Following on from my recent review, I have now started Cold City with my regular Monday night online group. Regular players Thomas and Terry have been joined by Becky. So now we are four.
Situation creation
My plan is to run Cold City as per the book, so we started our session zero at the beginning.
1 Open/Closed game: open.
I prefer open games because betrayal feels less personal when you can see it coming and lean into it. It also suits Cold City's collaborative nature. So I suggested we have an open game, and nobody objected.
2 Tone: Noir-ish
We talked a bit about tone, and we weren’t really sure what we wanted other than for the game not to be comic or pulpy. (I’m not sure what the difference is between Arthouse and Noir and Dark Horror – I’m not sure I’d run the game any different.)
Anyway, we’ve picked Noir-ish. Whatever that means.
3 Structure: Filmic
I expect to run this for 4-5 sessions, so it'll have a filmic structure.
4 Keywords/phrases
Keywords and phrases flummoxed us for a few moments because we weren’t sure what to do at this stage. We ended up with these:
- Tension
- Moral compromise
- Occult science
- Rain
- Cabinet of curiosities
- Black market
- Smoky nightclub
- Blinds creating light and shadows
- Surprise
5 What are we doing?
This step is a bit odd. I didn’t notice how odd it is when I first read Cold City, but when we came to this step, we struggled to understand its purpose. After all, in Cold City, aren’t the PCs hunting Nazi monsters and twisted technology? And if they aren’t doing that, what are they doing?
Cold City itself offers only two suggestions: hunting down monsters and investigating missing Nazi personnel connected to twisted technology – and I struggle to see much difference between the two. If Cold City thinks we can play different kinds of games, it needs a comprehensive list.
Anyway, this question puzzled my players, and we decided we were investigating the whereabouts of missing Nazi personnel with connections to twisted technology.
6 Antagonists
Now the players say what kind of villains they want to face. Isn’t that Control’s job?
Anyway, they told me they wanted to see sinister organisations stealing and continuing border science (including private owners via the black market), perhaps recruiting Nazi scientists to continue their work.
Oh, and reanimated soldiers.
7 Who else features?
As I mentioned in my first-impressions review, this is too soon to think about NPC contacts. Still, Thomas liked the idea of having a creepy artist somewhere in the game.
8 Scenes and 9 Locations
These two steps merged into one. The scenes became locations…
- A smoky nightclub
- A maze (could be underground tunnels, or might be a large, confusing office)
- Superscience laboratory
- Bombed-out underground
- Sewers
- Massive and soulless administrative block, slightly too big for humans, with endless corridors. Soulless. (Thomas described a place in Germany he had been to which seemed to be built for oversized people – where everything seemed bigger than normal and door handles were at shoulder height.)
And that was the end of situation creation. I have to say, it didn’t feel very complete.
Character creation
With situation creation finished, we worked through character generation and ended up with the following characters.
Alexandra (Sasha) Popov
Terry is playing Sasha Popov, a jaded Soviet military engineer working for GK-11. Their hidden agendas are:
National: Report back to GK-11 on all the actions of my fellow team - and their successes/failures.
Personal: Make sure any border science technology is lost or destroyed rather than recovered.
Gustave Galliard
Thomas is playing Gustave Galliard, a French military scientist excited by the possibilities suggested by the German experiments and working for Departement B. His hidden agendas:
National: Keep the other allies from discovering the Lac Noir project. (We’re not quite sure what the Lac Noir (the black lake) project is, but it seems to be something that the French are up to…)
Personal: Find out what became of Marie Oswald (a botanist colleague of Gustave’s – possibly a Nazi) and her files.
Nancy Miller
Becky is playing American Nancy Miller, an Extractions Officer for the USAF 515th Intelligence Wing. (We’re not quite sure what an “Extractions Officer” is – but we’ll figure it out.) Her hidden agendas:
National: Find the defector agent Jean Bernard, who has stolen the somatic grid (a device featured in Miller’s draw scene) and return him to Tempelhof Airbase for questioning.
Personal: Find Jean Bernard and help him get out of Berlin, and if he has it, return the somatic grid to the 515th, not ISLAC. (It appears that Bernard is a close friend – so a nice tension there.)
NPC contacts
At this point I asked the players to create three NPC contacts each. I’m sure they will be useful.
What next?
I’ve got plenty to work with, but sadly Cold City has no advice for moving from the end of setup to the start of play.
There’s an assumption that the PCs will probably investigate a situation – but there’s no advice (or even an example) on the best way to incorporate the PC’s hidden agendas into the game.
But maybe I am overthinking it. Maybe it will be obvious.
