1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that
Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game,
Wizards of the Coast, released the new version,
Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.
—oOo—
“Good luck. You’re on your own, now” It is perhaps one of the most famous opening lines of any scenario or campaign for any roleplaying game. It is an opening line—and its consequences—that all players of the roleplaying game have been faced with and have explored. It gave ultimate control to the players in deciding what their characters did next and where they went. Five years ago, the Cold War went hot. First in China, between the People’s Republic of China and the invading forces of the USSR, and later the Warsaw Pact. Continuing calls for support from Moscow a year later led to increasing dissatisfaction in East Germany and then an invasion by West Germany and an anti-Soviet coup in East Germany. West German forces were joined by U.S. forces and conflict quickly spread along the line of the Iron Curtain as NATO held off attacks by the Russians in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. The war quickly spread as old rivalries ignited into armed conflict. First between Turkey and Greece, the latter with Italian support, then India and Pakistan, the latter being invaded. As NATO drove into Poland as far as Warsaw, the first nuclear weapons were used by the Soviets. In limited fashion at first with tactical nuclear weapons, on the Western Front, but on a huge scale on the Eastern Front, shattering Chinese forces and its industrial base. That was three years ago. In the west, the nuclear exchanges escalated, but did not yet tip over into full scale launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The destruction of industrial facilities and extensive disruption of trade was followed by famine and pandemic, and in the USA, a wave of refugees crossing the Rio Grande border. Unable to deal with the crisis, the now military-led government in Washington responded with arms and incensed, Mexico sent its army across the border to protect its citizens. By the end of the year, Mexico would occupy much of the U.S. southwest. Breakdowns in government and disputed elections in the USA ran right to the top, resulting in two governments, one civilian, one military. That was a year ago. The war in Europe bogged down into one of raids and attrition. A month ago, NATO forces in southern Poland launched a new offensive. It was met with unexpectedly fierce resistance by Warsaw Pact forces. Today, the last units from that offensive were destroyed or overrun. It is Tuesday, July 18th, 2000. The Third World War is over. Now you have to survive its consequences.
This is the set-up for
Twilight: 2000, the military survival, post-apocalyptic roleplaying game published by Game Designers’ Workshop in 1984. The Player Characters are soldiers of the former United States 5th Infantry Division (Mechanised), left to fend for themselves and survive in southern Poland in an environment rife with danger—radiation, enemy forces, rival allied forces, bandits and marauders, limited supplies, desperate civilians—and limited intelligence. Of any roleplaying game released by a major publisher, it is arguably the most controversial. Most obviously due to its subject matter of nuclear war, and surviving that nuclear war and what it leaves behind, but also its militarism, its survivalism, and its Americanism. It would also win a major award, the
H.G. Wells Award for ‘Best Roleplaying Rules of 1984’, in 1985, prove to be highly popular, be subject to over forty scenarios and supplements, a board game, a computer game, and three further editions, not always of the best quality or playability. This included the
Twilight: 2000 2nd Edition Version 2.2 from Game Designers’ Workshop and the
Twilight: 2013 Core Rules from 93 Games Studio. More recently, Free League Publishing would release its own version using the
Year Zero Engine with
Twilight: 2000 4th Edition. There is a lot to unpack and explore in
Twilight: 2000—and not just in the game itself. However, that is the starting point.
