Cold City, Episode 2: Age Before Beauty

A child is missing in East Berlin, and the RPA's assistance has been requested in the investigation. New agent, Otto Keck has been assigned to the team, and has accompanied Friend and Ziller to the home of the distraught parents. Frau Keller is beside herself with grief, her child Dieter has been missing for three days. The team questions her, gently, to discover that he was a good boy, and very quiet, who rarely got into trouble. He's friends with a girl who's family shares the flat with them, and a few other boys at school. She provides a picture, he's a small boy with blonde hair and blue eyes.

The team slits up to investigate leads, and calls Ko and Patton in for assistance. Friend and Ziller go to the child's school while Keck, Ko and Patton question the father at the factory. From the father, they discover Dieter had recently been in a fight with another young boy at school. Dieter's nose had been bloodied, and he had begged his father not to tell his mother. Dieter didn't want his mother worrying.

Meanwhile, Friend and Ziller interview the principle of the school, as well as Dieter's teacher to discover that many children have actually stopped attending school recently. It isn't uncommon for some children to drop out, they're told, some children go to work to help support their families, particularly the older ones. The teacher is concerned however at the increased numbers, and the age of the children, some very young. Friend and Ziller obtain the records of the children who have stopped attending school, and discover a disturbing trend: many had seen the school nurse, Josephine Metzinger, shortly before they stopped coming to school. Friend and Ziller discretely request that the principle make Frau Metzinger available for questioning, after alerting the other team members of what they've found.

Ko, Patton and Keck leave to meet the rest of the team at the school, but get re-directed to a domestic disturbance by HQ. A disturbance is occuring at the home of one of the missing children. The team arrives to find the Volkspolezei trying to keep the peace, while the father of the second missing child screams at an elderly, nearly naked man. The father screams "How dare you!" while the old man can only sob and mutter the word "Father". The mother sobs quietly in a corner of the apartment.

The team splits up to contain the situation, and learn anything they can. From the mother, they discover that her son has a winestain birthmark on his back. The old man, of course, has an identicle birthmark. He tells them that the last thing he remembers was having an asthma attack at school, and seeing the nurse. Then he woke up outside, cold and weak, but he found the strength to get home.

The principle of Deiter's school tells Friend and Ziller that it's the stranges thing: she told Frau Metzinger that the nice gentlemen from the RPA wanted to talk to her, but now the nurse can't be found anywhere. The agents get the nurse's address and race to the scene, notifying their partners over the radio as they go. Ko, Patton and Keck agree to meet them there.

Frau Metzinger's address is on a block that appears completely deserted. Three agents enter the building from the front, while two obtain access from an alley in the back. In the alley, they discover what looks like a homeless encampment, but all of the men are elderly and most are dead. One of the corpses is so old as to be nearly mummified. He wears a nice suit under a soviet issue long coat, and he still has his identification on him: Grigori Sudakov. A broken syringe juts from his neck.

More determined than ever, the agents break into the house. Patton kicks one door in, while Ko shoots the lock from the other. Within, they find little but dust, but tracks in the dust lead them to a hidden stair. The hidden stair leads them to a laboratory (or as Brendan pointed out, a la-BOR-a-tory, not a labra-tory). Frau Metzinger furiously taps out a message on a telegraph, surrounded by lab equipment and gurneys. One gurney holds a young man, in his mid thirties, connected to feeding tubes and IVs.

The team orders Metzinger to her knees, and Ziller attempts to interrogate. Feigning deafness, Metzinger lures Ziller close enough to attempt to stab him with a syringe filled with a bright blue fluid. The needle sinks in, but Keck is too quick, shooting Metzinger in the arm and preventing her from pushing down the plunger. Patton slams the old woman into the wall, pressing the syringe against her throat.

Meanwhile, Friend disconnects the young man from the equipment. He is emaciated, but alive, with blonde hair and blue eyes; Dieter aged into a man's body. Ko rushes to the telegraph to see a notbook nearby, filled with chemical formulae. One page, the last, has the word SUCCESS written broadly upon it.

Metzinger taunts Ziller, seeming to know him, though he doesn't know her. She tells him that he should pick a side, and when the Furher returns he will want to be on the right side. She then slams the syringe in Patton's hand into her neck, injecting the blue liquid into herself. She drops to the ground and begins to rapidly age and wither, laughing until she begins to scream.

The ticker tape next to Ko begins to move, a message is being received. "I know who you are. Stop. You will not stop me. Stop. The furher will return. Stop. Love and kisses, Uncle Joe."

