Tag Archives: Twilight: 2000

MBT Viability in Twilight: 2000 4e, Part 2

Continuing from the original post here, based on the Juhlin.com forum thread here. I realized I’d never recorded my follow-up thoughts on the blog. Let’s rectify that.


Twilight: 2000 in all its editions is much more post-apoc adventure survival fantasy than excruciatingly-accurate simulation (Apotheosis Saga, anyone?). So treads and lube aren’t usually tracked to the level of tank extinction. But let’s talk about the mechanics of mechanical issues for our hypothetical T-72 owners.

Maintenance

v2

A T-72 requires 14 hours of maintenance per week. Potential breakdowns occur every 8 hours of movement or combat, rolled against the vehicle’s Wear value (10% for like-new, to 100% if it’s on its last legs). If there’s potential for a breakdown, the mechanic who did the last maintenance rolls a Difficult Mechanic check to see if his work prevented the breakdown.

Assuming a well-optimized but not maxed mechanic PC (Strength 8, Mechanic 8), a Difficult Mechanic check has an 80% chance of success.

v4

Every vehicle requires the same amount of maintenance: 6 hours per week in which it was driven at least one hex on the overland map. Maintenance requires a successful Tech roll. Failure reduces Reliability by 1 (with most vehicles maxing out at Reliability 5, so you have some margin for error).

Assuming a well-optimized but not maxed Mechanic PC (Intelligence d10, Tech d10), a Tech roll has a 75% chance of success.

Parts and Repair

v2

A well-buried rule indicates that parts need to come from a vehicle identical to the one being repaired. Furthermore, there’s some text indicating that parts are also component-specific (engine, main gun, radio, etc.). There are no explicit rules for scrounging or buying parts.

No roll is required to cannibalize a donor vehicle’s component for parts. However, if the component is damaged, there’s a 30% chance that the part is useless.

A character who’s a capable machinist (or gunsmith, for ordnance repair) may also fabricate mechanical parts with a successful skill check andaccess to a machine shop.

Most repairs require 1d10 parts (1d5 for minor breakdowns).

Damage is tracked by vehicle component, with most components having two states: OK or inoperable/destroyed. A few have an intermediate damaged-but-still-partially-functional state.

v4

“Vehicle parts” are generic – when needed, a bolt, brake cable, or turbocharger materializes out of the quantum foam of your mechanic’s spares box.

A successful Tech roll when scavenging a vehicle yields one part per success rolled, -1 for a destroyed vehicle. Parts are considered to be “common,” which means a 67% chance of availability in a typical settlement.

Only one part is needed to repair a destroyed item, though each repair only restores 1 Reliability per success, so thorough work will likely consume more than one part. Restoring reduced Reliability on an item that wasn’t fully destroyed doesn’t consume any parts.

A vehicle’s Reliability score covers its overall structural integrity, its transmission, and its engine. Weapons, radios, and other subsystems either have their own Reliability tracks or have OK/inoperable states.

Ammunition

v2

2nd edition provides varying availability levels for different ammo types.

125mm HE is common (80% chance of being available in cities, 70% in towns, 30% in villages).

125mm HEAT is scarce (60% in cities, 40% in towns, 20% in villages).

125mm sabot is rare (20% in cities, 10% in towns).

12.7mm and 7.62x54mm for the MGs are both common.

v4

As a broad category, all non-guided heavy weapon ammo is scarce (33% chance of availability in any settlement).

All small arms ammo is common (67% chance of availability in any settlement).

In both cases, chance of availability is for the broad category of item. The referee decides whether a specific sought-after model/type/caliber from that category is available. The West Possum Trot Trading Post may be fresh out of 125mm HEAT, but surely 122mm howitzer mustard agent shells are close enough for government work, right?

(Really, that last paragraph captures it. Ammo availability, perhaps more than any other resource, will be subject to referee judgement and fiat, even with strict adherence to the framework of the rules.)