The original
Twilight: 2000 is a boxed set. Under its green ‘Contents of this Box’ sheet it contains a twenty-four-page Play Manual, a thirty-two-page Referee’s Manual, Players’ Charts, ten-page Referee’s Charts, twelve-page Equipment List, Price List, eight-page Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz, Adventure Handout: Escape from Kalisz, Intelligence Briefing, A5-size Campaign Map depicting southern Poland, and three Record Sheets. The latter consists of the Character Generation Worksheet, Character Sheet, and Vehicle Record Sheet. There are also dice—four six-sided and one ten-sided—and an errata sheet. The latter is never a good sign… The Play Manual introduces the setting of
Twilight: 2000 and details character creation, time and travel, upkeep, and the first part of combat. The Referee’s Manual examines skills and attributes, contains the second part of combat, looks at encounters, provides additional rules for radiation, disease, trade and commerce, repairs, electricity, and swimming, a chronological background, and a broad description of Poland. The latter is actually a breakdown of the military forces present in the remnants of the country rather than a description of it, and the advice for the Referee—just three quarters of a page long—suggests preparing a combat and a vehicle trek as training missions before play starts and identifies the need for the players and their characters to have a long term, but really only discusses one. Which is, of course, going home. The Players’ Charts lists the personal weapons for each nationality—including the West German Bundeswehr being armed with the Heckler & Koch G11 ‘submachine gun’, skill lists, languages, service branches and specialities, and languages by nationality. The Referee’s Charts contains tables for movement, terrain, encounters, vehicle damage locations, combat with a plethora of weapons, language lists, diseases to be found in encampments and settlements, armour values for cover, equipment availability, NPC motivation, radiation illness, and encounter stats. The Equipment List gives the ammunition type, weight, magazine size, and price of every weapon in the setting from the longbow through to the 120 mm mortar. It does similar things for all of the equipment and all of the vehicles that the Player Characters might also encounter too. It is an extensive list and most items are given at least a basic description. Vehicles are given a more detailed description, though no more than a paragraph, whilst weirdly, the Heckler & Koch G11 is given three whole paragraphs of its own.
The starting adventure in
Twilight: 2000, Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz describes the region fifty or so kilometres east of the city, the various Soviet forces present and their disposition. For the most part it details what units are where and the relationships between the Soviet forces and the civilians and where they are present, the civilians and marauders. There are some rumours and radio transmissions too, and some suggestions as to what the Player Characters might do as part of their efforts to escape the region, which primarily consist of ways to disrupt any attempts by the Soviet forces to follow them. The Adventure Handout: Escape from Kalisz provides a description for the players and their characters of the last month leading up to the radio transmission that leaves them on their own. The Intelligence Briefing is for the highest-ranking Player Character and gives an intelligence estimate of the forces still active in the region. Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz is not a fully-fledged scenario in the sense that it has a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Instead, it is a set-up that the Referee will need to develop during play, likely with the need to create some ready-to-encounter NPCs and enemy forces beforehand to make it easier to run all dependent upon what the players have decided what they want their characters to do. There are not really any hooks or adventure ideas in the traditional sense, and honestly, it feels more like a wargaming sandbox reduced to a personal scale which the Referee will need to develop a lot of further detail. Even then, beyond the limits of Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz, like the Adventure Handout: Escape from Kalisz ends with, the Referee is on his own. (However, the official campaign, beginning with
The Black Madonna, and continuing east with
The Free City of Krakow, before turning north with
Pirates of the Vistula,
The Ruins of Warsaw, and lastly running west with
Going Home.
A Player Character in
Twilight: 2000 has six attributes—Fitness, Agility, Constitution, Stature, Intelligence, and Education. These range in value between one and twenty. An Education of nine or more indicates that the Player Character has graduated from high school, thirteen for a college, fifteen for a master’s degree, and eighteen or more for a PhD. Derived factors include Strength, Hit Capacity, weight, Load, and throw range. The Military Base Experience represents a Player Character’s basic military experience and will be lower for a Player Character with higher attributes, but higher for a Player Character with lower attributes as a balancing factor. From it is determined the number of dice rolled to find out how many months the Player Character has spent in combat. If this is higher than sixty, then the Player Character is a veteran, including of previous wars. Coolness Under Fire measures the Player Character’s reaction to stress and gun fire and is derived from the number of months spent in combat. Lower is better than higher. The Military Base Experience also determines how many Rads the Player Character has suffered. Rank is based on Education and Intelligence, plus a random roll, as are possible second languages.
