I've been thinking about the mindset difference between the 'old' Wardens (recruited before Dead beat) and the 'new' Wardens (recruited after Dead Beat)).

It's my hypothesis that the 'old' Wardens could mostly be described as something like 'peace officers' while the new Wardens can more accurately be described as 'soldiers'.

Notice that the poster boy for old school wardens is Morgan, who is described several times as a 'burnt out police officer'.  But note that what little we see of the new warden training looks much more like military training than police training.

Article discussing a bit about this difference:
Asking Our Soldiers to Do Police Work: Why It Can Lead to Disaster

Anyone else have any thoughts about this?

The default setting for a DF game is a city, but one you start getting into the 10-15 refresh range, a city can start to seem pretty small.

If you have a small group, this might not be a problem, but a single city can feel pretty crowded with 5+ characters, the antagonists, the non hostile people, etc.

So, how can you use the same aspect based setting generation for something larger?

The simplest way is to just make the setting 'regional' instead of a single city, so you could expand your setting to something like 'Along the Mississippi' or "the aegean" instead of a single city.  Locations might be switched from singular locations to cities or regions with particular character, for example 'The Las Vegas strip" or "out in the desert" become locations.

Another way to redefine aspects it to make the aspects related to the part of the world the characters 'see'.  For example, for a wardens game, no matter where you go, there's some sort of horrible magical crime.  If there wasn't, you wouldn't be there.

I posted up a quick example of how to do power design on another board, and one of the readers liked it so much he wants to use something like it in the game.  I need a double check on any seriously broken bits:

Now, for some power design...

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Assuming the 'base' power of your reality warping is going to be something similar to glamours [-2].

What does glamour actually do?

Is gives is a superior form of stealth (hiding trapping of stealth) and a superior disguise power (disguise trapping of deceit), and lets you use them both with discipline or deceit.
Also, the number of maneuvers you can do with discipline is expanded somewhat, but rules wise, since you could already do maneuvers with discipline, this is just an interesting aside, and not worth any more points. Also, glamours have some built in (minor) disadvantages based on the fact that they are farie magic.

So, pick two skill trappings to get superior versions of, that you can use discipline to generate.

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Here's an example:


We'll pick the breaking and building trappings of craftsmanship as our two base trappings to get superior versions of with this power.

So what does the power do? It lets us 'break' and 'build' stuff very quickly. We'll take greater glamours (-4) as our base power, so we have a lot of extra oomph to play with. We'll also need to come up with a minor restriction or two.

Building Stuff
You can create physical objects effectively out of thin air. Where the craftsmanship of the object is important, use your discipline. These objects are effectively permanent for the type of objet that they are. You are unable to create objects to can't understand intimately, so your other knowledge skills will determine what kind of (complex) things you can make. When determining the amount of time it takes to create the object, you can create objects at least 3 steps faster on the time scale than someone building it by hand.

Examples:
1
You are trapped in your house by zombies and need to shore up your defenses, pronto. It would normally take at least 15 minutes to do things like shove furniture in front of the doors and board up the windows. You can do this in about 30 seconds, even if you didn't have such niceties as boards, nails, and furniture before the zombies showed up at your door.

2
After you house is burned down due to an unexpected zombie infestation, you need a new place to live. No problem. It would normally take several months for the burnt wreckage of your old house to be cleared away, and a new house put up, but you can have your house back, just like you remember it, in around a week.

Breaking Stuff
You can also radically alter the scenery, about as well as a guy with a suit case full of explosives could, but the bomb sniffing dogs will never find you...

You can destructively alter the scenery, where the amount of damage you can do at once becomes important, use (discipline+4) when you want to blast single things or (discipline+2) when you want to damage a whole zone at once.

Examples:
1
You've finally found the house of the guy who sent the zombies to yours, and you are going to return the favor. His house is built out of great strength material, but with (discipline+2) zone wide effects, you can have it down in a pile of rubble faster than a guy with a bulldozer could.

2
The zombie summoner has managed to crawl into his safe room before you brought his hose down on top of his ears. The vault-like walls of the safe room are epic (+7) quality material, but at (discipline+4) you can have a hole bored through the side in just a moment...

(minor) Drawback:
As this power is based on bringing your dreams into reality, you can't directly effect something else that dreams. So, you can tear down buildings just fine, but you can't just go and revoke someone else's torso privileges. Of course, you can do things like create (or kill) all the worms and insects you want, as they don't dream. And if some poor sucker does something foolish like trade away their ability to dream to their friendly neighborhood Fae lord, well...

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Other stuff: range would probably be one zone.

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I'm also not sure what a lesser (-2) version of this power would look like.  Obviously, you'd reduce the bonuses, but what about the item creation?  Maybe limit the duration of stuff created with it?  (For how long? a scene? until the next sunrise?)

Have moved on to thinking about wards.  A surprising amount of "stuff" here, have had to suspend expanding ward rules to making notes about what we see wards actually do in the books.

Note: sections contains minor spoilers for many of the books, relating to the functions of wards.
Here's my note collection about the stuff we see wards do in the books.  Does anyone have anything to add to this section?  Or have anything they disagree with?

Are counterspells associated with any element?  Or are they just a straight Conviction/Discipline roll?  Or are they associated with spirit, since that seems to be the element for 'raw' magic use?  Or can you counter with whatever element you happen to be specialized in?

Next, what can the other elements do that spirit can't?  If you put your evocation specializations in spirit, you get your basic attacks and defense with force effects, you can do various force based maneuvers to do things like knock people down, bind them up in bands of force, blind them with light (or darkness), and so on more of less anything you would seem to want.  In addition though, you get the ability to veil things (and maybe have more powerful counterspells too).

So if I specialize in air instead, a lot of my combat options can look exactly the same, but I can't veil things with air...  So what stuff are the other elements capable of that a spirit specialist isn't?  Since veils are essentially stealth, should the rest of the elements have an associated skill, that they can be used for?
something like
air -> athletics, alertness (or investigation?)
earth -> might, endurance
fire -> empathy, intimidation
water -> craftsmanship, deceit
Spirit -> stealth, performance

So, for example, if I want to disguise something, I need to do it with water magic and if I want to find something I do it with air, and so on.

Looking at the write-ups that Deadmanwalking has posted up on the spoiler thread (and that people seem to like), members in the senior council power level tend to produce evocations in the power 12, control 12 range.  But what happens when they fight each other?  If you can hit with a power 10+ evocation, you'll blast someone to bits in the first hit.  So if, say, the Merlin (power 12, control 12) throws a spell at LTW (power 10, control 10), he's likely to beat LTW's defense by two, and deliver 14 stress right?  Even if LTW had an power 10 defensive magic item, to add 5 armor, he'd still be looking at taking a 9 stress hit.  So high level combat would depend on not getting hit at all, since any actual hit at this power level is going to be deadly. 

Am I missing something?