Why not have a DF story sans Dresden? I mean, Butcher's given us plenty of hints about some characters' backstories.

I really, really want to read the story of how Rashid took down Abdul Alhazred.

 

That's a good idea. Butcher has already written short stories from the POV of Murphy and Thomas.

Possible ideas to expand on:

1. Butcher has revealed tantalizing hints about Black Cats - the precursor to SI. It could be a Supernatural style story.

2. How Bob got into trouble with Faeries.

3. Micheal Carpenters first experience with the Sword of Love. Or alternatively, how he got recruited. He was contacted personally by an Archangel.

4. Lawyer!Forthill. In Proven Guilty he said he was a lawyer as well as a priest. Pro-bono of course.

5. Any expansion on Mac the bartender. He's very mysterious.

 

Dresden/Smallville crossover idea:

Clark Kent isn't an alien. Rather, he's the son of Mars and a mortal woman. When Mars fell along with the other old gods, his son was sent away through the Nevernever to Earth.

I think the Dresden universe is one of the few universes where a being of Clark's power doesn't completely break everything. You've got A) A load of other really powerful beings and B) A load of magic users, which interacts interestingly with Clark's powers.

I think the Dresden setting is actually an interesting setting for a character of Clark's abilities, because they're both extremely powerful but also entirely physical in nature. And while he would have no trouble with a spell that hit him with regular plain vanilla force or fire, he would be vulnerable to the more obscure/spiritual magic.

I think a lot of fun could also be had with the idea of him as the son of Mars, as opposed to an alien. You could explore a part of the Dresden world that hasn't really been covered in detail yet: that of the old gods.

No reason to include Kryptonite, given how prolific magic use is.

Plotwise, it could go lots of ways. One idea would be for some group of people to be targeting Clark. Could be to bring back Mars, or to use the bloodline of Mars as fuel for some other purpose, or to get revenge on Mars, or to try to recruit Clark into joining, say, the Black Council, or whatever.

The story could then be told either from Clark's perspective or, perhaps more interestingly, from Dresden's perspective as he gets sucked into the plot and then has to protect/save Clark, inducting him into the world of the supernatural along the way, including revelation's about Clark's lineage, and amusing/awesome scenes where Dresden sees Clark's powers for the first time.

Alternative plotline would be a more general Clark centric story following him as he discovers the supernatural world by his own initiative and finds his place within it, possibly establishing himself as some minor power. One fun twist to this would be to shift the storyline back in time so that Clark arrived on Earth during some historical period. By the time Dresden rolls around, Clark is some established power.

 

Then it would be hardly Smallville crossover, unless for some reason he likes to pose as teenager even after hundreds years of living (Twilight crossover?). But I like the idea and it could definitely work. Lionel could be US version of Gentleman Marcone.

 

Isn't Marcone the US version of Marcone?

 

Yes, he is. For some reason I moved Dresden Files to England when thinking about cross between it and Smallville. I blame HP for it.

 

A riff off Taure and Frodrick's ideas. A kid discovers he has some magic, kinectomancy or something. So, naturally, he puts on a costume and tries to fight crime. Things don't go as planned.

 

Probably would end in his execution by the White Council.

 

Probably, but it could make an interesting series - eight chapters, eight 'superheros', seven executions. You could go with kids who knew each other, or completely seperated. And then each one breaks a different law, apart from the one who tries to become the supervillian instead.

 

I'm not sure why that would result in his execution unless he decided to go around killing all the "bad guys".

 

In order of the laws, possible ways for a teenage superhero to break them:

1. Kill anyone. I'm not sure how directly you have to kill for this to count though (IE pushing someone off of a building, tripping them under a bus, ripping their heart out of their chest, etc).
2. "Awesome, I'm a witch. I shall now turn that annoying prat next door into a toad! That's what witches do, right?"
3. Molly.
Or would a powerful glamour along the lines of 'look how awesome this guy is!' be enough?
4. Yeah, I have to agree, not sure on this one.
5. "NO! Mr Tibbles! You can't be dead!"
6. This would require a bit of working on, but could be done similarly to MoR - an intelligent kid tries to figure out the 'rules' of paradoxes.
7. Depends entirely how you define Outer Gates - alternate universes, doors to gribblyville, doors of Heaven...

On the other hand, it might be difficult trying to have characters that understand what their magic is to begin with, and how to experiment/use it.

 

Necromancy of animals is actually ok, as we know from Dead Beat. Not to mention it's something that requires more than just raw talent and power.

 

Oh yeah...

But I thought Dresden only got off from that on it being a technicality and he saved the World from the Darkhallow?

 

While apparently only human corpses count against the Fifth Law, chances are any Warden that pops along would be more than willing to stop a potential necromancer in the making. Even after the Wardens were all but wiped out, Kemmler is still the bogeyman in the closet for the White Council as a whole.

 

The problem with the seven rule-breakers idea is that the last two laws, no time travel and no outsiders, are so difficult as to be inapplicable to newbies. With mind magic or necromancy, it pretty much goes, "I want this to happen" and it happens, more or less. But dimensional magic, or specifically dimensional magic where you don't immediately get eaten by Cthulu, would require quite a bit of knowledge.

I've never understood how Warden's know the laws have been broken. Do their naughty-senses tingle whenever somebody breaks the laws, or do they just have to stumble onto them like Dresden did in Proven Guilty? It would be really cool to follow a warden as they travel the world and kill interesting people. Then you could use the 7-lawbreakers thing.

 

I don't know if there's word of Jim, but certainly in Proven Guilty the Gatekeeper knows that Dark magic has been used. Whether he knows this because of timey wimey or other means isn't ever clarified, as far as I know, but you can easily use it as a bouncing off point for a fanfic.

 

Bob tells us in the book that he's probably using his Foresight to see the future, much like Harry did accidentally in Small Favor. On top of that, if Turn Coat is anything to go by the Gatekeeper sees multiple alternate futures and possibly the probability of those becoming reality. So chances are he was using his Foresight to look for things to do with black magic before the events of Proven Guilty got started, then warned Harry when the time came in order to set up the events to his most preferable future.

 

On the topic of a super-brat summoning a non-Cthulhu Outsider: I think it would pretty amusing if he was going for a side-kick and ends up getting a shape-shifting, smaller Outsider* that he's convinced will be his friendly, kick-ass sidekick. I envision that whenever the kid turns his back, the Outsider explodes into a huge tentacled monster, slowly creeping outwards to strangle both the kid and anything else nearby, which can result in a few confusing moments. "Where did the criminal we just captured go, Wonder Dog?" lololol...

The kid survives long enough to get executed because he's the summoner and so gets a small amount of resistance and control over the beasty.

This probably sounds retarded. I really need to stop mid-day napping.

*Edit: I'm going with the idea that Dresden magic can be intent-based, so the desire for a "super awesome, super unique, super powerful" side-kick plus not really having any idea what he's doing (working out of a ritual book he came across/stole from a magical relative's library?) could maybe lead to something odd like this scenario.

 

Ah. I suppose potentially he could do the same for the Wardens, but then I guess you wouldn't get warlocks, or at least not as many of them.

 

Chances are he does. It's just that the human population is so large nowadays that he'd have to be searching for black magic almost constantly, which would get in the way of his other work. Hell, it's a plot point that the White Council can't keep up with all the magical youths that are going Warlock simply because too many are being born. It's what the Paranet was designed to do too; find other magical people are help them protect themselves from magic/supernatural creatures.