It is late September 2000 of an alternate history in which the Cold War never ended.
In 1995, the Soviet Union and China went to war over border and resource disputes. Seeing an opportunity to weaken the Soviets by proxy, the United States and other Western nations provided military aid to China. As the tide turned against the Soviet Union, its leaders applied pressure to their Warsaw Pact clients/allies, demanding troops and material for the war effort. Tensions spiked in several Pact nations, and a covert request for aid ultimately led West Germany to cross the Inner German Border in the autumn of 1996. This attempt at German reunification triggered the broader European conflict for which NATO and the Warsaw Pact had been preparing since 1945.
The war went nuclear in 1997 – first with tactical-scale warheads on the battlefield, then strikes against rear-area targets, and finally escalating to a “limited” strategic exchange beginning in November. Governments collapsed, cities burned, industrial civilization crumbled – but the war continued in fitful, spiteful spasms.
By spring 2000, most nations and militaries were shells of their former selves. In northern Europe, the remaining NATO forces moved out of their winter cantonments in what would be the war’s last organized offensive. The objective was to clear the Baltic coast and north-central Poland of Warsaw Pact remnant forces, thereby securing a buffer zone and acquiring critical farmland, fishing grounds, and other natural resources. The U.S. Army’s 5th Infantry Division was tasked with a deep raid into south-central Poland, covering the offensive’s southern flank as the main group of NATO forces traveled east. Like most major units, the 5th ID had less than 20% of its prewar strength, with a sizeable majority of its troops drawn from the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, stragglers from other NATO nations’ armies, and even a scattering of former Warsaw Pact troops who’d defected to the West and proven their loyalty and utility.
Veteran Twilight: 2000 fans know how this story ends… or begins. The 5th ID ran into overwhelming Soviet and Polish forces in the vicinity of Lodz, eventually being pushed back and encircled at Kalisz. Radio transmissions from higher-echelon HQs indicated that the entire NATO offensive was encountering heavy resistance – no help was coming. Running out of ammo, fuel, and personnel, the 5th ID attempted to break out of its encirclement. It failed. Only scattered bands of survivors escaped the Kalisz pocket, finding themselves on their own in a hostile Poland collapsing ever farther into post-nuclear ruin.
But our story began a bit earlier than that, and somewhat off to the side…
In May 2000, a handful of survivors arrived at Ponikla, a small village on the south bank of central Poland’s Pilica River. Some were Poles fleeing the war’s devastation; others were NATO stragglers who’d been cut off behind enemy lines. Well away from any major travel routes and untouched by combat, Ponikla seemed to be a safe haven.
The PCs knew very little about the area around Ponikla. Even Zenobia, who’d grown up in the village, found herself having difficulty remembering the surrounding area, and some major geographic features didn’t match her recollections from childhood. After about a month of resting and healing, they began cautiously exploring the surrounding countryside. They met a couple of other survivor bands and convinced some of them to join the community, skirmished with ex-Soviet Army marauders, and identified a site or two with salvage potential.
During these initial explorations, the PCs also made contact with a couple of other survivor communities. The first was a band of former militia from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, a city on the north bank of the Pilica about 20 kilometers to the southwest of Ponikla. From this group, the PCs learned that Tomaszów was now controlled by more ex-Soviet Army marauders (a problem which the team has, to date, reconnoitered and poked but not dealt with conclusively – though Ellis and Miko did mount a covert operation to sabotage the fuel supply used by the marauders’ flagship hovercraft). The second was a loose coalition of seven large family farms north of Ponikla.
Several… anomalies… also surfaced during this initial exploration phase. As of early July, these included (list copied from an earlier post, Cracks and Breakage)
- Zenobia grew up in Ponikla and remembered the forest around the village being much less dense. She also recalled the Pilica River being not nearly as wide and deep as it is now. Childhood memories tend to make things bigger than we perceive them as adults… not smaller.
- The river water had (and still has) hallucinogenic properties with possible precognitive visions.
- Something had been taking the village’s children… and returning them with missing time. (I eventually addressed this with an encounter that nearly went horribly wrong. More horribly than planned, even.)
