[StainlessSteelCynic]

You're very welcome recon35, I have a fondness for topographic maps and spend far too long on the internet looking at them!

By the way, some other information that you might find usefull is below. I lived in Poland for just over four weeks back in 2010 and I posted this info on the Yahoo Groups T2k site.
Considering how many changes that Yahoo have gone through since then, the links I had orginally posted in this forum to those pages, no longer work.
So here they are the new links however in the interests of keeping this info in an active T2k group, I'm posting it here as well.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/...messages/13433
Kevin
Aug 23, 2010

G'Day all,
I'm an infrequent poster here but I've just spent the last three weeks living in Poland and while I didn't get to see every T2k related area or even get to spend a lot of time searching those T2k areas I did get to, I have a number of observations that could help a Polish campaign. I'm certainly no expert and I'm sure there's lots of other details that any Polish person could add but this should serve as a good base for further research.

1.When you get told Polish roads are either okay or bad, believe every word. Some of them are bloody nightmares of potholes and schizo efforts at patching up the holes and they patch them with everything from tar to concrete slabs to cobblestones. Sometimes you'll see all three types in the space of ten or so metres. Tar is often "thinned out" and so not enough is put onto the road to form a good solid base. During summer, these often go soft enough for the traffic to form shallow channels in the road. Rain is a nightmare for drivers as you cannot see the holes in the road and any of them might be quite deep.

2. A lot of Polish farms that are not running livestock do not have fences and if they do have a few cows or goats, they chain them to a peg so they can graze. You can literally walk off the road right into a farmer's paddock, off his land and into the next farmer's paddocks. You are likely to find a fence around his house and outbuildings however (although this is not always the case). Fruit orchards however, tend to fence off all their growing plots.

3. Land for farming is scant, everything that could be used has been. They won't get more unless they cut down some forest and often the local roads pass inbetween two or more paddocks operated by the one farm. When this occurs, you can catch the farmer driving his tractor, harvester or truck on the road to the next paddock holding up traffic for some time similar to what I have seen in other parts of rural Europe. Poland produces enough food for it's own use and doesn't appear to export much so there seems to be little impetus to increase agricultural output.

4. Sheep don't seem to be a big part of the diet, it's mostly beef, pork and chicken. I've seen all of the above on farms and even ducks and some goats but I can't recall seeing any sheep. There's also a reasonable amount of fish and chicken eggs on the menu. Meals tend to be carbohydrate heavy, lots of wheat products and green vegetables tend to be cabbage,spinach and lettuce.

Other vegetables are typically potatoes, beets, onion, capsicum (known locally as papryka), cucumber and pickle. There's others but I just can't remember them at the moment. Apples, cherries and strawberries and I think oranges are also grown but all tropical fruit is imported.
People often go out of the villages and towns to pick berries and mushrooms in the proper forests and sell them by the roadside (something they'd likely do to supplement their food in T2k no doubt).

5. There's a hell of a lot of lightly forested land spread inbetween various towns even up to the point where one town may be quite spread out because there are anything up to six or seven (and sometimes more) forested "reserves". The towns feature lots of apartment blocks so there's lots of people concentrated in one area but the town planners don't seem to want to cut down the forested areas to provide more land for housing. The apartments are tiny (I'm staying in one at the moment) - kitchen, bathroom, toilet, lounge/living area that doubles as the parent's bedroom and the one bedroom is usually reserved for the kids.

Villages are spread out a bit more and typically feature much bigger houses and while some vacant land may be between various houses, they don't have forest plots like the towns do. They are surrounded by farmland and proper forests.

6. Soviet era apartment blocks generally do not have any sort of elevator if the building is less than seven floors (I'm on the second floor, thank goodness I'm not on the sixth, the constant climb up the stairs would kill me!) And they have very little in the way of alternate entry points, it's either the front door or get in through the windows.

