AAARG!  Help I've painted myself into a corner and I can't get out...

I have a group that I have been playing Pathfinder with every Friday for the last year and a half.  Two GMs alternate games so neither one will get burned out and they each get to play as well as GM - 2 weeks ago they both felt a little burned out and decided they needed a break at the same time soooo - having bought the Dresden Files RPG books and itching to play I decided to volunteer to GM a game and try out the system...Yeah, I'm not sure how that went.

Everyone had a good time (at least there were no complaints at the end) but I'm pretty sure I didn't use the fate points appropriately - I never got a chance to invoke an aspect and only one person used a fate point to increase a role.  We were Playing the free write up called Night Fears http://www.dresdenfilesrpg.com/2011/04/26/casefile-night-fears/ and pretty much NOTHING went as planned.  For those of you who don't know this is a 'feet-in-the-water' level game with 13-14 yr olds who stay in a haunted house on a dare and encounter ghosts.

After exploring the house and finding various clues, instead of sitting down to tell scary stories these kids decided to use all their abilities to start investigating the murder - so they skipped the entire 2nd act and just to throw in a little flavor I had Maggie's diary implicate a White Court Vampire; Skavis (hired as a gardener while Jerome was away at work) as the reason for the couples extreme despair reactions of murder and suicide. 

Well the night ended with them giving rest to the murdered baby and mother and the character who talks to ghosts found out from the father that it was the fault of the white court Vampire and tasked them with finding the fiend and making sure he didn't do this to anyone else - I threw that task out there - thinking this was a one shot and we would never see these characters again...

The Gm who's week it would have been this week has been in a motorcycle accident (he's okay but recovering - and without health insurance it may take him a longer time) so the players have asked me to run again - with the SAME 14 yr old characters...taking on a white court vampire...

I figure I can lead them a merry chase through some LESS deadly enemies on their search for the vampire - maybe some more ghosts - but I also want to play the game with more of use of the mechanics that I don't seem to be using correctly.

help help help... the game is Friday

The PCs are:
Andy Drabyk, Jock in the Making
Chris Stein, Trickster Changeling
Donny Disney, Rich boy
Jaimie Collins, Psychic Bookworm
Mike Ng, Troubled Medium
Nicky Hamonic, Steadfast Best Friend
Terry Jefferson, Devout Follower of the Shepherd (good natured cultist)

I had to ask if anyone else has adapted a sword and sorcery/fantasy game (AD&D, Warhammer 2000, Steam Punk, Whitewolf) to the Dresdenverse and how that is working out.  I really like the idea of the fate system but you have to have a lot of trust/understanding between the game master and the players - something not a lot of groups have.  Has anyone played the Dresdenverse in another time period besides the here and now?

I thought this one was interesting because it would seem like a natural off-shoot of the White Council and could be adapted to include younger versions of council members or 

http://www.pigames.net/store/product_info.php?cPath=43&products_id=538

On Her Majesty's Arcane Service   
Published by Better Mousetrap Games
Her Majesty Elizabeth, Queen of England, secretly established in 1560, the second year of her reign, the Arcane Service. The Service is composed of people, usually but not solely of magical bent, who have sworn to protect the realm from magical assault. The head of this service is Dr. John Dee, the Queen’s Astrologer, and noted Savant. He finds agents for his Service by listening to the advice of the angels, who speak to him from a peculiar mirror he has installed in his rooms, which he keeps covered in cloth when not consulting it. He has a long, pointed beard, and wears a skullcap over his thinning hair. The player characters are assumed to be agents of Doctor Dee. They are people passionately devoted to the welfare of England, and of the Queen, and unafraid of dealing with magical creatures and powerful workers of magic. At times they may be performing political missions, perhaps in other lands, perhaps in England. At other times they will be defending the realm from magical assault from foes domestic and foreign. They can function as spies, as diplomats, as magical assault squads, and as investigators - Doctor Dee is not picky about such quibbling differences. A Blood Games II game

Writers resources - anything you have used to push you forward

http://www.rhymezone.com/?loc=top

http://dictionary.reference.com/



http://www.helium.com/

http://xomba.com/

http://www.webook.com/911writersblock

the full article is here:  http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secrets-of-storytelling

Although not a new idea, going back to the psychological roots of story telling when you are stuck might be one way of finding a way out of a technical or narrative problem.

