Playing Cold City

Last weekend, a bunch of college buddies and I all got together and spent the weekend pretending we were back in the day. We did all the stuff we used to do in college, wife-free and life-free. In other words, we drank beer and played games.

I ended up heading up with a one-shot game of Cold City in mind to run. I have never run it before, and only ran its sister game, Hot War, once (and it was in a very loose interpretation of the system). But as with Hot War, the concept of the world just grabbed me and pulled me in.

Cold City takes place in the 1950s, Berlin. The second World War is over. All the rumors of the Nazis working on supernatural experiments and weird sciences actually did happen, and the allied countries who are now rebuilding have put together a combined organization that is set to find all the remains of these experiments and control or destroy them. Of course this is all played against the backdrop of the rise of the Cold War, so suspicion, backstabbing, spying, espionage, etc. all have their place here.

The players come in as members of different countries who are working together to try to deal with something regarding the war. None of the individual countries trusts the others enough to let them go off on their own after these WWII remnants, so they have to work together. And what better time to spy on the other side than when you’re working together.

I put together three characters for the guys to pick from.

There was Mikhail, the Soviet gunman and military specialist.

There was Bud, the American faceman and thief.

And there was Nigel, the British wheelman and scientist.



Of course, nothing was as it seemed.

Mikhail was actually an undead soldier, the result of Soviets trying to improve upon the sciences that they had recovered from the Nazis. He was what they called the “Perfect Undead”, a man who kept his mind from when he was alive, and maintained his full range of movement and skills. This technology was unknown to the other allied nations, so he had to keep his true nature secret. To make things more complicated, he was ordered by the Soviets to gain information about the American codes used for transmissions

Bud was a new arrival in Berlin. He was ordered to Berlin to try to find and plug a leak within the organization. Evidently information was leaking out of the department (not surprising given how many nationalities there were and how people were spying on each other all the time). But while that was more or less expected, the problem was that some information was leaking to the underground Nazis, the people who escaped the allies after the end of the world war. Additionally, Bud was trying to get access to the Berlin black market and find a way to make some money for himself. His family back home was going through tough times and he needed to get them more cash fast.

Nigel, finally, was given some simple orders from his British government: complete all jobs fast and with minimal funds. Britain was still rebuilding and the more money they could keep out of these projects, the more they could keep in the homeland. Of course, Nigel did not care as much about that. He was a traitor to the allies, and the very leak that Bud was looking for. His current mission was to learn all he could about the Soviet projects with the undead. Whispers had reached the Nazis that the Soviets had improved upon their technology and they wanted to learn what they did.



Over all of this was the actual mission that was presented to the group: they had to find a Nazi code-breaker, a device that would help break the codes on a number of documents the allies had already recovered. To do this, they would end up having to find their way into a nightclub run by a very dangerous man who dealt with drug trafficking, slavery, and information brokering. He had his hand in everything. They were able to get information from him regarding the Nazi scientist who might have been involved and tracked him to an insane asylum. Speaking with him, they learned about where the code breaker was being held and traveled out after it. Along the way, the Nazis learned about this mission and set obstacles in their path.

By the end of the game, I had to declare Nigel the winner. He managed to uncover the truth about Mikhail and keep his own hide safe, all on a shoestring budget! Bud came in second as he was unable to uncover the leak, but did set himself up in the black market and start getting more money coming his way. Finally, poor Mikhail’s secret was let out of the bag (though Nigel kept that to himself), and he failed to get any information on the American codes.

Overall, a fantastic game, and a great one shot. I think it’d be hard to run something with this much paranoia as an ongoing campaign, but as a one-shot, it was definitely worth it.