7. They sell beer in the corner stores, supermarkets and fuel stations! Not only beer but spirits as well. I've been in at least two petrol stations were beer was with the softdrinks & water while the spirits were behind the counter. This has been standard practice for decades. AND... they sell beer in 500ml cans and bottles. Now I know this isn't particularly important but it could be an interesting situation for PCs to find spirits in the ruins of a petrol station. (I'm from Australia so alcohol being sold in the local shop and fuel station is damned unusual to me!)

8. The summer weather is deceptive, it seems relatively cool to me (coming from Australia where I've experienced summer days of 47+ degrees C) with some days reaching into the high 20s and early 30s. However... the humidity is brutal, often at 70-95% and you can get early morning fog. It rains every so often but it doesn't last for long, often just a few hours but it buckets down and overwhelms the drains. The rain stops, clears the air and the humidity and then the sun gets its chance to get brutal. I'm drinking about 1-2 litres of water more and a few Cokes here and there, just walking around on the tourist trail than what I would back home for the same temperature.

9. Summer time in the thick forests found seperating towns from other towns, cities, farms and so on can be stifling when you walk through them. There's next to no breeze and the canopy traps the moisture so you feel like you're in a hothouse all the time. And then there's the gnats and mosquitoes and it's allegedly not a tropical country!

10. A number of town centres are of the "town square" type, this means a large square or rectangular area formed from local buildings with next to nothing except a few small buildings, kiosks or stalls around the sides or in the centre. No plants to speak of and all that concrete, brick and cobblestone reflects back the heat to make it feel 10 degrees hotter than it is.

11. I've found a few bridges around the country have fording points nearby. And I don't mean a shallow sandy driveway into the water, these are purpose made, permanent facilities with mooring points for pontoons. The one here in Fordon where I'm staying has a wide concrete roadway leading up to it that could easily fit three trucks side by side. I also found some pontoons nearby.

12. The Vistula river has ducks, fish and also mussels in it. It appears to be pretty clean and I would say probably drinkable as long as you boiled it (although I really could not guess at anything like heavy metal content and such like). It does have a problem every now and then with floating debris. Much of the river has trees or shrubs and so on growning right down to the river although where it passes through a town/city the banks are usually built up from stone, concrete or brick and so on. It's damned wide in many places and the current is quite strong from Krakow in the south to Bydgoszcz in the north (a distance of roughly 350 klicks from my rough map estimate).

13. Some towns that I visited still have working water pumps in public areas, the hand-pump type and even though some have the main handle removed they are still functional and can easily be put back into service. Krakow had a few of these in the old districts.

14. Krakow also has a church that features an artesian bore of drinking quality. It permanently fills a small pool and is accessible to the public. It's known as The Church of St. Stanislaw AKA The Church of the Rock, it's a Paulite church and monastery situated just off the bank of the Vistula almost due south of the Wawel Castle in the Kazimierz. During the events depicted in T2k I can imagine this church being a strong focal point for the locals, the first native Polish saint was a bishop of the church that stood on the site originally and there are also a number of Polish writers buried in the grounds of the newer church.
There are a few websites about the church such as http://www.sacred-destinations.com/p...aws-church.htm

15. Something else that appears to have been unknown to the GDW staff and something I haven't seen mentioned in relation to T2k, there are some small caverns beneath the Wawel castle site in Krakow. I didn't get to enter the caverns but my friend said they were smaller than what you would expect (according to the tourist blurb it's all limited access so you can't see the entirety). The current entrance is from a turret on the castle walls.
Here's some links...
http://www.cracow-life.com/poland/krakow-dragons-cave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wawel_Dragon
http://www.krakow-info.com/smocza.htm
The most important aspects of these caverns is that 1. there are pools of fresh water in some of them and 2. there is an exit to be found on the embankment below the castle (it's not apparently accessible to the public and it's not easily recognized these days but it's near the dragon statue below the castle walls.
Also, the crypts under the cathedral in the Wawel castle are pay to view and you cannot take photos there so I decided not to see them. I couldn't be bothered paying an extra fee to see more of the castle (the cathedral is also pay to view and I didn't check that out either - I'd seen enough of the insides of churches by that stage!)

