Twilight: 2000 (4e) Campaign Update
I have been very remiss in any sort of play report for my campaign using Free League’s 4th edition of Twilight:2000. So, with the conclusion of our 7th session this last weekend I will attempt to catch up a bit. In all honesty I have felt less a need to produce a play report, in part due to the nature of the game as a very exploratory sandbox, with good procedural tools supporting that, and the game’s clear time structure of shifts (common to YZE games). This allows for a cadence of simple note taking for the referee, and it also seems for the players. In short, things feel manageable without needing detailed reports. Also, I’ve just decided that putting energy into thinking about the next session and other aspects of my hobby is more important than a slick write ups for the last.
With that time to look over my notes for where the campaign has come in seven three or four sessions…
If you use the provided setup the game starts you just after the final battle in World War III between the US and NATO, and a still extant Soviet Union. Both sides have fought each other to exhaustion through conventional warfare and a somewhat limited nuclear exchange. Both sides navies are effectively gone so Americans are stuck in Europe…for now?...forever? The PCs start in a largely depopulated (in my game) and lightly irradiated (tactical nukes were used fairly liberally) Poland.
Matt couldn’t make the first session so Jack and Jason created characters using the life path system. I can’t recommend this enough. It’s a simple system and while you could probably roll up a character yourself in about 20 minutes, we did it together and in turns. This took maybe an hour for two characters, but the richness of the experience was worth it. As a group we learned about the characters and even something about the world. An example beings Jack’s Character Jackie “Mouse” McKenzie. Mouse started off growing up in western Massachusetts, but his family later moved to Boston where young Jackie fell in with the wrong crowd and started a criminal career. He later ended up in prison and kept failing the rolls to get released. Ultimately, all American characters will get drafted in the end so it was a neat piece of implied lore when Mouse was drafted out of prison. How badly was the war going for the US to do something like this? Anyway, it was a strong suggestion as to the possible bleakness. Jason’s character Joseph “Country” Tucker had a more varied career jumping between the military and intelligence services before “volunteering” for officer training and ending up in Poland as an older “mustang” tank platoon leader. We have since discovered through play that he actually never formally left the CIA and was effectively a plant in the military indicative of the growing intragovernmental distrust in the later months of the war. Of note it seems that a life path character has a good chance of racking up somewhat more skill increases and specialties than a character made with the also provided archetypes.
After character creation I tossed out a couple rumors and stray radio transmissions randomly generated from the game’s toolkit. Country and Mouse meet in a lonely and overcast Polish field south of Lodz. The date is Tuesday, April 18th, 2000, and the last NATO counteroffensive collapsed the previous day. The war is over, and they are “on their own,” per the last orders from their higher headquarters. They head off in the direction of a request for assistance from a small group of American soldiers cut off in a nearby town attempting to evade the Soviets. After a couple random encounters with refugees, which the party avoided, and a large wildfire, which they had to divert around, we called it quits for the night.
It was a pretty good first session, especially since I had prepared almost nothing for it. The most I did was post the travel map in Miro so we could start tracking the hexcrawl. I put notes of rumors and encounters and sometimes traveled routes directly on the Miro board which becomes part of the campaign documentation. It has over the sessions become a bit of a combination map, job board, and public record.
Here is the region they are embroiled in after seven sessions - the full map is much larger.
There were a couple things that needed to happen before the next session. First, I needed to prep a scenario for the isolated stragglers which would be our first real test-drive of the systems combat rules, and second Matt needed a character since I wanted to be able to jump into the action fairly quickly.
Matt and I were able to get together in an off weekend (we play every two weeks) and create his character. He decided to create a Polish medical student to ground the party a bit. Kacper “Doc” Jankowski is very much a Polish nationalist and looking to help stave off the total collapse of civilization in his country. This is a nice tension with the other characters that has developed over play to be pulling Jackie and Joseph more towards helping the people of Poland than just trying to get the hell out the warzone and back home.
In the next session we pick up in the early morning hours of Wednesday April 19th, 2000. Country is on watch and hears the low rattle of a dirt bike along a nearby trail. He tries to throw a stick through the spokes of Kacper’s front wheel but misses and Matt and Jason briefly roleplay through figuring out they aren’t exactly enemies, and agree to work together for a bit. After sunup at 5:32 AM (I’m using historical light and astronomical data) they travel the rest of the way to the small village where the American stragglers are now pinned down by a Soviet patrol.
