It was pretty funny when Lefleur chased the vampires who had just been grappling him and otherwise dishing out the pain.  If he was losing outside against them, changing the venue shouldn't make much difference.  I think his player was mostly frustrated, since he kept missing everything.

I had one trick planned in the roof battle, but Lenny didn't cooperate.  When Tim the vampire sniper (stolen right from the rulebook), I was thinking of switching back to normal and then detonating the explosives we had planted there.  But Lenny never moved his ass until after Tim was down, so he would have been in the zone too.  It may have served him right though.  

I had thought about investigating the convent.  But I thought it would just be more of her paranoia (are the people John says help the victims really treating them?) than anything bad actually happening, and it seemed like there was tons of stuff going on already.  So I was like, "sounds like something to bring up next adventure." And now they're all dead.  

Temper let the vampire go because she wouldn't have been able to one shot it with a gun.  So it just would have run away, and then John would have been pissed she ruined his whole 'let's talk about this' deal.  But if she had known the full story on Rothchild...  

The holy water "acid" flasks are still funny.  No one even knew better to correct her, either.  

Regarding John's focus item, I was assuming that it had already been transferred away from the police station during the interrogation - it makes sense the vampires might want to get their hands on it or destroy it.  So trying to trick the Lt into drinking the antivenom wouldn't have helped in that case.  Obviously, that wasn't the case, so leaving it behind looks kind of dumb.  But from our PoV, it could have been anywhere, and not just in the trash right behind the station.  

Temper had never taken a consequence while monstered up before that fight.  Supernatural Toughness is pretty damn tough as long as you aren't facing serious evocation specialists.

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Outstanding issues/things to do:

Have someone keep an eye on Rothchild.  His knowledge is pretty dangerous if he seeks out more vampires.  Fortunately, most of them aren't as modern as Maya - her different sensibilities made her a serious long term threat (John and Temper actually prioritized her over the Count before she was a noble) - so he might have trouble finding buyers.

Try to find Jimbo's backer.  Looking into the boat he was robbing might help.  I had Temper check into any land deals going on and came up blank, so his new partner didn't seem to be using Walter's strategy.

Eh.  A baseball bat is Weapon 2 and seems to lend itself to inflicting bruises and knockouts.  A .45 pistol is also Weapon 2, and seems to lend itself to more bleeding wounds and death.  Clearly, weapon rating, while generally indicative of how effective something is at taking out enemies, doesn't necessarily indicate intent or what kind of damage people take. 

A wizard's non lethal lightning blast could be designed to use the same principles as a taser so it incapacitates instead of kills even with high power.  Generally speaking, of course.  Accidents do happen.  And someone might be justified in Declaring that the non-lethal spell might be less effective against an inhuman physiology.  Maybe the rubbery bat body of a RCV just isn't bothered by high voltage, or microwave beams, whatever - so if you want to have full effect against monsters, you have to risk death to innocents.

Regarding Lefleur: In a way, he's the odd man out of the group. John's a Warden who fights monsters. Temper is a Denarian who wants to use her evil powers to fight monsters (and other bad guys). Ignatius beats up scary dark monsters with nothing more than a pair of metal sticks. And Lenny is some nut who'll use any excuse to blow something up (like monsters). And then he'll gut them for alchemy components.

LF, on the other hand, is less motivated by fighting monsters and often more motivated by personal gain. His Trouble is basically Sometimes Does the Right Thing, implying that he more often does not do the right thing. Just kind of interesting. Anyway, the final scene with Lefleur was essentially put together to let him use his top skill to solve the situation, his Superb Deceit, instead of the violence we more typically see as the final solution to problems (every Dresden book tends to end with a big fight saving the day). So he beat up Machete Dan socially instead.

I think group cohesion could be really helped if we caught Lefleur taking some Compels on his trouble, so we could see some of his good side.

Elly is pretty badass.  For essentially being designed around the fast flight + Guns gimic, she has some surprising versatility with Glamors+Deceit for general trickiness and social conflict.  Elly is pretty resilient too, with Good Endurance and Inhuman Toughness - 6 Stress boxes and 6 dodging means she can actually take one of John's 8/8 lightning attacks with only a moderate consequence.  Not exactly great, but still better than most enemies, and she'd probably just want to live long enough to run away.

Victim: maybe the point of Ghost Dad IS that he's an obvious hallucination. Use your imagination.

Yeah, I mentioned that I could think of a few benefits:

An obvious illusion could be used to cover up a few more subtle alterations.  OTOH, once she figures it out, the whole thing becomes a lot less likely to work. 

Or creating the impression of mental illness or influence could be the goal. 

