So, I think last night I started with the biggest bangs we've managed yet.
Some backstory: The game's set in LA, and the players have been put up against an alliance of the Black Court (run by an Elder souped up with an Outsider Sponsor) and a rogue court of Faeries. They've stopped three or four schemes, usually involving trying to revive the Red Court (who had been a third prong of the alliance before Dresden exploded them). Additionally, they've made significant headway in identifying the enemies, and it's been made personal on both sides.
So last night, starting a new scenario, I lowered the boom on them with simultaneous assassination attempts. I tell you, the players' reactions when I said the first thing I was doing was making 7 fate points' worth of compels between the three main PCs was worth the price of admission alone.
One player, playing a blind mage who sees auras, I had set up in the previous downtime scenario that she was regularly receiving packages and letters from an NPC that she had to step outside and sign for. After several weeks of this, I start the scene describing the same thing--only to compel the blindness and have the courier be a gunman, who hits her from ambush. Some magic armor saves her from further injury, but she ends up with a gunshot wound (Severe consequence, the first a player's taken so far). Of course, it turns out attacking a wizard on her own doorstep is a bad idea, so the gunman is struck by the wards (earning a Severe consequence of his own) and runs off scared shitless.
The second character, a mortal cop who has a Denarian's shadow in his head, is the target of a minor entropy curse--someone screwing with traffic while he's crossing the street. He narrowly manages to escape injury (and save his ex-wife and kid, who'd gotten caught in the crossfire).
The third character is an overpowered Wizard on the Dresden template, who has among her aspects a terrifying reputation, and has made the fight the most personal. As such, she warranted overdoing it--a lowercase 'd' dragon, flanked by giant bugs I ripped off from Scyther and Beedrill. The hilarious part? When I flat out told the players in the previous scenario that the rogue faeries had a dragon on their side, they assumed the NPC was speaking metaphorically.
The dragon and his cohorts, it turns out, are very much prepared for the wizard--the dragon's first action is specifically to take care of a 7-shift shield item the wizard's been relying on for defense, which leads to the bees poisoning her--with a special poison forcing an Endurance check equal to half the power of any spell she throws.
They knock her out of the sky, and onto a speeding semi on a major highway, where she proceeds to take a Severe mental consequence in order to go nuclear--she throws out a 16-shift spell (12 power, +2 to make it a zone attack, +2 to exclude herself from it), and dumps every fate point I'd given her (6) to roll it at 19. Needless to say, it's super effective against the mantis and the bees...but the dragon is immune to fire. And, it turns out, the truck she was standing on was not, so it derails and throws her for a loop, giving the dragon an opening to knock her out and capture her--making it the first time one of the PCs has outright lost a fight. And said player was excited about it, noting that it feels more Dresdeny if the wizard gets her ass kicked once in a while.
We cut to the cop, who's in the hospital (the ex-wife sustained some injuries). Where his boss comes in and tells him that the blind wizard (who's dating the cop) was brought in with a gunshot wound, and another ex-PC (player had to quit for life reasons) was found in her apartment beaten to within an inch of her life. Then he finds out the GMPC was captured, and the nuclear wizard is MIA (only clue being some grainy footage on the news of her exploding).
So, the pure mortal is the only PC who isn't injured, half the party is MIA, and it's clear that the badguys are making their move. The pure mortal is seriously considering taking up the coin to even have a fighting chance, and I am stoked for the next few weeks' sessions.
And then in our OOC chat, things went off the rails when another PC, playing a pixie, decided because his character was the only one who wasn't viciously attacked, and because the attacks were all tailored to the PCs, said pixie was the prime suspect.