To close it out, here’s a price comparison for main gun ammo:

Twilight: 2000 4e Conversion: NM-116

Continuing my fascination with new-to-me Nordic light tanks (see also the Ikv 91), today’s Christmas leftovers offering comes to us from Norway. The NM-116 Panserjager was a Norwegian upgrade of the WWII-vintage M24 Chaffee that served until 1993. Rather than reiterate the excellent Online Tank Museum article, I’ll just link it here. You’re only here for the 4e stats anyway, right?

Because the NM-116 was in real-world service until after the Cold War’s end, we can reasonably assume it would have served in the Twilight War. For those who are using a 1e or 2e alternate history, NM-116s would have been in combat as early as December 1996, when the Soviets made their unsuccessful play for a quick victory in Norway. By mid-2000, surviving examples could have been found anywhere in the Nordic countries. A few might also be floating around the Polish-German coast after being “requisitioned” by American units that fought in Norway and later redeployed across the Baltic (6th Infantry Division and 2nd Marine Division). The sticking point in keeping one operational would be obtaining an ammo supply for the up-gunned 90mm.


Number-crunching on this is pretty basic. Just for fun, I also threw in a stat line for the NM-130, the armored recovery vehicle variant (with all of four built).

If you’re looking for v2/v2.2 stats, Paul Mulcahy, of course, has the NM-116 as a tracked light combat vehicle.

Technically, the coaxial is an M3, but stats should identical to those of the M2HB for game purposes. The 90mm gun is a French low-pressure model (the D/925) also used on some obsolete-by-the-1990s French AFVs. Its ammo selection is limited to HE, HEAT, and smoke, so it’s not going to be punching that far above its weight:


Edited to add: for v2.2 stats, Paul Mulcahy, of course, has you covered.

Before They Let Me Teach Again

I wrote this a couple of years ago to get it out of my head. Occasionally, I consider submitting it to my current employer’s University Honors Program to see if they’ll let me teach it in place of my occasional disaster preparedness seminar. Lightly redacted to remove contact info and other potentially-incriminating items.


Honors Seminar Proposal: Your Parents’ Dark Futures

Primary Instructor

Clayton Oliver, M.S., CEM – Emergency Manager

Will there be any additional instructors for this seminar?

Additional instructors are not anticipated.

Has this seminar been presented before?

No. This proposal is for a pilot delivery.

Do you think this seminary should qualify for International Perspectives or US Diversity Credit?

No.

Please select how you would like to offer the seminar.

Two credits. Two class hours per week. Full semester.

An enrollment cap of 20 is recommended for this pilot delivery.

Please enter your preferred teaching days/times/location for the seminar.

A Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday evening slot is preferred. A weekly two-hour block is necessary due to the extended collaborative/narrative nature of some class activities. My recommended time is 6pm-8pm.

Preferred location is Jischke Honors Building 1151+1155 for student convenience and the ability to “pod” the room’s seating for breakout groups.

Please describe any additional meetings that may occur outside of normal course hours if applicable.

No scheduled meetings are planned at this time. However, students will be expected to convene for group activities outside class time. Students will schedule these group meetings on their own.

Please write a brief description of the seminar that is attractive to students and will be shared on our website.

In the 1980s, the emerging entertainment medium of roleplaying games (RPGs) began to reflect the political and socioeconomic concerns of the day. In this seminar, we’ll analyze four RPGs of that era, each of which postulates a different dystopian near future: Twilight: 2000 (1984, post-World War III survival), Cyberpunk: 2020 (1990, hypercapitalist science fiction), Vampire: The Masquerade (1991, urban decay and power imbalances), and Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992, political corruption and ecological collapse). Through reading, class discussion, collaborative storytelling, supplemental research, and reaction papers, we’ll examine the fears, assumptions, cultural stereotypes, literary archetypes, and social trends that produced these works and ask ourselves if they remain relevant today. We’ll also analyze the storytelling craft of roleplaying as a means of exploring and expressing identity – our own and that of others.