- The disappearing/appearing swamp road southwest of Ponikla where they acquired their UAZ-469.
- The mysterious circumstances that led to that UAZ-469 being found abandoned and idled dry, with impact damage to the front end and lots of blood splatter on the ground around it.
- So far, everyone they’d encountered from outside Ponikla had serious issues with long-term memory and any sort of planning or abstract thought, as well as a general inability to comprehend the concept of “map” or other recorded knowledge. Conversation that probed the latter topic induced some sort of minor seizure, after which the issues usually receded.
- What’s a map? The PCs failed to find maps in at least three places they would have expected to find them (highway maintenance facility, mobile command post vehicle, railroad maintenance facility).
- For that matter, other recorded knowledge was (and remains) profoundly rare, too. Ponikla only had about five books. The most blatant and recent example of this was the apparent erasure of a family library that Zenobia remembered being in a relative’s house at the village by the rail yard.
- A pack of dogs with healed wounds that should have been fatal.
- A couple of instances of weird howling or heavy wind noise coming from the river with no apparent weather pattern to account for this. (This was eventually discovered to be the aforementioned marauder hovercraft.)
- Pettimore’s memories of living through events of June through October 2000 before finding himself in Ponikla in May 2000. (This is an artifact of Pettimore being the one PC ported from a previous iteration of this campaign and setting.)
The next phase of the campaign, beginning in mid-June 2000, saw the PCs ranging farther afield. By this time, they had a couple of small alliances, they’d accumulated a decent motor pool, and they’d started building Ponikla up into a small but robust base of operations.
Their first expedition was a follow-up on an early discovery of a derelict tractor-trailer. Said vehicle contained a Stegosaurus skeleton, some other mineral samples, and documentation indicating that these contents were part of the collection from Warsaw’s natural history museum. Apparently, the collection’s most valuable assets were being relocated to a secure location before the war reached Warsaw. With written directions to a location, the team decided to head there to see if any of the museum staff were still present. What they discovered, instead, was a former Nazi bunker complex repurposed into a secure vault for government records and museum exhibits. They also found a mildly-radioactive room containing a cistern with no apparent bottom and hints of motion in its depths. They declined to further investigate.
Immediately upon returning from this expedition, the team discovered that one of Ponikla’s kids (actually one of a group of teenagers rescued/recruited from their hideaway in an abandoned railyard) was missing. The search for her led the team to a vicious encounter with mirrorshaded and exotically-armed Soviet surplus thugs, Slavic Men in Black, and profoundly creepy doctors, none of whom had normal human anatomical or medical traits, as well as a black Volga sedan. They recovered the teenager, who was being subjected to some sort of blood treatment. Further scientific investigation by Red revealed that the MiBs and doctors had some sort of oddly-regular microscopic things in their blood… and, upon following a hunch, Red discovered that the PCs and Ponikla’s other residents did as well.
(Speculation at the time, borne out by further observations, is that these are some sort of nanites. It’s uncertain whether they have undiscovered functions, but their effect is to drastically increase healing speed [at the expense of significantly-increased caloric intake]. On a meta level, this is both a creepifying plot element and a way to explain the core rules’ unnaturally-fast healing times. I’ll note that allied NPCs who don’t have these little passengers have shown healing times much closer to what medical science dictates they should display.)
Ranging farther southwest, the PCs made contact with Opoczno, a larger survivor community located on a major east-west highway. Opoczno, despite suffering from the same brain fog and memory loss (or mental blind spots) as other survivor enclaves, turned out to be the closest thing to a nearby trade center. The team also rescued Arkadi, a former KGB Ninth Directorate operator who’d defected to NATO and had previously served alongside Pettimore. From Arkadi, the PCs learned of the recent NATO offensive and the demise of the 5th Infantry Division… and Pettimore realized that he somehow was living the summer of 2000 again from a completely different perspective.
In early August, the PCs made contact with three loosely-affiliated groups of potential allies. One was White Eagle Battalion, a unit of the pro-Western Polish Home Army that was operating out of Skarzysko-Kamienna, some distance southeast of Ponikla. The second was the Bracia Wilkow – literally “Wolf-Brothers” – a group of Polish partisans who aren’t pro-Western so much as anti-invader. The Bracia Wilkow know things they shouldn’t know, and the team’s general suspicion was (and remains) that they’re something akin to lycanthropes. Or at least really creepy.
