Category: Roleplaying Games

It’s the full campaign video for Cold City Hot War! We launch TOMORROW!

You might have seen the short trailer for Cold City Hot War in black and white. But which is best? We are literally arguing about this. Full colour or black and white? Let us know on Facebook or Bluesky.

Transcript

But I mean, I think the the Cold War era has obviously appeared in a lot of, a lot of games of different kinds, but I don’t think it’s been as much of a setting as a period in games as, as you would expect it to be. There have been a lot of games, but I think, I mean, because gaming is dominated by fantasy and science fiction, you know, that’s a given. So yes, I think it’s an area of interest to me.

I’m now a Cold War historian and, it was great to be doing games that kind of bring in elements of that history and of the period that I kind of research and going to write about. 

I think it’s quite exciting. Like the sort of espionage model is it’s not under-used. You know, we could list out loads and loads of spy games and so on.

But it’s something that really appeals to me in kind of the genre as a whole in wider media is you can’t just storm in killing folks, you know, you can’t. That game, that great game stuff where nobody wants to break cover, nobody wants to reveal anything. And if you do, you kind of lose, right? As soon as you take a definitive action.

You know, the Soviet Union has planned for all of these outcomes, right? It’s that stuff. So you’ve just got to play this really, really canny game. I love that. I think it’s really next level stuff. Really good. 

I mean, the thing is about a lot… I’m not disparaging any espionage style games, but, I mean, a lot of games are about, say, espionage in the Cold War era.

They’re not actually about any of the themes and ideas and stuff to do with that. They’re just a game with a list of Cold War era guns, right? You know, there’s, you know, they don’t have the the Cold War and secrecy and trust and tension and hidden agendas aren’t embedded in the game. They’re not driving play and Cold City and Hot War are the opposite of that.

All of these things are embedded into the way the game plays and the mechanics of the games themselves. 

Really good. I really, I really want these games. We better fund on the old Kickstarter because I really want to play it like from the book that we’re making. Fingers crossed.

Yeah, fingers crossed.

Transcript

I think it’s really interesting that you talked about the early 2000s indie scene. I think it seems weirdly, we talk about this a little bit., it seems weirdly forgotten in some quarters. I know, certainly in the UK, roleplaying game scene, there are a great many creators, and I’m not disparaging anyone when I say this, who were children then because we’re really old, right?

So they’re not aware necessarily of things like the Collective Endeavour, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got my haircut earlier and it was just so grey and I was like, whose hair Is that? Where’s this hair coming from? Let’s it’s oh, it’s mine! 

I have, you know, read professionally, several histories of role playing games. Some of them came out recently and they all the all tend to be quite US-centric. Now, of course, the vast majority of the roleplay games industry in the English language speaking world, it’s been centred in the US. That’s unavoidable. 

There’s a certain kind of eliding of of the UK scene in that period, people forget there some really important games and designers emerged from that 2000 up to 2010 period of design where people remember rightly, figures like, you know, Vincent and Meg Baker, you know, in the US, you know, Emily, Emily Care-Boss Paul Czege and the like.

But the conversation never seems to include a lot of the important designers. Gregor Hutton I mean, for God’s sake, you know, and you know, who emerged from the UK scene as well. 

It’s always had its own sort of aesthetics, hasn’t it? The UK scene, I think, which is it’s always provided an interesting, you know, in, in line with the way the UK, I tend to think tends to work with the American market or American ideas.

You know, I think it’s quite an interesting interplay. It’s nothing to do with this game. But that’s what you get! It’s good. So all good. Yeah. It’s been interesting to to come back to it and, and it’s been very interesting for me in reading the text [of Cold City and Hot War]. I had no idea and purposely had no idea what was from the original version. I’ve been purposefully ignorant of the original version in order to to to read the new one, right? 

That’s been quite important to me. It’s, you know, we’re starting from scratch. This isn’t this isn’t a nostalgia game. I mean, I’m very glad to see there’s so many people that fondly remember the original games and they’re like the bedrock of what we’re doing.

But if you don’t know anything about those original games, that’s fine. You don’t need to, and you don’t have to be old. 

I like that we’re doing them because they’re still good games and they’re going to be even better games with these revisions. They’re going to be more accessible. They’re going to be more playable, going to be easier to play, more satisfying play experiences. You know, the there’s going to be a lot of meat there. 

And these are not just kind of like, I don’t know, let’s resurrect these two games from 2006 and 2008. No, they’re I mean, they’re going to be worthwhile in the modern gaming marketplace. They’re still solid games and really good, fun games.

The Transcript

So like this sounds really good fun to play?

You know, it’s not necessarily a given. Right? So sometimes you say like, I want to play this now it’s sold. Okay. We’ll just go and play it. 

It was really funny. Well, doing this playtest with the students, I had not run a game of any kind for about it’s at least a decade, 10 to 10, 12 years.

And it was really funny getting back into it, even with my own game. But actually it all came back and I was like, oh, hang on a minute, this is much easier. This game I’ve created is actually quite good at making my job really, really easy. I felt a certain burden of responsibility that the students had signed up to do this on their own time.

I’m one of their lecturers, so I don’t want to look like a complete idiot in front of them, not having the faintest idea what I’m doing. And I, I was I was really surprised. I was like, oh, I’d forgotten how much fun this was, right? You know, doing this kind of thing was great. 

It’s always if you’re running your own game, I always think it’s just terrifying because if you’re running a game you’ve bought, you can go, oh, this game’s bad because of this thing in it. We don’t understand. This is badly written or this was poorly presented or I couldn’t find this bit in the book. But if it’s your own game, you don’t get any of those kind of excuses to to just grease the wheels, you know?

Yeah, yeah. But the writing I think is really important. And this is where we’ve been, we’ve been doing a lot of work in the background in the taking. The the games have been both heavily rewritten, but I think you and I did bits of conversations and with Morgan and Gregor as well, where there needed to be greater clarity in the text because originally these games, you know, came out of this mid 2000s indie small press scene where there was lots of assumptions about what happened, and the language.

And the games are now, I think, much clearer, and, more accessible to someone who perhaps isn’t familiar with a game such as this. You can pick it up and read it and go, oh, I know how to play and or run this game. And that’s been a really satisfying part of this entire process of creating the new editions is making them better in terms of that level of accessibility and the engagement that people can have with them. 

I know my own contribution has largely been to go, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what that is. You know, but that’s the useful thing, isn’t it, to have some of that. I don’t I don’t get it. Which, you know, that I’ve made lemonade out of my own inability. 

But yeah. No, I think that’s really, you know, so I go I mean, that’s really sorry. I keep talking over you, Jon.

That’s really useful. I keep saying to students when I’m marking essays or giving advice about essays, right. For an informed but non-expert audience. Right? Yeah. Yeah. This kind of physician heal myself kind of things like, like I need to pay more attention to that of writing for a non-expert audience in writing about the procedures and mechanics and the way, the way these games games play.