Monday Musings #90 🤬
Digital dice and Cold City Playtest session
Good Monday, Gamer!
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, a necromantic curtain has descended across the continent." — W. Churchill, Paladin
Sunday night, I got together with two of my favorite gaming friends for a playtest session of Cold City—the upcoming reboot from Handiwork Games. Cold City was a milestone game for me when it first dropped, and getting to playtest this new version? That’s an honor. But also, playtests are serious business—this isn’t just about having a good time; it’s about stress-testing mechanics, poking at edges, and seeing what sings or falls flat. LMAO. It's about a good time and answering designer questions about our experience!
Cold City Playtest – Serious Business
If you haven’t heard of Cold City, it’s a game set in Berlin, 1950, where players take on the roles of operatives from various Allied nations tasked with hunting down remnants of Nazi occult experiments, eldritch horrors, and Cold War threats. It’s part conspiracy thriller, part horror, and part espionage, built around trust mechanics that shape how characters work together (or don’t).
For that, I needed a table I could trust—people with grace, experience, and the ability to call BS when needed. I encourage everyone to find a group like that—people you can bring your best, your wild ideas, and your mistakes to without hesitation.
Now, no spoilers, but the playtest scenario wasn’t what I expected. It threw me off at first. But my experience with Handiwork's work is that they don’t miss; I was missing something. It seemed like an odd scenario to me...then.
We walked through the setting creation rules, even for a one-shot, and I’d 100% recommend doing this. It added layers of depth we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Character creation was equally sharp, combining evocative traits and descriptors for trust points to shape the world and each other. And the draw scenes? 🔥 Every game should have them.
And just like that, somewhere between character creation and the draw scenes, that odd 1-shot scenario in the playtest materials clicked. With the world fleshed out and the characters locked in, the weirdness of the mission snapped into place.
Our ISLAC agents:
Vivian Bailey – An MI-7 underestimated codebreaker. Well read, observant, clumsy.
Denis Portier – A shell-shocked French soldier, the last survivor of his unit. Well read (fringe/supernatural), good instincts, 'PTSD'
Vivian’s draw scene put her in a briefing room full of men, waiting for the arrival of… a man. Instead, it was her. The room’s disapproval was thick. They even tried to offer her another job. But she stuck the landing!
Denis’s scene had him on a recon mission to an occupied French village—he and his squad watched German troops get torn apart by… something, then it came for them. His commanding officer sacrificed the team to ensure Denis escaped to tell France what happened there.
And here’s where the game really shined—both characters failed their opening conflicts. That meant they picked up negative traits:
Vivian: Square Peg, Round Hole
Denis: Cursed
What’s fascinating is that negative traits give you +2 dice when used instead of +1 die for positive ones. But if they come up the highest die, the result—win or lose—is colored by the flaw. That’s a slick mechanic, and I’m eager to see how it plays out!
We're jumping into play next week! I'm excited, and I hope we can have an extra couple of playing sessions!
Rolling Madly
Code, coffee, and “Candy” by Cameo. That was my Sunday soundtrack opener as I went down the rabbit hole of dice roller tech—first, RIP RollWithMe.xyz—one of my favorite online rollers, which has been defunct since November. I tried to resurrect it. Pulled the code down from GitHub, dug into the guts, and got it semi-running, but the deeper I went, the crankier I got. It used AWS Amplify and backend JavaScript, and look, I could make it work, but I’d be forever cranky about it. I build my backends in C, Go, and Rails—things I actually enjoy working with. So, instead of fighting with a system that wasn’t built for me, I decided to start from scratch...and inspired by the bsky.app UI.
It’s not much yet—just a barebones dice roller with a live-updating feed—but the goal is simple:
✅ Fast, no-nonsense dice rolling for game sessions
✅ A familiar, social-media-style chat/dice/image feed
✅ Dice/Chat macros - soooo underrated!
✅ Fast, low-friction experience
Right now, it’s ugly. Function over form. But it works, and that’s the first step. Beautification comes later.
Prepping, Planning, Perusing
💀 The Electric State – Thinking I wanna do a podcast of this game... maybe IRL even!
🎲 The Mech Hack Prep – Max and I are starting our tour of Mecha RPGs with this one.
📝 Tabletop RPGs: How Do They Work? Do We Even Know? – Checkout this post from TaleTurn, a great exploration of how RPG mechanics shape play experiences. It digs into the sometimes-chaotic nature of role-playing games and how we engage with rules, structure, and improvisation. Worth a read!
What are you working on this week? What’s on your gaming radar?