# Day 03: Cold City 2e - Harland Lemarche, Cunning CIA Acquisitions Expert tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2026 #game/rpg/cold-city > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2026]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice The Kickstarter is done. The process of getting books through layout and into printing is underway, but we backers have in our hot little hands something absolutely shocking: *[[Cold City|Cold City: Second Edition]]*. ![[Cold City 2E (cover).jpg|400]] You can be forgiven for not necessarily being aware of *Cold City* and its companion follow-up, *Hot War*, from 2006 and 2008. Again, these are products of a very specific time and place in the indie games scene. One of the seminal works to come out of The Forge. Then the author effectively fell out of our portion of the planet for a while, went off to work on his PhD in international history with a particular focus on the Cold War and what came after, then popped back a couple of decades later and said, hey guys, you know, I think this would be really cool with some updates. He's not wrong. What's the game about? Well, you may remember a little thing called World War Two. It turns out that the Nazis were really into doing some shady pseudo-scientific shit, as were the Soviets and pretty much everybody else. After the war, somebody has to clean up the mess. That's where the RDA and the protagonists come in as a multinational pseudo-military force dedicated to dealing with the fallout. Of course, since the great powers don't actually fully trust one another and have different interests, so too do the players. I think you get the idea, considering that the GM is now called Control in the latest edition. You probably have exactly the right image in your mind. I think it's time to start. ## Acts of Creation Cold City is very much a collaborative roleplaying game, and simultaneously very much not geared to solo play. That's fine. We can be a little broad-minded in our exploration of character generation. It does mean that we're going to have to think about things from two positions at once. ### Collaborative Game Creation As usual in these situations, I'm just going to take the reins on both sides, make the hard decisions, and put something together that I think is interesting. As a result, if it's interesting to you, we'll both be in a great position. #### Closed or Open? The first thing to decide is whether or not the game is open or closed. This question essentially refers to the hidden agendas of the characters. In a closed game, you have a very traditionally architected situation where people have game mechanical things that they're pursuing that they literally want to keep secret from the other players. In an open game, everybody knows everyone's hidden agenda. Now you might think that the latter case is kind of silly. What's the point of having hidden agendas if they are something everyone knows at the table? The key understanding is that player knowledge is not character knowledge, and that with the knowledge of other characters' hidden agendas, your character can put himself in a position to actively invoke those conflicts, as opposed to actively trying to avoid putting himself in a position which reveals his own hidden agenda. Yes, from the stance theory point of view, it puts the player more into an authorial space than an immersive space. But let me tell you, secrets that no one ever learns about because you're too good at keeping them secret are no fun at all. They just get in the way of enjoying play. If you've never played a game with open secrets before, let me endorse that mode of play for you right now. Anywhere, everywhere, not just in *Cold City*. Obviously, in this case, we're going for an **open game**. #### Game Tone I'm a big fan of setting the tone of a game early so that everybody is on the same page regarding the sort of sources that can be used as inspiration, what kind of play they should expect, and how the characters should be involved in the world as a whole. Listed as options here are *Art House*, *Black Comedy*, *Dark Horror*, *Noir*, and *Pulp*, with *Noir* being pretty much the implied default setting. I'm feeling a little different, so I'm going to say that the tone is *Art House*, but specifically Kafkaesque labyrinthine bureaucracy, which makes you wonder if anyone actually knows what's going on at any point, including the protagonists. Something out of *Brazil* or *Naked Lunch* is where I'm thinking.   Maybe even a little *Dark City*.  #### What's the Game's Structure? Because we're going as an example with this whole thing, rather than a filmic three to five acts or a TV series of multiple episodes with three to four acts each, or even novelistic structure which can sprawl in all sorts of directions, we're going for the one shot. This mainly affects Control's dice groups which you see on page 64 and the discussion of how to end a one-shot game on page 122. #### Key Words/Phrases I think this is the sort of phase in setting up for a campaign that is critical to almost every system and not just Cold War. Effectively, everyone at the table goes around and lists some elements that they want to see show up. This includes Control, because the GM is in fact a player of the game. I'm going to go ahead and be both Control and myself as player, though bounce back and forth between me in the process. | Control | Player | | ---------------------- | ---------------------- | | Multilevel