Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:00)
I finally ran an RPG for my cousins that I've been trying to do. I haven't done an RPG in like 10 years. But I found this sort of short one called Escape from Dino Island.

Brian (00:10)
Okay, so you didn't go for Gloomhaven or whatever. You went right for some random nonsense. I gotcha.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:14)
No.

Well listen, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Brian (00:20)
I mean, I do like high concept RPG names. You know, you're Dungeons and Dragons, no surprises. I know there's gonna be two things, there's gonna be Dungeons and some of them will have Dragons. So, yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:30)
Yeah, but there's

really a bunch of different good names, but I do like the ones that do what they say on the tin, and sometimes they also evoke good stuff, like Monster of the Week. Well, you know you're getting some Buffy the Vampire Slayer type nonsense there. Scum and Villainy, well that evokes Star Wars immediately. Blades in the Dark, get Villains and Vigilantes, which is just a really fun And then,

Brian (00:41)
Right. Exactly what it says.

Sure.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:56)
I think perhaps one of my favorite names, if you wanna do a Ghostbusters game with kind of that goofy, funny, dry humor of the Ghostbusters movie where you're a team of literally like a franchise of Ghostbusters, play Inspectres with the word Specter being spelt like the ghost, not like.

Brian (01:04)
Mm-hmm.

got it. See, I originally thought you were going to say who you're to call, but clearly it's not like the official license or whatever, right? Of course, the officially licensed ones, they can have some of the worst names like, like the Dresden Files role playing game. there must've been something that was more fun.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:33)
Somebody, yeah,

because they even got another bite at the apple and they said, what are we gonna call this one? Dresden Files Accelerated. ⁓ come on. But there's good names out there. Honestly, you remember the groupings of the books that they had for the first one, it was Wizard for Hire? That would be an incredible name for an RPG about the Dresden Files.

Brian (01:42)
Yeah, not very creative. Not very creative.

Right.

Yes. And then you could do the second one

could be like, like what a wizard at large or whatever it is. Yeah. Wizard under fire. Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:57)
Yeah, Wizard Under Fire, yeah, those ones.

the thing is, I might have found a better name. buddy of mine has recently published an RPG and I said, well, what's it about? And he said, well, it's about these detectives with magical abilities and they're investigating like supernatural mysteries. And I said to him, ⁓

Brian (02:03)
Okay.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:17)
So like the Dresden Files, and he's like, ⁓ I've heard about that, but I never really read it. I'm like, you gotta read it, you just made a RPG about the Dresden Files. Hey, by the way, what's it called? And he said, Dick Wizards.

Brian (02:21)
You

I mean it is funny

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:38)
Welcome one, welcome all, welcome to recorded neutral territory where the spoilers go all the way through 12 months. I'm Adam Ruzzo, and with me, as always, is a man addicted to Red Court vampire spit, it's Brian O'Reilly.

Brian (02:52)
Bianca, please spit in my mouth.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:55)
⁓ okay, we're gonna leave

Brian (02:58)
You're gonna leave

that in, huh? You're not, we're gonna go with that?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:02)
Sometimes the audience has to understand what I'm dealing with. All right. So let's get moving here, ladies and gentlemen. Today we've got chapters 16 and 17 of Great Peril they're gonna talk about. But before we do go there, I do wanna mention that RPG that I mentioned in the cold open is real.

can find it at wolfmanzella.com I did get to play a playtest version of it a couple of months ago with my friend and it was really cool. it's a very light system, very rules light, it's like a very one sheet and a one page little thing to help the players understand and it was just kind of a goofy fun, supernatural exploration and investigation thing and so if that's at all interested to you, check out that, it's in the description. Let's move on.

Day two is where we're on here, Brian, Harry has just finished helping Mickey Malone. He's come home and he's talked to Bob, tried to figure everything out, now,

he's decided to go and search for Lydia.

Brian (03:57)
which is a bit of a swerve because we haven't been talking about Lydia for four whole chapters now, three whole chapters. And Jim knows this, which is why it's really smart that he kind of reminds us who Lydia is.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (04:13)
Not only that, recontextualizes her in the context of what Harry and Bob had just been talking about in the previous chapters.

the very beginning of chapter 16, he sets up how finding people is hard and a ton of people go missing every year. And then he says, quote, I didn't want Lydia to become one of those statistics.

Either she was one of the bad guys and had been playing me for a sucker, or she was a victim who was in need of my help. If the former, then I wanted to confront her. I have this thing about people who lie to me and try to get me into trouble. If the latter, then I was probably the only one in Chicago who could help her." Unquote.

Brian (04:49)
Yeah, and you know what we should mention here again that Jim likes to tout miss or have Dresden tout some missing people statistics in the Dresden files. still remember in Deadbeat the percentage taken out by a supernatural predator when he's explaining it to Butters because my wife grilled me on that the first time I had her listen to it. And this is a near seven digit figure is when he begins the chapter with saying that's

the statistic he's talking about. That's almost a million people. That's like five kids vanish from every school, which is crazy. And even in the Dresden files, Harry's probably doing the math but it is really important that he remind us that this world is more dangerous and that Dresden be concerned that Lydia is going to become one of these statistics because that is actually what's happening.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's literally what's happening and we'll find that out very soon. Now, the next piece of this that I thought I wanted to talk about is there's this fun line. As he's doing this, like, she might be dead. I might be the only one who can help her. Like, resetting the stakes of the situation, he then very quickly, just three or four paragraphs later, transitions into, quote, the shadows from the trees of Wicker Park, meanwhile, stretched out like black fingers creeping toward my throat.

Thank God my subconscious isn't too symbolically aware or anything." That's just a fun tone to keep things from being too dark, from sucking you too deeply into the, holy crap, everything's terrible and there's these supernatural predators that are gonna eat everybody. The injection of humor at the appropriate times is, think, one of the things that Butcher does really well, and it's one of the reasons that people can enjoy the books as much as they do, because

even though some really dark stuff happens in a lot of these books, it doesn't ever drag down my mood. It doesn't ever drag down my mood when I'm going through my day. I don't know if that's the same for you there, Brian.

Brian (06:54)
For the most part, I mean, there are some scenes including towards the end of Grave Peril. a couple scenes that do make me feel a little something heavy.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:03)
Yes, there are

certainly exceptions, but I feel like they are exceptions to the normal rule of the stories that we get presented.

Brian (07:09)
Agreed.

And I actually think that's something that's really important when you're writing something that's noir-inspired in, sort of modern literature. And it's part of the reason why the series is so popular. Jim understands that if you just do straight noir, like that's a really noir line, the shadows were like fingers creeping towards my throat, and you undercut it by hanging a lampshade on it, by pointing out it's a little ridiculous to say something like that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:27)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

and Harry's the one doing it, right? The implication here is that his own brain, because he's read all the noir books, right? He's got a huge shelf of books, he reads a lot. And so his brain is formulating those noir tropes while he's looking at the and his brain is doing this, he's like, God, of course my brain is going to noir tropes while I'm trying to find this girl.

Brian (07:44)
Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:59)
it fits perfectly, like you said, it hangs a lampshade on it, but it feels like something Dresden would do, so it also feels natural in the writing.

Brian (08:09)
Yes, and we're going to talk later about media that's like the Dresden Files, but one thing I want to call out is in a lot of modern, especially movies, where they want to have a neo-noir feel and they want the protagonist to be admirable, smart, genre savvy, self-aware, do exactly this. I think actually the new reader reaction episodes, Charlotte brought up Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (08:34)
Hmm.

Brian (08:35)
as

being very similar to Dresden Files and know Lucky Number Slevin is another movie that's like that where the protagonists know what a gangster movie is like or what a noir movie is like so they make jokes about how much this is like a movie and Dresden's kind of doing the same thing here in a way that makes you the reader feel the dread still but also kind of reassures you that the protagonist understands what they're getting into.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:02)
And other characters in the Dresden Files do this too. I distinctly remember Molly and Thomas and Murphy all have made various remarks referencing various movies and TV shows. But my favorite Brian is Rollins in Battleground where he thought you were gonna retire two weeks, gonna die of cliche poisoning. Like that is my favorite, that has gotta be my favorite.

Brian (09:05)
Yes.

Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:27)
up there with my favorite lines of all the series. I love that one. Cause again, it's that self-aware thing, but it's hanging a lampshade on like, I know this is a trope, but so does the person living through it. And you know what? Those things can happen. Those kinds of coincidences can happen. Sometimes a cop at the end of their career gets stuck with a really bad situation and it's like two days till

it works for me. It works me so well.

Brian (09:51)
And if you'll notice, Jim always gives ⁓ that awareness, the ability to poke fun in genre savviness to characters that you're supposed to at least like a little bit. Like who's the most villainous character who does that? Probably Marcon.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:03)
Mm.

⁓ yeah, okay, yeah, there's a couple of times he does that.

