You might want to see if you can pick up Vancouver: Secrets of the City (by Shawn Blore, I see its on Amazon) - it has some interesting factoids & weird bits about Vancouver like the large water caverns that serve as a reservoir under Queen Elizabeth Park, the real spiritual starting point of Vancouver, and the tunnel mazes that run under the city in and around the Pender area. There's some unexpectedly cool stuff about this city that you'd never imagine

In the version of Vancouver our group is drawing up for our Dresdenverse (with obvious inspiration from Big Trouble In Little China, hehe)

A key feature that spun out of the enormous Chinese population here is Chinatown, and its shadow, Chinatown Below, which connects to all the other Chinatowns and their Chinatowns Below in the world. It even connects to the Richmond Night Market on the nights it is on during the summer, and it has ever-changing gates to important Chinese subcommunities in and around the Lower Mainland (the gate-keepers are grumpy too, and some of the gates are rivers and you need ferryboats to cross them. But it's a fast way to travel and it beats BC Transit!)

It has drawn in ghosts, spirits and minor godlings from the Celestial Bureaucracy, and they have been bumping shoulders with the totems and spirits of the Coast Salish who were the First. Amongst those are they who think that they should be the Only, but the lines to the Jewel of the Northwest are many, and the Celestial Bureaucracy are only a few of the many Immigrant Gods who have come ashore (one key theme in our City is that it is a melting pot of many peoples, and its not just the people who have come...the recent influx of Japanese and Korean, for example, have added new complications to the mythic status quo)

Within that are the politics and machinations of the many wheels and wheels-within-wheels in the Bureaucracy; Vancouver is a prized outpost and there are many jockeying to exert their own control.

The Jade Court is also here, and although you have to look hard for them, their control and power is subtle and deep. Anyone of any power though, will have to deal with them at some point...

There's also something really cool about the insular nature of Chinatown and its shadow Below - its literally another world, with smoky interiors, exotic smells, strange glass jars of mysterious creatures in apocatheries and the storefronts Above whose doorways lead to temples and shrines instead of other rooms. Narrow stairways that fall backward in time and space. Lanterns that never stop burning because they anchor a reference point for those who live there. Marketplaces with wicker cages of chicken and pigs, blind beggars who earn their coin with sword demonstrations, monkeys that chatter from the rafters above teahouses. There are bamboo forests in courtyards and lotus-covered pools and fountains where snake goddesses live. They would tell your fortune if you wish... for a small favour of course.

So if you go into Chinatown... beware. And watch which alleys you are stepping into...

And that's all before we take into account the wealth and complex tapestry of the Coast Salish mythology, which makes up the fundamental fabric of the Nevernever in that part of the World. Many of them want to flex their muscle, and awaken the sleeping giant who would shake the world and remake it (this is tied to the Big Earthquake that's yet to come, which all of us who live here are kind of waiting to happen)

Also our game is set about 5 or 6 years before the 2010 Winter Olympics get here; there are some yet to be determined ties to that upcoming event as well. The game actually starts against the backdrop of Vancouver celebrating the awarding of the Games to the city.

Some great maps of Vancouver and the region can be found here:
http://johomaps.com/na/canada/bc/maps.html
http://johomaps.com/na/canada/bc/vancouver/maps.htm

Edit - Dammit Arcteryx! It took me ages to format that and, originally, I chose the Elf as an example, formatting it all until I realised that his Alertness was just mediocre so it didn't specifically state it. Ah well, you win

bahahaha! ah well, the only winner was the OP... I just dumped the appropriate bits that proved the point, thas all...

So, looking at a supernatural beastie which radiates fear - is Incite Emotion (Fear) the way to simulate this? Is it an active attack action (it reads that way) and if so, is there a mechanism to make it 'always on' (add refresh cost?)

In the same way, if a player is sitting on a small pile of fate points he can enter each conflict safe in the knowledge that he can handle most situations by invoking an aspect or two. A +2 bonus or a declaration is a powerful ability in this game and while I want them to use it, I want it to be valuable. With spare fate points, situations become less about suspenseful drama and more about over-the-top conflicts where people abuse their aspects as much as possible.

I still don't get that... The key word in fate point economy is economy. Supply...and demand.

GM <evil maniacal laughter: MOUAHAHAHAHA!>: create demand
Players self-compelling or begging for compels: provide supply

If players are sitting on a vault full of fate points... GM, crank that dial from Easy to Hard and give them chances to burn them up and turn those stories into their own with aspects coming into play.

Why wouldn't you allow a player to store them? If they've earned them by eating compels, they get to keep'm - and how they spend them is up to them. Fate point economy is an underlying core principle of the game.

Well, OW59 has their "The Catch [+2] is wounds from holy objects.", so if going according to canon, it'd make sense why ghouls would avoid churches (and other holy places). If the game is set in Calcutta, I'd be interested in seeing the city character sheet, curious to see how others are incorporating local culture, customs, myths, religions and beliefs in a meaningful way.

I have a gunslinging warden and one of my aspects is "...every problem looks like a nail." The compel on it is that I think every problem can be solved with gunplay. Every. Problem. It should lead to some serious problems. I also have an aspect called "always outnumbered never outgunned" which leads to me overestimating my gun skills ability to overcome strength of numbers.

I would love to have found a way to make "God is a Bullet" an aspect but I didn't think of it when I was building my character.

Goes without saying that it really depends on the tone of the campaign... some GM's I know would go banana's (in a bad way) and others would lap it up and make you suffer to the end of time, which with an aspect like that might be not very long... its all context of the game you're in.

Good times. Good to see so many demented minds working OT on this...

...
Bulletproof X -Gun-fu on the defense

I love this...

All this now reminds me that there was a movie called Bulletproof Monk, which I've never seen, but maybe I should...