Twilight: 2000 allows for a wide variety of nationalities, including those from the Soviet Bloc. The Service Branch and Specialities cover support services, infantry, engineer, medical, artillery, armour, and aviation, as well as special forces, rangers, and intelligence. Most have a straight roll requirement which must be equalled or bettered, but without any modifiers. The various specialities provide bonuses to certain skills or simply make one or two cheaper to buy. Every Player Character has some basic skills, but receives skill points to assign based on his Military Base Experience and Education, and then some Background skill points. Some skills are restricted to either being Military, Education, or Background skills, but all are purchased at a cost of one point per percentage point, and then two points per percentage points over fifty. Every Player Character gets his nationality’s basic equipment and then is free to buy any further equipment with the money earned based on his time in service. Vehicles are rolled for rather than purchased. Choice of equipment is limited depending on whether it is rare in the East or the West. However, this can lead to the Player Characters accruing a lot of equipment—and that much vaunted Heckler & Koch G11 is only $400!
Kevin Mongeau
Age: 27 Nationality: American
Service: US Army Branch: Engineer
Rank: Captain
Fitness 13 Agility 10 Constitution 18
Stature 17 Intelligence 13 Education 14
Strength: 15
Hit Capacity
Head: 18 Chest: 50 Abdomen: 35 Left Arm: 35 Right Arm: 35 Left Leg: 35 Right Leg: 35
Load: 50 Throw Range: 30
Military Base Experience: 5 Time in Combat: 24 Months
Coolness Under Fire: 5
Rads: 14
Skills
Body Combat 50, Chemistry 50, Civil Engineer 65, Combat Engineering 75, Combat Rifleman 50, Computer 50, Electronics 50, Farming 50, Foraging 50, Instruction 50, Mechanic 50, Melee Combat 20, Metallurgy 50, Motorcycle 50, Nuclear Warhead 20, Pistol 20, Scrounging 50, Swim 20, Thrown Weapon 20, Tracked Vehicle Driver 50, Wheeled Vehicle Driver 40
Base Hit Numbers
Combat Rifleman 30/15/10, Pistol 12/6/2
Body Combat Damage: 8
Equipment
M16 Assault Rifle, 9mm pistol
The character creation process is not particularly difficult, although it does involve a fair degree of arithmetic and it is far from quick. The Character Generation Worksheet is there to make it easier. The main issue is perhaps learning all of the three letter acronyms that the roleplaying game’s skills are reduced to.
Mechanically,
Twilight: 2000 is a percentile system.* Attributes are multiplied by five when they need to be rolled against and tasks are either easy, average, or difficult. An easy task doubles the value, average keeps it the same, and difficult halves it. Combat uses the same core mechanic and plays out over six five-second rounds per combat turn. A Player Character can typically conduct one action per round, some of which can be combined with a move action. However, some of these have to be Hesitation actions when the Player Characters can do nothing. The number is dependent on the Player Character’s Coolness Under Fire. The lower the Coolness Under Fire, the fewer the number of Hesitation actions a Player Character is forced to do. Certain actions, such as repetitive ones and drivers under direction can avoid Hesitation actions under certain circumstances. Initiative order is determined by skill, higher skills being better. Combat is treated comprehensively, including rate of fire, aimed shots—all shots are assumed to be quick, but a round spent aiming doubles the base hit chance, firing from and at vehicles, and so on. The rules also cover indirect fire and antitank missiles. Damage can be slight, serious, or critical. Damage that does less than the Capacity in a location is counted as slight damage, serious if it exceeds it, and critical if it is twice the Capacity. Critical hits to the head are fatal.
* Which begs the question, why was only one ten-sided die included in the box?
