A Dresden Files Fiasco or I Played a Pinball Wizard

For a while, I've been playing in a Dresden Files game run by one of the players in my (on-hiatus) Star Wars Alternate Universe campaign. In said game, I play a Young Wizard of the White Council by name of Danny Copperfield, who I will freely admit has morphed into Dresden Lite (not as tall, not as powerful, and not nearly as broke).

Well, we sort of picked up the campaign this past weekend. So after some retweaking of a couple characters (GM confessed that she was a lot more generous with handing out the Major Milestones or "level ups" than she should of been), we sat down to play. Only instead of the usual troupe style play, it wound up being me and the only other returning character from the old campaign, an honest-to-the-Greek-gods Amazon by the name of Jessie Armstrong, being pitted against a group of supernaturally-empowered crooks as they sought to pilfer a tome containing forbidden lore about "things beyond the outer gates" aka Lovecraftian-style horrors. Apparently the GM had gotten the idea courtesy of a Dresden Files supplement called "Hocus Focus" for an indy game named Fiasco. The general idea behind Fiasco is that you play a bunch of hoodlums that get involved in a scheme, but the scheme invariably goes awry due to someone or something "tilting" events to make things start falling apart for the crooks. In this case, my wizard Danny was "the tilt" (and yes, he did get called a pinball wizard) after getting looped into what the crooks were after and some of the not nice things they had done in pursuit of their goal.

I have to say that in spite of the adversarial nature of the set-up, it actually proved a very interesting change of pace, with the players of the crooks getting a chance to try out character types they otherwise might not try, such as an Outsider-worshipping focused practitioner (game terms: Sponsored Magic, Outsider patron, limited to entropy-based effects) or a Hollywood Voodoo Diva or a White Court Vampire that feasted on despair. I don't know if I'd be in a hurry to play that kind of set-up again, but it was fun to get back into Danny's red canvas duster and start slinging around the fire and wisecracks once more.

Read about Fiasco here, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Fiasco RPG