Occasionally, my wife and I go off on worldbuilding tangents that result in new fictitious species. This has previously resulted in the ghost plum and the spider peacock. Another time, someone’s Reddit handle inspired discussion of the floating ghost carrot.
Well, it’s not really a carrot. Nor does it float. It’s actually a subspecies of ginseng that can temporarily activate latent telekinetic powers.
The problem is that while a lot of people would like to have latent telekinetic powers, very few actually do. Because some of the interested-but-without are wealthy, powerful, and unscrupulous (but I repeat myself), this has resulted in a significant off-the-books genetic research project to identify the source of latent telekinesis. The results have been… questionable science, at best. And some of those results point to specific organs as the source of said latent telekinesis. Which has, in turn, resulted in a growing black market trade in organs stolen from latent telekinetic persons for transplant.
A West Marches-style campaign accommodates a large number of PCs. I have eight players, so one PC per player should be sufficient for now (I may open up a second PC slot if the campaign goes on long enough or if PCs start getting dropped with long-healing-time critical hits). Let’s take a look at the survivors whose exploits I’ll be chronicling here:
Dr. William “Red” Greyson (Lieutenant, U.S. Navy)
“Red” was doing his residency when the war began. Drafted and direct-commissioned as a Navy trauma surgeon, he was attached to an infantry battalion in 2nd Marine Division. With the collapse of anything resembling international law and treaty enforcement, he’s picked up a rifle to defend his patients… and himself… and, really, anyone else who needs it.
Medical Aid B; Combat Medic, Load Carrier, Trader
M4A1, Browning Hi-Power, medical gear
Ellis (CIA)
A veteran CIA case officer, the man who calls himself Ellis began operating in Poland several years before the war went hot. His main line of work was countering Soviet influence and encouraging Polish pro-democracy movements. His last major op involved obtaining an unspecified item from the Soviet Reserve Front HQ and Polish puppet government capital at Lublin.
John Lee Pettimore (Staff Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps)
Pettimore grew up in a trailer in rural eastern Kentucky with two younger brothers and an alcoholic mother. He supported the family through hunting, both for subsistence and as a guide for out-of-town rich folk, and eventually parleyed that skill set into a job with the Corps. He spent the first half of the war with the 2nd Marine Division’s 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion. After the main event in Norway was over, he shifted south to the Baltic. In the churn of combat replacements and reshuffled recon assets, he eventually wound up attached to the Army’s 5th Infantry Division before its ill-fated end run into central Poland. He survived the breakout and linked up with a small group of other survivors who made their way to Krakow. He’s somewhat evasive on what happened between now and then… especially as he’s realized that his personal timeline doesn’t line up with anyone else’s…
(Pettimore is a character from a previous campaign who’s been ported from my house-ruled v2.2 into this v4 version.)
Ranged Combat B; Hunter, Scout, Sniper
Thoughts and Prayers (Dragunov), M45 MEU(SOC), compound bow, Bible
Leksik “Leks” Müürikivi (Corporal, Free Estonian Defense Force)
One of a number of Estonians who defected to NATO as soon as it became survivable, Leks is the party’s beatstick. He’s Ellis’ right-hand goon – the two of them have been through a number of escapades prior to the events that led them to Ponikla.
Survival B; Forager, Killer, Machinegunner
MG3, pump-action shotgun, Zippo engraved with “Fuck Communism”
Magda Szymanska (Polish Home Army partisan)
Magda would much rather be baking, but this is what she’s stuck with. A few years before the war started, she joined the Strzelec territorial defense volunteer organization – partly out of patriotism, partly because most of her friends were doing it. When the war broke out, she chose the side of getting her country out from under Moscow’s boot.
Recon B; Cook, Rifleman, Scout
wz.88 Tantal
Mikolaj Krol (Polish civilian)
Mikolaj was a teenager when things went sideways. He came of age in Warsaw – and then in Warsaw’s irradiated ruins. He’s the party’s scrounger and always has one eye on the exit.
Survival B; Runner, Scout, Scrounger
PM-84, machete
Minka (Polish civilian)
Before the war, Minka was a blacksmith and farrier with just enough veterinary knowledge to be dangerous. She was a skilled practitioner of a dying trade. As literal horsepower became a critical resource again, she found her skills in high demand. She’s looking for her mobile forge and her trusty horse, both of which were stolen by Soviet cavalry troops a few months ago, but until she finds those particular Russians, she’s happy to take out her frustrations on any Russians.
