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
Murray Vinson comes from a part of east Tennessee where, as the song goes, “they draft the white trash first ’round here anyway.” He quit his job at the mine and enlisted as soon as imminent war in Europe started making the newspapers. His thinking at the time was that NATO would suck the United States into the conflict sooner or later and he’d rather get in on the ground floor than be a poorly-trained last-minute draftee replacement. He was right about one thing, at least – two months after joining the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fulda, Murray was in the back of an M3 Bradley Scout Vehicle, heading east toward the Inner German Border.
Since crossing into East Germany with the Blackhorse in December of ’96, Murray has been on near-continuous combat operations, interrupted only by a stay in a field hospital over the winter of ’98. Following that, he found himself unceremoniously transferred to 2-108 Cavalry with the Louisiana National Guard’s component of the 5th Infantry Division. He spent a solid year trying to train draftees and defectors how to be cavalry scouts while simultaneously attempting every trick known to the E-4 Mafia to get back to the 11th ACR. In this, he not only failed, but failed so spectacularly that they made him a sergeant and put him in charge of a scout section.
That was a “reward” in the spring of 2000, just before the 5th ID moved out on what was supposed to be NATO’s last grand offensive into central Poland. Instead, the 5th ran into all the Soviets in the world outside Lodz. Murray was with 2-108 Cavalry when they went down fighting at Łask. After his Bradley and most of his scout section were shot out from under him, he managed to sneak out of the encirclement by sheer good luck and judicious use of pyrotechnics. Now he’s on the run in hostile territory, but he still has an armored cavalryman’s most dangerous weapon: a radio.
Traits
Nationality: American
Rank: Sergeant (E-5)
Age: 29
Branch/Specialty: Armor/Cavalry Scout (MOS 19D)
Attributes
Fitness 12
Agility 14
Constitution 10
Stature 8
Intelligence 9
Education 11
Strength 10
Physical Characteristics
Hit Capacity head 10, torso 28, limbs 18
Weight 72 kg
Load 26 kg (burdened 52 kg)
Throw Range 20 meters
Body Combat Damage 1d6+1
Military Experience
Time in Combat 37 months
Coolness Under Fire 1
Rads 31
Skills
Body Combat 20%
Combat Rifleman 65%
Electronics 50%
Equestrian 60%
Forage 30%
Forward Observer 40%
Geology 30%
Heavy Weapons 40%
Instruction 40%
Language (English) 100%
Language (German) 30%
Language (Polish) 20%
Mechanic 50%
Medical 40%
Melee Combat 20%
Mining Engineer 40%
Mountaineering 50%
Pistol 20%
Recon 70%
Scrounging 40%
Swimming 20%
Thrown Weapon 40%
Tracked Vehicle Driving 40%
Wheeled Vehicle Driving 40%
Equipment
fatigues, American woodland camouflage
Kevlar helmet
Kevlar flak jacket
combat web gear
rucksack
personal medical kit
5/25km secure manpack/vehicular radio
flashlight
gas mask
binoculars
IR goggles
3 days of MREs
M16A2 assault rifle w/ 8 full magazines
M9 pistol w/ 3 full magazines
bayonet
2 fragmentation grenades
2 smoke grenades
Cached (too heavy to lug around Poland on his back)
partial case of 5.56mm ammo, 200 shots remaining
partial case of 9mmP ammo, 465 shots remaining
partial case of fragmentation grenades, 28 remaining
partial case of smoke grenades, 14 remaining
spare fatigues x2
thermal fatigues
personal medical kit x2
chemical defense suit
Geiger counter
optical chemical sensor
spare binoculars
electronic repair tools
9 days of MREs
$1,850 in portable wealth (gold, silver, etc.)
$7,481 of equipment allocation remaining for group use
Notes and Afterthoughts
Murray is about as standard of a first edition Twilight: 2000 character as it’s possible to build. His rolls are painfully average, with the exception of a spectacularly low (which is advantageous) Coolness Under Fire. As a cav scout, he’s ambidextrous – capable of operating from an armored vehicle (in the modern sense of the job) or on horseback (increasingly common in Twilight: 2000 as working vehicles, and their fuel and parts, become ever more scarce).
One of first edition’s amusing idiosyncrasies is that there is an inverse relationship between a character’s attributes, which mostly don’t matter in play after character creation, and his military competence. So characters with worse stats get more military skill points and more combat experience and are more likely to be promoted. Peter Principle much?