tonight was my first Cold City game. I have read the book and played malc's short demo. I am playing with James, and Carl, my roomates, and BJ, a friend of mine from highschool. James read a lot of the book before we played.

Character generation was really easy. We took our leisurly time, and short of some concerns about what would make a good trait and what would be to vauge we didn't have any problems or questions. We settled on what turned out to be very good traits so there wasn't a problem there at all.

Started a mission blatently stolen from Durham 3, zombie nazi's in a sewage treatment plant (i love games that take place in sewage, its one of my favorite settings i use it a lot and i know it well from years of urban exploration). After questioning some workers the party journed under-ground. We got to one conflict with a bunch of zombies. We were setting smaller stakes (i imobilize the zombie, i Kill this one of them). Combat became sort of turn-based and we didn't have any problem with that, but something tells me that isn't how the game is supposed to play. I guess that moment to moment thing is just how i GM and we all had a good spooky time with it. we probably only got in about an hour of real play and i didn't get to develop any real sub-plot, this was more of a getting comfortable with the system session. So, yeah, really looking forward to next week.

Some Questions:

How often is it recomended that Hidden agendas change? Personal ones will evolve as play goes on, so i'm not worried about that but what about national ones? Should i "re-assign" the players at some point, use it to create tension?

Hey Kevin,

Nice to hear that you found character creation a painless process. I would, however, be interested to hear what the results of your discussion over what made a good trait were. Was there an overall consenus about what was good and how did this affect the traits chosen by players for their characters?

It seems like the 'hunting zombies in a sewage plant' situation is fast becoming the de-facto, in media res start point for Cold City games! Must use it myself at some point.

As regards your question about hidden agendas, I think you and your players should feel a liberty to change national agendas as appropriate to the circumstances. If one national agenda has reached a resolution point or if the player(s) feel that something else would give greater drive to the story, then it's very easy to have NAs countermanded from above and new ones brought into play.

Cheers
Malcolm