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.