Since I'm currently pretty hyped about City of Mist, I thought I'd share here as well.

City of Mist is a new RPG that's getting a kickstarter towards the end of October. A Quickstarter with characters and a sample adventure can already be found on
http://cityofmist.sonofoak.com/

What's it all about?
The setting is solid urban fantasy. You are a Gateway, a person that has a connection to the Mythos and draws incredible power from it. Sleepers (as regular folk are called) can't see past the veil of the Myst and will quickly forget even the weirdest things they see. But every power comes with a question. A Mythos that needs an answer.

The system is a mixture of Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) and Fate, using the best parts of both. Each character has 4 themes that define them. They are a bit like Aspects in that regard. Each theme has 3 Power Tags and one Weakness Tag that further defines the theme. There are also 2 types of themes, Mythos and Logos. Mythos describes your supernatural aspects and the questions related to it, Logos represents your mundane identity.

When you do something, you use a "move", there are different ones, depending on what you want to do. There are moves like "Sneak Around" to hide, "Change the Game" which is basically a maneuver (or "create an advantage" from Fate Core) or "Hit with all you've got", when you want to go on an all out attack. Once you've decided which move to use, you gather up your Power. For each Power Tag that can help you, you add 1 to your Power, for each Weakness Tag you add you subtract 1. The GM can add Weakness Tags as well, if he thinks one of your Weakness Tags could affect the action.
Then you roll 2d6 and add your Power. If you get 7-9 you've got a partial success, on a 10+ you got a success. What exactly this means is different for each move, mostly a failure and even partial success allows the GM to activate moves of his own.

One very neat feature the system also brings with it are statuses. A status is basically like a temporary aspect, but rated 1-6. When you do something, you can create statuses as well. For example shooting at someone can give them the "Badly Injured - 3" status. There are not really any Hitpoints or even stress tracks. Once you get a level 5 status, you're out for any action this status could feasibly oppose. This is called "narrative damage" in the system and works really well. You can also add statuses to a roll, if they could help or hinder the action. You always take the highest helpful and the highest hindering one.

But wait, there's more. I talked about Weakness Tags before. And they add another really cool feature. When you add a Weakness Tag to a roll, the theme it was on gets "attention". For every 3 attention a theme gets, you can improve on the theme, add more Power Tags or cure a cracked/faded theme.

Cracking or fading on a theme occurs when you act against the theme. Logos cracks while Mythos fades. There is even a move that forces you to choose between 2 themes, if appropriate. If you lose a theme, you get a new one but from the other type. If you lose a Logos theme, you lose part of your identity and go further into the Myst. If you lose a Mythos theme, you lose your connection to the Myst and revert to a regular mortal.

As with all PbtA games, the GM doesn't roll, just uses moves. Since this was my first experience with a PbtA game and I was running, it felt a bit weird at first,but it works really well. Running the sample adventure was all kinds of fun.

Ok, so I'm incredibly excited about this game. I'm looking forward to the kickstarter and the full game. Thought some of you might like it as well.

I've stumbled upon the art for the Spanish version of the RPG and I was absolutely blown away. The artist is sharing his art on his website and is selling other pieces in an e-book (300 illustrations for 3.50). I thought some of you might enjoy it as much as I did.

http://www.charroart.com/2364860-dresden-files#1

Someone just posted this to the Fate Core G+ community, and I absolutely love the idea. I'm wondering if this would work in DF as well, or if it might need some tweaking.

Human Shield
If there's someone else in your zone you can grab them and use them to defend against an attack. Instead of defending against your attacker you roll Fight opposed by the shield's Fight or Athletics. You count as having a Mediocre (+0) defence for purposes of the actual attack against you, but you can pass as many stress on to your shield as you rolled against them. If the human shield rolls higher than you, you must add their shifts to the original attack. Unless you establish an aspect like Human Shield you just grab the victim and then let them go after the attack. You can't use this stunt on a target that has been taken out.

