officer Vastolo’s 
  uncle John is a member of the Dupin Society; he 
  has funneled useful information to her, informa-
  tion which has kept her and her partner alive in 
  the dark corners of Baltimore.
  Houses of Worship
  The Roman Catholic Church has been strong 
  in Baltimore for nearly four hundred years. The 
  Maryland colony was founded as a refuge for 
  Catholics from the UK, so it makes sense that 
  the oldest cathedral in the United States is in 
  Baltimore. 
  The Archdiocese of Baltimore does not offi-
  cially acknowledge the existence of magic or 
  supernatural creatures beyond the Almighty, 
  angels, and the Prince of Darkness. If you press 
  them they might quietly say something about 
  demons but then stumble over themselves to say, 
  almost as if embarrassed, that most “possessions” 
  are nothing more than the manifestation of deep 
  psychological problems. 
  However, when mortals are in need of phys-
  ical protection from things that go bump in the 
  night, the one they want to talk to is Sister Peter 
  Ann Doran (page 377), who is one of the caretakers 
  at the Basilica of the Assumption. There’s a safe 
  house on site, a virtually impenetrable fortress 
  in supernatural terms. If you’re in trouble with 
  things beyond mortal jurisdiction, this is a good 
  place to be.
  Of course, the Catholics don’t have a 
  monopoly on this sort of thing, even if they have 
  the best P.R. on the subject. In addition to Sister 
  Ann, there are at least three other good people, 
  representing a variety of faiths, who can help you 
  if you find yourself on the losing end of spiritual 
  warfare: Rabbi Ben Greenstone at Temple Beth 
  Israel, Reverend Isaiah Smith of the St. James 
  AME Church, and Imam Jamil al-Islam of the 
  Islamic Center of Baltimore. The four regu-
  larly exchange notes on supernatural goings-on 
  around the city. All four of them have personal 
  courage way above their weight class and have 
  spread the word that their houses of worship are 
  available as refuge for people in trouble.
  Individuals
  Here’s a list of important people in Baltimore; 
  some would work out well as PCs, some will be 
  opposition, and some could serve as allies if the 
  PCs play their cards right.
  Evan Montrose
  Suggested player character!
  Educated in magic by his father and in 
  mundane matters by the finest Baltimore prep 
  schools and European colleges, Evan Montrose’s 
  hope of spending a few post-Oxford years sailing 
  with his best friends Maya McKenzie and “Biff ” 
  Abernathy (see below) was interrupted by his 
  father’s mysterious death. He’s returned to the 
  manor (see page 393) as a well-trained wizard of 
  the White Council, but lacking the seasoning to 
  go with his power. The Wardens want to recruit 
  him, but he’s managed to evade their attempts 
  thus far. Evan is meticulous, detail-oriented, 
  and a bit of a neat freak. Despite his tendency 
  toward indulging his playboy side, he never does 
  anything without a plan.
  Evan’s father changed his family name 
  from Montresor after “that bastard Poe” (as 
  Evan’s grandfather wrote in his journal—and 
  remember how long-lived wizards are) wrote 
  Which is, of course, why 
  they have an official office 
  called “Exorcist.” Right.
  
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  davian only put 
  trouble lines 
  into the stat 
  blocks of the 
  Pcs and probable 
  enemies. that’s 
  probably oK for 
  now—if one of 
  the other NPcs 
  unexpectedly 
  becomes an 
  important 
  antagonist the 
  gm can add one.
  EVAN MONTROSE
  High Concept: 
  Young White Council Wizard 
  Trouble: In Over My Head 
  Other Aspects: Heir to Montrose; 
  Precision Is Everything; Here’s the Plan; 
  Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here; 
  I’d Rather not be a Warden, Thanks
  Skills
  Alertness: Average (+1)
  Athletics: Average (+1)
  Contacts: Good (+3)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Craftsmanship: Average (+1)
  Discipline: Great (+4)
  Deceit: Average (+1)
  Empathy: Average (+1)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Good (+3)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Fair (+2)
  Resources: Great (+4)
  Scholarship: Fair (+2)
  Powers
  Evocation [–3]
  Thaumaturgy [–3]
  The Sight [–1]
  Soulgaze [+0]
  Wizard’s Constitution [+0]
  Notes
  Evan is a capable wizard, mustering 3 shifts 
  of well-controlled effects easily, 4 shifts if 
  we’re talking the air element, and more if he 
  pushes himself. He acts at Average initiative 
  in a fight.
  Specializations
  Evocation: Elements (Air, Water, Spirit); 
  Control (Air +1)
  Thaumaturgy: Control (Wards +1)
  Rote Spells
  Bise (Air maneuver, four shifts): Creates 
  a very strong wind lasting a moment; 
  this is useful for filling a sail with wind, 
  dispersing toxic fumes, or altering wind 
  away from a predator. If Evan needs 
  more power or finer control, the effect is 
  much briefer. Evan must have his staff to 
  cast this rote spell.
  Bricolage (Air block, three shifts):  Creates 
  a three-foot-diameter wall of wind. Evan 
  does not need his staff to cast this rote; 
  he developed it for use in emergencies, 
  such as the time when a palm crashed 
  through the roof of his bungalow during 
  a downpour on Crete…
  Javelot (Force attack, four shifts): 
  Launches a spear of force at a target. 
  Evan requires the use of his copper rod 
  to cast this rote.
  Focus Items
  Oak Staff (defensive power +1 for air)
  Quartz Pendant (complexity +1 for wards)
  Copper Rod (offensive power +1 for air 
  and spirit)
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OOO   Social OOO
  Total Refresh Cost: –7
  maya has it too, and it certainly 
  does; it’s a license to print fate 
  points, as well as to spend them. 
  the characters can invoke it when 
  they need to be there for each 
  other, and the gm can compel it 
  to send one into trouble after 
  another. And because they all 
  have it, it doesn’t matter who’s 
  in trouble first; it just works.
  Hey, Biff and Evan 
  both have “Hail 
  Hail the Gang’s All 
  Here” as an aspect. 
  That’s got to have 
  some sort of special 
  effect, yeah?
  
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  “The Cask of Amontillado.” It’s essentially an 
  exposé of the excesses and crimes of (at least) 
  one member of the Montresor family. If you 
  haven’t read it, go read it. Yeah, right now. It’s not 
  long, it’s free on the Web, and it’ll take you about 
  ten minutes. I’ll wait. 
  Whether or not Montresor was a few bricks 
  shy of a load (ha!), you can understand the fami-
  ly’s unhappiness with Poe. Yeah, Montresor was 
  Evan’s grandfather, or maybe great-grandfather. 
  Evan doesn’t quite believe that “Amontillado” 
  was literally true; he has no idea that he has 
  literal skeletons cluttering his house’s basement. 
  That said, he carries on his family’s resentment 
  of Poe and, by extension, the Dupin Society.
  Evan knows that he can completely trust 
  Wellington, his personal aide. Biff Abernathy is 
  living in the servant’s quarters in his estate, and 
  Maya McKenzie is a frequent visitor.
  Biff Abernathy
  Suggested player character!
  Biff, or Mortimer Louis Abernathy III as 
  he was christened, met Evan Montrose when 
  the two were classmates at Baltimore’s most 
  prestigious preschool. Their first day, little 
  Mortimer decked Evan in an argument over 
  a set of building blocks. Through his tears, all 
  Evan could do was point at his attacker and say 
  “Biff!” Whether Evan referred to the child or the 
  action, the name stuck and the two became fast 
  friends.
  Biff ’s interests were more athletic than 
  Evan’s; Biff was a jock through school and is still 
  quite the athlete. He’s an outstanding soccer and 
  rugby player, as well as an accomplished martial 
  artist—he’s especially skilled at Krav Maga (a 
  form devised by the Israeli Defense Forces), 
  leading to a great deal of speculation about just 
  how he spent that semester abroad. He has an 
  undeserved reputation as a dumb jock. He’s in 
  a long-term but tempestuous relationship with 
  Maya McKenzie (see below); he, she, and Evan 
  are a more or less inseparable trio.
  When Evan returned from Europe, Biff (and 
  Maya) came with him. Despite being a trust 
  fund kid wealthy beyond most people’s wildest 
  imagination, Biff moved into Evan’s house, living 
  rent-free in the servants’ quarters.
  Evan’s supernatural opponents often make 
  the mistake of underestimating Biff, who knows 
  his way around a fight. 
  BIFF ABERNATHY
  High Concept: Trust Fund Jock
  Trouble: “Sorry, Mouse,” Said Maya’s 
  Steady Boyfriend
  Other Aspects: Dumb Luck; Krav Maga; 
  Mortimer Louis Abernathy III; 
  Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here; 
  Plays the Dumb Jock
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Great (+4)
  Contacts: Average (+1)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Driving: Average (+1)
  Endurance: Good (+3)
  Fists: Superb (+5)
  Guns: Average (+1)
  Might: Good (+3)
  Rapport: Fair (+2)
  Resources: Great (+4)
  Scholarship: Average (+1)
  Weapons: Average (+1)
  Stunts
  Martial Artist (Fists): Biff may make 
  assessments and declarations related to 
  fighting styles and fighting culture using 
  his Fists skill at +1.
  Lethal Weapon (Fists): Biff’s Fists are 
  Weapon:2 against an unarmored oppo-
  nent; Weapon:1 vs. Armor:1.
  Redirected Force (Fists): When using 
  Fists to defend against a close-combat 
  attack, Biff may sacrifice his next action 
  to use that successful defense as a 
  maneuver, placing a temporary aspect 
  such as Thrown to the Ground or 
  Taken off Balance on the attacker.
  Stress
  Mental OO Physical OOOO Social OO
  Notes
  Fair initiative, Superb attacks and Great 
  to Superb defense. His fists count as 
  Weapon:2 against opponents without any 
  armor, and his defensive moves often leave 
  a surprised foe on his ass.
  Total Refresh Cost: –1 (Pure Mortal)
  davian, do 
  you know 
  about the 
  skeletons for 
  true fact, 
  or is this an 
  embellishment 
  for the 
  sake of the 
  campaign 
  setting? 
  You’re not 
  going to tell 
  me, are you.
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  Maya McKenzie
  Suggested player character!
  Maya McKenzie met Biff and Evan as a pre-
  teen at their prep school. Maya was on scholar-
  ship at a school of very wealthy people; a trailer 
  park kid among the trust fund crowd, she quickly 
  learned how not to attract attention to herself. One 
  day in ninth grade, Biff Abernathy finally noticed 
  her, mentioning that she was “Quiet as a mouse.” 
  He’s been calling her Mouse ever since. She thinks 
  of him as her steady boyfriend, but the relation-
  ship runs hot and cold depending on how much 
  of a jerk he seems to be in a given month, but her 
  platonic friendship with Evan Montrose, based on 
  their magical talents, has been more consistent.
  Maya’s mother was a shapeshifter of moderate 
  talent, and when she noticed that Maya’s obsession 
  with going unnoticed was a precursor to a similar 
  talent, she trained Maya in the art. Already a small 
  woman, Maya quickly gained the ability to trans-
  form herself into a tiny white-footed mouse. Maya 
  used this ability not only to avoid notice where 
  necessary (although leaving behind her clothing 
  prevented frequent use at school), but also to use 
  it to gather sensitive information on others: first, 
  her classmates, then teachers who were up to non-
  approved activity, then getting the dirt on outright 
  criminals in the community. Evan has warned 
  her that her crusading will get her into trouble 
  someday, but now that he’s the White Council 
  representative in Baltimore he finds himself 
  relying on Maya regularly. 
  MAYA “MOUSE” MCKENZIE
  High Concept: 
  Insatiably Curious Were-Mouse
  Trouble: “Biff, you jerk!” said Biff’s Steady 
  Girlfriend
  Other Aspects: Quiet as a Mouse; 
  I Remember Where I Came From; 
  Locked or Unlocked, it’s All the Same 
  to Me; Hail Hail the Gang’s All Here; 
  Uncommon Sense
  Skills
  Alertness: Good (+3)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Burglary: Fair (+2)
  Deceit: Average (+1)
  Driving: Average (+1)
  Empathy: Great (+4)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Great (+4)
  Lore: Good (+3)
  Presence: Average (+1)
  Rapport: Average (+1)
  Scholarship: Fair (+2)
  Stealth: Good (+3)
  Survival: Average (+1)
  Stunts
  Listening (Investigation): Maya gains a +4 
  on her Investigation roll when Listening, 
  but her Alertness drops to Terrible while 
  doing so, due to the exclusion of her other 
  senses.
  Powers
  Beast Change [–1]
  Echoes of the Beast [–1]
  Diminutive Size [–1]
  Stress
  Mental OO   Physical OOO   Social OOO
  Notes
  Maya technically has Human Form, but since 
  all that gets her is a 1 point power (Diminutive 
  Size), she doesn’t get the Human Form bonus. 
  When in mouse form, her Stealth is at least 
  Good and boosted to Epic thanks to her 
  size; she also gets a +2 bonus to Alertness 
  and Investigation to notice small details. She 
  tends to “mouse out” and run away from 
  fights; Good initiative and Fair defense. Her 
  physical stress track drops by 1 box when in 
  mouse form.
  Total Refresh Cost: –4
  Not to be 
  confused with 
  Harry’s dog!
  Does this person 
  actually exist? The 
  ability to change 
  into a mouse yet 
  still retain her 
  human faculties 
  is an incredibly 
  impressive feat—
  and not without 
  risks.
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  Wellington
  Motivation: I will serve Montrose to the best of 
  my ability. 
  Face of: The Montrose Estate (page 393)
  Wellington is actually an ogre in the guise of 
  a human—a creature of Faerie, bound to serve 
  the Montrose Family. While he is somewhat dry 
  in his wit, his loyalty is absolute. Unfortunately, 
  most of the Secrets of the House are things he 
  has been bound not to reveal, so he can be frus-
  tratingly unhelpful when it comes to providing 
  information. He currently serves as aide to Evan 
  Montrose.
  Wellington is house-bound due to an old 
  pact; he simply can’t leave the estate (if he’s 
  forced out of the estate, he’s automatically 
  compelled into uselessness). He’s also a bit of 
  a runt, lacking the Hulking Size of his ogre 
  brethren. He’s unable to talk about whether this 
  is a natural issue or a side-effect of the ancient 
  Montrose pact he’s part of. 
  Gilgamesh
  Motivation: The power of the ley line will fuel 
  our clan’s glorious victory! 
  Face of: Federal Hill Park  (page 389)
  Gilgamesh has been the self-styled 
  “God-King” of the Ereshkigal ghoul clan for 
  about two hundred years, and just a year ago 
  became a recognized Freeholding Lord and 
  signatory of the Unseelie Accords. Vicious and 
  cunning, Gilgamesh leads the clan with remark-
  able political skill; he knows when (and how) to 
  negotiate, and when to tear his adversary limb 
  from limb, which he can do without a thought—
  he’s freaking huge. His size makes it tough for 
  him to blend in among mortal humans, so he 
  tends to avoid being seen outside in daylight. 
  Gilgamesh is possibly the single most 
  dangerous creature in Baltimore, and that 
  includes the Black Court vamps in town. He 
  lusts after the power of the ley line, knowing 
  that he can use it to power his own spellcasting 
  (assuming he has real power, that is) or can use 
  it as a bargaining chip to gain concessions from 
  other supernatural players.
  WELLINGTON
  High Concept: 
  Summer Court Ogre Butler
  Other Aspects: 
  Unable to Leave the Estate;  
  “I am by no Means an Expert, Sir, But…”;  
  Bound by a Secret Pact
  Skills
  Alertness: Good (+3)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Great (+4)
  Empathy: Good (+3)
  Endurance: Good (+3)
  Fists: Fair (+2)
  Might: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Superb (+5)
  Scholarship: Good (+3)
  Weapons: Great (+4)
  Most other skills default to Fair or Average. 
  Powers
  Glamours [–2]
  Human Guise [–0]
  Inhuman Strength [–2]
  Supernatural Toughness [–4]
  Inhuman Recovery [–2]
  The Catch [+3] is cold iron and the like.
  Physical Immunity [–8]
  The Catch (Stacked) [+5] is that ogres are 
  only immune to (mortal?) magic, not 
  mundane harm.
  Stress
  Mental OOOO  
  Social OOOO, +1 mild consequence
  Physical OOOO(OOOO), Armor:2
  immune to magic     
  Notes
  Wellington has Good initiative, Weapon:2 
  strength, Great skill with a club (though he’ll 
  usually pick up a piece of furniture to do 
  the job), Fair skill with his bare hands, and a 
  Fair facility for Glamours. He’s also utterly 
  unflappable.
  Total Refresh Cost: –10
  He’s like 
  Reginald 
  Jeeves. If 
  Jeeves was 
  an ogre.
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  VASILIKI LAGIOS
  High Concept: White Court Patriarch 
  Trouble: Disloyal Subordinates
  Other Aspects: Patience is Usually a Virtue; 
  Ruthless Predator
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Good (+3)
  Contacts: Great (+4)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Deceit: Great (+4)
  Discipline: Superb (+5)
  Endurance: Good (+3)
  Empathy: Superb (+5)
  Investigation: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Great (+4)
  Resources: Great (+4)
  Scholarship: Fair (+2)
  Weapons: Good (+3)
  Most other skills default to Fair or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Social Graces (Empathy): When determining initiative 
  in a social conflict, +2 to Empathy.
  The Weight of Reputation (Presence): Vasiliki may 
  use his Presence instead of Intimidation to scare 
  someone, provided the target knows of his “rep.”
  Filthy Lucre (Resources): +2 to Resources whenever 
  using it for illicit purposes.
  Powers
  Emotional Vampire [–1]
  Human Guise [+0]
  Incite Emotion (Despair; Lasting Emotion, At Range) [–3]
  Feeding Dependency [+1] affecting the following 
  powers:
  Inhuman Strength [–2]
  Inhuman Speed [–2]
  Inhuman Recovery [–2]
  The Catch [+0] is True Hope.
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OOOO   Social OOOO  
   Hunger OOOO, extra mild consequence
  Notes
  A powerful WCV in masterful control of his appetites. 
  Fantastic initiative, and he favors using a knife in a fight, 
  with Good skill. Great defense, Weapon:2 strength. 
  He can also inflict despair as a Weapon:2 mental 
  stress attack using Great Deceit, up to a zone away—if 
  possible, he’ll prefer to make his opponent give up the 
  fight and lay down to die. But his real arena of choice is 
  in a social conflict.
  Total Refresh Cost: –12
  GILGAMESH
  High Concept: Ghoul Tyrant
  Trouble: Wizards and Vampires and Faeries 
  in My Way
  Other Aspects: Gilgamesh the God-King; 
  Politician Among Thugs; Too Clever By 
  Half
  Skills
  Alertness: Good (+3)
  Athletics: Great (+4)
  Endurance: Good (+3)
  Fists: Great (+4)
  Intimidation: Good (+3)
  Presence: Superb (+5)
  Conviction: Fair (+2)
  Might: Good (+3)
  Weapons: Great (+4)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Most other skills default to Mediocre, with 
  any physical ones defaulting to Fair.
  Powers
  Claws [–1]
  Human Guise [+0]
  Hulking Size [–2]
  Ritual [–2] – possibly?
  Worldwalker [–2] – possibly?
  Feeding Dependency (Meat) [+1], affecting: 
  Supernatural Strength [–4]
  Inhuman Speed [–2] 
  Inhuman Toughness [–2]
  Supernatural Recovery [–4]
  The Catch [+2] is wounds from holy objects. 
  Also, dead is dead with a ghoul; if you 
  inflict enough massive trauma (e.g., decap-
  itation), it’s not something they come back 
  from.
  Stress
  Mental OOO   Hunger OOO
  Physical OOOOOO(OO), Armor:1   
  Social OOOO, additional mild consequence
  Notes
  Epic initiative, Great attack, Superb defense, 
  and Weapon:6 strength & claws. Not 
  someone to mess with.
  Total Refresh Cost: –12, possibly as 
  much as –16 if his claims of spellcasting and 
  opening portals to the Nevernever are true.
  Holy crap, I need to check with 
  davian and make sure this is 
  accurate! maybe we should 
  steer clear of Baltimore with 
  our “outreach” program…
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  Vasiliki Lagios
  Motivation: I will protect the standing of the 
  Lagios family at any cost. 
  Face of: city theme of Decay and Corruption 
  (page 362)
  Born in Richmond in 1823, Vasiliki rose to 
  lead House Lagios a few years after the U.S. 
  Civil War. He is a supreme politician and has 
  guided the family successfully to a comfortable 
  stability, fending off challenges from several 
  rivals over the years. He’s a conservative strate-
  gist, very risk-averse, and is content to execute 
  plans that take decades to show fruit. He’s also 
  extremely careful and is watching the schemes 
  and machinations of his niece Alexandra with 
  a wary eye. Vasiliki has no regular haunts; he 
  frequents any of two or three dozen bars and 
  cafes across eastern Baltimore and conducts 
  business wherever suits him at the moment.
  Alexandra Lagios
  Motivation: I will lead House Lagios to 
  triumph. 
  Face of: city threat On the Brink (page 362)
  Alexandra was born in Baltimore in 1973. 
  She’s grown impatient with her uncle Vasiliki’s 
  conservative leadership; she believes that they 
  can improve their position by aggressively 
  seeking new prey in new situations. It was 
  Alexandra who recruited corrections officers 
  at the Maryland State Correctional Facility to 
  allow the White Court to feed there. She also 
  established the brothel at The Mantis Club 
  in Fell’s Point, providing prey for those clan 
  members who prefer lust to despair; this may 
  include herself, for the despair she can inspire 
  is mixed with a healthy amount of lust. She 
  has made a few key alliances within the family 
  and may make a play to take over the family 
  leadership.
  Damocles Ravenborn
  Motivation: Montrose WILL take me seriously. 
  Face of: city threat On the Brink (page 362)
  Damocles Ravenborn leads a half-dozen 
  strong gang of Red Court vampires in Baltimore. 
  Prior to the Vampire War, he was intimidated 
  by Old Man Montrose into keeping a very low 
  profile. Once the war started, they stayed out 
  of the way (nobody believes he was capable of 
  killing Evan’s father, but you never know…). 
  Now that the Old Man is dead, Ravenborn 
  ALExANDRA LAGIOS
  High Concept: 
  Charismatic White Court Upstart 
  Trouble: 
  Vasiliki Knows I’m Moving Against Him
  Other Aspects: Ambition Is My Master; 
  Why Put Off Until Tomorrow
  Skills
  Alertness: Good (+3)
  Athletics: Great (+4)
  Burglary: Fair (+2)
  Contacts: Good (+3)
  Conviction: Fair (+2)
  Deceit: Superb (+5)
  Discipline: Average (+1)
  Endurance: Average (+1)
  Guns: Fair (+2)
  Intimidation: Average (+1)
  Investigation: Average (+1)
  Presence: Good (+3)
  Rapport: Great (+4)
  Resources: Fair (+2) 
  Stealth: Average (+1)
  Stunts
  Sex Appeal (Rapport): She receives a +2 to 
  the roll on any seduction attempts she 
  makes with Rapport vs. someone who 
  could be receptive to her advances.
  Powers
  Emotional Vampire [–1]
  Human Guise [+0]
  Incite Emotion (Despair; Lasting Emotion)[–2]
  Feeding Dependency [+1] affecting the 
  following powers:
  Inhuman Strength [–2]
  Inhuman Speed [–2]
  Inhuman Recovery [–2]
  The Catch [+0] is True Hope.
  Stress
  Mental OOO   Physical OOO   
  Social OOOO    Hunger OOO
  Notes
  Epic initiative, Superb defense, but not much 
  of a fighter. She’s a Fair shot with a gun, but if 
  she can get up close and personal (the same 
  zone), she can inflict a Weapon:2 mental 
  stress attack with her Superb Deceit, with 
  consequences manifesting as despair.
  Total Refresh Cost: –9
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  is ready to assert his strength against Evan 
  Montrose and the rest of Baltimore.
  Baltimore needn’t worry too much. Damocles 
  Ravenborn is the ultimate goth vampire 
  LARP poser, like he’s perpetually playing 
  Evernight—right down to the sunglasses, 
  trenchcoat, and katana. 
  A classic bully, Damocles is quickly intimi-
  dated by anyone who stands up to him, which 
  is how Old Man Montrose kept him in check so 
  easily. But he does hold a grudge.
  Even though he’s a poser, as an actual 
  Red Court vampire, Damocles can still be 
  dangerous—the same way a toddler with a gun 
  can still kill people. The trick with Damocles 
  is to show him who’s the boss early on and to 
  make it about something other than fighting. 
  Personally, I’m nursing a theory that someone 
  turned him as a way of getting rid of him—folks 
  will only let a rabid mutt run wild for so long.
  Frank Walker
  Motivation: I just want to do my job. 
  Face of: The Fall Line (page 389)
  Anyone who wants to know about the Fall 
  Line in Baltimore should talk to Frank Walker, 
  a senior surveyor and civil engineer working for 
  the City of Baltimore. He is the recognized local 
  expert in matters of hydrology, land use, and 
  structural planning for the parts of Baltimore 
  along the Fall Line. Although well into his 
  forties, he may be coming into some latent 
  hydromancy talent.
  With that talent, Frank is more of an engi-
  neer than anything. He plans things out care-
  fully, then executes—and he’s at best half-aware 
  that some of what he pulls off is magic. Not the 
  sort of guy who gets into a fight.
  Walker is married to Janet Walker, a Park 
  Ranger at Fort McHenry. His brother Scott 
  works for the city water authority.
  DAMOCLES RAVENBORN
  High Concept: 
  Actually Red Court, but Still a Poser 
  Trouble:
   Bone To Pick With Montrose
  Other Aspects: 
  Bully; Folds Under Pressure 
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Intimidation: Good (+3)
  Performance: Good (+3)
  Stealth: Average (+1)
  Weapons: Average (+1)
  Most other skills default to Mediocre.
  Powers
  Addictive Saliva [–1]
  Blood Drinker [–1]
  Claws [–1]
  Flesh Mask [–1]
  Feeding Dependency [+1] affecting the 
  following powers:
  Cloak of Shadows [–1]
  Inhuman Strength [–2]
  Inhuman Speed [–2]
  Inhuman Recovery [–2]
  Inhuman Toughness [–2]
  The Catch [+2] is sunlight, holy stuff; armor 
  doesn’t protect belly.
  Stress
  Mental OO   Physical OOO(OO), Armor:1   
  Social OO   Hunger OOO
  Notes
  Fantastic initiative, Mediocre to Average 
  attacks (with a katana!), Good defense. Can 
  do physical stress with Weapon:4 strength 
  & claws (or Weapon:4 strength & katana), 
  or set aside the weapon bonus to make it a 
  mental stress attack with his narcotic saliva. 
  It’s said that Damocles often licks the flat of 
  his sword blade to deliver the venom, but he’s 
  the kind of idiot who might end up cutting off 
  his tongue by accident if he did that.
  Total Refresh Cost: –10
  Okay, someone 
  needs to explain 
  to this guy that 
  if you simulta-
  neously carry 
  a katana &wear 
  a trenchcoat, 
  you’re a dork. 
  You have to 
  pick one!
  I know I’m going to regret asking this, but: Evernight?
  It’s a LARP system. Thomas can tell you about it.
  thomas plays? do you think he could get me into a game?
  This sort of thing, where 
  someone doesn’t realize 
  that their “knack” is 
  actually a magical 
  talent, happens more 
  often than you’d think. 
  If that person’s lucky, it 
  never becomes a problem.
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  Park Ranger 
  Janet Walker 
  Motivation: My park will be a safe place.
  Face of: Fort McHenry (page 389)
  Ranger Walker (and yes, she’s tired of the 
  Chuck Norris jokes, so don’t make them) works 
  almost every day at Fort McHenry National 
  Monument, showing tourists the grounds 
  and making sure everything is maintained 
  to exacting standards. She’s seen what some 
  other employees and visitors call the ghosts on 
  the walls, but her rationalist sensibilities won’t 
  acknowledge them. She does not tolerate specu-
  lation of ghosts from her staff and discourages 
  them from even mentioning it to the tourists, 
  believing it will turn the national monument 
  into a laughingstock.
  Ranger Walker is married to Frank Walker, a 
  Baltimore city engineer.
  FRANK WALKER
  High Concept: 
  Budding Hydromancer/Civil Engineer 
  Skills
  Contacts: Good (+3)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Fair (+2)
  Resources: Fair (+2)
  Scholarship: Great (+4)
  Most other skills default to Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Scientist (civil engineer, Scholarship): +1 to 
  all rolls dealing with civil engineering, local 
  Baltimore geology, or related topics.
  Powers
  Ritual (Hydromancy) [–2]
  The Sight [–1] (visions tend to manifest in terms 
  of hydrodynamics: ethereal liquids, flows of 
  power)
  Stress
  Mental OOOO  Physical OO  Social OO
  Focus Items
  A high-quality antique slide rule (+1 complexity 
  and +1 power for hydromantic rituals)
  Notes
  Frank hasn’t developed the ability to use his 
  hydromantic talents in a fast, evocation style, but 
  he might pick up Channeling (Water) at some 
  point if he does. 
  Total Refresh Cost: –4
   JANET WALKER
  High Concept: Skeptical Park Ranger
  Skills
  Alertness: Great (+4)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Discipline: Great (+4)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Guns: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Good (+3)
  Lore: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Scholarship: Good (+3)
  Most other skills default to Average or 
  Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Paranoid? Probably. (Alertness): Gains +2 to 
  Alertness when rolling against surprise and 
  ambush.
  Iron-Willed Disbelief (Discipline): Rooted 
  in her firm disbelief of the supernatural, 
  Janet’s mental stress track is determined 
  by her Discipline skill.
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OOO   Social OOO
  Notes
  Great initiative, Fair defense, and a Fair shot 
  with a gun. Her skepticism about the super-
  natural is both a strength and a weakness.
  Total Refresh Cost: +0 (Pure Mortal)
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  Sergeant Jim Flanagan
  Motivation: I’m cleaning up the river. 
  Face of: Fort Carroll (page 390)
  Sgt. Jim Flanagan, a former Navy petty officer 
  and currently a policeman in Baltimore’s Marine 
  unit, often patrols the waters of the Patapsco 
  River near Fort Carroll (see page 390) in a three-
  man patrol boat. He and his crew have chased 
  visitors from the island fort many times, often 
  arresting trespassers. In the execution of his 
  duties, he’s interrupted more than one arcane 
  ritual. He’s been offered bribes from time to time 
  to adjust his patrol route to avoid the fort, but 
  he’s always refused. He’s seen some weird stuff 
  and suspects that there’s something real to it; if 
  Baltimore has a potential Karrin Murphy, it’s 
  Flanagan. 
  Patrol Officers Leslie 
  Vastolo and Luis Mirabal
  Motivation: Lock and load—let’s get ‘em. 
  Face of: city threat On the Brink (page 362)
  Officer Leslie Vastolo and her partner Officer 
  Luis Mirabal have the distinction of being the 
  only Baltimore cops known to have killed both 
  a ghoul and a Black Court vampire while on 
  duty. The ghoul was their baptism-by-fire into 
  the existence of the supernatural; the two of 
  them each emptied three clips into one of the 
  bastards, finally taking it down by severing its 
  spine with a lucky shot. 
  Of course, the department didn’t believe 
  their story, and they were both reprimanded for 
  excessive discharge of their sidearms. They’ve 
  learned not to pass reports of “weird” stuff up 
  the line, and their peers have learned to pass on 
  such reports to them directly.
  Vastolo’s uncle John (a member of the Dupin 
  Society) has begun to pass them useful infor-
  mation, which they’ve enthusiastically acted 
  on; they both carry wooden nightsticks rather 
  than the composite and plastic varieties (which 
  allowed them to dispatch a Black Court vamp 
  last year) and pack really big personal firearms 
  (high-capacity .45 automatics and big shotguns 
  loaded with steel-jacketed slugs) in addition to 
  their department-issue pistols.
  They’re also willing to take up arms while off-
  duty, which gives some of the Dupins ideas about 
  taking a more active role in the community.
  Both load their personal firearms with steel-
  jacketed ammo, which has a particularly strong 
  impact on certain supernatural creatures.
  these two are going to 
  get killed, aren’t they?
  SERGEANT JIM FLANAGAN
  High Concept: Clued-In Cop
  Other Aspects: Untouchable; Right Place at 
  the Right Time
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Good (+3)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Deceit: Average (+1)
  Empathy: Fair (+2)
  Endurance: Great (+4)
  Guns: Good (+3)
  Investigation: Great (+4)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Fair (+2)
  Other skills default to Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Interrogator (Intimidation): Once per interroga-
  tion, Jim can ignore the stress he’d inflict with 
  Intimidation and instead treat the attack as 
  a successful Empathy attempt to “read” that 
  target.
  Listening (Investigation): Jim gains a +4 on 
  his Investigation roll when Listening, but his 
  Alertness drops to Terrible while doing so. 
  Quick Eye (Investigation): Jim’s first Investigation 
  roll to determine deeper details about a scene 
  is two time increments faster than usual.
  Pin Them Down (Guns): When Aiming, the aspect 
  Jim places on the target remains sticky so 
  long as the target does not move out of the 
  zone. Any attempts to leave the zone face an 
  increased border of 1 so long as Jim continues 
  to make Guns attacks against that target.
  Too Fast To Hit (Athletics): Jim takes no penalty 
  for moving one zone and gains an additional +1 
  to the roll (for a total of +3) when mounting a 
  Full Defense.
  Stress
  Mental OOOO Physical OOOO Social OOO
  Notes
  A highly skilled, capable mortal. Fair initiative, 
  Good shot with a gun, Good defense.
  Total Refresh Cost: –3 (Pure Mortal)
  Is there some law 
  that says clued-
  in cops need Irish 
  surnames?
  Keep reading.
  
