Hot Under The Collar For The Cold War
It’s the TEETH RPG newsletter! Vibrant and radioactive in your inbox. Written by Marsh Davies and Jim Rossignol. And hey, you can buy our tabletop games.
Hello, you.
LINKS!
Malcolm Craig in the new editions of Cold City and Hot War.
Hello, you.
It’s been a couple of weeks, eh? We hope you are doing okay.
Marsh has been very busy. The top tier GOLD TEETH backers got portraits of themselves as pirates as the top reward tier, and Marsh has shown off a few of those. You can see a couple below. I think we can all agree this worked pretty well.
Meanwhile we’re still ongoing with playtests to tweak the design, writing the bits and pieces that still need to go into the book, and continuing with the design and illustration of this formidable piratey book!
I dragged this image into the chat for a visual reference this week.
More news on that as we create it.
Discord community super-helper Snowkeep has released a new version of the TEETH Foundry package, and says “The format still looks like BitD - if you know CSS, please help.” Please do! You can find him on the Discord.
Thanks to everyone who bought zines and PDFs to support the growth of the newsletter, it’s much appreciated. We’ll have some more news on that front in a month or so.
-Marsh & Jim
LINKS!
“Exploration and ecology” RPG Mappa Mundi is going absolutely nuclear over on Kickstarter. An extremely dense quickstart PDF explains precisely why.
This fantasy city generator will doubtless come in hand somewhere and somehow.
We were excited to see Tim Denee’s future-BitD expansion, Blades ‘68, getting highlighted in Polygon. “Blades ‘68 … applies several tweaks to the game system to introduce more ways to flesh out characters’ personal lives. Also? It encourages time travel.”
Gunslinger RPG We Deal In Lead looks fantastic.
The reliably excellent Tanya Floaker is Kickstarting a ‘slice of life’ game about parenting: “For parents and carers, Mum Chums offers a cathartic experience. For everyone else, it provides space to examine a world often hidden in plain sight. In either case, it is perfect for people who love to dive deep into an emotionally complex role-play experience.”
In research this week, Marsh was very taken with the tale of the toadstone. “From ancient times people associated the fossils with jewels that were set inside the heads of toads. The toad has poison glands in its skin, so it was naturally assumed that they carried their own antidote and that this took the form of a magical stone.”
Hot Under The Collar For The Cold War: Dr Malcolm Craig on his classic RPGs redone for 2025
Malcolm Craig is a senior lecturer of American history at Liverpool John Moores, but his interest in both the Cold War and in RPGs runs much further back. Now, nearly twenty years on from his original indie releases of Cold War RPGs, he’s releasing a new edition. Having been intrigued by this prospect when we talked the Jon Handiwork a few newsletters ago, we were glad to find that Malcolm was also up for a little chat.
JR: Can you start out by talking a bit about a) what the Cold City: Hot War project is all about, but with a view to b) explaining the origin of the books? This is a new edition, so what’s the story behind the original edition?
MC: Cold City and Hot War are two linked RPGs that explore various manifestations of the Cold War era. However, they also incorporate themes from horror and speculative fiction to help lift them out of the ordinary a little. Cold City is a game of trust, hidden agendas, and monster hunting in Berlin in 1950, and Hot War is a game of friends, enemies, relationships, and horror in the aftermath of nuclear war, set in London in late 1963.
Cold City was first published in 2006 and Hot War two years later. They both emerged from my fascination with the Cold War era and also my encounters with early to mid 2000s ‘indie’ RPGs that changed how I thought about the function of games. Cold City was a minor success, and Hot War was something of an evolution of that game. To be honest, I’m continually amazed that they remain fondly regarded by many people!
In both games the Cold War exists as we know it, but World War Two saw fractures in reality because of the immense suffering, ‘border scientific’ experimentation, and so on. These things exist in both games alongside - and frequently allied to - atomic/nuclear weapons. Although, it is an axiom of both games that such speculative/fringe/occult elements should not be used to excuse or explain human atrocities.