The Play Manual also covers time, and more importantly, upkeep. This includes food requirements, foraging and fishing, hunting, fuel, and vehicle maintenance. All of this is important because the Player Characters no longer have access to regular supplies as they would normally. So, fuel includes consumption of different types and changing from one fuel type to another, also distilling alcohol, which typically takes three days to complete. Vehicle maintenance is also important; they are likely to break down especially since the road networks have been severely damaged and soldiers no longer have access to vehicle bays for checks and preventative maintenance. In many ways,
Twilight: 2000 is a roleplaying game of technical survival, and as important as combat is in the play of the game because it is a military roleplaying game, so Player Characters who have technical, mechanical, and similar skills are as important as those who are crack shots.
The Referee’s Manual expands upon the use of skills, notably allowing for Outstanding Success and Catastrophic Failure. An Outstanding Success is equal to ten percent of the skill or attribute roll, whereas a roll of ninety or more, followed by a second failure, is counted as a Catastrophic Failure. What these are in game terms is left up to the Referee to decide. There are also some suggested skill rolls. As well as expanding on skill use, the Referee’s Manual expands on combat. It adds rules for explosions and explosives, chemical agents, mines, and vehicles. Vehicle combat is the most complex aspect of the roleplaying game, especially when it comes to component damage after a shot has penetrated a vehicle. The nature of
Twilight: 2000 means that vehicle combat is a possibility, since the remnants of both sides are capable of fielding a mixture of light and heavy armour, and both the Player Characters and NPCs are likely to have access to anti-armour weapons. Encounters covers random encounters, settlements, and NPCs, though in the case of the latter, the drawing two cards from an ordinary deck of playing cards to determine their motivations. For example, clubs indicates violence, diamonds wealth, hearts fellowship, and spades power. The face cards indicate particularly strong motivations and drives, such as ‘heart Queen’ for love or ‘Club Jack’ for murderer. It is a very broad treatment, but works well enough should the Referee need an NPC quickly. The additional rules cover the extra dangers of the post-apocalyptic setting of
Twilight: 2000, including radiation and disease, in particular a lot of diseases that are rare in highly advanced societies, such dysentery and typhoid fever. None of this is particularly pleasant as you would expect. The Referee’s Manual is rounded out with some notes on trade and commerce and on repairs, something that the Player Characters will need to do for reasons already explained, and the timeline and overview of Poland in the year 2000.
Physically,
Twilight: 2000 is decently presented. There is some good writing in places. For example, character creation in the Play Manual is supported with some colour fiction that serve as the source for the examples of the process. Both the Play Manual and the Referee’s Manual are illustrated with a range of scenes and characters done in greyscale. When the artwork is not depicting an over-the-top combat scene, it is actually decent, depicting the difficulty of life and survival in this dangerous new world with some delicacy and also diversity. However, the rules would have certainly benefited from some more fully worked out examples of play and combat, especially vehicle combat.
Of course, as contemporary a roleplaying game as
Twilight: 2000 was in 1984, even though it was set sixteen years into the future, events outpaced it. By 1986, with the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party, the
de facto leader in the Soviet Union, and his adoption of greater transparency and openness, relations had begun to thaw between the USA and the USSR. Within five years of the publication of
Twilight: 2000, the Berlin Wall had collapsed, the Warsaw Pact had begun to break up, and by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had disintegrated and was no more. Game Designers’ Workshop would update
Twilight: 2000 with a second edition first published in 1990 and then again in a new version in 1993, to take account of the rapidly changing geo-political situation. The belated version published by 93 Games Studio the history even further forward,
Twilight: 2013 being set in 2013 within its even then, very short future history, deviating from 2007. The fourth edition, published by Free League Publishing as
Twilight: 2000 – Roleplaying in the World War III That Never Was, returned the setting closer to its roots in the original version by Game Designers’ Workshop and made it an alternate timeline, which fortunately, we have lived past.
