Due to some lucky circumstances, I managed to land an interview earlier this week with Ryan Macklin and Lenny Balsera. This was a serendipitous event, as Evil Hat had just released their official press release announcing the release date and info about the Dresden Files RPG. I sit down with these two and BS about the challenges of creating a game from the Dresden Files license, then we dive into some of the nitty gritty about how FATE was used to create the world of Harry Dresden.

Relevant Links

• Dresden Files RPG
• Evil Hat
• Lenny’s Blog
• Ryan’s Blog
• The Sunless Citadel
• Duke Nukem Forever
• Urban Fantasy
• Perdido Street Station
• Endgame Oakland
• Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies
• Ptolus
• Chris Hanrahan’s Blog
• Scribd
• bittorrent
• GURPS
• Hero
• D20
• Starblazer Adventures
• Diaspora
• Spirit of the Century
• Jared Sorenson’s 3 Questions
• The Wire
• Clark and Amanda Valentine
• Caine  (Kung Fu)
• Las Vegas: The Strip, Sumerlin, Henderson
• Steve Wynn
• Burning Empires
• The Bracelet Problem
• Mage (The Awakening and the older Ascension)
• In Nomine
• In Nomine Fate Fan Conversion
• Robert Bohl (and our interview with him)

Crunchy Bits!

• Intro and Outro music provided by .

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Dogs in the Vineyard wraps up with the small ranching town of King’s Crossing. The players experiment with taking on conflicts solo, and finds some pretty serious challenges facing their characters. The defeats culminate with a very tense final showdown!

Unfortunately this is our last session of Dogs. We had a pretty rough three months this winter and have only managed to record twice due to plague, work, weather, and holidays. It was very difficult to keep the momentum going, but we all feel this is a good session to end on. The conflicts were tough, the morality fuzzy, and the ending suitably tragic.

Relevant Links

• Clancy Brown
• Deadlands: Los Diablos
• Wolf Brother
• Conner from Angel

Crunchy Bits!

• Intro Music from the soundtrack to The Proposition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (the composer, not the comic writer)
• Outro music from “God’s Gonna Strike You Down” by Johnny Cash.

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And here we have our first full town for D. Vincent Baker’s Dog’s in the Vineyard. The gang learns a few good lessons this session. Namely, there’s pretty much no stopping a group of Dogs when they team up, and no matter how bad you don’t want your cousin to be a Sorcerer, sometimes you just have to face facts.  This town was created by Jason Morningstar, and is based on the true story of Olive Oatman. When Jason found out I was running his towns, he shot me an email warning that a few of his early town designs aren’t the most ideal. I thanked him for his concern, but went ahead anyway.

Since then, I’ve done a LOT of reading on the lumpley forums on The Forge about town design, and gotten a bit of play under my belt. I now know what Jason was concerned about. I’m not sure if it comes through in the recording, but this town lacked the tension of some later ones I’ve run, and I know exactly why: The situation was too clear, the antagonist too one-sided, and the problems of the town hadn’t escalated to Hate and Murder yet. Vincent recommends ALWAYS designing a town up to Hate and Murder. I learned a lot from running this town, and my second town is one I made myself, and I think really hits all the right spots for what a town should be. Stay tuned for that!

Relevant Links

• Dogs in the Vineyard
• Vincent Baker’s Blog
• Dogs in the Vineyards Forum
• Kevin’s Post on the DitV Forum about this session.
• January Branch Document
• Jason Morningstar’s awesome play aids
• Mouse Guard
• Wheel of Time
• Detect Evil
• Carnivale
• Deadlands
• Unknown Armies

Crunchy Bits!

• Intro Music from the soundtrack to The Proposition by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (the composer, not the comic writer)
• Outro music from “When The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash.

Podcast: |