Twilight: 2000. Game 2. Day Zero.

Welcome to the start of my second solo game of Twilight 2000 4th edition.

After the first game being cut incredibly short, I decided to make a team of characters for this game to improve survivbility.

Each entry after the game starts will follow the same pattern as already established. Text describing the mechanics of the game in the main text, character dialogue text in a box out, and notes in italics where needded.

I intend to write each entry from the point of view of one character, switching to another PC for the next entry.

For the team I decided to make a mix of nationalities and careers. A CIA agent for face skills and intelligence, A sniper for damage in small arms situations, a machinegunner for when volume is preferable to accuracy, and a blue collar mechanic for a different point of view from the military characters, and some needed tech skills.

After following the lifepath character creation and choosing gear I got the following characters.

Charles Mckinney, CIA Agent.

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Apple pie wishes it was American as he is. Observant and persuasive. The intelligence and psy-ops specialties will be useful.

Chorąży Dariusz Model, JW GROM Sniper

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Fast and accurate. On the cold side of Calm. Being able to draw two initiatives and pick the best is a great roll for a high damage character.

Caporal Fabien Bouchard. French Army Machinegunner.

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Friendly and a bit loud. Never seen without his lucky ’98 World Cup football shirt. Lower skilled than the previous two characters as he only got a couple of terms in before the war. Useful tank driving specialty.

Zofia Langowska. Civilian Mechanic

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Good metalworker, willing to help out. Again lower skilled due to war breaking out after a couple of terms. Her Pickup Truck will come in useful.

After character generation comes picking group gear and rolling for a vehicle.

From the available gear list I had 4 picks (One per PC) and went for:

• 4 extra food rations (more food is always welcome)
• Extra Fuel (roll d100 for how much) 74 Litres
• Bow + 5 arrows (useful for hunting)
• Anti Tank Rocket Launcher (RPG7V)+ 3 reloads (I took this in case of heavily amroured enemies)

For the vehicle you roll 2d6 and add the number of PCs. I rolled 11, add 4 gives 15. Consulting the chart this gives us a Main Battle Tank! A great improvement over the last game’s jeep. I picked the T-72M from the available options.

Organising the group and gear into the vehicles.

Bouchard will be driving the tank, with McKinney riding in the gunner seat acting as lookout. They will be carrying the RP7V, as they have no tank cannon ammunition. They will be driving in front of the pickup as they are more resistant to attack.

Langowska will be driving her pickup truck with Model riding in the passenger seat acting as lookout. They will be carrying the extra fuel, everyone’s spare food and water rations, and the bow and arrows.

I have already drawn the first encounter card for this group. A group of Soviet soldiers waiting in ambush (Queen of Diamonds for anyone reading who owns the game). Next instalment will cover the resolution of this.

Twilight: 2000 Plans and Preparations.

After the somewhat abrupt end of the last T2K4 solo game I’ve been making plans for the second and possibly subsequent games.

First, I’ve been working on the idea of a persistent map for future campaigns. Marking a .pdf copy of the travel map with each encounter as they are drawn and resolved. So in future if an encounter is triggered when passing through a hex the players will find the after math of the last encounter.

For example, if the next PCs have an encounter in hex S26, it’ll be the ruined bus that the first game’s PC already searched. Or if they go through hex W44 they could hit the same roadblock where the last PC was killed.

Encounters from game 1 marked on the travel map of Poland

Second, I’ve been working on the characters for the next game. Going for a team this time to, hopefully, increase survival chances.

This team will include a CIA agent who is operating on standing orders to continue the war effort. A Polish GROM sniper who wants all these foreign forces to stop using his country as a battleground. A French heavy weapons gunner who mainly wants to go home, And a Polish civilian mechanic who wants the war to end and mostly wants to help people survive.

For those not familiar with this edition of the game, at the start of the campaign you roll 2d6 and add the number of PCs. You then compare this number to a chart in the Players Manual and see what vehicle you get. For this team I rolled an 11, add 4 PCs to get a total of 15. Looking at the chart this gives me an MBT with half a tank of fuel. From the options available I chose the T-72M. With luck that should fare better than the jeep in the last game.

Twilight: 2000. Day One.

This took a bit longer than expected due to outside stuff. Especially as it’s quite a short session, but it’s here now. Last entry I created the character for this solo game Sgt. Harry Matthews, this has the first two shifts of the actual game.