Brian (10:09)
And you're

supposed to be, you're supposed to feel a little conflicted about whether you like him or you don't. Whereas a straight villain, you know, the Genosqua will never be genre savvy.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:13)
Mm-hmm.

No, but occasionally

Mab has surprised Harry with some kind of genre savvy line. yeah, and I believe in a couple chapters here, it's not like a genre savvy line necessarily, but there's a moment when Harry confronts the nightmare in Murphy's office. And we're gonna get to it where.

Brian (10:31)
And she's not a straight villain, so...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:45)
nightmare says, there is something you have forgotten and Harry says, yeah, what's that? And then the nightmare says, I have partaken of thee and like blasts him with venta servitas. And Harry's like, should never have given him a straight line like that. And it's just so perfect, right? In this case though, we're not supposed to like Kravos, but Harry's the one noticing the genre convention. So that makes it okay.

Brian (10:57)
huh.

Well, but it's also

is Kravas looking for a straight line before he does the wind spell? Because I have partaken of thee. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (11:10)
yeah, exactly, yes, yes,

of course he's gonna give Harry some shit in exactly the way that Harry would give someone shit, because he's partaken of thee. So anyway, I like that tone setting. It's hard to explain to people why I like the Dresden Files, because it's this big sprawling mess. And if you try to, how do you condense something that big without just being super general? Like, it's got great world building, and the characters are likable, like.

if you can say something more specific about it in that the tone it manages to strike very much up my alley because, and then it's like, okay, it can have dark tones, but it has these moments of levity within them, but it's not like undercutting every serious moment the way like a Joss Whedon film does. you do have some serious moments and that's important for the series as well. so

After he has his own little ability, his own little self-awareness of his subconscious being symbolically aware, he manages to triangulate with a tracking spell to try and find specifically man's talisman that he gave to Lydia at the beginning of the book, and he uses his own shield bracelet as like the link because he made both of them in the same way.

Then he does find the warehouse where he thinks Lydia is, or at least his dead man Talisman is, and he considers, like, do I go call Murphy or Michael, or do I just go in? And this is another situation where Jim has done himself credit in, Harry can never have a cell phone. Cell phones are death to good narratives, Brian. Everybody knows this. You wanna write good horror, you can't write it in the modern day, or you have to come up with a reason that cell phones don't work.

Brian (12:47)
Right.

Yep.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (12:56)
Put it in the mountains somewhere. That'll do it.

Brian (12:58)
Right, or the cell phone has to be part of the horror.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:02)
That's

Brian (13:03)
So Lydia is in fact in distress and when Dresden goes inside this factory he finds Lydia passed out inside a van and that's when he gets jumped. But before we get to that I think we should discuss like why is Lydia in this warehouse in the first place? Kyle and Kelly picked her up presumably off the street and then they drove to this warehouse?

Why would they do that?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:33)
Yeah, so I was kind of trying to come up with answers like in fiction, right? Why are they, those characters have the motivation to go to this specific warehouse with this girl. And on the one hand, Maybe they had other business here. Maybe they stashed something here or maybe they came to pick something up or to meet someone and they were just waiting for sunset after having concluded their business, right? Or.

Maybe they know that this is a safe place to hold up until sunset officially comes. They did something dangerous going out in the sun. Yes, they had a fully tinted van, but still, that's still very dangerous. As you pointed out, one traffic accident and they're screwed.

Brian (14:17)
Yeah, if a window

breaks, they're on fire. And it's crazy that they managed to get Lydia in the first place. Like, what, did they tempt her with candy? Because how do they get out of the van? So.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:29)
well,

she was looking for uppers, right? So maybe, maybe they have, I mean, but the other implication that we sort of had, and we'll talk more about why we think this later, is that she may already have an existing relationship with the Red Court in some way. And so maybe-

Brian (14:31)
True. Maybe.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:50)
she trusted them to supply drugs because they've done that in the past, because they use that to lure prey, right? They could be that to her. So that's one possibility. But what do you think, Brian? Why do you think they came here? What's the most likely scenario?

Brian (14:56)
Sure.

So I think that Lydia probably went inside somewhere to get drugs. That she went to some trap house or something to go buy ⁓ meth or crack or whatever she takes to write. And...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:21)
Something to stay awake.

Brian (15:23)
Kyle and Kelly know the drug trade in this area really well. They probably run part of it. So they probably just drove around to the various places where they could park in a garage or something and then go inside. And they happened to get lucky and find her. And, you know, maybe Jim didn't really think all the way through how are they picking her up off the street, but we can kind of build that back in. They got to her inside or they have some way of doing it under an umbrella. You know, I don't know if that works.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:52)
they followed her into an

Brian (15:53)
Right. Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:53)
alley that's not east-west, right? It's north, it's, or something like that. So that the setting sun would not shine into this particular street or something like that. And they pulled the van up right next to her, grabbed her, pulled her in, got the saliva on her so she'd calm down immediately, and then just drove. And they're like, okay, now we need to go hide somewhere. Cause if anybody saw that, you know, they might send somebody to come looking. Hey, I know this abandoned warehouse. We can go hide there real quick. Nobody's there.

Brian (16:18)
Well, I bet

it's not even, hey, I know this abandoned warehouse. I bet this is owned by the Red Court. They probably have buildings across the city that if you get caught out in the sun, you just run to the building. know, every Red Court vampire has got a key ring to a few different, crappy warehouses in Chicago that they can just... Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (16:23)
That might even be the case, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, at least the upper lieutenants would certainly

have that, right? And we're pretty sure that Kyle and Kelly are sort of high-ranking lieutenants in Bianca's forces. So that kind of establishes what we've got going on here. I find that pretty likely because as Dresden says, the van's engine is like ticking as it cools as he walks in. So it only recently arrived inside this warehouse, or sorry, this loading dock, this sort of enclosed loading dock.

That brings up the next question, like, okay, so what has Lydia been doing all day? Because it's almost sunset and she left the church last night to find uppers. And again, we only know that from the very last chapter of the book where Fort Hill explains the sequence of events after she comes back to him. So I guess she's just been wandering the streets trying to stay awake all day and Kyle and Kelly found her, you know, an hour or two before sunset and then...

like we said, drove into this abandoned ⁓ manufacturing facility. But then the question, Brian, why the heck are they risking going out during the day to hunt down this specific girl?

Brian (17:50)
Yeah, so there's a few things that are going on here. First, maybe Lydia can get a little bit of sleep during the day. Because, you know, it approaches a little bit suspension of disbelief if she does not sleep for actually four days. That is the kind of thing that, could kill somebody.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:01)
okay. Yeah, maybe.

Yeah.

Brian (18:16)
so that that's what that's really hard to do i don't have yours

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:19)
Or

maybe she's sleeping while on something, so it's a fitful sleep. It's not deep enough for her to make that domain in the never never that Harry and Bob will be talking about in the next chapter. That is how the nightmare gets you, right? So if she's trying to have this fitful sleep that's not really a good deep sleep, it'll at least get her some of the way towards not dying of fatigue or exhaustion, but.

It's not enough to get caught by the nightmare and that's enough to get her through the day.

Brian (18:51)
Especially because as we'll find out in ghost stories, most ghosts sort of blank out the entirety of the day. So if you go to sleep at 11 a.m. and wake up at 1.30 p.m., probably no chance that a ghost is actually gonna realize you're sleeping and come for you.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:58)
Yeah.

Brian (19:08)
but to be clear, that would be why Kyle and Kelly would go look for her during the day, because they know she's gonna be on the move at night and she's more likely to be sedentary during the day. As to why they're looking for her, well, we do, I think, know that she has a prior relationship in some way, shape, or form with the Red Court, but more

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (19:17)
Hmm.

Brian (19:32)
we have very strong hints that Kravos and Bianca and Mavra are all kind of going in lockstep at this point. So, and not just like working together in a general sense, they have the same goals. There is some plan here that they are all working on. And part of the plan is to get Kravos in Lydia

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (19:42)
They're all working together, yeah.

Brian (19:59)
Maybe we don't know if the destroying Amorachius thing is just a, they take the opportunity to, or if that's actually a plan.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (20:08)
Yeah, it feels

more like an opportunistic thing, but yeah, I think maybe the get Lydia for me is like Kravos' price to Mavrah and Bianca to do their bidding, do what they want with regards to Dresden or whatever else. He wants revenge on Dresden too, but he probably has his own plan of like, I'm going to come back from the dead using either Corpse Taker's method or something else, right?