For the University Honors Committee, please briefly outline the seminar’s readings, topics, assignments, and expectations. Seminars are graded Satisfactory/Fail; what must a student do to pass your seminar?

During this seminar, the class will be divided into four groups of five students, each of which will examine one of the four selected works. A successful student will be able to:

  • Articulate an understanding of the cultural factors that produced the selected work;
  • Discuss the literary archetypes inherent to the work that shape the narratives which players can use the work to construct;
  • Discuss the identities and assumptions inherent in the work’s archetypes and how they are relevant or outmoded in today’s society;
  • Contextualize the work’s postulated dystopian future within the time it was authored and describe how subsequent historical events support or undermine its fictional setting;
  • Articulate the value of roleplaying for self-examination, problem-solving, and empathy.
  • Contrast the work’s original context to the modern era and argue whether or not the work could be reproduced in today’s environment.

Readings

Each student will be assigned one of the four selected works as a primary reading. These are available commercially in PDF format for between $10 and $20 each.

Readings will be synchronized across the semester to examine:

  • Setting – what is the world described in the game? How does it relate to the societal trends and fears of the era in which it was written? How accurate were its predictions?
  • Player characters – what are the implied and explicitly-stated roles of players and their in-game personas? How do these roles and the game’s provided character archetypes facilitate the exploration of identity or the concerns the game raises?
  • Gamemasters – what are the implied and explicitly-stated roles of gamemaster/referees/storytellers? Is their relationship with the players one of collaboration, antagonism, or something in between?
  • Stories – what sorts of stories is the game intended to facilitate?
  • Mechanics – how does the game model its world? What mechanisms does it provide for resolving uncertainty or conflict? Do the rules facilitate the stated storytelling goals?

Actual Play

Most roleplaying games are designed as group experiences, so reading alone will not enable students to examine the full experience. Over the course of the semester, each group will be expected to meet for a minimum of five game sessions, play the game, submit short written response/reflection papers, and be prepared to discuss their experiences in class. I will attempt to arrange groups to ensure that each one contains one experienced gamemaster who is comfortable running the assigned game, with the other four group members as players.

The standard attendance policy for Honors Seminars is that only two absences are allowed unless there is a special circumstance. If you prefer a different attendance policy, please explain.

This attendance policy should work.

Please include a summary of your background to include with the seminar description on our website.

Clayton Oliver is the university’s Emergency Manager. He is a recovering technical writer, having spent twelve years writing documentation no one read for software no one installed. In 2012, he decided to pursue a more frustrating career and entered the emergency management field. Since then, his disaster response experience has included power outages, severe winter weather, derechos, home football games, hazardous materials spills, overly-enthusiastic student celebrations, that one time someone accidentally drilled into a natural gas pocket, and a pandemic that no one wants to hear about any more. He holds a B.A. in English, an M.S. in Emergency Management, and the Certified Emergency Manager credential from the International Association of Emergency Managers. He maintains proficiency in his former craft through performing freelance design work in the roleplaying game industry, posting on the university’s subreddit as [redacted], and writing about himself in the third person.

Favoritism

Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.

My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.

Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.

For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.

The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)

The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.

Expanded Hunting Results (Twilight: 2000 House Rule)

Although Kaserne on the Borderlands is on vacation right now, I still have campaign thoughts. One of them is that the default in 4e is to separate non-threatening-but-edible animal encounters (hunting results) and dangerous animal encounters (card draw results), and I mislike that. I’ve been wanting something a bit more in-depth for both random encounters and Pettimore’s hunting expeditions. Here’s a first stab at it, informed by Wikipedia’s inventory of Polish wildlife:


Yeah, that’s a percentile table. Don’t judge me. Right-click it and select “open image in new tab” to embiggenate.

Additional Pharmaceuticals (Twilight: 2000 House Rules)

As mentioned in my previous post on my campaign’s homebrew specialties, I’ve also added a few more drugs to the team medics’ pharmaceutical inventories. Here’s how we’re handling them:


Antacid

Provides +1 STAMINA to resist food poisoning.


