Catch Part One here.
Cold City and Hot War are coming to Kickstarter in early March (we want to let the Zinequest folks do their thing first!) In preparation for that, we bring you the second in a short series of compact videos unpacking the basics of what these two tabletop RPGs are all about! In part two we discuss who you play, and a little bit about the system that powers the game:
Here’s the transcript:
Jon: Your characters are the foreground, right? That setting stuff is the background. What do your characters do in both games?
Malcolm: Well, in Cold City, for example, you’re part of this secret agency set up by the occupying powers, the victorious allies, including the Soviet Union, in Berlin.
And you’re there to hunt down and deal with the legacies of, monsters and experiments and cracks in reality that emerged because of the suffering of the war. So you are essentially secret agents fighting an underground war, to try and paper over the cracks and conceal all this from, from everyone else in the world.
And then in Hot War, your characters occupy a very, similar role, but it takes place in London in the winter of 1963, 64. And you are again agents of the state. But it is a state that is turning horribly towards awful forms of government and is already there. So you are pushing your own hidden agendas, and perhaps you’re trying to do stuff that is against the interests of the state, whilst you’re dealing with all these monsters and horrors and the breakdown of society.
Very good, very good.
And what kind of system can we expect to see here? This is not 5e, right? What what kind of system is this?
So it is at a simple level. It’s, based on, based on d10s, but it is very much focused on story, producing story at the table, the game situation in both games that you start off playing is created at the table by everyone.
It reduces the cognitive load on the GM, called Control, for obvious reasons harking back to spy fiction, and the dice, as with many other games, help you interpret the story. It emerges, what’s happening at the table. We can push it off in interesting directions make interesting things happen. The system allows you to mechanically bring in things like trust, relationships, the hidden agendas that the characters have. And all of that contributes towards the play at the table.