Opoczno Aftermath (20 October 2000)

This one is slightly out of order, technically occurring before the guest post which spoilers Janek’s survival. Slow GM is slow.

This post condenses a long but slow-running thread on the group’s Discord server that occurred after the last session. Which was in March. Adulting sucks.

Red goes to work on Janek while Minka begins tending to Miko [downed with damage, but no crit – for once] and the bystanders with minor injuries. Zenobia and Leks obtain heavier weapons from the attackers, as do the surviving Russians. They and Leks are eyeing each other uneasily when the actual Opoczno militia shows up in force.

Thankfully, both actual militiamen survived the attack. Franek stays with the party to prevent lethal misunderstandings while Mieszko peels off to intercept the incoming response at the door. Thanks to their intervention and the known credibility of some of the team (particularly Red and Leks), there’s a minimum of unnecessary friction. Alexei, with Ludwig in tow, arrives at about the same time, and they’re kept cooling their heels outside the perimeter until Ludwig rather loudly announces his medical credentials. He taps in for Minka, freeing her up to assist Red.

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Splintered

Twenty or so years ago, when Clan War was a going concern in the Lexington gaming community, I bought a bunch of 1″ square adhesive-backed magnets and some thin steel sheets to use for unit movement trays. They worked well enough for the purpose: keeping a bunch of little samurai in line while marching across the table.

Fast-forward to today, and the magnetic base thing has come ’round again. Apparently, while I wasn’t doing any wargaming, the wargamers adopted steel storage trays and rare earth magnets as a means of transporting figures. It’s a sidegrade (if not an upgrade) from foam, or maybe it’s just clever marketing, but I was intrigued. The guy who runs BLKOUT demos in this corner of Appalachia made me aware of Tabletop Stronghold. I’m strangely okay with supporting some dude’s localish (based out of West Virginia) garage entrepreneurship, so I picked up his smaller magnetic case. I haven’t used it for travel yet, but assembly was a breeze (and glue-free) and everything seems to work as advertised.

Not wanting it to be confused with other Tabletop Stronghold cases at the local stores, I decided to experiment. I’ve always found the Swedish M90 splinter camouflage pattern to be aesthetically pleasing, so I broke out the painter’s tape and rattlecans and commenced to defiling.

Prototype for comparison (swiped from Camopedia):

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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The Tale of Vandal 6-1

A few days ago, someone in the Twilight: 2000 subreddit asked about campaign starts. Here’s my contribution:

I’ve been playing since 1st edition and my preference remains the classic Escape from Kalisz campaign seed. Having said that… a few years ago, I introduced T2k v2.2 to a group who’d (with one exception) never heard of it. I started the campaign on 06 July 2000, about a week and a half before the Kalisz breakout. The PCs were the 7th Combat Engineer Battalion’s engineering recon team. This meant they were the guys who got sent to assess the maneuver brigades’ requests for engineer support and determine what was feasible and what resources were needed. In practice, this let me give them a series of assignments that had them present at or near most of the major story beats in the run-up to the 5th Infantry Division’s last stand.

This enabled me to start them off with a good supply situation and strong support – available fuel, sufficient medical supplies, occasional mortars on call. Then I ramped up the pressure with each major contact, adding additional hostile unit markers to the world map as the encirclement took shape. They got to watch the 5th ID crumble from the inside.

It took about twelve sessions to get to the breakout. For that, we shifted focus off the PCs. Every player got one or two combat vehicles, most of whom were already low on ammo and carrying some non-disabling damage. This gave us a chance to use the vehicle combat rules to their fullest as the players fought their way through the Soviet encirclement. To raise the stakes, they were escorting five trucks, which the Soviets were trying to kill. Each truck that made it off the map added to the resources (fuel, ammo, food, attached NPCs) that the PCs had after the breakout.

I’ve always wanted to raise the stakes on this by finding an appropriate wargaming system (something tuned for micro armor, perhaps) and actually playing out part of the 5th ID’s last stand. Battalion, perhaps even brigade, level. The Soviets’ objective would be to kill American units. The Americans’ objective would be to get as many units as possible off the map. This would all be the setup for a subsequent RPG campaign whose starting parameters would be determined by the American players’ success in the battle.

Fanfic Preservation: Black Winter

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, I ran across a Twilight: 2000 fanfic novel titled Black Winter. At the time, my T2k fandom was largely dormant. Everyone in my usual gaming groups was invested in the World of Darkness scene, GDW wasn’t publishing anything for T2k, and I didn’t have anyone to play it with. I took note of the work, read it, and promptly lost track of it.

A few years later, when I got involved with the Twilight: 2013 project, I went back to look for it. Couldn’t find it – I hadn’t bookmarked the site, and every search turned up a dead link. I didn’t find it again until the summer of 2020, when a random synapse fired and my need to resolve the question led me to archive.org’s stored copy.

Today, while scrolling through Reddit over lunch, I found a thread in which someone was inquiring about Black Winter. By the time I got home and was able to start formulating an answer, the original poster had answered his own question and posted a link to a PDF of the story. I grabbed it because I’m a digital packrat, and that’s when I had a bit of cognitive dissonance and no small amount of resurgent guilt.

The archive.org copy was credited to an author whose identity I never knew, posting under the address cadillacofthesky@ntlworld.com. The PDF, however, bore a handle I didn’t think I’d see again: Twilight2000v3MM.

Twilight2000v3MM was the nom de net of Max “Moose” Messina. Max had been a fairly prolific writer in T2k fan spaces in the early 2000s, doing quite a bit of design work for a proposed third edition of the game. He was a natural fit for the Twilight: 2013 dev team, and his contributions were invaluable. I can’t recall ever being aware of his fanfiction work, though, only his game design pursuits. Until today, I didn’t know the novel was his. I feel like a shittier friend for not knowing that. I wish I’d had a chance to tell him that I’d enjoyed it.