JR: And how is this different for the new books?
MC: Both games were very much mechanically ‘of their time’ in small press RPG design and needed a bit of a re-think. The texts were full of assumed knowledge about how games worked, so that’s been addressed. More broadly, there was still a lot of load placed on the GM. That’s something I’ve addressed in the new additions. Finally, I wanted to embed themes of the Cold War and the post-apocalyptic breakdown of society more directly into the mechanics. This has now been done, and pretty successfully I think!
There’s also the fact that I abandoned games and gaming for a lengthy period of time, which has given me space to reflect on these old designs. I’m now working with Jon Hodgson at Handiwork Games to produce these new editions. Brilliantly, though, my old friend and creative partner Paul Bourne now works with Jon. Paul is an amazing artist and designer, and I’ve been lucky to work with him on every game I’ve ever done. His work on the new editions is just remarkable.
One thing Paul and I have both always loved is using in-game artefacts to impart setting information. That was a core element of the original games, and we’re really ramping that up for the new editions. Posters, pamphlets, memoranda, diary entries, interrogation reports, intelligence briefings, and all sorts of stuff really help to bring the game worlds alive in a very visceral manner.
JR: Why two books at once? What is each one about? Do they stand alone?
MC: Glibly, there are two books because they are two separate games! Less glibly, they both deal with different themes and issues, even though Hot War is a chronological follow-on from Cold City. But yes, they do stand alone. You don’t need to know about one to play the other.
In the broadest sense, Cold City is about how the trust and mistrust between individuals operates when those individuals have to undertake tasks that must be kept secret, while at the same time pursuing their own - often conflicting - hidden agendas. It’s very much a reflection of the Cold War themes of perception, misperception, trust, fear, and secrecy. Of course, the Nazi occult is part of this, but so are the ways in which the war’s immense suffering altered the landscape of reality. A recent historiographical touchstone here is Eric Kurlander’s impressively wide-ranging Hitler’s Monsters, which is a serious history of the Nazi fascination with - and ideological use of - border/fringe ‘science’ and the occult.
Hot War focuses more on how people relate when living in a society that is crumbling into pieces. At the same time, they have to undertake frequently horror-filled jobs, navigate their hidden agendas, and manage the conflicting priorities of the organisations they answer to. You can see that both games have broad similarities, but the tone is different and there are mechanical differences between the two (although the essential core is the same for both).
JR: The big chunk of background to all this is that you’re now a lecturer studying many of the topics that your games are about, but ALSO studying games with relevance to the topics they are about! Can you explain a) how that came to be, and b) how your TTRPG and historical work now interrelate?
MC: From starting my PhD studies in 2010 up to 2022, my main research focus was on the history of nuclear proliferation. I grew increasingly dissatisfied with this and wanted a change of direction. It was by chance that when looking through boxes of old games in our basement I thought “Hmmm, nobody has really looked at RPGs and their relationship with the Cold War, fears of nuclear war, and all that. I wonder…” And the rest is - in many senses - history.
My current research project emerged from this. I’m writing a book on post-apocalyptic and Cold War adjacent RPGs from the 1970s and 1980s, fitting them into the wider cultural, political, and social milieu of nuclear anxiety, Cold War, etc. A huge part of this is my oral history project, where I’ve been interviewing loads of people about playing such games in the period I’m covering. It’s a cliche, but you can’t understand the history of games without understanding the history playing those games, so the oral history component is absolutely vital.
Cold City and Hot War relate to this in a very meaningful way. Academia is very concerned with ‘impact’. In short, this is how we take the knowledge generated through research and ensure that it causes meaningful change in society, politics, or culture. My aim with the games is to create impact (through expanding and changing understanding of the history) by bringing out real historical themes and ideas in a light touch way. These aren’t textbooks, but they will contain the very latest understandings and interpretations of many Cold War issues in an accessible way. That’s the hope at least!