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  Sister Peter Ann Doran
  Motivation: Nobody need fear the darkness. 
  Face of: Basilica of the Assumption (page 394)
  Sister Peter Ann Doran OSB is a spry 
  92-year-old Benedictine nun, and the care-
  taker of the safe house at the Basilica of the 
  Assumption (see page 394). She’s about four foot 
  five, eighty pounds dripping wet, and is never 
  seen without her black habit. Don’t let that fool 
  you; I’m told Sister Ann once stopped a demon 
  cold in its tracks with nothing but her battered 
  old Rosary beads and the fierce glare only a nun 
  can deliver. Those of you who went to Catholic 
  school will understand. 
  Sister Ann has done many things in her 
  career, but her education is in psychology. She 
  spent many years at Johns Hopkins, working as 
  a chaplain and counselor, ministering to termi-
  nally ill patients and their families. 
  Her most important assignment, however, 
  was in prison ministry; it was in ministering 
  to the imprisoned that she met Imam al-Islam 
  and Reverend Smith. Their shared experience 
  working in the Baltimore jails and Maryland 
  prison system convinced the three of them that 
  the supernatural world not only existed but 
  posed a significant danger to mortal humans. 
  And they knew they could do something about 
  it, with God’s help. Rabbi Greenstone, also 
  performing prison ministry, joined their group 
  just after Sister Ann’s retirement.
  So should we just call her 
  Sister Mary Yoda?
  LESLIE VASTOLO
  High Concept: Monster Hunting Cop
  Other Aspects: Gunslinger
  Skills
  Alertness: Good (+3)
  Athletics: Good (+3)
  Contacts: Good (+3)
  Conviction: Fair (+2)
  Guns: Great (+4)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Fair (+2)
  Weapons: Fair (+2)
  Most other skills default to Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Fast Reload (Guns): When Vastolo must reload 
  she takes no penalty when doing it as a 
  supplemental action; if she’s in a race to see 
  who reloads first, or anything else having to 
  do with her speed or ability to reload, she 
  gains a +1 on the roll.
  On My Toes (Alertness): Gains +2 to Alertness 
  when using it for initiative.
  I Know Just The Guy (Contacts): When 
  Gathering Information, Vastolo’s efforts are at 
  a +1, and are 1 time increment faster.
  My Weapon Makes Me Powerful (Discipline): 
  Officer Vastolo gains courage when armed. 
  When in possession of a loaded firearm, 
  Vastolo gains a +3 to Discipline rolls for 
  mental defense.
  Stress
  Mental OO  Physical OOO  Social OO
  Notes
  Fantastic initiative, Great shot, Good defense.
  Total Refresh Cost: –2 (Pure Mortal)
  LUIS MIRABAL
  High Concept: Monster Hunting Cop
  Other Aspects: Wheelman
  Skills
  Alertness: Good (+3)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Burglary: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Fair (+2)
  Driving: Great (+4)
  Guns: Good (+3)
  Investigation: Good (+3)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Weapons: Fair (+2)
  Most other skills default to Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Corner of My Eye (Alertness): When 
  successfully rolling Alertness passively to 
  pick up on details, Mirabal gains an addi-
  tional three shifts.
  Like the Back of My Hand (Driving): 
  Mirabal’s knack for shortcuts and naviga-
  tion gives him a +2 to Driving when using 
  it for street knowledge and navigation.
  Eat Chrome (Driving): Mirabal is an expert at 
  defensive and offensive driving. He gains 
  +1 to Driving rolls used to attack or block.
  On My Toes (Alertness): Gains +2 to 
  Alertness when using it for initiative.
  Stress
  Mental OOO   Physical OOO   Social OO
  Notes
  Superb initiative, Good shot with a gun, Fair 
  defense. 
  Total Refresh Cost: –2 (Pure Mortal)
  
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  When age forced Sister Ann to retire from 
  prison ministry, she was assigned to the Basilica 
  of the Assumption. In retirement on paper only, 
  she now works as hostess for the safe house, 
  providing what comfort and safety she can for 
  anyone seeking sanctuary from things that go 
  bump in the night.
  Other Clued-In 
  People of Faith 
  Sister Ann is far from the only holy person 
  actively fighting against the darkness in 
  Baltimore. Below are a few of her allies.  All of 
  them share similar motivations with Sister Ann, 
  and each is the face of his own house of worship.
  Rabbi Benjamin Greenstone
  Rabbi Greenstone is the young leader of Temple 
  Beth Israel, a synagogue in the Belvedere neigh-
  borhood just a few blocks from the Washington 
  Monument. Rabbi Greenstone is an outstanding 
  theologian, as well as a former U.S. Army officer. 
  In his Army service, he saw several things that he 
  could not explain and that frightened him to his 
  core. In addition to his work at his synagogue, 
  he began ministering to prisoners and quickly 
  joined with Imam al-Islam and Reverend Smith 
  in their work protecting mortals against the 
  supernatural.
  Imam Jamil al-Islam
  Imam Jamil al-Islam runs the Islamic Center of 
  Baltimore, which is in the west of the city in the 
  Rosemont neighborhood, close to Gwynn Falls 
  Park. He played football at the University of 
  Maryland in the 1970s and was a teammate of 
  Isaiah Smith. The two continue their friendship, 
  their shared vocation to ministry in the prison 
  system, and their commitment to protect the 
  hunted. Under his leadership, the Islamic Center 
  is known as a place where people, Muslim or 
  not, may find refuge and safety.
  Reverend Isaiah Smith
  Reverend Smith is pastor of St. James AME 
  Church near the East Green. He maintains 
  the imposing stature he had while a defensive 
  lineman at University of Maryland; he also 
  maintains a close friendship with his old team-
  mate Imam Jamil al-Islam. Reverend Smith is 
  a gifted orator; his voice always reminded me 
  of James Earl Jones. Full disclosure: I attended 
  St. James AME while I was growing up, and 
  Reverend Smith was my pastor. I knew he met 
  regularly with an imam, a rabbi, and a nun, but 
  I didn’t know why until I got involved with the 
  Alphas.
  SISTER PETER ANN DORAN
  High Concept: Nun in the Know
  Other Aspects: Faith That Moves Mountains; 
  Frail of Body, Not of Heart
  Skills
  Conviction: Superb (+5)
  Discipline: Great (+4)
  Empathy: Great (+4)
  Lore: Good (+3)
  Rapport: Good (+3)
  Scholarship: Good (+3)
  Most other social and mental skills default to Fair, 
  physical to Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Blessed Words (Conviction): Given a proper amount 
  of time to pray to her God, she may lay an aspect 
  upon a scene with a successful Conviction declara-
  tion representing the effects of that prayer.
  Person of Conviction (Conviction): Sister Ann may 
  use Conviction instead of Presence to determine 
  her social stress capacity.
  Withering Glare (Conviction): Nobody can deliver a 
  cringe-inducing glare quite like a nun. Sister Ann 
  can use her Conviction score to intimidate a foe, 
  provided the foe can see her face.
  Powers
  Bless This House [–1] 
  Stress
  Mental OOOO, additional mild consequence   
  Physical OO   
  Social OOOO, additional mild consequence
  Notes
  While she has no fight-relevant skills, she’s still the 
  sort that the supernatural steers clear of. The thresh-
  olds of the places she calls home are practically 
  unassailable.
  Total Refresh Cost: –4
  
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  RABBI GREENSTONE
  High Concept: Loremaster Rabbi
  Other Aspects: The Children of 
  Wickedness Will Not Afflict Us; 
  Former Army Officer
  Skills
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Good (+3)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Guns: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Great (+4)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Scholarship: Good (+3)
  Most other skills default to Average or 
  Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Blessed Words (Conviction): Given a 
  proper amount of time to pray to his 
  God, he may lay an aspect upon a scene 
  with a successful Conviction declaration 
  representing the effects of that prayer.
  Tower of Faith (Conviction): Provided he 
  gets a chance to pray or otherwise call 
  upon his faith, he gains Armor:1 against 
  any mental stress in a scene.
  Occultist (Lore – Demons): Rabbi 
  Greenstone gains a +2 to Lore rolls 
  when performing research related to 
  demons.
  Powers
  Guide My Hand [–1] 
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OOO   Social OOO
  Notes
  Average initiative, Fair shot with a gun, Fair 
  defense, and some potent prayer-fu. Makes 
  an excellent contact for demonic matters.
  Total Refresh Cost: –4
  IMAM JAMIL AL-ISLAM
  High Concept: 
  Imam Who Defends the Defenseless
  Other Aspects: There Is No Soul But 
  Hath a Guardian; Sanctuary!
  Skills
  Athletics: Good (+3)
  Conviction: Great (+4)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Empathy: Good (+3)
  Fists: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Average (+1)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Fair (+2)
  Scholarship: Good (+3)
  Most other skills default to Average or 
  Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Blessed Words (Conviction): Given a 
  proper amount of time to pray to his 
  God, he may lay an aspect upon a scene 
  with a successful Conviction declaration 
  representing the effects of that prayer.
  Tower of Faith (Conviction): Provided he 
  gets a chance to pray or otherwise call 
  upon his faith, he gains Armor:1 against 
  any mental stress in a scene.
  Powers
  Bless This House [–1] 
  Righteousness [–2] 
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OO   Social OOO
  Notes
  Average initiative, Good defense, Fair 
  fists. His invocations of Islam make him 
  a true threat to the supernatural in a 
  fight; his Great Conviction coupled with 
  Righteousness gives him a blanket +1 to his 
  rolls when he’s pursuing a divinely-inspired 
  purpose.
  Total Refresh Cost: –5
  
