Author Archives: Clayton Oliver

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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CCC2025 Final Thoughts

Well. That was a thing.

I’ve written 31 characters in 31 days before. In truth, I don’t think I’ve ever run a convention LARP that didn’t have a pre-gen death march as part of my prep. Those efforts were always single-system and single-setting, though. This was rough, and I know my quality was rather variable across all the entries. It was much more of a time suck than I thought it would be, too. When I’m writing LARP pre-gens, I estimate a minimum of one hour per character, and I suspect I exceeded that in this project.

Was it rewarding? Yeah, to a point. But that point was sometime in the 20s, when it turned into a slog and all the fun sort of evaporated. I had to force myself to grind out the last eight or ten. While every system I used is something I’ve played or run at least once, most of these required at least some degree of refamiliarization before I could start building.

Will I do it again? Enh… maybe? I have a limited amount of creative energy these days, and part of my rationale for taking on this project was the fact that I didn’t have any other creative projects in the hopper when I committed to this in late December. For future years, we’ll see what else I have going on.

Since I like indexes, here’s an index of every system and character for this iteration:

1 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness – Kabu, California Coyote Ninja Avenger
2 – Star Wars – Anastasia “Convor” Glaux, Reconnaissance Starfighter Pilot
3 – 7th Sea – Gervais Fournier, Reluctant Porte Sorcerer
4 – Spycraft – Isak Eriksen (code name Svallin), Watcher on the Baltic
5 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Curtis Baxter, Anarch Vigilante
6 – Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Nadia Vasylyk, Dangerous Antiquarian
7 – Mage: The Ascension – Gordon Armstrong, Cryptid Preservationist
8 – Wraith: The Oblivion – Margo Vaughn, Stormchaser at the End of the World
9 – Changeling: The Dreaming – Gökhan Karga/Silver Mhachkay, Goth Bard
10 – World of Darkness: The Hunters Hunted – Neville Grimes – Eighteen Wheels, Both Barrels, and Exodus 22:18
11 – Demon: The Fallen – Tom Hartman/Viatiel, Darkness on the Edge of Town
12 – Legend of the Five Rings – Iuchi Masuyo, Reluctant Yojimbo
13 – Shadowrun – Julien Yoshioka (“Harbinger”), Nocturnal Predator
14 – Stargate SG-1 – Staff Sergeant Jared Ingram, Interstellar Weatherman
15 – MechWarrior – Sao-shao Aleksey Sokolov, Electronic Warrior at Large
16 – Blue Planet – Cutter, Cetacean Salvage and Recovery Expert
17 – Dark Conspiracy – Mercedes “Sadie” Cantrell, Two-Fisted Psychic
18 – Cyberpunk 2020 – Vera Rodriquez, Account Adjuster
19 – Adventure! – Ainsley McTavish, Heiress of Secrets
20 – Aberrant – Bánoy (Manuel Kidlat Salazar), Stormwhisperer
21 – Trinity – Inspector Ekundayo “Kunda” Temitope, Forensic Engineer
22 – Conspiracy X – Special Agent Corey Marsh, Deniable Enforcement Asset
23 – Exalted – Jarlath Shonida, He to Whom Borders Are as the Morning Fog
25 – Eclipse Phase – Hackbird (Sequence C15.5359j), Dataspace Predator
25 – Palladium Fantasy – Valpuri Savolainen, Errant Lady-at-Arms
26 – Earthdawn – K’Jal Mirrorlake, Questing Nethermancer
27 – Feng Shui – Athena Cheng, Maverick Cop
28 – Twilight: 2000, first edition – Sergeant Murray Vinson, Cavalry Raider
29 – Twilight: 2000, second edition – Corporal Václav Procházka, Everyone’s Favorite Defect(or)
30 – Twilight: 2013 (aka Twilight: 2000, third edition) – Lieutenant Commander Owen McNeil, M.D., Horse Surgeon
31 – Twilight: 2000, fourth edition – Captain Katie “Acid” Christensen, Trapped in the Mud but Staring at the Stars

Katie Christensen

Game: Twilight: 2000 (4th edition – Fria Ligan AB, 2021)

My Experience: I’ve tinkered with 4th edition for a while. As amply documented on this blog, I’ve been running a campaign (with added paranormal elements) for about two years now. Haven’t actually gotten to play yet, though.

Captain Katie “Acid” Christensen, Trapped in the Mud but Staring at the Stars

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Václav Procházka

Game: Twilight: 2000 (second edition, v2.2 – GDW, 1993)

My Experience: The second edition of Twilight: 2000 came out in 1990, when the so-called end of history had rendered the first edition’s game history obsolete. It featured an updated timeline to which, admittedly, I paid very little attention. More of my focus was on the more playable game engine, which eliminated a lot of the headaches high-school-age-me had with the original game. I snapped up the yellow boxed set as soon as it released, flailed ineffectually with it through high school and my early college years, and shelved it when it became clear that I wasn’t going to find anyone interested in playing. Along the way, GDW released v2.2, which I didn’t actually use until I was in my late thirties and involved in a few play-by-post games. But we did have some pretty fantastic PbPs…

Corporal Václav Procházka, Everyone’s Favorite Defect(or)

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Murray Vinson

Game: Twilight: 2000 (1st edition – GDW, 1984)

My Experience: The first edition Twilight: 2000 boxed set was probably the second or third RPG I owned. I would like to say I ran it for my Boy Scout troop during my middle school years, but the truth of the matter is that I was in middle school and had no idea what the hell I was doing. By the time I did scrape together some sort of clue, first edition had long since fallen by the wayside in favor of the Big Yellow Book and later iterations. Still, it’s a universe I’ve found compelling for almost forty years, so for the last four days of this challenge, I’m going to build a character for a different edition each day.

Sergeant Murray Vinson, Cavalry Raider

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Athena Cheng

Game: Feng Shui (first edition – Atlas Games, 1996)

My Experience: Since at least 1998ish, Feng Shui has been my go-to for minimum-preparation one-shot games, usually played over New Year’s Eve. I’ve never run a sustained campaign in it, and never really felt the need. I’m probably doing its metaplot a huge disservice, but in my Feng Shui universe, it’s always Hong Kong in the latter half of the ’90s, and something is always blowing up.

Athena Cheng, Maverick Cop

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K’Jal Mirrorlake

Game: Earthdawn (first edition – FASA, 1993)

My Experience: I’ve run Earthdawn twice. The first was a couple of years after its release, during one of the Louisville Gaming Mafia’s formative summers, and we maybe got four sessions in before reverting to our usual World of Darkness hijinks. The second was after college, and we did manage to complete one decent story arc before my players lost patience with the clunky and idiosyncratic system.

K’Jal Mirrorlake, Questing Nethermancer

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Valpuri Savolainen

Game: Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game (Palladium Books, 1983)

My Experience: This is another game where my play experience is mostly limited to Little Sister’s games. She put together a campaign in our early college years that fell apart almost as soon as it started because everyone involved was having more fun with her Shadowrun campaign. A few years later, she ran a one-on-one for me. We actually got a fair ways into that one, as she had a nicely detailed setting based on the old Legend of the Red Dragon BBS door game (showing our ages here). My character was painfully unoriginal, a port of my former primary character on a MUD which, itself, was based heavily on Warhammer Fantasy. But we were entertained. I own the 1998 third printing of the Palladium Fantasy rulebook, but it’s a Palladium product, so I suspect very little changed between 1983 and 1998…

Valpuri Savolainen, Errant Lady-at-Arms

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