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The Transcript

So what was the situation we were just talking about? So you know what we’re talking about. So you’ve got your players, you’ve got the characters worked out that your students were playing these kind of, technocrat scientists and so on in Berlin. What was the situation that they came up with?

So we were playing a very noir ish, dark, smoky, tension filled, game where they were, ordered by their superiors. Actually one of their superiors, a French woman who’s one of the people in charge of the secret organisation called Justine Cabret, known as the cadaver inside the organisation. And, it’s just writing itself. Yeah, they were they were trying to, hunt down a former SS officer, kind of fringe science figure who is supposedly died in 1945, a guy called Karl Geisler.

But Geisler had been seen around there been rumours and the secret organization really want to get their hands on Geisler. So that was the core of it. And it started. The entire thing started in medias res, with them running through the streets of Berlin, chasing someone that they’d been to interview because he thought they thought they might know where Guy Geisler is.

So we started with a chase scene. That’s what it kicked off as, and yet all just spiralled from there with, you know, meetings in British Army barracks with the senior commanders of of Soviet forces and British forces and American and French forces, you know, cocktails and champagne, but everything going horribly wrong. So it was it was great.

It was a really fantastic set up for a game. 

So this is yeah, it’s really collaborative, right? It’s not as straightforward as the GM has a prepared scenario… a pre-pared. That’s quite nice. Pre-paring knife prepared scenario in front of them that you kind of run the players through. Everyone’s throwing stuff in. It’s that kind of game right?

Yes. Or I mean, or if you’re say running a convention game, the person GMIng can sit down and prepare the situation themselves. And in in the games themselves, there will be a set of pre-prepared situations. So if you just want to go like, oh, let’s just can like create some characters and play this game, you can just whip this prepared situation out and go like, let’s play this one, too.

Or you can do the complete creation system. But doing this with students was such immense fun. One of the players, Amy, had never played a role playing game before. And her character was this American. The character was, she was a scientist, an American scientist. And she ended up becoming this, you know, schnapps drinking, stone cold killer over the series of the of the three sessions, because of all the stuff she’d been exposed to, Amy played it brilliantly. She was a really, really great, kind of like you saw the changes in this character’s perspectives and ideas over just like three weeks of play. It was fantastic experience. 

Transcript

Yeah. Quickfire questions. Quickfire questions show. It’s me, Jon Hodgson from Handiwork Games. And who are you, for the first quickfire question?

Doctor Malcolm Craig, senior lecturer in American history at Liverpool John Moore’s University and also designer of Cold City and Hot War.

That’s really good to know that you’re here because that’s what we’re talking about today. We’re doing these really quick videos. I like the format. It’s very manageable for me, and we’re talking really fast. We’re talking really fast because to overcome the shorter format, I’m going to ramble in like eighth gear to speed it up. I thought it’d be a nice thing today if we talked about playtesting and things like that.

We’ve got the upcoming public playtest. We’re finalizing stuff for that that will be going out soon at the time of recording, probably not when you watch this, but at the time of recording, you can still sign up to playtest the game ahead of the campaign launch. I said I wasn’t going to do things like this that date it.

It’s too late. I’ve done it. But you have already done quite a bit of, you know, playtesting, internal playtesting, as it were, I believe with some of your students. Is that right?

Yes. So the core mechanics of both Cold City and Hot War are the same as they were. But I had last year a brilliant opportunity, I thought.

I asked my head of department: I’d like to playtest one of my games because it’s involving history. I thought, can I get some undergraduate students? So I put an open call, and I had three of them. We did a four week playtest of Cold City and it was amazing. They were so into it, they didn’t have very much experience of role playing games.

Fantastic. Totally bought into. I understood what it was about. Great time.

So what what kind of what was the scenario they were presented with or who did they play in the scenario, which is so more important to talk about first?

So we went through the process of collaborative situation creation. That’s in a both Cold City and Hot War, and we did this for Cold City. So we collaboratively came up with what they were going to be doing: the enemies, the antagonists, you know, what is happening to them, all of that kind of thing. And then they did their characters and they all kind of like settled on.

They were either kind of like scientists, engineers, technocrats of some kind who had been brought into this one was German, one was Soviet, one was American, and they were brought into this secret organisation in Berlin in 1950. So they were they were all basically scientists and engineers who were suddenly told, oh, you’re secret agents. No, no.

So what do we do? And it was, it was it was great fun. They they were so imaginative about their characters and the I wasn’t expecting 19 year old students to say, oh, yeah, we want this to be like a film noir,

right? And I was like, yeah, but we want it to be like a noir. And I was like, whoa, that’s brilliant.

So, it was it was, you know, lovely. Some great characters, great moments. Yeah, really good fun.

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.