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  Joe Nowakowski
  Motivation: Just tryin’ to get by, one day at a 
  time. 
  Face of: Washington Monument (page 391)
  Joe Nowakowski is a homeless man who 
  spends most of his days in the park around the 
  Washington Monument in the Mount Vernon 
  neighborhood. Typically, Mount Vernon is far 
  too rich a place to tolerate folks like him, but Joe 
  is crafty. He’s a Vietnam vet and has learned all 
  sorts of tricks for staying hidden when he wants 
  to. He’s also keenly observant; not much goes on, 
  day or night, around the Monument grounds 
  without him seeing it. If you gain his confidence 
  (hint—he’s a coffee fiend, he can’t get enough of 
  the stuff), he’s only too happy to tell you about 
  what he’s seen.
  Susan Mallenbaum
  Motivation: Don’t disturb my fish! 
  Face of: National Aquarium (page 391)
  Susan Mallenbaum is a marine biologist 
  working at the National Aquarium on a fellow-
  ship from the National Science Foundation. 
  She’s pursuing her Ph.D. in some obscure aspect 
  of marine biochemistry. The important thing is 
  that she’s almost always there; she sleeps on the 
  ancient sofa in her office as often as she goes back 
  to her apartment. Any visitor to the Aquarium, 
  at any time of day, is likely to encounter her. 
  She is as protective of the chemical balance of 
  the water in the tanks as she is of the animals 
  living in them. When not obsessively studying 
  biochemistry, she helps out with the dolphin 
  show as a swimmer.
  Wallace “Lizard” Gibbs
  Motivation: I don’t care if you do have super-
  natural powers, don’t mess with my business. Or 
  the East Green.
  Face of: The East Green (page 392)
  A successful drug dealer in the East Green, 
  “Lizard” Gibbs is a young but worldly and driven 
  man. While he sells drugs to whoever is willing 
  to buy, without hesitation or remorse, he has a 
  sense of right and wrong—though most people 
  would find it pretty twisted. He’s not out to hurt 
  people, but he claims it’s not his job to nanny 
  people who want his drugs. 
  He’ll be the first to say that violence is bad 
  for business, and he tries to conduct his with a 
  minimal body count; his organization is rather 
  REVEREND ISAIAH SMITH
  High Concept: 
  Monster Hunting Minister
  Other Aspects: Get Thee Behind Me; 
  Back When I Played Ball
  Skills
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Endurance: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Great (+4)
  Scholarship: Fair (+2)
  Most other skills default to Average or 
  Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Blessed Words (Conviction): Given a proper 
  amount of time to pray to his God, he 
  may lay an aspect upon a scene with a 
  successful Conviction declaration repre-
  senting the effects of that prayer.
  Fiery Oratory (Presence): Smith is an 
  extremely powerful speaker; the force of 
  his personality comes through like a bull 
  in a china shop whether he’s preaching 
  from the pulpit or deep in a private 
  conversation. The reverend gains a +2 
  to uses of his Presence skill to attack or 
  block in social conflict.
  Begone You Devil (Presence): Smith 
  may substitute his Presence skill for 
  Intimidation when attempting to intimi-
  date creatures that he suspects to be 
  supernatural in origin.
  Powers
  Bless This House [–1] 
  Guide My Hand [–1]
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OOOO  
   Social OOOO
  Notes
  Average skills for a fight, but he’s more 
  about the social conflicts and speechifyin’.
  Total Refresh Cost: –5
  
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  SUSAN MAILENBAUM
  High Concept: Dedicated Grad Student
  Other Aspects: Live to Work
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Good (+3)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Scholarship: Great (+4)
  Survival: Fair (+2)
  Other skills default to Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Capable Researcher (Scholarship): Scholarly 
  research is completed two time increments 
  faster than usual. 
  Scientist (Scholarship – Biochemistry): 
  Mallenbaum gains a +2 to Scholarship rolls 
  related to biochemistry.
  Stress
  Mental OO   Physical OOO   Social OO
  Notes
  Fair initiative, Good defense, but not much for 
  attacks. She’s not exposed to the supernatural 
  world just yet, but that could change.
  Total Refresh Cost: +0 (Pure Mortal)
  JOE NOWAKOWSKI
  High Concept: Homeless Vet
  Other Aspects: Hawkeye
  Skills
  Alertness: Great (+4)
  Contacts: Fair (+2)
  Deceit: Good (+3)
  Rapport: Fair (+2)
  Stealth: Good (+3)
  Most other skills default to Average or 
  Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Corner of my Eye (Alertness): When 
  successfully rolling Alertness passively to 
  pick up on details, Nowakowski gains an 
  additional three shifts. 
  Blend In (Stealth): If there’s a crowd to hide 
  in, Joe gains +2 to his Stealth rolls.
  Stress
  Mental OO   Physical OO   Social OO
  Notes
  Joe’s predominately an information contact. 
  Whether or not he’s got the kind of combat 
  experience and skills he can still use is up to 
  the GM.
  Total Refresh Cost: +0 (Pure Mortal)
  LIZARD
  High Concept: Clued-In Drugdealer
  Trouble: I think I can Take Them
  Other Aspects: This is MY House; 
  Fair Is Fair
  Skills
  Alertness: Average (+1)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Contacts: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Fair (+2)
  Deceit: Good (+3)
  Empathy: Average (+1)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Fists: Average (+1)
  Guns: Good (+3)
  Intimidation: Great (+4)
  Lore: Average (+1)
  Resources: Good (+3)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Average (+1)
  Other skills default to Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Rule with Fear (Intimidation): Use 
  Intimidation instead of Presence 
  whenever rolling to represent Lizard’s 
  reputation.
  Subtle Menace (Intimidation): When the 
  context of power is absent, or Lizard’s 
  victim is actually in a superior position, the 
  victim does not get any advantage bonus 
  when Lizard attempts to use Intimidate 
  against him.
  You Don’t Want Any of This (Intimidation): 
  When performing a Brush-Off to move 
  past someone, he gains a +2 on the roll.
  Leadership (Presence): +1 when using 
  Presence to command a group. Efforts to 
  coordinate a group are efficient, moving 
  one time increment faster than normal.
  Filthy Lucre (Resources): Lizard gains a +2 
  to Resources whenever using it for illicit 
  purposes.
  Stress
  Mental OOO Physical OOO Social OOO
  Notes
  Average initiative, Good shot with a gun, 
  Fair on defense, and still one of the scariest 
  mofos you’ll ever meet. It’s just how he 
  carries himself—and the extremes he’s 
  willing to go to. 
  Total Refresh Cost: –3 (Pure Mortal)
  this guy would make 
  an excellent “strange 
  bedfellow” sort of 
  ally to the Pcs if 
  they end up with 
  a common enemy. 
  
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  successful at exercising its power without 
  resorting to bloodshed. Strangely enough, resi-
  dents of the East Green who know the rules, 
  don’t rock the boat, and don’t bring in trouble 
  (read: the cops) are actually relatively safe. This 
  isn’t to say that they’re happy, of course; most 
  residents are afraid of Lizard and his thugs, but 
  they know not to make trouble. And he’s merci-
  less when someone challenges his authority.
  About a year ago, Lizard noticed a new resi-
  dent. He kept odd hours and, even stranger, he 
  was white; all other residents of the East Green 
  were African-American or Hispanic. Lizard 
  suspected he was a police plant and had his 
  people keep a close eye on the stranger. To make 
  a long story short, after several bizarre deaths 
  Lizard and his gang realized that the stranger 
  was in fact some kind of monster feeding on the 
  despair of the residents.
  Lizard was enraged. This was his project and 
  he’d be damned if he was going to get pushed 
  aside. And though he didn’t like to admit this to 
  himself, maybe it just pissed him off that some-
  thing was trying to eat these people’s souls. It 
  offended his weird sense of what’s fair. If some 
  junkie uses drugs, Lizard figures that’s his deci-
  sion; nobody decides to get eaten by a monster. 
  Rather than flee from a supernatural terror, 
  Lizard rallied his lieutenants, gathered some 
  muscle and lots of guns, and launched an assault. 
  And damned if it didn’t work. A couple of 
  his guys died in the attack, but they killed the 
  vampire. Of course, few people believed anyone 
  that spoke about the battle; Lizard eventually 
  swore everyone involved to silence.
  Lizard continues to rule the East Green, 
  but he knows that there are monsters out there 
  more powerful than rival drug lords or vindic-
  tive cops. He hates them for their presumption 
  of power, and he believes that he can kill them. 
  This combination of beliefs makes him very 
  dangerous to the supernatural community as 
  well as very vulnerable; it would be tremendously 
  easy for him to get in over his head. 
  Dave Gerard
  Motivation: I want my club to be a success, but 
  I don’t want to get caught doing anything illegal.
  Face of: city theme of Conflicting 
  Identities (page 362)
  Dave Gerard owns and operates the Mantis 
  Club in Fells Point. He’s handsome, well-
  dressed, charming, moderately wealthy, and an 
  epically successful ladies’ man. The bastard. 
  Additionally, he is a close associate of 
  Alexandra Lagios, who (rumor has it) operates 
  a brothel in the VIP rooms of his club. He gets 
  a kickback, of course, but he often wonders how 
  voluntary the arrangement actually is for him. 
  He feels like he shouldn’t voice this misgiving, 
  and the padding it provides his wallet dulls the 
  pain a bit.
  Gerard once briefly dated Dr. Allison 
  Ralston.
  Curt Gazo
  Motivation: I’m going to help Alexandra get to 
  the top.
  Face of: Fells Point/The Mantis Club (page 392)
  Curt Gazo is the doorman (read: head 
  bouncer) at the Mantis Club. He’s an expert at 
  working the door and always seems to create the 
  perfect mix of clubgoers to keep it hip and rele-
  vant year after year. Similarly, he never lets things 
  inside get out of control; heavily intoxicated or 
  belligerent guests are quietly but firmly escorted 
  away before they cause trouble. He speaks with 
  a noticeable English accent, which seems to 
  help him defuse tense situations (Americans 
  almost universally find English accents charming 
  and respond positively). He keeps his hair cut 
  short, wears blazers without ties, and is solidly 
  
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  CURT GAZO
  High Concept: White Court Doorman
  Trouble: Need to Keep my Cover
  Other Aspects: Professional to a Fault; 
  Loyal to Alexandra; Charming Accent
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Good (+3)
  Burglary: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Fair (+2)
  Deceit: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Great (+4)
  Endurance: Good (+3)
  Fists: Great (+4)
  Intimidation: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Fair (+2)
  Might: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Good (+3)
  Most other skills default to Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Martial Artist (Fists): Curt is able to recognize 
  many styles of martial arts, using Fists as a 
  knowledge and perception skill focused on 
  unarmed fighting, rolled at +1. 
  Redirected Force (Fists): On a successful defense 
  roll using Fists against close-combat attacks 
  (swung fists, thrust knives), he may sacrifice his 
  next action to treat the defense as a successful 
  maneuver, placing a temporary aspect such 
  as Thrown to the Ground or Taken Off 
  Balance on his attacker.
  Powers
  Emotional Vampire [–1]
  Human Guise [+0]
  Incite Emotion (Despair; Lasting Emotion) [–2]
  Feeding Dependency [+1] affecting the following 
  powers:
  Inhuman Strength [–2]
  Inhuman Speed [–2]
  Inhuman Recovery [–2]
  The Catch [+0] is True Hope.
  Stress
  Mental OOO   Physical OOOO   
  Social OOO   Hunger OOOO
  Notes
  Fantastic initiative, Great defense, Great fistfighting 
  (and well trained at that), Weapon:2 strength. He 
  likes to touch or grapple problem patrons and hit 
  them with a little bit of despair-mojo; takes the 
  fight right out of them, and gives him a nice snack.
  Total Refresh Cost: –10
  DAVE GERARD
  High Concept: Corrupt Club Owner
  Trouble: Played by Alexandra and 
  Knows It
  Other Aspects: Smooth as Silk
  Skills
  Contacts: Great (+4)
  Deceit: Good (+3)
  Empathy: Good (+3)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Good (+3)
  Resources: Good (+3)
  Other social skills default Fair or Average, 
  other skills to Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Ear to the Ground (Contacts): Difficulty 
  of any Getting the Tip-Off roll is 
  reduced by two.
  Honest Lies (Deceit): Whenever incorpo-
  rating a real, valuable piece of the truth 
  (however marginally valuable it may 
  be) into a lie, Gerard gains a +2 on his 
  efforts to pass off the untrue parts.
  Social Graces (Empathy): When deter-
  mining initiative in a social conflict, he 
  gains +2 to Empathy.
  Sex Appeal (Rapport): Receives a +2 to 
  the roll on any seduction attempts he 
  makes with Rapport, provided that 
  the target could be receptive to his 
  advances.
  Stress
  Mental OO   Physical OO   Social OOO
  Notes
  A great contact who’s more deeply 
  connected than he realizes. It’s up to the 
  GM to decide if he’s aware of the super-
  natural dimension to his associate, Ms. 
  Lagios. David Gerard will have plenty of 
  choice bits of info for the PCs—if they 
  can afford to believe he’s telling the truth. 
  Gerard is also a good enough liar that he 
  might just be able to pull one over on the 
  White Court vampires who occasionally 
  cross his path.
  Total Refresh Cost: –2 (Pure Mortal)
  
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  built without being massive or overtly intimi-
  dating. Those observing closely might notice 
  a radio earpiece (the microphone is in his left 
  sleeve) with which he communicates with the 
  entire security staff. He is unarmed, but he is an 
  extremely dangerous adversary in an altercation. 
  Unknown to most, Curt is a White Court 
  vampire and Alexandra Lagios’ trusted lieu-
  tenant; he is loyal to her and to her alone. His 
  assignment is to make sure that the club is run 
  to maximize the success of, and minimize risks 
  to, Alexandra’s high-end brothel.
  Dr. Allison Ralston
  Motivation: I want to know, no matter who says 
  I shouldn’t.
  Face of: Johns Hopkins (page 392)
  Deep in the basement of the Meyer Building 
  on the campus of Johns Hopkins Hospital, 
  forensic pathologist Dr. Allison Ralston toils 
  away in relative anonymity. She has little regard 
  for formal hospital procedure, which led to her 
  exile in the basement. Provided she publishes 
  once or twice a year, her superiors rarely bother 
  to check up on her.
  She is also an active member of the Dupin 
  Society and uses her position at the hospital 
  to perform unofficial post-mortems and other 
  medical examinations vital to their mission as 
  recorders of supernatural events. She’s not above 
  doing other off-the-books work, such as treating 
  injuries of heroic monster hunters who get a bit 
  banged up in the course of their work.
  She’s a regular at Neutral Grounds (see 
  page 394), and she once briefly dated Dave Gerard.
  Ellsworth Dillman
  Motivation: I want to preserve the peace.
  Face of: The Francis Scott Key Bridge (page 393)
  Ellsworth Dillman is a huge man (he carries 
  troll blood inherited from some recent ancestor) 
  frequently described as “jolly” by those who get 
  to know him. He is content in his work as a toll 
  collector (which he calls the “family business”) 
  at the Francis Scott Key Bridge, but he is also 
  a trained and skilled mediator. He is a pacifist 
  at heart and is proud of his role as a facilitator 
  of discussion and negotiation among Baltimore’s 
  supernatural community. He is more than 
  capable of enforcing the peace on the bridge, or 
  anywhere else, if necessary. 
  He’s sometimes seen at Neutral Grounds (see 
  page 394) on his days off.
  Paul Mackey
  Motivation: I want to preserve knowledge.
  Face of: Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum 
  (page 393)
  Paul Mackey is an expert in early American 
  literature and is the curator of the Edgar Allan 
  Poe House and Museum. As such, it’s never 
  questioned that he spends almost all his time 
  there. He is also director of the Dupin Society. 
  He is resisting a push among some in the society 
  to become more active in protecting mortals 
  from supernatural forces.
  DR. ALLISON RALSTON
  High Concept: Clued-In Forensic Pathologist
  Other Aspects: Dupin Society Scholar; 
  Ignored By My Superiors
  Skills
  Contacts: Fair (+2)
  Deceit: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Good (+3)
  Empathy: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Good (+3)
  Scholarship: Great (+4)
  Other skills default to Fair or Average.
  Stunts
  Doctor (Scholarship – Forensic Pathology): +2 on rolls 
  to administer medical attention. +1 for any medical 
  research and an additional +1 in forensic pathology.
  Capable Researcher (Scholarship): Scholarly research is 
  completed two time increments faster than usual.
  Basement Office (Deceit): Dr. Ralston is adept at 
  begging, borrowing, and stealing to get what she 
  needs to do her job without drawing bureaucratic 
  attention to herself. Her workspace quality is deter-
  mined by her Deceit skill, not her Resources.
  Forensic Eye (Scholarship): May use Scholarship instead 
  of Investigation to examine evidence.
  Forensic Training (Scholarship): +2 with Scholarship 
  when performing autopsies, analyzing crime scene 
  evidence, etc.
  Stress
  Mental OO   Physical OOO   Social OOO
  Notes
  Not a fighter, but a hell of an information source.
  Total Refresh Cost: –3 (Pure Mortal)
  dr. ralston would be 
  an amazingly useful 
  NPc for the Pcs to 
  make contact with.
  
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  John Vastolo
  Motivation: I want to stop the predators.
  Face of: city threat of On the Brink (page 362)
  John Vastolo is a member of the Dupin 
  Society, and one that believes that the group 
  should become more active in resisting the 
  weird. He is being held in check by Paul Mackey, 
  for now, but that doesn’t stop him from passing 
  information on to his niece, Patrol Office Leslie 
  Vastolo of the BPD.
  Scott Walker
  Motivation: I’m going to find out what’s going 
  on here.
  Face of: Clifton Gate House (page 393)
  Scott Walker is an experienced technician for 
  the city water authority. He and his crew main-
  tain the facility at Clifton Gate House. Walker 
  knows that there’s something weird going on 
  there; one of his workers vanished on the job 
  late last year. He’s tried talking with his brother 
  Frank, a city water engineer, who just doesn’t 
  buy it.
  PAUL MACKEY
  High Concept: 
  Director of the Dupin Society
  Other Aspects: Patient Observer
  Skills
  Contacts: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Deceit: Fair (+2)
  Discipline: Fair (+2)
  Investigation: Good (+3)
  Lore: Great (+4)
  Presence: Good (+3)
  Resources: Fair (+2)
  Scholarship: Great (+4)
  Other skills default to Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Finely Tuned Third Eye (Lore): Mackey 
  gains +2 to Lore whenever using it as an 
  Alertness substitute to pick up on the 
  presence of the supernatural.
  Capable Researcher (Scholarship): Any 
  scholarly research Mackey does is 
  completed two time increments faster 
  than usual.
  Quick Eye (Investigation): Mackey’s first 
  Investigation roll to determine deeper 
  details about a scene is two time incre-
  ments faster than usual.
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OO 
  Social OOOO
  Notes
   Exactly the sort of non-supernatural super-
  natural contact the PCs should be culti-
  vating. Plus, how can you not hang out at 
  Poe’s digs in a Baltimore game?!
  Total Refresh Cost: –1 (Pure Mortal)
  ELLSWORTH DILLMAN
  High Concept: 
  Trollblooded Toll Collector
  Other Aspects: Enforce the Peace; 
  Mediator; The Family Business
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Great (+4)
  Endurance: Good (+3)
  Fists: Good (+3)
  Intimidation: Good (+3)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Most other physical skills default to Average, 
  the rest to Mediocre, with a few Fair 
  standouts.
  Stunts
  Territorial (Alertness): Dillman gains +2 
  to Alertness when acting on or near the 
  Francis Scott Key Bridge.
  Powers
  Inhuman Strength [–2]
  Inhuman Toughness [–2]
  Supernatural Recovery [–4]
  The Catch [+3] is cold iron and the like.
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Social OOO
  Physical OOOO(OO), Armor:1   
  Notes
  Fair initiative (Great near the Bridge), Good 
  attack and defense, Weapon:2 strength, and 
  built like a brick outhouse. 
  Total Refresh Cost: –6
  So, this is “Pay toll to the 
  troll” taken literally, huh?
  