He's a dark sorcerer. He had a book of shadows. Like maybe he had his own way to cheat death. And Lydia being someone that was close to him in life was part of his cult and has some talent, maybe is a key component to whatever his plan is. So he says to Bianca and Mavra, you promise to get her for me. I'm not doing anything else that you want until she's delivered. And that's why Kyle and Kelly are out here in the day looking for

Brian (21:06)
Right, I mean I would bet that it's actually Mavra's spell in the first place. How to get him, out of the land of the dead and back into the land of the living. She sells it to him as one package. Yes, you are going to commit suicide, but you're going to come back and, you know, well, okay, you've got to put me back into somebody who's got some talent.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:15)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (21:26)
And

he knows that Lydia does because when he met her and they touched hands, they got the practitioner or, you know, joy buzzer feeling. that's I think that's probably why it's Lydia specifically and why Kyle and Kelly have gotten her. But you brought up Adam. They might be deliberately trying to set a trap for Dresden specifically, since he seems to be attempting to protect Lydia. And Kyle and Kelly seem to kind of be.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:31)
Yeah.

Brian (21:54)
six-a-one half a dozen of the other with regards to whether they want to kill Harry immediately.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:59)
Yeah, we speculated a little bit during the delivery of the invitation for Bianca's party. the goal of Kyle and Kelly, like was there a primary goal of like try to get Dresden killed through a technicality thing? Of like, ⁓ she's on a diet, she couldn't control herself. Whoops, well, we'll kill her and don't worry, there's your were guild. Like we've dealt with the problem. That was a possibility. Now here.

It feels like it could be a trap. Initially, Dresden thinks it's a trap. And I think the way that it's written is designed to confuse the reader, right? Because Dresden is very confused at this point. He doesn't know who's doing what or why.

Brian (22:38)
Yeah, why do the

vampires want her except to get to me?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:41)
Yeah, again, he's a little egocentric, right? He's a little arrogant, like everything's about me, isn't it? it's not necessarily about him. In this case, he thinks it's a trap set for him, and then Kyle appears to be surprised that Dresden is the one that he jumped on. He says, you, in a surprised way, and Harry's like, well, that's great villain dialogue right there, buddy. unless Kyle is,

purposefully misleading him, I do believe he was surprised to find Harry there because I think we kind of sussed out. I think he's on a different mission. He's picking up Lydia Kravos, like at Bianca's orders. But if Harry's here, might as well do something with it.

Brian (23:26)
But I wonder

if Harry is deliberately trying to effectively steal chattel as far as the accords would be concerned. You know, if he's sort of cattle rustling. I mean, the Old West, you know, they'd shoot you for that. They'd hang you. So maybe this is one of those things where if we can... Kyle and Kelly's orders are, if you can kill Dresden because he's doing something stupid, take full advantage of it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:36)
Mmm.

Yeah?

Brian (23:53)
Like, if we can kill him and get away with it, do it. That accomplishes what I want to accomplish. But the plan is actually to get him at the party. It's just if you have the opportunity beforehand to make him look like an idiot and kill him at the same time, go for it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:07)
Yeah, because

having him at the party is a risk we don't wanna take, but it's our backup plan. Let's see if we can kill him with the invitation. Nope, he dodged that. And then he falls into the hands of my lieutenants. Well, they already have orders to try to kill him. And ⁓ if we go back to your idea about this is a property owned by the Red Court, he's violating their territory and he didn't announce himself. And like you said, he's stealing chattel. There's almost certainly some kind of justification they could use here.

Brian (24:26)
Sure.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:35)
And again, maybe pay a ware guild like, oops, well, it's terrible. And you're right, probably we're in the wrong. Here's a bunch of money kind of a situation.

Brian (24:43)
or not even, because they probably want the war, so that's probably what they're hoping to do, just not.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:46)
yeah, you're right.

Brian (24:49)
pay a wear guild and start it that way. But you know, worst case scenario, or it's not even probably worst case scenario, it's probably we're going to get him at the party. But if we have the opportunity, the party might not work. I mean, it's possible that he doesn't show up or he leaves too early. So if you have some other opportunity to do it, fine. But the point is we get this guy killed in a way that creates a pretext for war and either makes the council look weak or gives us the fight that we're

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, because the council didn't want to go to war. And imagine a situation where, okay, Harry burns down like Bianca's whole thing and then kills Bianca and all of that stuff, right? At that point, the Red Court has the Cassis Belli, the cause for war, the justification, right? They're the ones declaring war on the White Council. The White Council can't refuse at that point. Harry's pulled them into it. Imagine Harry gets killed.

Brian (25:35)
Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:46)
the White Council wasn't really interested in this war when it was forced on them. If they're the ones with the cast spell eye, they're gonna look for reasons to not press that claim. And you're right, it's gonna make them look weak, which will cause the faction in the red court that wants war to get stronger. Cause they're like, look at these guys. We just killed one of their people and they're not even forcing the issue. Like what is going on with this?

Brian (26:13)
And

it does seem like

of the Black Council's

goal is to sow dissension within the White Council. And we will talk about this at the end of the book. It might be that some of the masterminds of the Black Council would be in a great position to do that if it was the White Council that have the Casas The way things actually happen, the Red Court is at war essentially when the book ends because Dresden has murdered nobles. But

it could be if the shoe was on the other foot that the idea was to use people like Peabody to sort of create a war party in the White Council and, you know, push it out that way. So obviously this is not a very complicated moment.

In the story itself, Dresden barely gets away. He does get poisoned, but he knocks out the wall, which brings in the sunlight. And it's a cool scene, but it's not that deep. It's not that long. But because of the implications of grave peril on the larger story, and because we know this is where Mirror Mirror is going to jump off from, this is the differentiating point. It's really interesting to speculate how the larger plan is influencing these smaller scenes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:27)
Exactly. And this one feels like the attack on Dresden in this scene is another sort of opportunistic moment. They didn't plan for him to show up, I don't think. I don't think there's enough evidence to support that. But one thing that I do want to do, Brian, and you know I like to keep these statistics that we've been sort of tracking while we've been reading these books, and eventually I'm gonna put some nice charts and graphs on the subreddit so that we can see how things change over time. One of the things I want to do is...

do a sort of report on property damage that is directly or indirectly caused by Dresden. This is the fifth building that Dresden has destroyed, all right?

Brian (28:07)
five

buildings in less than three books? What? I don't believe you. Give it to me.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:10)
Yeah.

So the Varsity gets burned down by Marcon as a result of Dresden's actions.

Brian (28:16)
Uhhhh ⁓

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:22)
He does, and

Marcon basically says, because you confronted me in public in this place, we have to burn it all down. Sure, so the varsity and Victor sells Lake House, obvious, in the first book, right? So the Lugaru goes crazy in the SI precinct, and I blame this on Dresden because if he hadn't split up with, from Macphin in the woods.

Brian (28:30)
that I guess that counts as him being hard on building short.

Okay, yep, got it. Yeah, that one for yep. Definitely. Absolutely.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:49)
then probably the Luguru wouldn't have been caught.

Brian (28:53)
Look, if the question is who's hard on the building, the Lugru is harder. But Dresden does destroy several walls. I mean, he's hard on the building, so for sure, definitely.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:02)
Yes. Yes. Yep.

Then there's Agatha Hagglethorn's domain at the beginning of this book, burns it all to the ground. No?

Brian (29:08)
⁓ Those aren't real buildings.

No, they're- that's- that's- that's ectoplasm or whatever. Come on.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:16)
Alright, alright, so it's the fourth building then. So this Sumner Manufacturing is the fourth building burned to the ground as a result of Dresden. I'll try and keep track of other lesser damage even when he doesn't burn entire buildings to the ground, because as he says in this chapter, I can be really hard on buildings.

Brian (29:33)
Yeah, so and that's what we're

trying to check how how hard is he being on them and I will say you know This is a good book to start tracking on it because dresden is Famously hard on a building in grave peril

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:45)
Which is why it's important that he has a castle that can't burn to the ground now. Well, okay, fair enough.

Brian (29:49)
Anything burns if it gets hot enough, Adam. Alright.

So the other thing we have to of course check in on here is the Coyote Scale. Dresden comes up with this plan to find Lydia. It succeeded, Adam! He did it!

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:57)
Yeah.

Yeah, he did do it. And then we have to ask ourselves, was going in and not calling for backup like the right choice in this instance? Like he had only a certain amount of time and he was worried if he took too long to find a phone, he wouldn't make it. Considering he could have called to get them in the area, like at the beginning of this process. Actually, no, I take it back. He did, he tried to call Michael and Murphy at the start of this chapter and couldn't find them.

I guess that means that he did try to do that at least. So I'll retract that and say that he did try to do what he could, so he probably can't be blamed for that aspect of it.

Brian (30:44)
Yeah, and you know, the way that he actually approaches Lydia in the warehouse is a little single-minded. mean, why do you think she's laying still in a van, Dresden? It's probably not for good reasons. So maybe he should be a little bit more cautious in his approach. Then again,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (31:04)
Yes, he definitely

ran right over to the van, because he's like, there's a bundle in there, what is that? And it did not describe him like circling the room and making sure there was nobody hiding there. He's just like, hey look, bait! Let me run right over to it.

