I'm going to point out a bit of irony to you.  Jim has mentioned the delays in finishing his current home as one of the reasons for the delay with the book.  You have to question how Jim felt when the contractor came at him with excuses as to why the work lagged.  I suspect that like his readers Jim felt a little frustration.  Of course the book will be done when it's done.

You can't assume the "excuses", though. The one thing Jim has said is that when his dog died and he didn't have a proper place to write in, his productivity dived to the point he was only putting out a few hundred words a day. It was only once those issues were taken care of he was back to putting out thousands of words a day and steady updates.

Cons also take a lot out of your day combined with things like travel, prep, and non-writing work. I can't assume that's why the chapter's not done yet but it's a fair assumption to make based on experience. I wouldn't be surprised if the chapter takes a while longer after con for similar reasons.

My take on it is it was either Early Installment Weirdness or that Harry might've mentioned something about there being a wizarding council but not the full details of it. Since Murphy knew some things from Harry on top of him being a wizard, but she didn't know all of it, which is a large part of what led to conflict early on.

They both backslide and you can't backslide without first improving. It's not surprising that they backslide either, as I said.

We know why Harry has these character flaws. We don't know where Murphy's come from.

Personally, I think there's a lot that can be inferred. There's a lot of pieces to her on top of her short story that helps put together how she could turn out the way she did. After all, we don't ask *why* Morgan or Langtry or Ebenezer have their flaws though we know how they've messed up and how they've developed.

The story repeatedly says that SI division is not treated well since it's considered a deadend career-wise, and in books like FM we see where her association with Harry becomes a point of stress (and FM is where she has her worst moments before undergoing several books of character development). Then, she loses everything she worked for because she had to make another difficult choice.

Harry also recognizes she has trust issues in regards to getting into relationships after being twice divorced, one being because she was supposedly ignoring him for the job, which doesn't make it difficult to see it extending to other aspects of her life. And that's not even getting into her father's suicide when she was 11.

I think a big differentiator in whether a) Harry just feels guilty b) Harry is culpable for someone getting hurt and/or killed through withholding information comes through in the narrative choices.

Whenever Harry makes a mistake like being in denial about his feelings towards Murphy, or being too afraid to bond with Maggie, or even just in how much guilt he feels about something, Butcher's usually good at throwing someone reliable at Harry to challenge him on those points-of-view. Murphy in Cold Days, Michael in Skin Game, and even Uriel in The Warrior short story, for example.

In the case of Kirby, the narrative doesn't challenge Billy's response to Kirby's death (contrasted to how the narrative challenged Butter in Skin Game). Billy is the one challenging Harry and is framed in justified in expecting Harry to share more information. Harry might not be the cause but there's culpability, otherwise Harry would have no reason to change how he does things.

I'd rec Felix Caster, except you'll fall into the void of waiting years for book 6....

I don't know much about DFA, but...White Court Virgin lets you take a Pure Mortal mantle in addition to itself. So you probably want to cut down the Magical Practitioner mantle until it's roughly equivalent to a Pure Mortal mantle. Maybe removing the ability to exhaust yourself for a power bonus would work?

A White Court Virgin already has one way to exhaust themself for a power boost. A second feels a little redundant.

That making it the equivalent to a Pure Mortal Mantle sounds like a good way of putting it, thanks! We  decided to take out the Burnt Out condition for that reason, so will see how it feels once we do more sessions with encounters.

It seems VERY much to me that -- as canonical Dresdenverse powersets go -- Wizardry & WhampVirgin are diametrically opposed.  Wizards use focus & discipline to bring their gift to greatest fruition, but a WhampVirgin is LOSING focus and discipline as they give into the Whamp urges.
So I won't almost never allow bonii to stack.

When put that way, I might suggest that to the player to keep in mind, especially for play and leveling up. Since, the largest appeal of the combo narratively is the branching potential so if they ended up giving into their Whamp urges I'd imagine their wizard abilities might drop off and vice versa (especially if they somehow get the conditions to remove Whamp Virgin mantle).

I finished DMing the first arc for a group of friends and we've been looking to go forward and see where the group's adventures take us. It's the first time any of us have played with Fates Accelerated so we're still getting a feel for how to handle things and make adjustments as we go.

One of those adjustments is balancing one of the PCs, a wizard/white court virgin. It's a combo that gives some fun scenarios (i.e:PC doesn't know about Wamp heritage and nearly got mind whammied into Wamping out on his crush) but in terms of gameplay it leans towards broken when the player can take something like Evocation Specialist and get a +2 to evocations and then add vampire stunts to up the roll further.

With this in mind, any thoughts on how this can be balanced? Me and player have debated things like limiting what stunts can effect what actions (like, even if magic approach is forceful not being allowed to add vamp mods to it) as well as simply adjusting scenarios to make it so she can't spam all her abilities in one go (i.e: adding more confrontations or making the hunger a bigger concern), but it'd be nice to have a better idea before moving forward with them.