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  Diane Basset
  Motivation: I want to educate Baltimore’s 
  supernatural community.
  Face of: Neutral Grounds (page 394)
  Diane Basset is the owner and operator of 
  Neutral Grounds, a coffeehouse and book shop 
  near Johns Hopkins. Raised in the supernatural 
  community by her mother, Basset is a prac-
  ticing Wiccan and possesses some degree of 
  magical talent. Her clientele at Neutral Grounds 
  have dubbed her a “caffeinomancer,” and some 
  customers are more than a bit serious. They say 
  she adds the right spice and a minor effort of 
  will to give the strong coffee she brews a bit of 
  something extra.
  Basset opened Neutral Grounds in 1988 and 
  has been welcoming of anyone from the super-
  natural community in Baltimore. She petitioned 
  Queen Mab to grant the coffeehouse Accorded 
  Neutral Ground status, and Mab assented to the 
  request; in thanks, Basset gives female customers 
  a free espresso every Midwinter’s Eve, assuming 
  that one of them might be Queen Mab.
   “caffeinomancer?” 
  Hell’s Bells, how do we get 
  one of those in Chicago?
  JOHN VASTOLO
  High Concept: Dupin Society Member
  Other Aspects: I Can’t Just Do Nothing
  Skills
  Burglary: Fair (+2)
  Contacts: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Deceit: Great (+4)
  Empathy: Good (+3)
  Investigation: Great (+4)
  Lore: Good (+3)
  Rapport: Fair (+2)
  Scholarship: Fair (+2)
  Other social skills default Average or 
  Mediocre
  Stunts
  Finely Tuned Third Eye (Lore): Vastolo 
  gains +2 to Lore whenever using it as 
  an Alertness substitute to pick up on 
  the presence of the supernatural.
  Capable Researcher (Scholarship): Any 
  scholarly research Vastolo does is 
  completed two time increments faster 
  than usual.
  Quick Eye (Investigation): Vastolo’s first 
  Investigation roll to determine deeper 
  details about a scene is two time incre-
  ments faster than usual.
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OO  Social OO
  Notes
  This is the sort of contact that’s just as 
  likely to come looking for the PCs as 
  vice-versa.
  Total Refresh Cost: –1 (Pure Mortal)
  SCOTT WALKER
  High Concept: Clued-In Technician
  Other Aspects: I Have a Work Order
  Skills
  Alertness: Good (+3)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Burglary: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Fair (+2)
  Craftsmanship: Great (+4)
  Endurance: Great (+4)
  Fists: Good (+3)
  Investigation: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Average (+1)
  Might: Good (+3)
  Social skills default Average or Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Jury-Rigger (Craftsmanship): Walker has a 
  talent for improvising with available materials. 
  When jury-rigging, his repairs last two scenes 
  longer than usual.
  No Pain, No Gain (Endurance): Walker is a tough 
  SOB and can take a bunch of punishment 
  before it starts to add up. He may take one 
  additional mild physical consequence.
  Yes We Can (Craftsmanship): Walker excels 
  at fixing things. He gains 2 extra shifts of 
  success to any successful Craftsmanship roll 
  to make repairs.
  Stress
  Mental OOO   Social OO
  Physical OOOO, +1 mild consequence  
  Notes
  Never underestimate a talented Mr. Fix-It. 
  Especially this one: Good initiative, Fair to Good 
  defense, Good fistfighting.
  Total Refresh Cost: –1 (Pure Mortal)
  
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  Corrections Officer 
  Mike Robinson
  Motivation: I want to ride that gravy train.
  Face of: Maryland Men’s State Correctional 
  Facility (page 395)
  Officer Mike Robinson is the director of 
  the intake processing unit at the Maryland 
  Men’s State Correctional Facility at Baltimore. 
  He’s a loathsome man; he’s completely in the 
  pocket of Alexandra Lagios through a combina-
  tion of bribes and regular access to prostitutes. 
  Robinson and his staff look the other way as 
  Alexandra and her cohorts have their way with 
  incoming inmates.
  Russell Carson
  Motivation: Power, plain and simple.
  Face of: city theme of Decay and Corruption 
  (page 362)
  Russell Carson is a renegade sorcerer who 
  has amassed a small cult following among 
  Baltimore’s community of minor talents and 
  dabbling practitioners. He’s a madman, but he’s 
  very savvy and makes the most of the opportu-
  nities presented to him—he’s laid low for years, 
  but now that the Vampire War is distracting the 
  majority of the White Council’s Wardens, he 
  feels freer to operate openly.
  His goal is to establish himself and his 
  followers as a Freehold under the Unseelie 
  Accords, much like Gilgamesh did. He doesn’t 
  have a permanent home; he lives with different 
  members of his cult, moving around every few 
  days to keep the Wardens off his tracks—just in 
  case they do decide to hunt him down.
  His talent lies in thaumaturgy rather than 
  evocation; he trusts in his .38 special rather than 
  magic for immediate self defense.
  DIANE BASSET
  High Concept: Kitchen Witch
  Other Aspects: Caffeinomancer; 
  Accorded “Neutral Grounds”
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Contacts: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Great (+4)
  Discipline: Good (+3)
  Empathy: Good (+3)
  Lore: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Rapport: Good (+3)
  Other skills default to Average or 
  Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Occultist (Lore – Fae): Basset gains 
  a +2 to Lore rolls when performing 
  research related to fae creatures.
  Occultist (Lore – Magic): Basset gains 
  a +2 to Lore rolls when performing 
  research related to mortal magic.
  Powers
  Ritual (Crafting) [–2]
  Marked by Power [–1]
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OO 
  Social OOO
  Focus Items
  A hazel wood wand (+1 to Crafting 
  strength), used to stir coffee when 
  she is brewing a spell into a cup.
  Enchanted Items
  Diane’s Cuppas (2 potions) Diane has 
  dedicated both of her enchanted 
  item slots for potions. She can brew 
  two extra potent “cuppas” (using her 
  wand) to create a Superb (5-shift) 
  potion effect.
  Notes
  Fair initiative, Fair defense, but she’s not 
  a fighter—and folks who step into her 
  Accorded Neutral Ground coffee shop/
  bookstore had best be careful not to be 
  as well.
  Total Refresh Cost: –5
  
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  RUSSELL CARSON
  High Concept: Power-Mad Sorcerer
  Trouble: Laws? What laws?
  Other Aspects: Paranoia Strikes Deep; 
  Wily & Savvy; Loyal Minions; Ritual Showman
  Skills
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Conviction: Good (+3)
  Discipline: Great (+4)
  Empathy: Fair (+2)
  Endurance: Fair (+2)
  Guns: Fair (+2)
  Intimidation: Fair (+2)
  Lore: Good (+3)
  Performance: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Great (+4)
  Rapport: Good (+3)
  Most other skills default to Average or Mediocre.
  Powers
  Channeling [–2]
  Thaumaturgy [–3]
  The Sight [–1]
  Soulgaze [+0]
  Wizard’s Constitution [+0]
  Refinement [–1] x3
  Lawbreaker (First) [–1] (These might all be higher)
  Lawbreaker (Third) [–1]
  Lawbreaker (Fourth) [–1]
  Specializations
  Channeling: Elements (Spirit)
  Thaumaturgy: Control (Psychomancy +1, 
  Divination +1), Complexity (Psychomancy +1, 
  Divination +1)
  Focus Items
  Pocketwatch (+2 control, +1 to complexity for 
  psychomancy)
  Crystal Orb (+1 complexity for divination)
  Stress
  Mental OOOO   Physical OOO   Social OOOO
  Notes
  Carson is a ruthless SOB who’s willing to kill 
  anyone who gets in his way. His immediate circle of 
  followers is loyal to the death. In terms of thauma-
  turgy, he’s a powerhouse at psychomancy—he can 
  easily cast Superb spells of that type with no prep, 
  and he can safely channel seven shifts of power 
  per casting roll. In combat, he’s far more likely to 
  rely on a minor talent minion or a gun (Fair skill, 
  Weapon:2) rather than his own evocations, which 
  are rudimentary spirit channelings.
  Total Refresh Cost: –12
  MIKE ROBINSON
  High Concept: Corrupt Prison Guard
  Trouble: Alexandra’s Lackey 
  Other Aspects: Phoning It In
  Skills
  Alertness: Fair (+2)
  Athletics: Fair (+2)
  Contacts: Fair (+2)
  Deceit: Good (+3)
  Endurance: Great (+4)
  Fists: Good (+3)
  Guns: Fair (+2)
  Presence: Fair (+2)
  Other social skills default to Average or 
  Mediocre.
  Stunts
  Honest Lies (Deceit): Whenever incorpo-
  rating a real, valuable piece of the truth 
  into a lie, Robinson gains a +2 on his 
  efforts to pass it off.
  Fast Reload (Guns): Takes no penalty to 
  reload as a supplemental action; +1 on the 
  roll if it’s contested.
  Stress
  Mental OO  Physical OOOO  Social OOO
  Notes
  Fair initiative, Fair shot, Good fistfighter, 
  Fair to Good defense.
  Total Refresh Cost: +0 (Pure Mortal)
  
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  What’s Where 
  in Baltimore
  Anyone can find a map of Baltimore easily 
  enough. Rather than regurgitate a bunch of 
  geographic information that you can easily find 
  yourself on the Internet, I’ll discuss a series of 
  locations of interest. These locations are impor-
  tant for a variety of reasons; some are impor-
  tant to the magical or supernatural community 
  in Baltimore, some are just locations where it 
  would be cool to stage a scene in your game. 
  Each locale has at least one aspect and at least 
  one person (a face) associated with it. Many of 
  these locations and people have been discussed 
  earlier in this chapter; detailed descriptions of 
  all the people can be found in “Who’s Who in 
  Baltimore.”
  The Fall Line
  Theme: On the Ley Line
  The Fall Line is the border between the 
  coastal plain and the Piedmont region on the 
  east coast of North America. The geology 
  changes at this line; a layer of harder rock inland 
  didn’t erode as quickly as the softer rock along 
  the coast, leading to a series of waterfalls in 
  rivers flowing to the Atlantic. As the continent 
  was settled, towns grew up along the Fall Line, 
  because that was as far inland as ships from the 
  coast could navigate. Baltimore is one of the 
  most successful Fall Line cities in the country.
  A corridor of focused magic has arisen along 
  this fall line; whether this has to do with the 
  towns and cities that have sprung up there or 
  a natural result of geology is a matter of some 
  debate among certain scholars on the White 
  Council. In any event, the ley line runs along the 
  Fall Line, right through the city of Baltimore.
  Face: Frank Walker, city engineer (page 374)
  Federal Hill Park
  Threat: Gateway to Hell
  Federal Hill Park is in central Baltimore, 
  on the south shore of the Inner Harbor. The 
  park is dominated by the hill which grants a 
  commanding view of the Inner Harbor. The 
  tree-dotted, grass-covered park conceals perhaps 
  the most horrifying aspect of Baltimore’s under-
  world—the Federal Hill tunnels. There have 
  long been urban legends of underground tunnels 
  leading from Federal Hill to Fort McHenry, two 
  miles to the southeast. The legends speak of 
  terrible things living in these tunnels. Of course, 
  these urban legends are true.
  When Fort McHenry was constructed in the 
  early 19th century, its builders constructed the 
  tunnels to keep the fort resupplied in the event 
  that it was besieged, as all approaches to the 
  fort were within gun range of ships anchored 
  offshore. Only a year after it was constructed, 
  the tunnels began to get a reputation among the 
  soldiers of being haunted. People moving about 
  in the tunnels started to vanish without a trace.
  Major James Foster, commander of Fort 
  McHenry at the time, dispatched a company of 
  Marines to investigate. Only a few returned alive, 
  and the survivors raved about battling vicious 
  beasts impervious to rifle fire—ghouls, Clan 
  Ereshkigal to be specific, although the Marines 
  neither knew nor cared what they were called. 
  Major Foster immediately ordered the tunnel 
  sealed at both ends, and President Thomas 
  Jefferson’s administration quietly declared the 
  entire affair to be a state secret.
  The ghouls have been living there ever since. 
  The once-sealed Federal Hill entrance (which 
  empties into a rain sewer system under Federal 
  Hill Park) has fallen into disrepair over the 
  centuries, and now the ghouls come and go as 
  they please.
  A third of a mile from Fort McHenry, 
  eighty feet under a warehouse, the ghouls 
  control a portal to the Nevernever. This portal 
  allows them to strike directly at the Summer 
  Court, who they’ve been at war with for years. 
  Periodically, a strong raid force goes through in 
  one direction or the other, creating havoc and 
  slaying enemies before retreating back through. 
  The battles under Baltimore have been bloody 
  and vicious.
  The park and the tunnels both lie along a 
  branch of the ley line radiating out from the 
  Washington Monument.
  Face: Gilgamesh, self-proclaimed “God-King of 
  the Ghouls” (page 371)
  Fort McHenry
  Theme: On the Ley Line
  Site of the famous 1814 battle between 
  American gunners and a squadron of British 
  warships that inspired The Star-Spangled 
  
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  Banner, Fort McHenry is currently a national 
  monument visited by hundreds of tourists daily. 
  A handful of U.S. Park Rangers and dozens of 
  employees operate the park. The fort is very well 
  maintained; the walls, the fortifications, and the 
  buildings are all in excellent condition.
  Fort McHenry marks the other end of the 
  tunnels leading from Federal Hill Park (see 
  above). The tunnels, occupied by a Freehold of 
  ghouls of Clan Ereshkigal, were sealed by the 
  U.S. Marines in the early 19th century (see 
  Federal Hill Park above); the seals on the Fort 
  McHenry side have never been broken, so the 
  ghouls do not have easy run of the fort. Rather, 
  the ghouls have excavated exits from the tunnels 
  right on the shore of the Patapsco River close by 
  the fort. Fish and shellfish have become a staple 
  food for the ghouls, along with the occasional 
  homeless junkie or prostitute; taking too many 
  humans would bring the mortal authorities in, 
  which the ghouls’ Freeholding Lord, Gilgamesh, 
  strongly wishes to avoid.
  The fort lies on the same branch of the ley 
  line as Federal Hill Park; the star shape of 
  the fort seems to send the ley line diving deep 
  underground, where it reaches through the earth 
  under the Patapsco River only to re-emerge at 
  Fort Carroll.
  A few visitors, employees, and rangers report 
  seeing ghostly images of soldiers in early 19th 
  century uniforms walking the walls late in the 
  evenings.
  Face: Janet Walker, park ranger (page 375)
  Fort Carroll
  Theme: Terminus of a Ley Line
  Fort Carroll was constructed in the late 1840s, 
  under the direction of a young Army officer by 
  the name of Robert E. Lee. A hexagonal artificial 
  island in the Patapsco River, it augmented Fort 
  McHenry in defending Baltimore until 1920, 
  when it was abandoned. It passed into private 
  hands some time thereafter, and not much has 
  been done with it since. At least, not from the 
  human point of view; it has become overrun 
  with vegetation and the many birds which nest 
  there, safe from terrestrial predators.
  Resting hundreds of yards from shore (but 
  visible from the Francis Scott Key Bridge), 
  the fort is, as a fort is designed to be, difficult 
  to access from the water. Sheer concrete and 
  stone walls rise fifteen feet from the surface of 
  the water. A small concrete landing dock, a sepa-
  rate islet in its own right, lies twenty feet off the 
  northeast wall, where a bridge once led to the 
  
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  fort’s only entrance; here, lettering painted on 
  the wall of the fortress threatens “PRIVATE 
  – KEEP OFF – GUARD DOG.” The bridge 
  has long since corroded away, leaving anyone 
  attempting to gain access to the island fortress 
  with quite a challenge ahead of him; the only 
  way in is to somehow climb the sheer walls, with 
  only the occasional gun port as a handhold, and 
  most of the gun ports are closed up.
  Inside the fort, the brick, stone, and concrete 
  construction has weathered the years rather 
  well. Trees and shrubs grow from cracks in the 
  pavement, and birds by the hundreds nest every-
  where, but the small buildings built as part of 
  the fortress are largely intact. Steps lead up to 
  the top of the walls, which give any visitor a 
  wonderful view of the Patapsco River, its busy 
  shipping traffic, and the surrounding shorelines 
  of Baltimore City and Baltimore County. The 
  skyline of downtown Baltimore is visible on a 
  clear day.
  The height of the walls inside the fort allows 
  people some modicum of privacy once inside. 
  More importantly, the radial of the ley line 
  that is driven underground at Fort McHenry 
  resurfaces at Fort Carroll, dispersing a large 
  amount of magical energy at the fort, then dissi-
  pating in the river. It’s a popular destination 
  for Baltimore’s spellcasting community, where 
  casters can tap into the immense power of the 
  ley line in the privacy afforded by Fort Carroll’s 
  remote location and high walls.
  Face: Sgt. Jim Flanagan, BPD patrol boat pilot 
  (page 376)
  The Washington 
  Monument
  Theme: Wellspring of Magic
  The Washington Monument lies in the 
  Mount Vernon neighborhood, a quarter mile or 
  so northwest of the Inner Harbor. Situated close 
  to the Fall Line, the monument is a 178-foot-
  tall column atop a single-story museum. The 
  column contains a circular staircase, and at the 
  top is a statue of George Washington and an 
  observation platform that provides a very nice 
  view of the city.
  The reason that this location is important is 
  that the shape and exact location of the monu-
  ment attracts the power flowing through the ley 
  line that runs along the Fall Line. The monu-
  ment gathers it in and re-broadcasts it in three 
  smaller branches across the city; add in the 
  northeast and southwest lines running along the 
  Fall Line, and you get a rough five-pointed star 
  centered on the monument.
  Face: Joe Nowakowski, homeless vet (page 380)
  National Aquarium
  Theme: Tourist Magnet
  The National Aquarium is one of the most 
  popular tourist destinations in Baltimore. The 
  facility is located right at the Inner Harbor. 
  It consists of two buildings connected by an 
  elevated walkway. All sorts of fish, shellfish, and 
  even a few dolphins call the National Aquarium 
  home.
  Billy…That’s 
  some border-
  line reckless 
  speculation 
  you have in 
  the sidebar. 
  Ley lines 
  are very 
  powerful and 
  a lot more 
  complicated 
  than that, and 
  frankly I’m 
  not all that 
  comfortable 
  with this 
  in here. 
  the point 
  is that it 
  provides a 
  power boost, 
  but you pay a 
  price. We’re not 
  providing all 
  the details.
  I think it’s safe, 
  Harry. If someone 
  could tap the ley 
  line with what 
  Billy wrote here, 
  he was going 
  to figure it out 
  anyway.
  The currents of magical power running 
  through the earth along the eastern seaboard 
  of the United States all seem to flow together 
  along the Fall Line, the dividing line between 
  the coastal plain and the higher ground of the 
  Piedmont plateau. It’s a natural border, and the 
  ley line running along it is old and powerful.
  This ley line can provide Sponsored Magic 
  (see page 292), as per “Places of Power.” Attuning 
  oneself to it requires the functional equivalent 
  of preparing an Epic (+7)-level Thaumaturgy 
  spell—which means anyone with a Lore of 
  at least Good (+3) can do it without trouble. 
  Once attuned (and bearing the proper 
  Sponsored Magic supernatural power, with 
  associated refresh cost), the caster can use the 
  ley line to boost his spells as per the Sponsored 
  Magic rules. GMs should consider letting that 
  character get a free tag on the Washington 
  Monument’s Theme if he’s at that location.
  Of course, there’s a cost. The ley line is a 
  border. It seeks, whether by conscious effort 
  or some unconscious force of nature, to divide. 
  Only spells which further the city’s theme 
  of Conflicting Identities or threat of 
  On the Brink can be sponsored. Tap that 
  power too much, and you may wind up finding 
  yourself compelled to further these concepts 
  somehow…
  The Ley Line: Place of Power
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  The internal architecture of the larger building 
  is very interesting. Gently sloping spiral floors 
  ending at landings connected by escalators lead 
  upward from ground level, taking the visitor past 
  a variety of exhibits, including everything from 
  mountain stream ecosystems to Atlantic coral 
  reefs and sharks. Across the walkway, the smaller 
  (but newer) building houses mammal exhibits 
  (including a dolphinarium) and an elaborate 
  amphibian terrarium.
  The dolphinarium is open at the top and sits 
  at the focus of a large amphitheater-like room 
  suitable for Sea World-style shows, which is 
  exactly what they use it for several times a day in 
  the tourist season.
  Face: Susan Mallenbaum, dedicated grad 
  student (page 380)
  The “East Green”
  Theme: Poverty Breeds Desperation
  A poster child for the failure of late twen-
  tieth century urban housing policy, this complex 
  of two-story apartment buildings interspersed 
  with lawns, playgrounds, and flower gardens 
  is ruled by a gang of ruthless drug dealers. 
  The actual name of the housing complex is an 
  irrelevancy known only to bureaucrats in the 
  Baltimore Housing Authority; to residents and 
  the predators that prey on them, this public 
  housing project is known only as the “East 
  Green.” Nothing occurs in the East Green 
  without the permission of a drug gang led by 
  Wallace “Lizard” Gibbs.
  Face: Wallace “Lizard” Gibbs, drug dealer 
  (page 380)
  Fells Point/Canton
  Theme: Nightlife on the Harbor
  The Fells Point and Canton neighborhoods 
  are the center of Baltimore’s club scene and 
  nightlife. Many tourists are surprised when 
  they seem to “roll up the sidewalks” at the Inner 
  Harbor around 8 PM; many don’t realize that 
  if they just proceed a few blocks east, they’ll 
  encounter some of the best live music, dancing, 
  and dining on the East Coast.
  Just about every major genre of popular and 
  jazz music is represented by at least one club; 
  rappers, bands, individual performers, and DJs 
  lucky enough to develop a following and attract 
  the right patrons make a good living here. It’s 
  also fertile ground for drug dealers, higher-
  priced escorts, and savvy White Court vampires. 
  Some of the minority of House Lagios who 
  prefer lust to despair spend a great deal of time 
  in Fells Point and Canton. Some of the clubs, 
  and the general sort of music and crowd you’ll 
  find there, are: the Key Club (eclectic dance, 
  B’more club), the Soul Garden (R&B, soul), 
  Monte Cristo (hip-hop), the Blue Jacket (jazz), 
  the Mantis Club (techno), Molten (hard rock), 
  the Dead Greenhorn (country and Southern 
  rock). The Mantis Club is a front for Alexandra 
  Lagios’ (page 373) brothel.
  Face: Curt Gazo (page 382), a doorman at the 
  Mantis Club
  Johns Hopkins 
  Hospital
  Theme: Knowledge Is Power
  Johns Hopkins Hospital is not only widely 
  regarded as the best research hospital in the 
  United States, it’s also one of the largest. 
  The huge campus occupies many city blocks 
  in downtown Baltimore (just northeast of 
  the Inner Harbor)—it’s slowly becoming its 
  own miniature city within the boundaries of 
  Baltimore. They have their own police, mail 
  delivery, and zip code. Specialists in just about 
  every medical discipline known to Western 
  medicine can be found there. They have foren-
  sics facilities beyond compare. With access to 
  the latest in medical research and technology, 
  and home to a top-notch trauma center and ER, 
  banged-up PCs can find respite here, provided 
  their insurance cards are up to date.
  Aside from being a world-class research 
  hospital, Johns Hopkins is one of the largest 
  landlords in downtown Baltimore. They prac-
  tically own several downtown neighborhoods, 
  and they’re not always well thought of by their 
  tenants.
  Note that Johns Hopkins has two other 
  major facilities in Baltimore. First, there’s Johns 
  Hopkins Bayview, on the east side of town. 
  This is more of a traditional hospital, where 
  average Joes go to get treatment. Second, there’s 
  Johns Hopkins University, with a traditional 
  college campus north of downtown among the 
  Hampden, Charles Village, and Guilford neigh-
  borhoods, not far from Druid Hill Park.
  Face: Dr. Allison Ralston, forensic pathologist 
  (page 384)
  this whole 
  facility screams 
  “fight scene.”
  That sounds 
  familiar.
  Injuries you 
  get in my 
  line of work 
  aren’t usually 
  covered 
  anyway.
  It sounds like 
  we could run an 
  entire campaign 
  centered on Johns 
  Hopkins alone…
  
