This week is another post nuclear war RPG originally from the 1980s called Twilight: 2000. The photo above is a rather battered 1st edition box set that I picked up somewhere.
Published by Game Designers Workshop (GDW) in 1984, the characters take the roles of military personnel in the chaos and ruins of late-WWIII Poland. The game postulates a war breaking out in 1995 between NATO and the Warsaw Pact after an attempt to reunify East and West Germany. The war involved conventional troops, some NBC warfare, but not a full exchange of nuclear weapons. Five years after the war started, troops are still fighting, but the logistical and command chains have broken down. In game terms, this means that the characters--which are military troops--are in undersized and under supplied units that have to scavenge, trade for, or buy supplies, fuel, and ammunition.
Although the boxed set presumed Poland as a setting, there were supplements that expanded the game beyond Poland, including one I remember that took place in the Caribbean with the characters potentially being able to man a sailing vessel that was a reproduction of the U.S.S. Constitution originally intended to be used in a motion picture.
Now I have to say that, as best as I can remember, I have never played this game. A high school friend of mine had picked it up as well as some supplements but never got around to running it with our gaming group. However, some years ago, I acquired a boxed set of the first edition rule set. But since I haven't played any version of the game, I have included a couple video reviews below. The first covers the first edition of the rules. The second video gives an overview of the different editions of the game, explains why post-apocalypse games were so popular for kids growing up in the 1980s and then reviews the most recent edition of the game.
The first edition box set came with two rule books--a "Play Manual" and a "Referee's Manual"--a set of charts to assist with creating a character, a set of charts commonly used in play, an equipment list (actually a booklet), a price list of common gear, a beginning adventure ("Escape from Kalisz") and player handout, an "Intelligence Briefing" giving background for the military unit the characters begin in, a map of Poland, record sheets, and a set of four six-sided dice and a single 10-sided die. The Play Manual has a general background and explanation of terms and abbreviations, character creation rules, the general rules for tasks, skills, time and travel, etc., as well as the first part of the combat rules. The Referee's Manual has additional rules on using skills, combat, encounters, radiation and disease, repairing equipment, trade and commerce, etc.
The boxed set I have, being a used set, was missing the dice, but had stuffed into it a couple supplements detailing Soviet vehicles and U.S. Army vehicles, respectively, and a setting guide entitled The Free City Of Krakow.
When creating a character, the player roles 4d6 for each physical or mental attribute (e.g., intelligence or fitness) and subtracts 4 from the result giving a result of 0-20 (but re-rolling a 0 result). From there, you can boost an attribute you want to increase, but at the cost of reducing another attribute. And there are other characteristics that must be rolled (e.g., your radiation exposure) or selected (e.g., your nationality). Characters also will have skills depending on which branch of service and specialty they have.
The basic rule mechanic is that you take an "asset" (a character attribute or skill level), multiply it by 5 to get a target number, and then roll a percentile die (1-100 created by rolling the 10-sided dice once for multiples of 10 and a second time for the single digits with 0, 0 considered as 100) and try to get under the target number. If you roll under the target number, you succeed. If something is easier than normal, the asset X 5 result may be doubled to get a higher target number, and then the percentage die rolled. If harder, the result would be halved to get a smaller target number. Of course, other dice may be rolled for particular rules.
Because of the setting, there are, of course, rules on radiation, disease, foraging, hunting and fishing, and so on, but nowhere near the detail of the Aftermath! game covered last week. However, since the characters are all members of a military unit, there are fairly extensive rules on combat.
The game has gone through several revisions. A second edition released in 1990 had to deal with the fall of the Berlin Wall and so created a different backstory to explain the outbreak of the war. In 1993, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the game was updated again with an alternate timeline where the KGB launched a successful coup against Boris Yeltsin to maintain communist rule and then the war broke out.
In 2006, a third edition was released by a company called 93 Games Studio and renamed Twilight 2013, which moved away from the Cold War setting of the original game. However, this version wasn't very popular and the company went out of business two years later.
VIDEO: "Twilight 2000 - where it all started, a peek at 1e"
UKgamerspodcast (30 min.)
VIDEO: "Review - Twilight: 2000"
Willy Muffin (29 min.)
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