The third group of potential allies was a band of East German troops – but East Germans who’d been on the side of reunification, and who fought on NATO’s side as part of the reunified Bundeswehr. Under the command of former Oberstleutnant Boris Von Bahr, they were holding the town of Bialobrzegi, about thirty kilometers east/downriver of Ponikla. This included both an intact road bridge… and a small hydroelectric power plant. Somewhat accidentally, the PCs figured out how to weaponize the brain fog – while removing Von Bahr and his command staff from it.
Meeting Von Bahr set some events in motion that would move the campaign into a new and deadlier phase, though none of the PCs realized it at the time…
A few days after this meeting, the PCs received an urgent summons to the North Farms. They arrived to find a rapidly-spreading grass and field fire. In the process of attempting to fight it, Minka, Pettimore, and Arkadi became aware of invisible spirit-presences within the fire, and Pettimore demonstrated that Thoughts and Prayers, his Dragunov SVD, has some measure of power beyond ordinary ballistics. Following this incident, the PCs participated in an interfaith blessing/cleansing of those fields which demonstrated that two of Ponikla’s elders, Wilhelm and Aina, were quite well-versed in Slavic Pagan rites…
Von Bahr had previously warned the PCs about a large Soviet presence in the ruined city of Radom, and the team had several escalating encounters with these troops and other forces with whom they were in contact. This included the liberation of a number of POWs from the U.S. 5th Infantry Division (some of whom were later “adopted” as secondary PCs). Intensive reconnaissance in the Radom area identified most of the Soviet garrison there and linked it to Soviet Reserve Front HQ and the puppet Polish Communist government in Lublin.
Exploring south and west, the team had another encounter with the Bracia Wilkow. This pointed them to a patch of land south of Tomaszów under the claim of another unspecified power – but one which the Wolf-Brothers treat with very cautious respect. This began a clue chain which led the team to the remains of a crashed MH-53J – and the last survivors of Task Force Cobalt, a joint special operations team which raided the campus of the Politechnika Łódzka under cover of 5th Infantry’s assault on the city. TF Cobalt, it appears, was tasked with recovering materials and researchers who were involved in some questionable physics.
This was the point at which Ellis and Pettimore began seriously contemplating the likelihood that at least some of the war, as well as much of the weirdness they’d seen over the past few months, had been deliberately orchestrated. This was stoked by the Broadstreet Dossier, a document which one of Pettimore’s teammates handed off to him in his past-that-was.
As these various explorations and revelations had been progressing, the Soviets in Radom were getting more aggressive. They were pushing Von Bahr’s people and patrolling west along the highway. There was concern that they might try to get Opoczno under their thumb, or even discover and annex Ponikla itself.
The PCs’ response was to escalate before the problem escalated itself at them. A couple of weeks of additional recon, planning, and coalition-building resulted in a joint effort between the PCs, the White Eagle Battalion, Von Bahr’s people, and the Bracia Wilkow to neutralize the Soviet presence in Radom. On September 10, the alliance moved against the Soviets. It was a confused and bloody series of skirmishes that distinctly showed the difference between planned ambushes and unplanned meeting engagements, but the PCs and their allies carried the day.
In the battle’s aftermath, the team brokered a regional security and reconstruction agreement. They also negotiated a POW exchange with the Soviet command structure… and learned that at least some of the Soviets at Lublin are as awake as they are, and were trying to stabilize the region against whatever is happening. They also received a warning that whatever that unknown force is, some kind of escalation is brewing in Warsaw.
Edited to add: here’s the current campaign map. “Foggy” hexes are those which the PCs have on their fragmentary maps but haven’t yet explored. Hexes with little lightning icons are those in which electrical power could theoretically be restored from the hydro plant at Bialobrzegi.
That brings us to the current phase of the campaign. I recommend reading the following posts, in order, for the detailed catch-up:
Be seeing you…