—oOo—
Twilight: 2000 was reviewed not once, but twice in
Space Gamer Number 74 (May/June 1985) in ‘During the Holocaust: Twilight: 2000’. First by Rick Swan, who lamented the lack of crossover between wargamers and roleplayers before saying, “Twilight: 2000 may change all that. Let’s say this up front: Twilight: 2000 is the most successful bridge between conventional wargames and roleplaying published to date. If it doesn’t bring the two camps closer together, it probably can’t be done.” However, he was critical of the Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz, complaining that, “Unfortunately, Twilight: 2000 continues in the grand tradition of basic sets by including a substandard introductory adventure as part of the package. “Escape From Kalisz” is so sketchy (not a single NPC is described and the situation is directionless) that you may as well write your own. Let’s hope that GDW doesn’t waste any time in publishing some adventures worthy of the system.” Yet beyond this criticism, he said, “I’ve yet to come across a more engaging premise for a roleplaying campaign. And a war-based game that still retains such a strong sense of humanity is an accomplishment by any standards.” and his conclusion was more positive. “Whether or not Twilight: 2000 becomes a standard remains to be seen, but it certainly fills a niche and does so successfully. I hope it finds an audience with roleplayers and wargamers alike. As a design, it’s nothing spectacular, but as a concept, it’s an innovation. Bring on the adventures!”
Greg Porter offered a rebuttal in ‘Another View’. He praised the character creation system, the relatively realistic equipment list, and the simplicity of the core system. However, he criticised the use of acronyms for the skills and the need for errata in a new game, and called the combat system abysmal. He finished with, “All told, Twilight: 2000 is a tragic waste of 18 bucks. The nice concept and character generation system are completely overrun by innumerable flaws and hopeless violations of the laws of physics. If you insist on buying this game, read a friend’s copy first. I wish I had.”
Chris Felton reviewed
Twilight: 2000 in ‘Notices’ in
Imagine No. 27 (June 1985). He highlighted the difficulty of refereeing a game of
Twilight: 2000 with, “This game system has its downfall built into its basic premise. A group of soldiers behind enemy lines in a disintegrating society is far more difficult to referee than any other game because of the fast-moving nature of the group. Radom is a big crater: will they go north to Bialobrzegi or south to Szydlowiec? Will they attack the supply dump or not? And so on. The players have endless choices in each evening’s play and the referee must be ready to cope with any decision they make. This is against the current trend in rpgs, especially in the States where parties tend to be steered for the referee’s own ease.” Although Felton had other criticisms, such as the acronyms, he said, “Overall, this is a good game, well worth clubbing together for if you belong to a group of experienced players who like free-running games and whose referee can run a scenario from minimal notes. If your referee has no experience of ‘winging it’ and needs all the details worked out in advance, this is not the game for you.”
Marcus L. Rowland reviewed
Twilight: 2000 in ‘Open Box’ in
White Dwarf Issue 68 (August 1985) in what perhaps is one of the most notorious and controversial reviews to appear in gaming magazines, let alone the pages of
White Dwarf. He was highly critical, commenting that, “While the system is playable, the moral stance and attitudes it exemplifies are fairly loathsome. The rules favour the style of behaviour found in ‘fun’ war films…” and that, “The setting, two years after the last nuclear weapon was used, has evidently been designed to avoid showing the worst effects of the bomb; the random encounters don’t include civilians suffering from third degree radiation burns, blind children, and the hideously dead and dying victims of blast and heat. Starvation and plague are occasionally mentioned, with the implication that characters can always use their weapons to get food and medicines.” He finished by saying, “The suggested theme (which beautifully explains the attitude of this game) is to ‘return home’ to America: Europe evidently isn’t worth say anything about the possibility of rebuilding settlements, negotiating local peace treaties, or doing anything else to start civilisation working again. The box blurb says ‘They were sent to save Europe. . . Now they’re fighting to save themselves’, and it’s evident that this game has been written by and for Americans, with little or no understanding of European attitudes or desires.” and then awarding the roleplaying game a score of five out of ten.
