I've been reading the Dresden Files books, following the threads here with great interest and am now ready to try statting out characters. I've had my fill of wizards from the books and am more interested in the magical one-trick ponies and mercs like Binder, Kincaid or Tam Veda (artifact dealer from one of the better Dresden Files fics). I like the sandbox but want to import stuff from outside it.

In that vein, I'm going with Tito from William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, specifically the second book Spook Country. I've been fascinated with the character since I read it back in 2007. This gives me the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by experimenting with DFRPG character creation and doing it with a non-DF character.

Here's my (somewhat confused) attempt at statting him out:

Name: Tito
High Concept: Semi-reluctant Santeria Superspy
Trouble: Wanted by the US Government (?)*
Other Aspects: Loyal to the Family, Never Without a God, Soldier in the Cold Civil War, The Journey is the Destination, My Music is a Comfort, Doesn't Like to Fly, Large Family No Surnames, Beautiful in Motion, In Between Everything, Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane(?)

STUNTS AND POWERS
-1 Marked By Power** (Initiate of the Guerreros)
-1 Inhuman Speed (Limitation: when channeling the Guerreros)
-1 Martial Artist
-1 Tradecraft
-1 Not Entirely Unlike Parkour
-2 Perfect Aim (Limitation: when channeling Oshosi)
-1 Crypsis By Perpetual Motion (Tito's training and the gifts of the Guerreros let him blend into crowds)
-1 The Street As One Animal (The Guerreros grant Tito a kind of enhanced pattern recognition, letting him spot tails easily; when channeling Oshosi; can be used in conjunction with Crypsis By Perpetual Motion)

Firearms - he should have decent Firearms; he's well-trained but hasn't had much occasion to actually shoot anyone
Athletics - his greatest talent, he backtucks and monkey-vaults like the rest of us breathe
Contacts (intelligence) - his Contacts are the rest of his family and their Contacts are vast and deep.

Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer. He's pretty in an almost feminine sort of way, agile, quick hands, looks like a very serious fifteen-year-old. He belongs to a multi-racial family (Cuban-Chinese by way of Russia) that are variously referred to as illicit facilitators, freelance spies and the world's smallest crime family.

Among other things, they use one-shot pneumatic pistols (hand-made by a long-dead Bulgarian) that shoot salt cartridges. When they move house, they scrub everything forensically speaking. Mattresses, presumed to contain skin flakes and DNA traces, go to the landfill. It's funny how there are so many parallels between the tradecraft of espionage types and supernatural countermeasures. For the purposes of the Dresdenverse, we can make his family supernaturally clued-in.

In addition to his "systema" (as it is referred to within the family) which is a combination of pseudo-parkour and Cold War-era tradecraft (both of which he was trained to from a very early age), Tito practices Santeria, one of the many Afro-Caribbean religions that merge Yoruba traditional religion with other stuff (in this case, the veneration of Catholic saints.) The gods or orishas (Tito follows the Guerreros***) mount/possess their more worthy initiates.

The way the book is written, the orisha may be geniune supernatural entities or just a form of deliberately-induced DID that helps Tito better focus his skillset.
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So. What am I missing? I don't have the PDFs or anything; I'm basically doing this using other people's character sheets as templates. The numbers are almost certainly wrong and so forth.


*_{As he currently stands, I can't quite figure out a decent Trouble for him yet; Spook Country was a very low key book that way.}
**_{I'm undecided as to whether to keep this at all. Not reflected in the original text but might make sense when porting him here. Is it possible for Marked By Power to be behavioral instead of literal i.e. no glowing facial tattoos?}
***_{THE GUERREROS
Eleggua: Opener of the ways, lets you access the others, precognition apparently (that business with the ICE badge)
Ogun: As Eleggua opens every road, so Ogún clears each road with his machete. God of iron and wars, of labor; owner of every technology. The number seven, colors green and black,
Oshosi: Hunter and scout of the Orishas: the colors blue and yellow, the number three and seven
Osun: whose role was mystery}

Suppose a wizard (perhaps Harry) were to attempt to attack someone inside a home with a nice strong threshold (let's say the Carpenter home.) If the wizard threw a fireball at the open doorway, would it get through? As in, would the threshold stop it, slow it down, weaken it or have no effect?

There are plenty of ways to make piles of money with magic without so much as skirting the Laws. Tracking spells and/or ferromancy to find buried treasure/sunken ships/gold or diamond mines. Doing the same thing Harry does but for a more exclusive and better-paying clientele. Potions. Rare plants. Healing magic. Bodyguarding (as Gard demonstrates.) The list goes on.

Anyway! Let's assume our hypothetical wizard, desirous of Being Cool (to say nothing of all the modern conveniences), is less of a self-flagellating martyr than Harry Dresden. What measures does he/she take to ensure this? Big-screen TV not required, but doable.

Transport - Harry drives an ancient Beetle. A wealthier wizard could probably manage to drive a 1968 Chevy Impala (like a certain other supernatural troubleshooter) or a 1956 Chevy Corvette. If the pre-WWII thing is really that absolute (as opposed to a mere function of the technological complexity), then why not a WWII Jeep like on the TV show*?
Apartment - get a frickin' house. Or a bungalow. Or a cabin in the woods. Or a farm. That way, you're not endangering your neighbours and you can build a better threshold.
Modern conveniences: warding circles and lots of them. Better yet, get all your electronics close together and put them in one big warding circle. Since anything including wires crossing the circle will break its sanctity, hook them up with a bank of car batteries inside the circle. Bam. Problem solved. As a bonus, it even let the wizard use wifi. A voice interface takes care of the rest.
We know circles are normally powered by blood and will and, yes, having to cut yourself every time you want to watch TV would be inconvenient. Even Hand however provides a solution. That story had Gard using the "sorcerous equivalent of a nine-volt battery"** to power one for Marcone.

What else else could the wizard who wants everything do to ensure a life more comfortable than Dresden's?




*_{That was one of the few things the show did right IMO}.
**_{Yeah, so maybe it contains a Schrondinger Cat with its throat cut. Who knows how Gard does things?}

Is anyone using The Order of St. Giles, Venatori Umbrorum, Venators, Prosthanos Society or the Stygian Sisterhood (latter two both from Backup) in their games? Invented any new ones? Borrowed/reskinned any from other settings? I for one fully intend to throw in the Order of Teraka from Buffy at some point: an ultra-egalitarian assassin cult full of everything from changelings and scions to warlocks and badass normal vanilla types would fit into the Dresdenverse perfectly.