It seems that battling monsters is becoming something of a theme with the Play Collective. That being the case, this seems as good a time as any to talk about one of my current projects: Hot War.
First off, what is Hot War, I hear you cry!
Well, it’s something of a thematic follow on to Cold City. It takes the same premise: that weird German technology was taken by the Allies at the end of WW2. The timeline is further forward, though. The Cuban Missile Crisis went pear shaped and the world became enveloped in war. In fact, why am I repeating myself? Here’s some intro stuff from the text:
“People around the world were only too aware of the threat posed by nuclear Armageddon. Cold War posturing, brinkmanship, puffed-up military parades, wars by proxy and boastful national pride all did their part. The public were not aware of the hidden apocalypse science.
By mutual consent, the erstwhile allies of Britain, France, the USA and the USSR kept what they had found in secret German facilities during World War Two hidden from view. They never mentioned the ongoing Underground War conducted throughout the 40’s and 50’s, a war that combated the remnants of wartime madness. A war in the shadows. They never talked about the frantic attempts to utilise the technology and find out what the other sides had in their arsenal. The atom weapons, intercontinental bombers and fledgling missile programmes were nothing compared to what could be unleashed by the twisted technology. Nothing.
On October 27th, 1962, the world ended.
Nobody is clear why, or how. The Cuban Missile Crisis was in full swing and tension was high. But to this day, there is no agreement over who fired the first shots, who decided to unleash Hell.
Most people expected the flash and wind of nuclear weapons. Most people did not expect the other weapons. Flotillas of Soviet landing ships appeared off the East Coast of the UK. The waiting troops were never briefed on what might come out of them. The country was being peppered by nuclear bombs. Miraculously, London was never suffered a direct hit.
Wireless and telephone reports trickled in from the Continent as mushroom clouds rose over Berlin, Warsaw and Paris. The reports talked of other things, of black masses moving across the land, of hordes of seemingly unkillable soldiers, of holes appearing in the sky. Then the continent stopped talking. Waves of static and precious little else.
The English countryside became a battlefield. Whatever the landing ships and aircraft unleashed swept down lanes and over dales. Britain fought back in kind. But things started to go wrong. command and control started to falter, communications broke down, discipline started to waver. All communications north of Newcastle simply stopped. Then the RAF carried out it’s most controversial mission since Dresden. Someone ordered the crew of a remaining Vulcan to drop a YELLOW SUN nuclear bomb on the research facility at Porton Down. Thus was born the infamous Operation INDIGO DIAMOND. It was later assumed that something had gone horribly, terribly wrong at Porton. The reputation of the RAF would be irrevocably damaged from then on.
Now there is only Hell. And Hell is right here.”
The focuses on London and the Southeast of England. I’m very deliberately not talking in the game about anywhere else, expect in the vaguest and briefest terms. I want to keep it focussed and claustrophobic. There are a bunch of misfits, the Special Patrol Group, who have the unenviable task of rooting out monsters, spies, seditionists, Soviet troop remnants in the ghettoised, partially ruined streets of London one years after the war, when some semblance of order is returning. Oh, and the Thames Estuary is home to ‘internment camps’ housing refugees from continental Europe and the rest of the UK in miserable, filthy, half-starved conditions.
If you want to know what I’m aiming for, then you can do no better than watch The War Game, a BBC programme from 1966 that was considered so disturbing that it wasn’t shown until 1985. This is one of the visual touchstones for the game.
The mechanics of the game are an evolved version of those used in Cold City and the first draft of the Hot War text will be finished by the end of December and be ready to go out for some external playtesting at that point.
So I’m soliciting volunteers who would be able to playtest it for a bit, be that one session, a few sessions, longer, even. Feedback on both the system and setting elements would be great and I’ll provide outlines of some of the stuff I’d particularly like looked at to each group.
Bear in mind this is early stage testing, so there are quite a few rough edges!
If you’d like to give it a go, then please do express your interest by emailing me at: malcolm [at, t
Threads that have so far been talking about the game:
The first thread, talking about the basics
Some locations in London
Some organisations of a military nature
The recent first playtest
Cheers
Malcolm