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  Edgar Allan Poe 
  House and Museum
  Theme: If These Walls Could Talk
  The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum is 
  on a quiet streetcorner west of downtown. Poe 
  lived here for several years, from 1832 or 1833 
  until his marriage in 1835. He shared the house 
  with his future wife and mother-in-law, and he 
  was living here when he first started to experi-
  ence some success as a writer. The house is a tiny 
  two-story brick structure on Amity Street. It’s 
  nearly 200 years old and has many of the quirks 
  of an old house; the floorboards creak, the steam 
  pipes bang and groan in the winter, and the 
  windows are leaky. 
  Currently, the downstairs and upstairs are 
  devoted to exhibiting artifacts of Poe’s life. 
  The basement is the main office of the Dupin 
  Society; meetings are often held there after 
  hours. It’s not big enough to comfortably seat 
  every member, so sometimes meetings of the 
  entire group are held at Mackey’s home.
  Face: Paul Mackey, Director of the Dupin 
  Society and curator of the museum (page 384)
  The Montrose Estate
  Threat: Skeletons in the Closet…And in 
  the Basement
  Located on the northern edge of Baltimore, 
  the Montrose house and events that happened 
  there in the early 1800s were the inspiration for 
  Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” So, you can 
  imagine that the house is a really great place.
  The estate is, on the surface, a well-managed 
  and elegant old money mansion—and I mean 
  really, really vast amounts of old money. Very 
  recently, Old Man Montrose passed on (the 
  cause of death is still mysterious; the medical 
  examiner claimed “natural causes,” but nobody in 
  the know thinks that’s right) and left the entire 
  estate, grounds, and his fortune to his 20-some-
  thing son Evan.
  The estate consists of a dozen acres of 
  partially wooded grounds along a tributary 
  of the Patapsco. There are a few cottages used 
  for servants’ residences, a garage/maintenance 
  building, and of course the big house itself. 
  Imagine the classic Old Money Mansion, and 
  you’ll get it: dozens of rooms, a huge hall, a 
  kitchen able to provide a state dinner, high ceil-
  ings, sweeping staircases in the entryway, and 
  a vast cellar. The estate is managed by a collec-
  tion of faceless accountants and maintenance 
  personnel, but an unusual gentleman who goes 
  by the name Wellington serves as the lord of the 
  manor’s personal aide and performer of “odd” 
  jobs.
  Face: Wellington, Ogre Butler (page 371)
  Clifton Gate 
  House (Heritage 
  High School)
  Threat: Easy Hunting
  Decades after the removal of Black Aggie 
  disrupted their hunting patterns, a trio of Black 
  Court vampires from the original scourge in 
  Druid Ridge Cemetery eventually discovered 
  this wonderful place from which to base their 
  predation. The water tunnels and maintenance 
  access passages under the Clifton Gate House, 
  which is an old pumping station for Baltimore’s 
  water system, would not normally be great 
  hunting ground; the occasional maintenance 
  technician or civil engineer does not a bounty 
  make. 
  However, Clifton Gate House shares a loca-
  tion with Heritage High School. A lot of the 
  gang violence and “runaways” reported among 
  students at that school are actually caused by the 
  vampires. 
  Face: Scott Walker, maintenance engineer 
  (page 385)
  Francis Scott 
  Key Bridge
  Theme: Magically Grounded 
  Other Aspect: Sweet Merciful Gods This 
  Is a Tall Bridge
  Known to locals as the “Key Bridge,” this 
  bridge carries Interstate 695 across the Patapsco 
  River as part of the Baltimore Beltway. The 
  massive flow of the Patapsco River passing 185 
  feet below, combined with the vast distance to 
  solid ground on either side, tends to ground 
  magical energy; it is extremely difficult to 
  perform any sort of spellcasting on the bridge—
  the massive river acts as a Great threshold.
  davian, you had fight scenes in 
  mind with this, didn’t you?
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  While the bridge is not neutral ground, it 
  often serves as a meeting place for people who 
  want to minimize spellcasting during tense 
  discussions. The tollbooth supervisor, Ellsworth 
  Dillman, can arrange access to the maintenance 
  deck of the bridge—out-of-the-way spaces just 
  under the superstructure of each end of the main 
  span. These places are very suitable for private 
  discussions where magic should be suppressed.
  Face: Ellsworth Dillman, toll booth employee 
  (page 384)
  Neutral Grounds
  Theme: Accorded Neutral Ground
  Located one block east of Johns Hopkins, 
  Neutral Grounds is a coffehouse and indepen-
  dent bookstore. It has a well-stocked occult 
  book section which, in combination with the 
  excellent coffee, has enabled it to become a 
  regular hangout for the minor members of 
  Baltimore’s supernatural community (although 
  they do a brisk business with Johns Hopkins 
  staff, too). Another reason it’s attractive to 
  supernaturally aware people is the sign located 
  immediately below the “Fueled By Zeke’s Coffee” 
  poster: “Accorded Neutral Ground.” Much like 
  MacAnally’s Pub in Chicago, the internal archi-
  tecture is irregular, the tables spaced oddly, and 
  the bookshelves are all askew of one another. 
  Neutral Grounds does not offer WiFi, free 
  or otherwise. Wireless Internet does not mix 
  well with wizards, and even cell phone recep-
  tion is unreliable within the shop. The clientele 
  seems to take this in stride (a third sign on the 
  wall exhorts patrons to “UNPLUG.”). Many 
  patrons indicate that this is a big reason that 
  they frequent this coffeehouse over others.
   Face: Diane Basset, owner & manager (page 386)
  Basilica of the 
  National Shrine 
  of the Assumption 
  of the Blessed 
  Virgin Mary
  Theme: Raise Your Eyes To Heaven
  The first cathedral built in North America, 
  The Basilica of the Assumption is a big, sturdy 
  stone cathedral. Its lines are a bit cleaner than 
  something like Saint Patrick’s in New York 
  or Our Lady of the Angels in Chicago, but it’s 
  still a Roman Catholic cathedral—it has all the 
  bells and whistles you’d expect. Interestingly, 
  its main entrance suggests Greek architecture, 
  with its Ionic columns and pediment. The 
  color dominating everything is white. Shades 
  of white everywhere you look. White marble, 
  cream woodwork, white pews; it’s a very bright, 
  uplifting interior. The artwork on the arched 
  ceiling is beautiful.
  It’s fairly classic cathedral design; the main 
  altar is at the center of the cross made by the 
  floorplan, there are side altars and a chapel in the 
  apse behind the main altar. A balcony and choir 
  loft overlooks the sanctuary.
  
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  Nevermore/Baltimore
  The rectory houses the offices of the Basilica’s 
  staff, the residence of several priests (Monsignor 
  O’Brien is the current pastor), and—although 
  this is not well-known—a safe house. 
  Authorized by the Archbishop of Baltimore 
  in the early 1900s, the current caretaker and 
  hostess of the safe house is Sister Peter Ann 
  Doran. Under her protection, the safe house is a 
  virtually impregnable fortress for those needing 
  sanctuary from supernatural threats. Monsignor 
  O’Brien makes sure that Sister Ann has what 
  she needs in terms of material and staff to run 
  the safe house, but the program is hers to run.
  The safe house is actually more of an apart-
  ment; it contains two bedrooms, a common 
  room, a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a small 
  chapel. It is devoid of mirrors. It is connected 
  to the Basilica by a secret hallway leading from 
  the Basilica’s apse; refugees can be quickly 
  ushered to safety if they come into the Basilica 
  itself because, while the Basilica is a pretty 
  safe place, it’s not nearly as strong as the wards 
  and protection placed around the safe house. 
  Sister Ann’s threshold is like unto the Walls of 
  Constantinople.
  Rabbi Greenstone, Imam al-Islam, and 
  Reverend Smith make occasional appearances 
  at the safe house to coordinate with Sister Ann.
  Face: Sister Peter Ann Doran OSB, Benedictine 
  nun and caretaker of the safe house (page 377)
  Maryland Men’s 
  State Correctional 
  Facility at 
  Baltimore
  Threat: Abandon All Hope
  This state prison is located in the northern 
  part of the city. Housing seven hundred mostly 
  violent men serving long terms (but only 
  designed to house five hundred), it’s not a happy 
  place. It’s loud and overcrowded, and you can 
  cut the tension with a knife. Abandon all hope, 
  indeed.
  Criminals are processed in by Officer Mike 
  Robinson, who is fully bought and paid for by 
  Alexandra Lagios. She and some of her followers 
  occasionally “visit” the incoming prisoners on 
  Robinson’s watch; the vampires enhance and 
  feed on the new inmates’ feelings of doom and 
  despair as they are made fully aware of the 
  horrors they’re going to face.
  This isn’t limited to induction. Inmates iden-
  tified as depressed by the health care staff are 
  frequently sent for “treatment” to mental health 
  professionals who make regular visits; these 
  psychologists are, of course, more White Court 
  vampires.
  None truly get better, but nobody notices. 
  Mental health is not a legislative priority for the 
  State of Maryland, and the honest psycholo-
  gists working in the prison system are frankly 
  overwhelmed. 
  One bright spot in this prison hell is 
  that Rabbi Greenstone, Imam al-Islam, and 
  Reverend Smith conduct their prison minis-
  tries here, each twice weekly. They’re starting 
  to suspect that something is wrong with the 
  mental health services, but they haven’t identi-
  fied exactly what yet.
  Face: Corrections Officer Mike Robinson, 
  corrupt intake processing director (page 387)
  Problem is… Now it’s 
  Istanbul, not Constantinople, 
  if you take my meaning.
  Yeah, but it still took a while 
  for the walls to come down.
  Ugh... Billy, Davian really ends this one 
  on a down-note. Isn’t there anything more, 
  I dunno, hopeful we could put in here?
  davian’s a big fan of tHe emPIre StrIKeS BAcK 
  — I think “down endings” is where it’s at for him.
  Geeks. All of you, geeks.
  
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  glossary
  Action (Playing the Game, page 192): The use of 
  a skill to accomplish something. There are 
  many different types of actions. Taking an 
  action almost always requires rolling the dice.
  Aspect (Aspects, page 98): A short description 
  that identifies the distinguishing features of 
  characters, places, and things in the game 
  world. Nearly anything can have aspects; 
  they form the basis for using and gaining fate 
  points in play.
  Assessment (Aspects, page 115): An action taken 
  to  reveal an aspect that is unknown or 
  hidden, or to discover relevant facts and 
  details, as with an investigation.
  Attack (Playing the Game, page 200): An action 
  taken in a conflict to inflict stress and conse-
  quences on a target.
  Backlash (Spellcasting, page 256): One of two 
  results of failing to control magical energy in 
  a spell. Backlash expresses itself as physical 
  stress or consequences to the spellcaster.
  Base Refresh (Character Creation, page 53): The 
  amount of refresh given to the PCs to spend 
  at character creation. It is also used as a rela-
  tive measure for the creation of opposition.
  Binding (Spellcasting, page 273): A thaumatur-
  gical spell cast to subsume the will of a super-
  natural entity to the will of the spellcaster. In 
  this way, the spellcaster can gain a supernat-
  ural servant.
  Block (Playing the Game, page 210): An action 
  taken in a conflict to preemptively prevent 
  the success of another action. Setting up a 
  block uses up your action in an exchange.
  Border (Playing the Game, page 212): An obstacle 
  (such as a wall or other barrier) that makes it 
  difficult to move from one zone to another in 
  a conflict, increasing the difficulty of a sprint.
  Campaign (Running the Game, page 314): A unit 
  of game time, the sum total of all scenarios 
  played in a particular game.
  Cat & Mouse (Playing the Game, page 194): A 
  type of extended contest where the partici-
  pants jockey back and forth for advantage 
  over the course of several opposed rolls.
  Challenge (Running the Game, page 324): A situ-
  ation where one or more PCs is attempting 
  to accomplish an involved or complex goal 
  that requires the marking of progress over 
  time. Analogous to an extended contest, but 
  lacking opposition.
  Character (Character Creation, page  52): A 
  persona controlled by either a player or the 
  gamemaster, consisting of a collection of 
  aspects, skills, stunts, and possibly supernat-
  ural powers. During play, whoever controls 
  the character describes what that character 
  says, dictates the character’s actions, and 
  rolls dice for that character when appropriate. 
  PC is often used to refer to a player character; 
  NPC is often used to refer to a gamemaster-
  controlled (or non-player) character.
  Combined Skills (Playing the Game, page 213): 
  Any action that requires the use of two skills. 
  When this occurs, one skill is named primary, 
  and the other skill is named secondary and 
  might provide a bonus or penalty to the 
  primary skill depending on the circumstance.
  Compel (Aspects, page 100): Bringing an aspect 
  into play to introduce a complication or limit 
  the responses available to a character in a 
  particular situation. Responding appropri-
  ately to a compel gives the responding player 
  a fate point; ignoring the compel costs the 
  responding player a fate point.
  Complement (Playing the Game, page 214): On 
  any roll with combined skills, when the 
  secondary skill can only add to the primary 
  skill, it is said to complement that skill.
  Complexity (Spellcasting, page 264): The general 
  difficulty of performing a particular thauma-
  turgical spell. Complexity determines both 
  how much power needs to be summoned for 
  the spell and how much preparation must be 
  devoted to its casting. Complexity is usually 
  compared to the Lore skill of the caster.
  Concession (Playing the Game, page 206): An 
  alternative to being taken out in a conflict, 
  wherein a player accepts defeat for his char-
  acter (or the GM, for an NPC) in exchange 
  for being able to dictate the terms of that 
  defeat.
  Glossary
  
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  glossary
  Conflict (Playing the Game, page 197): A situa-
  tion  where two or more characters have 
  mutually exclusive interests that cannot be 
  easily resolved; in other words, one party 
  cannot succeed without harming the other. 
  Typically exemplified by a fight scene, but 
  mental and social conflict are also possible. 
  Game time operates differently in a conflict, 
  divided up into exchanges.
  Consequence (Aspects, page  203): A type of 
  aspect  that describes the effect of lasting 
  harm to a character. Consequences come in 
  four severities: mild, moderate, severe, and 
  extreme. A character can only have one of 
  each type at a given time and must recover 
  from that level of consequence before taking 
  another at the same level.
  Consequential Contest (Playing the Game, 
  page 193): A contest that could potentially 
  result in the inflicting of consequences on 
  the loser.
  Containment (Spellcasting, page 272): A thau-
  maturgical spell intended to hold or trap 
  a supernatural entity for a certain period 
  of time. Usually the prelude to a binding 
  attempt.
  Contest (Playing the Game, page 193): A simple 
  action that is rolled against another PC or 
  against opposition, rather than against a set 
  difficulty. The party that rolls highest is the 
  winner of the contest.
  Control (Spellcasting, page  256): The general 
  difficulty of safely channeling power for 
  a spell. A caster rolls his Discipline skill to 
  control the amount of summoned power. 
  Failure to achieve this control results in either 
  backlash or fallout. 
  Counterspell (Spellcasting, page 253): An evoca-
  tion intended to cancel out or interfere with 
  the energies of another spell.
  Debt (Spellcasting, page 288): A compel owed to 
  a sponsor. Unlike a normal compel, you do 
  not gain a fate point for responding appro-
  priately to it. You accrue debt by using a 
  sponsor to invoke an aspect without paying 
  a fate point for it.
  Declaration (Aspects, page  116): An action 
  taken in order to establish or create a new 
  aspect on a target or a relevant fact that’s 
  of benefit to a character. Analogous to an 
  assessment, except that the declaring player 
  chooses the aspect or fact that’s being estab-
  lished, rather than discovering it. 
  Defense (Playing the Game, page 200): An action 
  taken to prevent an attack or maneuver from 
  affecting a character. Unlike a block, which 
  is preemptive, defense is a free action and 
  can be attempted as many times as necessary 
  during an exchange.
  Defining Moment (Aspects, page 105): An event 
  of such significant dramatic weight that it 
  justifies escalating a compel. Highly subjec-
  tive according to the consensus of the play 
  group.
  Difficulty (Running the Game, page 310): A rank 
  on the ladder that indicates how challenging 
  it is to accomplish an action. A skill roll must 
  meet or exceed the difficulty for the action to 
  be successful.
  Effect (Playing the Game, page 192): The number 
  of shifts generated by a skill roll. The higher 
  the effect, the more potent the results of the 
  skill roll. Also referred to as strength, espe-
  cially in reference to the effectiveness of 
  blocks.
  Effort (Playing the Game, page 192): The base 
  result of a skill roll before it’s compared to 
  anything, expressed as a rank on the ladder.
  Element (Spellcasting, page  250): A basic 
  component of an evocation. In the Classical 
  tradition, the elements are air, fire, earth, 
  water, and spirit (or force).
  Enchanted Items (Spellcasting, page 279): An 
  item that contains a “ready to cast” spell 
  within it, which must be recharged after 
  use. Spellcasters often have a number of 
  enchanted items at their disposal.
  Escalate a Compel (Aspects, page 105): Creating a 
  compel that is of sufficient dramatic weight 
  to be worth more than one fate point. 
  Optionally offered at a defining moment.
  
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  glossary
  Evocation (Spellcasting, page  249): A direct, 
  no-prep, short-term form of magic spell, 
  usually used in combat. Evocations can only 
  be used for attacks, blocks, maneuvers, and 
  counterspells.
  Exchange (Playing the Game, page 197): A unit of 
  game time used in conflicts, where each indi-
  vidual in the conflict takes turns performing 
  and resolving a single action.
  Extended Contest (Playing the Game, page 193): 
  A contest that requires multiple skill rolls to 
  resolve.
  Face (City Creation, page 41): An NPC who 
  represents or exemplifies a theme, threat, or 
  location in a city.
  Fallout (Spellcasting, page 256): One of two results 
  of failing to control magical energy in a spell. 
  Fallout expresses itself as stress, conse-
  quences, temporary aspects, and other unin-
  tended side effects to the environment and 
  bystanders. 
  Fate Points (The Basics, page 19): A currency that 
  players spend to take advantage of aspects. 
  They are regained primarily by responding 
  appropriately to compels.
  Finish Line (Playing the Game, page 194): The 
  limit  on the number of rolls allowed in a 
  Race.
  Focus Items (Spellcasting, page 278): An item 
  that  gives a spellcaster a bonus for doing 
  magic. Most spellcasters have several of these 
  to help make their evocations and thauma-
  turgy more effective.
  Fragile (Aspects, page 114): A temporary aspect 
  that goes away after it is tagged.
  Free Action (Playing the Game, page 213): An 
  action that doesn’t count against the normal 
  “one action” limit in an exchange; the most 
  common example is defense.
  Frequency (Spellcasting, page 279): The number 
  of times an enchanted item or potion can be 
  used in a session. A spellcaster who special-
  izes in Crafting can get bonuses to frequency.
  Full Defense (Playing the Game, page 199): The 
  choice, during an exchange, not to take an 
  action in favor of concentrating on defense. 
  This adds +2 to all defense rolls for that 
  exchange.
  Game Aspects (Aspects, page 107): An optional 
  category of aspect that applies to the entire 
  game, rather than to a specific character 
  or scene. Usually used to represent broad 
  thematic ideas or concepts.
  Game Master (Running the Game, page 306): An 
  individual responsible for overseeing the 
  game, adjudicating the rules, creating opposi-
  tion and the content used in scenarios, and 
  controlling all NPCs. “GM” is often used as a 
  shorthand to refer to the game master.
  Oh look, it’s 
  Mister and his 
  pet wizard!
  Truer than you 
  know. I’ve been 
  inside Mister’s 
  head.
  