subterranea | Kafkaesque bureaucracy | | Empty streets | Always night | On top of everything else, I think all of these produce a real sense of the mood, especially combining multi-level underground areas with empty streets, with the protagonists walking barely visible in the shadows off to one side. We've got a real mood here. #### What Are We Doing? Isn't that the ultimate question? What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? Why are we even bothering? In this case, I think we're doing it at the behest of a Kafkaesque remote (physically and emotionally), ISLAC directorship. There is an uptick in the appearances of specialized troops, the undead super soldiers created by the Third Reich on their way out. This is obviously a problem, and that's what they need us for. #### Who Are the Antagonists? Who are the real opposition in the story? Obviously, if you don't come up with this, you're not going to really be able to make any headway in dealing with the situation. But, in line with my inspirational media and the thoughts I've had before, here's my suggestion: - *The ISLAC factionalization, not just between major powers, but individual power blocs within the ISLAC itself, want to use the group to advance their individual power plays, and that remotely building tension is the real source of antagonism.* #### Who Else Features? This is usually something that works a lot better once you have your character creation complete and can figure out what kind of relationships that you want to have, because that's really what we're talking about here. What kind of characters are important and the players want to come into play. I don't really have much of an idea yet, which is a little awkward. And within the structure of a one-shot, I may not have a whole lot that I can bring to bear. So we'll come back to this later. #### Are There Particular Scenes Participants Would Like to See? Again, this is one of those places where the collaborative storytelling situation really comes to the fore. If you want to see something happen, and you don't necessarily want to justify how or when it happens, this is the place to do it. - *My protagonist stands on a catwalk in some deep place under Berlin, staring upwards at the ceiling, which is an inverted copy of the city above, hanging like stalactites.* Do I have any idea how that can come to happen, or even why? Not a bloody one. But it's a cool idea, and if it's possible for it to come up, I think it should. Every player at the table should have something that they can put into the pile that they want to see happen. #### Are There Particular Locations Participants Would Like to Use? I'll be honest with you, I am not familiar enough with the geometry of post-war, pre-war Berlin to have much of an opinion here. I'm sure there are fascinating locations with tons of historical precedent and loads of implication which I could be tapping. I just don't know it. And this is one of the issues with *Cold City* as a game. It is very much a thing of its time and place, and you have to really want to know and be in that time and place. The author is clearly an expert and loves it. I'm not saying that you have to have a PhD in post-World War II history to get the most out of this game, but you're going to want to have more than a passing interest. In this case, I'm just going to leverage my knowledge of what the war generally did to Berlin and insert a potential scene location more for its visual than its historical connection. - *In the collapsed basement of a pre-war movie house, surrounded by the largely burnt out remnants of destroyed projectors and flash-burned film* #### Control's Dice *Cold City* uses a mechanic that I've seen come up in some other indie games, which I really like, in that it provides the GM a pool of dice which are allocated in the moment within scenes to provide opposition. There are ways that they can build. There are times that they refresh. But ultimately, what you see is a pacing mechanism for limiting what the GM can do at any given time within a game mechanical framework. In the case of *Cold City*, there are multiple pools in question which direct how much threat control can bring to bear from a particular vector at any given time. And that really does help change the flavor of play. In this case, we have five groups: - Berlin - The cold - External enemies - Internal enemies - Monsters Berlin is the city of Berlin itself, the environment, and the people that live there. The cold is the Cold War and its influence on people's lives through politics, betrayal, history, confusion, and alienation. External enemies are the people outside of ISLAC. Internal enemies are the people within ISLAC. And monsters are kind of obvious in this context. The more dice in a group, the more important the story element is to play. Since we're running a one-shot, each group starts with eight dice, and then Control can move up to eight dice between groups. Then each person at the table, including Control, can add three dice to any one group. | Group | Dice | Control Moves | Player Adds | Control Adds | Total Dice | | ---------------- | ---: | ------------: | ----------: | -----------: | ---------: | | Berlin | 8 | -2 | | | 6 | | The Cold | 8 | -4 | | | 4 | | External Enemies | 8 | | | | 8 | | Internal Enemies | 8 | +4 | | +3 | 15 | | Monsters | 8 | +2 | +3 | | 13 | Looking at how things shook out, it's about as I expected and desired. Internal enemies