28. Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?
29. How about a quintet or a decalogue?

This guy doesn't miss a trick, does he?

What you're probably looking for is Spirit of the Century. Indications are that, while it won't be exactly like The Dresden Files RPG, it will be similar enough to start on. And, from all accounts, it's a pretty good game on its own.  But wait, there's more - a stripped down version of the rules is available for free, here.

The sample city is Baltimore, I believe. There's no word on additional books (it's a tad early to be worrying about that anyway  ), and as for the character types . . .

This list is a little light on the faeriekind, but that's mainly because this is the list of "definitely-yes" player character types, and the faeries live on the "maybe-yes" list:

Pure Mortal
Champion of God
Changeling
Emissary of Power
Focused Practitioner
Knight of a Faerie Court (* Might be a maybe, depending on what all's entailed here)
Lycanthrope
Minor Talent
Red Court Infected
Sorcerer
True Believer
Were-Form
White Court Vampire
White Court Virgin
Wizard

I don't know if this has been pointed out (I didn't see it; I did check first!), or how relevant it may be, as, like the eBay thing, it could easily be a case of real-time circumstances, but in Fool Moon Harry mentions driving by Cook County Hospital:

"I drove past Cook County Hospital, a virtual city of its own inside Chicago," (Fool Moon, 39, paperback).

Cook Country was replaced in late 2002/early 2003 with the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, which Harry mentions in Small Favor:
 
"The Stroger building, the new hospital that has replaced the old Cook County complex as Chicago’s nerve center of medicine" (Small Favor, 392, hardcover).

I'd say this places Fool Moon pre-2003 (I am tempted to extrapolate on the fact that no mention of the construction adjacent to Cook County was made, but that's just me getting too caught up), and Small Favor after, possibly recently after.

Seems solid to me. When did the construction on the Stroger building begin? If Fool Moon takes place in October of 2002, that only leaves one, maybe two months until it opens. OTOH, if it takes place in 2001, that leaves a full year and a bit.

Also, it just occured to me that the first chapters of Grave Peril also take place at Cook, almost exactly a year later. this would seem to force the issue, dating Grave Peril to 2002 and Fool Moon, and consequently Storm Front, to 2001 - literally, "The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium".

Now, it could certainly be argued that the Grave Peril reference is to the Stroger Hospital (Wikipedia notes that it's also called "New Cook County Hospital"), but I do like the idea that the series starts out right on top of the 21st century, on purely personal grounds.

I'm tempted to combine that with the mention of "that pirate movie" (Small Favor, 77 hardcover), which is vague enough that it may or may not have been released in July 2003, and put Small Favor at the end of 2003. (Mind, there was another "pirates" movie that was released in 2005 that I can quite imagine Bob wanting to see, but I can't quite imagine it showing at a drive-in in Aurora, or Harry sitting through it with a pervy skull on the dashboard.)

The problem with this is that it compresses all the books between Fool Moon (or Grave Peril) and Small Favor into one year (2003). This is clearly impossible, as numerous places in the books (referenced in the timeline) refer to months passing between each book - I believe the longest gap is between Death Masks and Blood Rites, which if I'm reading right seems to be more than a year and a half.

However, there was more than one "that pirate movie", the latest of which came out in 2007 and, assuming Small Favor takes place in November 2009* (!), that leaves plenty of time for it to trickle down to the drive-in, which I assume probably isn't very high on the blockbuster distribution chain. Actually, by that logic, it could, in fact, be the first "pirate movie". 

*The Timeline has it at the eighth year after Storm Front.

Aha, Were-Form - good way to put it. 

Well, the first two events that came to mind were the recent attempted curse on the Yankees, and that meteor in Peru that had everyone in an uproar last fall.

Here's a big list of such weird events.

Anybody want to Dresdenify this phenomenon? 

Insert Quote
Vindication awoke hungover, disgruntled and proceeded to emasculate another abbreviated news clip.  Exasperated with tiresome drivel constantly quoting Garfield he searched in vain for immaculate reporting.  Valiantly ignoring vivacious vixens with the biggest, loudest dance-routines, he decided not to apply logic, rather to invoke vainglorious abortions of dogmatic speeches that did exterminate any chance and distinguished Camembert from those devious dairy turncoats.  What the hell!  Flinging a piece of Havarti and starting a stirring of goulash, he felt intensely satisfied that he wasn't medicated; however, his defenestration and subsequent resurrection memory-loss had constructed a tuba symphony.  This unwittingly surprised him. So much unexpected noise!

I'm hoping to have a little more ambiguity than just good and bad. Yes - there are some pretty obvious bad guys, but for example was Bianca really bad? . . . How about Molly? If you ask Morgan he might well put her in the evil camp. So might the Merlin.

True, but the very fact that I said "good guys" and "bad guys" instead of "heroes" and "villains" (or even "protagonists" and "antagonists") indicates the effect that sort of dramatic twist that a scenario like what I attempted to describe would generate.