The party could have gone better.    John's brother was attempting to influence the guests against him.  With John helping to negotiate, Lefleur reaches a settlement with Machete Dan.  Temper, after consulting with occult expert Lenny, decides that John is being mentally influenced by Lefleur.  Then she contacts his boss using the information from when John checked in after restarting the war and nearly getting blown up...  Lefleur notices her absence, however, and he and John confront her.  She is asked to leave.  Lenny convinces some people to try out some of his beauty products that "don't quite have FDA approval yet," covering up the actual magic nature of his business.

Oh, and the caterer drugged the wine with vampire venom.  John, fearing an attack, goes all Batman Begins and insults the guests until they leave.  Too bad the whole point was to addict the other rich and influential people. 

Good times.  And to think John was just worried about getting his house burned down.

Don't most cities have highways looping around them?  It's not a special feature of Atlanta, even if you do have a nickname for it.

Fire, in terms of heat direction, seems to make sense for creating Ice.  There's no Ice element to infringe upon.

Yeah, I just messed around with Beast Change.  Temper could go from the skills listed early to these sets:

Temper, human form:
5: 0
4: Alertness, Athletics, Discipline
3: Guns, Craftsmanship, Deceit, Empathy
2: Fists, Scholarship, Stealth, Investigate
1: Conviction, Presence, Endurance, Lore, Survival

Temper, monster scorpion form
5: Fists, Might
4: Alertness, Discipline
3: Stealth, Endurance, Athletics
2: Scholarship, Empathy, Survival
1: Conviction, Presence, Lore, Deceit

+1 Fists over the current build, and +4 Might.  Ouch.  Temper gets better speed and dodging normally, and more guns.  I'm not sure increasing Endurance is all that great, since 7 stress boxes and Armor 2 makes her quite a tank already.  But what else would go there?

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I wonder who the new summer knight will be?

That statement is in direct response to Victim's post, but still I stand by it.  If you want to play a game where you can tweak and twist the rules to make a broken characters then there are MANY systems out there that allow and even encourage that.  Fate is not one of those systems, in fact everything about the system is about working together with other players and the GM to create an interesting story and the rules are just a vague tool to facilitate that.  Therefore, if you create a character trying to get the most power with the least disadvantage by seeking out aspects that hurt your allies and their players ability to enjoy the game then you are flat out doing it wrong.

Note here, I'm not a Fate system fanboy, Dresden is in fact the first time I've tried the system, I prefer more 'crunchy' rules sets like Shadowrun and Champions, but if you read the rules to this game you see that there is a clear intention to avoid the pitfalls of mechanics based RPGs.

Your Story is like 400 pages.  Several hundred pages of that are rules.  This isn't exactly an ultra light game, even if some of the underlying mechanics are pretty simple. 

If you don't want players to pick Aspects that can screw over other characters (which will often happen without any special design - wizard vs mortal tech, for instance), then why have the reward structure encourage it.  When the wizard hexes his mortal friend's nightvision goggles, you're saying that the magical parts of the story are more important than the mortal preparation parts - essentially giving priority to the wizard's story.  And then you're giving the wizard a bonus to further control the story.  I'm not saying the wizard should get the fate point.

Similarly, in the examples, we can see that a sort of team Aspect is already really good since it can be invoked a lot.  But it's reasonable not to have one.  However, if the only way for the mortal to get any kind of compensation when a magical thingy ruins what he was trying to do is to have the team aspect, then you're pretty much forcing the character to take an aspect like that.

Note that on page 21, Biff getting kidnapped out of the blue is a Compel on his Dumb Luck.  It's a not Compel on Maya's "Biff, you jerk..." aspect, even though she's getting stood up.  Getting ambushed is bad, and the fate point is going to the person who suffers most.

Molly Carpenter = Carpenter Kid (Can be invoked to represent her family getting into trouble), Harry Dresden's Apprentice (Can be invoked to drag her along on Harry's cases)

Susan = Former lover of Harry Dresden can be invoked to force her to interact with her past

Rawlings = Murphy's Partner (Probably invoked in every story to get him into some weirdness).

Amazing.  In a novel series with one main character and many recurring supporting cast, we can see that lots of secondary characters have strong relationships to the main character, and tertiary characters are often tied to secondary characters.  Notice the lack of reciprocal aspects - Harry has no special aspect for Murphy or Susan.  Murphy has no Aspect for being Rawling's partner (or rather it's within the top 15 most important things about her, versus within the top 6 important things about Rawlings).  Harry is the main character.  Susan and Murphy are tied into the story because of their relationship with him.  Rawlings is in the story because of his relationship with Murph, who is Harry's friend.

Generally, this tells us NOTHING about gaming.  There's usually not one main character, so that kind of structure isn't helpful.