Brian (31:15)
Yeah, there's no, there's no, I

reached out with my wizard senses, you know? So I think that was a little ridiculous. But at the same time, even if he did that, the red chord is pretty good at not being found when...

that they don't want to be. They hide in the shadows and they move lighter than a normal human being because of their superior muscle control and whatever. So it's not a bad plan. It's the best plan he can come up with under the circumstances, maybe, and he does feel like he has to do it. And it's not fantastically executed, but I don't think that there's any way...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (31:32)
That's fair. Yeah.

Brian (31:57)
executing it differently, like he still confronts them even if he finds them beforehand.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:00)
Yeah,

in his defense, how was he to expect a pair of vampires to be here, right? He was trying to find Lydia, it's still daylight. it would be unfair to expect him to expect the vampires, right, at this particular moment. So I think overall, I would say it's definitely a failure, but I don't know that it's necessarily Harry's fault. It might just be sort of the random sort of...

Brian (32:07)
Right, has no reason to. Yep.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:26)
The random roll of the dice is he got unlucky by the circumstances here.

Brian (32:30)
Well, I think it depends what we call the plan. Because if the plan is to figure out whether Lydia is screwing it's a success!

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:38)
I guess that's true. But if the plan was to

rescue her, if she's not screwing me, then it's a fail. I mean, he does only get saved by that wall happening to collapse. If that doesn't work, he's dead, he's already dead. So.

Brian (32:44)
Right, so I mean...

I think you can either call it a lucky success or an unlucky failure depending on exactly how you contextualize what he did.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:00)
That's fair. Okay, so let's move on to chapter 17, where this is the one where Harry is now drunk on vampire venom, the vampire spit, and it got on his skin and immediately had this really blissful, like, everything's cool, man, just super uncaring about the world, and boy, Brian, the most...

crazy thing in this entire book is that he drove home under the influence of that thing. He says, quote, I had a vague image of all the cars around me going way too fast and then Mr. Rumbling Purr greeting me as I got to my apartment. Wow.

Brian (33:27)
my god. Yeah.

I mean, to

be clear, he was definitely in the car driving 15 miles an hour. You know, just like, right, he's white knuckling the wheel like he's doing a hundred and just.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:48)
Yes, everybody's honking at him and like giving him the finger.

That makes total sense. So he does manage to get home, he collapses on his bed and Mr. tries to get his attention and he thinks, oh, Mr. is just hungry, I'll go give him some food. Of course, we know it's not Mr. It's actually Bob who...

was sent out with Mr. to go search for information and he has not left Mr. yet and he's trying to get Harry to go down to the lab so he can talk to him about the fact that you're covered in vampire venom and here's how you can fix it. But he doesn't understand,

gives Mr. some food and then he does manage to rally his mental defenses away from this incredibly relaxation been washing over him this whole time.

He does manage to put up the walls to keep out this opiate effect. He mentions how he learned to keep pain out, but it's actually way harder to keep this opiate effect of relaxing, calm, pleasure feeling, and he wants that, right? His body wants that, so keeping those walls up is way harder than keeping out pain that he doesn't want.

Brian (34:58)
Well, I mean, what is it really, right? I think that this is the red cord is literally big mosquitoes. This is a thing that they, you know, give you so that it doesn't hurt. So it's it literally is something opiate, something like, you know, heroin or whatever. And those drugs don't make you feel good. They make you feel none of your bads

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:06)
Hmm

Exactly. Exactly.

Brian (35:25)
right just the

every sense every slight bit of uncomfortableness that is sort of that you're feeling you just don't have those sensations anymore so of course that's hard to keep out because what you're trying to keep out is the oblivion of you know sensations not like that it's causing them it's getting rid of them it's emptying you of them

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:44)
Yeah.

And what's really interesting here is that Harry focuses and puts up these walls so that he can think about what just happened for a little while and try to come to grips of like, okay, Liddy was there and...

her pulse was normal, but my pulse is really slow, but she was also on the venom. Why was her pulse normal? He doesn't really answer that question, but then he's like, okay, maybe the nightmare took her, maybe this happened, maybe that happened, and then he can't keep it out any longer and the walls come in. What I think is really interesting here, Brian, is that the next chapter, Harry and Bob are gonna talk through all this stuff, and Bob's gonna be like, I think I know how the nightmare got into all these people past the thresholds and how it ate you and whatever, but.

Here, Butcher takes the time to have Harry think through some of it on himself. It feels like it would narratively be very easy to just say, why is he gonna go through all this himself now? Why can't we just have him fall asleep, do the nightmare thing, and then have him think and talk through this with Bob later? So that's an interesting distinction. He's taken the time to have Harry focus and do this ahead of time.

Brian (36:53)
I think that Jim was a lot more conscientious in the early books of writing it like a traditional murder mystery. And part of the way that a modern in a traditional murder mystery makes it feel like there it's not, you know, the round up these little suspects. We're going to have a day new ma and the foyer, you know, like, like one of those where everybody gets together and Sherlock Holmes walks around and says, you did this and you did this and you did this and just explains everything.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:01)
Hmm.

Yeah.

And that means

those three are the killer.

Brian (37:24)
Right, it is that you drip feed it as slowly as you can. You have each realization come three pages apart, very slowly and very progressively, and you just keep laying bricks in the wall the way that people actually do think of things, you know. So it's very true to life and it works. And I think Jim is paying a lot of attention to making sure that Harry doesn't just think about the case when

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:32)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (37:52)
getting a lot of exposition from Bob. The other thing that's really interesting is that he considers the nightmare being in Lydia, which works really well with the red herring that Jim's laid out about. maybe Lydia was standing outside the residence, you know, tearing the heads up. Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Mickey Malone's house and got the invitation

in. Cause that's another time he goes back to that maybe while he's having this sort of opiate barbarian at the gates that he's trying to hold back. He thinks, okay, maybe the nightmare had taken her, then got to Malone and gotten an invitation in. And one of the things that I thought of is here, this pause before Bob gives you the answer is a time for the reader

to sort of try to come to their own conclusion. Harry's throwing a lot of stuff at the wall, trying to see what sticks, and having this pause gives the reader the chance to think about it, because Harry's not giving you answers. He's speculating. Maybe this happened, but then why did that happen? And what did they have to gain? And what did that have to do with this? Well, maybe it was because of this. He's not giving you answers. Bob's gonna give you some answers in the next chapter. This is a nice breath to let the reader try to figure it out on their own, which is what people usually like about mysteries, is trying to figure it out on their

Brian (39:10)
Right, and I think that it's really interesting that we know that wasn't happening. So why do you think Lydia's pulse was so much faster?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (39:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, that is a very good question. Why is Lydia's pulse so much faster? Now, the first thing that came to me is she is terrified. Something is, like she's obviously blissed out on this venom, right? But something is keeping her terrified. So either the nightmare is possessing her at that moment, but because she's blissed out on the venom, it can't like do anything because it's also blissed out on the venom.

Brian (39:46)
Eww.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (39:49)
because it's in her. So that's possibility. It's terrorizing her, so the heart rate is still higher, but it can't do anything because of the venom. The other possibility that you brought up that I thought was great, Brian, is that she is dreaming and therefore having one of her Cassandra's Tears visions in her dream, which is, because it's a vision of this nightmare taking her, very, very scary.

Brian (40:14)
Yeah, I thought that that, we were discussing in pre-show, could be a cool thing Jim had in his head, Ganon, as he's writing it. It might just be as simple as, she's on a hell of a lot of uppers.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:25)
Yeah.

Brian (40:26)
So, you know, her pulse is only going to get so slow. She fell asleep, you know, after snorting a couple lines of Adderall, and she's just actually at a normal heart rate. So it could be any of those reasons. Maybe she's just so habituated to the venom that it doesn't have as much of an effect. You we don't know. But it's interesting that Dresden points that out, and we never get a direct answer about it. But as you were saying, he does eventually succumb to sleep.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:40)
Yeah.

And this is a great way that Butcher introduces the backstory, I think, right? He then falls asleep and starts thinking about the time he took down Kravos, and we get the full flashback here up until the moment that it goes wrong, and he's like, in real life,

Brian (41:00)
⁓

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (41:16)
We wrapped everything up in a bow and it was perfect. Everybody did what they were supposed to, blah, blah, blah. In the dream, five paragraphs of horror. Michael being eaten by a demon and Harry having his magic taken away by Kravos and boy, it is awful.

Brian (41:26)
This

This might be, honestly, this far into the books, into the series, this might the best thing from an outline perspective Jim has done as a writer. This is so smart. Because you have to give us the flashback to Kravos at some point. You have to. He's actually the character who later you're going to tell us is the nightmare. He needs to be introduced. We need to understand something about him.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (41:48)
Hmm.

Brian (42:04)
but one you can't just do it if you want to start in meteor race and take it through just through this case there's no natural way to do it

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:12)
through the Michael thing, right.

