Just look at his face, so silly

OK, so, a proper review of Dresden Files RPG. The game is set right before the book Changes, so there are going to be some spoilers, mostly concerning supernatural creatures, metaphysical concepts and such rather than specific events and characters as I would try to avoid talking about them.

For all the three of you who care, you’ve been warned.

Let’s start with presentation. Normally I don’t talk about art in TRPGs since, in my opinion, it’s not all that important compared to video games, movies, animation or even regular books. While some TRPGs are written well enough that you can read them for entertainment, it’s not their true purpose. That would be providing you with information necessary to create your own scenarios. What players would imagine during the game depends more on what the GM describes than on what rulebook says. As such, while character portraits and views of important locations may give you something (provided you actually use said characters and places unmodified), illustrations of specific events can be skipped without much loss.

My interests also typically lie in small indie games that don’t have much of a budget to spend on artists, so the art in them tend to not be impressive. DRYH, for example, uses monochrome photos of ragged-looking people. They are fine, they fit the atmosphere of the game, but there wasn’t a moment where I would stop reading to look at a picture.

However, since this review is intended to be more detailed than usual, I think I should spare a few words on art.

Aside from the cover, which you can see above*, the art is done in a comic-ish style and displays problems typical to it: bad proportions, HANDS, strangely flat faces occasionally and, of course, sexualization of women, particularly distressed damsels.

*Seriously, Harry looks so stupid. He’s, like, “Whoa, man, there is no spoon in my glowing hand, you have to see it.”

Also, naked Harry. You’re welcome

“Let’s settle it like men! By comparing our rods of power! Mine has a bigger knob!” “Oh yeah? Well, I have two!”

It doesn’t help that, while illustrations try to sexualize women, the style is decisively unsexy:

So even if you don’t regard such art as ideologically problematic, it’s certainly problematic on technical level.

To be fair, it does better when depicting monsters, action scenes and badass posturing:

Ascending to just OK instead of bad. It never really gets good, and can sometimes be quite silly, but, eh, it doesn’t make me want to claw out my numerous eyes, and, as I said, I don’t care for art much.

While most illustrations focus on men, Harry in particular, Murphy is a surprising bright spot here:

Look at her, wearing a sensible coat and standing like an anatomically sound human being. Not even spiral curse clearly affecting her hair seems to bother her.

Also, Murphy facepalm:

Probably the best reaction picture for this book, mutated hand aside.

Overall, the art doesn’t impress me, and it seems to be faithful to the books in worst possible ways, making me worry over the game’s content.

You might have noticed that all illustrations are slightly askew, and the images themselves look pages from a spiral notebook. That’s because the game presents itself as an in-universe artifact, specifically a draft of a yet unpublished game developed by a guy I should call Spoiler for now (who was canonically into TRPGs) and given to Harry for fact-checking under mistaken assumption that Harry knows anything about supernatural stuff.

You see, at some point DF introduces the idea that Dracula was published to expose weaknesses of a certain type of vampires (and of course there is more than one type of vampires) to the general population in an acceptable form. I’ll wait for Farla to comment on this idea when she gets to the relevant part. What’s important here is that Spoiler wants to do the same with a whole of supernatural world.

Via a TRPG.

Yeah, it’s a silly idea.

That does raise certain questions that may be familiar to you from Farla’s Animorphs reviews: we know that White Men Council is willing to kill people for learning about their existence, so you’d think they would object to something like this. And if not them, then some other group. Harry insist on changing everyone’s name in the final draft, but the second volume deals with supernatural Chicago, many events are described from what is obviously Harry’s perspective, and he’s even used as a sample character, so it shouldn’t be hard for concerned parties to learn who’s behind it.

Plus, you know, it’s rather dubious how much impact a TRPG can make on how people would deal with suddenly discovered supernatural threats. Dracula at least can claim to codify human perception of vampires (and even then it quickly changed with Nosferatu introducing their aversion to sunlight), but TRPGs are niche product.

Also, do other urban fantasy games exist in the world of Dresden Files? Are White Wolves or Black Dogs around? If so, you’d think that would lead to some confusion.

Also, unlike Animorphs or, say, House of Leaves, the game doesn’t pretend that its world is our world. It pretends to be an unfinished draft you obviously weren’t supposed to see, which is not a good thing as far as immersion is concerned.

Still, if you are willing to suspend your disbelieve regarding these questions, it’s not a bad way to enhance your reading experience. It’s fun to imagine Spoiler and Co developing the game and bickering with Harry (for fans more so, I imagine).

Speaking of bickering, the game includes comments by Spoiler, Harry and Bob in the margins. Spoiler serves as a stand-in for devs, talking about game design and process of playing, Harry typically asks leading questions and references the books, while Bob occasionally provides some information about occult phenomena. All of them engage in light banter.

Butcher’s style is actually well-suited for this. The comments read easily and nicely complement the game. Most of them seem inoffensive, though I’ll keep an eye out for any problematic stuff.

So, all in all, the idea is silly but fun. Let’s move on to the actual content.


