Cold City: Bete Noir
So, there, our Shock game crashed for various reasons, and there we were. Malcolm had promised us a game of his scrumptious Cold City game, and we agreed to go there next. Tonight we met to get the game going.
We are playing Cold City with a couple of tweaks, as Malcolm is constantly evolving and improving the game based on actual play experiences. So, the character sheet we got looks nothing like the one in the book, and Malc introduced a couple of new ideas to playtest. Nice.
We had a chat about what style of game we wanted - Malc calls it "tone" in the forthcoming CC Companion - and decided on a noirish, rainsoaked setting with long shadows and echoing footsteps in the alleyways of Berlin. We also decided to play an "Open Game", another new idea for CC, which basically means that hidden agendas are known by everyone around the table. This is going to be interesting, because Joe M and I have not played "closed games" for God knows how many years. In our experience there's no way back after discovering how powerful a story game can be if the players know the secrets of the player characters. It's a major oomph. Joe P had not tried an open game before, but was very keen to try.
We used a huge sheet of paper to note down ideas and the relationship map of the characters and NPCs.
Characters
Joe P created Jacques Benoit, a French private eye who got recruited to the RPA by former resistance fighter Christine Monet. Joe M came up with professor Bloom, a half-Jewish american intellectual and code-breaker, also recruited, albeit reluctantly, by Ms Monet. I floored the pedal with Eduard Reisser, a former German spy, infiltrator and assassin.
We playtested another new CC idea called "the draw", a kind of cross between a Kicker and a backstory scene, very similar to the initiation scene in Dogs. The draw is a scene that displays why or how the character got involved in the RPA. Each player describes the scene, drafts other players to play NPCs, sets the conflict and stakes and rolls against a pool of opposition dice. The draw scenes all went very well, and were a great way to kickstart character descriptions and backstory.
This could be good. Really good.
Per Fischer
1 Comment
Reader Comments (1)
Open and Closed games have always been part of CC and the possibility for everyone knowing about hidden agendas has been mentioned before. However, the terms Open and Closed are new and serve to formalise the distinction between the two styles.
There's a lot of good stuff contained within the characters and their backstories that will give the real meat to what's going to happen.
To my mind, the initial scenes worked well, even if you take into account the initial hesitation that anyone gets when first introducing a new character. I like the use of Christine Monet as a recurring figure, I think we'll get to see a lot more of her over the next few weeks.The fact that two of the PCs have a relationship with her right now, right at the very start, is good. The fact that Reisser has no connection at all with her is also good. If you know what I mean.
Cheers
Malcolm