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…