Tag Archives: Twilight: 2000

The Tale of Vandal 6-1

A few days ago, someone in the Twilight: 2000 subreddit asked about campaign starts. Here’s my contribution:

I’ve been playing since 1st edition and my preference remains the classic Escape from Kalisz campaign seed. Having said that… a few years ago, I introduced T2k v2.2 to a group who’d (with one exception) never heard of it. I started the campaign on 06 July 2000, about a week and a half before the Kalisz breakout. The PCs were the 7th Combat Engineer Battalion’s engineering recon team. This meant they were the guys who got sent to assess the maneuver brigades’ requests for engineer support and determine what was feasible and what resources were needed. In practice, this let me give them a series of assignments that had them present at or near most of the major story beats in the run-up to the 5th Infantry Division’s last stand.

This enabled me to start them off with a good supply situation and strong support – available fuel, sufficient medical supplies, occasional mortars on call. Then I ramped up the pressure with each major contact, adding additional hostile unit markers to the world map as the encirclement took shape. They got to watch the 5th ID crumble from the inside.

It took about twelve sessions to get to the breakout. For that, we shifted focus off the PCs. Every player got one or two combat vehicles, most of whom were already low on ammo and carrying some non-disabling damage. This gave us a chance to use the vehicle combat rules to their fullest as the players fought their way through the Soviet encirclement. To raise the stakes, they were escorting five trucks, which the Soviets were trying to kill. Each truck that made it off the map added to the resources (fuel, ammo, food, attached NPCs) that the PCs had after the breakout.

I’ve always wanted to raise the stakes on this by finding an appropriate wargaming system (something tuned for micro armor, perhaps) and actually playing out part of the 5th ID’s last stand. Battalion, perhaps even brigade, level. The Soviets’ objective would be to kill American units. The Americans’ objective would be to get as many units as possible off the map. This would all be the setup for a subsequent RPG campaign whose starting parameters would be determined by the American players’ success in the battle.

Fanfic Preservation: Black Winter

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, I ran across a Twilight: 2000 fanfic novel titled Black Winter. At the time, my T2k fandom was largely dormant. Everyone in my usual gaming groups was invested in the World of Darkness scene, GDW wasn’t publishing anything for T2k, and I didn’t have anyone to play it with. I took note of the work, read it, and promptly lost track of it.

A few years later, when I got involved with the Twilight: 2013 project, I went back to look for it. Couldn’t find it – I hadn’t bookmarked the site, and every search turned up a dead link. I didn’t find it again until the summer of 2020, when a random synapse fired and my need to resolve the question led me to archive.org’s stored copy.

Today, while scrolling through Reddit over lunch, I found a thread in which someone was inquiring about Black Winter. By the time I got home and was able to start formulating an answer, the original poster had answered his own question and posted a link to a PDF of the story. I grabbed it because I’m a digital packrat, and that’s when I had a bit of cognitive dissonance and no small amount of resurgent guilt.

The archive.org copy was credited to an author whose identity I never knew, posting under the address cadillacofthesky@ntlworld.com. The PDF, however, bore a handle I didn’t think I’d see again: Twilight2000v3MM.

Twilight2000v3MM was the nom de net of Max “Moose” Messina. Max had been a fairly prolific writer in T2k fan spaces in the early 2000s, doing quite a bit of design work for a proposed third edition of the game. He was a natural fit for the Twilight: 2013 dev team, and his contributions were invaluable. I can’t recall ever being aware of his fanfiction work, though, only his game design pursuits. Until today, I didn’t know the novel was his. I feel like a shittier friend for not knowing that. I wish I’d had a chance to tell him that I’d enjoyed it.

Max passed away on 10 September 2020, reportedly from cardiac complications after a too-brief fight with pancreatic cancer. He left behind a wife and two sons. His final contribution to Twilight: 2000 was as one of the advance readers on The Pacific Northwest. His feedback was still in my inbox when we lost him.

His novel is preserved below.

Black Winter Twilight2000v3MMDownload

Twilight: 2000 4e Conversion: VBL

This image recently appeared in /r/TankPorn and was immediately reposted to /r/Twilight2000 for reasons that should be obvious:

Naturally, someone requested VBL stats. Let’s give it a shot. WordPress compresses the screen shots of my tables; click each one to enlarge it in a new tab.

The MILAN doesn’t appear to be statted in the 4e core rules, despite being listed in the Marder’s stat block, so here’s a quick conversion:

AFAIK, we don’t have official rules for reactive armor, so the IIT’s tandem-charge warhead gets extra armor penetration as a kludge.