Chapter 1: Harry’s World

And here we see our first problem with presenting the game as in-universe artifact: the term Dresdenverse. The term makes sense for us, since the books focus exclusively on Harry and his adventures, we see the setting through his eyes only, but for inhabitants of this world he probably wouldn’t be the center of the universe, despite what he may believe.

The game actually lampshades it with comment by Harry saying that only Spoiler and his wife refer to supernatural side of things as Dresdenverse, which suggests things about their family life I didn’t want to know.

The chapter itself is a simple introduction to the setting: the world is like our own only with magic and monsters lurking in the shadows, yadda yadda, ancient organizations, etc.

Of note here is a section on what separates monsters and mortals: free will. You see, monsters have no choice but to follow their nature, while mortals always have a choice, even if sometimes it’s not an easy one. Later we’ll see that the game attempts to put emphasis on this theme in mechanics.

It is actually a thing in later books and a question characters explore, so I can’t fault the game for including it, though I would say I don’t like it much. Robbing people like Bianca and fairy queens from choice strikes me as diminishing potential conflicts, much in the same way Always Chaotic Evil thing in D&D did.

That, however, is a small complaint compared to what comes next. The section is very faithful to the books in worst possible ways, which means in includes lengthy passages on how people just don’t want to see the supernatural lurking just behind them and simply refuse to acknowledge its existence even when they encounter it because, sure, that’s how humans work.

The game even includes a charming section titled Science Fails, which very smugly and self-indulgently talks about how monsters and magic defy science, how science can’t understand them and is useless against them.

And no shit it can’t explain supernatural. We are talking about a world where scientists simply don’t know about it for some bizarre and unexplained reason (I mean, seriously, you’d think people like Newton, a famous alchemist and scientist, would rectify that in this world). Science is an empiric system of knowledge, it relies on correct data being available, so when you deny the knowledge to all but a few chosen, of course you ensure people know jack shit about it.

It would be more correct to say that supernatural forces exist outside of boundaries of modern scientific knowledge, which can change with time provided more people become aware of it. Even if we can’t understand the nature of mythical forces on fundamental level and how they interact with physical laws, we can still catalog facts about them, find patterns, figure out their own rules (hell, this very book can be considered scientific if we accept its in-universe status).

But no, in the world of Dresden Files science is a religion, of which Bob reminds us by stating that science seems like a flavor of belief to him.

And the sheer smugness of it! It honestly reminds me of Left Behind: instead of an urgency of a warning you’d expect given the premise of making the game to spread knowledge, the text conveys gloating of someone who thinks he knows more than you and is eager to rub it in your face.

I have only one adequate response to this shit:

Oh, and it’s also established that no wizard ever has attempted to record the effects of magic on technology because fuck everything.

Let’s move on.

Chapter 2: The Basics

As the title implies, this chapter introduces the basics of FATE system as utilized by this game. I’ve talked about FATE before, so I’ll just note interesting points here:

– It’s third edition, behind current one, so the rules of getting flat bonus for spending a fate point without invoking an aspect is still around. It’s a pretty useless rule, and I understand why it was removed. The bonus is smaller than the one you would get from an aspect invocation, so players would naturally prefer to do the latter, and if you can’t work some of your aspects into the roll, you probably shouldn’t get a bonus anyway.

– There are supernatural powers separate from skills, stunts or aspects. They aren’t described in this section, though.

– Refresh doesn’t erase Fate points. As a reminder, refresh occurs after each session. It’s an event that restores the number of your Fate points to default. Default is different for each character and depends on the number of stunts you have (and in this game, supernatural powers, but we’ll get to it). Normally, if you have more points than your refresh, you lose them. It’s not the case here, and I don’t think I like it. While losing your Fate points may seem unfair, the alternative can lead to hoarding, which disrupts Fate points economy. I’ve talked before that you really aren’t supposed to be stingy with them, but the game seems to disagree with me.

– Description of compelling aspects seem to emphasize the free will theme: you can act in accordance with your nature and be rewarded for it, even though it makes your life more complicated as a rule, or you can ignore it and pay the price (of 1 Fate point). As a consequence, it downplays introducing new events rather than suggesting character behavior. We’ll see how it’s implemented in the chapter about aspects, but it’s something to keep an eye on. I actually wouldn’t mind compels to be about what character does rather than what happens to the character, but that would require designing aspects with it in mind.

– Players can make declarations by spending Fate points. That is, they can introduce new elements and alter the game world, much like the GM does. The GM has a veto power over it, though. It’s interesting that the rule is more open than Invoking for Effect and similar rules found in other FATE incarnations: players can make declarations absolutely not connected with any of theirs aspects. The game does state that it’s preferable to work with your aspects, though. Declarations seem to be intended to make small adjustments, like arriving at a scene at a dramatically appropriate moment, or having a lighter on you even if you don’t smoke, stuff like that, though technically it doesn’t state any hard limits beyond GM’s veto powers.

All in all, this chapter a simple introduction to the system that does its job well enough.

Tune in next time for the chapter about city creation.