Gam mechanics will be in main body text

Character writing will be in these boxes

side notes will be in italics

The Referee’s Manual lays out the procedure for solo play. On each shift follow the below steps.

1. Roll for weather change
2. Assign and resolve tasks for each PC
3. Draw an encounter card from the deck.
4. Roll Recon to see if it can be avoided
5. Resolve encounter if one is triggered
6. Use the Oracle (p.103 of manual) if needed to clarify situations
7. Proceed to next shift

Shift 1 – Morning -Tuesday – April 18th – 2020 – Kalisz

• Weather – one step worse – fair changes to cloudy

Weather's got worse, just like home. Just gotta wait for it to get quiet.

• Eat breakfast (MRE) and then drive south towards Krakow. 10 hexes, 100km, uses 20litres of fuel. Driving roll success

Finally, it's clear, I can get this crap piled in the jeep and get out of here. 
First up some food. Ugh... Muesli, sodding rat food.*

At least the roads are pretty clear.

*I googled British 24 hour ration packs. There are 20 options I rolled a D20 and got a 10, so he got menu 10 which starts with muesli.

• Encounter card – 4 of Diamonds – Viper’s Nest. Abandoned bus with +2 bonus to scavenging, viper hidden in bus counts as ambush. Scavenging roll gets one success, roll for item gets a teddy bear. Viper gets first initiative due to ambush but misses its attack. Harry hits with a knife attack and kills it.

In a normal game it is up to the referee to decide when an encounter occurs. For this I rolled a D10 to see how far along his 10 hex journey this happened, getting a 4. So 4 hexes, or 40km in.

Bit difficult getting round this jam. Looks like a lot of civilian vehicles got hit by something. Poor bastards.

Let's take a look in that bus. Ah fuck. Snake nearly got me.
C'mere ya little shit.
Got it. I wonder if it does taste like chicken. I'll find out later.

Everything in the bus was too wrecked to be of use. I did pull this teddy bear out though. Gives me someone to talk to on the drive.

Rest of journey continues for this shift.

Shift 2 – Day -Tuesday – April 18th – 2000 – Somewhere near Praszka

• Weather – no change – remains cloudy

Clouds are holding, if I'm lucky it'll hold off from pissing it down for until I can get to shelter.

• Fill tank and continue driving to Krakow. All fuel now in Jeep. Drive further 10 hexes/100km, successful driving roll. 18 litres of fuel left

Less than a third of the fuel left, that should get me a bit closer to Krakow, then I'll have to walk. What do you think Ted?

• Encounter card – 9 of Hearts – Join us or Die – 3 Marauders manning a roadblock. 2 armed with AKMs 1 manning an pintle mounted DShK-38 HMG. Rolled a 10 for how far along journey this took, placing it at the end 20km south of Częstochowa. Selected battle map based on this.
• Ask questions, try to get PC to join them, may attack if provoked.
• Did not notice as cannot roll recon when driving. Another PC would be needed to do that.
• Selected map for encounter based on location. Placed tokens marking characters and vehicles

Yellow = Marauders. Red = Harry

• Tried to bypass with persuasion, failed roll
• Tried to intimidate past by pushing persuasion roll, failed roll

Ah shit Ted, what's this?
Three of 'em, all tooled up and looking sketchy. I'll park up a bit away.
One's coming over.

"Hey, in the vehicle. Where you going? You got anything we want? Want to join us, get some good stuff"

"Sorry mate, not interested, I just wan to get to Krakow"

"I said WANT TO JOIN US?"

"And I said fuck off"

oh shit...

• Draw initiative cards.
• Sgt Matthews – 6
• Marauder 1 (AKM) – 9
• Marauder 2 (AKM) – 2
• Marauder 3 (HMG) – 1
• Two marauders go first, then PC, then other marauder.
• First marauder on HMG rolls, hits for 4 damage. One point is ablated by jeep armour. Roll for hit location – driver – roll location on body – legs. No armour on that location, take 3 damage.
• Second marauder with AKM rolls, hits for 3 damage. Identical location rolls result in 2 damage to legs. This takes Harry to his Hit Capacity, incapacitating him.
• Harry is unable to do anything due to injuries.
• Third marauder walks to jeep. Sees Harry’s condition. Takes the empathy roll needed to execute someone, fails, kills Harry. (An empathy roll must be failed to execute a defenceless opponent. Unfortunately marauders have a REALLY low empathy stat.)

