Staying Alive on I-75

Quick plug here, back over the summer I tried out making a Travel Map for Free League’s upcoming 4th Edition of Twilight: 2000 and publishing it via the Free League Workshop in DrivethruRPG.

CENTKYTO is in the same style as the Poland and Swedish travel maps that come with the game, but it is focused on Central Kentucky in the U.S.A. I chose that location because it’s where I grew up, and most post-apocalyptic games revolve around the players playing in the ruins of their hometown.

Also while I don’t know if Free League will be publishing anything set in the states, I figured that this was probably an area that they were not thinking of doing anything for, so it was fair game.

I don’t have a gazetteer or anything to go with it, it is just a map. I figure it can work just as well for a WWIII campaign as it would for a Walking Dead-style zombie apocalypse campaign or a Battle: Los Angles-style alien invasion campaign.

I did include assets and instructions for using the map on Roll20 and Foundry VTTs, which is why it is a bit more expensive than some of the other Workshop maps out there.

CENTKYTO T2k Travelmap on DrivethruRPG

T2K 4e Lifepath Booklet

Stalker on a Halt by Bobrbor

So this month the 4th edition of Twilight:2000 is being released by Free League, and it does a lot of things very well. The new encounter system is interesting, and definitely solves the problem of the game grinding to a halt whenever the party entered a new hex. (My earlier attempt to solve this problem was to reorganize the 2.0 version of the encounter system to be easier on the referee to use to try and speed things up. Free Leagues totally revamped it and is using a card-based system that is definitely faster, but less flexible in my opinion.)

I do like how they do the life path method for character creation especially, but for some reason, the way it is described in the book was hard for me to follow. So as part of my usual M.O., I rewrote the process in my own words mostly to try and understand the flow, and organize the information in a way that made more sense to me.

Ideally, this document gives a player everything they need to complete the lifepath flow. But it doesn’t try to explain game rules or any unnecessary concepts. (Since that is what the rule book is for.)

I went ahead and made it a printable booklet so that the referee can print out multiple copies on a black and white printer and give to players at the table to do their character creation without everyone fighting over the book.

T2K Lifepath Booklet (PDF)

Since it is formatted as half-letter pages, ideally you can print it booklet style. On the print dialog (as shown to the left) there is a button for Booklet mode that will print the pages onto a double-sided landscape letter page that is organized so that you just staple it down the middle and fold it.

Having a Long-Arm stapler of course makes the stapling a lot easier.

Milton, NM

The Netflix show Stranger Things was pretty inspirational, so I went and created this fictitious small town called Milton New Mexico as a setting for a similar style game. To create the town I used a modified version of the Microscope collaborative setting rules, and all the players were able to contribute ideas to the town's history and various mysteries. I then designed a map to tie everything together and give a common sense of geography. (For the actual game the players all rolled up 9th graders in 1986. I used the Bubblegumshoe RPG rules set.)

The campaign is on haitus but the players have enjoyed putting the clues together about the "strange doings down by the Circle K", and are keen to come back to it in a few months.

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An Old School Polish Sandbox

While I played first edition D&D back in the day, I was a SF fan and so pretty quickly moved on to Traveller, 2300AD, and other GDW games. In college I played in a friends Twilight: 2000, but it was in a gonzo modern campaign, and had nothing to do with the original game setting.  So it wasn’t until fairly recently that I picked up T2K 1st ed. and its core modules to read for the first time. And I was surprised to discover that it is a classic sandbox game- but hampered by poor organization.

The original rules for Twilight: 2000 give an initial adventure called Escape from Kalisz, where it sets up the PCs are solders in WWIII cut off behind enemy lines. They have escaped a disastrous battle in the middle of Poland, and are on their own. Furthermore the game has established that all of Europe has been devastated by the war, so there is no law and order for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.  They have limited information about their surroundings, and there are Soviet soldiers and marauders in all directions. It is a 'points of light' setting where the PCs are free to continue to fight for democrocy, or set themselves up as warlords themselves. The intro module does not have plot- just descriptions of the various villages and towns of central Poland in the vicinity of their starting point, and what kind of help or threats can be found there.

The PCs are not given an objective- they have some information about what is in their area- but there is no place they being directed to try to make it to, other than some rumors that Krakow is supposed to be safe. They are on their own to decide which direction to go, and how best to survive. But the first 5 modules published continued and completed the default campaign:

• Free City of Krakow – a freeform module that details Krakow and expands the sandbox south to the Czechoslovakian border.
• Pirates of the Vistula – a structured module that has the Party travelling to the northeast on the Vistula River to Warsaw. Details the towns along the river.
• The Ruins of Warsaw – a freeform module that details Warsaw and expands the sandbox to the east.
• The Black Madonna – a freeform module set in Silesia. Expands the sandbox to the South West, to the Czech/German Border
• Going Home – A structure module (although not as structured as the Pirates of the Vistula) that has the PCs trying to make it to a port in Germany to catch the last transport ship home to the USA. Expands the sandbox to the west, through Germany all the way to the French DMZ.
• Also issue 25 of Challenge magazine had an article titled The Baltic Coast: A Looter's Guide, which expanded the sandbox to the north, along the Baltic coastline.

(After Going Home, GDW began producing adventures set in North America, and gradually switched to more structure modules- which were more the preferred style by the late 1980s. Later modules returned to Europe and Poland, but did not return to the sandbox format.)

…So split between these publications, quite a bit of Poland was detailed with adventure hooks and threats. If the party chose to strike out into a random direction, the GM has plenty of information about what they would encounter.

The biggest stumbling blocks to this is that all this information is split up between multiple books, as well as the locations were not keyed except by the town name. So looking up polish location names in a map, and then hunting thought various books to see if that location has an entry was probably too unwieldy for most GMs.

My solution: I went through the laboured process of collating the sandbox information from the publications, and keying it to a hex grid overlaying the maps. Theoretically this would help a GM run a sandbox game set in Poland, since it would be much faster to look up a hex number to see if it has a description. I also made a more detailed handout for the players explaining the events leading up to the Escape for Kalisz adventure.

The Index:

• Eastern European Hexmap index - A compiled list of the sandbox content, keyed to the hexmap's hex numbers.
• Eastern European Hexmaps - The maps of Poland and German, with a numbered hex grid superimposed.

The player resources for Escape from Kalisz:

• Escape from Kalisz: The Death of a Division (Player Background for the start of the campaign)
• Final Intelligence Report player handout (re-laidout for clearer printing.)

These are provided solely as aids for GMs to improve their Twilight:2000 gaming.

Here are a couple of topo maps I think would be cool to have printed out and hand to Players. (note these are very large map files)

• Southern Poland Including Kalisz, Krakow, & Silesia
• Northern Poland including western USSR
• Germany & Denmark