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  glossary
  Game Time (Running the Game, page  314): 
  Units of measure used to describe actual, 
  “real world” play time as experienced by the 
  participants. Divided into exchanges, scenes, 
  sessions, scenarios, and campaigns.
  Grapple (Playing the Game, page 211): A special 
  type of block where the target must break 
  free before attempting any other actions. 
  In any exchange where the target is still 
  grappled, the grappler may perform several 
  different supplemental actions on the target.
  Hexing (Living With Magic, page 228): The use 
  of magic to interfere with or damage tech-
  nology. A spellcaster might accidentally hex a 
  piece of technology in moments of emotional 
  duress.
  High Concept (Character Creation, page 54): 
  An aspect that defines the essential nature of 
  a character. Access to supernatural powers 
  is often restricted by a character’s high 
  concept.
  Initiative (Playing the Game, page 199): The order 
  in which all participating characters act in an 
  exchange.
  Intensity (Living With Magic, page 223): The 
  mind-breaking impact of people, places, or 
  objects seen with the Sight. Individuals using 
  the Sight risk stress or consequences when 
  viewing things with a high intensity.
  Invoke (Aspects, page 98): Bringing an aspect 
  into play to aid a character on a skill roll. 
  Doing so costs a fate point, and allows either 
  a +2 bonus to a skill roll or a reroll of the dice.
  Invoking for Effect (Aspects, page 99): Bringing 
  an aspect into play to make a declaration 
  without the use of a skill roll.
  Ladder (The Basics, page 16): A tiered set of 
  adjectives and numbers used to describe skill 
  level, effort, and difficulty in the game. It 
  ranges from Terrible (-2) to Legendary (+8).
  Lawbreaker Ability (Supernatural Powers, 
  page 182): A supernatural power acquired by 
  spellcasters who routinely break the Laws 
  of Magic (page 232). These abilities have a 
  corrupting influence and can slowly alter the 
  caster’s aspects over time.
  Location (City Creation, page 37): A particular 
  area of a city where scenes usually take place 
  and which possesses its own aspects and 
  faces. There are two types of locations: neigh-
  borhoods and places of interest.
  Maneuver (Playing the Game, page 207): An 
  action taken in a conflict to create a situa-
  tional advantage for a character, represented 
  as a temporary aspect.
  Milestone (Advancement, page 88): The basic 
  unit of advancement, allowing PCs to change 
  or add details to the character sheet. They 
  are divided into categories: minor, significant, 
  and major.
  Modify (Playing the Game, page 214): In any 
  action  with combined skills, when the 
  secondary skill can either add a bonus to or 
  penalize the primary skill, it is said to modify 
  that skill.
  Must (Types & Templates, page 72): A require-
  ment to qualify for a particular template, 
  usually in terms of specifying a particular 
  high concept.
  NPC (Running the Game, page 326): Acronym 
  for “non-player character;” any character 
  controlled by the GM. They are divided into 
  types based on their significance in the game: 
  nameless, supporting, and main.
  Opposed Roll (Playing the Game, page 193): Any 
  roll where a player rolls against another 
  player (or the GM) instead of a set difficulty.
  Opposition (Running the Game, page  326): 
  NPCs  specifically designed with a direct, 
  abiding conflict of interest to the PCs. Overt 
  antagonists. They are divided into categories 
  based on how difficult they are to defeat: 
  minor, equal, challenging, and overwhelming.
  Overflow (Playing the Game, page  214): A 
  number of shifts left over from resolving an 
  action, which can be used for an additional 
  action in certain circumstances. 
  Partial Refresh (Running the Game, page 317): 
  The occurrence of a refresh during a partic-
  ular session, which gives back part of a PC’s 
  refresh level in fate points.
  I bet Langtry 
  would have 
  a fit over this 
  American 
  spelling of 
  “manoeuvre”.
  Ooh, bonus!
  
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  glossary
  Persistence (Spellcasting, page 252): An evoca-
  tion  that lasts for more than a single 
  exchange has persistence.
  Person Aspect (Aspects, page 108): A type of 
  aspect describing a relationship between 
  characters.
  Phase (Character Creation, page 58): A “unit” of 
  backstory, used to help choose a character’s 
  aspects during character creation.
  Phrase Aspect (Aspects, page 108): A type of 
  aspect describing an interesting or note-
  worthy fact about a character.
  Player (The Basics, page 16): An individual who 
  controls a single character in the game.
  PC (The Basics, page  17): An acronym for 
  “player character,” a de facto protagonist of 
  the game, controlled by a player. 
  Potion (Spellcasting, page 280): An enchanted 
  item that can only be used a limited number 
  of times before it is consumed.
  Power (Spellcasting, page 255): The effect of a 
  particular spell, measured in shifts. All 
  the power summoned for a spell must 
  be controlled for the spell to function as 
  intended. The amount of power a spell-
  caster can summon safely is affected by the 
  Conviction skill.
  Power Level (Character Creation, page 53): The 
  base refresh, upper skill limit, and skill 
  points allowed to PCs at character creation. 
  Divided into tiers based on amount of expo-
  sure to the supernatural world: Feet in the 
  Water, Up to Your Waist, Chest-Deep, and 
  Submerged.
  Preparation (Spellcasting, page 266): Additional 
  steps that need to be taken to successfully 
  cast a complex thaumaturgic spell. Typically, 
  preparation involves perfecting or researching 
  the necessary ritual actions for a spell, 
  acquiring symbolic links to the spell’s target, 
  and acquiring additional sources of contrib-
  uted power.
  Prop Aspect (Aspects, page  108): An aspect 
  describing a significant, identity-defining 
  object possessed by a character.
  Race (Playing the Game, page 194): A type of 
  extended contest where two or more partici-
  pants roll several times against a set difficulty 
  and attempt to acquire the highest number of 
  accumulated shifts.
  Refresh (The Basics, page 20): The awarding of 
  fate points to a PC at the beginning of every 
  session. The number of fate points received is 
  determined by a character’s refresh level.
  Refresh Level (The Basics, page 20): The differ-
  ence between base refresh and spent refresh. 
  For PCs, this must always be 1 or higher.
  Restrict (Playing the Game, page 214): On any roll 
  with combined skills, when a secondary skill 
  can only penalize the primary skill, it is said 
  to restrict that skill.
  Rote (Spellcasting, page 257): An evocation that a 
  spellcaster can perform via “muscle memory,” 
  allowing a certain effect and effort without 
  rolling the dice.
  Scenario (Running the Game, page 314): A unit of 
  game time, the sum total of scenes required 
  to resolve a particular storyline or plot, 
  usually taking one to three sessions. The 
  end of a scenario usually triggers a significant 
  milestone; the end of every few scenarios 
  usually triggers a major milestone.
  Scene (Running the Game, page 307): A unit of 
  game time, consisting of the amount of time 
  it takes to resolve a single conflict or accom-
  plish some other significant purpose. Scenes 
  can vary widely in length from a few minutes 
  to a half hour or longer.
  Scene Aspect (Aspects, page 105): A type of 
  aspect that is placed on a scene, rather than 
  on a particular character. Scene aspects 
  usually describe noteworthy features of the 
  environment in which the scene is set.
  Session (Running the Game, page 314): A unit of 
  game time, consisting of a number of scenes 
  played across the span of a number of hours 
  (usually two to four). A single “sitting” of the 
  game.
  Shift (Playing the Game, page 192): The basic unit 
  of measure for effect. Shifts are applied to 
  affect nearly every outcome of a skill roll in 
  the game.
  
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  glossary
  Sight, The (Living With Magic, page 223): A 
  mystical capability allowing an individual to 
  see reality in a supernatural context rather 
  than a physical one. Use of the Sight is risky 
  and can potentially cause harm to the viewer.
  Simple Action (Playing the Game, page 192): An 
  action taken to accomplish a single, basic 
  task or goal, most frequently against a set 
  difficulty.
  Situation Aspect (Aspects, page 110): An aspect 
  describing circumstances routinely experi-
  enced by a character.
  Skill (Skills, page 120): Abilities that represent 
  the basics of what a character can do in the 
  game. They are rated according to the ladder.
  Soulgazing (Living With Magic, page 226): A 
  narrow, specific application of the Sight that 
  allows an individual to gain a supernatural 
  insight into the nature of another individual, 
  at the cost of revealing their own soul as well. 
  As with The Sight, soulgazing can be risky to 
  both participants.
  Specialization (Supernatural Powers, page 182): A 
  particular capacity at a certain kind of magic, 
  represented as bonuses to spellcasting rolls. 
  Spellcasters can specialize in areas of both 
  evocation and thaumaturgy.
  Spent Refresh (Running the Game, page 20): 
  The amount of base refresh used to attain 
  stunts and supernatural powers.
  Spin (Playing the Game, page 214): An optional 
  rule allowing a bonus on a subsequent action 
  if a particular defensive effort succeeds with a 
  high degree of effect.
  Sponsor (Spellcasting, page 287): A supernatural 
  being that confers supernatural powers to an 
  individual, usually in the form of a specialized 
  kind of magic.
  Spray Attack (Running the Game, page 326): An 
  attack that divides the effort up between 
  several targets.
  Sprint (Skills, page 212): An action taken during 
  a conflict to move across several zones.
  Sticky (Aspects, page 115): A temporary aspect 
  that remains after it is tagged, usually for the 
  duration of a scene.
  Story Aspect (Aspects, page 110): An aspect that 
  describes a potential source of dramatic 
  complication in a character’s life, or a cata-
  lyst for that character to get into difficult 
  situations.
  Story Time (Running the Game, page 314): Time 
  as experienced by the characters in the game, 
  usually divided into seconds, hours, days, 
  weeks, etc.
  Strength (Spellcasting, page 279): The potency of 
  a particular enchanted item. Analogous to 
  effect strength.
  Stress (Playing the Game, page  201): Minor 
  harm  suffered by characters in conflicts. 
  Stress almost never lasts beyond the scene in 
  which the conflict occurs. Divided into cate-
  gories based on the source of harm: physical, 
  mental, and social.
  Stunt (Mortal Stunts, page 146): Special tricks 
  that  a character can do, expanding the 
  function of a character’s skills or otherwise 
  subverting the normal game rules in a partic-
  ular circumstance.
  Summoning (Spellcasting, page 273): The act of 
  bringing a supernatural entity into a spellcast-
  er’s immediate vicinity, usually to bargain for 
  information or power, or attempt a binding.
  Supernatural Power (Supernatural Powers, 
  page 158): An ability that is completely impos-
  sible for mortals to achieve, flying in the face 
  of generally accepted laws of reality. In game 
  terms, supernatural powers can be viewed as 
  “stunts on steroids,” providing an immense 
  comparative benefit at the cost of more spent 
  refresh.
  Supplemental Action (Playing the Game, 
  page 213): A minor action taken as an adjunct 
  to a character’s normal action in an exchange, 
  significant enough to affect the roll, but not 
  significant enough to require its own roll. A 
  supplemental action gives a -1 penalty to the 
  main action for the exchange.
  Tagging an Aspect (Aspects, page 106): Invoking 
  an aspect without spending a fate point. A 
  player is allowed one tag on an aspect that he 
  has established or discovered with an attack, 
  maneuver, assessment, or declaration.
  
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  glossary
  Taken Out (Playing the Game, page 203): Defeat 
  of a character in a conflict. Being taken out 
  allows the opponent to determine and dictate 
  the fate of the defeated character.
  Template (Character Creation, page  72): A 
  particular character “type,” characterized 
  by access to certain (or no) supernatural 
  powers. Usually, a character must have a 
  particular high concept to qualify for a 
  certain template.
  Temporary Aspect (Aspects, page  114): An 
  aspect  established by a maneuver, either 
  on a character or on the scene. A tempo-
  rary aspect lasts until removed by another 
  maneuver or until the end of the scene, 
  whichever comes first.
  Thaumaturgic Types (Spellcasting, page 272): A 
  subdivision of thaumaturgy analogous to 
  elements in evocation, for the purposes of 
  specialization and item bonuses.
  Thaumaturgy (Spellcasting, page 261): Ritual or 
  ceremonial magic used outside of combat, 
  capable of a wide variety of functions and 
  long-lasting effects, but often requiring signif-
  icant preparation to perform.
  Themes (City Creation, page 30): A short descrip-
  tion of a key concept or idea that defines 
  the identity of a city. May become an aspect 
  during city creation.
  Threats (City Creation, page 31): A short descrip-
  tion of a problem that is pervasive in a city. 
  May become an aspect during city creation.
  Threshold (Living With Magic, page 230): A 
  supernatural barrier that inhibits the opera-
  tion of supernatural powers, usually 
  surrounding homes, sacred sites, and other 
  such locales.
  Time Chart (Running the Game, page 315): A 
  tiered set of story time divisions, useful for 
  dealing with issues such as how long it takes 
  to perform a simple action, thaumaturgic 
  spell duration, and so on.
  Trapping (Aspects, page 120): A discrete cate-
  gory of function for a skill, describing what 
  actions can typically be performed with that 
  skill.
  Trouble (Character Creation, page  55): An 
  aspect  describing a complication for the 
  character’s high concept.
  Veil (Spellcasting, page  255): A type of spell 
  which  can be cast as either evocation or 
  thaumaturgy, designed to render the caster 
  (and potentially others) invisible to normal 
  detection.
  Worldwalking (Spellcasting, page 283): A type 
  of thaumaturgy involving transition 
  between the normal world and realms in the 
  Nevernever.
  Zones (Playing the Game, page  197): An 
  abstract measure of space used to divide and 
  organize the location where a conflict takes 
  place. If the location is a bar, the zones might 
  be the bar itself, the back room, and the 
  parking lot.
  
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  Index
  606: OW245
  Abby: OW99
  Abernathy, Biff: YS369
  Academics: OW70
  Accidental Compels: YS102
  Ace: OW99
  Actions: YS192
  Free & Supplemental: YS213
  Acts of Faith: YS124
  Addictive Saliva: YS162
  Advancement: YS88
  Mid-session: YS91
  Agatha Hagglethorn: OW156
  Aiming: YS131
  Aleron LaFortier: OW165
  Alertness: YS121
  Alex is Smart: OW244, OW245, 
  OW248, OW249, OW254, 
  OW259, OW260
  Alice’s Restaurant: OW26
  Alphas, The: OW93, OW116
  Amanda Beckitt: OW108
  Ambush: YS142
  Anastasia Luccio: OW176
  Ancient Mai: OW100
  Animal Handling: YS143
  Anna Ash: OW105
  Anna Valmont: OW239
  Answers: YS140
  Anthony Forthill: OW147
  Apprentice: YS86
  Aquatic: YS162
  Arcane Research: YS134
  Archangel: OW206
  Archive, The: OW100
  Archleone, Nicodemus: OW102
  Armor: YS202
  Art Appreciation: YS135
  Artemis Bock: OW113
  Arthur Langtry: OW165
  Arturo Genosa: OW150
  Ash, Anna: OW105
  Aspects: YS18, YS98, YS316
  Choosing: YS55, YS108
  City Aspects: YS46
  Compelling: YS100
  Creating: YS108
  Discovering: YS113
  Interaction With Others: YS105
  Invoking: YS98
  Limitations: YS101
  Negative Ones: YS109
  Positive Ones: YS109
  Sample Aspects: YS117
  Scene Aspects: YS105
  Temporary Aspects: YS114
  Ass Sand: OW195
  Assessment: YS115, YS195
  Astor, Faith: OW106
  Athame: OW170
  Athletics: YS121
  Aurora: OW106
  Authorities: OW67
  Avoiding Surprise: YS121
  AWESOME!, Our Playtesters 
  and Proofreaders 
  Are: YS3, OW3
  Backgrounds: YS44, YS59
  Backlash: YS256
  Baltimore: YS29, YS358
  Bart: OW106
  Bartlesby, Charles: OW106
  Beast Change: YS174
  Beckitt, Amanda: OW108
  Beckitt, Greg: OW108
  Beckitt, Helen: OW108
  Becton, Drea: OW110
  Belief: YS12
  Benn, Deborah: OW110
  Betrayal: YS58
  Bianca St. Claire: OW231
  Biff Abernathy: YS369
  Big Red MORE Button: YS286
  Big Trouble in Little 
  China: YS156
  Billy: OW114
  Billy Speculates: YS243, 
  YS391, OW19, OW28, 
  OW30, OW38, OW60, 
  OW70, OW76, OW77, 
  OW79, OW82, OW91, 
  OW98, OW100, OW103, 
  OW129, OW139, OW142, 
  OW151, OW151, OW155, 
  OW160, OW164, OW166, 
  OW205, OW219
  Black Aggie: YS361
  Black Council, The: OW63
  Black Court: OW20
  Black Court Vampires: 
  OW84, OW191
  Black Dogs: OW81
  Blackstaff: YS246, OW192
  Bless This House: YS187
  Blocks: YS210
  Blood Drinker: YS188
  Bob the Skull: OW110
  Bobby: OW113
  Bock, Artemis: OW113
  Boggart: OW12
  Boogeyman: see: Boggart
  Borden, Georgia McAlister: 
  OW114
  Borden, William: OW114
  Borders: YS212
  Boughton, Lisa: OW116
  Boughton, Rick: OW117
  Bram Stoker: YS11, YS185
  Brawling: YS131
  Breaking: YS320, YS321, YS125
  Breaking Things: YS135
  Breath Weapon: YS162
  Brother Wang: OW240
  Brush-Off, The: YS132
  Bucky: OW43
  Building: YS125
  Burglary: YS123
  Butters, Waldo: OW118
  Buying Things: YS139, YS322
  Camouflage: YS143
  Canon: YS196
  Captain Marvel-Mary 
  Marvel-Captain Marvel 
  Jr. option: OW52
  Captain Obvious: YS95
  Caring: YS33
  Carlos Ramirez: OW215
  Carmichael, Ron: OW118
  Carpenter, Charity: OW120
  Carpenter, Daniel: OW121
  Carpenter, Michael: OW125
  Carpenter, Molly: OW123
  Carpenters: OW121
  Cars: YS128
  Cashing Out: YS206
  Casing: YS123
  Cassandra’s Tears: 
  YS172, OW178
  Cassius, Quintus: OW127
  Cassius. Snakes: OW32
  Cat & Mouse: YS194
  Cat and Mouse (Skill 
  Trapping): YS126
  Catch, The: YS185
  Champion of God: YS73
  Changeling: YS74
  Changelings: OW41
  Channeling: YS181
  Character Concept: YS52
  Character Creation: YS52
  Character Sheet: YS17; see 
  also sheet at end of book
  Charisma: YS136
  Charity Carpenter: OW120
  Charles Bartlesby: OW106
  Chases: YS128
  Chaunzaggoroth 
  (“Chauncy”): OW35
  Chicago: OW244
  Chicago Neighborhoods:
  Bronzeville: OW261
  Bucktown: OW256
  Bungalow Belt: OW262
  Cabrini-Green: OW255
  Chinatown: OW260
  Englewood: OW261
  Gold Coast: OW255
  Grant Park: OW258
  Hyde Park: OW261
  Lincoln Park: OW255
  Loop, The: OW254
  Near North Side: OW254
  Near West Side: OW260
  Northwest Side: OW258
  Pilsen: OW260
  South Loop: OW259
  Uptown: OW257
  Wicker Park: OW256
  Wrigleyville: OW256
  Chicago Themes: OW245
  Blood & Butchery: OW245
  Blues: OW246
  City That Works: OW246
  Corruption: OW247
  Fire: OW247
  Flesh: OW248
  Futures: OW248
  Grey City: OW249
  I Will: OW249
  Magical Architecture: OW249
  Rivals Clash: OW250
  Sky-Scraping, Sky-Scraped: 
  OW250
  Urbs in Horto: OW251
  Water: OW252
  White City: OW252
  Chit-Chat: YS138
  Chlorofiend: OW32
  Choice: YS10
  Choosing Aspects: YS55, YS108
  Christian, Nick: OW127
  Christmas cards: YS56
  Church: OW16
  Churchmice, The: OW148
  Circle, The: OW129
  City Advancement: YS93
  City Aspects: YS46
  City Creation: YS25
  City in a Garden: OW251
  Clark Pell: OW206
  Clark Valentine: see: Baltimore
  Classic Werewolves: OW92
  Claws: YS162
  Climbing: YS121
  Cloak of Shadows: YS169
  Close-Combat Defense: YS131
  Closing Down: YS138
  Cobbs: OW42
  Collin Murphy: OW198
  Combat Initiative: YS121
  Command: YS137
  Common Ritual: YS134
  Community: YS36
  Compelling Aspects: YS100
  Compelling Aspects On 
  Accident: YS102
  YS = Volume 1: Your Story  OW = Volume 2: Our World
  