You'd have to have Harry like reminiscing about it or telling another character who wasn't there. But here's the problem, Michael and Murphy and Rudolph were all there and Harry doesn't really interact with anybody else that he would talk about this with in this book. Yeah, you'd have to figure out a new character, like introduce like, Stallings wasn't on that raid because he's new to SI or whatever.

Brian (42:29)
Right, like Lydia? Yeah, exactly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:41)
try to come up with that. But another thing about this, Brian, So Harry has been hearing about Kravos recently. It's come up a couple of times so far in the book. right, Butcher is kind of drip feeding this to the reader, foreshadowing it a little bit. But because he's foreshadowing it to us, he's also foreshadowing it to Harry. And Harry's intuition is personified by the man in black who speaks to Harry in his dreams.

Right? He probably is making connections that conscious Harry is not. And so it would make sense for the man in black to be like, hey, moron, something about the Kravos case is not right. And it's connected to what's going on. And then trying to shove that into Harry's conscious mind through his dreams. Of course,

Brian (43:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:31)
His id doesn't know that Kravos is about to come and eat him in his dream, right? He's not setting that up on purpose. That's just one of the consequences of what's going on here because his id doesn't know everything.

Brian (43:41)
Well,

and the black hat Harry might be manifesting Kravos coming in because it might be his subconscious pushing it so hard that creates the demean in the first place. But...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:53)
Yeah. And we know demeans

are easier because the barrier has been torn up recently.

Brian (43:59)
Yes, but the the crazy thing is right look at all he's accomplishing there. So he gives us this backstory we also it makes sense We're getting this drip fed thing about Kravos It makes sense that harry's thinking about it and it's also narratively the next piece of information we need about Kravos Okay, what was this actually like? Like what do you actually remember what actually happened? and

It also serves the entire plot by creating the main problem Harry has to overcome. This is the moment where Harry is disempowered in the way that sets up the drama of the book. So this is sort of the most important.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:33)
Yeah?

Brian (44:41)
story beat that Jim has to execute so far in the book. Dresden has to have part of his magic taken away so that he's at a disadvantage. That's why he can't wrap this case up. That's why this is a novel and not a novella, not a short story, because Dresden doesn't have it all at his fingertips and the nightmare is way stronger than it's supposed to be because it takes a chunk out of him. So in that story element that's so important to the overarching plot of this book,

Jim also weaves in all that backstory and it's perfectly logical that it happens at this moment. I mean, this might be the sort of most adroit writerly bit in the series so far. Not the best lines.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:21)
Mm-hmm. And he's written this

before he's ever published his first book, right? Stormfront gets published after he's done writing this. Now the other thing that I would point out about this particular scene is I'm not a horror guy. I don't like horror movies, generally speaking. I'll do thrillers, absolutely, tension is okay. Like body horror and like people being ripped to pieces, that's never been my thing. Jim...

Brian (45:27)
Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:47)
rides the line of this being a horror scene without being too graphic so perfectly for someone like me. Because for example, Claus flashed out and Murphy stumbled back, her eyes wide with shock where the talons had carved through her Kevlar jacket, her shirt, her skin, leaving her belly torn open. Blood and worse rushed and she let out a weak gasp, pressing both hands against her own ruined side. That...

paints such an evocative picture without saying, and her intestines were falling out like sausages or, you know, some kind of extra graphic elements that could have been written into this. And I know some people like that kind of weird horror graphic elements, but for me, it would have really made this scene harder for me to really enjoy at all and get through. And if-

he had written like the entire Dresden Files with that kind of extreme horror tone, then it probably wouldn't be a series that I like to reread at all. But because he rides that line of like, I'm gonna let your imagination do what it does, I don't have to tell you every single detail for you to fill in the blanks. Blood and worse rushed out. Yep, I get the picture. I get it. without you having to describe it.

Brian (47:02)
Yeah, he very much

leaves it up to you how graphic you want to make it in your brain. He's not trying away from it, but he's also not, you know, really wallowing in it in a way that you can't escape it. And that allows the series to serve different people. I mean, I don't like the Saw movies. They don't really do anything for me. They are scary. I mean, I get it. Like it's the body horror is effective, but I don't

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (47:07)
Exactly, exactly right.

Brian (47:28)
really enjoy it in any way and I don't think they're particularly novel or whatever. I prefer my terror to be you know Seven very psychological like it can be gory and messed up but you you're coming at me for more of the psychological dread lens and the dread in this scene the inescapable inevitability of it is just so I mean this is the I will I will say that and it's part of why I like this series so much.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (47:36)
Hmm.

Brian (47:58)
The genre of movies that I'm most upset that they stopped making was the sort of late 90s early aughts action horror film. The Mummy being the Brendan Fraser, you know, that being the kind of biggest example, but if you've seen Underworld or there's a lot of movies that have protagonists who are in fact competent, who know what they're getting themselves into.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:11)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Brian (48:27)
It's not, know what you did last summer, it's a bunch of teenagers who should all die. don't even, why does one of them survive? They should just all die, right? It's somebody who I think has a prayer of surviving, but it's still scary. And Jim does a great job of making, it's not like I read the Dresden Files and I can't fall asleep that night, but this is legitimately a scary scene. You feel bad.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, and if you,

the closest comparison I can make is that, like I said, I don't do horror movies, generally speaking, but I saw Sinners last year, and you're talking about dread. That did a very good job of like creating the dread and slowly building the tension, but also the rest of the movie was so, outside of the horror elements, was so magnificently executed that,

the horror elements of it weren't as bad for me because I could appreciate so much more was going on. And that's kind of the way that the Dresden Files works is I like so much of the set dressing that the horror feels less bad to me when I get to that L. Again, for my own personal tastes. I'm not saying Jim has written this badly, just to clear.

Brian (49:37)
No, and I think that's the reason why I can sort of very confidently say, because the Dresden files are very interesting in that.

they certainly show you the growth and development of a protagonist without being overly graphic in any arena and in that way they resemble a lot of books and series that are classified as YA, especially insofar as their fantasy. But they also cross the line and this is an example of, think, where you couldn't put this in

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (50:13)
Percy Jackson, you know, this is way too far for something like that, right? So it's it really Jim has a knack ⁓ when it comes to horror. He has a real knack for making it legitimately repellent and a little bit gross and scary without making you need to take a shower afterwards or you have trouble going to bed or you know, he rides the line nicely. So

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (50:14)
No. Agreed.

right.

All right, so we're

actually gonna talk a little bit more about that next week on our question for Bob, but before we get there, let's go through the rest of this. So things go wrong, the demon eats him, he wakes up terrified, throws up, runs downstairs, gets into his summoning circle, calls up the circle to like protect him, it shimmers, it's hard for him to do, and Bob comes down and ends the scene by saying, I think I know what tried to eat you. It's like.

Man, Jim does come up with some pretty good cliffhanger-y endings. Like, well, I guess, I mean, it's 11.45, but I guess I'm reading the next chapter, because I gotta know what tried to eat him, too.

Brian (51:12)
Yeah.

as you pointed out, actually, I want to give you credit for this because I didn't even notice it. I don't know if this happened to any other readers. When Mr. wakes him up in this scene, it never really landed with me that, that's Bob. That's what you said. I was just like, ah, is, know, Dresden's pets are a little bit, they get it, you know, to a certain extent. Cats have a little bit of play in the supernatural community. You know, they do stuff. No, no, no, no. That's not Mr. being a smart cat. That's Bob.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (51:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Brian (51:50)
literally horrified slapping Dresden because he sees spiritually this thing literally taking chunks out of him. mean the horror-

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (51:55)
Yeah. He says, tried

to help you, but you wouldn't wake up, right? Cause he was a mister and he finally got him eventually.

But before we move on to our question for Bob, I've got one last question I want to talk about here, Brian. How do we integrate this description of Kravos eating Harry's chi with sort of future descriptions of how the spirit slash soul works? I mean, was Kravos eating Harry's soul? Was that what's happening here?

Brian (52:22)
So I think that's a really good question because talks about like chakra points and this is when I think the books are trying a little bit more self-consciously to use new age language or without necessarily

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:38)
Yeah, touchstones that people would be familiar with.

Brian (52:43)
delving too far into stuff that's clearly Abrahamic religion-coded. And Jim eventually is gonna be like, I mean, look, that's what I know, that's where I was raised, I'm gonna have to use some of that language if I'm gonna make sense of this. But here he doesn't do it, he doesn't say it ate your soul, he says it went after one of your chakra points. yeah, so, I mean, you have to think, it made Kravus magically stronger.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:49)
Right.

Right.

Yeah. Got you right in the chi.

