Roleplaying in a World that Never Was (T2K)

A cold, hard future

Twilight 2000 fourth edition arrived today, in a gorgeously illustrated and sturdy box set thanks to the excellent work of Fria Ligan. The box was full of maps, counters, cards and dice as well as the two softcover rulebooks, and it just about fits everything in, even the extra dice and cards from the Kickstarter. The screen doesn't fit, but that's fine. It's a sturdy and beautiful reference aid in itself.

Other things to do today, but I've skimmed through the contents. Love that new book smell. There's a map included. One side covers a large part of Poland, the original campaign area. The second covers Sweden, the alternative campaign setting. I love mappage. It makes the game feel so much more real to me, especially in this case. When you examine the map, you realise that all the large population centres are ruins, either from nuclear strikes or bombing. The world as we know it has gone. It gave me a cold shiver down the spine and connected harder than it did when I first met the game as a teenager. Having children does that to you.

All gone. Ruins. Ashes.

Set after a nuclear war and the collapse of central authority, players take the parts of soldiers and civilians trying to survive after the apocalypse has come and gone. The alternative timeline has the Soviet Union survive, and eventually end up in a war with NATO. I haven't read the new timeline, but in a lot of ways, it's irrelevant.

Several of my school friends loved this game as a military RPG; I loved it because it told stories about the way people survive. Stories about hope, about holding back the collapse. Stories of humanity's persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. The military splatbooks and pages of weapon specs never really interested me. What the characters did was the thing. It's the same kind of situation that you see in the British apocalypses created by Ballard and Wyndham. What happens to the human spirit in the face of adversity.

The first edition of the game had an crunchy and complicated game engine that I found added little. The second edition evolved into the GDW house system, which did little for me. I took one look at the third edition and walked away because it had too much crunch. This edition uses an evolution of Fria Ligan's Year Zero Engine, a much more narrative engine. It's at the higher level of crunch for one of their games, but not overly complicated. It seems a perfect fit for me for a game to tell stories of survival.

Fria Ligan has past form with sandbox games that you can explore with their Mutant Year Zero line and the Forbidden Lands games. This draws on that experience, and build upon it.

The situation the game presents leaves me cold from the horror of the consequences. The roleplaying opportunities excite me. And the quality of the game materials presented is stellar. I hope that a closer reading confirms my thoughts that this needs to be played. 

29th October 2021