Example: An attacker gets Superb (+5). You grab a hapless peasant passing by and get Fantastic (+6) to their Fair (+2). You have 4 shifts over your attacker, so you get to pass off 4 of the 5 shifts from the attack on to the hapless peasant.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RichardBellinghamSkimble/posts/f5xaou1gYYU

Discuss.

So the title of the other thread gave me an idea that I very much enjoyed. Basically, a bunch of low level talents who get together and store their powers in "the cloud", where they can all access them, if they need them.

This cloud is a shared pocket of the nevernever, that is attached to a magical item, usually a ring or an amulet, I suppose. The characters can then draw onto those powers, whenever they need them. However, no power may be taken twice, so the characters would have to come to an arrangement on how to distribute the powers. On the other hand, by shifting the powers around, they can be quite versatile, and if done right, it can be incredibly powerful.

Just wanted to share, since I will probably not be able to play this any time soon, but if someone likes the idea, go ahead.

So I recently picked up Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', and while I enjoy it, there was something odd in there I hadn't seen anywhere else, and I wanted to ask you what this was.

Every sentence that starts with 'A', as in "A car was driving by" or "A week ago the rain began to fall", there is no space between the 'A' and the following word. In the book, the sentences are "Acar was driving by" and "Aweek ago the rain began to fall". Now the first time I read that, I thought it was a typo, honest mistake, happens to the best of us. But I'm now two thirds through the book and every single time a sentence began like that, it was missing the space. No exception.

Now is this some sort of special grammar question where you are allowed to write like that, but it isn't necessary? Or is it simply a mistake and nobody caught it? Seems unlikely.

So my initial sessions with my group went rather well. We got a scope of what lies ahead and what the characters are going to have to deal with.
In short:
A cult of humans and lesser Fomor has tricked the PCs into freeing one of the Fomor heroes, Grolgam the Awaker. They learned that quite a large number of Fomor heroes have been put into a magic sleep, so they could be revived one day. The cult has taken over a few businesses around the globe, where they can easily transform their slaves and get resources and such. The group is stumbled upon one of those and found possible locations of a few more. Since two wardens were part of the cult, they wanted to have the wizard take the fall for the ritual that broke the prison. He got away, of course, but now he is cut off from the white council. Faced with an enemy of this magnitude and their own allies hunting them, the players decided to build up their own group made up mostly of minor powers, werewolfs, focused practitioners and the likes, to have enough power to fight and finally clear their name. I have even thought about giving the wizard the opportunity of becoming a freeholding lord, but I have not yet told the player that. One step at a time.

Now the players had the idea to have an old boarding school as their headquarter in the long run. There is one not far from us, which was the inspiration for it, with a gymnasium and a church attached for the angel-turned-human character and so on, brilliant idea. There is only one catch: I want them to earn it.

At the moment they are planning their first strike against one of the facilities, to free a large chunk of lesser magical folk and hit the cult where it hurts. After that, they are going to go for the boarding school.

I am planning to put all kinds of hurdles in there for them. For one, I want to have a ghost there (or a couple?), that is strong enough to have fought of the demolition of the boarding school. It was supposed to be cut down multiple times already, but there was always so much trouble, it just didn't work, so now it just sits there and rots.

But what else could get in their way before they can start settling down? You got any cool ideas?

When I started with the Evocation rewrite, I also wanted to give Thaumaturgy a go, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how. The things that were bothering me with Evocation are similar to the things that I don't like in Thaumaturgy.The numbers get way too high for me to feel comfortable, and the process of casting the spell itself just feels disconnected from the rest of the game. I couldn't put my finger on it before, but then I found the Google+ posts of Robert Hanz. It was especially this post that caught my attention. I thought that might work to clean up Thaumaturgy.

So what do I want to do? First, I want to make Thaumaturgy a conflict. Always. It might be a short conflict every now and then, but it will be a conflict nontheless. But you can't have a conflict without at least one opposing character. So lets go fractal on this thing and make the spell itself the opposing character. If you take out the spell, you have successfully cast it, if you as the caster are taken out, you go into fallout land. You could concede at any point, so you cast the spell, but less powerful or a bit different than you planned to.