Anti-Diarrheal

Once you’re ill, one dose provides +1 to one infection (STAMINA) roll made for any disease that has diarrhea as a symptom.  Dying ass-first sucks.


Anti-Psychotics

Provides +2 to your EMPATHY roll to recover from long-term mental trauma after your counselor makes a successful MEDICAL AID roll.


Antiseptic

A liquid compound suitable for cleaning medical equipment.  Used during a surgical procedure, one unit ensures the patient doesn’t have to make a STAMINA roll to avoid infection.


Hydration Salts

When taken in conjunction with one ration of clean water, a character suffering from dehydration immediately heals one point of dehydration damage. Further doses have no additional effect.


Morphine

Used for sedation and pain relief.  One does allows an attending physician to roll an extra d8 (treat as an ammo die) for stabilizing critical injuries or otherwise conducting surgery.  A second dose allows an additional d6 on the roll, but one or more 1s on an extra die mean the patient is addicted (if he survives the procedure).


Multivitamins

A month’s supply for one character gives +1 STAMINA to resist disease or infection during that month.


Stimulant, Mild

Once per day, one dose restores one point of Stress.

[We’re also using this rule for coffee, which makes it a desirable trade good for more than – ahem – flavor reasons.]

Stimulant, Strong

Injected pharmaceutical.  One dose provides a +2 to MEDICAL AID when getting a downed character back on their feet from incapacitating damage.  Also usable for other story-appropriate effects.

The Twilight: 2000 Avatar Game

Back in the day, my World of Darkness group occasionally dabbled in what were then called “avatar campaigns” – porting the real-world players to the game’s character model. I’ve seen this done in a number of other settings, usually with results as grim and dismal as ours were. Off the top of my head, the only published systems that are designed for it are Outbreak Undead and its SPEW-AI assessment quiz, and possibly Legendlore (it’s been a while since I glanced at it).

During a discussion elsenet about Twilight: 2000 campaigns, someone commented on players who feel that their real-life military experience should entitle them to command roles or better character traits in play, regardless of the normal character creation process or results. I was inspired to provide something to… help… those folks. These, then, are my pre-alpha-test notes for running player-history-based characters. This should work for any edition of the game.

Step One

Bring to the table printed copies of the following:

  • your latest medical examination up to, but not later than, your nation’s official entry into combat (November 1996 for American players in most editions)
  • if claiming military service, your DD-214 or equivalent
  • if claiming education, transcripts from all postsecondary education attended
  • if claiming workplace experience, copies of income tax records for each year claimed that clearly show claimed occupation for that year

Step Two

Assign attributes and skills appropriate to your verifiable personal history up to November 1996 (or equivalent).

If you had no military service history prior to November 1996, assume you were drafted and apply additional skills appropriate to the training an infantry conscript would have received in your nation in 1997.

Step Three

Pass your personal history documentation and character sheet to the player on your right.

Using your choice of red pen, X-Acto knife, or Zippo lighter, audit the materials you just received and correct the character sheet as you deem appropriate.

When done, pass that character sheet to the player on your right. Continue this process until your own character sheet returns to you.

Step Four

Roll 1d20 and consult the following table:

  1. died in transportation accident or enemy attack during deployment or troop movement
  2. died from small arms fire
  3. died from artillery
  4. died from air strike
  5. died from other kinetic effect (e.g., minefield, heavy weapons fire, destruction of vehicle)
  6. died of strategic nuclear strike on critical infrastructure or military installation
  7. died of tactical nuclear strike
  8. died of radiation poisoning
  9. died of untreated chronic medical condition (either existing but previously-undetected or caused by wartime conditions)
  10. died of animal- or insect-borne illness
  11. died of foodborne illness or accidental toxin ingestion (e.g., eating the wrong frog)
  12. died of respiratory illness
  13. died of dysentery
  14. died of dietary deficiencies (e.g., scurvy, rickets)
  15. died of starvation
  16. died of dehydration
  17. died from medical error (e.g., incompetent surgeon, contaminated or incorrect drugs)
  18. died of environmental causes (e.g., heatstroke, hypothermia, drowning, snakebite)
  19. succumbed to despair and self-terminated in a manner of your choice
  20. survived to enter play

Step Five

If you rolled 1 through 19, contemplate the yawning abyss that is your own mortality and the inevitable triumph of entropy over everything you’ve ever been, done, known, loved, created, or experienced. Take two drinks.

