Dresden: First Session

I apologize for the delay in getting this posted, but I wanted to think over the session a while before posting. Our first session was on 2017-09-06, so now I’ve had plenty of time to plan out what to write.

For our first session, we didn’t get a lot accomplished, because, like many first sessions, we were building characters, figuring out the setting, deciding how our characters knew each other, etc. Additionally, this is the first time many of us had played a game over the Internet, used Roll20‘s interface, or used our built-in web cameras. So, there were some technical obstacles in our way as well.

We decided to set the game in Bloomington-Normal, IL as we all had familiarity with the city for various reasons. This allowed us to have a common frame of reference when we were placing headquarters, our characters housing and places of employment, and other locations of importance.

Once we had established all of the elements of the back story and fixed the technical issues, we got up to speed rather quickly. I will say though, it took a while to get up to speed on the Dresden Files Accelerated rules. Part of this is that is a new system to me (as well as others in the group); most of the rest of the issue stemmed from the fact that the rulebook is laid out in – what felt like – a very disorganized manner. If you plan on playing Dresden Files, I highly recommend the PDF version (instead of, or in addition to) the hard-cover version. Being able to search this book makes a world of difference.

The characters are:

  • Sri Patel (played by me): A White Court Vampire of House Skavis
  • Shelby Nash: A focused practitioner who is a real psychic hiding under the guise of a sketchy fake psychic (also good at cold reading)
  • Fiona McCormick: A 1%-er who also happens to be a were-panther
  • Sgt. Mike Peebles: a clued-in mortal who is also the biggest redneck you’ll likely encounter in a city of 100,000 people.

We begin our story by finding out that seven performing arts students disappeared from ISU’s campus after putting on an impromptu dance recital in the quad. We followed a lead to a local club and, noticed that people in the club starting dancing uncontrollably when a young woman opened her laptop and starting playing the B-52s’ hit, “Rock Lobster.” It must have been open mic night if they are letting just anyone play music at the club; we didn’t concern ourselves with such trivialities as the dancers started to approach us threateningly.

Once some bodies hit the floor, and Sri started playing “Headhunter” on the laptop like a normal person, we recovered a mind control device (that looked a lot like a chicken nugget) from the girl and her brother – who seemed to be the useless sibling of the pair – Sri made plans to take it to the White Court’s archivist on the morrow.

It felt reminiscent of my days of role-playing in high school in that we got into a giant bar (club) fight. However, this was definitely a more mature version of that scenario in that our characters didn’t start in the bar, get drunk, have one character pick a fight with everyone in the bar, and the rest of the group get their @$$es handed to them defending him. Our characters started elsewhere, tried diplomacy first in the bar, handed other people their @$$es, and then went to bed at a respectable hour (like adult PCs do).

That’s where we had to end the session for the night since the players also had to go to bed at a respectable hour. Ah, the joys of adulthood. I want to give a special shout-out to Vanir of Critical-Hits for GMing the game and for making a trope of high school role-playing everywhere new and exciting.

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