The HMG barks once and I feel an impact in my leg. I don't have time to react before the other lad on the roadblock copies his mate.

Christ I can't think straight. 
That's a lot of blood. 
I think that's an artery.

I manage to get the door open and fall out of the jeep.

Other bloke's walking up, raising his gun

No, no, not like-

And that’s the end of Sgt Matthews. 1960-2000. Longer in character creation than in gameplay. Half a day, two encounters, three bullets.

So what did I learn from this? Combat in this game is deadly, don’t swear at marauders, and have a mate along making recon rolls. Ted let us down on thet last one.

For the next game I play of this I’ll roll up a team and have them working together. Hopefully, that way I can sneak past a few things, especially as there are much nastier encounters in that deck.

Twilight: 2000. Day Zero.

This is the start of the much delayed solo game of Twilight:2000 fourth edition I’ve been planning for a while.

This entry will cover character creation, initial character thoughts and setting up the plan for the game proper.

In character writing will be in these sections...

…whilst game mechanics and explanations will be in main body text like this.

First up, character creation. I decided, as this game would also double as a test of the rules so I can learn them, to only go with one character. If successful, and if he survives, I can add more as the game progresses as if meeting them on the road and joining together.

I decided to go with a straight forward soldier for my first character. I think of this as the closest to the default “Fighter” type that I use to test other less grounded games. I used the lifepath character generation as this throws up some interesting results and often leads to more skilled characters than the archetype method. Also I decided to make him British, as the desire to get home after it’s all gone to shit is a strong motivation and means he’s got a long way to go.

For his history I rolled up a working class background with the “Scrounger” specialty, useful for scavenging.

First term I decided to go with gang member, influenced by my D&D test character who has a similar background and went on to be a fighter. I rolled the “Killer” specialty, he can be cold blooded when necessary.

Second term I went for him going straight. As I’d put most of the stat points into physical attributes I decided on a blue collar construction job. During this term he earned the “Builder” specialty, which could be useful if needing to fortify a position.

This period doesn’t seem to have gone too smoothly for him as he also picked up further close combat skills. I see this as him struggling to stay out of trouble whilst trying to keep this job going.

Third term and onwards I went for a military combat arms career. I saw this as him being unsatisfied with the construction job and needing something else. During this period he was trained in ranged combat, reconnaissance, heavy weapons and driving. Specialties picked up in this period were “Redleg” extra training in mortars and howitzers, not that he’s likely to find either, “Combat Engineer” for setting, disarming and avoiding mines, “Tanker” extra training in tracked vehicle driving, and “Brawler” increasing unarmed combat skill (which I see as him being a member of the Army Boxing Assosiation).He was also promoted several times, achieving the rank of Sergeant.

Then I picked his gear, the main point of choice being his weapons. I opted for a knife instead of grenades as travelling alone would be better done quietly. As for his main weapon I went with an assault rifle. The L85A1 isn’t listed in the main book, but I did find stats for it online so went with that.

Rolling for a vehicle I got really lucky and ended up with a Jeep. As I got this I went with extra fuel from the group gear list. In total I have 58 litres of fuel, enough to get a good part of the way from Kalisz to Krakow (approx 300km).

So then a name was needed, and I can’t resist puns and plays on words. So Harry Matthews, known as “Hazmat” to his friends was born.

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Well, this is fucked. 

"Good luck, you're on your own" the radio said just before it crapped out. 
Yeah, I'd noticed mate, everyone else is dead.

Right, I've got my rifle, a few rations, and managed to get a Jeep to work. What now?

I've got no standing orders and we just lost, badly. So I guess I'll head home. Though I've overheard a few things about Krakow and some interesting stuff happening there, might be worth a look but it's 300km out of my way. 

I'll flip a coin. Heads I go west and as straight a line home as I can do, tails I head south to Krakow...

Tails. 

South it is. 

There we have it, a character with an aim to head to Krakow. I picked this destination as I have the Urban Operations expansion box on order and that’s set there.

I’m not sure how often I’ll update this, it will very much be on a “when I have time” basis.