Hot War – Thoughts and a bit of a review
Almost a year ago I met this interesting Scot named Malc. We played a game of My Life With Master at KapCon and got to talking. It turned out that he was a game designer and the game he was about to release was called Hot War.
The premise of the setting is an alternate future. In 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis actually happened and the world is plunged into a terrible war. The book starts out a year later, with all of the players in London being part of a task force called the Special Situations Group. However the nuclear winter isn’t the only thing they have to deal with. Other ‘twisted’ technologies were also used, creatures from nightmare and out of crazy experiments. These are the real destructive force at play, not the run of the mill nuclear weapons.
The book is very well laid out and has a number of great hooks in the shape of diary entries, propaganda notices and photos that really evoke the way London is in 1963 after the world has ended. It also easily leads you through the collaborative nature of the game set up, character creation and in game play. This is a game of shared narration. It isn’t only the domain of the GM to push the story, the players are also given a vested interest in making what they want of their character’s situation.
I’ve played through two short scenarios with this game so far and I’m loving the way the setting demands that stories and conflicts get told. In a way London isn’t just the backdrop to the adventures, it is a character in it’s own right. The crumbling buildings, haunted people and brutal situations all emerge from the London backdrop utterly seamlessly.
The characters who find themselves in this London are made up of their ability to deal with physical, mental and social situations through their attributes and traits. They are driven by their agendas and their relationships. All of these elements come together to create complex and interesting characters that are a whole lot more then just the sum of their stats and skills. The creation of dice pools to work out who wins and looses in the conflict took me awhile to get used to and required a slight shift in thinking from the god old target number model.
Hot War describes itself as “A game of friends, enemies, secrets and consequences in the aftermath.” and that is what it delivers.
If you are at all interested in a game of personal conflict or in an interesting setting that is far from the norm then head along to Contested Ground Studios and check it out.
Hot War covers
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