The AA-52 is a GPMG whose stats should be equivalent to those published for the FN MAG / M240B / KSP 58B. It was originally chambered in 7.5x54mm, but my cursory research suggests the French military had converted to the NATO standard 7.62x51mm by the time the Twilight War rolled around.

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Twilight: 2000 Edition War

Not much of an edition war, actually. At least, not here, where I’ve turned off commenting.

A couple of months back, someone on the Twilight: 2000 fan forum asked about the relative merits of the game’s second and fourth editions. Having just written up characters for all four editions for the 2025 Character Creation Challenge, I’ve been thinking idly about this subject again. Here’s my take on the best features of each edition:

First edition wins for timeline and setting. It has the deepest library of official publications from which to draw and consequently is the best-developed world. When I’m running T2k, I base my world on the setting presented in the 1e materials, with an alternate-history break point occurring in the early 1980s. I generally like percentile systems, but the mechanics herein are just… odd… in a number of places.

Second edition, specifically its v2.2 iteration, wins for play-by-post. Its mechanics have deeper levels of detail, but that slows me down too much when I’m trying to run a realtime game. I’ve found a number of players willing to try it but none willing to master the rules. Its life path system also tends to generate characters who aren’t competent enough to succeed consistently at the sort of adventuring the setting calls for, so some house-ruling is often necessary for me.

Third edition, i.e. Twilight: 2013, is where I have both some bias and an emotionally complex response. As the lead rules designer, and probably the most visible member of the design team still involved with the T2k fan community, I’m still more than a bit sore about the game’s shitty reception among the existing fan base. Having said that, I also acknowledge that a lot of the mechanics I developed are better suited for computer-mediated play than tabletop pencil-and-paper gaming. Where 2013 sits for me is mainly a source for strip-mining conceptual elements to port to the other editions. Justin Stodola’s work on the ballistics model still sings. The gear library adds the fiddly “what’s in his pocketses?” bits that appeal to my inner twelve-year-old poring over U.S. Cavalry catalogs. I occasionally think about returning to the initiative system to tweak it to feel more like X-Com’s action points, but that would require creative effort better expended elsewhere.

Fourth edition is my current go-to for in-person (or VTT) play. It has enough detail to satisfy my usual groups, none of whom are particularly obsessive about tactical minutiae, and it runs smoothly and quickly enough that I can get an eight-player group through a firefight in a single session with time left over for investigation, exploration, and roleplaying on either side of the combat. It also, generally speaking, offers characters who can be made broadly competent enough to contribute meaningfully outside one narrow niche.

Point-Buy Character Creation for Twilight: 2000 v2.2

One of my long-standing headaches with Twilight: 2000 v2.2 is the life path character creation system. While it does help build the character biography, I more often find it constraining when I have a concept that doesn’t fit neatly within the limited number of boxes it offers. The random elements also tend to generate parties with widely-varying levels of competence, which means some PCs are more capable than others of making meaningful contributions to party success – both in and out of combat.

My solution to this, which has been kicking around my core rpol.net play-by-post group for several years now, is a point-buy system. Mathematically, this works out to roughly what you’d get out of a well-optimized four- to five-term life path PC with good rolls. This has gone through a few different iterations; this is, I think, the one with which I’m happiest.

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Katie Christensen

Game: Twilight: 2000 (4th edition – Fria Ligan AB, 2021)

My Experience: I’ve tinkered with 4th edition for a while. As amply documented on this blog, I’ve been running a campaign (with added paranormal elements) for about two years now. Haven’t actually gotten to play yet, though.

Captain Katie “Acid” Christensen, Trapped in the Mud but Staring at the Stars

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Václav Procházka

Game: Twilight: 2000 (second edition, v2.2 – GDW, 1993)

My Experience: The second edition of Twilight: 2000 came out in 1990, when the so-called end of history had rendered the first edition’s game history obsolete. It featured an updated timeline to which, admittedly, I paid very little attention. More of my focus was on the more playable game engine, which eliminated a lot of the headaches high-school-age-me had with the original game. I snapped up the yellow boxed set as soon as it released, flailed ineffectually with it through high school and my early college years, and shelved it when it became clear that I wasn’t going to find anyone interested in playing. Along the way, GDW released v2.2, which I didn’t actually use until I was in my late thirties and involved in a few play-by-post games. But we did have some pretty fantastic PbPs…

Corporal Václav Procházka, Everyone’s Favorite Defect(or)

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