Author Archives: Clayton Oliver

Twilight: 2000 Edition War

Not much of an edition war, actually. At least, not here, where I’ve turned off commenting.

A couple of months back, someone on the Twilight: 2000 fan forum asked about the relative merits of the game’s second and fourth editions. Having just written up characters for all four editions for the 2025 Character Creation Challenge, I’ve been thinking idly about this subject again. Here’s my take on the best features of each edition:

First edition wins for timeline and setting. It has the deepest library of official publications from which to draw and consequently is the best-developed world. When I’m running T2k, I base my world on the setting presented in the 1e materials, with an alternate-history break point occurring in the early 1980s. I generally like percentile systems, but the mechanics herein are just… odd… in a number of places.

Second edition, specifically its v2.2 iteration, wins for play-by-post. Its mechanics have deeper levels of detail, but that slows me down too much when I’m trying to run a realtime game. I’ve found a number of players willing to try it but none willing to master the rules. Its life path system also tends to generate characters who aren’t competent enough to succeed consistently at the sort of adventuring the setting calls for, so some house-ruling is often necessary for me.

Third edition, i.e. Twilight: 2013, is where I have both some bias and an emotionally complex response. As the lead rules designer, and probably the most visible member of the design team still involved with the T2k fan community, I’m still more than a bit sore about the game’s shitty reception among the existing fan base. Having said that, I also acknowledge that a lot of the mechanics I developed are better suited for computer-mediated play than tabletop pencil-and-paper gaming. Where 2013 sits for me is mainly a source for strip-mining conceptual elements to port to the other editions. Justin Stodola’s work on the ballistics model still sings. The gear library adds the fiddly “what’s in his pocketses?” bits that appeal to my inner twelve-year-old poring over U.S. Cavalry catalogs. I occasionally think about returning to the initiative system to tweak it to feel more like X-Com’s action points, but that would require creative effort better expended elsewhere.

Fourth edition is my current go-to for in-person (or VTT) play. It has enough detail to satisfy my usual groups, none of whom are particularly obsessive about tactical minutiae, and it runs smoothly and quickly enough that I can get an eight-player group through a firefight in a single session with time left over for investigation, exploration, and roleplaying on either side of the combat. It also, generally speaking, offers characters who can be made broadly competent enough to contribute meaningfully outside one narrow niche.

Pool Party

Louisville. RiverCon ’94 at the ol’ Executive West hotel. I didn’t personally witness this, but it’s a fixture of Louisville Gaming Mafia folklore.

This con is infamous for several reasons, not the least of which is that it’s the con (and con LARP) at which most of the LGM met for the first time. Like many LARPs of its day night, the Vampire LARP issued badges separately from the con’s membership badges. Regardless of the status of your con badge, if you were wearing your LARP badge, you were considered to be in character and in play.

You will see this material again.

Also, like many LARPs of its day night, this con featured significant power creep and inattention to consequences. One of the PCs was one Father Drake, a vampire hunter with True Faith. For audiences who may be unfamiliar with Vampire: The Masquerade, the capitalization indicates that the wielder is capable of faith-based supernatural effects.

We shall cut, for a moment, to the players running our game’s Sabbat pack – effectively, semi-feral nomadic vampires who reject human morality and any pretense of clinging to their own humanity (ref: The Lost Boys, Near Dark). The players decided that since the hotel had a perfectly usable pool and the game had slowed down, they may as well take a dip. Alcohol may have been involved.

For the sake of expedience, many LARPers – including several of our Sabbat players – had attached their LARP badges to their con badges’ lanyards or holders. Thus, it so transpired that the Sabbat pack was having a (perhaps unintentional, but again, alcohol may have been involved) pool party in character.

There our vampires were, minding their own business, when Father Drake’s player came sauntering down the Executive West’s main hallway. He glanced through the windows overlooking the pool desk and saw… opportunity. Quickly, he affixed his own LARP badge and collared a Storyteller.

Around and in the pool, the Sabbat players were having a grand old time. Several were in the pool as Father Drake approached, unnoticed, trailed by a Storyteller whose smirk could best be interpreted as yo, Caine, check this shit out – you are about to see some shenanigans, fangboy.

One of the players climbed onto the diving board.

Father Drake looked left. Looked right. Saw no one observing him.

The player strutted out to the end of the board.

Father Drake knelt poolside.

One bounce.

Father Drake placed his hand in the water.

A second bounce.

Father Drake began chanting in Latin.

A third bounce.

Father Drake completed his invocation, stood, and smiled.

The player launched on a gentle arc and happened to glance toward the side of the pool. Recognized the clerical collar. Had just enough time for regret, and perhaps the beginnings of a Wile E. Coyote-esque air-clawing motion, vainly attempting to halt his ballistic plunge.

And that’s when the screaming started.

Chapter I: Hoard of the Sea Wolf King

The lost province was once an imperial crossroads. It is said that an ancient northlander king once came south in search of glory and treasure and cut a bloody swath through these lands before the Old Empire finally stopped him. Struck a mortal wound by an imperial champion, he was carried from the field of battle by his followers, who entombed him near the site of his greatest triumph on the banks of Lake Aster. For centuries, his burial site was hidden from mortal view, but the ancient spells woven by his priests and seers have begun to fray…

Armed only with the information above and a good supply of blades and torches, a group of crawlers set out from Plainwood to seek the long-lost burial site. Tonight’s party consisted of:

  • Nubbin Stump: drawn halfling, fighter 1
  • Vraazox da Pryist, wolfchild goblin, priest of Memnon 1
  • Tulk, marked half-orc, ranger 2
  • Ylva Fekyue, outcast halfling, bard 1 (player joined late, PC introduced in play)

The following post may contain spoilers for Hoard of the Sea Wolf King from Cursed Scroll Vol. 3: Midnight Sun.