If you rolled a 20, do the following

  • Roll a number of d20s equal to the number of edits the other players made to your character sheet. Add the total of all rolls. This is your starting rads.
  • Multiply your starting rads by 10. This is your starting budget for selecting equipment.
  • Roll 1d4-1. This is the number of promotions you earned after November 1996 (or equivalent). Record your new rank, then edit it off your sheet because it doesn’t matter any more.

At this point, you’re probably the only person at the table with a surviving PC. Good luck! You’re on your own!

This is intended as satire and should not be used for actual campaign setup. No grognards were harmed in the making of this post.

Custom Specialties (Twilight: 2000 4e House Rules)

I’ve thrown together a few custom specialties over the last few months. Some fill gaps in the 4e character model that my group has identified. Others are just there to add flavor (but should still be worth the 10xp investment). The following are currently in play on PCs or allied NPCs.


Herbal Medicine (Medical Aid)

When you attempt to forage, you may choose to gather medicinal plants rather than edible ones.  If you succeed, roll 1d12 on the following table and gain one dose per success of the indicated medicine:

  1. Pain reliever
  2. Pain reliever
  3. Pain reliever
  4. Anesthetic, local
  5. Antibiotics
  6. Antacid
  7. Anti-diarrheal
  8. Multivitamins
  9. Sedative
  10. Stimulant, mild
  11. Stimulant, mild
  12. Stimulant, strong

[Some of these meds are also homebrewed. I’ll eventually post them too.]


Jerry-Rig (Tech)

Gives a +1 bonus to SURVIVAL when scrounging for parts and a +1 bonus to TECH when repairing or improvising construction of simple machines.

[We’re currently monitoring this one to see if it’s too powerful.]


Meteorologist (Survival)

Roll SURVIVAL when you spend a stretch or more making weather observations.  If you succeed, the Referee should tell you the upcoming weather trend for a number of days equal to the successes you rolled.


Storyteller (Persuasion)

Once per shift, roll Persuasion when you spend a stretch (5-10 minutes) telling a moving or inspirational story. For each success, choose one audience member who may remove 1 stress.

[We’re also monitoring this one to see if it’s calibrated appropriately.]

Review: The Poisoned Chalice

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.)

Vehicle Commander (Twilight: 2000 4th Edition House Rule)

Something that’s always bugged me about Twilight: 2000’s vehicle combat is the relative lack of anything meaningful for the person in the vehicle commander’s seat to do. Sure, many of them have their own pintle-mounted MGs, but there’s no command function. This recently came up in a Kaserne on the Borderlands session and my table had a brief discussion about it. Here’s what we came up with:

Vehicle Command: As a slow action, the vehicle commander may coordinate the actions of his vehicle's crew.  Make a Command check.  With success, this counts as help (Player's Guide, p. 46) for each other crew member's actions this turn.

Timing wasn’t an issue because of our house rules on initiative. The table agreed that the commander should act first to determine success or failure on granting the bonus.

In the interest of balance, we restricted the benefit to actual crew positions, not passengers. There was some debate about whether human cargo using firing ports should benefit, but I felt that was excessive. If you want an in-game rationale, assume that only the actual crew seats have jacks for the vehicle’s intercom.

This seemed to work well as implemented. The commander’s player felt his XP investment in Command was being rewarded, and the gunner appreciated the extra +1 to offset penalties. The driver was a NPC, so he didn’t have opinions, but the bonus was there when needed.