Cold City: First Session Post Mortem

So, the plot was that sometime during the war the Nazi's summoned some Eldritch Horror from Beyond the Universe to Earth. Whatever they wanted to use it for, it was non-compliant and locked away, to be forgotten once the Reich fell. Four years after the end of the war it managed to escape and discover that it greatly enjoyed the touch of flesh, despite having none of its own. For months now, it has been murdering and skinning attractive people, then using their forms to seduce and have sex with unattractive people. Unfortunately for the monster, it is radioactive, and prolonged exposure to it leads to radiation poisoning and eventual death.

I thought of the creature more like an animal than a person, using the same hunting grounds over and over, unconcerned with being caught. We started in the middle of the investigation because there was some information that I decided the players had to start with, otherwise I feared it would take a few hours just to get to the Mockingbird. "Mystery" games can be surprisingly un-fun, especially if the players miss a lot of clues, either by bad rolls or just not thinking the way the GM expects them too. So it was useful to at least point them in a direction before letting them run wild.

The visit to the Mockingbird I expected, and had planned for the creature to be there at the same time. I was prepared for the agents to capture it there, but I was fairly relieved that they didn't. Chris handed me a huge out with his bribe to the police at the warehouse. With that, I had an immediate get out of jail free card in case we ran out of time. Which we did, a little, so I used the card and we had a fairly successful conclusion.

I didn't give the creature ample opportunity to explain it's own motivations, but then again, it's an Eldritch Horror from Beyond the Universe, and it should remain a little alien. I was prepared for the group to use the creature's radioactivity against it and use geiger counters to track it through the city, but lack of time prevented us from getting there. Over all it was good, thought I felt the end was a bit rushed.

Cold City, Episode 1: Radiation Kisses

The episode opens with a man and a woman in a dingy apartment having sex. Throughout the encounter, the woman keeps her sunglasses on. When the man reaches for her glasses, she playfully bats his hand away and they continue. Finished, the man falls asleep, but the woman dresses and leaves. An indeterminate time later, the man wakes up and retches, his eyes red and an obvious sweaty fever overtaking him.

German authorities have reported a number of mysterious deaths to the RPA. People have been dying of pneumonia and other symptoms of a suppressed immune system. It's February, 1950 in Berlin, so death by pneumonia isn't uncommon, but the German authorities became suspicious when a number of the corpses have appeared with redness and blisters on their mouths, hands and genitals. Additionally, a number of the deceased were known to frequent the same nightclub in the French sector of Berlin, The Mockingbird. Authorities have requested the RPA to investigate.

Oliver Friend and Rick Patton, only recently met, are in a tenement house in the American sector of Berlin. An apartment inside is known to be the home of Wilhelm Mott, a bartender at the Mockingbird who hasn't reported to work for days. The agents knock on the door, and Wilhelm answers, the same man from the prologue. He is obviously sick, sweating and pale, with a bright red and blistered rash around his mouth. Panicing at the sight of the agents, Wilhelm runs, only to be shot in the leg by Patton. Wilhelm dies as Friend questions him, his last words: "so beautiful, so beautiful, but I never saw her eyes".

Meanwhile, agents Grigori Sudakov, Pham Xuan Ko and Heinrich Ziller have been dispatched by the RPA to investigate a strange report from the East German Volkspolezei. Some school children have discovered what turns out to be flayed human bodies in a bombed out warehouse on the outskirts of Soviet controlled Berlin. Upon further investigation, the agents discover a pile of human skins, removed intact but for a single incision from nape of neck to tailbone. East German authorities burn the warehouse to the ground, "This was never here, and see that it never happens again" they tell the RPA agents. Sudakov leaves word (and bribes) that he should be contacted immediately should anyone in the area see someone approach the warehouse's remains.

At the Volkspolezei station, Heinrich interviews the children who discovered the bodies. They describe men and women they've seen enter and leave the warehouse, sometimes entering in pairs but always leaving alone. They also provide Ziller with a matchbook from the nightclub "The Mockingbird". The children are obviously distraught. Heinrich fears that the children will be emotionally scarred for life, and decides that the best course of action would be to kill the children and put them out of their misery. For the children, and for Germany. When he draws his service revolver, the children begin to scream, and Sudakov and Ko burst into the room, knocking Ziller out and carrying him away before the incident gets any worse.