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  Compelling Multiple 
  Aspects: YS104
  Compels: YS100, YS101
  Weak: YS104
  Complications: YS101
  Composition: YS136
  Computer Use: YS141
  Concentration: YS127
  Concept Spirits: OW82
  Concepts: YS37
  Concessions: YS206
  Conflicts: YS197
  Conjuration: YS274
  Connections: YS342
  Consequences: YS203
  Contacts: YS123
  Contests: YS193
  Conviction: YS124
  Cops: OW152
  Corpsetaker: OW129
  Counterspells: YS253
  Cowl: OW130
  Crafting: YS278
  Craftsmanship: YS125
  Crazy old geezers: YS36
  Creating Aspects: YS108
  Creative Communication: YS136
  Crime: YS27
  Critter Powers: YS162
  Cultists: OW63
  Current Events: YS14
  Dallas, Joan: OW131
  Damage: YS201
  Dana Watson: OW241
  Daniel Carpenter: OW121
  Dante: YS342
  Darkhallow: OW25
  Darkhounds: OW86
  Death: YS206
  Death Curse: YS282
  Deborah Benn: OW110
  Deceit: YS126
  Declaration: YS20, YS116, YS196
  Declaring Minor Details: YS141
  Default Advancement: YS91
  Defense Against the Nastybad 
  Arts: OW65
  Deirdre: OW131
  Delaney, Kim: OW132
  Delarossa, Lucille: OW133
  Delicious Crime: OW49, 
  OW159, OW235
  Demesne: YS170
  Demonic Co-Pilot: YS175
  Denarians: see: Order of the 
  Blackened Denarius
  Denton, Phil: OW133
  Dependents: OW108
  Dice: YS16
  Difficulties: YS17, YS310
  Diminutive Size: YS163
  Disciples of Kemmler: 
  OW66, OW129
  Discipline: YS127
  Discovering Aspects: YS113
  Disguise: YS126
  Distance Weaponry: YS144
  Distraction and 
  Misdirection: YS126
  Divination: YS275
  Dodging: YS121
  Domination: YS172
  Don’t Cross the Streams: YS17
  Donald Morgan: OW196
  Donny Wise: OW241
  Doughnuts: YS72
  Doughtnuts: OW143
  Drea Becton: OW110
  Dreamers: OW71
  Dresden, Harry: OW134
  Dresden, Maggie: OW140
  Dresden, Malcolm: OW139
  Driving: YS128
  Drulinda: OW141
  DuMorne, Justin: OW141
  Eavesdropping: YS133
  Ebenezar McCoy: OW192
  Echoes of the Beast: YS163
  Ecto-Suit: OW33
  Edgar Allan Poe: YS6, YS28, 
  YS29, YS36, YS38, YS41, 
  YS43, YS346, YS347, YS359, 
  YS361, YS365, YS366, 
  YS369, YS384, YS393
  Eduardo Anthony 
  Mendoza: OW193
  Elaine Lillian Mallory: OW183
  Elder Brother Gruff: OW142
  Eldest Brother Gruff: OW142
  Elements: YS253
  Elidee: OW143
  Elves: OW42
  Emissary of Power: YS75
  Emotional Control: YS127
  Emotional Vampire: YS189
  Empathy: YS129
  EMTs: OW68
  Enchanted Items: YS279
  Endings: YS353
  Endurance: YS130
  Equipment: YS322; see 
  also Weapons
  Equipment (Skill 
  Trapping): YS139
  Erlking, The: OW143
  Evan Montrose: YS368
  Evil Bob: OW113
  Evil Harry: OW139
  Evocation: YS180, YS249
  Examination: YS133
  Exerting Force: YS135
  Explosions: YS325
  Exposition and Knowledge 
  Dumping: YS141
  Eye of Thoth: OW74
  Faces: YS41
  Faerie Powers: YS166
  Faerie Queens: OW41
  Failure: YS310
  Faith: YS12
  Faith Astor: OW106
  Falling: YS121
  Fallout: YS256
  False Face Forward: YS126
  Falsehood and Deception: YS126
  Familiars: OW175
  Fashion Tips: OW141
  Fate: YS16
  Fate Points: YS19
  Earning: YS21
  Father Vincent: OW240
  FBI Hexenwolves: OW133
  Feeding Dependency: YS190
  Fellowship of St. Giles: YS14, 
  YS80, YS190, OW89
  Ferrovax: OW145
  Fetches: OW43
  Fewer Players: YS63
  Fifth Law: YS241
  Fine Thralls: OW83
  First Adventure: YS60
  First Impressions: YS138
  First Law: YS235
  Fists: YS130
  Fix: OW145
  Fixing: YS125
  Flatland: OW29
  Flesh Mask: YS175
  Focus Items: YS256, YS278
  Focused Practitioner: YS76
  Foo Dogs: OW82
  Forensics: OW68
  Forthill, Anthony: OW147
  Fourth Law: YS240
  Francisca Garcia: OW148
  Franklin: OW147
  Free Actions: YS213
  Freeholding Lords: OW145
  Fudge Dice: YS16
  Gamer Humor: YS2, YS26, 
  YS58, YS61, YS88, YS351, 
  OW115, OW145
  Garcia, Francisca: OW148
  Gard, Sigrun: OW148
  Gaseous Form: YS175
  Gatekeeper: YS243-246, YS304, 
  OW150, OW151, OW165, 
  OW172, OW179, OW196
  Gathering Information: YS123
  Genosa Prouctions: OW151
  Genosa, Arturo: OW150
  George Wilson: OW241
  Georgia McAlister 
  Borden: OW114
  Getting the Tip-Off: YS124
  Ghost Speaker: YS169
  Ghostbusters: OW58, OW251
  Ghoul Ninja: YS54, YS154
  Glamours: YS166
  Glau, Lucius: OW152
  Gleeful Murder: YS175
  Goblins: OW45
  Gogoth: OW152
  Gorilla Attack: YS353
  Gotham: YS25
  Government: OW117, OW70
  Grapples: YS211
  Greater Glamours: YS166
  Greene: OW152
  Greenteeth, Jenny: OW153
  Greg Beckitt: OW108
  Gregor: OW154
  Grendelkin: OW78
  Grevane: OW154
  Grimalkin: OW154
  Groups: YS334
  Gruffs: OW47
  Guest Stars: YS61-63, YS330
  Guffie, Jake: OW156
  Guide My Hand: YS187
  Gun Knowledge: YS131
  Gunplay: YS131
  Guns: YS131
  Hagglethorn, Agatha: OW156
  Half-Demons: OW79
  Hamilton, Kelly: OW156
  Hamilton, Kyle: OW156
  Hammerhands: OW43
  Harley MacFinn: OW180
  Harris, Roger: OW157
  Harry Dresden: OW134
  Harry’s Player “Jim”: YS54-5, 
  YS57-62, YS66, YS68, YS101, 
  YS103-4, YS107, YS113, 
  YS220, YS251, YS253, 
  YS257, YS271, YS280-1, 
  YS309, OW2, OW5
  Have a Little Talk: YS308
  He Who Walks Behind: OW76
  Healing: YS141, YS220
  Heavyweights: OW28
  Hedge Wizards: OW64
  Heinrich Kemmler: OW161
  Helen Beckitt: OW108
  Hellfire: YS291
  Hellhounds: OW47
  Help! I’m Trapped in an Indexing 
  Factory!: see: Recursion
  Hendricks: OW158
  Hexenwolf: OW93
  
  o
  p
  q
  r
  s
  t
  u
  v
  w
  x
  y
  z
  Hexenwolfitude: OW93
  Hexing: YS228
  Deliberate: YS258
  Hiding: YS142
  High Concept: YS54
  Himalayan Temple 
  Monks: OW75
  Hobs: OW47
  Holy Touch: YS188
  Hulk, The: YS135
  Hulking Size: YS164
  Human Form: YS176
  Human Guise: YS176
  I Get Hit in the Head a Lot: 
  YS61, YS130, OW255, 
  OW257, OW261
  Imminent Demon-Summoning 
  Badness: YS104
  Inaccuracy: YS30
  Incindiary Poo: OW37
  Incite Emotion: YS172
  Indian Monasteries: OW75
  Indiana Jones: YS319
  Infected: YS80
  Infiltration: YS123
  Inhuman Recovery: YS185
  Inhuman Speed: YS178
  Inhuman Strength: YS183
  Inhuman Toughness: YS185
  Initiative: YS199
  Injun Joe: OW175
  Inspiration: YS34, YS37
  Intent precedes mechanics: YS308
  Internets, the: YS27, YS37, 
  YS140, YS149, YS322, 
  YS358, YS361, YS389, 
  YS394, OW14, OW53, 
  OW138, OW152, OW203, 
  OW211, OW228
  Persons From : see: Ryan Macklin
  Interrogation: YS132
  Intimidation: YS132
  Investigation: YS133
  Invoking Aspects: YS98
  Invoking for Effect: YS98
  Items of Power: YS167; 
  see also Crafting
  Jade Court Vampires: 
  OW20, OW87
  Jake Guffie: OW156
  Jann: OW79
  Jared Kincaid: OW161
  Jason Lamar: OW165
  Jellybeans: YS19
  Jenny Greenteeth: OW153
  Jerks: YS58, YS106, YS218, 
  YS239, YS285, YS329, YS340, 
  YS347, YS370, OW113, 
  OW118, OW146, OW178, 
  OW214, OW223, OW229
  Joan Dallas: OW131
  Jumping: YS121
  Jury-rigging: YS320
  Justine: OW159
  Kalshazzak: OW36, OW161
  Karrin Murphy: OW199
  Kelly Hamilton: OW156
  Kelpies: OW47
  Kemmler, Heinrich: OW161
  Kenneth Hite’s Brain Can Beat Up 
  Your Brain: see: Alex is Smart
  Killing: YS235
  Kim Delaney: OW132
  Kincaid, Jared: OW161
  Kirby: OW162
  Klaus Schneider: OW224
  Knight of a Faerie Court: YS78
  Knights of the Cross: 
  OW74, OW125
  Knowing People: YS124
  Knowledge and Navigation: 
  YS129
  Korrick: OW162
  Kravos, Ghost of Leonid: OW162
  Kumori: OW164
  Kyle Hamilton: OW156
  Ladder: YS16
  Lady Cesarina Malvora: OW184
  LaFortier, Aleron: OW165
  Lamar, Jason: OW165
  Langrtry, Arthur: OW165
  Languages: YS141
  Lara Raith: OW207
  Lartessa, Polonius: OW167
  Lasciel: OW167
  Lassie smart: OW79
  Law: OW15
  Lawbreaker: YS182
  Lawrence: OW169
  Laws of Magic: YS232, OW17
  Leanansidhe: OW169
  Lenhardt, Nelson: OW169
  Lenny’s “Boxers” Story: see: 
  THE PAAAAIN!!!
  Leonid Kravos, The Ghost 
  of: OW162
  Lesser Dragons: OW38
  Li Xian: OW171
  Liberty, Martha: OW171
  Librarians (Mighty, Hot, and 
  Mighty Hot): YS26, YS27
  Librarians (Scary): OW114
  Libraries: YS26; see also 
  Workspaces
  Lifestyle: YS139
  Lifting: YS321
  Lifting Things: YS135
  Lily: OW173
  Linda Randall: OW217
  Lindquist, Mortimer: OW174
  Lisa Boughton: OW116
  Listens to Wind: OW175
  Living Dead: YS164
  Lloyd Slate: OW229
  Loas: OW82
  Locations: YS37
  Lockpicking: YS123
  Lone Ranger: YS208
  Long-Term Action: YS130
  Lord Raith: OW209
  Lord Talos: OW233
  Lore: YS134
  Loup-Garou: OW94, OW180
  Luccio, Anastasia: OW176
  Lucifer: OW178
  Lucille Delarossa: OW133
  Lucius Glau: OW152
  Lycanthrope: YS79, OW94
  Lydia: OW178
  Lydia Stern: OW233
  Mab: OW179
  Mac: OW180
  MacFinn, Harley: OW180
  Made Men: OW71
  Madeline Raith: OW211
  Madge Shelly: OW227
  Madrigal Raith: OW211
  Maeve: OW181
  Maggie Dresden: OW140
  Magic: YS222
  Magic Cops: OW18
  Magog: OW181
  Malcolm Dresden: OW139
  Malks: OW49
  Mallory, Elaine Lillian: OW183
  Malone, Micky: OW184
  Malvora, House: OW91, OW185
  Malvora, Lady Cesarina: OW184
  Malvora, Vittorio: OW184
  Mana Static: YS169
  Maneuvers: YS207
  Marcella, Rosanna 
  “Rosie”: OW186
  Marcone’s Mafia: OW22, OW188
  Marcone, John “Gentleman 
  Johnny”: OW187
  Marion Murphy: OW202
  Marked by Power: YS169
  Marling, Sandra: OW190
  Martha Liberty: OW171
  Martin: OW190
  Master Black Court 
  Vampires: OW86
  Maurice Sandbourne: OW223
  Mavra: OW191
  Maxims: YS10
  Maya “Mouse” McKenzie: YS370
  McAnally’s: OW180
  McKenzie, Maya “Mouse”: YS370
  Media: YS27
  Medical Attention: YS141
  Melee Combat: YS144
  Melee Defense: YS144
  Mendoza, Eduardo 
  Anthony: OW193
  Mental Conflicts: YS217
  Mental Defense: YS127
  Mental Fortitude: YS125
  Mercenaries: OW71
  Merlin: OW165
  Meryl: OW194
  Metropolis: YS25
  Michael Carpenter: OW125
  Micky Malone: OW184
  Mid-session advancement: YS91
  Might: YS135
  Mike the Mechanic: OW194
  Milestones: YS88
  Mimic Abilities: YS176
  Mimic Form: YS177
  Minor Talents: YS14, 
  YS80, YS169
  Miss Gard: OW148
  Mister: OW195
  Modular Abilities: YS177
  Moe: OW195
  Molly Carpenter: OW123
  Money: YS139
  Money Talks: YS139
  Monica Sells: OW224
  Montrose, Evan: YS368
  Monty Python and the 
  Holy Grail: YS217
  Mordite: OW15
  Morgan, Donald: OW196
  Mortals: YS10, YS35, YS73
  Mortimer Lindquist: OW174
  Mother Summer: OW197
  Mother Winter: OW197
  Mouse: OW198
  Murphy, Collin: OW198
  Murphy, Karrin: OW199
  Murphy, Marion: OW202
  Music: OW246
  Mystic Perception: YS135
  Mythic Recovery: YS186
  Mythic Speed: YS178
  Mythic Strength: YS184
  Mythic Toughness: YS186
  Names: YS58
  Necromancers: OW65
  Negative Aspects: YS109
  Nelson Lenhardt: OW170
  Nevernever: YS283
  Nevernever Powers: YS170
  Newt, turned into a: 
  YS228, YS237
  Nick Christian: OW127
  Nickleheads: OW57
  Nicodemus Archleone: OW102
  
  b
  c
  d
  e
  f
  g
  h
  i
  j
  k
  l
  m
  Nicodemus’ Guard Beasts: OW91
  Nixies: OW49
  No Control: YS359
  Not Getting Shot: YS121
  NPCs: YS326
  Oaths: YS274, OW39
  Obsidian Statue: OW203
  Occult Journalists: OW72
  Occult Proprietors: OW72
  Ogres: OW49
  On the Fly Character 
  Creation: YS69
  On the Fly City Creation: YS49
  Sample: YS50
  One Hand on the Wheel: YS128
  Opening Scenes: YS346
  Opening Up: YS138
  Opportunity vs. Penalty: YS262
  Order of the Blackened 
  Denarius: OW55, OW104
  Ordo Lebes: OW105
  Ortega, Paolo: OW203
  Other Faeries: OW53
  Other Projectile Weapons: YS132
  Other Vehicles: YS128
  Outer Gates: YS244
  Overflow: YS214
  Pack Instincts: YS165
  Paolo Ortega: OW203
  Parker: OW205
  Partial Refresh: YS317
  Passive Awareness: YS121
  Peabody: OW205
  Pell, Clark: OW206
  People: YS41
  Performance: YS135
  Phases: YS58
  Phil Denton: OW133
  Philosophy of Limits: YS146
  Physical Actions, Other: YS122
  Physical Fortitude: YS130
  Physical Immunity: YS186
  Pietrovich, Simon: OW206
  Pissing People Off: YS153
  Pixies: OW49
  Places of Power: YS292
  Playing to an Audience: YS136
  Plot Building: YS340
  Plot Devices: OW98
  Poe, Edgar Allan: see: 
  Edgar Allan Poe
  Politics: OW14
  Polonius Lartessa: OW167
  Positive Aspects: YS109
  Possessed People: OW37
  Potions: YS280
  Power Level: YS45, YS53
  Power Sources: YS267
  Power-up: YS91
  Powers: YS19, YS66, YS158
  Big List: YS160-161
  Critter: YS162
  Faerie: YS166
  Items: YS167
  Minor: YS169
  Psychic: YS172
  Shapeshifting: YS174
  Speed: YS178
  Spellcraft: YS179
  Strength: YS183
  Toughness: YS184
  True Faith: YS187
  Vampirism: YS188
  Presence: YS136
  Priscilla Spencer: see: 
  AWESOME!
  Property Damage: YS260, 
  YS320, YS321
  Protagonists: YS45
  Provocation: YS132
  Psychic Powers: YS172
  Psychometry: YS173
  Punching: YS130
  Quick Character Creation: YS68
  Quintus Cassius: OW127
  Race, The: YS194
  Rachel: OW206
  Raith, House: OW91, OW209
  Raith, Inari: OW207
  Raith, Lara: OW207
  Raith, Lord: OW209
  Raith, Madeline: OW211
  Raith, Madrigal: OW211
  Raith, Thomas: OW212
  Ramirez, Carlos: OW215
  Randall, Linda: OW217
  Ranks: YS65
  Rapport: YS138
  Rawhead & Bloody Bones: OW50
  Rawlins: OW218
  Reading People: YS129
  Reaper: OW43
  Recovery: YS141, YS220
  Recurring Locations: YS39
  Recursion: see: Recursion
  Red Court: OW20, OW204
  Red Court “Infected”: OW89
  Red Court Infected: YS80
  Red Court Nobles: OW87
  Red Court Vampires: OW87
  Redemption: YS246
  Reese: OW218
  Refinement: YS182
  Refresh: YS20, YS66, YS68
  Renfields: OW86
  Reputation: YS137
  Research: YS26
  Research and Lab Work: YS141
  Resources: YS139
  Respeccing: YS91
  Reuel, Ronald: OW219
  Rick Boughton: OW117
  Rick Neal: see: AWESOME!
  Riding: YS143
  Righteousness: YS188
  Rising Conflict: YS59
  Ritual: YS181
  Robot from the Future 
  Needs Beer: see: Release 
  dates of the game
  Rodriguez, Susan: OW219
  Roger Harris: OW157
  Rogers, Willamena 
  “Will”: OW220
  Rolling the Dice: YS309
  Ron Carmichael: OW118
  Ronald Reuel: OW219
  Rosanna “Rosie” Marcella: 
  OW186
  Rosanna (Denarian): OW222
  Rote Spells: YS257
  Rough Thralls: OW82
  Rudolph: OW223
  Rule of Three: YS109
  Rumors: YS124
  Run Away: OW130, OW161
  Running Things Over: YS128
  Sample Aspects: YS117
  Character Creation: YS54
  Character Phases: YS58
  Character Phases 
  Worksheet: YS64
  Character Sheet: YS67
  City Sheet: YS32
  Faces: YS43
  Locations: YS38
  Phase Five: YS63
  Phase Four: YS63
  Phase One: YS59
  Phase Three: YS61
  Phase Two: YS60
  Sample Spells: YS293
  Sandbourne, Maurice: OW223
  Sandra Marling: OW190
  Santa Claus: OW52
  Sanya: OW223
  Say Yes: YS102
  Scaling the Opposition: YS331
  Scarecrow: OW43
  Scavenging: YS143
  Scene Aspects: YS105
  Scene Compels: YS107
  Schneider, Klaus: OW224
  Scholarship: YS140
  Science: YS11
  Scion: YS75
  Second Law: YS237
  Seelie Magic: YS290, YS166
  Sells, Monica: OW224
  Sells, Victor: OW225
  Senior Council: OW172
  Setting: YS24
  Seventh Law: YS244
  Shade of Gygax: OW18
  Shadowing: YS143
  Shadowman: OW225
  Shaggy Feathers: OW227
  Shakespeare: YS280
  Shameless: OW65
  Shapeshifting Powers: YS174
  Shelly, Madge: OW227
  Shellycobbs: OW51
  Shen: OW37
  Shiro Yoshimo: OW242
  Shooting: YS131
  Shoulder to Cry On, A: YS129
  Shroud of Turin: OW148
  Shut Up Bob: YS13, YS22, YS58, 
  YS91, YS121, YS123, YS126, 
  YS132, YS182, YS260, 
  YS280, YS281, YS282, 
  YS302, OW34, OW96, 
  OW114, OW121, OW222
  Sidekicks: YS354
  Sidhe: OW22, OW51
  Sidhe Knights: OW22, OW52
  Sight, The: YS174, YS223
  Sigrun Gard: OW148
  Simon Pietrovich: OW206
  Situation Vs. Story: YS110
  Sixth Law: YS243
  Skavis: OW91, OW228
  Skill Packages: YS65
  Skills: YS18, YS65, YS120
  Combining Them: YS213
  Skipping Scenes: YS270
  Skulking: YS143
  Slate, Lloyd: OW229
  Snakeboy: OW127
  Social Attacks: YS132
  Social Conflicts: YS215
  Social Defense: YS129, YS138
  Social Fortitude: YS137
  Social Initiative: YS129
  Sorcerer: YS81
  Sorcerers: OW66
  Soulfire: YS292
  Soulgaze: YS174, YS226
  South Side: OW258
  Special Investigations: 
  OW68, OW202
  Spectre: OW57
  Speed Powers: YS178
  Spellcasting: YS248
  Examples: YS293
  Spellcraft Powers: YS179
  Spider Walk: YS165
  Spider-Man: YS132
  Spike: OW229
  Spiking the Punch: YS162
  Spin: YS214
  