Twilight: 2000 was placed at number thirty-five of ‘Arcane Presents the Top 50 Roleplaying Games 1996’ which appeared in
Arcane #14 (December 1996). Editor Paul Pettengale said, “Pretty much all the previous ‘post-apocalyptic’ RPGs had been fairly fantastical, and had been set some time after the apocalypse. Twilight: 2000 is realistic and set in the middle of the breakdown of European society. Involving, but not exactly cheerful.”
One interesting remark by Allen Varney in ‘Roleplaying Reviews’ in
Dragon Issue #175 (December 1991) would lead to a debate about the morality of
Twilight: 2000. In his review of
Dark Conspiracy, Game Designers’ Workshop’s near-future horror role-playing game, he wrote, “…[G]ood PCs fighting evil monsters is at least an improvement over the moral vacuum of the TWILIGHT: 2000 game…” This led to an early Internet debate the same year involving Varney and others, including an unnamed former GDW employee, about the morality or lack of to be found in Twilight: 2000, and by extension other games. The heated debate would result in ‘DO THE RIGHT THING: A Commentary’, which appeared in
INTER*ACTION: The Journal of Role-Playing and Storytelling Systems Issue 1 (October, 1994) and is available to read
here.—oOo—
Let us be fair about
Twilight: 2000. It is very much a product of its time. It was released in 1984 at the height of the Cold War. The leader of the free world, President Ronald Reagan, faced off against a Soviet Union headed by Konstantin Chernenko, the last of the Communist old guard who still esteemed Stalin. The film
Red Dawn depicted a Soviet invasion of the United States, which would be satirised by Greg Costikyan two years after the publication of
Twilight: 2000 when relations between the USA and USSR had radically changed with
The Price of Freedom from West End Games. Films such as
The Day After in the USA and
Threads in the United Kingdom, showed the public the horrors of nuclear war. As the bulwark against the forces of Communism, the American armed forces were held in high esteem, and of course, Communism itself was seen as a great evil, almost Satanic, anti-Christian, and definitely, anti-American. Thus, whatever the situation, even in a post-apocalypse as that set up—if not necessarily depicted—in
Twilight: 2000, soldiers are seen as heroes. There can be no doubt that, along with its extensive list of guns, that the militarism and Americanism in the roleplaying game appealed to a certain audience, hence its popularity.
However, outside of the USA, as evidenced by Marcus L. Rowlands’ review in
White Dwarf Issue 68,
Twilight: 2000 found lesser favour. Again, because it was a product of its time and because of the Cold War. The United Kingdom might not have been on the doorstep of the Eastern Bloc, but it was closer and any conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would take place only a few hundred miles away on the other side of the English Channel. There was a vocal anti-nuclear weapon, ‘ban the bomb’ movement in both the United Kingdom and in Europe, the Greenham Common RAF airbase being the site of an extremely long campaign of civil disobedience, including the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, protesting against the stationing of U.S. cruise missiles on the base. There was also a political divide to the anti-nuclear war movement too, as well as an anti-Americanism, which grew out of the feeling that whilst the U.S.A. would be protecting the United Kingdom and Europe against Russian invasion, it was not going to feel the consequences at home of such a war as the United Kingdom and Europe would suffer. Of course, were the Cold War to have gone hot and nuclear missiles been launched by both sides, everyone would have suffered.
As to the Americanism of
Twilight: 2000, that is undeniable, since it is about American soldiers surviving on a wild frontier, a frontier to which they have themselves contributed to its wildness, wanting to get home to America. Indeed, the thrust of the first six releases for the roleplaying game, would be all about getting out of the hell of Europe and getting home. However, this is a roleplaying game written by American designers who had various degrees of military experience, and published by an American company, for an American audience, and the fact that anyone outside of the USA could buy
Twilight: 2000 was extra income for the publisher. There were supplements set outside of the American experience for
Twilight: 2000, such as
Survivors’ Guide to the United Kingdom, but these were exceptions, not the rule.