Medical Aid B; Blacksmith, Rider, Veterinarian
AKM, sledgehammer
Zenobia Slusarski (Polish civilian)
Zenobia is a native of Ponikla, though she moved away long before the war and only returned a month before the campaign began. A mechanic, tinker, and locksmith, she trusts and appreciates machinery more than people.
Originally posted to the Juhlin.com Twilight: 2000 fan forum.
Having recently discussed the MBT issue in Twilight: 2000’s 4th edition, I thought it might be interesting to tinker with everyone’s favorite apocryphal light tank, the LAV-75. Back in 2009, Kato’s forum had a rather long and productive thread on it, which yielded a few different variants and development histories. I’m too lazy to use that entire thread, but I did cherry-pick the bits dealing with the hypothetical upgrade to a 90mm low-pressure gun system (presumably the same one for which we already have second edition canon stats courtesy of the MPGS-90).
So what does the LAV-75 look like in 4e? Using the conversion rules in the back of the Referee’s Manual, we get a stat line that looks a little something like this (apologies to those on mobile):
(I deviated from canon by providing both pintle and coaxial MGs. Rebellion is a heady drug.)
So, not really awful. It suffers in the tactical mobility department, most notably being slower off-road than the tanks it was intended to slow down in its original RDF conceptualization. However, it’s actually faster on a road march than any of the T-series. But life and AFV design are about compromises.
The big objections to the LAV-75 have always centered around the gun, though. Does it fare any better in 4e rules than it did in previous editions (much less real-world acceptance testing)? Well, let’s take a look at how the 75mm Ares cannon, as well as the 90mm low-pressure gun of the forum’s LAV-75A1, convert to 4e:
(I stuck the 75mm with Reliability 4 because I am cruel. Forgiving referees may feel free to ignore that.)
Okay, so the design objective of both of these guns was to kill Soviet tanks of the types likely to be encountered in Southwest Asia – so anything up to and including a T-72. How do they stack up?
As it turns out, slightly better than in real life. Looking at frontal armor, the T-55 comes in with 6 (actually worse than the LAV-75, by Free League’s own conversion rules), the T-62 has 7, the T-64 goes to 8, and the T-72 goes to 9, while the T-80 (unlikely in the originally-intended AO) goes to 10. For cracking armor, both guns get roughly equal performance (save for range) out of their HEAT and APFSDS rounds. For the 75mm, we’re looking at Damage 6, Armor -1; for the 90mm, it’s Damage 7, Armor -1.
With that Armor -1 modifier, the 75mm will consistently penetrate the frontal armor on a T-55. It won’t automatically crack a T-62 or T-64, but a good hit or luck with ammo dice, because it’s burst-capable may boost the damage enough to go internal. The Penetration Limit rule on p. 82 of the Player’s Manual keeps it from being able to get frontal penetration on a T-72 or T-80. To the sides and rear, of course, good hits are much more feasible, though they still rely on extra successes or ammo dice to pop a T-64 or higher.
How about the 90mm? Much the same story, but up one level: reliable frontal penetration on a T-55 or T-62, but dependent on superior marksmanship to find a weak spot in the face of a T-64 or T-72. However, marksmanship is actually more critical here because the low ROF of a conventional cannon restricts the use of ammo dice.
Because Twilight: 2000 is set in our alternate history, I decided to use Free League’s travel map of central Poland for this campaign’s world map. Obviously, this dictates geography, but the framework from the setting’s history also strongly implies some of the major factions out there, their rough areas of control/influence, and what they’ll be doing over the coming in-game months.
Because my players may read this blog, I will not be discussing those in detail… until they encounter them.
I decided to start my PCs in a small farming community near the south bank of the Pilica River (which, in-setting, is larger than it is in real life, and is navigable as far upriver as Tomaszow Mazowiecki). It’s near the center of the map, giving them ample room to explore in any direction. It’s June 20, 2000 – the summer solstice. They’ve been in the village about a month, having arrived here after evading pursuit by a large number of Soviet troops. Since then, they’ve been laying low and healing up, but as the village is becoming their semi-permanent home, it’s time to start seeing what threats and opportunities are out there. Thus, in West Marches style, they start off with visibility only in their home hex, and they’ve gotta go hexbash to clear out that fog of war.
