Dresden Files Chargen, Pt. 3: City, continued.

All right, so once we got all the characters more or less in place, it was time to pick some locations and faces. The summary is that part of chargen and city creation is the choosing of important places within the city that tie to the threats/themes, and the faces that represent both the locations and the threats/themes AND major NPCs, as well. Nearly everything has a face tied to it, really -- themes and threats and their aspects are well and good as a thought exercise, but it's got to have some application on the ground.

So, first things first: Remember back in the day we picked Baltimore and started setting up themes and threats. This is where we came up with the faces to go with.

• 20 Minutes From Anywhere -- Again, this plays a number of different ways, from transport hub to thin walls between reality and the Nevernever, etc.
  -- Simon bar Sinister, Summer Court affiliate and local liaison. He's incompetent but well connected, more or less, and was manipulated into this job. By who or what has yet to be determined.
  -- Mike Monroe, dockmaster. Mike's the local dockmaster, or at least one of them. He's African-American, local, and very much a proponent of bootstraps, unions, blue collars, and beer. And yes, he knows stuff.



• Check the Fine Print -- everything has rules; it's all about the legal loopholes, both mundane and supernatural.
  -- Mouthpiece, demon-ridden hobo. Mouthpiece's real name is lost to pretty much everyone, including him. He made a deal with a demon a while back in which he exchanged being able to speak through Mouthpiece for some undefined short-term benefit. The wording was badly phrased, though, and so ANY demon can chose to speak through him whenever they like. Poor bastard.
  -- Sheila Dixon, former mayor of Baltimore. Sheila is based on her real-life counterpart who was elected mayor and then resigned two years later in the midst of a corruption scandal (following an investigation assisted by both Zeke and Dylan). The deal she took as part of her resignation was truly a work of art, if Wikipedia is anything to go by. She can't run for office again in Baltimore, but her power structure and contacts are pretty much intact. We'll take one kingmaker to go, please, motivations cloudy.
  -- Rosalyn Duquesne, partner in a large law firm. Rosalyn is a business and contract law specialist, a useful occupation in this town. She loves the law and revels in its peculiar and speculative claims of moral neutrality. Ostensibly she's an ally, but it really helps if you hire her first.



• Swim At Your Own Risk -- there are monsters in the deep, and things beyond the ken of smaller fishes swim in waters dark and deep.
  -- Hope Sullivan, marine biologist. Hope's specialty is Chesapeake Bay and it's associated waters. She works at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
  -- "Hobo Joe," hobo. Hobo Joe is a hobo named Joe. Joe's a fixture of the area, adding local color into pretty darn well graffittied city already. If it's going on streetwise, he's likely heard of it, especially if it's down near the water. Who or what he may be in addition to that has yet to be revealed.


The city balance of power falls out thusly, based on character backgrounds and so forth: The Black Court is surprisingly active here -- it's really their last bastion of power on the East Coast, if not the US as a whole. The Fae are naturally very active here given the ease of crossing over, and resultingly there's a large population of changelings as well -- though how many gravitate here and how many are local is up to interpretation. The popular impression of Baltimore as a shithole is not entirely without merit.... daily life here for middle class and lower is tough on the best of days. If you don't have money, then nobody in authority is your friend. The line between the haves and the have-nots is more like a carefully policed gulf hereabouts. Corporations and entrenched government bureaucracy are the powers that be, both the city's gov't and the Federal influences. Everything's got forms and protocols and triplicate, and while the wheels do move, they grind exceeding fine and slow. The powers that be also encourage an official separation between supernatural and mundane; much like the World of Darkness, it's not that people don't know that things are going on, it's that it's way too much work and worry and potential screaming to acknowledge anything of the type. Individual cops might want to protect against the big bads, but Baltimore's official stance is to deride and belittle and disenfranchise those who insist that something is wrong. There is no SI department like in Chicago; things just don't work that way here, and a few more open cases isn't going to hurt anyone, figuratively speaking.

Movers and Shakers: The entrenched bureaucracy is willfully in the dark and wants things to stay the same. Advocacy groups for the everyday man are thick on the ground and want to rock the boat, but they don't know what's out in the water either. There's a heavy Eastern European crime syndicate/mafia tug of war going on, and they're both aware and looked to maintain their powerbases -- they're at a sort of detente right now, but god help any new factions who come in looking to expand. And naturally, given a town with a Jesuit university, the Loyola Jesuits know what's going on and want to rock the boat; more power for the church, more safety for their parishioners... there really isn't a front on which they wouldn't welcome some change in their favor.

All right, so the next post is locations and NPCs! Stay tuned!