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Point-Buy Character Creation for Twilight: 2000 v2.2

One of my long-standing headaches with Twilight: 2000 v2.2 is the life path character creation system. While it does help build the character biography, I more often find it constraining when I have a concept that doesn’t fit neatly within the limited number of boxes it offers. The random elements also tend to generate parties with widely-varying levels of competence, which means some PCs are more capable than others of making meaningful contributions to party success – both in and out of combat.

My solution to this, which has been kicking around my core rpol.net play-by-post group for several years now, is a point-buy system. Mathematically, this works out to roughly what you’d get out of a well-optimized four- to five-term life path PC with good rolls. This has gone through a few different iterations; this is, I think, the one with which I’m happiest.

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Chapter [$undefined]: Tomb of the Dusk Queen

After a thoroughly enjoyable demo game of Shadowdark at RiverCityCon a few weeks ago, I’ve decided to start a side campaign with the usual suspects. This will likely involve most or all of the players from Kaserne on the Borderlands, and perhaps a few others from the same friends circle, but not all at once. Somewhere West of Light, as I’m calling it, will be a pick-up game – either “we don’t have a quorum for a scheduled Twilight: 2000 session” or “I’m bored, can I get three to five players for a dungeon?” It may wind up being West Marches-ish. I’ll be chronicling it here, both for my own memory and for entertaining my three loyal readers. Don’t expect writeups to be as in-depth as what I do for Kaserne, though.

We did a dry run tonight with four players. I threw together a set of level 1 pre-gens, and my players chose:

  • Pryist, goblin wolfchild, priest of Memnon
  • Worluck, human minstrel, warlock of Kytheros
  • Nyte, halfling amnesiac, Knight of St. Ydris
  • Baarrd, elf scholar, bard

(I may have been giggling like a twelve-year-old as I rolled up and named a score of disposable PCs.)

For our test-run adventure, I grabbed the free Foundry pack community content pack and selected Sersa Victory‘s Tomb of the Dusk Queen. It’s a delightfully tightly-written dungeon, and I suspect I’ll be buying more of that author’s content in the near future. Module spoilers behind the cut:

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Con Report: RiverCityCon 2025

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: RiverCityCon, despite the name and host city, is not a successor to RiverCon. Whereas the latter con (and its shorter-lived successor, Conglomeration) was a general fantasy/SF con with a gaming track, RiverCityCon is a board game con that wedges TTRPGs into the cracks around its founders’ main focus. It’s a Louisville-based spinoff of the older Lexicon, which, as the name suggests, started in Lexington, Kentucky a few years ago.

Because it’s in our city of shared origin, the Louisville Gaming Mafia used last year’s inaugural RiverCityCon as a found-family reunion. We put it to the same use again this year, and as far as that goes, it satisfied our purposes adequately. Absent that, as a con fitting my own purposes, I’m somewhat ambivalent about it.

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A Day Off in Dobrodzien (18 October 2000)

Weather: Clear skies with a waning gibbous moon and an overnight low 39ºF, afternoon high around 60ºF. Hernandez’s forecast has clouds moving in tomorrow with cooler temperatures, followed by rain and possible sleet the following day.

Health: All personnel are in good health.

Food: 161 person-days plus emergency reserves and trade goods.

Vehicles:

  • Comms: Reliability 5/5, fuel 266/350 liters + 5x 20-liter jerrycans
  • Industrial Light and Mayhem: Reliability 5/5, fuel 324/400 liters + 2x empty 200-liter drums
  • Lazarus: Reliability 1/4, fuel 92/390 liters; front armor breached 3/4
  • Thing One: Reliability 5/5, fuel 20/20
  • UAZ-469: Reliability 5/5, fuel 75/75 + 2x 20-liter jerrycans

Weapons and Ammo: Green on small arms ammo (Pettimore and Cowboy yellow on secondary weapons). Yellow on anti-armor (105 rounds KPV ammo on Comms; SPG-9 w/ 3 HEAT and 8 HE rounds on UAZ-469; 2 HEAT rifle grenades and 1 RPG-18 distributed).

October 18 dawns cool and crisp, but with the promise of unseasonable near-warmth. Hernandez finishes his morning readings from the weather station mounted on ILM and warns the team that the next couple of days, at least, are likely to be craptastic.

From last night’s visit with a few of the American troops living here, the team is aware of several points of interest in Dobrodzien:

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Torchlight Welcome (17 October 2000)

We’re back in action, slowly. To save time introducing the community of Dobrodzien and B Troop of 1/116 ACR, I ran the following scene in a text thread on our Discord server. This post is a lightly-edited transcript of that playthrough.

The team’s first impression of Dobrodzien is that it’s… big. The town itself would not have been anything spectacular by prewar standards, but it appears to be supporting a population pretty close to what it had five years ago. Tomaszow and Radomsko each had a larger prewar population in absolute terms, but both cities also had huge swaths of devastated and abandoned ruins. Dobrodzien, at first glance, has surprisingly little war damage.

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