JR: The Cold War is certainly a fascinatingly underexplored era for TTRPGs: what’s so good about it?
MC: Hah! I teach an entire twelve-week long undergraduate module called An International History of the Cold War Era, and that’s nowhere near long enough for me to encapsulate my thoughts about the Cold War. I think that ‘Cold War’ is a fascinating idea, a period, a system, and a way of periodising history. But, I also think - as do many other scholars - that ‘Cold War’ can sometimes distort our perceptions of the post-1945 period. I wonder if in a few decades time if ‘the Cold War’ will even appear in the title of university courses, or will we instead see it as a theme within the era of anthropogenic climate change, the information age, or the era of decolonisation? Answers on a postcard, please!
So why is what we call ‘the Cold War’ such a source of persistent fascination for so many people? I can only speak for myself, but its vitality stems from the nature of the global standoff between nuclear-armed adversaries and by its sheer diversity beyond that typically imagined bipolar ‘free world’ versus ‘socialist camp’ dynamic. On one hand you can lean towards the classic Cold War imagery of secret agents in Vienna, Jakarta, and Cairo. On the other hand you can lean into the epochal changes wrought by decolonisation, the end of European empires, and ways they link to, influence, and are influenced by ‘Cold War’.
The themes that resonate through the era are ripe for games that want to lean into themes like horror and alienation. Better brains than I have pointed out that the nuclear standoff is in many ways Lovecraftian: ordinary people at the mercy of tremendous powers that they can scarcely comprehend or defeat. Tangentially, when people ask what I think the best horror film ever made is, I’ll tend to go for Threads, the 1984 BBC film about a nuclear attack on the UK. It is utterly bleak, horrific, and really drives home the futility of nuclear war.
JR: What are the best books to read about the Cold War?
MC: That’s an incredibly tough question to answer! Like all fields and subfields of history, the literature is vast and diverse. General histories of entire eras, ideas, or themes are notoriously difficult to write. However, there’s some great, accessible stuff out there on the Cold War in general.
The great Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A world history is - for my money - the best general introduction for the interested reader. It’s genuinely global in scope and touches on many places and themes that previous general works (like John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War) ignored or elided. Lorenz Luthi’s Cold Wars: Europe, Asia, Middle East is also great, but slightly more academic in style and form, and much more granular and detailed.
On more narrow topics, I always find it hard to look past stuff like the brilliant Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. It’s a wonderful combination of diplomatic, political, social, and cultural history that draws out some remarkable conclusions about the nature and impact of the nuclear age in the United States and the Soviet Union.
In creating Hot War, Peter Hennessey’s marvellous book The Secret State (get the revised second edition from 2010) provided so much background and inspiration. It’s also a wonderful work of history in and of itself, revealing much about the way successive British governments thought about and planned for the Cold War’s appalling ultimate outcome.
JR: Fantastic recommendations. If we are not RPGing we are often historying. Anyway, can we get into the mechanics of the game a little bit? In our chat with Jon he mentioned how much he liked the Trust mechanic, can you explain that? (And is there anything else you’d like to highlight in terms of what systems players will be benefiting from in playing this?)
MC: I’d already come up with the idea of Cold City in 2005 and had sketched out the mechanical framework, but that framework was deeply unsatisfying. Then at GenCon 2005 I played The Mountain Witch by Tim Kleinert and a lightbulb appeared above my head. TMW used the idea of trust between the characters in a sophisticated, satisfying way that really made the game sing. So my immediate thought was “This kind of thing would work really well for my Cold War Berlin game!” Trust in Cold City isn’t the same as Trust in TMW, but you can see the genealogy very clearly.
So what it does is mechanises the trust that the characters have with each other, allowing it to be used positively or negatively in conflicts. You have a situation where the more trust you have in someone, the bigger help it can be in a tight spot. But you are also making things worse for yourself if they choose to turn around and betray you or stab you in the back.
