Twilight 2000 rules for an espionage campaign
 

Has anyone used Twilight 2000's rules to run an espionage campaign? How did it go?

Not yet. I'd really like to do something with only a few players in Krakow, and I have a glimmer of a secret that could be uncovered somewhere in Poland, which would have to get out to NATO in Germany.

I’ve always used T2K v2.2 set of rules, so I’m not familiarized with the previous versions of the game. I’ve not run campaigns entirely based on espionage or investigation, but some of our adventures have dealt with these subjects as a primary plot, without problems. Probably the only minor issue you will find is that you will miss some skills (those not military related). As an idea to solve this, you can take a look to the skill lists in the other role-playing games of GDW (Traveller:The New Era and Dark Conspiracy) and add the skills you find suitable to your game. TNE, for example, has skills like Act/Bluff, Carousing, Interview, Investigation, Research or Disguise.

I agree, v2(.x) rules would work better, IMO. Between the skills and careers it's better to create agents and to adjudicate their actions.

EDIT: Let me point you to the "Krakow Undercover" thread on this board, which touched on one of my ideas. http://forum.juhlin.com/showthread.p...ghlight=krakow

What sort of espionage? James Bond or more George Smiley?

Also, have you ever heard of Merc 2000? There's a lot of spy-esque missions there.

With some work you could play Free City of Krakow as an espionage adventure. just have Operation Reset set at the beginning of the war and the PC are member of the Special Forces Strike team assigned to recover it and the inventor.

You can have head to a Krakow safe house once they have it. Then have move to another area (The Baltic coast or small airstrip for exfil)

Anything in Krakow (or anywhere, maybe) can become an espionage game, especially with few PCs. By necessity, they'll have to become stealthier, as they can't fight their way thru difficulties.

I've tinkered with something similar. The biggest holes I've found are (1) the absence of skills covering investigation, intelligence analysis, and some aspects of overall tradecraft and (2) the general inadequacy of the 2.2 lifepaths to provide access to the key skills an intelligence officer would need. Neither is insurmountable within the overall 2.2 framework, though.

Reflex handles these marginally better but not enough for me to recommend it over 2.2 if you're already familiar with the older rules set.

Having said all that - absolutely agree with Krakow as an espionage setting, and I wrote the Prague chapter of the 2013 Czech Republic sourcebook specifically to facilitate espionage-style play.

- C.

One could argue that the investigate, analysis, and tradecraft skills shouldn't be stats on the page, but things that the player has to think through, and convey to the GM at the table.

I'm sort of in this camp.

I make them Qualifications of other skills in my game. For instance, Interrogation is a Qualification of Persuasion and Intrusion is a Qualification of Lock Smithing or Electronics. Hacking is a Qualification of Computer Programming. Espionage was partially addressed in both Merc2000 and The Special Operations Handbook.

The problem I have with such an approach is that it places an unfair burden of prior knowledge on the players. This creates barriers to both entry and fun for players who aren't already real-world subject matter experts. We aren't such a large or growing fan base that we can afford to run off people who don't meet a litmus test for genre competence.

- C.

That's something valid, too. One could argue that someone could say "my character, with some knowledge/experience/training in espionage would know these kind of things, so let's just handwave that," and I'd be cool with that.