My friends and I are starting a DF game and so far we've done two sessions, both character/city creation. (We needed time to think). I'm going to start a thread detailing our experiences and occasionally asking for advice. Hopefully there are those that can gain something useful from descriptions of creation and play, and I can mine more minds for ideas.
First off, we chose St. Louis because we are all from there and it gives a good background for creation. We are expanding St. Louis to include a lot of the Metropolitan area including the wineries and suburbs.
Arcane St. Louis: Gateway tot he Supernatural
Choosing a city was pretty quick. We all know it, we are all from here. Made sense.
Then we went on to talking about Themes and Threats. Our first thought for a theme was the idea that St. Louis is made up of multiple townships and municipalities. There are dozens of different police departments, school districts, fire departments, and city councils throughout the area. We figure supernatural nasties can use this to their advantage, jumping around enough and not drawing too much attention to themselves. I know people who have called 911 and reached the wrong dispatch, just because of where a phone tower is vs actual city/county lines.
For right now we have decided on the aspect: Big City, Little Towns, though that might change a little to be darker.
Second theme was the rivers. We decided that the rivers would be some sort of ley lines, but also act as a giant threshold around the city. The rivers have historically controlled a lot of what made St. Louis important, and we decided that maybe now there are supernaturals using the thresholds of the rivers to hide out. St. Louis would have a higher concentration of supernaturals, but a lot of them just want to lay low, and will try not to do anything that will draw attention to themselves.
Here we settled on Where Two Rivers Meet, but again that may be too generic and/or not dark enough.
Since we already had two themes, we picked a threat for the third. We liked that there are different kinds of werewolves that are functionally so different, so we decided to throw that in St. Louis. St. Louis also has a decent crime rate and lots of areas of the inner city and North St. Louis can be pretty bad and have areas of abandoned buildings. We decided that there is are rival gangs battling in North Country. One gang is lycanthropes and the other is a group of shapechanging werewolves. They have recently really started pushing each other and its threatening to get out of control. This ended up tying into some of our other faces as well as we looked at other things.
As an aspect we talked about Who Let The Dogs Out, representing the werewolves, but also the fact that something else is behind their aggression.
After talking about Themes and Threats we then jumped down to the Balance of Power and Movers and Shakers. Here we just discussed a lot of things that we want to include, and jotted down a few notes.
Supernatural Status Quo
-Skavis in the Police Department
-Summer Court presence in the wineries
-Disinterested local warden that wants to gamble
-And then the werewolves
Mundane Status Quo
-Blues and Jazz presence in the Loop
-Lots of colleges
-Rising unemployment. A lot of big corporations (TWA, McDonald Douglas, Anheiser Busch, auto factories) have "recently" sold out or moved.
-Sports town
-multicultural; Bosnian/Kosovo refugees, areas of French & German settlers, Indian population, African-American population, especially because of the unique position during the civil war, etc
-high crime rate. St. Louis is frequently pretty high on the list of dangerous cities to live in per capita
We decided that the Skavis, Summer Court, and resident Warden are happy with the way things are, as are the corrupt cops and most of the wineries. On the other hand, there are a lot of multicultural activists pushing and pulling things, the werewolf situation is rocking the boat, including relief workers in those areas, and since the Summer Court is strong, the Winter Court has to want to mess that up.