All of our agents descended on The Mockingbird, filling each other in over the radio on the way. While questioning patrons and the entertainment, a handsome man in sunglasses entered the club and almost immediatly began hitting on a homely woman drinking alone. Some of our agents were immediately suspicious, and approached the man, who broke and ran. The agents attempted to physically restrain the man, but find him to be far to physically powerful. During the skuffle, his glasses are knocked aside and his face torn. Beneath his borrowed skin, the myserious man has a skull that seems to be made from glass with a faint green glow. The thing escapes into the night, and our agents recover and return to base.

Later, Sudakov receives word that his bribe has paid off, two men have entered the remains of the warehouse. Sudakov and Patton rush to the site, leaving word behind for their partners to join them. Arriving at the remains of the warehouse, they discover the alien thing in ragged skin, gently but hurridly pulling the skin from a recently murdered body. Sudakov and Patton engage the creature, keeping it busy until their companions can arrive. Combined firepower disables the creature, but doesn't kill it. A research crew arrives to load the unconcious creature into a led container and cart it away.

Cold City Characters and their Draws 1/3

Rick Patton's draw, straight from the player: "Sent to "eliminate" former German scientist who was being wooed by Soviets and ambushed by patrol of undead German soldiers blocking way to scientist's hideout."

I'm honestly not sure if the player, Patrick brought the undead German soldiers in from the book or came up with the idea himself, but either way it's awesome. Presumably, if the scientist was being "wooed" by the Soviets, he pictured this occurring after the war, but I tried to make as many of these origins as possible actually occur during the war's final days. So, instead, we put the German scientist in the no man's land of the western front, building STs out of the remaining parts of fallen soldiers. No matter what I threw at him (and his team) Rick kept heading for his target. We pretty quickly came to a point where a roll seemed like a good idea. Does Rick kill the scientist, or does the scientist get away? Rick kills the scientist, gets overwhelmed by the STs and wakes up back at base a somewhat terrified hero.

Pham's draw involves women in a Viet Namese hospital and a monsterous breeding program headed by the Japanese. I didn't talk about lines and veils with anyone, but I had every intention of talking to Kim, the only other daddy in the group, about how he felt about child endangerment in the game. His draw made it pretty clear that he's okay with it, so six limbed monster babies died left and right. I tried to interject some situation by making one of the pregnant women a friend of Pham's missing sister, but if Pham agonized about what to do with her, I couldn't tell. She died in childbirth and it was up to Pham: does he kill the monster baby, or does it escape into the night to terrorize Viet Nam? He kills it, is what he does.

Cold City Characters and Game Structure

Character Creation for our Cold City game was mostly done through forum posts. One of the highlights of the system, I think, is how simple the character records are. A few numbers, a few descriptions of traits and agendas, and off you go. We have six (!) players, and that's a little daunting for any game, but more-so for one that structurally only really accommodates five. So our RPA team has representatives from both East and West Germany.

Cecil put together Oliver Friend, a charming MI6 operative.
Kim is playing Pham Xuan Ko, French via Viet Nam analyst for the External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service.
Justin is Heinrich Ziller, West German and tied to no organization other than the RPA.
Brendan will be Otto Keck, East German Stasi agent (I think).
Patrick is Rick Patton, American CIA agent and somewhat loose cannon.
And finally, Chris is Grigori Sudakov, of the GRU.

With this many players there is NO way that we'll ever all get together at the same time. With that in mind, my plan is to structure the game as episodically as possible. Each "mission" has a hard stop at the end of each session, and there are to be no cliffhangers. I envision it something like Fringe, but set in 1950 Berlin and co-produced by HBO. I'm planning on six sessions and connected cases to give the game something of an arc.

How we came to live in Cold City

I've managed to convince a number of my non-gamer friends to play RPGs with me. I want this to be a magnificent triumph, but they keep reminding me that they're already painfully nerdy and this isn't an accomplishment. I'm choosing to ignore them on that point.

Over a series of emails and forum posts, I tried to see what direction their interests pointed the group in. One member of the group is an actual gamer, and his preference is for 3.5, which just does nothing for me. Sorry, Cecil. I got a general feel from them what they wanted in broad genre terms, whether inter-party conflict should be a part of the game, and how much creative input they wanted. Once I had a general idea about the direction, I asked about specific games.

This is where I screwed up. I offered to run the three things that I'm most interested in at the moment: APOCALYPSE WORLD, SMALLVILLE and LEVERAGE. I know that a lot of the guys are history buffs and like spies as well, so I also threw COLD CITY in there. Including COLD CITY wasn't my mistake, my mistake was in describing (and actually naming) the other games.

