Cold City 1.1- Review
Cold City 1.1 is a game produced by Contested Ground Studios, the producers of Hot War, and is set roughly a decade earlier in a divided post-WWII Berlin. Cold City is the spiritual predecessor to Hot War and from the cover is “a game of hidden agendas, trust and monster hunting”.
Your character has been assigned to the shadowy and unusual Reserve Police Agency (RPA). This is the group that fulfil the monster hunting section of the cover blurb. The RPA has been tasked with cleaning up the mess left behind by the Nazi party’s increasingly desperate occult experiments. The outcomes of these experiments are roughly broken into three different categories – The Alternatives, The Incursers and The STs, which are basically the Nazi zombies.
The Alternatives are poor individuals who were warped by twisted Nazi experiments. They are now broken in mind and body put often still have enough of a sense of self to realise what has been done to them. This makes the situation all the more horrible.
The Incursers are the creatures from other dimensions that have been sucked through to our world through Occult rituals and massive machines to fight the Nazi’s enemies. Some of these creatures want nothing more than to be returned to where they came from, while others have far more violent desires.
And finally the STs. These pitiful creatures were a last gasp attempt by the Nazi’s to stop the Red Army in its tracks. Through dark ritual and experiment they were able to tack dead soldiers and re-animate them to fight another day. But what happens when these walking cadavers retain a spark of who they once were?
The monster hunting in Cold City can be as big, or as little, a part of the story as your group wants. Conceivably you could spend an entire campaign in Berlin just playing out the tensions of the Cold War, not even touching on the more occult/other worldy aspects of the game. One of the things I like about Cold City is the way that these unfortunate creatures are described and how they help spark your own imagination.
Each character can choose to represent one of nations who got a chunk of Berlin in the aftermath of WWII; the USA, Britain, France, the USSR or even one of the Germans. A great aspect of this is that you get to fall back on obvious national stereotyping that must have been rife at the time and if you feel like it pervert them to your heart’s content.
As the cover says agendas play a strong part in Cold City and remain a fabulously elegant way of deciding what your character is trying to achieve. Cold City does have weighted agendas as Hot War does, and uses your National affiliation rather than factional. However rather than having a specific strength it gives a bonus to the attribute you are using. You also get to play your personal agenda off against your National agenda if you so desire, and therefore get to add another dimension to your character’s goals and ambitions.
Trust is the final game element mentioned on the cover and one that is quite different from Hot War. It is allocated to the people in your team only rather than the wider range of Relationships you can have in Hot War. Trust is not just influenced by how much you trust the others in your team, but also how much they trust you. In game mechanic terms your levels of trust can become potent weapons in conflicts, whether you are using your Trust to uphold the trust another character has in you or undermine it.
Any look at a recent Contested Ground Studio game would not be complete without looking at its setting. In this case it is Berlin, 1950. And what a setting it is. The real world tensions can be played out to their full within the group, the National agendas fantastically drawing characters into situations they don’t want to find themselves in and facing creatures that should never have existed. Malcolm Craig has been able to show Berlin to be a dark and dangerous place with its own personality and even to a certain extent its own agendas.
While it’s easy to compare the two games due to their thematic links, thinking that they are basically the same is a mistake. Cold City may have started out as the basis for Hot War, but by the end of the process two different games and settings have emerged to ignite your imagination. Not to mention lead to any number of dark and twisted stories.
Cheers, Sophie