have a fair number of threat dice to throw around, followed by monsters, and the Cold War itself isn't a big player in terms of things that are going to come into play. Fantastic. ### Chargen Now that we have some idea of what's going on and where we're at, what we're doing, it's time to actually put together a character. You would think we would have gotten here already, nearly 2,000 words in, but life is funny. #### Nationality Given the setup, it's not surprising that the first thing you decide about your character is what national alliance they have. It's interesting that, definitionally, no two players should have characters of the same nationality, both because ISLAC is a multinational force, but also because it actually leans into the mechanics around trust and the dynamics that reinforce it. Sensibly, we are going to be **American** because, of course, we're going to be American. #### Character Name When the character name is chosen during the course of character generation varies so much between systems these days that I find it an endless source of amusement. Do you wait until you know all the what's and wherefores about the character before you give them a name with the expectation that it should reflect part of their nature, or do you give them the name first and then see if that influences your choices down the line, because it certainly can? One is not necessarily better than the other, but they do have different styles and different outcomes. We'll be **Harland Lemarche**. #### Occupation and Background This is surprisingly freeform. You can have pretty much any occupation and background you want. It's probably military, given that World War II only ended five years ago, and then you stick it together with an adjective to come up with a description. Harland Lemarche, **Cunning CIA Acquisitions Expert**. The CIA is always on the lookout for new elements of border science to safely store away from the prying eyes of the world, and certainly not to capitalize on for their own gains. It's a living. #### Draw What is it that brought Harland into the ISLAC? We just need a single line here, a rough description. At the end of character creation, we play out a Draw Scene, which will elaborate on things a bit more. **Harland has seen some of the border science technologies that the CIA has acquired and brought back to Langley and is fully fascinated by what he knows and craves to know more.** #### Attributes We keep things simple over here. Attributes start at one and can go up to five, with two being human average. There are three attributes: action, influence, and reason. You start with one in each, and you have five points to allocate. Honestly, it's hard to get simpler than this, and I'm here for it. | Attribute | | | --------- | --: | | Action | 3 | | Influence | 3 | | Reason | 2 | Haaland is a persuasive man of action. He's no slouch when it comes to thinking his way out of a problem, but a little bit of a fast talk or a punch to the jaw is probably more his style, which might not necessarily go particularly well with nightmare cults and body horror. #### Traits See, this is the far better way to handle things that characters are good at or impaired by, and that is a freeform description of a trait. There's no completely static list of traits that you can go from, though there is an example list on page 89. Some are positive, some are negative. Traits add two dice to any pool in any conflict that is justifiable. The most number of traits you can have is five, and the only way you can get them or lose them after character generation is a Consequence that arises out of a conflict. At character generation, we need two positive and one negative trait. - **Has an intuitive recognition of border science technologies and occultism (+)** - **Willing to get others to bend the rules (+)** - **Enjoys breaking the rules (-)** I don't think I've ever made a character with this particular kind of inclination. Sure, he's really good at recognizing when border science technologies and occult things are in play. He's fascinated by them. And if you need to fast talk someone into breaking the rules or persuade them that they can get by with it this time, or maybe even argue convincingly that you'll be ripping your enemies if you do what you're told, Harland is your guy, but he loves breaking the rules. In fact, breaking the rules is possibly an end unto itself. He might not be the best guy to be involved in a covert organization, but here we are. You go to subversion with the spies you've got, not the spies you want. #### Hidden Agendas They were mentioned, and now they have come to be. Like traits, there are no true full lists of available hidden agendas. The player is perfectly free to come up with their own, though there are sample lists on page 91 and 92. All characters have two hidden agendas, and there are two types: national and personal. In play, if you're engaged in an activity or a conflict that advances your hidden agenda, you get a bonus equal to the attribute you're using at the time. It is mechanically useful to be forwarding your hidden agendas. It's totally worth quoting the following paragraph in its totality: > The ultimate goal for each character is to advance their Hidden Agendas to fruition, possibly using the Trust the other characters have placed in them. This could lead to a dramatic betrayal as characters realize that they have been taken for a ride, their trust has been betrayed and that they have actually been aiding someone working against them. Remember the discussion earlier about trust and how it has mechanical impact? You want to pull off your hidden agendas? Odds are that you're probably going to have to betray at least one other person who really believes in you, because that betrayal itself will provide mechanical advantage to succeeding in that outcome. But it's important that other people trust you because there's a bigger set of things on the table, and you can't get by in a complete state of paranoia—not successfully. I love it when the mechanics actually support the theme of a game. Oh yes, Harlan's hidden agendas: - **Secure Sample 78-AD, which Harland has not had described to him save to say it's smaller than a pocket watch and must *not* be handled save with direct skin contact.