  o
  p
  q
  r
  s
  t
  u
  v
  w
  x
  y
  z
  Spinal Tap: YS242
  Spirit Form: YS170
  Spirits, Concept: OW82
  Splattercon: OW190
  Sponsored Magic: YS183, YS287
  Sponsors & the Sponsored: 
  OW66
  Spray Attacks: YS326
  Sprinting: YS122, YS212
  St. Claire, Bianca: OW231
  Stallings, John: OW232
  Stanton, Jennifer: OW233
  Stealth: YS142
  Stern, Lydia: OW233
  Stoker, Bram: YS11, YS185
  Story Power: YS158
  Streetwolves, The: OW205
  Strength Powers: YS183
  Stress: YS201-202
  Track Length: YS124, 
  YS130, YS136
  Stunts: YS18, YS66, YS146
  Sue the Zombie Dinosaur: 
  YS143, YS156, YS241, 
  OW33, OW96, OW112, 
  OW113, OW144, OW171, 
  OW177, OW259, OW267
  Summer Court, The: 
  OW39, OW236
  Summer Knight, The: OW145
  Summer Lady, The: 
  OW106, OW173
  Summer Queen, The: OW236
  Sunlight: YS304, YS325
  Supernatural Locations: 
  YS39, YS292
  Supernatural Recovery: YS186
  Supernatural Sense: YS165
  Supernatural Speed: YS178
  Supernatural Strength: YS183
  Supernatural Toughness: YS186
  Supplemental Actions: YS213
  Surveillance: YS133
  Survival: YS143
  Susan Rodriguez: OW219
  Swift Transition: YS171
  Sword of the Cross: YS168
  Swords: OW19
  Sylphs: OW52
  Tagging: YS106
  Taken Out: YS203
  Talk Like a Pirate Day: OW55
  Talos, Lord: OW233
  Tattoos of St. Giles: YS190
  Templates: YS72
  Temple Dogs: OW79
  Temporary Aspects: YS114
  Temporary Powers: YS92
  Tension: YS343
  Tentacled Horrors: OW77
  Tera West: OW241
  Tessa: See: Polonius Lartessa
  Thaumaturgy: YS181, YS261
  The Empire Strikes Back: YS395
  The Princess Bride: YS206
  Themes: YS31, YS40
  Theriomorphs: OW92
  Things to Run From: OW28
  Third Law: YS238
  Thomas Raith: OW212
  Thorned Namshiel: OW233
  Thralls, Fine: OW83
  Threats: YS31, YS40
  Threats (Skill Trapping): YS133
  Promoting: YS94
  Resolving: YS94
  Thresholds: YS230
  Tigress, The: OW235
  Tim the Sniper: YS328, YS330
  Time: YS314
  Taking Extra Time: YS316
  Time Chart: YS315
  Time Travel: YS243
  Titania: OW236
  Toddler with a gun: YS374
  Tommy Tomm: OW236
  Toot-toot: OW237
  Torelli: OW238
  Totally Batman: YS20
  Toughness Powers: YS184
  Tracking: YS143
  Transformed Werewolves: OW93
  Trappings: YS120
  Adding New Ones: YS147
  Travel: YS27
  Tree Woman: OW238
  Trixie Vixen: OW240
  Trolls: OW53
  Trouble: YS55
  True Believer: YS82
  True Faith Powers: YS187
  True Names: YS78, YS239, 
  YS267, YS273, YS298
  True Shapeshifting: YS177
  Twin Peaks: YS44
  Uber-Ghouls: OW59
  Ulsharavas: OW238
  Undead Al Capone: YS35
  University of Chicago Library 
  Ghost: OW58
  Unseelie Magic: YS167, YS290
  Uriel: OW238
  Ursiel: OW239
  Valmont, Anna: OW239
  Vampirism Powers: YS188
  Vancouver: YS28
  Vehicles: YS128, YS326
  Veils: YS276
  Venatori Umbrorum: OW73
  Verisimilitude: YS327
  Victor Sells: OW225
  Victor’s Scorpions: OW33
  Vittorio Malvora: OW184
  Vorpal best: YS234, YS234
  Waldo Butters: OW118
  Walkers, The: OW76
  Warden Captain Anastasia 
  Luccio: OW176
  Warden Carlos Ramirez: OW215
  Warden Donald Morgan: OW196
  Warden Swords: YS303, OW177
  Wardens: OW18, 
  OW62, OW176
  Wardhounds: OW34
  Wards: YS276
  Weak Compel: YS104
  Weapon Knowledge: YS144
  Equipment: YS202
  Skill: YS144
  Well-Known Character 
  Syndrome: OW134, OW201
  Wellington: YS371
  Were-Form: YS82
  Wereraven: YS83
  Werewolf?: (There, wolf. 
  There, castle.)
  Werewolves, Classic: OW92
  West, Tera: OW241
  When to Call for a Roll: YS309
  White Council Allies: OW18
  White Council, The: 
  OW62, OW164
  White Court Vampire: YS84
  White Court Vampires: 
  OW21, OW89
  White Court Virgin: YS85
  White Court Virgins: OW91
  Who is Number One?: UR#6
  Why Did It Have To Be 
  Snakes: OW32
  Wild Hunt, The: OW40
  Willamena “Will” 
  Rogers: OW220
  William Borden: OW114
  Wings: YS165
  Winter Court, The: OW40
  Winter Knight, The: OW229
  Winter Lady, The: OW181
  Winter Queen, The: OW179
  Wise, Donny: OW241
  Wiseass: YS62, YS63, YS64, 
  YS6, YS82, YS98, YS202, 
  YS331, OW136
  Wizard: YS86
  Wizard Senses: YS222
  Wizard’s Constitution: YS170
  Wizard-Lycanthrope-Red-
  Court-Infected-Changeling-
  potamus: YS72
  Wolfweres: OW95
  Workspaces: YS139-140
  World Without Harry: OW139
  Worldwalker: YS171
  Worldwalking: YS282
  Wrestling: YS135
  Yoshimo, Shiro: OW242
  Za Lord: OW237
  Zombie Pirates: OW111
  Zombies that still have to go 
  to the bathroom: OW82
  Zones: YS197
  Mental Conflicts: YS217
  Social Conflicts: YS215
  
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  Billy—
  Thanks for using our 
  system to power your game, 
  and giving us a couple pages 
  in the back of the book 
  here. Much appreciated!
  — Fred
  Don’t Rest Your Head 
  A Game of Insomnia in the Mad City 
  Evil Hat Productions
  Evil Hat Productions believes that passion makes the 
  best games. It is this passion for gaming that raised 
  Evil Hat to its acclaimed position in the RPG commu-
  nity. Our games can be used to build the best kinds 
  of role-playing experiences—full of laughter, story-
  telling, and memorable moments.
  We started by running games at small conventions 
  under the Evil Hat banner, making face to face connec-
  tions with some of the same people who’ve worked on 
  these products. Player to player, gamer to gamer, we’ve passed our 
  passion along into the gaming community that has already given us so 
  many years of lasting entertainment.
  Today we don’t just run games, we don’t just make them, we work 
  with you to make your play the best it can be—the kind that upholds 
  and gives birth to passions of your own.  That’s the Evil Hat mission, 
  and we’re happy to have you along on it.
  You can find out more at www.evilhat.com
  Hey, uh, Billy? 
  I don’t do hats.
  Evil ones especially.
  Whoa — Billy, these 
  guys really are 
  your kind of people.
  Harry, hold on a sec. 
  Keep reading.
  damn straight.
  Don’t Rest Your Head
  Don’t Rest Your Head is a sleek, dangerous little game, where your 
  players are all insomniac heroes with superpowers, fighting — and 
  using — exhaustion and madness to stay alive, and awake for just 
  one more night, in a reality gone way wrong called the Mad City. It 
  features its own system, and is contained entirely within one book.
  ISBN 978-0-9771534-2-8  • EHP1000 • $15.00
  Don’t Lose Your Mind (Supplement):  
  ISBN 978-0-9771534-3-5  • EHP1001 • $20.00 
  Insomniacs with superpowers? Sounds like you, boss.
  Shut up, Bob.
  
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  Apes flying planes?  
  Reminds me of that 
  time at the Rue Morgue.
  Spirit of the Century
  Spirit of the Century is a complete, stand-alone pulp role-playing 
  game based on the award-winning Fate system. Character creation 
  can be done as quickly as a few minutes, or expand to take up an 
  evening; adventure design is a snap with three methods for creating 
  relevant, flavorful, player-focused stories at a moment’s notice. 
  Spirit delivers an evening of fun—a “pick-up” game that requires 
  little preparation, but provides hours of entertainment. All you will 
  need to play are some friends, some dice, and this book.
  ISBN 978-0-9771534-0-4  • EHP2000 • $30.00
  Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies
  Enter the world of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies (S7S), the latest 
  game from Chad Underkoffler featuring the PDQ system! In S7S 
  you’ll find a richly detailed setting of sky-ships, piracy, intrigue, 
  mysticism, musketeers, and more, whether you’re sailing through 
  the haunted Ghost Sky, battling pirates from the inconstant isle of 
  Ilwuz, intriguing in the Spider Empress’ court of Barathi, or chasing 
  thieves across the rooftops of Agua Azul.
  ISBN 978-0-9771534-4-2  • EHP7001 • $30.00
  A Penny For My Thoughts
  A Penny For My Thoughts is a stand-alone improv acting/role-
  playing game hybrid about memory and identity.  The players are 
  patients in a mental ward for recovering amnesia victims. Using an 
  experimental drug, they enter into one another’s minds and memo-
  ries to discover who they are—and if that is indeed who they still 
  want to be.
  ISBN 978-0-9771534-6-6  • EHP7002 • $15.00
  
  Reference Sheets
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  The Ladder
  +8	
  Legendary
  +7	
  Epic
  +6	
  Fantastic
  +5	
  Superb
  +4	
  Great
  +3	
  Good
  +2	
  Fair
  +1	
  Average
  0	
  Mediocre
  –1	
  Poor
  –2	
  Terrible
  Rolling
  Effort = 
  Skill + Roll.
  Effect = 
  Effort – Difficulty, 
  measured in shifts.
  Skill Competence
  Mediocre (+0) indicates a lack of either talent 
  or training. 
  Average (+1) indicates a novice level of 
  training, or a high degree of talent with no 
  formal training.
  Fair (+2) and Good (+3) indicate journey-
  man or “professional” capacity, or a nearly 
  inhuman degree of talent.
  Great (+4) and Superb (+5) indicate veteran 
  or masterful capacity, or the combination of 
  extreme talent and good training.
  Fantastic (+6) and above skirt the boundaries 
  of natural human capacity.
  Difficulty Guidelines
  A player will nearly always succeed against a diffi-
  culty of 2 less than his character’s skill without 
  needing to invoke any aspects.
  A player will usually succeed against a difficulty of 
  1 less than his character’s skill, but might need 
  to invoke an aspect on occasion.
  A player has a relatively equal chance of succeeding 
  or needing to invoke an aspect against a diffi-
  culty equal to his character’s skill.
  A player will usually need to invoke an aspect 
  to succeed against a difficulty of 1 higher than 
  his character’s skill, but has a fair chance of 
  making the roll as well.
  A player will almost always need to invoke an 
  aspect to succeed against a difficulty of 2 higher 
  than his character’s skill.
  Degrees of Success
  0 shifts = Minimal success:
  The character pulled it off. It’s neither pretty 
  nor graceful, but it works.
  1 shift = Notable success:
  This is a clear success. The character’s result is 
  solid and reliable; while it may not be inspired, 
  it is absolutely workmanlike.
  3 shifts = Significant success:
  The success is noticeably well done and of fine 
  quality, very reliable, and so on. If you use the 
  optional spin rules (page 214), this level of success 
  and higher on a defense roll generates spin.
  5+ shifts = Potent success:
  Not only is the quality of the success remark-
  able, it may have some unexpected, secondary 
  benefits, such as a deeper insight into a problem 
  at hand.
  Time 
  Increments
  instant
  a few moments
  half a minute
  a minute
  a few minutes
  15 minutes
  half an hour
  an hour
  a few hours
  an afternoon
  a day
  a few days
  a week
  a few weeks
  a month
  a few months
  a season
  half a year
  a year
  a few years
  a decade
  a generation
  a mortal lifetime
  several mortal 
  lifetimes
  and so on
  Skills & Trappings
  Alertness: Avoiding Surprise, Combat 
  Initiative, Passive Awareness
  Athletics: Climbing, Dodging, Falling, 
  Jumping, Sprinting, Other Physical 
  Actions
  Burglary: Casing, Infiltration, Lockpicking
  Contacts: Gathering Information, Getting 
  the Tip-Off, Knowing People, Rumors
  Conviction: Acts of Faith, Mental Fortitude
  Craftsmanship: Breaking, Building, Fixing
  Deceit: Cat and Mouse, Disguise, 
  Distraction and Misdirection, False Face 
  Forward, Falsehood and Deception
  Discipline: Concentration, Emotional 
  Control, Mental Defense
  Driving: Chases, One Hand on the Wheel, 
  Other Vehicles, Street Knowledge and 
  Navigation
  Empathy: Reading People, A Shoulder to 
  Cry On, Social Defense, Social Initiative
  Endurance: Long-Term Action, Physical 
  Fortitude
  Fists: Brawling, Close-Combat Defense
  Guns: Aiming, Gun Knowledge, Gunplay, 
  Other Projectile Weapons
  Intimidation: The Brush-Off, 
  Interrogation, Provocation, Social 
  Attacks, Threats
  Investigation: Eavesdropping, Examination, 
  Surveillance
  Lore: Arcane Research, Common Ritual, 
  Mystic Perception
  Might: Breaking Things, Exerting Force, 
  Lifting Things, Wrestling
  Performance: Art Appreciation, 
  Composition, Creative Communication, 
  Playing to an Audience
  Presence: Charisma, Command, 
  Reputation, Social Fortitude
  Rapport: Chit-Chat, Closing Down, 
  First Impressions, Opening Up, Social 
  Defense
  Resources: Buying Things, Equipment, 
  Lifestyle, Money Talks, Workspaces
  Scholarship: Answers, Computer Use, 
  Declaring Minor Details, Exposition 
  and Knowledge Dumping, Languages, 
  Medical Attention, Research and Lab 
  Work
  Stealth: Ambush, Hiding, Shadowing, 
  Skulking
  Survival: Animal Handling, Camouflage, 
  Riding, Scavenging, Tracking
  Weapons: Melee Combat, Melee 
  Defense, Distance Weaponry, Weapon 
  Knowledge
  You want to make copies of these two pages for your personal use? Knock yourself out!
  
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  Using Aspects (page 98)
  Invoke: 1 fate point to get a +2 or reroll 
  Compel: GM pays 1 fate point to constrain 
  and complicate, or player pays 1 fate point 
  to say no thanks to that.
  Tag: A free invoke for a character that has 
  discovered or created an aspect.
  Running Conflicts (page 197)
  Once a conflict begins, follow this regular 
  pattern.
  1. Frame the scene.
  2. Establish the groups in the conflict.
  3. Establish initiative.
  4. Begin the exchange.
  a. Take actions.
  b. Resolve actions.
  c. Repeat step 4, begin new exchange.
  Evocation (page 249)
  1.	 Determine	the	effect	you	want	to	achieve,	
  describing	the	element	you	want	to	use.
  2.	 Describe	the	effect	in	terms	of	one	of	the	
  following	 basic	 conflict	 actions:	 attack,	
  block,	maneuver,	or	counterspell.
  3.	 Decide	how	many	shifts	of	power	you	want	
  to	put	into	the	spell.	Take	1	mental	stress,	
  plus	1	for	each	point	of	power	greater	than	
  your	 Conviction	 modified	 by	 any	 power	
  bonuses	from	a	focus	item.
  4.	 Roll	Discipline	to	cast	the	spell,	plus	any	
  control	bonus	from	a	focus	item.	The	diffi-
  culty	 is	 equal	 to	 the	 power	 of	 the	 spell.	
  This	roll	is	also	used	for	targeting	if	you’re	
  aiming	it	at	a	target.		If	you	do	not	meet	
  or	beat	the	difficulty	to	control,	the	margin	
  of	failure	turns	into	shifts	of	backlash	(bad	
  things	happening	to	you)	or	fallout	(bad	
  things	happening	to	everything	else).
  Conflict Actions
  Attack: Roll against an opponent to try to inflict stress or conse-
  quences on him directly (page 200).
  Maneuver: Roll against an opponent or against a fixed difficulty 
  to try to place an aspect on the opponent or the scene (page 207).
  Block: Roll to set up a preemptive defense against a specified 
  future action; anyone committing that named action will have 
  to roll against the block to succeed (page 210).
  Sprint: Roll to change zones, with a higher roll allowing a greater 
  degree of movement (page 212).
  Each character gets one basic action per turn, but under certain 
  circumstances your character can take a supplemental action 
  and/or a free action in addition to that main action (see 
  page 213 for more details). Of course, in lieu of anything else, a 
  character may choose to just duck and cover:
  Full Defense: You can always choose to do nothing active in the 
  exchange at all; your character is assumed to be concentrating 
  entirely on defense. As such, any defense rolls you make to 
  avoid attacks or maneuvers are done at +2.
  Weapon Rating Guidelines (page 202)
  Small pocket weapons, knives, saps, and “belly 
  guns”
  Weapon:1
  Swords, baseball bats, batons, most pistols
  Weapon:2
  Two-handed weapons, oversized pistols 
  (Desert Eagle and company), rifles and shot-
  guns, most fully-automatic weapons
  Weapon:3
  “Battlefield” weaponry, explosives
  Weapon:4+
  Stress and Consequences (page 201)
  Stress = Shifts + Weapon Rating – Armor Rating
  Mild consequences cancel out 2 stress. They last for one scene 
  after recovery starts. (Examples: Bruised Hand, Nasty 
  Shiner, Winded, Flustered, Distracted.)
  Moderate consequences cancel out 4 stress. They last until the 
  end of the next session after recovery starts. Think of things 
  that are bad enough to make you say, “Man, you really should 
  go take care of that/get some rest.” (Examples: Belly Slash, 
  Bad First Degree Burn, Twisted Ankle, Exhausted, 
  Drunk.)
  Severe consequences cancel out 6 stress. They last for the next 
  scenario (or two to three sessions, whichever is longer) after 
  recovery starts. Think of things that are bad enough to make 
  you say, “Man, you really need to go to the ER/get serious 
  help.” (Examples: Broken Leg, Bad Second-Degree 
  Burn, Crippling Shame, Trauma-Induced Phobia.)
  Extreme consequences cancel out 8 stress. They’re permanent, 
  and they change an existing aspect on the character.
  Thaumaturgy (page 261)
  1.	 Determine	the	desired	spell	effect	which	
  will	determine	the	complexity	of	the	spell.
  2.	 If	complexity	>	Lore,	prepare:	make	up	the	
  deficit	by	invoking	aspects,	making	declara-
  tions,	accepting	or	inflicting	consequences,	
  or	skipping	scenes.
  3.	 After	prep,	proceed	as	with	Evocation	steps	
  3	and	4.	Repeat	each	exchange	until	total	
  power	equals	complexity.
  You want to make copies of these two pages for your personal use? Knock yourself out!
  
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  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (High Level)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  The Balance of Power
  City-Wide Themes and Threats
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Faces
  Name 
  Concept
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Faces
  Name 
  Concept
  What is the Supernatural status quo?
  Who is  
  in the know?
  Who wants to maintain the status quo?
  What is the Mundane status quo?
  Who is  
  in the dark?
  Who wants to rock the boat?
  The Status Quo
  Movers and Shakers
  The Supernatural
  The Current Order
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Faces
  Name 
  Concept
  
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  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (Locations)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  Name
  Description
   Theme (or) Threat 
  The Idea
  The Aspect
  The Face
  Name 
  Concept
  
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  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  City Sheet (Faces)
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  City Name
  Campaign Title
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  Name
  is the Face Of...
  with the High Concept...
  and Motivation...
  with these Relationships...
  
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  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Phases Worksheet
  Phase Three
  Phase Five
  Phase Four
  Phase Two
  Phase one
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Character
  Player
  Template
  High Concept Aspect
  Musts
  Trouble Aspect
  Rising Conflict: What shaped you?
  The Story: What was your first adventure?
  Guest Star: Whose Path Have You Crossed?
  Guest Star Redux: Who Else’s Path Have You Crossed?
  Background: Where did you come from?
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  Phase Aspect
  What nation, region, culture are you from? What were your family circum-
  stances like? What’s your relationship with your family? How were you 
  educated? What were your friends like? Did you get into trouble much? 
  If you’re supernatural, how early did you learn this? Were there problems?
  Who were the prominent people in your life at this point? Do you have 
  enemies? Close and fast friends? How did your high concept and trouble 
  aspects shape you and events around you? What were the most significant 
  choices you made? What lessons did you learn in this time?
  Story Title
  Guest Starring . . .
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Story Title
  Whose story was this? Who else was in it?
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  Events
  
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  Current 
  Fate Points
  Base Refresh Level
     Adjusted Refresh
  FP From Last Session
     Skill Points Spent 
  Total Available
     Power Level 
  Skill Cap
  The Dresden Files Role-Playing Game
  Character Sheet
  © 2010 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. Permission granted to make copies for personal use.
  Character
  Player
  Total Refresh 
  Adjustment
  The Ladder
  Legendary +8
  Epic 
  +7
  Fantastic 
  +6
  Superb 
  +5
  Great 
  +4
  Good 
  +3
  Fair 
  +2
  Average 
  +1
  Mediocre 
  +0
  Poor 
  –1
  Terrible 
  –2
  Aspects
  Skills
  Stunts & Powers
  Stress
  Consequences
  High Concept
  Trouble
  Other Aspects
  Superb (+5)
  # of Slots:
  Great (+4)
  # of Slots:
  Good (+3)
  # of Slots:
  Fair (+2)
  # of Slots:
  Average (+1)
  # of Slots:
   
  1 
  2 
  3 
  4 
  5 
  6 
  7 
  8
  Physical 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Endurance)
  Mental 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Conviction)
  Social 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  (Presence)
  Armor, Etc: 
  Cost Ability
  Type 
  P/m/S Stress Used? 
  Aspect
  Mild 
  ANY 
  -2 
  Moderate ANY 
  -4 
  Severe 
  ANY 
  -6 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  Extreme 
  ANY 
  -8 
   Replace Permanent
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/The Dresden Files/The Dresden Files Volume 1 Your Story.pdf