The only leap is a council that is largely clued up and more awareness then Chigcago's  council was part of Anclagon's original premise.

Well, I'm not entirely sure what you are saying here - my premise was that IF the government knows about the supernatural, the effects and impact of that knowledge would be most keenly felt in the Nation's Capital.

Anyway, I must admit that this thread has given me a number of ideas, especially the Queen and Fairies part.  In Canada we have a Governor General, who is the Queen's Official Representative (we *are* a constitutional monarchy, after all).  The idea that the office of the Governor General - usually seen as purely ceremonial - is actually the one that is aware of supernatural issues is just too good not to use

Hello

I'm going to talk about Ottawa here, but really what I'm about to say would apply to Washington DC as well (or London, Paris, any National capital).

The assumption in the Dresden files so far is that the government knows little, if any, about the supernatural.  This is made somewhat easy by the novels being located in Chicago - ie NOT the national capital.

However, I'm planning on running my game in Ottawa - Canada's capital.  If there is any sort of government agency, awareness or anything - even if it's pretty limited - it's going to have quite an impact in Ottawa itself, and therefore on how the game is run. 

If anyone has any advice on running the game in "Government Town", I'm all ears

Hello

I hope this hasn't been already covered.  If so, I apologize. 

So I've been thinking about this Aspect part of the game, and how it is important.  I see that the better aspects are those with both a good and bad side - something as simple as "HULK SMASH!" would work quite well.

This isn't the first system to have a "disadvantage" aspect.  In Hero, it is seriously beneficial to take disadvantages to get more points.  But a lot of the disadvantages are story or role-playing related (as opposed to other system, where people create munchkiny hunched-back diabetic club footed monstrosities of characters).  And that was ok - the disadvantages were mostly character creation tools really.

When we were playing, we noticed that we rarely had to "roll" for these during play (as in the GM saying "roll to see if you lose your temper"), as the players would just roleplay their characters faults along with the good.   So to me, if I have a PC with "hulk smash" as an aspect, the GM shouldn't have to compel me to lose my temper - as a good roleplayer, I should have my PC lose his temper anyway!

So... how does it work?  Should the GM hand out fate points every time a player roleplays the negative aspects of his PC? 

If you want to see "golem magic" *fully* developed, I recommend the following

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Council by China Miéville.

One of the main character is basically a golem maker, but he does far more with his magic than just make animated lumps of clay.  He animates iron spikes so he can nail them in with one blow for example.  He makes gunpowder golems.  It's a challenging book - very heavy, political angles, grim at times - but China Miéville has an incredible vision of magic. 

that was neat, and I'm looking forward to part 2!

the cities of Europe have such rich history that it must be really neat designing a Dresden-city... although some of that history may be things you want to skirt around. 

North American cities are much newer and "thinner" history wise, but in general they are a lot less bloodier.  While it may be "fun" to say that "ooh, the firestorm in Dresden in WWII was caused by a battle between fire elementalists!"... it might be a bit crass.  I'm really not sure what to do with that kind of historical events.

There are a lot of cool ideas in "alternate" comic books...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Hawksmoor_%28comics%29   the "king of cities".  He can walk around barefoot because there is never any glass where he happens to step, masonry will fall on his enemies etc.   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Sparks : the spirit of the 20th century (... oh yeah...)

etc etc.

so Harry at the beginning of the series was already at the "submerged" level of power?  dang....