16. Krakow has had a tram system in operation since the late 1800s, it's all electric now but for the T2k world I can imagine that horse drawn trams or at least wagons using the tram line could be easily put into use. Even perhaps alcohol engined trams?
It'll be a bit of a judgement call as to what lines would be in use but this site gives some good info on the history plus a map of the current system as of 2007
http://www.zyxist.com/en/archives/20/comment-page-1
http://www.krakowpost.com/article/49 This site gives a little more info on what lines would be available for the T2k period.

With the rationing of electricity in Krakow, the electric trams aren't going to be much use but they may keep them for special occassions or emergencies. Imagine the shock of any group of indentured workers about to stage a riot when a tram turns up and disgorges dozens of ORMO troopers!
Other towns that date from the earlier 1900s or earlier have tram systems as well. Lodz has one of the longest systems in Poland that goes from Lodz to a small town nearby. Tram rails in some towns might be ripped up for rebuilding though. Trams could be put back into use by converting them to horse-drawn versions however, so ripping up the rails might be a last resort in some places.

17. Storks are quite common in northern Poland with many of them nesting in the country villages right down into central Poland. There's also a large breed of hare and also small deer to be found in the countryside.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Kevin

And a follow up by another poster
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/...messages/13436

Scott David Orr
Aug 24, 2010
I'll just add a couple of things to this very good report....

Hide message history
On 8/23/2010 11:48 AM, Kevin wrote:
>
>
> 1.When you get told Polish roads are either okay or bad, believe every
> word. Some of them are bloody nightmares of potholes and schizo
> efforts at patching up the holes and they patch them with everything
> from tar to concrete slabs to cobblestones. Sometimes you'll see all
> three types in the space of ten or so metres. Tar is often "thinned
> out" and so not enough is put onto the road to form a good solid base.
> During summer, these often go soft enough for the traffic to form
> shallow channels in the road. Rain is a nightmare for drivers as you
> cannot see the holes in the road and any of them might be quite deep.
>

Poland's roads are notorious as some of the worst in Central Europe,
even by ex-Communist standards.


> 3. Land for farming is scant, everything that could be used has been.
> They won't get more unless they cut down some forest and often the
> local roads pass inbetween two or more paddocks operated by the one
> farm. When this occurs, you can catch the farmer driving his tractor,
> harvester or truck on the road to the next paddock holding up traffic
> for some time similar to what I have seen in other parts of rural
> Europe. Poland produces enough food for it's own use and doesn't
> appear to export much so there seems to be little impetus to increase
> agricultural output.
>

Unlike the rest of the Communist world, Poland, probably because of the
historical strength of the farmers' movement, never saw large-scale
collectivization, and therefore had a lot of small farmers even under
Communism. One byproduct of this is that it has a far larger proportion
of the population working in agriculture than elsewhere. If it doesn't
export more, it's probably because (I say "probably" because my info is
out of date) EU price supports in less efficient countries.


> 4. Sheep don't seem to be a big part of the diet, it's mostly beef,
> pork and chicken. I've seen all of the above on farms and even ducks
> and some goats but I can't recall seeing any sheep. There's also a
> reasonable amount of fish and chicken eggs on the menu. Meals tend to
> be carbohydrate heavy, lots of wheat products and green vegetables
> tend to be cabbage,spinach and lettuce.
>
> Other vegetables are typically potatoes, beets, onion, capsicum (known
> locally as papryka), cucumber and pickle. There's others but I just
> can't remember them at the moment. Apples, cherries and strawberries
> and I think oranges are also grown but all tropical fruit is imported.
>

I should add that traditional Polish food is /incredibly/ bland.
Even pizza (at least, when I was there 10 years ago) is just tomato
paste and cheese on a crust--no spices at all.


> 7. They sell beer in the corner stores, supermarkets and fuel
> stations! Not only beer but spirits as well. I've been in at least two
> petrol stations were beer was with the softdrinks & water while the
> spirits were behind the counter. This has been standard practice for
> decades. AND... they sell beer in 500ml cans and bottles. Now I know
> this isn't particularly important but it could be an interesting
> situation for PCs to find spirits in the ruins of a petrol station.
> (I'm from Australia so alcohol being sold in the local shop and fuel
> station is damned unusual to me!)
>

Well, I know it's like that in the U.S., too, and actually in most if
not all the other countries I've been in.


