Campaign Toybox
The Story: Long ago, the great bird dove down into the endless ocean and brought forth a single, perfect pebble. That pebble was the earth and all the forces of the universe wished to walk upon it and share its wonders. Soon enough, they began to fight over it. Great and terrible wars waged between the forces, and the earth was scorched and frozen and cracked. Finally an accord was reached: a fragile peace based on sharing the world with equal time. Half to darkness, half to light; half to ice and half to fire. The phenomenon that humans see as the passage of time is in fact the slow exchange of territory through pacts, treaties and states of détente.
It is not always a painless or smooth process, for there is no love lost between the sides. And that’s where the Clockwalkers come in.
They are agents of Time herself, dedicated to preserving the peace and policing the treaties. It’s a thankless job, and an endless one, because everyone – every force in the universe – is looking for an edge, or an opportunity – a way to bend the rules for a moment, if not towards gaining more territory or leverage, then to make some money or advantage out of messing around with those players who do want territory or leverage. Because besides night and day and hot and cold, there are countless other factions at play – wet and dry, earth and sky, animal, vegetable, mineral…
Style and Structure: A cold war doesn’t just happen, you have to have all the pieces in place. You need a bunch of superpowers with irreconcilable differences, plus a big reason why they aren’t keen to rush out into hot war. Mutually assured destruction being the obvious one, and that means equality (or belief of equality) in power levels. You’re going to have to sit down and make sure that nobody has an upper hand waiting to be exploited because if there is, your players will find it and will exploit it. Of course, misinformation and the fog of war go a long way to helping this along. The other thing you need for a cold war is lots of tiny battles to fight and ‘salami’ victories to win, so that the war can bubble and simmer without exploding. It’s not enough, in other words, for cold to bring a blizzard to the desert for just a day; what you’re looking for is actual shifts in weather patterns – rather like global warming…
Once you have the pieces in place, cold war stories are pretty easy to come by (and the sources to steal from are legion, see below). As long as the stunts and locations change, it doesn’t matter that the bad guys always want the same thing. The only thing to watch is to make sure the heroes don’t accidentally shift the balance of power too much. But that’s a concern for the PCs in game as well, so you can let them worry about it. And that makes things different from your average cold war spy tale. James Bond just has to stop SPECTRE, not weaken them just enough to stop them winning but not so much that they can’t come back from it.
PCs and NPCs: While there must have been and must still be neutral parties in these great factions wars, that’s no fun for character origins – go for pathos wherever you can. You don’t want your game falling apart as PCs from the various sides start fighting each other (unless you’re into that) but there’s plenty of reasons why an agent might follow everything Lord Winter or Lady Summer stand for, yet believes in working to preserve the balance more. They might be tempted, of course, and walking that fine line is part of the fun. Regardless, this is where your cool powers and “races” come from – whether our agents were born on the side of fire, ice, dark, light, or everything in between, before they went to work for Time. It’s also a source for their personalities, because The Zenith King no doubt runs things differently to The Empress of Midnight.
Every pack of intelligent agents need a boss. Not to mention a department to come home to and all the people who staff it. James Bond’s Q had an awesomely cool box of toys, and he didn’t operate in a nega-dimension time-palace where your every thought can be made real. Obviously, toys need to be specially crafted to operate properly on our world. That interface can justify a lot of weird effects, or explain away any narrative limits you need to make stories work or stop runaway power curves. Also useful to keep the reins on is the need to keep the public unaware of operations. This isn’t because they’d react with fear or violence, but just because they’d get in the way with what needs to be done, and the whole point of the treaty is to keep the human world operating smoothly and time flowing without incident. In other words, no need to sneak around pretending you don’t have powers, but likewise no calling in the earth cops.
Plots and Villains: Like I said, a cold war tends to write these for you. Every side has enough pride, fanaticism and vainglory to motivate even the most desperate, petty or exotic grasps for extra power. Likewise, when your world is divided into black and white (literally), extremist villains breed like rabbits. And just because the Clockwalkers aren’t supposed to involve humans doesn’t mean there won’t be countless unscrupulous seasonal climes who are happy to sell their services to the highest bidder. Of course, that raises the question of what such rogue agents might want, but being mortal must offer some advantages. Likewise, there are some things a human could offer Lord Summer: if he wants to turn up the heat, we can always keep working on those greenhouse gasses…
Sources: We’ve already mentioned James Bond but he’s just the tip of the ice-berg of an entire genre of cold-war spying, a genre that dominated novels, movies and television for twice as long as the Cold War itself lasted. For all the fun of battling personifications, you should start with Terry Pratchett, particularly Hogfather, Thief of Time and Wintersmith. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman also has plenty of personification politics, especially in Seasons of Mists. And Gaiman and Pratchett together gives Good Omens, which uses a cold war metaphor for the battle between Heaven and Hell. Borrowing from that particular stand-off is a good idea in general, and sources from Paradise Lost to Supernatural will be useful. Of course, your gods don’t have to be Christian, or even traditional. Returning to Mr Gaiman, they could even be American Gods.
RPGs: Cold City is your first stop, the fantastic RPG of trust and mistrust as soldiers from various nations work together or against each other in post-WW2 Berlin. Mix in Nobilis, the game of personified powers who play politics whenever they’re not playing war. Personifications also show up in In Nomine, which brings us back to the heaven and hell angle. For more spies, you’ve got the awesome if out of print Top Secret, James Bond and Spycraft (adding in D20 Modern for your superpowers), or indie works like Lacuna and Blowback, plus plenty more options from Mountain Witch to Best Friends if you want to play around with people who really can’t trust one another. Secret cold wars between godlike beings also fits a lot of World of Darkness settings, plus Scion, not to mention other dark horrors like Witchcraft and all its Unisystem friends, and of course the Supernatural RPG. Statting out servants of cold and fire might also require your favourite superhero system, and indeed, this could be a great limited-source supers game waiting to happen, or just an awesome war to suddenly break into your already-running supers campaign (which is just what happened in the City of Heroes supers MMORPG recently). Tis the season!