Key Concepts

   * Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.
    * These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
    * By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.

Here are some excerpts:

To study storytelling, scientists must first define what constitutes a story, and that can prove tricky. Because there are so many diverse forms, scholars often define story structure, known as narrative, by explaining what it is not. Exposition contrasts with narrative by being a simple, straightforward explanation, such as a list of facts or an encyclopedia entry. Another standard approach defines narrative as a series of causally linked events that unfold over time. A third definition hinges on the typical narrative’s subject matter: the interactions of intentional agents—characters with minds—who possess various motivations....the best stories—those retold through generations and translated into other languages—do more than simply present a believable picture. These tales captivate their audience, whose emotions can be inextricably tied to those of the story’s characters. Such immersion is a state psychologists call “narrative transport.”

...research by Green has found that people who perform better on tests of empathy, or the capacity to perceive another person’s emotions, become more easily transported regardless of the story. “There seems to be a reasonable amount of variation, all the way up to people who can get swept away by a Hallmark commercial,” Green says....Empathy is part of the larger ability humans have to put themselves in another person’s shoes: we can attribute mental states—awareness, intent—to another entity. Theory of mind, as this trait is known, is crucial to social interaction and communal living—and to understanding stories.

Perhaps because theory of mind is so vital to social living, once we possess it we tend to imagine minds everywhere, making stories out of everything. A classic 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, then at Smith College, elegantly demonstrated this tendency. The psychologists showed people an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square and asked the participants what was happening. The subjects described the scene as if the shapes had intentions and motivations—for example, “The circle is chasing the triangles.” Many studies since then have confirmed the human predilection to make characters and narratives out of whatever we see in the world around us.

But what could be the evolutionary advantage of being so prone to fantasy? “One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one,” writes Steven Pinker, a Harvard University evolutionary psychologist, in the April 2007 issue of Philosophy and Literature. Pinker goes on to argue against this claim, positing that stories are an important tool for learning and for developing relationships with others in one’s social group. And most scientists are starting to agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.

As our ancestors evolved to live in groups, the hypothesis goes, they had to make sense of increasingly complex social relationships.  Living in a community requires keeping tabs on who the group members are and what they are doing. What better way to spread such information than through storytelling?

Anthropologists note that storytelling could have also persisted in human culture because it promotes social cohesion among groups and serves as a valuable method to pass on knowledge to future generations. But some psychologists are starting to believe that stories have an important effect on individuals as well—the imaginary world may serve as a proving ground for vital social skills.

In support for the idea that stories act as practice for real life are imaging studies that reveal similar brain ac­tivity during viewings of real people and animated cha­racters. In 2007 Mar conducted a study using Waking Life, a 2001 film in which live footage of actors was traced so that the characters appear to be animated drawings. Mar used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan volunteers’ brains as they watched matching footage of the real actors and the corresponding animated characters. During the real footage, brain activity spiked strongly in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporoparietal junction, areas associated with processing biological motion. The same areas lit up to a lesser extent for the animated footage. “This difference in brain activation could be how we distinguish between fantasy and reality,” Mar says.

As psychologists probe our love of stories for clues about our evolutionary history, other researchers have begun examining the themes and character types that appear consistently in narratives from all cultures. Their work is revealing universal similarities that may reflect a shared, evolved human psyche.

“You do find these commonalities,” Gottschall says. He is one of several scholars, known informally as literary Darwinists, who assert that story themes do not simply spring from each specific culture. Instead the literary Darwinists propose that stories from around the world have universal themes reflecting our common underlying biology.

