The very first session my group played. It started with the group's only Pure Mortal at a club, dancing with a cute girl. The pure mortal is an "Elusive Drifter", two of his aspects are "Blinding Ego" and "Dangerously Passive Aggressive". So, he's dancing with this girl when this big guy in a suit pushes him roughly aside and cuts in. How does he respond? He immediately sneaks up behind the guy and sets his coat tails on fire. The scene ended with the big guy (who turned out to be a Red Court vampire) and a bunch of his buddies taking the Drifter out back and beating the hell out of him.

Flash forward and his date is being fished out of the river and my character, an ex-soldier and Newly-Cloaked Warden ends up investigating. Long story short, he calls in an old colleague for backup, an Aura-Seeing Detective when the investigation leads to the local Summer Court. They end up heading to the Nightclub's Ballroom night undercover. Meanwhile in a parallel storyline the Drifter and his friend the Alchemist Hacker are trying the track down the guy who beat him up (the Red vamp) so he can "kick his ass".

So, it's a high-class ballroom dance. My Warden is in a tuxedo (packing a concealed hold-out pistol) and the Detective is in a beautiful gown with a small set of throwing knives. We're stealthily investigating the joint. Its all very classy and James Bond-ish. In bursts the Drifter (wearing a tattered canvas duster) and the Hacker (bright green hoodie). The Drifter walks up to the bartender and calls him a "Stupid, frog-humping @sshole f*cktard." All four of us immediately find ourselves surrounded by Red Court vamps. The GM politely informs us that we are not ready for such a confrontation and advises us to run.

Both the Detective, who has the aspect "Protective Mama Bear", and my Warden, who has the aspect "Tortured by the Red Court" both immediately decide to stay and fight so the GM tosses us both a fate point each. The Drifter immediately bolts and leaves us all behind and the Hacker self-compels his "Know Idea How Much I Don't Know", tries to help but ends up setting off the sprinkler system (rendering my Newbie Warden's magic virtually useless). So, the Drifter abandoned us, we have mortals fleeing in every direction, water grounding out my Warden's magic and we are surrounded by vampires.

How does it all end? With four dead vampires, a captured bartender,a bloodied detective,a tired Hacker, a soggy Wizard and a flooded Nightclub. It was a good night.

Got the two game books for my birthday in June. Immediately started trying to put together a group to play together regularly. Took me four months to find enough people and to get them to agree on a time to play.

Our GM is a gaming veteran who doesn't have a whole lot of GMing experience, then there's me who's only vaguely familiar with pen-and-paper RPGs but is essentially an expert on the source material. And then there are our other three players who have never done any gaming before.... This is going to have a high learning curve. The GM and I set out to teach the other three the game mechanics as well as the basics of the source material. We meet every other Sunday for almost three months, helping them build the characters they want, playing a practice game or two, and building our city. In the last month we finally finished our city and character creation. It felt like it would never end.

Wait, what's that? City created? Character's done? GM prepared? Players are anxious to start?

We actually get to play the game next sunday!!! 

If you do character/city creation together, you can set up a connection between the player characters before the first real session starts.

If they're all part of the same vigilante team or something like that, then you really don't need to strong-arm them at all.

The group character creation process can lead to links between character without really having to work at it much at all. And our GM pointed out that everybody doesn't necassarily have to know everyone else, as long as they all have a reason to come together for the first adventure. The first player in my group wanted to play a psychic detective who was secretly an undercover agent for a government monster-hunting squad. This mad it easy to connect with my character who started out as a U.S. Marshal but was later recruited to the White Council as a Warden. Our next player wanted to play as a sort of Pyromancer arsonist drifter. Well, that's easy. He's run into the Warden in the past, maybe circumstances forced them to work together. And now that the arsonist is back in town, he's being hunted by the detective. The last player wanted to play as a Hacker Alchemist, who was being strong-armed into working for some sort of mundane criminal organization. Again, not hard. The Detective encountered him earlier in her career and tried to free him from his forced employment. She failed but now that Hacker is a secret ally who passes her information.

I don't think Jim has ever done a signing in Iowa. At least not since I've been a fan. Cedar Rapids or Iowa City would be great, though a suppose a road trip to Des Moines isn't unreasonable. Though, I have to admit if he does a signing in Chicagoland, I'd still be tempted to make the trip.

I was discussing this with the GM of the game I help run. I don't the rules don't specifically forbid invoking two aspects at once for two fate points. This does seem to be a bit unfair at at the same time, if a player wants to spend two fate points on essentially one action and understands the implications, I fee like letting him make that choice.

Do any of you allow this in your games?

Sorry, I won't be able to add much to this thread (I'm still pretty new to the Dresden RPG) but I have a friend who occasionally likes to take Adventures from other FATE games and modify them to make them Dresden-ish. He said once that it was usually a simple matter of carefully swapping out characters, though he does have a copy of Our World

Cedar Rapids, IA! Come on Jim, I'll buy you some Burger King....