This past weekend we got together to playtest draft 1.2 of Malcolm Craig's ersatz-sequel to Cold City.

Hot War takes place in a 1963 where the Cuban Missile Crisis actually did lead to a nuclear war. The game is set in London (a year after the war) which was spared any direct nuclear hits, but much like Cold City, there are things almost worse out there to deal with. Both sides stole the sick and twisted technology from the Nazis after WW2 and continued their own experimentations.

First off I'll say that after a 3 hour playtest that was meant to be a one-shot, the table looked at me and said "when are we playing next?" So a good vote right off the bat!

We only had time for a quick overview of setting and rules, world and character generation, and an initial set of "Experience" scenes similar to those in Dogs. But we're trying to setup a second playtest session to get into the thick of the story.

Robert Early-Clark had played Cold City before. Chris Peterson, Karen Twelves and myself had not. And Robert noted that this game had quite a lot of similarities to the previous game, but also some particular differences.

Playtest Notes:

Game Creation:

Tone? R-rated; violence happens on-screen. Horrific. No one wanted to pull any punches here.

What are the characters doing? The SSG (Special Situations Group) is tasked with investigating the cause of some kind of "sickness" which is causing French refugees who live in a ghetto outlying London to disappear. We picked the appropriately named "Frogtown" and decided that it was generally in the East End of London, since we could all visualize what that area looked like.

Who are the antagonists?
-"Lucky" Du Champes: gangster from Marseilles
-Philip Glassman: British Special Branch officer in charge of Frogtown
-Henri Du Bois: part of a French circus. We couldn't resist the clowns.

Who else is involved?
-A mix of French and British street urchins, living underground.
-Circus group/gypsies, helping the gangsters to smuggle

What scenes do we want to see? This was interesting because the rules says that every player gets to call out one scene they would like the GM to use at some point. But it is limited to one black & white photo. I thought the limitation led to some nice creativity.
-Shot inside a sideshow tent with lots of curtains, pulled back to reveal several silhouettes (suspenseful tone ala David Lynch).
-Street scene with a beat-up old movie theater with a marquee in French, bodies covered in blankets with police and military standing by and lots of emaciated refugees starting to riot.
-Mid-action shot; a group of children playing; in the foreground there's a manhole cover slightly ajar, but the boy chasing the ball towards the camera doesn't see it. Creepy!

Before we started character generation, I noted a rumor going around that one rainy night, a hole appeared in the clouds over Frogtown and amphibians rained over the city. Below are the characters and a short description of their flashback Experience scene that happened soon after the war started. These scenes need to have a real conflict and they need to define something about the game world. One big difference between from Dogs is that these scenes are almost entirely scripted and setup by the player, up until the point of conflict. This was a nice opportunity for the players to stretch their creative legs a bit and gave me as the GM a good chance to rest and watch the fun for a bit!

Karen's character was Penelope von Brecktenstein, the twenty-something daughter of a British secretary and a German scientist who escaped the Nazis before 1940. Her Experience scene took place when Penelope broke into her her father's office to see if she could find anything that pointed to his disappearance. He had been carrying out experimentations at the Porton Down Chemical & Biological Defence Establishment up north. Which Penelope was going through his papers, she was confronted by Malcolm Letton, one of the men in the office. She rolled 12 dice versus 8 for the opposition, and got eleven successes! She intimidated the SSG into hiring her and locked the positive traits "knowledge of twisted technology" and "intimidating techie talk".

FACT: The British are carrying out experimentation on human subjects.

Robert's character was Edward "Buntie" Bentwix, an older and bitter ex-metro and Special Branch cop. His Experience scene took place a press of refugees getting dangerously close to rioting over a too-little food delivery. Buntie was working crowd control and already had a soured relationship with the police force. Right before this food rush was the last time he ever saw his girlfriend. As the rioters got closer to the armored cars guarding the food, Buntie's police boss (Philip Glassman, from above) orders him to fire on the crowd. The conflict is; does he follow orders to fire on the crowd or refuse and force Glassman to do it himself. Note that Robert as a player was fine allowing the horror to happen. This conflict was specifically about his character's morals and control. He rolled 4 dice against 6 for the opposition and lost by 2 successes. He chooses to lock the negative trait "brutal".

FACT: Cops fire on British citizens.

Chris' character was John Mitchell, a stranded USAF officer on secondment to the SSG. His Experience scene is about being interrogated by air force personnel after his is the sole surviving member of a bomber flight assigned to destroy the Portal Down Establishment. His memory of the battle is much different than the "official" version. In his version, there were monsters on the ground that could only be destroyed with a tactical nuke (which he doesn't remember). In fact, at one point the flight ran into bad weather and frogs (not the French kind) were falling all over the planes in the air. He rolled 6 dice versus 4 for the opposition, and lost by 2 successes. He gained the negative trait "perceived as a nutter".

FACT: Frogs rained down on his bomber in flight.

Analysis/Questions:

1. Since the relationships vary from "distant" to "very close", it seems like it's difficult to create a nemesis for a character, which would be fun. Could you use a personal hidden agenda as a nemesis?
2. As the number of a hidden agenda decreases, does anything happen mechanically? Or does nothing happen until the number hits zero? The table thought that it would be more interesting if something was triggered at different points as the hidden agenda was accessed. Otherwise the game feeling is "nothing, nothing, nothing...boom", which doesn't seem as satisfying.
3. Is ten successes in a conflict an outlier? We had presumed so since the highest success level noted in the rules was 4+.
4. It seemed a bit weird that extra dice in a conflict (i.e. the fifth and sixth dice when I am rolling 6 dice against your 4) are automatically successes. It seems like it might be more interesting to have mechanics which pump up the dice values or importance in some way rather than simply giving an incentive for each side to keep bringing in hidden agendas, traits, things, etc.
5. Because the three attributes start at 1 and five extra points are given, the attribute scores tended to end up as 2-3-3 or something similar, which felt a bit staid.
6. Everyone liked the setting concept and after an initial hesitation was able to really add to it. I think the Game Creation phase (especially the black & white picture) and the Experience scenes were very helpful to get everyone collaborative and in the spirit of the game.

Posted By: Malcolm Craig
Point 2: Excellent question, and the answer is currently: no, nothing happens until the resolution of the hidden agenda is reached. Do you feel this would be dis-satisfying in play? It certainly appears from your comments that this could be a problem as time goes on.

I don't think it was so much a problem as that, as other-Chris (not Caesar X) made a point of, it just feels like things should ramp up as it ticks down. I joked that maybe you should have to yell "Uno!" when you only have one point left to go.

Point 5: True, this does seem to lead to broadly similar groups of attributes. However, I'm not so sure this is a problem. During play, they can change a fair bit and the real differences can start to come out. However, did this affect the enjoyment of the game in coming up with individualised characters?

We all tended to end up with very mid-range characters.

Point 6: One thing I'm noting from all the playtests is that people are outlining so really cool B&W photos as part of the collaborative creation process.

The photo thing is amazingly helpful to me personally. I can often visualize a still shot better than I can verbalize something. The fact that it was B&W, despite the year, also was sort of intersting and even played into the setting a bit. Why B&W? Is it a newspaper photo? A secretly taken and printed photo.

Plus, there's the "Who's holding the camera?" question left floating unanswered.
Plus, other-Chris brought mine right back into the experiance sceen for my character. I'd actually originally hoped for a "Do they shoot/Don't they shoot?" but when he brought it back around, it changed the nature of the outcomes from something broader event-y to something personal for my character.

Thanks again for the playtest!

Thanks for knocking out another cool game-setting.