The Dresden Files > DFRPG
the Dresden Files in a Government Town
Knave:
--- Quote from: Ihadris on March 07, 2010, 06:31:07 AM ---Im loving the idea of the Fae signing on with the magna carta and having their own house of lords! You had any thought about adapting any other bits of English history?
--- End quote ---
Hiya - well yes and no. There is a trap of putting every historical event down to supernatural causes and I'm trying to avoid it, so for now I'm just thinking in broad stroke 'game seeds' and adding more stuff as and when.
-In my mind I've got the various orders and chapters of masons re-enacting ancient traditions, but the traditions were taught by ancient wizards and are integral to massive spells that can be tapped by practioners with the right knowledge. - It's a seed that can be used in a few ways:
1) Someone is knocking off anyone involved in a particular branch of masonry... players have to figure that out, then figure out why, and then what the tradition is for, and who might be able to use it / be harmed by it.
2) Someone is using massive power by tapping one of these things... Disciples of Kemmler or similar?
3) One of these things have been lost and needs to be re-established to combat badass de jour.
-Saint George and the Dragon => Knight of the Cross... seems pretty likely to me... ; ) It may be a myth, but I figure if humans can leave ghosts then so can dragons... :P A PC with a dead dragon in his belly seems like a pretty unusual character concept...
-If there is also a Faerie parliament, who was Guy Fawkes really after?
--etc etc. endless plot ideas, and the risk of cheese... ;)
Ancalagon:
One of the thing that would make it harder in Ottawa I find is that the murder rate here is so low. We have about 12 murders per year - so that's 1.2 murder per 100 000 inhabitant. Washington has 30 per 100 000 inhabitant, and Chicago has about half that.
This makes the whole notion of predators hiding in the night a bit odder, as well, each murder is quite the big thing here. But that may be an opportunity as well - why is the murder rate so low? Is there a Dresden explanation?
I'm working on one ... but I hesitate to use it because it's erm, un-PC and political.
SoulCatcher78:
Check the statistics for missing persons and you find your pool of candidates.
Deadmanwalking:
Yeah, missing persons is the standard Dresden Universe explananation, I think it's gone into explicitly in Dead Beat (reference is made to the number of missing persons who are never found being the same proportion of the population that herd animals lose from predators).
Monster kills actually don't tend to wind up listed as murders, for a variety of reasons, from the fact that the bodies are usually either clearly killed by a wild animal, or completely gone in one way or another (either eaten or disposed of somehow) to, in the case of more subtle predators such as the White Court, the fact that they show up as heart failure or something relatively innocuous like that.
Douglas:
If you dan't want to post your ideas but still want feedback, feel free to PM me. I'll just post my stuff here for the moment.
what Deadmanwalking and SoulCatcher78 said about missing persons, plus suicides. Children abducted by trolls or the victims of house Raith are unlikely to show up in murder statistics. I've been able to get a look at a crime map of Ottawa's missing persons cases and there are plenty, about 300 in the last 30 days. Even given that most of those people will be found and the causes will be quite mundane in the real world, in the Dresdenverse some of those people may have been taken into the nevernever, or their bodies were disposed of and never found. I haven't been able to track down suicide figures yet; and all I have to go on are the stories from some guys I knew on a rowing team and the number of times they saw bodies first thing in the morning on the canal or Dow's lake, but that may be a biased sample.
The low rate of violent death in Ottawa makes it unlikely we have any numbers of Black court vampires or ghouls around, but that leaves a lot of options. There is a fair amount of variation in the styles of various Red court vampires; Bianca left a trail of bodies, while Ortega was very controlled in the matter of feeding. He kept deaths to a minimum and kept a captive community for his vassals to feed on. If the city does have Reds they probably act in a similar way, confining their feeding to poorer areas of the city (Vanier? Hintonburg?) and using cash and threats to buy the silence of their blood supply. Or if you prefer a darker route, and don't mind borrowing from White Wolf, they may have simply grabbed people no one would miss and keep them caged like battery hens someplace secret; maybe someplace outside of town off a side-road. The Raith don't have to go to those lengths, their feeding is usually non-lethal and when they do kill it probably doesn't look like murder.
One thing I can say is that if this city had a supernatural presence, they would not be sloppy. Ortega or Lara could survive here, Mavra or Bianca would likely cause too much disruption and draw too much notice. Subtler actors and manipulators would find it easier to move about here, provided they were careful enough in cleaning up after themselves.
As far as a element of conflict goes, Ottawa weather suggests we may be a battleground for the Winter and Summer courts. I doubt either of them is responsible for hushing up the fallout of those battles, besides weird and unseasonal heat waves and cold snaps, but that still leaves plenty of options for string-pullers. A government organization could be a potential candidate there, but given powers of the vampires and the sidhe I find it unlikely that such a group could remain [1] hidden, and [2] uncorrupted.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version