I purchased my copy of The Poisoned Chalice at full price and am receiving no compensation for this review. However, in the interest of full disclosure: author Alf Bergesen and I are long-time collaborators. We’ve been playing in each other’s play-by-post games for over a decade, and we coauthored Tara Romaneasca, the Romania sourcebook for Twilight: 2000.
I don’t often review stuff, mainly because of some undefined unease about the process. This is probably unfair of me because, as an author myself, I appreciate any attempt at a thoughtful review that shows someone actually read and paid attention to my work. This post, then, is an initial attempt at a module review. Reviews probably won’t be regular features here, but I do want to make some sort of occasional effort toward highlighting products that I find interesting, useful, or praiseworthy.
By the Numbers
The Poisoned Chalice is a module for Twilight: 2000 4th Edition. It’s PDF-only, available on DriveThruRPG through Free League Workshop, that publisher’s community content channel. At the time of this writing, the product link is https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/437864/Twilight-2000-The-Poisoned-Chalice and the module is priced at $1.99. For that princely sum, you get a 19-page module (3 pages of front and end material, 16 pages of content) and a 27-hex x 18-hex battlemap in 4th edition’s 10-meter scale.
For those who like to work off word count because you know different layout styles can mean radically different amounts of content in the same page count, the module clocks in at just under 5,000 words. By my imperfect estimation, that’s probably double the word count of your average old school article/module from Challenge.
New toys include five vehicles (PTS-M, BTR-50P, Alvis Stalwart, Zil-131, and the Ursus C-451 farm tractor) and three weapons (Stechkin, L2A3 Sterling, and – inexplicably missing from the core book despite its ubiquity in both reality and film – the H&K MP5).
Presentation
Layout appears to use the Free League community content toolkit. The main text is a larger, well-spaced sans serif, while sidebars are clearly set off with borders, darker backgrounds, and a serif font with a delightful retro typewritten aesthetic. The background color appears to be a very pale grey, which may or may not consume unwarranted ink or toner if printed at home. Stat blocks for NPCs, vehicles, and weapons align with the Free League format.
The four art pieces are AI-generated. They’re all appropriate to the theme and mood, rendered in a pencil sketch style reminiscent of that used in the game’s first and second editions.
The writing is solid. Having worked with the author for a while, I have the advantage of having seen his writing style progress over the years, and this is him at the top of his game: tight and focused. I did catch a couple of grammar and mechanical issues, but they probably won’t leap out at many readers, and they didn’t derail my own reading.
The map, provided in a separate PDF, is usable and visually appealing. It has an appropriate mix of terrain for allowing maneuver and use of cover during tactical play. It is somewhat tight for vehicle combat. The style and palette aren’t a close match for Free League’s own, but it shouldn’t be hard to determine the terrain style in each hex. I have one quibble here: I’d like to see this map provided in an image file format (e.g., JPG or PNG) for easier import into a virtual tabletop.
Content and Usability
I’ll attempt to avoid spoilers here. This may result in excessive vagueness.
The module starts with two pages of history to establish a framework on which the referee can improvise. The Poisoned Chalice is set in northwestern Poland, which may be a geographic issue for integration into a campaign set around Kalisz after the U.S. 5th Infantry Division’s demise. However, there is a valid historical reason for the author’s choice of locale. For the referee who wants to use the module elsewhere, adapting it to another town should be problematic only if your players are history students with very specific areas of specialty – in which case, I recommend telling them to get over it because the game is clearly alternate history anyway.
Ahem.
The module is set just beyond the northwest edge of the boxed set’s Poland travel map – about 40 kilometers west of Grodzisk Wielkopolski in hex D13. While the tactical map is delightful, it would increase the module’s usability to have a local 10-kilometer-hex travel map to manage positioning, travel routes and times, and overall geography.
(My hypocrisy knows no bounds here, as I didn’t include maps in The Pacific Northwest – and rightly got called out for that in reviews. But I think it’s more of an issue for a 4th Edition product, given that rules system’s well-integrated focus on hexbashing.)
(Also, there’s no provision for moving the module to Sweden. I’m not sure if that would be historically plausible within the module’s framing, but I do feel compelled to note that here in case any of the game’s Nordic fans happen across this review.)
After setting the stage, the module suggests a few rumors and other options to use as hooks for pulling the PCs into the module. The focus is on a single town and the interactions the PCs and other factions have with it. There’s reasonable suspicion that a MacGuffin is located in the town. With word having gotten out, the community is attracting unwanted attention from multiple directions.
Once the PCs engage with the situation presented, The Poisoned Chalice is more sandbox than linear story. The module leaves the timing of events up to the referee and the “correct” response up to the players. The major decisions are how the PCs engage with the town, whether they attempt to take possession of the MacGuffin themselves, and how they deal with (or avoid dealing with) the competing interests that are converging on their location. I like the sandboxy nature here – this is similar to how I run my LARPs, with predefined plot elements in motion that will continue until and unless the PCs interact with them and change their vectors. However, it might be helpful for new referees if the module included a suggested timeline for driving those events – e.g., “Day X, PCs arrive; Day X+3, Faction A arrives; Day X+5, B-52 wreckage catches fire.”
There’s not a lot of depth here – which is not a slam on the product, more an acknowledgement of the limitations of tight word count. There is enough of a framework for a good referee to improvise a few different battles or pursuits (note to self: write pursuit/chase rules for 4th edition) and probably get three to six sessions of play out of it. As noted above, an inexperienced referee might benefit from more direct guidance.
I probably won’t use The Poisoned Chalice in my current campaign, but that’s not due to any failing on its part. As written, it would work as a stand-alone one-shot/short-run or would integrate nicely into a conventional hexbashing campaign of the sort that the 4th Edition rules support very well. Kaserne on the Borderlands is going in a different direction in both a geographic and a narrative sense. However, The Poisoned Chalice is solid and usable, and I’m strongly tempted to lathe it down into a four-hour one-shot scenario for use as a convention demo game. It has the core elements that would make for a solid demo: a well-contained core premise, a community for NPC interaction and “establishing shots” of the setting, some technical challenges to accustom players to the mechanics without risking their PCs, and the likelihood of a climactic firefight.
Score: Six out of seven loaded magazines. Not a full combat load, but it’ll get you through most firefights.
(I have no actual scoring scale but that seemed thematic.)