> 12. The Vistula river has ducks, fish and also mussels in it. It
> appears to be pretty clean and I would say probably drinkable as long
> as you boiled it (although I really could not guess at anything like
> heavy metal content and such like). It does have a problem every now
> and then with floating debris. Much of the river has trees or shrubs
> and so on growning right down to the river although where it passes
> through a town/city the banks are usually built up from stone,
> concrete or brick and so on. It's damned wide in many places and the
> current is quite strong from Krakow in the south to Bydgoszcz in the
> north (a distance of roughly 350 klicks from my rough map estimate).
>

I'm not sure what condition it was in in Communist times, just in case
you're playing that sort of scenario--typically, pollution dropped off
in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, not just because of
increased environmental awareness among newly empowered voters, but
because heavy industries that were unprofitable were closed down.



> 16. Krakow has had a tram system in operation since the late 1800s,
> it's all electric now but for the T2k world I can imagine that horse
> drawn trams or at least wagons using the tram line could be easily put
> into use. Even perhaps alcohol engined trams?
> It'll be a bit of a judgement call as to what lines would be in use
> but this site gives some good info on the history plus a map of the
> current system as of 2007
> http://www.zyxist.com/en/archives/20/comment-page-1
> http://www.krakowpost.com/article/49 This site gives a little more
> info on what lines would be available for the T2k period.
>
> With the rationing of electricity in Krakow, the electric trams aren't
> going to be much use but they may keep them for special occassions or
> emergencies. Imagine the shock of any group of indentured workers
> about to stage a riot when a tram turns up and disgorges dozens of
> ORMO troopers!
> Other towns that date from the earlier 1900s or earlier have tram
> systems as well. Lodz has one of the longest systems in Poland that
> goes from Lodz to a small town nearby. Tram rails in some towns might
> be ripped up for rebuilding though. Trams could be put back into use
> by converting them to horse-drawn versions however, so ripping up the
> rails might be a last resort in some places.
>

In my experience, you'll find trams in every sizeable ex-Communist city
of Eastern Europe (the biggest place I've been without them, I think, is
Narva, Estonia, which has a population of 80,000). They're the fastest
mode of public transportation (since they're not inhibited by traffic)
along main travel routes in cities. Pretty much every city will have a
combination of trams, buses, and trolleybuses (buses powered by overhead
electrical cables), plus commuter trains (typically electric) for
reaching the suburbs (though I have seen one case, St. Petersburg, where
a tram line goes miles outside the city proper). Subways are typically
found only in the biggest cities.

Scott

I'd also add that Poland grows a lot of plums too and the pizza that Scott mentions, yeah it was still like that in 2010 although they did have other varities but I doubt this is of any significance for a version 1 or 2 game of Twilight (for 2013 it would be of use however).

It's worth noting too, that a number of Soviet military garrisons that formed closed cities (AKA secret cities) were sometimes on the grounds of former German military camps dating back to the late 1800s/early 1900s. On one site I visited, a large barracks building was still in use by the local townsfolk as a storage warehouse after the Soviets left the region. Originally it was a 1920s or 1930s building constructed for the Wehrmacht.

During one trip to see a castle I don't recall where, as we wandered through the bushland near the site, we stumbled across a mostly buried bunker system. It was built of concrete and appeared small and we were told that the Nazi's built it. None of the locals really knew much more about it except that it was "the Nazi bunker".
Local youths had apparently used it for a place to hang out (as evidenced by the very minor collection of trash inside, drink cans and food wrappers etc. etc.) but it was difficult to explore because the only entrace we found was a hatchway (minus the hatch) hidden by some shrubs and the room below was about one third filled with sand (from who knows where, a collapsed roof, infilling by the local council? I don't know). The tunnel leading off from the room was mostly filled by sand so all we could see was that one small room