(While I haven’t been specific about character histories and none of my players are Twilight: 2000 canon purists, I’m assuming that the 2000 NATO offensive occurred a few months earlier than in canon. Thus, PCs for whom it’s appropriate may have been involved in the Kalisz encirclement.)
After some collaborative world-building, we’ve decided that the village currently has 52 residents, not including the PCs. Its population was dwindling even before the war due to urbanization. Wealthier Poles from nearby cities were buying up vacant farms and converting them to hobby farms or vacation homes, so by the early ’90s, about half of the village’s remaining residents were involved in providing various services for these absentee landlords. Nowadays, the population is split evenly between prewar residents and refugees from the cities, which means there’s a shortage of the skilled farmers necessary for salvage-economy subsistence agriculture. There’s also a general lack of skilled trades, so finding and recruiting people with those skill sets will be an ongoing objective for the PCs.
One of the world-building assignments I handed out was “tell me three problems the village has.” The skilled trades issue was one. A second was a lack of potable water – water from the Pilica can cause illness and hallucinations. An additional catch here is that some hallucinations accurately predict future events, but those are accompanied by more incapacitating illness.
Did I mention that my players are mostly from my college-era World of Darkness group and they near-unanimously asked for supernatural elements in their post-nuclear apocalypse?
This ties into the village’s third initial problem, which is that something is taking the children. So far, it’s also returning them, but they have no memory of what happened to them while they were gone…
Occasionally, my brain does strange things with syntax. Such was the case when I recently became aware of the peacock spider. If we have peacock spiders, I asked, why can’t we have spider peacocks?
So in my headcanon, the spider peacock is now a thing in the 7th Sea game setting.
It started out as a Montaigne attempt to breed a mute peafowl that would be decorative without disrupting garden parties with its shrieks. The result wasn’t a mute bird, but rather one with raspy, rattling vocalizations – sounding, quite frankly, like a woman being strangled rather than one being knifed. As if that weren’t enough, the breed’s plumage lost much of its coloration, becoming silvery grey and the dark red-brown of dried blood. This might have been the end of the experiment if not for the elaborate patterns on the fowl’s tailfeathers, which resembled unique, intricate spiderwebs when raised in full display.
While a few eccentric Montaigne do still keep flocks of these “spider peacocks,” the primary market for the breed is, unsurprisingly, Vodacce. There, they are cherished pets, allowed to freely roam their owners’ estates. Some Vodacce believe that spider peacocks also can sense when a sorte strega tugs the strands of Fate in their vicinity, and that their ubiquity in certain nobles’ presence is more than simple ornamentation or ostentation.
Originally posted to the Juhlin.com Twilight: 2000 fan forum.
Once every 1d6 months or so, I’ll raise periscope over on RPG.net to see if anything of interest is being discussed. Back in November, I noticed this thread on running a tank-focused campaign in a post-apoc world. This prompted some thoughts on the viability of such a campaign in Twilight: 2000.
Long-time denizens of the usual fora and mailings lists, or capable search engine operators, will no doubt recall or find several threads on this topic from previous editions. The fan base has generally concluded that running a tank is a loser’s game for PCs due to the logistical issues of fuel, parts, and main gun ammo, as well as the tactical issue of being a huge effing target. However, I don’t think we’ve taken a detailed look at the issue in the light of the game’s fourth edition, so let’s see if the dead horse has a few more resonant thumps left in it.
With a limited selection of tanks available in the 4e core rules, I chose to focus my initial work on the T-72.
Fuel Economy
… so, in terms of fuel economy, the 4e rules give us roughly equivalent fuel economy over distance when running on diesel, but are much more favorable if we retain the conceit of diesel engines being converted to alcohol fuel. Interestingly, 4e’s road movement speed is significantly lower than 2e’s.
Fuel Production
But what about those stills? Well, let’s look at the means of alcohol fuel production in 2e and 4e:
Again, 4e is considerably more generous/forgiving, assuming both a 2e party and a 4e party are using mobile facilities. What becomes a crushing logistical impossibility in 2e is actually kind of feasible in 4e… at least, from a strict numbers perspective.