** - **Learn as much as possible about border science, no matter what. The more personally dangerous, the better.** So what we have here is a character who loves border science, which is effectively black occultism given technological form, is good at getting people to break the rules, loves breaking the rules himself, and has been directed to get his hands on some sort of Nazi technology, which must always be in direct skin contact with someone, and is obsessed with learning more about border science, not for the nation, but for himself. Yeah, I can't imagine any way this could possibly go wrong. This is absolutely peak cinema. #### Languages Given how much a polyglot situation this is, the fact that languages are important shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. You get your native language for free, and everyone also gets to speak German to a reasonable conversational level. It would suck not to be able to talk to people in the place that you literally work. You also can grab other languages equal to your Reason attribute. For Harland, that is 2. - **Russian** - **French** Being relatively fluent in English, German, Russian, and French is a solid core, especially if you are interested in border science. It's going to be interesting to see how Harland gets along with any Soviets they run into. #### Trust This is a pretty important thing if you have other people that you're going to be playing with. Effectively, you have a trust level that is associated with every other player and a description of what your opinion of them is. Every other character gets marked with how much trust you have in them and how much trust they have in you. 0 trust means you definitely would not trust the character to tell you the time of day and trust 5 is trusting them with the lives of your nearest and dearest. Ironically, this doesn't touch on *[Intimacy 5 is Sex](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/BlissStage)*, because this is the world of spies. You can absolutely be totally banging someone you wouldn't trust and, in fact, probably are. Since we don't have any other players, I can't really set any trust values here, which is absolutely a shame. If we did, during the introductory phase, we would just assign trust. When you assign someone trust points, you give one reason why you trust them for every one you assign. You have to assign a number of trust points equal to the number of characters minus one times two. If you're playing a four-player game, you're going to have six trust points to assign. We'll let that go for now, but keep it in mind. ### The Draw Scene This is what we used to describe as a *Kicker*, a scene in which the player's character does something to get involved in the situation. In this case, expanding on the draw that we defined earlier. We just need a scene that involves a conflict which can't end in them either being killed or keeping them from joining ISLAC, but doesn't necessarily have to succeed. After all, failure is interesting. If the character wins the conflict, they gain an additional positive trait relating to the scene, and if they lose, they gain an additional negative trait that relates to the scene. This, I'm pretty sure I'm equipped to put together at least off the cuff. > Harland is back in Langley as a new but well-trusted intelligence analyst circa '44, being exposed to his first taste of border science technology: a captured Special Trooper, a zombie shambling around in a dark pit underneath a concrete bunker, surrounded by electronic equipment. Every time the zed gets too near the wall, there's an ozone flash and the thing recoils in a way human motion simply *shouldn't*. Lemarche is immediately fascinated. His gift with recognizing this sort of thing makes him valuable, especially to a country itself fascinated by the possibilities. > > Then there's a failure of the containment wall as the lights blink out into velvet only made more stark by the scattered emergency lighting. > > Can Harland get out without losing something important? The conflict starts with a 5d10 pool, which is pretty chubby, I'm not going to lie. On top of that, each of the other players and Control can choose to either add or subtract a die from the pool for whatever reason they want. As Control, I'm going to decide to add a die, just because I'm curious to see what it is that Harland would lose. That brings the pool to 6d10. Harland's goals for this season are straightforward. He wants to get away from the zombie unscathed. Control, taking the position of the Zed in question, wants to do as much damage to people, places, and things around him to manifest his hatred of all