The highlight of the fight being when Country decided to try to capture the Soviets BTR-60 APC. Here we try out the rules for grenades when dropped in an enclosed space (which I mess up by the way) and grappling rules as Country fights a soviet soldier who, err…miraculously, wasn’t killed by the grenade (oops). Anway it was really intense and requires Kacper to intervene to save Country, cementing the friendship in the process. The party now has a big, armored truck they can cruise around in. Which is great but will also end up becoming a target as a very valuable piece of kit.
I created a handful of American NPCs using the NPC tools in the Referee’s Guide, which are very good. Of note I highly recommend picking up the original version (PDF of the 1991 reprint of 1st Edition published by GDW in 1984) of the game available on DTRPG for a much more in-depth version of the playing card method of building NPC motivations. It yields the same results per card draw as the 4e version but provides a lot more detailed suggestions for the NPCs reactions. It’s actually very system neutral and can be adapted to almost any game with really only maybe tiny changes. It really is worth checking out.
Here is the entry from the 1e book - Radoslav drew a 10 of hearts...
So, new guys in tow the PCs decide to follow on a rumor of the current mayor of nearby city whose child has gone missing. They see this as a way to get in the good graces of what might be a friendly faction and perhaps settle into a temporary home base as they figure out what to do next. This ends the session and I decide for the next session instead of using one of the 52 provided encounters in the book/cards that I will randomly generate a couple in prep.
In the third (?) session they have two encounters, which I briefly sketched from the toolkit. The first they run into is a group of Polish refugees led by a Soviet deserter. This character, Radoslav, is actually a former Spetznaz soldier. For his motivations I drew him maxed out on fellowship, and he is truly good-natured and helping anyone he can in this terrible time. He agrees to work with the group if they will help get his friends to relative safety. Radoslav is also a beast behind the APCs heavy machine gun and will end up being pretty clutch in later combats. Everyone loves Radoslav.
The group now fully fills out the twelve-person capacity of the BTR. As they rumble along, they encounter an impromptu caravan park. Stopping they are greeted by the group’s leader, Artur, who claims to be a former police officer in the same town to which they are headed. However, he secretly hates the mayor, his former police chief, and wants to overthrow her for control of what’s left of the city. He covets the APC as a weapon to help him do that. Unable to see an opening to kill them now he convinces the party to let him and a couple of his “policemen” to hitch a ride. Due to the full load, and also not really trusting Artur, they let the new guys ride on top of the vehicle’s back deck.
Before the next session I decide that Artur’s improvised plan is to instigate conflict as the party approaches one of the armed checkpoints outside the city. This ends up playing out in a pretty fun way.
Kacper, due to being the son of an automobile mechanic, is the best driver in the group and is usually behind the wheel. Though he will later be the primary gunner, Radoslav is still not fully trusted by the PCs and Country is behind the gun. As the APC is slowing down after being flagged to stop by the checkpoint the straphangers open up with their AKs kicking off the fire fight before dropping off the truck to flee.
After making a show of firing back on the instigators and not the defenders, Country is able to make a very hard persuasion check (hard both due to his lack of skill and the circumstance) to convince the checkpoint they are on the same side. They work together to hunt down Artur and his men. After things cool down I roll to see if any of the refugees with Radoslav might be recognized by the guys on the check point, result is a resounding “yes, and” so I rule they are actually related. Things quickly simmer down and the party is admitted to the City Piotrokow Trybulnalski (PT).
Since I can’t imagine anyone reading about 1500-2000 words about this game in one sitting I’m going to stop there for now. This gets us through about the first three or four sessions, and we just wrapped session seven last weekend.
We all are really enjoying the game. Though the PCs have committed to the current course of action helping the mayor and town of PT it really is all the result of some random rolls. I have avoided using the published scenarios for the most part, which I think are good, but following the choices of the players and whims of the dice has yielded a very rich experience. If you think you would like a modern, post-apocalyptic hexcrawl game Twilight:2000 4e has a lot to offer.