“We couldn’t even find one culture that had more emphasis on male beauty,” Gottschall notes, explaining that the study sample had three times as many male as compared with female main characters and six times as many references to female beauty as to male beauty. That difference in gender stereotypes, he suggests, may reflect the classic Darwinian emphasis on reproductive health in women, signified by youth and beauty, and on the desirable male ability to provide for a family, signaled by physical power and success.

Other common narrative themes reveal our basic wants and needs. “Narrative involves agents pursuing some goal,” says Patrick Colm Hogan, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut. “The standard goals are partially a result of how our emotion systems are set up.”

The power of stories does not stop with their ability to reveal the workings of our minds. Narrative is also a potent persuasive tool, according to Hogan and other researchers, and it has the ability to shape beliefs and change minds.  Advertisers have long taken advantage of narrative persuasiveness by sprinkling likable characters or funny stories into their commercials.

As researchers continue to investigate storytelling’s power and pervasiveness, they are also looking for ways to harness that power. Some such as Green are studying how stories can have applications in promoting positive health messages. “A lot of problems are behaviorally based,” Green says, pointing to research documenting the influence of Hollywood films on smoking habits among teens. And Mar and Oatley want to further examine how stories can enhance social skills by acting as simulators for the brain, which may turn the idea of the socially crippled bookworm on its head.

One thing is clear—although research on stories has only just begun, it has already turned up a wealth of information about the social roots of the human mind—and, in science, that’s a happy ending.

I have been to so many author interviews where some person will ask "where do you get your ideas?" and the authors usual reply is "All around me; the news, discussions with other people..."  I don't know how anyone could NOT have a story idea or two floating around in their head.

So I thought it would be good if you are having issues with a story and need a new plot development, want to practice with a story idea that is not your main one, or just saw something TRUE that you think would be a cool thing to put into a story - to have a thread dedicated to TRUE things that might be 'story worthy'.  Things that could either inspire a story, add an extra true element, stuff that could be added to an RPG game, or just discussed with like minded curious people.

Remember that even if many people have the same inspiration - it's the execution that makes it interesting, so post the site you found the Factoid on and what you think it might be used for...or, if your in a mood, what logical explanation might un-mystic and explain it.  I am reminded of the 'Sherlock Holmes' Quote that goes 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'

http://www.ancientx.com/nm/anmviewer.asp?a=75&z=1

I'd like someone somewhere sometime to explore the idea that humanity is in a constant cycle of spiritual, intellectual, and technological growth and destruction.  That humanity might have existed thousands of years ago with technologies that we are only guessing at today and somehow we lost them through war or attrition or just plain stupidity

part of that link:

Out-of-Place Metal Objects
Humans were not even around 65 million years ago, never mind people who could work metal. So then how does science explain semi-ovoid metallic tubes dug out of 65-million-year-old Cretaceous chalk in France? In 1885, a block of coal was broken open to find a metal cube obviously worked by intelligent hands. In 1912, employees at an electric plant broke apart a large chunk of coal out of which fell an iron pot! A nail was found embedded in a sandstone block from the Mesozoic Era. And there are many, many more such anomalies.

What are we to make of these finds? There are several possibilities:

    * Intelligent humans date back much, much further than we realize.
    * Other intelligent beings and civilizations existed on earth far beyond our recorded history.
    * Our dating methods are completely inaccurate, and that stone, coal and fossils form much more rapidly than we now estimate.

In any case, these examples - and there are many more - should prompt any curious and open-minded scientist to reexamine and rethink the true history of life on earth.

It seems to me that there are many different types of magic that could be used for aspects in the game.  Consider Mortimer Lindquist the Ectomancer.  Harry has said he is a conjurer.  What kind of magic description conforms with what kind of uses of magic and what kind of actual magics are there?

We know there is a Life magic that Harry and the White Council use most of the time.  We know there is Death magic (used in Dead Beat) that is looked down on but NOT forbidden by the white council.  Which of these does Ectomancy fall under?

Are there other forms of magic besides Life and Death?  What is Carlos using with his green shield and glove with the Aztec symbols on it?


So many questions....