Brian (53:12)
I mean, we know that the soul isn't just magic, because soul fire is when you can blend those two things. But does magic come from anywhere that's not the soul?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:26)
Well, we do know that the soul acts remarkably like a ghost because in ghost story, everybody thinks Harry's a ghost. Even Mort thinks Harry's a ghost, but we find out later that he's just walking around naked in his soul. He's still technically alive. So, Harry does his magic, you know, with his memories the same way that Sir Stuart teaches him because that's how Sir Stuart does his.

abilities. That's how he does his damage against the other ghosts. So all of the things that Harry does as a ghost, quote unquote, are consistent with what ghosts do for the most part. And therefore it seems to me like, yeah, I think that his soul is what's being eaten by Kravos here.

If Bob hadn't helped Harry wake up, then maybe Kravos just eats Harry's entire soul and gets even more powerful and Harry's just a vegetable the next day when somebody comes looking for him.

Brian (54:27)
Or maybe if Corpse Taker gets to eat everything, that's when he jumps inside Harry's body the way he's planning on doing with you mentioned...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:38)
⁓ Yeah, if he can eat

your whole soul, then he's compatible with possessing your body as a real boy, as it were.

Brian (54:47)
Yeah,

and I think when we did the pre-planning, you talked about is this act similar to what the Corpse Taker's trying to do to Mort in Ghost Story? Are these fundamentally, totally different things? Because obviously when the Corpse Taker does the body swapping thing, when Corpse Taker's alive, she swaps your souls, we assume, from one body to another. But when Corpse Taker...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:11)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (55:15)
has nobody is Mort gonna become a ghost or is she gonna consume him and that's how she's gonna get back in. So that's really interesting because that creates another link between Black Court magic plans and necromancers. So if this is a trick that Kravos got from Mavrah you can eat the soul and gain power and eventually we're gonna bring you back to life.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:21)
Could be.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (55:43)
and Kamler's disciples know how to use the same trick to maybe come back to life, and maybe that's what Kamler was doing, we don't know, then it seems like those two things come from the same spring, or one of them is learning from the other.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:00)
Now, another interesting thing is talking with one of our senior council members, ⁓ Baggetinator, in the chat, and Baggetinator said it also, eating the soul,

makes the nightmare more real, remember that's what soul fire does. When you use a piece of your soul to enhance magic, it makes the magic more real. So if the nightmare is consuming someone's soul, maybe that makes the ghost real enough to possess a person permanently. And that's the kind of thing that Corpse Taker was trying to do in Ghost Story. And maybe that's the kind of thing that the nightmare is trying to do here.

Brian (56:40)
Yeah, I mean, it literally seems to be walking around and interacting with the physical world a lot more freely after this moment than before it. And that does suggest that it has been made more real. And that does suggest that this is the soul he's eating. So the other thing that's really interesting about that is, presumably that means that Harry could regenerate this as I he speculates that he could come back from this.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:50)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (57:10)
take

you know a while for him to recover but it suggests that later harry is going to get his mojo back in this book and maybe he's similarly improving himself when he does so

So we'll talk about that, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but I just want to lay the groundwork because figuring out exactly what the Nightmare is doing here has a lot of implications for the connections to later books in the series and what actually happens when Harry manages to pull off towards the end of the book.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so that's gonna wrap it up for this week's chapter discussion. Next week, we're gonna talk about 18, 19, 20. That's where Harry and Bob talk about what just happened and come to the conclusion that the nightmare is getting people through their dreams. That's how it's bypassing the threshold. Then Harry realizes, uh-oh, Murphy's next. That's also the point where they,

come to the wrong conclusion that the nightmare is the demon's ghost instead of it being Kravos' ghost. So Harry rushes to try to save Murphy. Vanny rushes to try to save Michael. Those are those three chapters. but now it is time for us to move on to our question for Bob.

Brian (58:27)
So what other media series are most like the adventures you've had with Harry?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:37)
You know, this would be a really good one because Bob has literally been absorbing the entire internet while he was with Butters and now he's also got connection to it while he's in the castle. So he probably could give us a big list of things that are, but unfortunately he sent us a message saying that he's on the book tour with Jim, which really raises a lot of questions.

Brian (58:58)
So we were going to ask him about the book series, but he's on a tour for the... I'm losing track of the meta of this bit, Adam. Is he part of the real world or just in the books? I'm losing it. Are the books real in the fiction? Alright, whatever. Okay, so we have some answers from ourselves and from the Reddit.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:09)
That's unclear. Maybe.

Brian (59:18)
One thing I want to talk about is just that in general, it's hard to come up with comparisons to the Dresden Files because it's combining tropes in ways that are not necessarily unique, but are very uncommon. So, you know, we can talk about some book series that...

that have like some superficial similarities to the Dresden Files and can I just rattle off a couple of them Adam? So, you know, if you look at the Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl, which are obviously, much more ⁓ serious for a younger audience, but they have the same kind of hidden magical world fantasy kitchen sink situation going on, but they don't have.

a of the same themes or the same tone really. Artemis Fowl is a little close because it does have a little bit of a heist film vibe to it, but there's no horror elements, no true horror elements. ⁓ K.A. Applegate, wrote Animorphs, if you guys have ever heard of that, did a series called Everworld, which does have some pretty horrifying elements and some more adult themes, but also the hidden world can't be in the real world. She can't kind of make it work. The never-never

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:18)
yeah.

Brian (1:00:32)
can't be as permeable as it is in the Dresden files. She hasn't figured out how to kind of make the two...

cross into each other as nicely as Jim does. And then you have stuff like Constantine, the comic books especially, but also the Keanu Reeves version of it, where things cross over. You've got magic in the real world and there's demons that are in the real world, but there's also a heaven and hell. But that's it. There's no real fantasy kitchens, like Odin's not running around, you know, saying hi to people. you know, he doesn't have a grandpa who's also a wizard and is around.

and whatever. So there's a lot of books that do some of the things, but I would not call any of those, if you like the Dresden Files, I know you will also like Harry Potter.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:22)
Yeah, and what's interesting is you said, well, there's not a lot that mash up these two particular things, and then I was thinking, but actually there's this and this, those all came after, they were inspired by the Dresden Files, right? Now, there were a couple that the Dresden Files were inspired by as well. I think Constantine is something that,

Brian (1:01:34)
Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:40)
Jim has mentioned as being an inspiration for him, as well as Anita Blake and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, things we're gonna talk about later in this section. So those remind us of the Dresden Files because they were Jim's inspiration, but let's talk about some others that have come more recently. So let's start with book series here,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:02:00)
First up for the books we want to talk about is a book that's not even out yet. Our good friend Nick Strom,

provided the episode artwork for Recording Neutral Territory has a book coming out that he's self-publishing. It's called Bronze and Blood, the first book of the Runetech Archives.

Nick is obviously a huge Dresden fan. He created this awesome artwork for each of the books, but he wanted to know what if he had a protagonist in a urban fantasy world that wasn't a wizard, but was an artificer?

And that's what we get from Bronze and Blood. I listened to the first two chapters so far, he's released them in a podcast form. I'll put the link in the description. But to give you a very quick summary, Bronze and Blood is a noir-infused dark fantasy set in an alternate 1980s, a half-drowned, aether-powered Portland, Oregon. It follows Fidelius Corvin, a resonant rune tech who can see and feel the currents of magic threaded through the sinking city's bones.

When he's framed as an accessory to murder, his attempt to clear his name only drags him deeper into a conspiracy involving mob family secrets, forbidden experiments, and a rising cult devoted to an ancient entity stirring beneath its depths. So

That sounds pretty cool to me. I can't give you a review yet, because I haven't read the whole book, but from what I have read, I want to know more. And that's what I'll be doing. So you can check the link out to that in the description.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:22)
mm-hmm.

Brian (1:03:22)
a smart guy who really

understands fantasy very well. Adam and I obviously are biased. We think that he's ⁓ pretty cool, especially because he gave us super cool art. So we're not going to give you an unbiased review. We can't pretend to. But we do think it's pretty good so far. And give it a look-see. But let's talk about something that you, Adam, have tried to turn me onto. I haven't jumped in yet as a companion to the Dresden Files, a comparison point, which is DCC.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:34)
Correct.

and

Brian (1:03:50)
Dungeon Crawler Car.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:52)
Yeah, Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dineman, and that was recommended several times in the Reddit thread where we asked this question, so I'll echo what they said was recommended by Boll-Eny, and they said they recommended it not because they're similar in most ways, but because they both have a strong primary protagonist with out-of-the-box problem solving, wacky situations, and are filled with great humor, unquote. And I think that's true.

protagonists are definitely different people and the fact that they do try to solve problems in unusual ways and they're usually on the back foot, right? Harry's always reacting to things in the same way, Carl is usually reacting to things and like in desperate situations coming up with a bonkers plan to save the day, a lot like Harry does most of the time. So that is a good way to combine those similarities.