I tried to stress that we wouldn't use SMALLVILLE to play Smallville, but without giving the group an idea of what the game really could/would be, they had no reason to vote for this one. It's also an example of how we're thinking of games differently. I'm thinking about taking the system and applying a totally different set of trappings to it. I'm not sure that makes any sense to someone who doesn't spend time thinking about system. Also, I should have called it Cortex Plus/Drama instead of Smallville, because once they read that word, they tuned out immediately, and I really don't blame them.

I think something similar happened with LEVERAGE. The group had already expressed to me that they didn't want to play in an established setting, so I probably should have called this Cortex Plus/Action instead.

With APOCALYPSE WORLD, I think I turned everyone off immediately by mentioning the sex moves. Ah well.

So ultimately, out of four games, we're playing the one I want to play least. But that's really really okay. I want to play COLD CITY, otherwise I wouldn't have suggested it. Out of the four, it's probably the least mechanically interesting. In fact I'm actively suspicious about the mechanics, but I'm willing to give it a shot. I'm honestly not sure how it's going to work, but I'm going to do my best to play it as written, instead of attempting to hack it right away. Hopefully, I can manage to do actual play reports as we er, actually play.

Noodling with Star Wars and PDQ (part 1)

This isn't going to make sense to anyone who isn't at least a little bit familiar with role playing games and Star Wars.

The Premise
I lurk over at Story Games and I've recently been interested in this thread: If you were to land the Star Wars RPG license, what would you do with it?

Rob Donoghue has written that Risus covers 80% of the situations that will come up in any game. I kinda feel that way about PDQ, which makes sense because both games tread very similar conceptual ground. So, I would probably start with PDQ (actually PDQ#, the swashbuckling variant used in Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies). The system will allow for just about any character you might want to play in Star Wars, and the dueling mechanic will cover everything from lightsaber combat to X-Wings vs. TIE fighters to debates in the Galactic Senate. I'd say that using PDQ# actually brings it up to an 90% solution: most of the game is there, we're just missing a few elements.

The biggest element lacking is the Force. Specifically the Force as a morality meter gauging the distance between Mercenary Smuggler and Heroic Rebellion General or between Jedi Padawan and Sith Lord. Stories of corruption and redemption are what make Star Wars really shine, and any game based on that IP should be able to mechanically address that. Some of the Force's presence is covered by Style Dice, but an additional layer is needed to really make it shine.

Which returns us to that Story Games thread. In it, Daniel Solis mentions his own Split Decision mechanic, which is already based around a 4k2¹ die roll. What does PDQ# use? It uses an Xk2 (or 3) mechanic. Already, we're getting somewhere. Split Decision adds an additional layer of information to the dice roll, so in addition to determining if a character succeeds or fails, the dice can also tell you if the action was Light, Dark or in the middle. The addition of this mechanic to what's already available in PDQ# brings us pretty close to Star Wars gaming nirvana, I think.

The Proposal
Light Side dice are blue, green or very rarely purple. Dark Side dice are always red. Most of the time, you'll be rolling just two dice: one Light and one Dark. Most regular PDQ# rules apply. Players may earn and spend Light Side Force dice (also blue or green) in exactly the same manner as style dice are described in S7S and the free version of PDQ#: by doing heroic things or otherwise having (interesting) misfortune befall your character.

Then there are Dark Side dice. Maybe you gain Dark Side dice by acting villainously. Maybe you get them for acting, not necessarily villainously, but impulsively or aggressively. Or maybe you get them just for asking or whenever the GM decides to offer them. The Dark Side is quicker, easier and more seductive, after all. When you roll your two dice (I'll get to duels and their extra die in a moment), plus any Force Dice you choose to spend, you get to keep any two dice, rather than just the two highest. The colors of the dice you keep, however, matter.

If you keep one Light Side die and one Dark Side die (remember without any additional dice, you're always rolling one red die and one blue die), nothing happens, you're not directing the Force, you're letting it do it's own thing. You succeed or you fail, and you can narrate your the results of the action however you feel is best. If you keep two Force (blue) dice, however, you mark one tick on your character sheet towards the Light Side and narrate your action appropriately. If you choose to keep two Dark Side (red) dice instead, you mark one tick on your sheet towards the Dark Side, and include details about your character's corruption in your narration. Ticks are mutually exclusive, meaning you could move towards the "center" if you were already leaning in one direction.

Next Time
Learning Points, Duels, Consequences and Problems I Don't Yet Have Solutions To

1: "4k2" means roll four dice and keep either the highest two, or just the two you like best. I assume most nerds will recognize Xd6 notation, but "XkY" is less common and I never pass up an opportunity to over explain something.