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Something you might remember from the first editions of Cold City and Hot War is the idea of presenting setting through in-world documents and ephemera. The second edition will build on this, and having read the absolute wealth of such setting material in the opening section of Cold City, we think it’s going to be really immersive book.

There’s just so much tone and content in these kinds of documents. You can learn about characters within the setting, what their conflicts, concerns, needs and wants are all about. The organisations within world of Cold City and Hot War are presented in the way they speak, and their relationships and actions in the world, demonstrated by these fragments of documentiaon.

The examples here aren’t the final thing – these still need to undergo some editing and corrections, but we wanted to share some of what you can expect to see inside the book, all in glorious colour. The two games will be presented as digest-sized hardcovers, with the option to have both in a slipcase.

If you’d like to help us playtest this new edition, then you can sign up over at the campaign preview. While you’re there you can sign up to be notified of the launch, and grab the free Reports which detail our road to these new editions.

The Transcript

Something I really like about [Cold City Hot War] is that that character interaction: it’s not quite what what the youth of today would call PvP ,you know, player versus player, but that can happen, right? And it is about a drama, isn’t it, between characters?

In Cold City you have trust, and people can be betrayed. You can use people’s trust in you against them. So the characters can use trust positively, but you can also betray the hell out of everyone, perhaps to advance one of your hidden agendas

In Hot War, it’s slightly different. Instead of trust, you have relationships because it’s about a society undergoing breakdown.So therefore you can use relationships in positive and negative ways. And again, you might betray the person that you love the most in the world in order to advance something that you perhaps hold even deeper than their love for you.

So all of this interpersonal stuff is built into the very heart of how the games actually work.

Yeah, actually, yeah. This is about relationships, isn’t it?

Cool stuff.

I know I was going to ask you. So these are second editions. What’s changed from the first editions?

Yeah. So the first edition of Cold City came out

2006. Hot War came out in 2008. And it was a kind of an evolution of that and hewed to my interest in the nuclear age.

So what has changed? The biggest change, I think that people who know the games already will notice is that they are now much less traditional on the game side.

So in the previous iterations, the GM had to do this kind of fiddle work of creating NPCs and outputting all that stuff there. That’s all gone now.

What the GM uses to provide opposition and conflicts is groups of dice that relate to different parts of the setting, so you can have in Cold City, for example, you have internal enemies, external enemies, monsters, the city of Berlin itself, and the cold which is the wider influence of the Cold War as an idea, as a system, as a series of events and the history of the Cold War.

But and then in Hot War the GM, “Control”, has a similar kind of like set of things, going on they again have internal enemies, external enemies, monsters, London, the environment of the city itself.

But then instead of the cold, you have breakdown, which is the breakdown of society and of politics and just the destruction wrought by a nuclear and occult apocalypse.

That sounds really good.

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 first in a short series of compact videos unpacking the basics of what these two tabletop RPGs are all about!

If you prefer to read rather than watch and listen, here’s the transcript:
Hello. My name is Jon Hodgson from Handiwork Games,
and we thought it would be a nice idea to make some little short videos explaining, to start off with, just the basics of Cold City and Hot War.
I am joined today by Malcolm Craig, the creator and designer of Cold City and Hot War, whose name I always get the wrong way round, and I’m trying really hard to not do that.

Malcolm, could you give us a bit of an introduction on who you are?

So I’m, Malcolm Craig in my day job, which I’m currently in, as you can probably tell, I am a senior lecturer in American history at Liverpool John Moore’s University, Liverpool in the UK. Remarkably enough. And by night. I am a games designer. A Has-been games designer of yesteryear! But now back, you know, like
a greying superhero with limited powers.

So. You say you’re back. This is the second edition of Cold City and Hot War.

Yes.

Some folks I know who will have already signed up at the campaign. There’ll probably be a link somewhere to do that. They will be well aware of these games. Could you give us kind of the elevator
pitch for what this is? It’s two games, right? What’s the elevator pitch for both games?

Well, they’re thematically linked games. Cold City is a game of, hidden agendas, trust, and monster hunting in Berlin in 1950, as the Cold War is really taking off. And Hot War is a game of friends, enemies, relationships, and the breakdown of society in the aftermath of nuclear war in London in the winter of 1963. So, they are both thematically linked by the history that they portray, but also by the fact that the they take a slightly alternative history, science fictional approach to the Cold War and that technologies were developed in 1939 and 1945 that still linger on in the present day.

I was going to say it’s really strongly inspired, obviously, by your professional-level
now knowledge of the history of the Cold War. But also there is a sort of that that element we might expect in games of a little bit of a more fantastical edge to things. If people are looking for that, it’s there.

Yeah. And, and otherwise it becomes unrelentingly bleak. Yes. I think the, the, your science fictional or cultish horror weirdly takes away from the bleakness slightly.

Yeah. It just cheers it up a bit.

You can now sign up to play test Cold City Hot War, and be notified of the campaign launch.
head to this link:

About Cold City and Hot War

Cold City and Hot War second editions are twin RPGs that explore hidden agendas, trust, and relationships during an alternative Cold War and its terrifying ultimate conclusion.

Cold City

In the divided city of post-World War II Berlin, terrors hide in the darkness. The legacies of war, suffering, and fringe science lurk beneath the surface, feared and desired by former allies and defeated enemies. Those that seek out these horrors are riven by suspicion, mistrust and political ambition. The four occupying powers of Britain, France, the USA and the USSR all have their own agendas.  In Cold City, characters are defined not just by who they are and what they are like, but by the views of the other characters and the trust that they have in them.

Hot War

London. Winter. 1963. It is a year since the Cold War went hot. This was not just a nuclear war, as darker weapons with their roots in World War II’s suffering and fringe science were deployed.  Survival and re-building are all that matter now. But human nature and the breakdown of society mean that everyone has their own ambitions.  Into this maelstrom steps a motley band of women and men tasked with the jobs too dirty or dangerous for anyone else. They have to deal with relationships, loves, hatred, and hidden agendas in a collapsing, ravaged, horror-strewn Britain.

A new edition

Revised and reimagined from their first editions that appeared in 2006 and 2008 respectively, Cold City and Hot War keep all that was great about these critically-acclaimed RPGs while bringing fresh ideas to the texts and the mechanics. Both books hold up a mirror to – and reflect upon – the Cold War era’s real history to help readers and players better understand the games and their settings.

Designed and written by Malcolm Craig, now a senior lecturer in Cold War history at Liverpool John Moore’s University, with art and graphic design by Paul Bourne of Handiwork Games, Cold City and Hot War will be presented as two books in a beautiful slipcase. 

Previews

Grab 31 pages of insights and inspirations free on DrivethruRPG in the Cold City Hot War Reports.