Although not as immoral as perhaps the earlier military roleplaying game,
Merc, published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1981,
Twilight: 2000 is not in itself a moral game. In play, it may become a moral game, but the focus in the roleplaying game as written is on survival, combat, and escaping. That is what the Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz is about, getting away from the chaos of a battle lost the day before, but then? It is not on the environment and the other survivors, who are relegated to aids and obstacles, nor is it on rebuilding and protecting what remains—at least until the Player Characters can get home to the shattered United States. Even then the rules do not support this concept of recovery or rebuilding, NPCs are not quite faceless, but they are very broadly drawn—quite literally from a deck of ordinary playing cards—and hardly at all in the starting scenario in the
Twilight: 2000 boxed set. Further, there is no guide to creating civilian NPCs, no discussion of the civil or social aspects of Poland that have survived, and no advice on bringing them into play. That said, the artwork does in places depict the innocents of the conflict, the civilians and the children, acknowledging their presence and suffering that the roleplaying game’s text does not.
It is interesting to note that at the height of the Cold War, the roleplaying hobby produced two of the greatest roleplaying games about the fears of the consequences of a world on the brink of Nuclear War. One,
Twilight: 2000, dealt with the immediacy of such a conflict and externalised it in a very strait-laced military treatment. The other is
Paranoia, which like the previously mentioned
The Price of Freedom, is designed by Greg Costikyan (along with Dan Gelber, Eric Goldberg, and Allen Varney) and published by West End Games. Where
The Price of Freedom satirised the possible invasion of the USA by the USSR,
Paranoia satirised and internalised those fears, most obviously that of McCarthyism.
Twilight: 2000 is the apogee of military roleplaying games and antithesis of the post-apocalyptic roleplaying game normally set centuries after anyone responsible for the disaster has died. The latter frees the players and their characters from having to think about the causes and the culprits, and instead focus on the consequences. In
Twilight: 2000, the causes and the culprits are present in the setting and the Player Characters are likely to be concerned with them, if not aligned with them, whereas the consequences, beyond the technical, are ignored and the Player Characters are only expected to think about themselves. In a roleplaying game setting in which humanity has suffered so much and which places the Player Characters on the frontline of that suffering, it is a pity that as written,
Twilight: 2000 ignores that humanity.
The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition, Gamemaster’s Screen comes with a three-panel screen and a ‘Gamemaster’s Guide’ for use with Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition. The three-panel screen is in landscape format and boasts a handsome collage on the front, player-facing side of the screen, the eight—bar the most recent Doctor, the Fifteenth Doctor—most recent Doctors, including the last of Doctor of Classic Who, the Eighth Doctor, last to appear in The Night of the Doctor, and also the War Doctor and the Fugitive Doctor, all bookended by flying Daleks! On the back, or inside of the screen there are various tables taken for the rules to help the Game Master run her game. The left-hand panel covers journeys and adventures with ‘Adventures on the Fly!’ enabling the Game Master to create encounters on the go, whilst the ‘Random Journeys’, ‘Vortex Hazards’, and ‘System Damage’ tables all throw the Player Characters—the Time Lord and his Companions—into the dangers of travelling the Vortex through time. At the top of the middle panel is the ‘Chase Tracker’, for which the Game Master will need to provide some clips to keep track of where the chased the chasers are relatively to each other, plus the ‘Difficulty Levels’ and ‘Success Levels’ tables for handling skills. This is the right place to have them as they probably going to be the most used tables in the game. There are also tables for ‘Improving Your Character’ and ‘Technology Levels’. The right-hand panel is devoted to combat, including the ‘Weapon Damage Table’, ‘Where Does It Hurt?’, ‘Armour’, ‘Cover’, and also ‘Conditions’. Necessary, of course, but also to some extent not as important, as The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition is very much a roleplaying game—as in the television series it is based upon—in which violence is always the last answer to any situation.