Trust wasn’t so thematically appropriate for Hot War, so it is mechanically replaced by Relationships. These don’t work in quite the same way (i’m keen to allow both games to stand on their own), but in a society that is in the process of breaking down the positive and negative relationships the characters have with people and organisations are super important.
Aside from the above, I’m very happy with the changes that I’ve made to reduce the load on the person running the games. Control (the GM) now creates opposition by drawing from thematic groups of dice that ebb and flow during the game. These groups don’t just represent things like monsters, enemies, and so forth, but also the physical environment the characters inhabit and the wider themes of the fiction. In Cold City you have ‘the Cold’, which is the overarching presence and influence of ‘the Cold War’. In Hot War you have ‘Breakdown’, the creeping decay of society in the aftermath of nuclear war. ‘Breakdown’ was actually the term used in British government nuclear war planning to describe societal collapse, so it has an actual historical antecedent!
JR: Outside of the thematic historical influences, which games have influenced your work here?
MC:Anyone who’s heard me talk about this before will now be going “He’s going to mention Dust Devils!” Matt Snyder’s brilliant Western-themed indie RPG Dust Devils was an absolutely formative influence. It was the first RPG that I played that really opened my eyes to the possibilities and promises of looking beyond the ‘traditional’ mode of GM-player authority. I still love that game.
The Forge era of indie RPG design is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented, although I’m as willing as anyone to recognise that not all was sweetness and light with the Forge and the community that surrounded it. However, it was a fantastic incubator for so many brilliant designers and designs. I’ve also been lucky enough to be friends with some enormously talented designers like Gregor Hutton, Jon Hodgson, Tanya Floaker, and many others. We have a standing joke that you haven't heard from Gregor for three months, then he pops up and resolves your game design problem in a single sentence!
And in many ways, these games are influenced by the games I played as a teenager. Hot War in particular is something of a reaction to my experiences of GDW’s Twilight: 2000. We played a lot of that back in the day (and it’s a game that I’ve been studying and researching as part of my professional life). Hot War was, I guess, my attempt to write a post-apocalyptic game that has a human core.
JR: How often do you get a game to the table? And how often is it something that you haven’t designed? Are there any games you think our (often rather history-enjoying) readers should be looking at?
MC: I’ll be honest, I hardly ever get to play RPGs these days! Life tends to be pretty busy, and playing online doesn’t spark the same feelings of connection for me. There’s lots of games that I would love to have the chance to play. Small-press designers like Tanya Floaker, Alex White, and many others are producing really exciting, innovative, and focused games.
JR: It’s an exciting time for TTRPG at the moment, and that seems so in academia too…? At least in terms of TTRPGs being an object for study. (Or perhaps I am just becoming more aware of it?) Can you comment on that at all?
MC: One thing that’s very exciting in the TTRPG sphere is the re-emergence of a thriving magazine scene. I’m thinking here of publications like Wyrd Science, which has amazing production values and thoughtful writing. A high-quality physical magazine is a distinct pleasure to read.
I perhaps wouldn’t use the term ‘exciting’ for UK higher education at the moment. ‘Terrifying’ or ‘apocalyptic’ might be more appropriate. We’re seeing the mass gutting of the arts and humanities in many institutions, mass redundancies across the sector, and a climate of fear more generally. The entire system needs a radical overhaul and rethink to make it genuinely benefit students and workers.
JR: Anything else you’d like to share with our audience?
MC: Well, only that it’s nice that people have got this far in my ramblings. And if you like the thought of Cold City and Hot War, we’re launching the Kickstarter very soon, so please do sign up to be notified of this. And if you’re at RPG conventions in the UK this spring/summer, please do look out for me giving talks about my research! So far I’ll be at AireCon in Harrogate, Conpulsion in Edinburgh, and UK Games Expo in Birmingham. Do stop by and say hello!
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More soon! x