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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.

The Transcript

Oh, yeah. So I don’t know if we can answer this, but in the game you’ve got your characters, you’ve got your situation. It’s like a scene. What are you doing as a player? What are you manipulating, to make the game work? What do the mechanics do? 

If that’s possible to answer in a brief, concise manner?

Yeah. So, like, you play your character most obviously, push for conflict, make the make the mechanics work for you.

Push the conflict so that it shoves the story along in interesting directions you might not have expected. You don’t you don’t be prejudging, matters like, oh, we you know, we want this to happen. You might want this to happen, but that’s maybe what doesn’t happen. So, you know, engage: you’ll have all this stuff that you’ve created, start on the table in front of you, engage with that stuff like, oh, right, we’ve got this antagonist Geisler.

Okay. I want to like, go and find this Kniepe, a bar that we know Geisler in the 1930s, used to be a regular patron of. I wonder if anyone remembers him? Or of there’s anyone who’s met him? Great. That’s a brilliant idea for a scene. Good. Let’s go there. We end up at the Kniepe you know, so you know that that kind of stuff of just really driving things forwards in collaboration with everyone at the table, using the stuff you’ve set up, using the conflict mechanics to drive the story forward and just create interesting, exciting, unexpected moments in the game.

Our playtest totally did not go in the direction anyone ever thought it would, and it just was a brilliant and satisfying story in the end. 

Nice. So I take it players. they’re setting, like a goal for what their characters kind of want to achieve? The GM is laying out the territory, if you like, of the scene in a bunch of different ways, and then are you rolling dice to determine how things go?

Yeah. So I mean, in both Hot War and Cold City, all the characters have hidden agendas and these are personal, hidden agendas with some somethings personally driving them and you have in Cold City something called a national hidden agenda, something they’ve been told by their bosses back home to do, generally something that’s going to come in conflict with everybody else.

So you know, the GM, control as they are known, should be looking at these hidden agendas and thinking, okay, how can I push them? You know, if I’m kind of setting up a scene or bringing people in, how can I push the hidden agendas? The players be thinking, okay, how can I advance my hidden agendas and get mechanical benefit from doing that, probably be more successful in a conflict and all that kind of thing.

So yeah, that kind of stuff is is really important. Everything, whether it’s the overarching sense of the Cold War or the breakdown of society after a nuclear war, hidden agendas, trust, who the characters actually are. All these have a mechanical contribution that has outcomes through conflict, and changes the story and changes the characters.

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.