I’ve been a gamer since 1983 or 1984, when an elementary school classmate introduced me to Car Wars. Tabletop roleplaying got on my radar a few years later when I picked up a copy of Autoduel Champions for the helicopter rules and found a bunch of other material on superheroes. My first actual RPG was probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, followed closely by Mechwarrior and Twilight: 2000.
Prior to 2000, I had played in two sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, separated by about five years. The third edition Player’s Handbook was the first D&D book I ever owned.
Today, I have approximately 49 shelf-feet of RPG material between my library and my office. My combined D&D material across all editions is under 2.5 shelf-feet, making it roughly 5% of my total TTRPG collection.
A cursory survey of my library yielded a small number of RPGs that can give me some form of high fantasy gaming experience with no meaningful connection to D&D, Wizards of the Coast, or the Open Gaming License:
Ars Magica
Blade of the Iron Throne
The Burning Wheel
The Dark Eye
Dominion Rules
Dragon Age
Dungeon World
Earthdawn
Exalted
Forbidden Lands
GURPS
Iron Kingdoms
Legend of the Five Rings
Palladium Fantasy
The Riddle of Steel
Runequest
Symbaroum
Talislanta
And that’s just what I have in print. Those vastly outweigh my D&D materials, even combined with the other games I own that rely on the OGL (13th Age, Blue Rose, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Fantasy Craft, Pathfinder, The Wheel of Time, and Worlds Without Number).
Has the OGL been a huge boon to the subsidized hobby (I can’t call it “industry” with a straight face) that is tabletop roleplaying? Absolutely. But Wizards of the Coast’s complete implosion and irrelevance will not meaningfully affect my ability to play games, even in the genre space that D&D currently dominates.
Sadly, I don’t have a D&D Beyond subscription to cancel.
Tonight, I ran the first session of a Twilight: 2000 fourth edition one-shot for my college gaming group… yes, “first session” and “one-shot” don’t go together well, but we ran long, so we’ll be picking up the plot next week. This was basically a shakedown cruise for the combat system, as it was everyone’s first time tinkering with it. Four PCs took down six marauders with only one PC taking hits (though he almost bled out from a brachial artery critical).
I’m getting more comfortable with the 4e engine, but this also was my first experience playing with the Foundry VTT, so there were some hiccups. Still, my feelings toward Foundry are mostly positive. We ran into a couple of UI idiosyncrasies but nothing we couldn’t overcome, and the visual design and automation are far beyond what I can wring from Roll20.
The other interesting thing that came out of tonight’s session was some group interest in a West Marches-style campaign of Twilight: 2000. I think the 4e engine lends itself well to this, though I’ll need to figure out a few things – first and foremost some community management and improvement rules beyond the core book’s base management skeleton. I may also want to mine Jarkman’s B-Troop campaign start concept for ideas.
This is not actually why I started this blog, but the timing is fortuitous. My hope is that I’ll be able to maintain enough focus to chronicle this campaign here. We have some other plot to get through first and I have some ongoing personal life stuff that may interfere, but… watch this space.
From a tangent during character development for an old duet Shadowrun game:
The ghost plum is an Awakened variety of Prunus mume (Chinese plum) found mainly in China’s Yunnan region. The tree is similar to its unAwakened parent, but the fruit is an exceptionally pale lavender.
If consumed raw by an unAwakened metahuman, the fruit has a chance to bestow temporary and unpredictable astral sight. This phenomenon is more common in areas with high background counts related to large-scale or traumatic deaths. Awakened characters are largely unaffected, though a few report difficulty casting health spells. Statistical evidence suggests that frequent consumption may make subjects more susceptible to HMHVV.
Ghost plum is more commonly distilled into liquor. The resulting ghost plum wine provides a more predictable effect, less prone to “bad trips” – albeit with a greater statistical correlation to HMHVV infection rates. It is popular in death-fixated youth cultures around the Pacific Rim. It’s also a ritual component for practices related to several death-aligned totem spirits.
I’ve been having some gaming-related thoughts lately that aren’t worthy of articles or forum threads themselves, but which I nevertheless want to get out there in case anyone else finds them useful. This blog will likely remain specific to gaming – I have another place for thoughts related to my day job and most of my gaming audience doesn’t care about my personal life.
I’ll also be reposting some older material from other places to ensure I don’t lose it when sites or forums outside my control go down.