And now TB or not TB adds, quote, the audio books are on another level. I didn't think narrators got better than Marsters or Travis Baldry, but Jeff Hayes is like talent at it and it's not a way I'd ever describe audio book narration, unquote. So TB is 100 % correct here. Brian, if you had asked me how many people,

were voicing the characters in the first two books on the audio book, I would have bet $100 that it was at least two, but I probably would have said four because they are so different and so good. Jeff Hayes does every fricking voice and the cast of characters in that is-

probably as big as the Dresden Files cast has become over 18 books and it's only seven books so far. And he's got at least as many like side characters that he needs new voices for. And the closest comparison I could make is, know, there's that one guy that does like 17 voices on The Simpsons. That's, Jeff Hayes is that good. Like he's so good. He did ⁓ a version of Warburton, the actor.

Brian (1:05:55)
Great.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:03)
that everybody thought that it was actually Patrick Warburton and then Patrick Warburton actually voiced a character in a later book. And people thought it was like Jeff Hayes, like they thought it was the same person. It's so good. Anyway, so in that sense, they are the same because they both have excellent narrators. James Marsden is fantastic and I really love all the emotion that he brings to it, but.

Brian (1:06:14)
my god.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:30)
Jeff Hayes is also fantastic.

Brian (1:06:32)
Yeah, and Marsters, of course, is trying to give you the sense that there is one person whose personal memoirs this is. Right, so it works that the voices all sound a little bit like Harry because it's kind of Harry reading it to you. But I will say that the big difference, obviously, between Dungeon Crawler Carl and the Dresden Files is that Dungeon Crawler Carl does not take place in the world we live in.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:39)
Exactly, yes.

Exactly right. Exactly right.

No,

it takes place in a weird world where aliens have come to Earth, killed most of the people, and then forced the rest to participate in essentially a squid games slash running man style competition. And if you can get all the way through, then you earn your planet back. And if you don't, then we get to keep it. And by the way, we're televising this to trillions of people across the galaxy and making boatloads of money off of your misery. And in that sense, it's not at all like, like,

the Dresden files,

Brian (1:07:31)
One series that does a similar thing that I also have not read but I did download the first audiobook is Alex Verus by Benedict Jaca and Sheboygan's 2 suggests the series

strips out most genre romance for more plot. Mage council politics are central, but the main character wants to be a loner, follows non-combat mages who can think on their feet rather than just blasting through things. Harry doesn't just burn down buildings.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:03)
Hahaha!

Brian (1:08:05)
Guns, trained gunmen and SWAT raids are favored for taking out mages, though battle mages are extremely dangerous. Majority of monsters were mostly wiped out long ago, so the big threat is primarily inner mages, but monsters can and do show up. The world in this one feels more real than the Dresden Files on the whole. That is a pretty strong way to sell it to me.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:25)
Yeah, and I would say if you were a fan of the Dresden Files books that had the White Council politics and intrigue, then this one is definitely right up your alley. Like if Turncoat was one of your touchstones for that reason, then definitely give Alex Varys a try because it really is in there. And one of the things that Sheboygan's points out, because I've read through the whole series and I do recommend it. I enjoyed it. It wasn't, I'm not gonna reread it all the time like I do with Dresden, but I fully enjoyed

and I'm glad that I went through all 12 books. It's a completed series, by the way, and it's a finished story, like gets to the end and you're like, yep, that's a natural ending point for a series like this. And one thing I'll point out is he talks about how the main character is non-combat mage. and it's also like a degree of difficulty that's really impressive. Like Benedict said, you know, what kind of mage do I want to write about? How about one that can see the future?

⁓ that's gonna be really hard to write. I'm just gonna do it anyway. Like that feels like, okay, it's kind of overpowered, but at the beginning of the book, he's a diviner is the way that they put it. He only has like a very short window into the future that he can see. Later on, he kind of gets a power up in the same way that Dresden gets power ups throughout the series. And that kind of changes the tone and the feel of the series that part way through. And I think it was the right time to do it because if you keep...

Brian (1:09:28)
Right, sure.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:52)
everything the same too often, then it can get boring. But if you change the main character and give them new things to accomplish, then that keeps it exciting. And I think that works really well in that series.

Brian (1:10:02)
Yeah, I definitely need to check it Like I said, I've downloaded the first book, but I am always wary of starting a whole new series because I tend to get pretty obsessive and I need to make sure I set aside the time and the calendar to rip through it. However...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:15)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly, when's the

slow period at work?

Brian (1:10:20)
Yeah, I

do always get Alex Verus confused with the next series we're to talk about because they're just kind of lumped together as being very similar to the Dresden files, which is Rivers of London. Yeah, and this one's by Ben Aronovich. Now, I believe that this is the one that actually has the Dresden call out in it, right?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:26)
Mmm.

and they both kind of take place in the UK, so.

Actually,

they might both, because I know that ⁓ Alex Varis has one. I believe it was something along, they reference a wizard in Chicago that's in the phone book or something.

Brian (1:10:51)
In Chicago, that's in that. Okay. That's in the Alex Varys series. Okay.

And Sarcastic Kenobi has read this one and he calls it Rivers of London, a book series that's kind of like, what if London had its own version of SI, but it was run by the last living wizard in London instead of a cop of the Napoleon complex. And the MC is a beat cop, tapped to be an apprentice to said wizard.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:18)
Yeah, so that's

like, Rollins, a younger Rollins ⁓ is teamed up with Harry Dresden, the leader of SI. Like that's the kind of archetype. And sign me up, that sounds awesome.

Brian (1:11:29)
Yeah.

I mean, it's like,

what if it like the Dresden file started from Fitz's perspective in 12 months, you know, something like that. Yeah, that's cool. B Bell's dad also recommends the series. Such an incredible sense of place in every book. Gotta love a good mise en scene. Bonus points if you're into architecture, as much as Constable Grant is. So definitely gonna get those beautiful building descriptions and

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:38)
yeah. Yeah.

Ha ha ha ha.

Brian (1:11:56)
Gullilmus De Insula, I think that's what it is. I think that's all one thing. Adds that Rivers of London is what the Dresden Files would be if it had stuck to the Casefiles format. It feels a bit flat compared to Dresden I mean, I think that's part of the Muggle protagonist syndrome in the supernatural world. We've seen a lot of books that are, what if there was a hidden world that you, a normal human, stumbled into? Actually, I should have saved this for when we talk about the movies, but.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:12)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:12:25)
Have you ever seen Queen of the Damned, Adam? I always every time I watched that movie, I sort of laugh at myself about the humans who get involved in that one because it's sort of the vampire apocalypse is happening. know, it's like, the Queen of the Damned is back.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:27)
I have not.

⁓

Brian (1:12:45)
So you kind of go from zero to a lot in that movie and it's like, the Muggles finding out the supernatural world, you never want to do it devil has decided to sort of show up in the universe. You want that to happen you're already got some experience or preferably never. But also, of course, you mentioned that early Anita Blake was an inspiration for Dresden.

before it got a little bit too soft core. That's Laurel K. Hamilton.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:13:17)
Knog gave this, early Anita Blake, up to about nine or 10 books, is very close to early Dresden, sometimes very much, and Dorsi56 said, yeah, I really liked it up until the point that it had so much sex that all possible sorts said, don't know how you could possibly do a book-by-book podcast review. And my way of thinking about this was like,

It started as urban fantasy, very much like the Dresden Files is, and each, there's like cases, and she's on the case, and she's working on all this stuff, and it's introducing you to this whole world that has necromancers, and werewolves, and vampires, and all kinds of other, and ghosts, and other things. And then it starts turning into a little bit of romantasy, because there's a little bit of a love triangle between the main character, and a vampire, and a werewolf.

and it's kind of a forbidden taboo thing and like she doesn't wanna do it cause she doesn't trust them, but does she? Yeah, she kinda goes in that direction, but the other political stuff that's happening in the background within their version of the vampire courts was so fascinating that I just pushed through the romantic stuff. I just, loved the world building and the other politics of the stuff that was happening around the outside. But then probably around...

Brian (1:14:14)
Hi, I like Twilight. The book Twilight? Can you recommend? Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:36)
like 11 or 12, it just started going up straight into erotica to the point where like almost half of like book 15 or something somewhere in there was like just sex scenes. And I was just like, when are we gonna get back to the cool politics?

Brian (1:14:58)
And will say I don't sneer at, you know, Romanticist series.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:15:02)
to be clear, I don't sneer at it either. It's just not my thing.

Brian (1:15:06)
no i understand i'm just saying that you know my wife actually

doesn't like it's not the only thing she reads but she's a lawyer when she comes home from work she does not want to dig into you know Chaucer like she give me something that is like not challenging you know so she does listen to her read some things that are you know romantic and we'll talk about him a lot of the sort of more modern stuff really invests a lot into the lore and keeping the politics you know and all of that stuff as part of the series

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:15:15)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Yeah.