Max passed away on 10 September 2020, reportedly from cardiac complications after a too-brief fight with pancreatic cancer. He left behind a wife and two sons. His final contribution to Twilight: 2000 was as one of the advance readers on The Pacific Northwest. His feedback was still in my inbox when we lost him.

His novel is preserved below.

Black Winter Twilight2000v3MMDownload

Szabla

Another BLKOUT unit at good-enough-for-table-use completion. This one is Szabla, a PMC offshoot of a Polish heavy industrial corporation’s security arm. Two riflemen, a marksman, and a jammer specialist who makes every model within 12″ immune to data attacks:

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Harlow Kinetic Solutions

I won’t say that the most recent painting drought has broken, but I spent a fair amount of time at the bench the past couple of weekends, getting my recent BLKOUT purchases into usable shape. The photos aren’t my best – I would swear iOS 26 lost some camera control capability. The paint isn’t my best either, but I think it’s good enough for use on the table.

For my initial force, I’ve chosen to go with Harlow Kinetic Solutions. In-universe, they’re a PMC of South African origin. On the colony world of Abol, they’re largely under contract to the Authority, a somewhat mustache-twirlingly evil offshoot of the remnant United Nations that is ostensibly the planetary governing body.

Mechanically, Harlow’s things are mobility and some of the better combat drills (limited-use maneuvers) in the game. In theory, this design supports aggressively going after objective points on the board over getting bogged down in fights.

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Villains by Necessity

A number of years ago – musta been while I was in college, to judge by the publication date – I happened to read Eve Forward’s Villains by Necessity. Someday, I’ll track down a copy that isn’t going for $40+ for a mass-market paperback… but today does not seem to be that day.

I’ve always wanted to run a fantasy campaign with the novel’s basic premise. Good won the war against Evil – a little too completely. The world is now tilting toward a pole of absolute Goodness. If not stopped, the entire morally-imbalanced universe will implode in a flash of floral-scented bunny sunshine. The PCs are the last unredeemed villains. They must save the world by releasing Evil from its prison.

It would probably degenerate into degeneracy within a half-dozen sessions, but there you are.

Blacked Out

Been a while since I got any updates posted here. Head full of other things.

A couple of weeks ago, I stopped in at one of the FLGSes in Roanoke. They had a new section of shelves devoted to BLKOUT. The game had been on the edge of my radar for a while, but the last things I need are more unpainted miniatures and another game system played by no one I know. Also, the last time I’d looked at the publisher, Enemy Spotted Studio, they were still leaning heavily into dudebro/vetbro mouthbreathing idiocy in their advertising, with the owner/founder doing balaclavaed videos under the nom de tube of “Head Goon.” Ugh. Hard pass.

Having said that… I got to chatting with the shop owner, who indicated that the game was starting to get some traction with his regulars. I went home without more minis (but an as-yet-unread copy of Dolmenwood purchased in the name of supporting a good FLGS). I spent enough time poking around the net to come away with a slightly more favorable opinion of BLKOUT. The minis have always looked good (and they’re made in North Carolina, which is a plus these days), the *bro advertising schtick appeared to be dead, and accounts of play seemed pretty good. I reached out on the shop’s Discord server and made contact with a guy who’s been running demos in the area.

Last week, I wandered back up to Roanoke for one of said demos and came away more impressed than I expected to be. The game lore could use a serious professional developer’s hand to rationalize some of the more hyperbolic elements, but the rules are really appealing. My opponent and I were both novices who’d read the rules but not actually used them before, and we knocked out a 3-unit vs. 3-unit game on a 2’x2′ board in an hour. I’d expect experienced players to resolve such a skirmish in 30 to 40 minutes. The level of complexity is not overwhelming, and any given mix of units provides interesting tactical choices.

More to come on this if I don’t lose focus and can motivate myself to get back to the blog.

The Sword of Destiny Cuts Both Ways

Saving this classic blog post from Walter Jon Williams because it needs to be preserved. Fantasy GMs and designers, take note.

Chosen Ones

I’ve had it with Chosen Ones. You know, the people we are told by the wise old wizard or some other Explicator of Plot who “are Chosen to save the world/kill the Dark Lord/become king/bring balance to the Force/whatever.”

Who the hell is it who does the Choosing, here? Lazy writers, that’s who.

Listen up, writers. Two things happen when I’m told that a person is Destined to accomplish something.

First, it removes all suspense. Because the character is Destined, you know the character’s going to succeed. Big yawn.

Second, it just makes me want to yell at the character, “Get on with it, won’t you? Don’t futz around for thirteen episodes, go kill the evil usurper and make yourself king. After all, you’re Chosen. It’s your damned job.”

Writers, if you’re going to give your characters a Destiny, at least give them one that isn’t so straightforward. Something like these:

Your character is Destined to fight a long rear-guard action against evil, until she makes a mistake or gets unlucky, and then she dies. (That would be Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

Your character is Destined to defeat the enemy, but will then be despised forever because of the means necessary to achieve that victory. (Ender’s Game)

Your character is Chosen to defeat the evil monster, but will die in the attempt; and without his leadership, his kingdom will fall. (Beowulf. Heard of the Geats lately?)

Your character is Chosen to wield the most powerful magic in the universe, but is also Destined to use it to destroy the world. PS, no exceptions. (The Wheel of Time)

Writers, what these examples do is add irony, which is a vital component of successful literature. They also open the story to at least the possibility of tragedy, which you really want. If a tragic ending isn’t possible, and demonstrated to be possible (kill Boromir!), the eucatastrophe or happy ending will have no power.

Give me Destiny if you must, but also give me Doom.