Monday Musings #96 🤬
Road Trips and Cold Cities
Good Monday, Gamer!
"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”― Lewis Carroll, Ranger
Last week, I road-tripped out to Dayton, Ohio, with my son. Family visit. Nephew’s birthday. Some holiday-adjacent downtime. About eight hours each way. Long enough to settle into the rhythm of the road. There are two things I really dig about these trips: car talk and travel games. We usually pack one or two easy-to-haul games—something we can bust out at the hotel while killing time between family plans (Lunch Money, Atma). And the car talk, song singing, just eating up the road. The conversations start light: week-in-review stuff, catching up on his school projects, making sure he's staying in touch with his mom. But after a couple of hours and a few highway exits, we drift into the woods—deep lore from Destiny, game mechanics we're chewing on, or music rabbit holes. This trip, he heard a drum loop in one of his favorite tracks and was floored to learn it sampled something from the ‘70s...which, naturally, we could evoke up via Spotify. So I gave him a quick tour of what was in heavy rotation for me when I was his age: Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, Hall & Oates, Arcadia, ZZ Top. I leaned into the drum-forward stuff to spark his inner percussionist.
Cold City Playtest Questionnaire!
I was giving myself anxiety trying to figure out how to write up my playtest notes for Cold City. I knew Handiwork Games would eventually reach out for feedback… and then, blessedly, they did. With a questionnaire, even!! Gamer, I can get with a questionnaire. Instead of agonizing over how to structure my thoughts, I got to react and reflect in bite-sized prompts. I cannot overstate how much that lowered my blood pressure. I really enjoyed the playtest. I want to play longer sessions. One-shots have their own vibe—focused, tight, sometimes a little rushed. But a short arc, say 4–6 sessions? That’s a sweet spot where characters stretch, stories breathe, and the system reveals its secrets.
Over the past few months, I squeezed in two one-shots (one of which spun into a follow-up session with the same characters), and a third planned game that never got past session zero thanks to life’s excellent sense of timing. Initially, I planned to do a compare-and-contrast: play the original Cold City, then the new version. But now that I’ve sat with the playtest edition? I want more of that. I might circle back to the old version later out of curiosity to just review it, but the table experience with the new rules stuck with me.
What I Liked
The conflict mechanics scale well and are easy to grok. You build dice pools, roll, compare, and then spend the margin of success. That part is easy. What makes it magic is the fiction-first scaffolding: players work the narrative to justify their dice—pulling in attributes, traits, tools, hidden agendas, trust, and betrayal— they want those dice. There’s a mechanic to make the conflict easy, hard, or complicated!! Conflict resolution changes the characters and the situation. The margin of success is used mechanically to change traits and dice pools.
My favorite dynamic is setting a scene —maybe to frame a moment or spotlight a character—and then a player escalates it into a full-blown conflict. The whole table’s been co-creating the fiction, and now it converges into a roll, everyone getting to an accord about what’s at stake. In the last couple of sessions, I’ve started slowing down right before the dice hit the table. I’ll say something like:
“Okay, so you're pushing for X, and the opposition is angling for Y, right?”
Just making it explicit and clear. Because after that, the dice have the last word. And when they fall? We’re all reading the tea leaves together. That’s the magic.
ICYMI
🖤 Running Velvet Glove? Thinking about? You oughta! Check out this fantastic write-up from Butcher Bird Press: Girlhood & Horror
🧠 RPG Design Deep Dives
Justin Alexander’s “Essential Reading List” dropped recently:
RPGs: The Essential Reading List
And here’s my reply post:
The RPG Design Playlist
Catch ya next week!