that exists. Harland does have the complicating problem of the fact that he exists, and thus is a valid target of said rage. The obvious attribute for Harland to use is Action. Of course, that's only 3d10, but you've got to start somewhere. Oddly enough, his personal hidden agenda comes directly into play here. He wants to learn more about border science. The more personally dangerous, the better. Hard to learn more about it than having it chase you through a pitch black laboratory. That's a hardcore education. As a result, we get to double the number of attribute points in the pool, so we're up to 6d10! Can we bring any positive or negative traits into the conflict? You know, I think so. In the course of clawing his way out, Harland cheerfully grabs one of the lab techs and gives him a shove directly into the clutching claws of the zombie, then tosses a jaunty salute as he beats feet, taking advantage of the distraction. I'm pretty sure that would usually be referred to as breaking the rules. We can add a couple of dice for the negative trait, but they need to be a different color than the rest of the pool. 6d10 + 2d10 is our current pool. Nobody here to trust, and there's nobody he trusts anyway, so that has no bearing. We don't have any tools that would be applicable to the current situation, which is a bit of a shame, but that brings us absolutely to our current dice pool. Somehow we've ended up with Control having 6d10 and Harlan having 8d10. > [!faq] Control > 6d10 = [2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] > [!faq] Harland > 6d10 = [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10] > 2d10 = [3, 10] If I'm interpreting this right, this is a particularly bad outcome for Control. He has the highest roll of an 8, while Harland has two 10s, and his next die is an 8. Unfortunately, Harland, his negative trait die was one of the successes, which means something bad related to the negative trait happens. Given that he just shoved an innocent bystander (for various definitions of the word innocent) into the waiting jaws of a zombie to save his own ass, this is probably something that higher-ups are going to make note of going forward. It might, in fact, be why he was assigned to his current investigatory team in Germany, with a high-stress, high-danger set of internal factions looking to fuck over each other, using those poor saps, and particularly Harland, as their cat's paws. The higher-ups may be largely incompetent and insane. But now they also really have it out for Harland in specific. Good job, boy. Still, he did end up succeeding on the conflict in the scene and thus can pick up another positive trait related to what he's just gone through. I think I've got one. It makes perfect sense. - **Absolutely unflappable.** This guy was just stuck in a near pitch-black bunker with a raging out-of-control zombie and managed to make it out while sacrificing one of the techs and throwing him an ironic jaunty salute, possibly as the door stemmed closed behind him. Aside from highlighting exactly how big an asshole he is, it also just shows off the fact that nothing at all is going to bother him after that. This is probably going to come in handy, given what they're up against. ## Exunt That's it. Weirdly enough, I think we are perfectly grounded in terms of character creation here. I'm not feeling bad at all about this. ![[03 - Cold City - Harland Lermarche, Cunning CIA Acquisitions Expert.webp]] Now you're not the only one who noticed there's no equipment on that character sheet. There was no discussion of equipment in the course of character generation, which I don't actually mind, especially after yesterday. I imagine that equipment is the sort of thing that you pick up along the way as the result of various consequences. Not to mention, you can effectively assume you have everything that you need to do basic stuff in the course of calling on your traits and attributes. What do I think about this game? Well, I really like it. Mechanically, it's very pleasurable and reminds me a lot of *Sorcerer*, which, given the time and place of its origin, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. I like the dice pool versus dice pool resolution system. I like the setup and the fact that trust is a big deal. I'm not absolutely in love with the fact that it very much is a creature of its location. Like, there's no way around that. It is a thing of its place and time by design, though it would be easy enough to break the mechanics off from the setting and take it elsewhere. I like the way that the GM has set pools of resources that have to be expended in order to drive conflicts. As a pacing mechanism, that's fantastic. Overall, I don't have a lot to complain about. It's a very niche product, as written, but a clever GM could do anything they wanted with it. In fact, I would love to see someone take *Cold City* and apply it to dungeon delving. Keep the trust mechanics just as they are, in fact. Set up multiple factions who have interest in the political and social situation around the dungeons and turn things loose. I think it would be fantastic. I'd love to see someone do that. Until then, we'll wait for *Hot War* to finish editing, and maybe we'll end up taking a look at that next year. Who can say? Tomorrow is going to be a serious gear change from these hefty RPG designs with many, many pages. Instead, we're going with a nice tri-fold one-page RPG. I think it's going to be interesting.