Brian (1:15:39)
and it sounds a little bit sometimes like, you know, what if Dragon Ball Z but instead of series of people screaming and powering up, know, was people, you know, hooking up, ⁓ you know, between fights. But I think that a lot of this sort of turns on a main difference between Dresden and other protagonists.

which is that in most series where the author is really trying to be honest, which I think Jim is, when the character is tempted with, hey, you can have the best sex of your life with a charming, supernatural, dangerous, interesting person who thinks you're really cool, the character goes, sounds great, sign me up.

and Jim comes up with reasons why Dresden is not that way and the reasons work and it creates a broader appeal to the series even though he had to kind of make the character a kind of way to to have that make sense.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:16:49)
Yeah.

And as another connection, Anita Blake is very similar in those earlier books where it's clear that she like has some attraction toward like some chemistry with these dangerous characters that she's interacting with. And they definitely like try to get her to go on a date with them or whatever, but she rejects them because she's like, I can't trust you. I'm literally a vampire hunter. You're a vampire. You're the bad guy here.

for several books refuses them in the same way that Dresden does, but they have the same kind of chemistry that like and Harry have. So eventually she does kind of get to come to trust them in the same way that Harry's done with Laura. It's just more of a central story in that series as opposed to being this background thing that suddenly got shoved to the front in this one book that we had recently.

Brian (1:17:43)
It makes you sort of pay attention to the fact like Jim doesn't have to have the winter lady resemble the maiden aspect of the triune goddess in such a literal way, but he does in part because I'm sure like he thinks that's an interesting problem to have in the series he's writing, but because it allows him to sort of stay out of that category, which I just I find interesting. He makes that choice in a way where you don't feel it, but he's

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:17:53)
No.

Brian (1:18:11)
kind of doing it on purpose a little bit.

But the one thing I want to do before we transition into TV shows and movies is to talk about something that is both a book and a movie that I often recommend to people who like The Dresden Files, which is Dune. And obviously Dune is very different from The Dresden Files. I mean, right away it is the sci-fi side, not the fantasy side of sci-fi fantasy. And it has some elements that are certainly fantastic to it. It's not...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:18:33)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:18:39)
entirely hard sci-fi, I would say, but it's trying consciously to be sci-fi. And of course, it doesn't take place on Earth. the things that are really, I feel like, akin in Dune and the Dresden Files are that Dune, is explicitly modeled on reality.

in the sense that it is where humanity is hundreds and thousands of years in the future. And you know things like the Fremen are like very obviously evocative of Middle Eastern Bedouin tribes or you know they're they're they're very specifically tied to archetypes that are

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:19:23)
not just supposed to be familiar to us, but are supposed to literally reflect a strain of human culture surviving into the future. And I think the most interesting thing, and the reason why I think that they are really truly akin to each other, is that Dresden is really interesting. Unlike something like Rivers of London, he's not a straight who's introduced to the supernatural world. He starts out as

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:32)
Hmm.

Brian (1:19:50)
Ebenezer's former apprentice. is one of the most in people you could be. He starts the series knowing that Mab is a person who exists. He knows that angels are real. He really knows just from a baseline level almost everything about the hidden world the same way like the Bene Gesserit do in Dune. And I think that that kind of

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:16)
Yeah.

Brian (1:20:19)
you're seeing the POV of an insider in this world that to most people is occluded that creates I think a similar level of you know obviously a normal person would do this but I have this greater knowledge and this greater burden to try to prevent you know things that like Paul's ability to see where the crusade is leading and to try to avoid it

is very similar to how Harry won't involve mortals because it's the nuclear option.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:52)
Right, yeah. So while we're talking a little bit about movies here, does Blade count? Do you think Blade is like the Dresden Files? Because that's the one that came to mind.

Brian (1:20:59)
absolutely

totally and i think especially the the movie the movies i'll say that the movies in fact work really well because the protagonist is sort of it's sort of like if you saw the dresden files from the view of somebody who really thinks dresden's cool right which is not dresden right

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:21:07)
yeah.

Yeah. No.

Brian (1:21:24)
but like just some character who was like, my God, this guy's wearing a leather trench coat everywhere and blowing stuff up wild. Like, yeah, yeah, I think in that way they're very similar.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:21:31)
Yeah.

All right, and then we've got some other TV show recommendations here. Supernatural obviously is a bit of an urban fantasy situation. ⁓ You had Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Lucky Number Slevin. I think we talked a little bit about that earlier. Now

Baggetinator also argues that Burn Notice might be like the Dresden Files. This is not one I've seen before, but after this recommendation, it sounds like I'm gonna go try it out. Michael Weston from Burn Notice reminds me a lot of Dresden in that both of them are black sheep, constantly offer deals with the devil to give them a new place that they belong, which they really, really want, and they're both going to stick up for the little guy and not be afraid to start kicking ass when the chips are down,

Thank you Baggetinator for adding that to my new list of things that I'll have to watch. And Cbaffle also adds to that about Burn Notice, quote, I never made that connection between Weston and Dresden, but you're absolutely right. Now I want to see a crossover, Fuego Notice. So all of you fanfic writers out there, get to work.

Brian (1:22:31)
That's great.

Now I have seen that show. I've watched quite a few episodes when I was younger and I do think it is pretty good and I see what they're talking about. I will say Michael Weston is like if Dresden and Marcon were like one character, you know? And but I will say that Fiona, the sort of main female character in that series, does feel like a female character that...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:22:39)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Brian (1:23:03)
Jim Butcher would write. Like the one line she says in the trailer to before every episode is, should we shoot them? And it's just very like, yes, absolutely. Just totally works for me. Of course, I'd also argue that X-Files has a very strong Dresden vibe because it's people who are in some ways in the know investigating the supernatural. They're always investigating something that's above their weight class. And

It has that monster of the week, but there's also a meta plot feel. no cell phones. So, kind of fits right into the Dresden vibe.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:35)
Hmm

Yeah.

And the last one that we had here for TV shows is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Obviously, we mentioned that big inspiration for Jim, so it makes sense that it would be there. But I wanted to include it because the blue shifting said, In my head, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe exists in the Dresden verse. The way magic works in both.

feels compatible. I could see a slayer swing into town to help hunt down a rogue monster." Unquote. And now I want to see that crossover.

Brian (1:24:09)
I would really like

it if Jim told us what fantasy series were canon in the Dresden Files. Like, he never can, but I really want him to. You also told me that somebody brought up a podcast?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:24:17)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah, it's Baggetinator again with the Magnus Archives. Now, familiar with some sort of story type podcasts, the Magic Tavern, for example, but this is not one that I'd heard of before. So this is a weekly horror fiction anthology podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organization dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. And I listened to a little bit of an episode and it got the feeling of like,

Okay, we sent an investigator to this town where something weird happened and they're just like investigating and pulling out their little tape recorder and going, click, I found out that the library is blah, blah, blah, blah, click. And then like the next thing, click, I just went to this thing and did this stuff. And it's like a combination of that and like this American life supernatural edition. was very interesting. So Baggettinator also commented on this one said, this is like the Dresden files.

Brian (1:25:11)
That's cool.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:25:17)
in terms of planning the series from the start, having a satisfying answer to most of the questions along the way. However, it doesn't stick the landing, but I blame COVID. The Magnus Archive is a really great composition. The writers know exactly where all the characters would end up and how to resolve the mysteries over time." Unquote. So now I'm kind of interested in adding that podcast to my ginormous list of podcasts.

Brian (1:25:35)
Yeah, I am waiting for somebody to do sort of an SCP, you heard, you know, the SCP foundation. Yeah. Do the SCP foundation sort of podcast, like welcome to Night Vale a little bit, know, Eldritch Horror. Yeah. But, but just like give it a real story arc and stick the landing. Like that's going to be, I feel like the SCP is going to be in...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:25:40)
Yes, yep, I'm familiar with SCP, yep.

Right, welcome to Nightmare was the other one I was thinking, yeah.

Brian (1:25:59)
some amount of years what Lovecraft is now where it's something that everybody grabs stuff from because it's so freaky but nobody like the actual thing is is never of course going to be nobody's going to make a Lovecraft movie for a lot of reasons you know

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:26:06)
Yeah!

Yeah, that

makes sense. All right, I think that's gonna be it for us. Remember to stick around at the end of this episode for that teaser from Bronze and Blood, the new book by Nick Strahm. next week's question for Bob is gonna be, what scenes in the Dresden Files do you hate to read even though they're well-written? So if you have an answer to that, please send us an email, mac at rnt.fm. We'd love to hear from you. Other than that, Brian, I think we're done.

Brian (1:26:42)
And we mean like the scene in this chapter during the dream where Jim kind of nails the emotional feeling of the character so intensely that you almost don't enjoy it but because it's so good. There's some scenes in this series that you would say are not as well written and that's why they make you feel uncomfortable. That's not what we're talking about.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:26:59)
Right, you're

Right, exactly. So we'll talk about that next week. See you then.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:45)
Hey, Adam here again. If that sounds good to you, check out the description of this episode and you'll find a link to the rest of that podcast.