In the novels, ghost dust seems to make ghosts "stick" to the moral world and keeps them from retreating off to the Nevernever. It is implied that if you kill a ghost without doing something to keep it from escaping off to the Nevernever, killing it just leaves behind a bunch of ectoplasm behind while the ghost goes back to the Nevernever and can cause further problems later. However, if you kill a ghost in the Nevernever it stays dead. AFAIK this is the canon.

In the RPG ghosts have physical immunity unless they acknowledge you and ghost dust is treated as something that works as a catch for this physical immunity and it also penetrates any lesser immunities that they have in the Nevernever.

Unless I'm missing something, the RPG stats for ghost dust don't seem to quite jive with the novel's description of how ghost dust work. How would you make them line up? Probably the clearest way would be to do a maneuver with ghost dust that hits the ghost with an Aspect of "ghost dust is causing me to stick to the real world" and go from there with the mechanics.

Any other ideas on this issue?

I know we won't get our hands on our pre-order PDFs until at least April, but I have too many ideas bouncing around my head that want to get out. Due to my one year-old son and my bizarre work schedule it’s going to be hard for me to schedule many games with my regular playgroup so I’m going to try running a forum-based (or possibly play by e-mail) game. My schedule is too unpredictable (especially when summer hits) to have regularly scheduled voice chat games but I have a good bit of random free time in between my various jobs, so I'd be able to run a forum or email game at a good fast pace.

The sorts of games I’d be interested in running:

A. Dresden in Asia: Asia would be a great place to run a Dresden Files game since there’s so much fodder for supernatural plots and being set well away from Chicago lets the players keep out of Harry’s shadow. The Dresden Files calls out to be set in a big city and I know Seoul very well and it’s really a great setting for an RPG.

Seoul was chosen as the site for the capital because it is supposedly a nexus of geomantic forces (in Dresden Files term: ley line central). Korea has a long history of being caught in the middle between great powers so there’ll be all kinds of Russian, Chinese and Japanese influence as well as the local Korean stuff as well as there being an American army base smack in the middle of the city. For plot fodder there’s a Stalinist dictatorship just north of the suburbs, Buddhism, very strong Christianity, Taoism, Shamanism, strange cults by the fistful (Moonies!), incredibly powerful corporate conglomerates run by secretive families that mostly marry each other, wacky internet culture, plenty of awesome movies (Korean cinema is incredible) to steal plot ideas from and a thousand urban legends. Also I can go out and take pictures of some adventure locations.

The general tone of this campaign would be pretty similar to that of the Dresden Files (Noir-ish investigation). The party could either be a miscellaneous group united mostly by their desire to keep people from being hurt by the supernatural (like Dresden & friends), mortals in over their heads or members of a supernatural faction of some sort.

B. Viking Age Historical Campaign: Vikings are a lot of fun to play since stereotypical Viking hero behavior often sounds a whole lot like stereotypical PC behavior. More than any other book I’ve ever read when, when I read the Saga of Egil Skallagrimsson, I hear a GM in my head yelling at the main character, “you’re doing WHAT now?” and reaching for something strong. Viking magic is also a good fit for Dresden magic since a lot of it would carry over without any work at all (just tone down the flashy stuff, focus a lot on Thaumaturgy and swap out potions for runes while keeping the rules basically the same).

For this campaign I’d run something long on the Icelandic Sagas and short on the Eddas, i.e. lots of bloody local conflicts, telling people who killed your father to prepare to die, Viking raids, runes, berserkers, shape-shifters, witchery and the undead but keeping the large-scale mythical stuff in the background. The overall feel would be low-powered, gritty and relatively historically accurate.

C. The 17th Century Turned up to 11: take the 17th Century and then throw out historical accuracy and base things on the Rule of Cool and Dresdenisms instead. That means Jesuits with secret kung-fu brought back by Matteo Ricci, The Pirates of the Caribbean, The Three Musketeers, Solomon Kane, the Thirty Years War, witching burnings, Red Court conquistadores vs. Mayan human sacrifice, etc. etc. The PCs would be globetrotting adventurers of some sort.

D. Sword and Sorcery: from what I’ve seen so far the Dresden RPG magic system would work well for more traditional fantasy and the stunt rules seem flexible enough to cover all kinds of critters and powers. Trying this would with some Sword and Sorcery (inspired by Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser especially) could be fun. We could use the Dresden city rules to create a Lankhmar/Ankh-Morpork-style fantasy city state to start in and the rest of the world would be full of corrupt tyrants, wild tribes, degenerate semi-humans, the remnants of lots civilizations, cults of demon gods and all of that fun stuff. The map would mostly be left blank except for various cool locations that the players would think up (most world creation would be done by the players, not me) and would be slowly filled in through play.

What are people interested in?