The bare minimum I see for a spell character is a high concept (basically a description of the spell like "regular old tracking spell" or "ritual of doom" or something along those lines), a trouble aspect (Magic isn't always the best way to do things, even if it is sometimes the only way, so there might be inherent limitations or flaws in the spell itself) and some skills. I would go with complexity, power as skills for now, but maybe it could become more. I think I'd like an endurance sort of skill as well, that determines the length of the spells stress track. Right now, I don't have an idea for a good name though, so I'll just call it endurance for now. Or just lump it into complexity or power?

Complexity would be the spells defense skill. The Wizard will attack it with his Lore skill.
Power would be the spells attack skill. The more power it requires, the more it will take out of the wizard and at some point he might get taken out because it was too much for him to handle. The Wizard would defend against this with conviction. The spell might even get a weapon rating.
"Endurance" determines the length of the stress track and bonus consequences.

The thing what is left to consider are the duration of one exchange in this thaumaturgy conflict and the number of consequences the spell can take before it is taken out. Mostly, I think this has to be a group consensus. I would probably, as a default, start with 1 minute and go up from there. If you relate that to complexity, you could just say that a complexity of 1 equals 1 minute, and go up the table (Y315) according to the complexity. A spell with a complexity of 5 would then have exchanges that are an hour long. Since a complexity of 5 is almost the top of the scale in this new set of rules, I think it is ok like this.
Consequences should probably be based on how important the spell is. Kind of like mooks, unnamed npcs, named npcs and the likes.

So that would be the basic makeup of a spell: High concept and skills. But what about different circumstances? Easy: stunts and powers.
So you got a bundle of hair from the bad guy and want to use them in a tracking spell, but he is behind a ward now? Give the spell a toughness power, depending on the strength of the ward. The spell is extra hard to cast or requires a boatload of money? Make it a stunt for its attack or defend skill. Or any countermeasures the target might have can factor in as stunts and powers on the side of the spell.

So for example, it could look something like this:
High concept: basic tracking spell
Trouble: as the crow flies
Magical stress track: OOO
Skills:
+2 Complexity
+1 Endurance, Power

Even the OW Harry can tackle this spell in a matter of minutes. The conflict would be set up, and Harry's goal would be stated (for example "find the location of the bad guy"). The spell is what is standing between him and this goal. If the spell was to overpower Harry, he could concede and say that he was only able to pinpoint the location within a block or so and now has a splitting headache.

This will, I imagine, make thaumaturgy a bit more interesting, add a little drama. It removes the "i win" effect, that a ritual without time constraints can feel like. It removes the passive casting without rolls and replaces it with active peril for the wizard. It basically turns thaumaturgy into a tool that allows you to start a conflict, and a conflict is where the action is. A conflict really tells the story of the spell.

Now I'm not sure yet how to actually handle a revamped thaumaturgy power. 3 refresh for a power that basically just lets you initiate conflicts feels kind of pricey. I also have no idea yet what to do with focus items, specializations and the likes. Regardless, If you have worked through this wall of text, I would appreciate your thoughts for the moment.

Since I started to excessively read and work with the DFRPG, I often see some scenes in the novels unfolding by the rules of the RPG. Now I've been rereading Turn Coat, and when I came to the scene where Injun Joe is fighting the naagloshii, I was wondering. It doesn't really feel like a conflict, from a mechanical point of view. Yes, they fight, and yes, they both get injured, but by and large, I always felt, that a conflict didn't fit this scene very well. It looks much more like the "cat and mouse" conflict resolution to me, and reading that scene again with that in mind fits fairly neatly, I think. You wouldn't have to constantly figure out what the different forms the two fighters are assuming can do and such, it is just their way of fighting, a cool way to describe it, but ultimately, you'd have a fairly straight forward mechanic for them to resolve the conflict.

Now I have to say, I never really used the other conflict resolution rules suggested in the book. A lot of scenes might be a lot easier to handle or might run a lot smoother if you don't set them up as a conflict by default, but as one of the other solutions.

My question is, has anyone done that or is doing so frequently? What is your experience with those rules?